The practical info everybody needs if their life isn’t going to completely suck from start to finish …
This is part 5 of 6 of a mini-series that will cure you of your desire to eat more than you need. This is not some, mark 31 days NOT doing something off a calendar, and you’ll be cured bollocks. So read the other parts, starting here, first. Then come back to me here. I’ll wait.
You with me? Let’s roll.
I know what you’re thinking. Hold up, steady the buffs. This sounds all too easy.
Yeah, it does. Because it is easy. That is not to say the problem is petty. Habits ruin lives. The solution however is simple. It’s recognising that everything we thought about life is arse about tit. Something that’s hiding in plain sight (trust me, when you see it, you’ll judge yourself for not figuring it out sooner).
We are only ever experiencing our thinking. We experience nothing of the world directly. We only experience the thinking we have in our pocket, from one moment to the next. What we have in there determines what we experience “out there” in the world, in the moment. That’s why we could both bite into the same sausage, yet both have a different experience. Me saying yum yum, pass the mustard, you spitting it into a plant and rinsing your mouth out with soda.
Neither of us are tasting the actual sausage, we’re only tasting our thinking about the sausage.
Because thought flows through us all day long (most of it unconscious I must add), we’re actively and continually creating our present moment experience of the world. It’s not a fixed thing. It’s an ongoing process. Whatever type of thoughts we have in the tank come to life for us to experience, moment by moment, as our experiential reality. As our thinking changes, our experience “out there” in the moment, changes right along with it. Again, not physically, but experientially.
So one minute you can be totally focused on a piece of work, thinking of nothing, in your flow, the next moment be lost in your head about some irritating comment your co-worker made last week. Now you’ve totally lost your thread, you’re feeling all pissed off, so you go off to make a cup of tea in the hope that if you dunk in a cookie, you’ll feel better again. (Which you will, but not because of the cookie, because that irritating co-worker thinking will leave).
In other words, life happens from the inside out.
Thought drives the bus. Our thoughts are not determined by what’s happening “out there”. What we’re experiencing “out there” is determined by our thoughts “in here”. We are the creators of our own worlds. Individually. I’m the creator of mine, you are the creator or yours. The muttering man in the bus shelter (who’s now pulled his pants down) is creating his. No one is sharing a reality. None of our realities overlap. I can’t affect you, you can’t affect me and it doesn’t matter how unhinged the fella over there is, he can’t affect anybody either.
This is how we’ve been living since we came sliding down the hatch as babies, but nobody realises. We are basically handed somebody else’s world and told “this is it, do your best, godspeed”. This is the putrid, smelly cyst that lies at the heart of humanity and is the cause of every bit of aggro, and splodge of overeating that exists in the world.
There is no objective world. We are all creating an individual perception of the world with the thinking we take to be true. It’s all a big, crazy misunderstanding. We aren’t at the mercy of other people’s behaviours, opinions, dodgy politics or passive aggression, none of it can touch us.
The world as we know it, isn’t “it”. It’s a version that we didn’t know we had the power to pretty much, take or leave.
We get to create our own version of reality, by actively choosing what thinking to value, and what to disregard. That is our power and our gift for simply being born. It’s what we’ve been doing since we were born, it’s just we haven’t realised so there’s been no conscious element to it. That is why for most of us (those who haven’t cottoned on), life fucking sucks.
The fact is you can no longer get eggy with the outside world when you realise it’s not the cause of your feelings. You can no longer start wars, give people fat lips, troll people online, put people down or rage at other road users when even that prick who cut you up on the slip road earlier hasn’t the power to affect you. You can certainly no longer pursue wealth at the cost of the environment, relationships and common human decency.
You also can’t be afraid of a loaf of bread when you see you are totally immune to them too. You can’t get squiffy about anything when you realise you’re the one creating the squiff, from within, thanks to the thinking that’s working its way through your system.
Also it’s worth pointing out, when you wake up to your indvidual power to create a reality you actually want, life becomes suddenly far too short to want to fuck with either people or dodgy diets anyway.
Don’t feel bad for not spotting it. Few of us have time to consider what might be going on behind the scenes of life because we’re busy paying mortgages and feeding toddlers. Nothing we learn at school points to it, quite the contrary in fact. Why would you twig? I didn’t “just figure it out” I had to be tapped on the shoulder too. Boy am I glad I was. I put my recent move to the tropics down to this discovery.
None of us would be in on it it weren’t for Sydney Banks. He’s the man. Just a totally normal guy who was bonked on the head with an enlightening experience back in the seventies when everything I’ve attempted to describe here just came obvious to him, literally dumped into his lap via a blinding light.
Anyway out of this explosion of clarity emerged an explanation of how our human experience is created. It’s not like people hadn’t been saying it all before, but the way he put it made it much easier to understand, totally logical and doesn’t make you sound like you’ve taken too much LSD. Basically he uncovered the three principles that underpin our human experience, that literally bolt the present moment together. It made so much sense that it wasn’t just people in afghans and open toed sandals that took notice. Word spread.
Now, the reason you haven’t heard of these three principles, or Sydney himself, is because we are experiencing the ‘Semmelweis effect’ which is when the information is out there but hasn’t yet been readily adopted into the mainstream.
