Your brains can’t help thinking. It thinks non-stop, because this is its nature. But you are not your brains. This means that your true nature transcends thought, it is beyond any expressions on either a physical or mental level. A direct consequence is that the world created by your emotional thoughts is not the real world. Emotional thought is unable to perceive the essence of any element of creation.
I often suggest that the world you (we all) perceive is not a “reality,” but I am well aware that it not an easy idea to grasp. You have your senses that “describe” the stuff with which you physically come in contact. Your eyes make you see a rose, your nose makes you smell its scent, your sense of touch makes you feel the softness of its petals, your ear makes you aware of a bee buzzing nearby, and your tongue makes you taste whatever you put in your mouth. Therefore …. This is the real world because this is the way you experience it.
No one can deny that you are having specific experiences. The problem is that such experiences do not represent what actually “is.” They are your personal interpretation of it. Think for a moment: When you look at a rose, you don’t simply enjoy the beauty of its color, its scent, or the softness of its petals. You have to think about it. Your brain starts immediately to reason about the characteristics of this flower, it cannot help making comparisons with other roses previously seen or smelt or touched … and so on. Therefore, while you are busy thinking, the deep essence of such experience is almost totally lost. By judging what surrounds you — as this is just what thinking is — you label situations, things and people. When you “label,” you put the object of your consideration in a specific category. Usually, such category is both inaccurate and restrictive. How come? It is inaccurate because you never have “all” the elements to make a fair assessment. You only believe you do. In fact, if another person is asked to define the same object, they will most probably give a totally different description. There are even jokes about how differently witnesses depict the same criminal to the police. If you are not aware of this, and possibly not interested in exploring such possibility, you create a kind of cocoon around you where you happily live without seeing beyond your prejudices. Where do these “prejudices” come from? You believe you are a free individual, you say that no one tells you what to do or what to think. It might seem so, but it is not totally correct.
Such prejudices are not innate. Since birth your mind undergoes a never ending absorption of information whose aim is to educate it, i.e. molding it in agreement with the accepted values of whatever society you live in. This information, that you get from most different but all equally powerful sources such as school, family, social environment etc., build an actual screen around your brain. Thus you find yourself fully conditioned, programmed to give precise answers to particular stimuli. If you fear something, your answer (your reaction) will be the result of the conditioning you have previously received. Therefore you will behave either cowardly, or bravely, or aggressively, or indifferently, and so on.
Given a particular stimulus, the possible reactions to it are many, as many are the programs that might have been activated in our brain since early childhood. Even the way you have seen others behave, an image you perceived, or a word you heard by chance, contributed to enrich your mental computer. But now you are an adult. You are capable of realizing if the “program” directing your life is still compatible with your needs. And if you decide that it is not, you are not compelled to keep it forever. Each conditioning can be eliminated and replaced by another of your own choice. It is exactly what you do with your computer when you want to change a piece of information, or with your washing machine when you select a different program according to your laundry items. If you leave such program unchanged, so it will remain forever. On the other hand, once you decide that you do not need or like it any more, you can learn how to erase it and reprogram the “computer” according to your present requirements. This is what Creative Thinking is about.
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