BEWARE - You Will Get What You Want

"Sow a thought, and you reap an act; Sow an act, and you reap a habit; Sow a habit, and you reap a character; Sow a character, and you reap a destiny”

-- Charles Reade - 19th Century English Author --

Our minds are like a very fertile pieces of ground that will grow ANYTHING we plant there in abundance.  The question is do we plant, crops or poison?  Desire or hope for something good is one kind of seed.  Fear of or worry about something bad is another kind of seed that is just as fertile--for some people it's MORE fertile.  Ultimately what we are and what we become is a function of what we choose to plant and nourish in our fertile minds.

I’ve been contemplating lately how improbable chains of causes lead to the exceptional effects (whether calamitous or beneficent) that we experience in life. Every outcome is the result of one or more choices or events that are themselves outcomes of another set of choices or events and so on back through time. Often very significant occurrences, when traced back through their precedent causations, turn on some of the most seemingly inconsequential events. The job you get, the person you marry, or the accident that kills you are all the ultimately the result of tiny events whose momentous consequences could not have been foreseen at the time they occurred. The dizzying possibilities of what might have been had we not moved where we moved, left the when we left, or met who we met, have been the subject of human regret and unrealistic mind-bending time-travel stories through the ages.

For some people the seemingly random outcomes of life can be attributed to luck, others believe in immutable destiny, and still others see themselves as either victims or beneficiaries of a complex web of arbitrary circumstances. I don’t believe in luck, destiny, or pure randomness. I believe we have chosen to be who what and where we are in life. To me so much of what happens to us we create or attract ourselves by what we choose as our goal. Our minds act like heat-seeking missiles that guide us subconsciously but inexorably down the paths that ultimately lead to our objective.  Ironically, that objective can be either something we desire or something we dread because faith and fear are simply flip sides of the same coin (e.g. seeking security is simply the antithesis of dreading destitution).

Your brain has the propensity to relentlessly solve the problems you give it.  How many times have you been wrestling with an issue, gone to sleep, and awakened with clarity about what to do or how to resolve the problem?  Our subconscious minds are busy all the time adapting and adjusting and moving us down the path toward whatever we seek.  The good news is that we can exploit our marvelous minds' auto-pilot feature to lead us to prosperity, peace, and happiness.  We do this by disciplining the eye of our minds to be single on the good outcome we seek.  For instance, if you want to be a good provider for your family desire that, plan for it, expect it.  Your amazing subconscious self will guide you to it.  If, alternatively, you worry about losing your job and being insolvent, that same auto-pilot feature will take you there.

What this means for you and I is that we must discipline our minds to focus on desired outcomes (faith) and not drift into distress over what we wish to avoid (fear). What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. Much of this mental focus is born from the unending dialogue we carry on with ourselves (some call this self-talk). The strange thing is that even our jests (e.g. self-deprecating humor) are sucked into our subconscious steering mechanism. Have you ever noticed how those with positive outlooks and expectations seem to live lavish lives while people with pessimistic propensities seem to punish themselves with perpetual problems? Jesus said it best, "seek and ye shall find".  The question is what do we consciously or unconsciously seek?

None of us are smart or powerful enough to consciously create all the conditions necessary to determine the precise outcomes we desire, but we can stand back and let our endlessly creative and strangely prophetic minds guide us through the chaotic complexity to the destination of our dreams.

Our dreams will come true whether we want them to or not so let’s ensure that they are fond fantasies and not nasty nightmares.