by Patrick Bailey
Introduction
"The intention in the human heart is like water far below the surface; but the man of intelligence draws it forth." Proverbs 20:5
Imagine that you found a magic coin and that you rubbed it and a little old gnarly man appeared who said, "You are now able to go to the Hall of Fates."
You are taken to a big room where there is a vast display of lights on a wall with switches next to each one. Next to each switch are three lights; green, white and yellow. There are three settings that each switch can be positioned to. If the switch is in the upward position the light is green, if it is in the middle position the light is white, and if it is in the downward position, the light is yellow. The wall of switches is miles high and goes on in both directions for as far as you can see.
"These switches are connected to the most powerful generator in the world," explains the little old man. "When they are in place, no earthly power can change them."
"But what do they signify?" you ask.
"Every person has a switch," said the little man. "I push some up and some down and leave some in the middle. If the switch is pushed upward, then that person will have the power of the generator working for her inevitable rise in life. Her dreams will be large and they will be fulfilled."
"And what about the switches that are down?" you ask.
"Those people are not going to be able to fight the power of the generators. They will slowly sink down in their lives and their dreams will never be realized," explained the old man. "I don't like to push the switch down, but those are my instructions. Some up, some down, leave some in the middle."
"And what about those that are in the middle position?" you inquire further.
"They can go either way in life, success or failure. The generator ain't workin' on their lives. It's not even connected to them. It's just up to them," said the old man.
"Why are you telling me this?" you ask.
"Because you rubbed the coin. It's my duty to show you your switch and to let you push it into any position you want," answered the old man, who then got onto an old elevator. "Come with me."
We traveled on that rickety elevator sideways and upwards for several hours until we finally come to a stop.
"I reckon that's your switch right there," said the old man.
(Before continuing with this story, do you already know which setting your switch has been set on? But that's impossible, you have never rubbed the magic coin before!)
"I ain't got much time, just move your switch and we'll be back down," continued the old man. "Unless you want to leave it where it is."
(Let's leave the rest of this story until the end of the book.)
If you want to live in this world, then you are going to have to know how to respond to its stimuli. You are a part of the world but only a small part. Your main function will be fitting in with what is already there. You are not the reason that the world exists. Approach the world as if you were a musical note of a chord; try and maintain the harmony that is already there.
Be in sympathy with the world and everyone in it.
It's true that life can be a struggle and that it's important to face up to the challenges in your life. But life is also an adventure and the two are not mutually exclusive terms. Engaging in the struggle can be an adventure. I did not say "winning" the struggle, because it's not your fault if you don't win every time you play. In fact, we learn as children that it's not fun to play if the same people win all the time.
The way you respond to the stimuli in the world will basically dictate the type of person you will become and the amount of success you have in bringing your own contribution into the world. It's imperative that you not only act in the world, but know how to react to the world. The way we respond to stimuli is both emotional and rational. Some people respond to the world more emotionally than others. These people are attractive to us by their very humanity but we must realize that their high susceptibility to emotional responses comes at a price for themselves, and to us, if we are close to them and vulnerable to their moods and ideas.
My emotional side is always looking for sympathy and love. I am writing these words with my rational brain but I don't deny that my emotions have a very real effect on me. The emotions are "hotter" than thoughts, which are rational, which undergo synthesis and which we intuitively feel to be constantly in need of adjustment. We don't really feel as "connected" to our thoughts as we do to our emotions. In this way, emotions seem much more stable and real to us than our thoughts do. Our emotional reactions tend to be regular, predictable and powerful. They can become too powerful at times and this is a danger to our well-being. Controlling our emotions is central to our socialization process as children. If we never really learn how to do this, we enter adult life with a decided handicap.
The fact that our thoughts are not so much a part of us as are our emotions is actually a good thing. We need to have an open mind and to allow new ways of thinking to influence us or even change us. Old ways of thinking hang onto us like wet clothes. But thinking is a powerful tool and it can be an active tool. We cannot become too attached to old thoughts unless they are our values. Values are special thoughts. Values are the thoughts which we put on a pedestal as our best thoughts, our guiding thoughts, the thoughts that govern us. In this way we form our character. Not all thoughts are fleeting. We must keep some as golden rules for ourselves.
