‘It is your Mind that creates this world’
The Buddha
Every morning when we wake up a beautiful thing occurs: we start to think. As we pass from the sleeping, dreaming state where thinking also occurs (just in a more abstract and disjointed way or so it appears), to the waking state, our thinking becomes somewhat more conscious – although not altogether! Because there are some thoughts we are more aware of, and others that just run as a programme within our head, a bit like an audio track that is on repeat, that we have become unaware of.
Some of those repeated tracks are very useful, such as being able to use the motor skills such as walking without having to consciously think: “left foot, right foot, that’s it keep going” or when we are eating the spoon glides smoothly towards our waiting mouth so that we can enjoy breakfast and not put the spoon in our ear or keep dropping it down our clothes (most of the time). Yet there are other thoughts that we may not be so conscious of that create feelings of anxiety or upset or even depression.
So why is this process of thought a beautiful thing? It is a beautiful thing because it is a constant throughout our lives; it is beautiful because every day we have the opportunity to tune our thinking in to all the love, peace and harmony that we wish to experience in our lives. We may ‘think’ that this is not possible due to the external circumstances of our lives i.e., that things are not going so well for us right now so it would not be feasible to focus on this beauty. Yet we are the thinker, we are the one having the thoughts, it is the power of our minds that creates these thoughts and ultimately our experience of life.
We are all aware that we can’t simply ignore our problems and expect them to just go away, but we can begin to recognise that while we allow our thinking to relax back into the beauty and joy of life, we are far more likely to come up with creative solutions to the less comfortable circumstances of our lives.
Our thinking is like a body of water constantly on the move, like a river flowing toward the sea. We may not be able to stop the flow, but we can carve out a new direction for it to irrigate the thoughts we would prefer to experience. To temporarily flood and nourish the fields of our minds with the healthful and beneficial crops of stillness, love and joy.
The beauty of realising that this is how the mind works, that it is our Mind that creates this world, our world, the one that we experience, is that it puts us back in control of what we experience. We are no longer the victim of our circumstances, but moreover we are the creator of our reality – now it is time to take the reins of our horse and steer it towards the life we wish to live, a life of joy, a life of peace and beauty, a life where we decide how it is we are going to feel, whatever the circumstances of our lives appears to dictate, we begin to live with the profound knowledge that we are the thinker.
