really hit home. He said that he thought his father was proud of him going to university and impressed that he had got a place. Yet deep down there was this fear that his father thought he was not good enough, not good enough to pass his exams and obtain a degree. Eventually he recognized that this was, in fact, his Ultimate Negative Belief, discussed in the chapter on Affirmations.
Here is a clear example of the way your mind works. If you try to analyse the situation logically to find out why you are stressed you will almost certainly run into all the logical and practical reasons, the obvious ones. When you let the subconscious mind throw up the information it has you can learn a lot more.
Use this technique of running a phrase whenever you are asked to in this book. You can also use it at other times, times of your choice and under any circumstance. For instance, if you are getting angry in a particular situation run ‘The reason I’m angry is …’. ‘Another reason I’m angry is …’. Note the slight change in wording for the second and subsequent repeats of the original phrase.
Or you may be sitting around with friends enjoying a chat, then feel yourself getting anxious. Run the phrase ‘A reason I’m getting anxious is …’, ‘Another reason I’m getting anxious is …’.
Remember, as a wonderful book called the Course of Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1975) says ‘You are never upset for the reason you think’. This technique of running a phrase is an excellent way of finding out the real reason you are upset. Use it at every possible opportunity.
THE Emotional Aspects of Stress
Your feelings of stress are a product of the way you think. When you think things are going to be bad, difficult and stressful then you experience fear, worry and stress. When you think they are going to be good, exciting and fruitful you feel happy, expectant and fortunate. These diametrically opposite results are the consequence of diametrically opposite ways of thinking. So let’s consider the way you think.
The title of this section, creative thought, may seem to imply that there is non-creative thought as well as creative thought – not so. All your thoughts are creative, one way or another, and your thoughts create your reality.
People think in different ways. Some people think only, or largely, in words, some people think only, or mainly, in pictures and others think only with their feelings. Most of us, however, think in all three modes, even if one mode does predominate, and the combination of all three gives you your total ‘thought’. For our present purposes we will use ‘thought’ to cover all three modes of experience.
If your thoughts create your reality and part of your reality is the experience of stress then it should be possible to change the experience of stress by changing your thoughts. This is the concept we are going to explore.
Good and bad days
Consider some of the good and bad days you have had. On a bad day you might wake up late, you trip getting out of bed, run the cold instead of the hot tap in the shower, burn the toast, find the milk is sour and mutter to yourself that this is going to be an awful day. After that it probably will be.
On a good day you may find everything goes right. The clothes you want to wear are all clean, the sun shines, you catch your bus and get to work exactly on time and decide that this is going to be a great day. And it probably will be.
How does this come about? There are two possibilities. Either you focus your attention on the things that fall within your expectations and, consciously and subconsciously, ignore or filter out those that don’t, or, by your focus of attention and expectation, by the subtle messages you give out, maybe even by the sheer power of your thoughts, you actually change the way things happen.
Filtering
The first of these two possibilities involves filtering the input you receive from the world around you and the events happening in your life. In this way if you expect it to be a good day you will focus your attention on the good and positive things that happen; if you expect it to be a bad day you will focus on the problems and setbacks that occur.
You may insist you do not filter, that you see the world rationally and objectively, as it is. However, if you are willing to open your mind and see past your normal mode of thinking you may be in for some surprises.
You filter the world in which you live in a number of ways and the ways in which you do this can have a great bearing on the amount of stress you experience.
Species filters
As human beings we filter out much that is going on around us. We have ears to hear, it is true, yet they can only hear certain sounds. Dog whistles are tuned to a frequency that can be heard by a dog yet is outside the range of the human ear. Many other animals hear at a frequency that is inaudible to human beings. The same is true of vision. Some animals can see in the dark while we as human beings are blind. Our sense of smell is minimal when compared to that of many animals, and thus we filter out many major olfactory experiences that are part of the daily life of other species. We filter out the radio waves that pass through us and our environment every day, likewise the television waves, the electrical and magnetic frequencies and so forth. All these things pass us by because we do not have the sense organs to perceive them; they are filtered out by the details of our make-up as a species.
This means that you are only consciously aware of part of your environment. It also demonstrates that something doesn’t fail to exist simply because it is not detected by your senses, a point that is well worth bearing in mind.
This filtering also means that there could be a number of stressful things happening but because you are not aware of them you do not feel stressed. For instance, sounds that fall outside your auditory range will not frighten you, smells that your nose doesn’t detect will not trouble you.
Cultural filters
Secondly you learn to filter as part of your upbringing. Some things stress you because they are not what you are used to or what you consider to be normal. These same things that you find stressful could leave someone else totally calm because they fit in normally with their expectations as to the way their life would be.
Consider, for instance, the wearing of the correct clothes and shoes. John and Susan were going to visit Susan’s parents. John, who had met and lived with Susan in Australia, hadn’t yet met her parents who lived in central London and this first meeting was to be at a dinner party in their honour. Since it was the middle of a summer heatwave and they had been told that the occasion was not formal John wore a beautiful Batik shirt, smart light-coloured linen trousers and beautifully tooled leather sandals, an outfit that would have been perfect at a similar dinner had it occurred in the Australian township where he grew up.
Susan’s parents were mortified when he appeared in sandals and without socks on. They considered the evening ruined and endured it in an embarrassment of wondering what their friends would think of him. John, unaware of the social rules he was flouting, had a wonderful evening and expressed himself delighted