1. Never Regret the Past
This is first on the list because we all have a past once we are aware of who we are and that we actually exist. It is good to learn from the past but it is not good to carry any burdens from the past with you. Let the past go with yesterday's sunset. There are some beautiful things in your past, cherish them. There are some beautiful things in your future, anticipate them with relish. But don't retrace your previous steps or relive what others have said or done to you or what you may have said or done to them. Take control of yourself and push yourself, step by step, into the next scene of the play. You are in the lead role. Don't let the audience down by thinking about the last play that you were in.
If you're spending a lot of time regretting the past then I already know something about you. You're still alive. Let's build on that. This whole book is intended to have a "cumulative effect," as my piano teacher used to say about my practice drills. You may not have the sensation that you are learning anything, but if you put the right ideas to work, you are learning.
I want to be very clear on what I mean by the cumulative effect. When I was practicing those drills on the piano it did not feel at all natural nor did it feel like I was learning anything nor did it sound great to my ear. It was more comfortable to plunk away on old songs that I had already learned, clumsy fingering and all, because those did sound all right to my ear and my hands were not having to learn new things so they were comfortable. If I were to judge the two behaviors by how I felt at the time, it would be more productive for me to plunk away on the old songs. Learning new skills does not always feel right. It's a mistake to think that if you do the right thing you will feel great. Not at first. You may feel terrible in fact. It may be extremely irritating to learn new things. And worse, you won't even have the sensation that you are learning anything at all. You will feel like a klutz. So this is our first clue that we must separate thinking from feeling. Right thinking leads to right action but not necessarily to a good feeling. Not at first. It takes practice to feel (and hear!) the benefit of those piano drills. The only sure thing is that you will never get any better at that old song of yours if you just plunk away at it and never do any other drills or exercises.
How we feel about what we do is not the correct guide for our actions. Too often wrong ways of thinking produce familiar feelings and those feelings gain power over us by their repetition. We're awash in the feelings but we don't examine the thinking. And when we do examine the thinking and experiment with changing our actions the feelings we get are fear and apprehension and so we go back to our old ways of thinking which produce the feelings that we are familiar with. It's a cycle we need to break and it takes practice and patience. Eventually our feelings will catch up with our right thinking and we will be in harmony. But the key is to control the process and control starts with thought, not with feeling.
Now let me be clear on what I mean about not letting feelings govern your actions. Do I mean that we should all be like Dr. Spock on the original Star Trek and say that feelings aren't logical? No, of course not. Do I mean that every time you have an impulse to buy a gift for a friend you have to engage in a lengthy Hegelian dialectic over whether it fits in with your life plan? No. I don't advocate becoming inhuman in order to succeed. I want you to be human and loving and spontaneous but I don't want feelings to run your life. I don't want you to approach your basic foundation of life the way you would buy something in a store on impulse. Because it feels good.
The process of changing your life is work and not play. Practicing the piano is not the same as playing the piano. Some work, like washing dishes, does not involve much thinking and can bring on an almost zombie-like state if done for long enough (My first job was as a dishwasher.) Then there is more cerebral work where you must think, interact with other people, make decisions and take risks. This second type of work is the category that changing your attitude fits under. If you read this book in a zombie-like state it will mean about as much as getting a good batch of dishes done. If, however, you think and act on what is written here, you will find that your life can change. Not all at once. Not like getting all those dishes done at once. It will take time and it will be a lot more frustrating than the dishes. But the end result will be worth it.
What is it about the past that you regret? You made a mistake? You didn't exercise the proper amount of judgment? You were living in a dream world? You had an idea about how things should work out and they didn't work out that way? You were weak when you should have been strong? You were human when you should have been above all that? You can't escape your humanity.
People aren't machines that can be programmed to spit out certain answers to every life situation. You're much more complicated than a machine. But there is one thing about a machine that can be used as a model. When my computer makes a mistake it doesn't say it's sorry. I suppose they could program one to say things like "I am sorry that I crashed your document yesterday. I couldn't get a wink of sleep last night." But I wouldn't believe it. I don't think a computer regrets its mistakes at all. This isn't the kind of forgetfulness of the past that I recommend for human beings. This is the kind of mind that a sociopath has. (I'm not saying that computers are sociopaths, but when you buy your first one you may get that inkling at times.) I don't think people should work their will on the world with no feeling for the effects it will have on other people. But if they have used their humanity in their judgments, then they have nothing to regret. And if they made mistakes before they fully understood their own humanity, then it's time they got on with their lives and not waste them regretting the time when they didn't realize how to live.
