The Power of Perspective

There is plenty to read about the power of thought. It's a subject that has been at the forefront of modern thinking for quite some time.

What you Think About You Bring About

What you Focus on Expands

Where your Attention Goes, Energy Flows

These are statements all directly reflective of the understanding of e=mc2. Everything is energy and everything is in motion.

While it's true that most of us grew up with this discovery as a part of our awareness; it is also true that most of us had no idea what the implications of that awareness were/are.

As we begin to tie all these pieces together, we find two constants: energy and motion.

The atoms swirling in objects and in our own bodies, the constant becoming-ness of our life experience. We never stop "growing" or "Passing" until we are "gone".

Thoughts may be the fastest form of energy we'll ever know. They are very swift.

However, they are, conversely, very slow. That is, you do not have the power of thought to think "glass of water" and materialize a glass of water out of thin air. This is good. If we had that power we would quickly descend into chaos!

Instead, we have the power to contemplate, muse, ponder and imagine.

Einstein also said that the power to imagine was the greatest of our powers.

The non-stop action/motion of life provides the power of the present moment. It is
this motion which allows us to think thoughts gather them and add to them. When we look at the birth of an idea and how it unfolds we can see clearly that energy and motion are both involved.

Our lives are full of these individual moments which, when strung together become something we call "our life". We cannot step outside of our now moment to any other point in time, forward or backward. However, we have the power to take any point in time in the present and transform it into the energy and motion signature of any memory, observation or imaginative new potential.

We can use our present moment to contemplate what we despise or what we desire, and when we do this, which we are always doing, whether we pay much attention to how we do it or not, we transform the energy of our present awareness to that energy/motion signature. This is why many people can be said to be "not present" in their present. They are mentally and emotionally engaged in their own internal reaction of their own past experience triggered by a current event or circumstance.

When we learn to step back from our lives and actually take this message seriously, we have the power to intentfully turn our gaze and add unto the world. Until we learn it, we have no power to uplift, simply because we have not yet understood the true power we hold.

Thoughts can be misleading, though. It is not difficult to become "lost" in thoughts. It is quite easy, particularly if you have a penchant for deeply and questioningly observing the world around you.

This is why finding our own internal ability to guide our perspective requires more than just a simple understanding of thought. It requires the integration of our thought with the knowing that is held in our feelings.

Our emotional bodies, conveniently centered right around our "gut", tell us what our feeling response to any observation or thought we ponder, is. When we feel ill, or upset or scared, the first place we feel it is in out gut. "That sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach" Everyone knows what it is.

That feeling center is not making any judgments about the specifics of what is going on in your thoughts: it is simply telling you directly what those thoughts or observations feel like in relationship to well being.

When you are following your inspiration and exuberant and joyful in your life, your gut feels great. It' isn't sending signals of warning through negative emotion to tell you that you are headed in the wrong direction. It is joining you in a happy inspired creative moment of life!

We all have our own internal system of knowing. We can, at any time, look out into the world and see others who are doing things so differently than we at that we think "How can they do that?" But ultimately, it is our own relationship to these two aspects of our experience: how we think and feel. Think and Feel. That determine the quality and details of our life experience.

Perspective is the ability to observe ourselves within this balancing act in motion and make gentle course corrections, little changes in how we choose to spend our attention: what we choose to think about, and how we choose to feel.

In the end it is taking the helm of your own ship. It is the power to determine how your life will be for you.

While it is true you can discuss it with your friends, or contemplate it's meanings with the people close to you, in the end what it really means is that you make your own choices based on specific sound guidance from within yourself. You decide.

That is the pinnacle of accomplishment in human terms. There are no short cuts on this path, because you can ask for outside advice but no one outside of you has the unique feeling/thinking mechanisms within you to tell them what is really going on: only you know.

What we think and feel and give our attention to regularly becomes, in the end, our life. How we feel as we go through it determines the quality of that life.

You cannot make a better world, a bigger success or any other good thing from a place of feeling hopeless, angry, in despair or suffering. You cannot "save" another from their fate, whether it be starvation, poverty, disease or anguish, by joining them in that suffering. Becoming poor doesn't make anyone else rich. Becoming sick makes no one else well.

When we act as if they did, as if our paying attention and feeling pain due to someone else's pain was somehow helping, we lose our power to assist. When we instead, use our feelings and thoughts to follow our highest dream of well being for whatever that pain is we have observed outside of ourselves, we can uplift.

