Create Good Things

Archive for the ‘Creative Thoughts’ Category

The universe in general works on the basis of cause and effect, but most people live their lives ‘at effect’, which means that they are in the habit of reacting to life as it happens. A far better way to live is ‘at cause’, and when you are in that mode of living you have a much greater sense of control over your day to day experience. That said, how does one shift to being at effect to at cause over life?

First, take responsibility for your life. Understand that your life right now is largely the effect of causes that you have previously set in motion, either consciously or unconsciously. An example of conscious cause is a previous decision to get married, which might mean that you now have a husband or wife, for better or worse. An example of an unconscious cause is a failure to work sufficiently hard at a job, which might have resulted in you losing your position. In both cases, a specific cause has led to a definite effect. The effects of our causes might appear instantly, or they may take decades to show themselves (making them more difficult to identify), but they are certain to manifest eventually.

With the understanding that your current life is largely the product of causes that you have previously set in motion, you should now start creating causes which are likely to bring desirable future effects. If you want more success in your career then you can work harder or more creatively. If you want to improve your relationships then you can set causes into motion that will lead to better communication, trust and so on. By thinking of the effects that you want to experience in the future, you can focus on setting the appropriate causes in motion today .

If you experience a situation that you don’t like, try to trace it back to the cause so that you can avoid causing the same situation again. For example, if your car gets a flat tyre when driving you might realise that you hadn’t checked the pressures for a long while. You can then make sure that you check your tyre pressures more often in future, which will reduce the chances of you experiencing a flat tyre for the same reason in the future.

Even if you find yourself in a situation which you believe is completely out of your control (for example, your employer going out of business or your neighbourhood being hit by a natural disaster) you can still be at cause by taking complete control of how you react to your circumstances. Someone who is at effect would accept the role of victim, and therefore set very poor causes in motion for the future. You, however, can maintain your position of being at cause by dealing with the situation as effectively and constructively as you know how.

When you are at cause over life, your experience each day becomes a very useful feedback device. Your situation today is a result of your previous causes, so if you are delighted with today you should continue putting similar causes in motion for tomorrow. However, if you aren’t so happy with your experiences today then you can start creating a better tomorrow by taking control and changing the causes that you create.

In life, you have two choices. You can be at effect, which is how the majority of people live their lives, or you can be at cause over life. Your decision in this matter is itself a cause which determines how fulfilling your life will be in the weeks, months and years ahead, so choose wisely!

Before we can change and use our creative power of thought in a conscious way, we first need to be able to bring our thoughts under control. Very often we allow our thoughts to roam freely, being as negative and destructive as they like. We forget that we are meant to control our thoughts – to put them on a tight leash so that they only go where we actually want them to go.

Developing this sense of control is something that we all need to work on and deliberately cultivate. A lifetime of undisciplined thinking cannot be overcome with a mere decision to become more disciplined. That is why I will now present a Thought Cultivation exercise that will help you to develop the ability to control your thoughts and concentrate in a focused, single-minded way. This has the effect of making the ‘magnetic attraction’ properties of your thoughts stronger and more effective.

This Thought Cultivation exercise is based on the ancient Zen practice of sitting and focusing the mind on a single point of focus and involves just a few simple steps:

Step 1 – Choose A Focus Object
Start by choosing a small object to focus on. Traditional objects used for this purpose are small, smooth, coin-sized pebbles, but you can use any natural object that you will be happy to focus on for fifteen minutes. Natural objects such as pebbles, leaves and crystals are best because they are less likely to be charged with any emotional meaning, and this will make the process easier for you.

Step 2 – Adopt The Sitting Position
It is a good idea to sit in the same place every time you use this process. If you are able, sit cross-legged on the floor, otherwise sit in a chair with your back straight and the soles of both feet on the ground. Place your chosen focus object in a position in front of you where you can look down at it at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees, as if looking straight down the slope of your nose.

Step 3 – Focus On The Object
Sit and relax. Feel a sense of poise and calm. Look at the object. Do not try to analyse the object or have mental conversations about it, but simply use it as a focus for your mind. Whenever your thoughts wander, bring your attention back to the object. Continue doing this for fifteen minutes. It will be difficult in the beginning, and you will quickly become aware of how much your thoughts try to avoid being under your conscious control, but persist with the process and you will soon find that it gets easier with time, and that your mind wanders less frequently.

