What’s in Your Memory Bank Account?

Those darn negative thoughts that just won’t go away, no matter how much inner work you do, are just plain annoying. What’s up with that?

Best-selling author Barbara Berger (with Tim Ray) wrote in her book, The Awakening Human Being: A Guide to the Power of Mind, about the Law of Thoughts Arising. Right off, she’s given you a big clue: It’s a universal law that thoughts will arise. “Thoughts arise and disappear. This is the first law because it describes an impersonal universal phenomenon which is true for everyone. No one knows why or where thoughts come from or what a thought is, but everyone has thoughts. This is the nature of life on this plane.”

Berger goes on to explain that when thoughts arise, it isn’t because we’re doing anything wrong; thoughts come and go on their own. Isn’t that the truth! Have you ever had a song or theme music start playing in your mind for, apparently, no reason? Where did the trigger thought for that music come from, why did it happen, and why that song or tune? And, how long does it take for you to get that recording to stop playing over and over in your mind?

Part of my daily morning practice includes reading the day’s message from Ernest Holmes’ book, The Science of Mind. I’d already decided what my article would be about this week, but was pleased to receive support through this reading. Holmes stated that everything that has ever happened or will happen leaves an imprint on “the walls of time; and could we walk down their corridors and read the writings,” we’d read the history. He likened this to how we can record voices and images, store them away safely, and revisit them, even decades later and still hear or view them. Well, this is exactly what we do: walk the corridors of our memories. And it’s not just our personal history involved; it’s also our physical, mental, and emotional genetic history.

That’s what those pesky negative thoughts are about: Our feelings and mental images, based on our perspectives and interpretations, imprint on our memory cells, like pages printed for books on shelves or paintings created and hung on the walls. Plus, there are genetic imprints on our cells as well. A thought arises and the next thing we know, we’re traveling down the corridors of our personal hall of records.

A negative-thought replay was going on for me, and this new thought came to me: Pebbles, Stones, Rocks, Boulders. I carry a lot of positive memories, which I do choose to replay from time to time. But isn’t it interesting that positive replays tend to occur more when we deliberately seek them out, rather than arise spontaneously. Negative-thought replays seem to arise far more spontaneously, but maybe that’s not really true. Maybe we have them closer to the surface than we realize. Maybe our practice is to go down negative-thought corridors, and we don’t realize this is our practice. It happens so fast, who has time to notice why it’s happening? And, after all, it’s what most people do, isn’t it? We call it being logical, or say it’s justified. We’ve made this practice almost a law, by virtue of so many of us doing it so regularly, as though it’s the only way to go.

I spoke with someone who’s trying to resolve a particular situation. The next steps are obvious, and we discussed them. Yet, every step discussed was met with a comment from the person about why it can’t be done or what’s impossible. I finally said, “Maybe you need to stop pulling up all the negatives you can imagine. You need to make a decision. The first decision is to get more information, because you’re deciding what can’t be done rather than discovering what can be done.” She agreed that was what she was doing. If all you focus on is what can’t be done, how or when the heck will you focus on what might or can be done? Which one will get you to an improved and preferred circumstance first?

Our memories are like bank accounts. You’ll find highs and lows there; and where you are with them fluctuates—because thoughts arise. But you can deliberately create more positives that get imprinted and stored in your memory bank account. You can also deliberately—or by default—continue to subtract from it by focusing on negatives. That’s what my Pebbles, Stones, Rocks, Boulders thought brought to my attention. I thought about how sometimes we get a pebble in our shoe. Maybe we stop and take it out; maybe we keep walking on it, complaining the whole time to ourselves or someone else.

Stones, rocks, and boulders, of course, won’t fit into our shoe; and if they did, we’d certainly stop and get them out right away. But when they are thoughts, which are already memories or become memories as we think them, we’ll put them into our shoe ourselves, repeatedly. When such thoughts come up, I’ve started saying to myself, “Pebbles, stones, rocks, boulders.”

I don’t need to figure out which category my negative thought fits into; that’s just walking the same path with something in my shoe that doesn’t benefit me. Saying those four words gets my attention on what I’m doing to myself—and that I can stop doing it. I can treat even the bigger ones like pebbles and remove them from my shoe then get on with creating something positive and feeling appreciation for the good stuff and people in my life, as well as the positive possibilities.

Thoughts arise. You maybe can’t break or change the law of this, but you can decide what to do from there. You can decide whether you’ll visit your memory bank account and count your negatives or your positives, as well as decide which one you’ll put more of into your account. What you put in and what you take out of your memory account is always up to you, and will reflect the inner life you experience, which then influences the outer life you live. You can choose to make your memory bank account work against you or for you. Choose for you. It’s a good practice, one you’ll appreciate.                    

          

Practice makes progress.

© Joyce L. Shafer

You are welcome to use this article in your newsletter or on your blog/website as long as you use my complete bio with it.

