The Power of Thought

Twenty years ago, a dear friend of mine recommended that I read a little book called As A Man Thinketh.  Written by James Allen, a British writer, journalist and philosophical thinker, it was published in 1903. It’s a small book, 72 pages to be exact, but it packs a punch with regard to content.  It was the book that put James Allen on the map as an author and self-help thinker, and left an indelible impression on me.

“ A man,”  says James Allen, “is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all this thoughts. As the plant springs from, and could not be without the seed, so every act of man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them”.

It is estimated that on average a person has anywhere between 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day, with the large percentage of those ( some resources say up to 95%) being repetitive and mostly negative. That’s a lot of thoughts. And, “thoughts are things. They are both a promise and a prophecy”. (1)

Think of the image of water that wears away stone. Water is fluid. It can be torrential, or a soft, repetitive drip, or anything in between.  Either way, given time and consistency in its route, it will wear a groove through whatever lays in its path, whether that be sand, soil or stone.

Thoughts work in much the same way.  They are always flowing. And they are, along with our experiences, constantly laying down neural pathways in the brain, whether we are conscious of it or not, and contributing to the neuroplasticity (or not) of the brain.  Thinking and thoughts are not the same thing.  Thoughts can pop into our minds, like an unwanted house guest, at any given time.  These kinds of thoughts are usually repetitive, negative, uncreative, unconscious and anxiety provoking.  We hear these thoughts as “I” but who is this thought really?  Where is this thought actually coming from? It springs from a type of hypnosis.  Based on your culture, race, socio-economic status, gender identity, religion, etc, you were born and raised to think a certain way. Most of us say “I” to this way of thinking and identify with it as ourselves.  But in reality, there is a much more creative and unique identity hiding out underneath all those layers of reflexive thoughts.

 Real thinking, at the most basic level, involves attention and awareness.  The word attention springs from the Latin verb, attendere, which literally means “ to stretch towards”.  In our mind, when we are giving attention to something, we are “ stretching towards it” in an effort to understand, to perceive, to respond and to create.  When you are truly present with your thinking, it is possible to disengage from your thoughts, viewing them objectively and pausing the need to identify with them. This gives us the ability to “ buy time” with our thoughts. In other words, to engage an “inner stop” before impulsively reacting.  Meditation, or any sort of quiet, contemplative time,  is one way to help separate the thinker from the thought. With practice and inner attention, it is possible to experience periods when you are not thinking at all and you are simply experiencing awareness, without thought or thinking.

 Many years ago, I was gifted a circumstance that challenged these very ideas and principles in a very deep and penetrating way. It is often said that, in life, the test frequently comes before the lesson. In this case, it could not have proved more accurate. In this particular incident, a certain person, whom I had never met before, had aggressively inserted themselves into my life and violated a very personal boundary, the result of which was a catastrophic upheaval in my personal life and the lives of my immediate family.  I simply could not get over the rage I felt at the fact that this person felt they had a right to trespass so intimately into my life.  

For several years, the image of this person, whether triggered from a personal sighting or a revisitation of the circumstance in my mind, ignited deep feelings of hatred, rage, betrayal, loss and revenge. These feelings were so visceral that when they were present, I felt like a mortally wounded animal, in pain, afraid and primed to lash out. There was nowhere I could “go” to get away from these feelings.  Suddenly, the personal tool box I had built and always relied on to help me rally to a difficult circumstance ( running, breathing, yoga, meditation, writing, etc), was no longer sufficient. My inner world felt totally out of control. I was full of violent and retaliatory thoughts.  I concocted fantasy after fantasy about all the ways I could inflict deep physical pain upon this person, without the benefit of anesthesia.  My attention became split.  I still had to attend to and focus on the responsibilities of daily life, even though my inner life was being hijacked.

