Just say yes

Life is an open-book quiz that we mark and we’re always right because there is only one answer – yes.

Whatever we throw out comes back to us like a boomerang or a relative who just keeps showing up.

It’s perception and choice. We can see the glass half empty, half full or broken.

If we peer at the morning with one half-opened eye and mutter good god, morning or throw back the covers and embrace the day with good morning god, it affects the rest of our day.

The way we see the world creates the world we see.

It isn’t only saints and gurus sitting cross-legged in a cave or society’s fringe dwellers who believe what some term psychobabble, but hard-nosed capitalists such as Walter Chrysler and Henry Ford.

“The real short cut to success is enthusiasm,” said the founder of the Chrysler car company while Ford maintained that if you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.

They knew that being rich doesn’t make anyone else poorer because it simply reflects the consciousness and a belief in abundance while many believe in a lack of this, that or something else.

If we keep thinking about what’s missing – whether it’s peace, love or laughter – we’re unlikely to wake up one morning brimming over with happiness or clutching a winning lottery ticket.

We weren’t always this way.

When did we change, why did we become world weary, what happened that we jettisoned our youthful enthusiasm for the so-called logic of the marketplace?

We are all creative geniuses; we create our own lives.

“We are all born geniuses, but life de-geniuses us,” said Buckminster Fuller, who somehow retained his genius.

We are infinitely more than this form that we pamper and perfume in front of the mirror every morning.

We are frozen energy, just like ice is frozen water, and water is frozen steam. We have forgotten that everything flows. Instead, we have chosen to believe that this is all there is while we might be a parenthesis in eternity.

There’s eternity from which we came and strut awhile upon the stage and then exit back to eternity.

In that belief system, we are a particularization of the Absolute, divine energy creating a mould, flowing into it, and we emerge.

But forms change, pass away and then reform out of the primal energy.

Quantum physicists have proved that we are both a particle, a well-defined point in space, and also a wave, which goes on forever and exists everywhere.

Would our fears and angst be lessened if we would remember that we are also the wave, that everything is already here?

Neither we nor scientists ever discover anything — any more than Columbus discovered America – we reveal what is there.

Electricity didn’t simply pop into being when Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell codified laws to harness it or when James Watt invented the steam engine.

We can’t see ultraviolet or hear ultrasound, but they’re all around us. We can’t see germs, but ask someone with the flu whether they believe in them.

We can’t see atoms or sub-atomic particles, but they make up the world; they make up us.

We are bound by nothing except our belief.

Let’s do an experiment. Let’s suspend some hard-held belief and see if it changes our worldview.

If we can’t suspend our disbelief that everything is unfolding as it should, that it is, as Voltaire said (OK, he was being sarcastic), the best of all possible worlds, what does it say about us?

Why do we refuse to let go of the rock that’s anchoring us to a belief system that makes us miserable?

Plato’s metaphor for life was people chained in a cave and seeing shadows from outside reflected on the walls and thinking they understood the world.

We tend to dismiss as absurd anything that doesn’t fit into our belief systems and think we are superior to Plato’s cave dwellers. Knowledge has increased exponentially since Plato’s time, but we’re still chained in that cave.

Knowledge spawns new theories, pushing the limits of belief. New cosmological theories have gone beyond the big bang and an ever-expanding universe to include a multiverse with big bangs popping up in an endless chain reaction.

“Whenever a thought crosses your mind that some terrible calamity might have happened, you can be sure it has happened in (some universe),” write physics professors Jaume Garriga and Alexander Vilenkin.

According to the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, every time we make a decision, universes split off where every possible permutation of that decision happens.

Strange beyond belief?

Four hundred years ago, suggesting there was anything beyond the inner solar system carried a death sentence.

Priest Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for suggesting there were other worlds in an infinite universe; 100 years ago, even Einstein believed we lived in a static universe made up of only the Milky Way galaxy.

The world didn’t change in the last 500 years, we did. We can stay mired in antiquated beliefs or we can step outside our belief system. What do we have to lose?

“Daily, we should open our consciousness to the divine influx, expecting greater wisdom and guidance and complete self expression,” Ernest Holmes wrote in Spiritual Awareness. “We must re-light the torch of our imagination by fire from heaven.”

Great philosophers and poets have no problem with such beliefs.

“All philosophy is based on the premise that we think, but it is equally possible that we are being thought,” said  Frederick Nietzsche, a sentiment poet Walt Whitman seemed to share.

“The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual — namely to you.”

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