Regretting the past is an invitation for negative thoughts to come into your mind and find a nice comfy little home for themselves. Negative thoughts are those that lead to feelings of doubt and powerlessness. They are what lead you to second-guess yourself, not just your actions, but your actual self. If you spend time regretting the past then you are living with these negative thoughts and they are corrupting your present. You don't have to let negative thoughts come into you. You can recognize them for what they are and not accept them. You may start to think about them out of habit, but then you can shut them out. Just as you would shut out the vision of a loved one's death in an accident or something else you didn't want to think about. You don't want to think negative thoughts. They aren't part of you. You don't need them and they won't do you any good. If you are curious about them, if you think you can learn from them, if you just want to feel sorry for yourself, then go ahead and let them wash over you for a while. Did they do you any good? Of course not. Don't waste your time with them next time. Your future can be a bright one, regardless of your past, and the first step is to block out all negative thoughts, including those of your past.
Some people become addicted to negative thoughts. These people think that their negative thoughts are what make them what they are. They probably don't think they could get along without all those negative thoughts telling them how worthless they are and how pathetic their lives are and forever will be. Why would anyone become addicted to this kind of thinking? Is it because of guilt that they feel they deserve to feel miserable about themselves because they don't love themselves? People who commit crimes are sent to prison, but why would anyone voluntarily put themselves in the prison of their negative thinking, slowly torturing their self-esteem until it is nothing but a limp noodle?
Kick negative thoughts out of your head and keep them out. There isn't any room for them. They get in the way. They turn sweet things sour. They make it impossible to appreciate the good things that you have or could achieve. They are trouble. They hang around like hoodlums on a dark street corner, waiting for you to turn your back so they can rob you of all your hope and confidence in the future. Why not find a nice sunny street to walk on? Why go down Negative Lane all the time? You've walked it enough to know there isn't anything good in the shops. They're all boarded up. It's Nowheresville. Don't be a city father of Nowheresville.
You have mountains to climb in your life adventure. They are sometimes kind of steep and you need to be nimble of foot and mind. But then you have that old luggage from the past to take up with you. You have that old car engine, the burnt-out washing machine, the assorted pots and pans of past experiences that you have tied all together and drag around behind you Maybe instead of climbing the mountain you just want to dig a big hole and put all your past things in there and then sit on them and make sure they're OK and remember all about them. Let the others go up the mountain. You have to sort through all that stuff. Why not dig the hole and bury those things, leave them and forget all about them! They are only going to make it impossible for you to reach your heights.
Maybe you'll get part way up the mountain and feel tired. You may feel anxiety and a fear of heights. You decide to go back down and dig up those old things and start dragging them around again. At least that's something that you know how to do. If you get tired on your journey up the mountain then it's OK to rest. It's OK to find a place to stop for a while. But don't go all the way back down just to dig up the past. Don't make it an either/or situation where you either have to be Superman or you have to accept defeat and wallow in things that have come and gone. Don't sabotage yourself because you can't do it all. You have limitations and you need support from others. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Don't mistake your human needs for human failings and don't look back over your life for "what went wrong." What is going wrong is the process of looking back and clinging to old things. What is needed is just to look up at the mountain and accept it as your challenge. Even if every single thing in your past life went wrong, it has no power to stop you from climbing the mountain unless you choose to let it. That past does not control us any more than alien beings from another planet control us. But if we believe that alien beings from another planet are controlling us, then it may as well be true.
Learning is life. Remembering is part of learning. Remembering and weaving that memory into the present is what makes a person grow. But don't save the negative emotions that you experienced. Just save what you found out about yourself and the world. The negative emotions that were associated with those experiences needn't be saved. They happened; they are memories; but they no longer serve any purpose. If you want to save something, save money. Money in the bank will do you some good later on, while negative memories won't. Run a clean engine in your life. A clean engine runs smoothly and quietly, not on the gunk from the past, but from the refined power that you have refined from all those experiences. Make all your experiences count for something, something that will make your life better. Take the essence of them and discard all the crud that you may have been immersed in at the time. Take a hot shower each day and wash away what you worked through to get to where you need to be. Approach each day fresh and ready to do it all over again.