I knew consciously that allowing these thoughts to run amok in my mind was detrimental to my being. However, because the neural ruts had been deeply grooved and well worn by repeatedly entertaining these thoughts, they began to have a mind pattern all their own. While the left hemisphere of the brain is ruled by logic and reason, the right hemisphere responds to rhythm, repetition  and rhyme. It is also the more dominant hemisphere when it comes to processing and expressing emotions, and can produce an emotional response tens of thousands of times faster than a thinking or cognitive response.  Therefore, the left brain, with its thinking and reason, can be a lot slower to respond to what the right brain may be screaming is an absolute threat to life and limb.

Eventually, this thought pattern had worked its way so deeply into the rhythm of my daily life that it became part of the fabric of my day. I had, by my own choice, my own mental labor, dug a trench so deep in my thought pattern that it became an addiction, working its way toward a possession.

While rage and anger are an appropriate response to what is called “ boundary devastation”, what is not appropriate or healthy is to keep revisiting that rage, anger and hurt much like you would keep licking at  a canker sore, impeding its ability to heal. My habit was robbing me of time, energy and creativity,  the most precious commodities I have.  It was time to get my life back. The physical intrusion of this person into my life was indeed a transgression of which they were guilty, and for which they would have to atone. However, this transgression had passed. I was the one psychically stuck in the no longer present circumstance.  I wanted to leave the slums of that kind of thinking behind and aspire to better neighborhoods.

To reroute this neural pathway, I started by putting a sentinel at the gate so I could begin to observe my thought patterns.  I let nothing pass without self-inquiry.  When the thoughts would come, I got in the habit of taking a deep breath, buying time before reacting, and asking: Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want with me?  I employed the silent witness.  I watched the context in which my thoughts would appear: Why are you here now?  What sparked your presence?  Do you require my assistance?  And I returned to  revisit another book about thoughts, this one published much later than James Allen’s,  called Loving What Is by Byron Katie.

Byron Katie’s book is based on self inquiry and what she calls the four questions, which are used to investigate your thinking patterns and thoughts in order to free yourself from the false perceptions and sensations your thought may be creating.

The four questions are:

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?

Katie also adds to the fourth question by encouraging the reader to “turn it around” and find examples of how this turnaround is true in your life.  For instance if you are upset because “ so and so doesn’t appreciate me”, you could change that to “ I don’t appreciate so and so” or “ I don’t appreciate myself” or “ so and so does appreciate me”, etc.  I admit this addendum to the fourth question was very tricky for me, and I still struggle with it.  Personally, I have found that in doing this exercise , the key is to find a turn around that feels true for you. It is not to deny the egregious assault of another.

When I applied these four questions to my circumstance, I realized that there was no way that I could know with absolute certainty that all the thoughts I was having about this person were absolutely true.  I knew what had happened was true.  I knew the fallout from that persons actions had been true for me and others who I cared about. I knew my feelings and initial reaction to that circumstance had been true and appropriate.  But the repeated re-engagement of that circumstance in my mind, swelling this person’s character to all sorts of malevolent proportions, was not true at all.  It was a work of fiction. Fiction that had held me prisoner in the penitentiary of my mind for years, and stole precious time from my life. As Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet once wrote: “ Why do you stay in prison when the door is wide open?”  It took me a long time before I finally realized that I myself held the key. 

There is a famous poem, written by Portia Nelson, called An Autobiography in Five Short Chapters:

                I

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost… I am helpless. It isn’t my fault.

It takes me forever to get out.

               II

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don’t see it.

I fall in again.

I can’t believe I am in the same place.

But, it isn’t my fault.

It still takes me a long time to get out.

              III

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in. It’s a habit. 

My eyes are open. 

I know where I am.

It is my fault. I get out immediately.

            IV

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

            V

I walk down another street.

Find that other street in your thoughts and in your life, no matter how long it takes you or how many failures you may have.  Your luminous life, the life you were born to live, depends on it.

1. Atkinson, William Walker. The Science of Living. Unknown publication date or publisher.