Getting what we don't want

Even though we know better, we re-inforce and re-affirm what we don’t want.

The more we think and act in a particular way, the more we become unconscious of how we behave.

If we’re in a hurry, we hunch over, clench our teeth and the steering wheel while muttering we won’t make it. And if our worst fears are realized, we take perverse delight in claiming we knew it would happen like this.

Our thoughts are repetitive and negative; what ifs taken to absurd conclusions. We zero in on what we can’t do, about lack, fear and resentment, habitual responses that happen if we’re unaware or unwilling to negate the negativity.

Whenever we’re depressed, we project that feeling into the future, believing it will cloud our lives like the dismal February sky. We must enjoy the despair or we wouldn’t choose it so often.

Thoughts do leap, often unbidden, from the unconscious, but we have the power to choose another thought.

Yet, when we’re as expansive as a sunny, July day, when life is humming along like our favourite song, we fear it won’t last, and cling to the pleasure like an over-protective mother with a wayward child. Both are destructive and push away what is held dear.

 “But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings; Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here,” Max Ehrmann wrote in Desiderata.

Indeed we do. We have our beliefs about why we’re here, some consider it a blessing, others a curse and some scamper between the two like a bipolar hamster.

But we were invited here by the Universe and nothing was preordained. Life is not something that happens to us, we create it with our thoughts, with the way we think. If we persist in thinking negative, dark thoughts, life mirrors those thoughts.

If we are adamant that good things only happen to other people, but never to us, guess what happens? And if the Universe should shower us with blessings, we soon fritter then away because we don’t believe it will last — and, consequently, they don’t.

“We control the frequency of our energy through our thoughts, feelings and beliefs,” it says on The Secret calendar for the ides of July. “If we are predominantly positive and feeling good, we are attracting like positive energy in every area of our lives. If we are in fear, powerless ness, blame, or any negative emotion, we are attracting like negative energy into our lives.

“As every single thing is energy, positive energy draws positive people circumstances, and events into our lives. Negative energy attracts negative energy, which we will experience through negative people, circumstances, and events.”

Our refusal to dance with life, our desire to ignore its music, create tension, which we don’t notice because it is so much a part of us. But it does make us anxious about life: about what we get, what we don’t and whether we’ll lose what we have. It shows up as a pain in the head, an ache in the stomach, or something much worse.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus put it this way:

“Therefore I say to you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than food, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. 

"Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by anxious care can add one cubit to his stature? And why are ye anxious for raiment?

“Consider the lilies of the field how they grow? They toil not, neither do they spin? And yet I say to you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clotheth the grass of the field, which to-day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

Until we shed light on the cause of our fear, anxiety, and anger, we deal only with the symptoms. We don’t acknowledge the emotional stress, or if we do, blame someone or something for our perceived problems.

We push it away, resist it, pretend we’re not feeling it. We get pulled into a whirlpool of dark thoughts like the event horizon of a dark hole; if we’re not careful, gravity will suck us in.

“If we are confused, it’s absurd to deal with the confusion; we have to decipher what is causing the confusion?” said Jiddu Krishnamurti, one of the spiritual greats of the last century.

A wise teacher does not tell us how to live, but asks the right questions so we can illuminate our own path. We are our own best teachers; we all have the answers to our questions. We can each be the high priest(ess) of our own truth, our own resolve, our own good intentions.

And the more we look into ourselves, the luckier we become, understanding at last what the Roman philosopher Seneca meant when he said luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment,” Eckhart Tolle, one of the spiritual greats of this century, writes in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.