A thought is just a thought. It’s the effect, the result, the manifestation of everything, everything, that’s gone before. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It just is…..the result of everything that’s ever happened within the whole universe.
Yet we believe our thoughts and we become so caught up in them, as if they’re real. But they’re not. They’re just the natural outcome of everything that’s gone before.
Because everything is the effect of everything that’s gone before, in order to see the world with any kind of hope, there has to be a belief that there’s some kind of guiding principle behind it all. That guiding principle is love. Not human love as we know it, but the organising principle behind the universe, growth, expansion. That’s why bad things can happen to good people. It’s not that “God” is bad or wants something bad to happen. It’s just the result of everything that’s gone before. Even man’s free will, man makes choices as the result of everything he’s learned, genetic inheritance, cultural inheritance, everything that’s gone before.
But underlying that, if we can see the bigger picture we can know that the bad falls away and all that’s left is growth, expansion, love. The trees lose their leaves, the flowers die, the plants die back in winter, all goes beneath ground. To all intents and purposes it looks like it’s dead. Dead bracken, tangled bine stems scoring the sky, as Keats would say. But underneath, this guiding principle is still at work, recreating, replenishing, renewing, and when the conditions are right, in spring, out come the shoots and they grow into flowers, leaves, blossoms, fruits. And then the cycle begins again, ever growing, ever the same.
And it’s the same with us. Our thoughts have no real impact on all of that. They only have an impact at an individual level as the effects of those thoughts create more effects, and more effects,. Everything that has ever happened in your life is the effect of everything that’s ever gone before.
But you can change that. You can choose another path, different thoughts. But even the choosing of it, that too is the effect of all that’s gone before, of cavemen looking up to the sky and seeing the planets whirling around and feeling there must be something bigger than themselves, more in control than themselves. And that effect manifests, perhaps, in your thought today that maybe there’s another way to choose, another way of looking at things, another thought that you could have and so it goes on.
Since our thoughts are not truth, they really are meaningless. They are just the effect of our conditioning. So it really doesn’t matter what we think, and it really doesn’t matter what happens, because it’s all exactly as it is meant to be. Everything is always exactly as it is meant to be because it always the inevitable outcome, the effect of what has gone before. When we realise this, and when we can learn to trust that underlying, guiding principle of love that makes the flowers grow and the planets whirl in space, then we can let go of needing things to be a certain way. We can feel ourselves to be part of the ebb and flow of life, the growth, death and rebirth as energy cycles around.
And then it really doesn’t matter what happens, it’s fine either way, it is exactly as it is meant to be. Our likes, our dislikes, our preferences mean nothing, they are just part of our conditioning too. They are not truth, they are not what or how it is meant to be. Life is far bigger than the little me. Life just is, an eternal cycle of growth, death and rebirth, of creative forces expanding and growing, a vast network of energy, of love. ,Because if it were not love, it could not grow. Love grows, fear diminishes. J Krishna Murthy, the great spiritual teacher, once stopped in the middle of a talk and asked if his students wanted to know what his secret was. He told them his secret was: “I don’t mind what happens.”
Eckhart Tolle talks about how in life we suffer many challenges, losses. We get drawn into old reactive responses and thoughts. The little me starts shouting, crying, complaining and we lose our centre, our connection, the enlightened knowledge we have. But once we have reached a certain level of spiritual practice, the challenges we face can deepen our connection, rather than bring out the little me. And then we can let universal energy resolve the situation, by flowing with life, surrendering to life and not trying to force an outcome.
It takes time to learn to dwell in the state of surrender. That is what spiritual practice is.