So named because when Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis suggested maybe diseases weren’t spread through smells but through germs and so frankly, having a surgery that was covered in the blood and guts of previous patients might not be the best idea, he was thrown into an asylum where he perished, ironically, from an infection. It takes years for a nub of wisdom to take hold you see.
James Abraham Garfield paid that price, the 20th President of the United States. He was assassinated. Well, actually, he died of an infection from a gunshot wound he received 80 days before. Had the surgeons and physicians of the day followed the sterilisation techniques implemented by Joseph Lister 20 years before and not had a good old root around the bullet wound with their unwashed, ungloved fingers, he might not have died just 200 days into his Presidency, poor old chap.
Anyway, this knowledge is on the cusp of being mainstream. Word of these three principles is spreading quicker than an Aussie bush fire. You don’t want to be the stubborn plonker who labels it all hippie piss, continues being miserable for a decade only to have to absorb this all later anyway because well, it’s the truth and only truth is true.
Right. So the experience you are having right this second as you read these very words on the page, are these three principles in action, working seamlessly together, creating your experience of the present moment. This is a fact. Like gravity is a fact (no one’s querying its existence now are they).
The first principle is Universal Mind. It’s the intelligent energy that makes stuff happen like a toenail growing back that has come off thanks to tight trainers. It’s the source from which everything sprouts, the energy behind life, animating spirit, if you will.
The second principle is Universal Thought, and it’s the force that determines what is actually going to sprout. So it’s responsible for the content of the moment, basically.
Then lastly, but by no means leastly, there’s Universal Consciousness. The third principle is the force that lets us experience this concoction as our individual version of reality, projecting it for us onto the screen of our life, making it seem like it’s coming from somewhere other than our own thinking.
Put these all together and what are you left with? One continuous stream of thoughts being brought to life for us to experience as though they were real. Life, then.
You can’t have an experience of the world anywhere other than at the point where these three principles meet.
Only where Mind meets Thought meets Consciousness can there be you, drinking yet another cup of coffee. The three principles might not be creating the physical elements of the coffee, but they’re creating your experience of the coffee and as I keep saying, this is the only bit that matters because the cup of liquid itself can’t reach into your body and make you feel something, think something or push a taste on you. You can only experience the coffee through the lens of your own thinking being brought to life.
Mind is the material that Thought builds into a shed that Consciousness lets us potter about it. If any of these principles weren’t working for you, well, you’d be dead. Or comatose at best.
Maybe your thinking is “ooh coffee, that feels good” and the moment is perfect. You could just as easily be thinking “oh god, that was my eighth cup, now I’m not going to sleep tonight, again” and have the moment be, not perfect. Different thinking, different experience. One reality where you’re loving your cappuccino, another where you’re disappointed with yourself because you’re meant to be easing off the caffeine. But are you getting this? The coffee isn’t anything without your say so. It’s not objectively good or objectively bad, it’s whatever it is to you, according to your thinking that happens to be rolling through at the moment that you drink it.
So our experience of the present moment – the part that has an effect on us – is self-created. In other words, our reality – the bit we can feel – is created by thought.
While that doesn’t mean you can manipulate your thinking to say that no, in fact it’s all good, this coffee was a good idea and I will sleep soundly tonight to try and forcibly improve the moment and through the power of auto-suggestion try and make sure you sleep well later, recognising the bridge of thought that exists between you and the coffee is all the power you need.
Do you see?
There is coffee / doughnuts / junk food / pizza (AKA the outside world), there is you, and there’s a bridge of thought between. When you don’t know the bridge is there you feel as though the coffee / doughnuts / junk food / pizza (AKA the outside world) is controlling you, that is has power over you. You feel like a cow wandering down the tunnel to have a bolt gun fired through its brain.
But …
When you can see the bridge of thought is there between you and the foodstuff (AKA the outside world), there’s a power shift. Now all of a sudden it’s you that’s in charge. In fact, if it wasn’t for you, the foodstuff (or anything else in the outside world) wouldn’t even exist in your reality because nothing can exist for you, outside of where these three principles meet.
Do you see? Your experience of everything, from monuments to food to memories and people, come from inside you. From within your bubble of thought, where you live. You are the creator of your moment by moment experience in the world, thanks to these three principles. Nobody can make you feel something. Nothing can make you do anything. No substance can exert any influence on you at all.
While you can’t manipulate your thoughts or stop them or control them to the extent that you pray for killer abs, count to ten and it’s Britney Spears herself staring back in the mirror, you can recognise the layer of thought is there at all, and that is enough.
There is no objective world existing outside of you because nothing in it can get up off its backside and affect you, not without your say so or your input.
We think the world is huge, it’s not. It’s tiny. It’s at the cross-section of where these three principles meet, because anything outside of there, we can’t experience. There is you, thinking, and from that thinking feeling, and from that feeling, experiencing the present moment, or the situation, or the person, or the food, or the memory or whatever it is.
We are all experiencing our thinking as though it were real, not the outside world directly, every moment of the day. That is the sum total of life.
When you see this, you are free. And your habit has no choice but to leave you be. The nudges become easy to disregard when you can see they are coming from inside you, made only of thought and as such have zero power.
Ready to knock this thing right out of the park? Onward, to the final piece of the puzzle —————>