in our way, we curse it. The same dandelion can be a beautiful or a miserable experience. All because of the way we think. The same dandelion!
What determines how we think about it? Why do some people end up in one place about dandelions and others in a completely different place?
Because we have deeper, hidden thoughts or beliefs that determine our thinking (and therefore our experience) of dandelions. People with manicured lawns may have something in the back of their heads saying a manicured lawn is of utmost importance. Whatever the reason, that person may not even realize or notice he is carrying around that belief. But when he sees a dandelion he is looking through those beliefs—through that lens—at the dandelion, and that is what determines his experience of the dandelion. The lawn guy will think the dandelion is in his way because it interferes with the manicured lens he is looking through. But the lens he is looking through, too, is self-created. He made it up! He doesn’t realize he is getting a bad experience only because of what he himself has made up.
This is what we do with our kids. This is what we do with our neighbors. This is what we do with our partners. This is what we do with our business associates. We have a set of thoughts about what’s important about life—from wherever we picked it up—then we look out at the world through that lens and see a distorted vision of the dandelion, person or situation. The lens, however, is not reality; it’s only an illusion we have inadvertently created, again with the power of Thought.
Very often we allow someone to drive us crazy because inadvertently we have created the illusion of what people should be like for us. In other words, we are creating our own misery by what we have made up—only we don’t realize it.
To realize this, to realize what we do to ourselves can be quite humbling. To realize this usually makes us want to take our thinking a little less seriously.
At least it does for me.
We’re sitting in a car stopped in traffic next to a large truck. All we can see out our window is a wall of truck. Suddenly we’re rolling backwards! We freak out and go for the brake. Only we’re not rolling backwards; we’re stopped. The truck is really moving forward, but we have the illusion we’re moving. That’s the thought. We freak and go for the brake because Consciousness gives us a real, sensory experience of our thoughts. We would swear we’re moving, until we find out we’re not. It’s our own thinking creating “our reality.”
I walked out of my motel room near Detroit, suitcase in one hand, banjo in the other, and my car was not in the parking lot. “What the...?” Maybe it wasn’t where I thought I parked it. I walked around the lot. It wasn’t there. Close to where I parked I saw a car a little bluer than mine and a little longer than mine, but it wasn’t mine. So I walked around the parking lot again. I still couldn’t find it. I walked around a third time and still didn’t see it. I couldn’t believe it. For some reason I didn’t panic. I thought it was interesting. Since I was on a book tour and had to get to a book signing a little later in the day I wondered what I would do. Because I hadn’t officially checked out yet I dropped my luggage at the front desk and decided to go back to my room and gather myself. As I walked up the stairs to the second floor I put my hand in my pocket for my car keys. They weren’t there!
“Oh my God,” I gasped, “I wonder if I left them in my car last night, and somebody stole my car!”
Instantly I remembered some very loud people in the room next to me late last night as I tried to sleep, and they had left early in the morning, saying, “Hurry up! Shhh! Quick!!”
“Oh no!” I thought, “Maybe they stole my car!”
I walked into the room and immediately noticed my car keys laying on the bed. So much for that theory! Puzzled, I looked out the window overlooking the parking lot and saw a car with a sticker on the back window just like the one my daughter had stuck on mine. “Whoa, that’s interesting,” I thought. Even more interesting, the car also had a green license plate and, what a coincidence, it was a Vermont license plate and, oh my God, it had the same number as mine, and oh gee, it’s my car! I ran downstairs and, sure enough, my car was right where I had left it. It must have been the car that had looked a little bluer and longer than mine.
There are a few possible explanations: 1) I may have been in a time warp, as on Star Trek. 2) Someone could have picked my pocket, took my keys, run to my car, drove to the store and zipped back so quickly he slipped the keys on my bed without my noticing. 3) I could be at the first stage of Alzheimer’s. More logically, for some reason my car was not in my consciousness, and as a result it did not exist for me at that moment. My car (the fact that it was there) was not in my thinking. Even though I was thinking about finding my car I was not having thoughts of the presence of my car; therefore, my car did not exist for me. This is a perfect example of Thought and Consciousness in action giving me my experience. Weird but perfect.
Like Lisa with the mountain, Tammy with the needles and me with my car, all demonstrate how our thinking is our only experience of life. Our thinking is our life.
* “Health Realization” is a term used primarily in the past to describe the understanding shared in this book.
* Note: I do not mean that feelings aren’t important. They are! I will explain their importance in Chapter VI.
II: Wisdom Is Always Available to Guide Us If We Know How to Access It
A word of caution: A few people have told me they felt uncomfortable reading this next story. Interestingly, in a perfect illustration of what the last chapter points to, others felt no discomfort. Still others have had important insights from reading this story. The fact is, for better or worse, this story happened exactly as written. I decided not to whitewash it.
Out of the blue a woman named Diane sent me an e-mail telling me how much she appreciated my books. She wrote that Health Realization helped her so much her life was “99.9% better.” Only one little thing kept her from total 100% health.
I e-mailed back, “What’s that?”
She wrote back saying she’d been having an affair for five years, and that was the one thing keeping her in a state that wasn’t perfect health.
“It sounds like you’re in pain,” I responded.
She wrote back. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it! I didn’t realize I was in pain, but I am. What you said just turned me around about this, and I know now that I need to end this relationship. I’m ending it right away.”
A couple of days later I received another e-mail from her: “I ended it. Everything is fine.”
A few days later she wrote back again: “At first the man I was having the affair with was fine, but then he wrote me this long, heartrending letter, and now I’m really troubled.”
It so happened I had an opportunity, on my book tour, to be in the Midwest city where she lived. I asked her if while I was there she would be interested in a counseling session. She said yes.
When I got to town I called her and we arranged a place to meet. It was a beautiful day so she suggested a nice park, which sounded fine to me. When I arrived at our rendezvous spot she had changed her mind and said we should go to a different park, not as pretty but closer. Didn’t matter to me.
We parked ourselves
