“Everything in the Universe is within you.” ~Rumi.
/The Power of Thought:
All You Need Really Is Within
Our human reality operates entirely through thought in the moment. Everything we feel is a result of our thinking. If we feel anxious, it’s because we are experiencing anxious thinking. If we feel happy, it’s because we are experiencing happy thinking. Our entire reality, therefore, really does come from within! It is an inside-out world.
When we were born, we were perfect and whole, and not anxious. Then, when we gained the beautiful power of thought, we learned that the external comfort blanket was super comforting, because “it made us feel better,” right? Wrong. The blanket is an object, with no capacity to make us feel anything. One hundred percent of the comforted feeling came from our own thinking about the blanket. It’s the same with all of life. I believe it’s the same with addiction. We reach for something to soothe and fix us and in that moment of relief, our thinking is altered and numbed so we have a distorted reality. We believe it is the answer to our problems, but it’s actually just thinking with an altered brain. Only when we put time and space between the outside source and our own reality, do we find the truth of our feelings.
We spend hours of our lives analyzing how to be happy, how to stop being negative, how to meditate, how to be less attached, how to be more empowered, how to be more creative, how to be more whole. Don’t get me wrong, this can be interesting, if (like me) you have your own small self-help library! But it’s more important to drop out of our head and into our heart.
Under our thinking is an innate wholeness that is always accessible to us in any moment, if we just see that our reality is entirely experienced through thought in each moment. All we really need to do is allow the feelings that arise from our thinking, conscious of the fact that our reality is constructed through thought. We can observe what comes up, embracing pleasant feelings and allowing the darkness without paying it much attention. Like an uninvited guest, it will eventually pass through, without you needing to do anything to get rid of it.
When we allow our thoughts to just flow through us, dancing with them through life, we create space where we would once have analyzed how to solve them; and it's in this space where clarity can arise and we can see the truth.
We humans are a vessel of energy, and, I believe, part of something greater that has a plan for us—and through this human life, we are blessed with the amazingly abundant, creative power of thought. All we really need to do is let go and flow.
With excerpts from The Tiny Buddha