2. Never Envy Anyone
I always say that if you want to get into the envy game then you should be fair-minded about it. Since you are only one person and you have no special claim on a perfect existence then you should be willing to envy anyone. You should be able to envy the unemployed, the terminally ill, the unfortunate sufferers with chronic pain, the people who are mentally ill. What? You want to envy movie stars and billionaires? That's hardly being fair about it. If you are going to envy people, then don't play favorites, envy everybody! And if that isn't your cup of tea, then try living your own life and not envying anyone!
The ultimate goal is to to envy your own situation. Not to think that your situation is perfect but to realize that you are in control of your life and that it is exciting to be alive and working your will upon the world in whatever way you can. If doubts about this are too strong to resist, if you choose to persist in wanting someone else's life and not your own, then this should be a signal to you that something is wrong with your attitude about yourself. Don't try to escape from who you really are. Don't focus on everything except your true self and then say that you're mixed up and that life isn't working out for you. If you're trying to be something that isn't really you then it's best that things don't work out. The message has to come back to you that you aren't in tune with yourself. Otherwise, how would you ever learn it?
You might think that other people can find themselves but they were lucky and you aren't lucky and your self is too troubled to be anything more than a burden and you'd just as soon not know who you really are because you think that if you ever did find yourself that you wouldn't be all that impressed with what you found. You might think that you've got enough to worry about without finding some true self who might come out into the light but not have a clue as to how to operate in the world. Your true self might be a baby because it's never been able to grow. You might imagine it's better to be stuck in a rut that you know about and can at least navigate with some success. You might fear that things could be even worse if you let go of your present ways of thinking. After all, at least you're getting by.
Comparing ourselves to other people is a tricky business. In a sense life is one big karaoke party. Other people can sing better than we can and look better doing it, too. We have to have a "have a few stiff ones" to even be persuaded to get up there. All eyes will be on us and if we make fools of ourselves it will be embarrassing for everyone, especially us. Maybe we better go hide in the corner where it's dark so no one notices us. Performing is for other people, people with the talent. We just won't be accepted or admired. We'll be laughed at.
The problem is that we all want to sound like Barbra Streisand or Frank Sinatra. We think we need to awe the audience. To conquer them. Just being ourselves and trying our best and laughing at our mistakes doesn't come easy. In a way, being ourselves is harder than being that singing idol. We're afraid of letting people see and hear us as we really are. We want a barrier between us, a talent that supercedes our personas and creates for us something to hide behind. Isn't this why a lot of superstars are unsatisfied? They have all the talent they need but they know they are not being accepted for who they really are. If you think of it that way, you actually have an advantage over them! You don't have the expectations to live up to or the track record to keep going. You're coming out and being yourself and showing that you are comfortable with who you are. It's not hard for me to imagine a big singing star watching your act and envying you for being so comfortable with yourself and your limited singing talents! Imagine the pressure they must be under each time they perform. They can't possibly forget the words or sound off-key. You can! It's all right to be yourself.
How do we find our true self and what do we do with him once we've found him? What if we wrote him a letter? I wrote my true self a letter:
Dear True Self,
I've thought about you a lot. At times I feel so close to you. When I laugh or when it's quiet and I'm thinking about you. I listen for you to talk to me but I don't know how to recognize your voice with all the other distractions I have in my life. I have worries and the world is sometimes too demanding on my time for me to really have time to get in touch with you. That doesn't mean that I don't want to. Sometimes I get so confused that I don't know if you really are with me or if you grew impatient with me and left for greener pastures.
I want you to be happy. I wish you could tell me how I should live my life. I wish I could wake up one morning and see that you've left me instructions on how to live and what to do. But I guess it doesn't work like that. I have to do the best I can to do what I think you would want me to do.
I want you to know that I love you and that I will always try to listen to you. If I fail, it will not be hard on me as long as I know that you are with me.
It was awkward to write that letter. I don't know if my true self knows all that I feel. But then he must, mustn't he? He's inside me, just like your true self is inside you. Why don't you write your true self a letter? He'll appreciate it even if he can't respond. He will just feel better knowing that you're thinking about him. One letter won't change much but it's a start. Try and get close to him and to listen to him. He is on your side. He wants you to be happy. He wants you to accomplish your goals in life. He wants to feel wanted and needed, just like you do. The world is not his concern. His concern is you. His concern is that you live in the world in the best way you can. He's watching and hoping that you can do your best and that you stay the same wonderful person whether you win or lose. He likes you that way. He wants your heart to be filled with love and happiness, with laughter and warm tears, with the spirit that he knows you have in you.
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