Thoughts are creative. This is a fundamental concept that all religions from all corners of the world have endorsed for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians believed it, the Hindu and Yogic masters believed it and the Christian disciples believed it. But the important consensus that thoughts have creative potential (or that, potentially, ‘thoughts are things’) is not only found among religious peoples. Even scientific minds concur, as can be illustrated with the famous quote from Albert Einstein that, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’
Some people have difficultly grasping how this can be. ‘How can something as seemingly fleeting and intangible as human thought have any creative power?’ they ask. It’s a very good question, so let us take the time required to answer it.
Human thought operates on several levels. Each level is important and affects our lives in different ways, from the basic to the sublime:
- Thought directs our actions and reactions as a biological organism. Although the thoughts that cause our heart to beat, our blood to pump and our lungs to breath are unconscious, they are still forms of thought and must be given credit, for without them the human organism would soon cease to operate effectively.
- Thought colours our image of the world. In other words, the kind of thoughts we think determines how we feel about life. If two people look at the same rose, one might notice how beautiful it looks and how fragrant the petals are, whilst the other notices only that it is covered in sharp thorns. The rose is exactly the same in each case, but the thoughts of each observer lead to them having two very different experiences.
- Thought directs our actions and reactions as we interact with the world. The thoughts we think influence the choices we make and the actions we take in life. Some people think ‘I can’t do that!’ and they don’t. Others think ‘I can do that!’ and they do.
- Thoughts communicate non-verbally with other human beings. Not only do we communicate through speech and language, but our emotional states and feelings are also communicated non-verbally. People can ‘sense’ how we are feeling, and we can usually ‘sense’ their feelings in the same way. This is how we can often tell when someone is lying, because their words don’t ‘match’ the feelings that we sense from them on a non-verbal level.
All of this is very impressive, and even if that were the limit of what our thoughts were capable of, it would still be worth developing our ability to think in a more purposeful manner, because doing so would have a direct and measurable creative impact on our lives. However, that is not the limit of the capability of thought, because there is one more level that is even more impressive than all the others put together:
- Thoughts are attractive. Any thought which is invested with enough mental energy over time will attract a similar condition into the life of the thinker. Creating something with the power of thought is therefore possible if one learns how to think in a disciplined and consistent way until the desired condition is brought forth into their actual experience.
Thoughts can be creative in this way because they are not merely fuzzy intangibles that exist in the neural networks of the brain. They are in fact impulses of electrical and spiritual energy which therefore have an energetic influence on the world around us. This is what so many spiritual leaders tried to teach their followers thousands of years ago, but which few truly understood well enough to make use of.
