Not long ago I came across a slight twist on “as you think, so shall you find” written by Wayne Dyer.  It’s a long paragraph and took a few reads to get to the essence of what he had said.   So here I have broken it apart into five pieces so it is a little easier to absorb.

As you think so shall you be! Since you cannot physically experience another person, you can only experience them in your mind. Conclusion: All of the other people in your life are simply thoughts in your mind. Not physical beings to you, but thoughts.  

Your relationships are all in how you think about the other people of your life. Your experience of all those people is only in your mind.  

Your feelings about your lovers come from your thoughts.  

For example, they may in fact behave in ways that you find offensive. However, your relationship to them when they behave offensively is not determined by their behavior, it is determined only by how you choose to relate to that behavior.  

Their actions are theirs, you cannot own them, you cannot be them, you can only process them in your mind.

People are as you perceive them, not as they are is.  That’s the truth Dyer’s paragraph boils down to for me.  Of course, EVERYTHING on Earth is as we think of them and not the completeness of what they are.  For example, what we see is not what is actually before us.  It is what we perceive based on reflection of light.  Even then there are spectrums of light we can see and many we can not.

How I live today is far different from how it was ten years ago.  It is not the conditions of my life that have changed.  I am still me, the same person as before.  The world remains round.  The sun continues to rise and set.  Folks around me are still basically the same.  I have the same job in the same profession.  It is not people, places, things and situations that have been altered:  It is MY WAY OF THINKING that has become changed.

My practical discovery is the only way to change one’s life is to change my thoughts.  My previous experiments of applying external things to alter my existence did work sometimes, but only for a short while.  Rapidly my life always returned to the same as before:  the life I wanted to change.

These days I am mostly happy because I chose to be.  There was no internal switch I flipped and caused that to be.  I worked at it.  When I began to live as if I was happy, I began to have more happiness.  Optimism came to me because I planted the seed of it within, nurtured it and over time it grew.  And so on.

Stopping being obsessed with my past came only when thought by thought, little by little I began to catch myself thinking about it.  At first being able to push away tripping over my history only worked occasionally.  However, with long-term consistency and practice I can now, more often than, successfully push the past away.  All I have done and all that has happened is still within me and thoughts still arise about it.  The difference is I can exercise some control and shorten the duration of such thinking.  In this way my life is no longer directed by what happened and I live more in the present than ever before.

Nirvana eludes me.  Enlightenment has not descended upon my being.  Instead as an athlete trains to get in shape, I have trained myself mentally over time to compete with my thoughts.  I don’t always win, but I am victorious a lot:  enough to be permanently life changing.  My gratitude for these insights is profound and my thankfulness for the many teachers I learned about this path from humbly resounds within.

We tend to get what we expect
Norman Vincent Peale