Joyce L. Shafer is a Life Empowerment Coach dedicated to helping people feel, be, and live their true inner power. She’s author of “I Don’t Want to be Your Guru, But I Have Something to Say” and other books/e-books, and publishes a free weekly online newsletter that offers empowering articles. See all that’s offered by Joyce and on her site at http://stateofappreciation.weebly.com

You Are Not Your Thoughts

Of the many thoughts you have each day, how many help you, how many hinder you? You can shift this in your favor.

This article may seem like some pretty heavy stuff for some, or stronger than I usually write, but I ask you to stick with me all the way to the end. Thoughts happen. They are like the stock exchange’s fast-moving digital tickertape, but much, much faster. But there are the thoughts and there is the YOU, the “consciousness” receiver of the thoughts. When you can distinguish between the two or remind yourself to do this, you begin to release yourself from being a prisoner of your thoughts. If or whenever this seems a challenge, just remind yourself that inside of a prison is constraint; outside of it is flow and autonomy.

There is a real YOU—the infinite consciousness that you are—that is not your body, your mind, or your emotions, as strange as that may seem. The “you” having the life experience provides information to your brain based on external stimuli because YOU are here in a body having experiences that use the fives senses to do so. But you are always, always more than that. When you have that feeling that says, “I know I’m more than this,” you’re right!

Life feels difficult and perplexing at times, or a good deal of the time, because you’ve believed the five-sense “you” is the real one, as well as everything the five senses input into your brain, which your brain then decodes to make some sense of that information so you can interpret “reality”. The sense we make of the information is more often than not colored by our beliefs and our conditioning because the brain filters signals we receive about “reality” to fit our beliefs. Sir Francis Bacon said: “The world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding…but the understanding to be expanded and opened till it can take in the image of the world as it is in fact.” 

You want to look at what you believe and who you believe it for. If it isn’t for YOU, you want to look at that as well. You see, restrictive beliefs result in a restrictive experience of “reality”, rather than a big-picture, holistic one. Restrictive beliefs, especially rigid ones, suppress our ability to open and expand consciousness. As we expand our consciousness (actually, lift the veil hiding our consciousness from us), we expand how our brain decodes information it receives; we discern differently because we have more information and an improved means to process it. We and how we experience life expands. That’s the only direction we and life can go in once we re-mind ourselves to expand our consciousness. You can have something of an experience of who the real YOU is if you watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED.com video about her Stroke of Insight, where she had a direct experience of full consciousness as one with All There Is compared to the I-am-Jill’s mind and separate, when she had a stroke that closed off her ability to interpret, in the standard manner, the signals her brain received about the world around her.

The five-sense “you” relies on those senses to navigate the life experience. YOU use the five senses but you have a sixth sense (maybe more) called intuition, or inner knowing. Intuition (inner knowing) is not an anomaly just for some. We all have it. I learned this as a fact when I went through the Silva Mind Method training a few decades ago. Even the strongest disbelievers in the class performed, as we had to, to graduate.

Intuition, or inner knowing, is one way we plug into the infinite consciousness we are and are a part of. The esoteric ones of old, and a number of our contemporaries, knew and know this. We may not be brought up to know this about ourselves, we may even be told it’s a “sin” to use this part of our true nature, but it’s still there for us, ready to assist our navigation through life in ways we desire but don’t necessarily feel skilled at using. But we can put it into practice.

Your five senses can cause you to believe the “matrix” is real, that what the senses perceive is all there is, which is quite different from the real All There Is—the One Source, which is limitless in what it can supply and provide for you, and does. The interesting thing about this is that quantum mechanics has proven that nothing, no thing, is there. The only thing there or here is the consciousness creating the appearance of reality, which is a pretty impressive hologram, so impressive that we can literally bump our heads on it. Ernest Homes wrote, “Nothing moves but mind.” He wrote this quite a while before quantum mechanics caught up with this as a fact.

This is an extraordinarily challenging truth for most of us to believe, much less grasp, because though true, it’s contrary to what most believe because of what we were taught and are still being taught, despite the empirical evidence (and ancient knowing). Humans managed to accept that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe and was round, not flat (once they knew they wouldn’t be punished or worse for believing that, and once those in authority could no longer get away with insisting it was flat, etc.). But this fact about reality we’re looking at here is a bit harder to wrap the mind around because we’ve believed the opposite for so long and because of how effective the physics of it all is, as well as what we’re told “reality” is.

When thoughts happen, someone—in your case YOU—is there to notice them. When a person’s body stops, their infinite consciousness departs the body suit but doesn’t cease to exist. This is evidenced by out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and more. Even though we know of these experiences or know people who’ve had them, or have had them ourselves, we still don’t necessarily integrate the full meaning for us into our daily lives.