But unless and until we have learned to "ride the wave" of our experience joyfully and with love, we have nothing to give to the world. When you think of this internally, it is sometimes confusing and hard to grasp. It feels "wrong" to feel "good". Isn't that interesting?

But when you simply move one person out from yourself: it makes perfect sense. For example: you have two friends. One is successful, happy, interesting and always interested in things, the other is depressed and angry all the time. Who do you prefer to spend time with? You'd probably have lots of good reasons all about "helping" to spend time with the depressed angry one, but even if you did, you would have to admit the cheerful interesting one would be your CHOICE in terms of how you will feel when you are around them.

You cannot uplift the world from pain and suffering by complaining, protesting or finding what is wrong with the world. That's going in the wrong direction. The only thing you can do, if you really mean it when you say you want to direct your own life into something positive for the world, is to find your OWN joy.

For so many this is a daily struggle because so many of us have taught ourselves to do the right thing and feel all these negative feelings about all the "bad things" in the world. But we must retrain ourselves if we want to transform the world from pain to joy: We must be the joy.

It seems so simple, and yet...

The intellectual understanding of this and the practical application of this are two very very different things. Anyone can pay lip service to this idea. Very few can actually effectively guide their own thoughts and feelings to their own joy consistently and purposefully. Even the naturally joyous in our culture are taught it is not polite or proper to "show off" to "shine" to light up the world!

So our first rule is the hardest for most of us: be gentle on yourself. Rather than finding the flaws (old pattern thinking) look for the gems. In your self. Appreciate , as often as possible, your own powerful unique perspective and your own personal ability to make choices that soften your learned sense of unworthiness. Gradually give up the internal game of beating yourself up for mistakes, recognize that you are in constant motion, use the information you gathered from the "mistake" and move forward into something that feels better.

The better we become at this simple skill, the faster we move into the world and life of our dreams. It's small corrections, over time, into a place where feeling good is the order of our day rather than the exception.

When you forget that that is the aim, simply think of someone really grouchy and ornery that you have encountered in your life and ask yourself if that is what you think you want or not. Of course, you don't want to be that unhappy person. You naturally want to feel good because you innately know you are supposed to feel good. When we don't feel good that feeling of separation from feeling good is what causes us to feel less than good. Only we can feel our feelings. Only we know, and only we have the power to choose and/or change our feelings. No on can do that for us.

In the end, only you will ever really know this journey you are on called your life. Others will experience you from without. But only you will feel and experience the thoughts and feelings which make up your internal perspective of your own life.

That is the ultimate power of perspective. In all life, in all physical experience, resides the awareness which is the source and power of life itself. In humans that awareness if very keen. When we pretend that it is not, or that we are powerless in the face of our own awareness, we deny what is our one true power. The power to choose how we will look at something, and how we will feel about it.

When we rise to the occasion and become willing to care enough about our own feelings to love in spite of circumstances and events, we are completely and utterly free and powerful.

We all have this innate capacity. We could not exist without it.

The one place we retain this knowing is in our cherishing and uplifting and upholding of infants in our culture: we even fight about the "rights" of the unborn!

When we look at those of us who have just arrived on our journey, we find no flaw or fault. We see the evidence of that perfect balance and connection to internal joy intact.

None of us would find a baby guilty. We would not, no matter how hard we looked, find any of the qualities we easily and thoughtlessly hand out in our judgments of adults in our world: pervert, creep, predator, misfit, freak, not human...

We cannot separate ourselves far enough from the evident natural goodness of a baby as we observe it to go to any of those kinds of negative labels. The internal well being of the baby is so powerful that we are enamored of it instantly. We coo and cluck and carry on as if we had never seen a baby before. People stop you on the street and say "Oh my, what a lovely baby!"

When, we finally come to the day when we acknowledge and uphold that internal light in our babies, as they grow to become children and young adults and adults we do what ever is within our power to help that connection remain strong and true by acknowledging the internal power and rightness of the child, we will have mastered, as a race, the power of perspective.

The individual members of our culture will not feel disempowered. They will not "act out" their disempowerment upon other, weaker, smaller or younger individuals. There will be no laws that restrict the individual freedoms of any, for the whole will be a reflection of the one and the one will be a joyful empowered and inspired creative human being.