we arrived at the steep part of the climb Lisa wanted to quit. She grumbled some more but managed to push on.
After trudging along a while, both of us sweating, we arrived at the steepest part of the climb—solid granite. Suddenly Lisa saw it as a challenge. Her experience of the hike changed. She pulled herself up steep boulders.
“This is fun!” she laughed.
After climbing steep rock for a while both of us were tired. We came to the first beautiful overlook. Lisa had never seen a view like it. She loved it. She thought we were at the top.
“You mean we’re not there?” she asked with a pained expression.
“Not yet. It’s up there. See?” I pointed.
Lisa became discouraged. Her experience of the hike changed again.
“I don’t know if I’m going any further,” she grunted, sat down, pulled out a cigarette and lit up.
“Lisa, look, we can see the top! Do you really want to quit now, when we’re almost there?”
Lisa grunted again.
A couple of Puerto Rican women, also attending the New England School, appeared on the trail. They didn’t feel like going farther either. We chatted a few minutes until some athletic-looking hikers passed by on their way down. I asked them how far it was to the top. They said, “Oh, probably about ten minutes.”
“It’ll probably take us twenty minutes then,” I joked.
For some reason the Puerto Rican women thought that was the funniest thing. They couldn’t stop laughing. Amazingly it jazzed everyone up, and we all got up for the last leg.
Grudgingly Lisa put out her cigarette and stood up. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Twenty minutes later the four of us stood on the peak. Lisa witnessed her first 360-degree spectacular view. Again she stared in awe. Lisa had climbed her first mountain. She had made it to the top.
Lisa made it because she stopped thinking she couldn’t.
Most of us don’t realize how our thinking controls us. We are at the mercy of our thinking—until we see and realize how it works to create our experience of life.
Thought is the greatest gift, the greatest power we have. It is our creative power—the power to create anything with our own thinking. This is the first spiritual Principle. It is a fact. We can have any thought. We generate it. We create it. We make it up.
The second Principle is the fact that we also have another awesome gift: the power of Consciousness. Consciousness allows us to experience life. Without consciousness we would not have any experience because we would have no awareness of whatever is happening out there.
Contrary to the way it appears we can never get a direct experience of the world out there through our consciousness. Our consciousness can only give us an experience of what we think is out there, of our own interpretation of what is “out there.” Our consciousness can only give us an experience of our thinking. The only experience we can ever have is of our own thinking.
This statement can be baffling. To truly understand this changes lives.
I’ll state this in a different way.
We take in life through our five senses. That’s obvious. What isn’t obvious is whatever our five senses pick up must be filtered through our own thinking. We can never get a “pure” or direct experience of the outside world. For example, some people looking out a window will see tree branches gently swaying in the wind. Others won’t be aware of trees or branches at all; they might see a truck going by. They are looking out the same window at the same stuff at the same moment but are having a different experience of what is out there. They are seeing a different “out there.”
Some people like the taste of broccoli; others don’t. Most people love the smell of roses; some don’t. Some people love rap music; others can’t stand it. Some people love the feel of velour because it reminds them of velvet; the feel of velour used to drive me up the wall. No matter what the sensory organ, it’s all how we think about it. It’s only how we think about it. Always! We can only know our own personal thinking of the outside world. That’s it. That’s all.
In other words, the mountain is not the problem. The mountain is the outside world. Our own thinking about the mountain is the problem. Lisa’s experience of the mountain differed from mine because we had different thinking about it and what it meant to us. That was the only difference! During the hike Lisa’s experience of the mountain changed numerous times. Sometimes it was drudgery, sometimes impossible, sometimes a challenge and fun. Why? Because along the way her thinking changed about it. The point is Lisa is the one who had to live with whatever experience she happened to think up at the time.
This is what happens in life. This is what our life is all about. This is our life, period. When we truly realize everything we experience— our perceptions, our feelings, our problems, whatever we call “reality” or “the way it is”—is really only a product of our own thinking, everything then changes for us. Our experience of life changes.
The outside world can never make us feel anything. Only our own thinking can make us feel things. Sometimes in the heat of battle or in a sport such as basketball or football we may not even notice we’ve been cut—until we notice we’re bleeding, and then we think about it. Only then does it hurt. We’re not experiencing the pain until we think about it. Our work isn’t what’s stressing us out; our own thinking about our work is what’s stressing us out. It’s not Johnny driving us nuts; our own thinking about Johnny is driving us nuts. It’s not our fear of speaking in front of a large audience; it’s our own thoughts about speaking in front of an audience. It’s not the mountain. Our thinking is the mountain. Our thinking is what the mountain is to us.
Our consciousness gives us an experience of whatever our thoughts create, and it makes that creation look real. That’s the job of consciousness: to make everything we believe look real to us. If someone cuts us off in a car nearly causing an accident and we get angry, it seems we really should be angry. But it is only our thinking. I’m not saying what the driver did wasn’t wrong or dangerous. I’m not saying we don’t sometimes have too much to do in too little time. I’m not saying Johnny doesn’t drive a lot of people nuts. I’m not saying there aren’t real people in the audience who judge us. I’m not denying the mountain is real. But what determines our experience of the mountain—whether we think we can climb it, whether we think we can make it, whether we think it’s too much for us, whether we think it’s overwhelming, whether we think it’s exciting or exhilarating—is all determined by our own thinking. Our thinking creates the mountain—for ourselves. Our experience of the mountain is determined by our own thinking. When our thinking changes, our experience of the mountain changes for us.
First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.
-- Donovan
“There Is A Mountain”
I had no idea what this song meant until I understood this. Like the mountain, our experience of our entire lives is determined by our own thinking—every aspect of life and every situation we encounter. Of course