Many of us who’ve been on the spiritual or metaphysical path say we believe we’re infinite consciousness. Do we really believe it, or understand it? If we’re infinite consciousness after we leave the body, then we’re infinite consciousness right now. When we believe only what our five senses supply us with that our brains decode and we (our “you” aspects) then interpret based on how we were conditioned by the various systems in place that hold so much influence over us and our lives (which influences past, present, and future perceptions and experiences), we cut ourselves off from our full, true nature. We say we want to be authentic, but what does that mean to us? Will we include the fact we are more than our thoughts and emotions and body? Or that, in fact, we are not them, that we simply use them while we’re here?

We don’t like feeling limited, but we aren’t too excited about going the distance with what’s being discussed here. In fact, it can be frightening because we’ll have to step away from tribal mentality, which might make the tribe leaders and members a bit peeved with us. (Ever wondered why that is?) Just that thought, or acting on it, can make us feel alone, but only until we find others who understand and live this. Not going the distance is making a choice, one we’re not happy with the results of but are used to, or conditioned to be used to, or are afraid to accept and allow.

We identify with our thoughts, and when we do so, we believe they express absolute truth. All you have to do is have one of your assumptions proven false to see this, which is a minimal form or example of this. We have tens of thousands of thoughts each day. We, as our five-sense “you”, may believe we need to believe each of those thoughts, simply because they’re there. You may recall the revelation that subliminal messages are placed in movies and commercials and more to influence people to buy products or believe whatever. Are those your thoughts? Did you choose them? YOU can choose your thoughts, just as you can choose which item on the stock exchange tickertape to pay attention to or focus on. You really can.

Is it easy to remember you’re more than your thoughts, more than what the five senses indicate you are? Not necessarily, because every day you wake up and set about dealing with whatever you deal with. What’s going on around you or “you”, based on your beliefs, can convince you to be busy in action or have busy-mind, rather than productive-constructive mind, or relaxed mind, which is usually when inner knowing communicates with us. With either or both of these busy aspects going on, who feels they have time or energy to remember he or she is infinite consciousness having a human experience? But we can remember this, even amid the busyness of our lives.

It is important to make time or remember to plug into the Truth of who we are and into our connection with the One Source so we don’t get lost in illusions and delusions. Otherwise, we’re prone to believe we’re weak rather than strong, stuck rather than creative and innovative, limited rather than infinite, not in control of our choices when we can be, and so on—even though some days or during some experiences, we feel limited more than infinite; but we can remember and recover our footing, if we know about this in the first place.

It will also help to know and remember that two of the parts of your brain are the R-complex, which is responsible for our fight, flight, or freeze reactions, and the neocortex, which helps us think things through. In the briefest of nutshells, you have both the ability to react based on whether you feel safe or not, which is based on your thoughts about events, as well as the ability to think about your thoughts a bit before you react. One reason we feel we can’t think straight or with more conscious consideration when we’re having strong (negative) emotions is because the R-complex is activated to ensure survival. This is why we can think straight, or more consciously, when we’re relaxed, without busy-mind.

The R-complex cannot distinguish between the past and present, and is why your body responds to a negative memory as though “it’s” happening now, which causes you to behave as though your survival is at stake, even if you’re lying in a hammock, with everything quiet all around you. If you rely on the R-complex too often or too much, you don’t exercise the neocortex. You then create brain “ruts” that lead you down the path of reactive behavior more than create neuronal “paths” that lead to conscious consideration. This alone may inspire you to become aware of thoughts and aware of the thinker.

How can you distinguish between thoughts and inner knowing? Thoughts have a loudness quality to them: they’re insistent. Inner knowing is subtle. It will nudge you once or twice then go quiet if you don’t listen. You can practically feel thoughts in your head, almost like a movie screen on your forehead facing inward. You feel inner knowing in your chest center, maybe you even feel it radiate into your limbs, but you don’t feel it in your head. Put another way, you feel it in your heart-energy center, not in your mind.

Your thoughts may lead you to want to be considered clever (after all, cleverness is rewarded), which your mind, through thoughts, can accommodate; but clever and wise are not the same thing. Wisdom is something your infinite consciousness provides. Cleverness without wisdom can be disastrous. It can lead to creating things or taking actions that do more short- and long-term harm than any real good, because cleverness doesn’t always consider ethics, morality, justice, and overall well-being, whereas infinite consciousness always does. Cleverness AND wisdom is a beneficial combination. We can look at our own lives and at what’s going on around us to see when cleverness, wisdom, or the combination is used, and when they are not.

Our thoughts based on only five senses keep us occupied, so occupied that we often can’t see the bigger picture going on around us. However, we can choose to put our attention on our connection to the One Source so we keep in mind who we really are, which is not the thoughts we have and not the thoughts we’re told to have or are influenced to have by anyone else. We can look at what’s going on in us and around us and ascertain whether we follow the path the One Source would encourage, or the herd. When we realize we’re not our thoughts, we can think and feel and know for ourselves, and do so from a higher perspective, a perspective more akin to the One Source than the “matrix”. It’s a good practice, one you’ll appreciate. 

Practice makes progress.

© Joyce Shafer

You are welcome to use this article in your newsletter or on your blog/website as long as you use my complete bio with it.