I was working with a client and from having observed their own behaviour for a while, they arrived at the following, powerful realisation:
“You can’t change your experience. I just have to see that it’s my thinking about it that’s causing how I feel.”
Wonderful. This helped them so much and took such a weight off.
Because they’d seen that while the experience is real (the situation is happening; the sensations of it all are being felt – we’re not denying anything here), it’s not true.
Because it’s made of Thought.
Oh how I wish we hadn’t landed on the word ‘thought’ to describe the felt human experience. It’s quite possibly the biggest source of confusion around the 3 Principles, and it has a tendency to become a big stick with which to beat ourselves.
So, for the record:
→ Thought is NOT ‘thinking’
→ Although ‘thinking’ is made of Thought.
But only because everything is experienced via the Principle of Thought.
What is Thought, then?
Why not consider it as being perception.
It’s everything we perceive; everything that consciousness brings to life in our awareness. It’s the entire experience we’re having (of which ‘thinking’ is only a tiny little bit, almost layered on top of it – the DVD commentary track, if you like)!
So for example, as I type this, I’m having an experience of this thing my keyboard and my wrists are resting on, that we collectively know to refer to as ‘desk’.
I have an experience of that. It’s solid; material and it’s perceived. It’s real and I feel it. It’s made of Thought-perception.
But if my Dad—a carpenter—were here, he’d take one look at it and say,
“Where did you get this piece of crap?! What a waste of money! Let me make you something better.”
They’re two totally different experiences.
(Not ‘points of view’ but literally different realities being created – made entirely out of this thing we’re labelling as ‘Thought’.)
Both of them are real.
But neither of them are true. (How could they be? Whose version is ‘right’??)
And as my client saw, it’s the same with all your reactions to everything. All these perceptions of life’s happenstance. They’re all real. Own them. Don't push them away. That’s your stuff, right there.
Just know that it’s not true.
There’s real freedom in that.
It changes the way we view situations. There’s more curiosity—“Oh, look how the mind is responding to that!”—rather than being in it, pulled this way and that way by it; a victim of circumstance; taking on these reactions as ‘how I am’ when they’re simply not true.
Because, as I heard Dicken Bettinger once say,
“[It’s] a thought-created feeling experience, that’s only held in place by the thinking we’re doing in that moment.”
😮
Giles
p.s. In tomorrow’s Daily Reminder I’ll share a personal example of how this played out, to my advantage, in a real life scenario. (You can jump in the Time Machine and read it now!)
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Giles P Croft
A 19 minute-long video in which I comprehensively unpick ‘Real and not true’ 💝