In my attempts to stop my imagination from creating worst-case scenarios for me, I noticed something: When I hang out in the dark recesses of my mind, my daily life develops practical hitches. I can’t get hold of people, the copier runs out of toner at the crucial moment or the grocer has no cheese for the macaroni for supper (- it actually happens where I stay!). In contrast, on days when my mind is at rest and I am quietly getting on with it, things fall into place with minimum effort. Now, you might say that that’s just because my focus is undivided and that’s true, but there’s more at play here.
I’ve noticed that my outer and inner worlds are strangely connected.
As within so without
I love driving. Being behind the wheel is calming and meditative for me. This may sound crazy, but when I zone in, traffic lights stay green until I have crossed, and petrol lasts right to the petrol station – although I don’t like to play around with that one too much! Even in thick, rush-hour traffic, my trips are usually smooth and uneventful because I anticipate tight spots and bottle necks and navigate around them.
Some car trips are different though. On one particular journey, the car in front of me had an accident. Then a dog was nearly run over two cars ahead and finally, someone hooted at me for no apparent reason. It felt like the world had suddenly hit a wobbly. Checking in on myself though, I realized that it was me that was feeling internally off kilter. My inner state seemed to have been the catalyst for what was happening out there.
Intrigued and not a little spooked by this discovery, I did some more investigating. My hypothesis: We see on the outside what we feel on the inside. An external disturbance is simply a manifestation of an upset internal balance. Thoughts create reality
My study into this link and the many experiments conducted around it, confirmed my hypothesis. Here’s how it works: Our mind interprets our experience, creating thoughts. Thoughts in turn create emotions. An emotion is literally ‘energy in motion’ and from science we know that energy affects matter. Result: Emotion recreates ‘out there’ what is ‘in here’. Life happens from the inside out. Our external lives are simply a reflection of our internal world.
So why was I feeling out of sorts on that car trip? I realized that I had lost direction and focus. Now that’s familiar territory: From past experience, I know that reality then literally crumbles around me. When there is inner dividedness, the outer manifestation literally tears apart. In practice, it looks like this: Appointments are cancelled, arrangements hit unexpected snags and electronic equipment malfunctions. I hit a hitch with credit card machines for a while. They often didn’t work first time round when I was in a hurry to pay. I learnt to physically walk away and divert my attention. Then they’d usually work again.
If we are unfocussed or feel torn, we can’t expect life to behave itself. If our intent is superficial and keeps changing, our external events and circumstances will be tossed about like leaves in the wind.
Here’s another example of how inner dividedness manifests externally. Some years back, I was all set to share practice rooms with a medical doctor to provide holistic healing support for patients. Her husband then broke both his legs on holiday just before the move and the space assigned to me was now needed for him to recuperate. I was very angry at life conspiring against my every effort to get ahead, but later I realized that I had decided on that move for the wrong reasons.
The power of intent
Studies have shown that our mind is so much more powerful than we realize:
• The double-slit experiment proves the classic observer effect: Not only do we disturb what we observe, we also produce what we observe. Mere observation affects the outcome of the experiment.
• In her book, ‘The Field’, Lynne MacTaggart reports on studies that show that we can influence the random output of electronic devices without prior training or special aptitude purely by the power of our thoughts.
• Masaru Emoto conducted experiments with water which prove that we can visibly order and harmonize the structure of water by sending it positive, loving thoughts. Negative thoughts change its structure to disorder and dissonance.
What we focus on, we get
This must be one of the most empowering yet infuriating principles of human existence. Once that penny dropped for me, I had to admit that I am utterly responsible for what happens in my life and the escape hatch of blaming and justifying was permanently bolted shut.
Think of it in terms of a box filling up bit by bit. Every time you think about something you want, your ideal job, for instance, that thought settles into the box labelled ‘ideal job’. When the box is full, the thought energy becomes dense enough to manifest and the ideal job suddenly presents itself. This takes time, however, and the delay between thoughts and their manifestation creates the illusion that there is no connection, that our reality is controlled by external factors.
On the up side of this principle, we fast track to where we want to be by using affirmations and visualizing our perfect outcome in vivid detail. The down side though is that most of us tend worry a lot and that box fills up too. Eventually, we manifest exactly what we were worried about.
What we fear, draws near
My late mother had a lifelong, intense fear of cancer which she often spoke about. As was to be expected, she eventually contracted breast cancer and then liver cancer and passed away a few years later. It’s important to know that the subconscious mind does not hear ‘no’. When we say that we don’t want to contract cancer, all it hears is ‘cancer’ and duly produces it for us.
Thoughts create our reality all the time, even when we’re not paying attention to what we’re thinking. If we don’t monitor our thoughts, we end up with unconscious creations and some of them will not be quite what we wanted, to put it delicately.
If you don’t make the time to work on creating the life you want, you’re eventually going to be forced to spend a LOT of time dealing with a life you don’t want. Kevin Ngo