Use this Thought Cultivation every day and your ability to control your thoughts will develop quite naturally.

If everything in the physical universe carries an electromagnetic charge of some kind, and if the way we think can influence the electromagnetic activity in our brain then it stands to reason that if we learn to think in a certain way, we can begin to ‘attract’ into our lives whatever circumstances and conditions we choose to attract.

We have all heard this before at some point. Spiritual teachers have been telling us for centuries that our thoughts are attractive and that our thoughts determine our experience, and that if we want to experience change in our lives then we need to change the way we think. There has always been plenty of purely anecdotal evidence that this kind of advice is accurate and reliable, but now, in the phenomenon of magnetic attraction, science has given us a logical explanation for why this should be the case.

In decades past, it was difficult for people to understand how thinking something could make it so. The biggest problem was that the whole process used to be described in terms of ‘transforming’ thought directly into physical objects. This made people very confused about how creative thought energy was able to actually ‘solidify’ into physical matter. A number of theories were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explain the process, but none have been substantiated since. This is probably because what used to be described as a process of solidification is actually one of attraction.

Although there is no human being who can claim to fully understand the exact process by which ‘thoughts become things’, we can – by combining the findings of current scientific research with the observations of spiritual thinkers over several thousand years – formulate a working hypothesis that is useful.

Since our thoughts have an electromagnetic quality then they – like all other electromagnetic waves – must radiate out into the world around us. Just as radio waves, microwaves and x-rays are capable of travelling vast distances, so it is logical that thought waves could do the same.

Then, if all physical matter carries an electromagnetic charge, however small, it is also logical that any object or person carrying a charge that is similar in nature to the charge of the thought will respond via a process of ‘magnetic attraction’. Or, if the charge of the object or person is dissimilar in nature to the charge of the thought, they will respond via a process of magnetic repulsion.  All of this brings us to the traditional conclusions that ‘like attracts like’ and ‘as a man thinketh, so is he.’

As living, breathing human beings, we are thinking all the time, and the overall nature of our thoughts therefore determines the overall nature of the things we experience in life. In order to change the nature of the things we experience in life, it is essential to change the nature of our thoughts.

Even after studying the subject for centuries, scientists are still not entirely sure exactly how the principle of magnetism works. However, they do know that magnetism is a reliable and certain phenomenon, and that it has a clear connection with energy – specifically with electrical energy.

If a piece of non-magnetic metal is wound in wire and an electrical current is passed through the wire for several minutes, the metal will have strong magnetic properties when the electrical current is switched off and removed from the wire. Physicists believe that this could be because the atoms of the metal are rearranged by the flow of electricity, but whatever the explanation, the fact that a fairly ordinary bar can be made strongly magnetic at will is very interesting.

Even more interesting is the fact that magnetism is not a principle that is only related to metals. The Earth itself is a magnetic planet, having both a North and South pole as its polarities. Tissue paper which is rubbed against wool for a sufficient amount of time (usually ten seconds or more) becomes charged with static electricity and immediately demonstrates the ability to attract itself to other non-metallic items.

If the passing of an electrical charge around a plain bar of metal can give it strong magnetic qualities, and the generation of a static electrical charge can make even tissue paper attract itself to other objects, then it stands to reason that anything carrying an electrical charge will show some magnetic qualities. And the incredible thing is that everything in the physical universe carries at least some level of electrical charge… even the human body!

The human body is a hive of electrical activity, because every single cell in the human body actually generates its own electricity. Information is carried around the central nervous system via electrical impulses. Of course, the brain is a particularly active part of the body from an electrical point of view, and thinking can have a direct influence on how electrically active it is. In fact, on the physical level alone, it has been said that thoughts are themselves electrical impulses.

So, thought is magnetic because it is basically an electrical process. Knowing this suddenly makes things like non-verbal communication much more understandable, because it means that we should be able to sense the electro-magnetic emanations of other individuals just as easily as we can sense the positively charged ions that are in the air just before a thunderstorm breaks out – and the negative charged ones that follow afterwards.