THOUGHTS

We would like to dive deep into a very common trope: “Thoughts are things that create your reality.”
You will find this notion stated in much of the self-help and abundance-creating information you come across. Usually in this schema, since thoughts are things that have the power to create reality, all you have to do is manage your thoughts, and you magically get the “reality” or more precisely, the experiences you want. That all sounds quite logical and very simple. The problem is, whenever you try to manage or control your thoughts, they seem to run even more fiercely away from you. We suggest that any thought, controlled, managed, or contrived, therefore not arising naturally, has no power to create reality. The managed thought arises out of fear. The fear that if you think something you deem to be negative, you will have a negative experience. A thought that arises as one thing, and is forced to assume the guise of another thing, actually becomes the beginning of a usually quite elaborate story. It is easy to get lost inside of these kinds of stories.
On the other side of the idea that thoughts create reality is the awareness that “thoughts are nothing—insubstantial, have no place in the creation of reality at all”—it is all One Life unfolding.
Both and neither considerations are entirely true.
But what does that mean for how you go about living your life? Of course, it feels better if you are in a positive thinking habit. A negative one is just self-undoing. But wait! Self-undoing? That is the point ultimately isn’t it? To undo the self so elaborately created over lifetimes of experience? To eliminate the elaborate stories you tell yourself to identify who you are?
From our perspective, you are always the creator and the created simultaneously and seamlessly. The moment you identify with one position, you limit the possibilities afforded by the other position. You can easily get fixed in one viewpoint and then you are engaged in maintaining that viewpoint, unable to see anything else clearly. The only choice is to remain impartial in the face of anything that seems positive or negative, and not identify with either. Thoughts then rise and fall, without needing to be controlled.
Thoughts have no power of their own. Only your investment in them can make them seem powerful. If you think a thought is something or is nothing, or is anything what so ever, you are assigning characteristics to that thought and its “thingness” seems then to take on form.
Once a thought seems to take form, it becomes fixed in time and space. Whatever characteristics have been associated with that thought are elaborated upon until that thought attains the guise of reality. It is however, just a thought, even though the edges that are formed around it with ideas and descriptions create an illusion that can be quite convincing.
Thoughts naturally appear and disappear in vast emptiness. When you try to manage them, they can easily become reified. They seem important and separate from what is simply One Life Awareness unfolding. Let go of trying to manage your thoughts, and attempting to bend them to your will. Stop grasping on to the “good ones” in hopes they will last and bring good fortune—stop pushing away the “bad ones” you fear will bring you difficulty. The thoughts you grasp and the thoughts you push away are not creating your reality, it is the deep perfect still space within that creates and is created in every moment in equanimity, that simply is reality. The grasping and the pushing away have no real influence on your experience, therefore, your reality. With deeper understanding you can see how fruitless it is to believe you can control your thoughts, or force yourself to think a certain way.
Test this for yourself. Notice that thoughts come and go on their own if you let them. Just be with them, and just be without them, with no preference whatsoever, and you will find freedom, liberation, from the burden of trying to manage and control thoughts. Find the freedom that allows thoughts to appear and disappear and your experience, your reality, will mirror the spaciousness and liberation of One Life Awareness.

---