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How to change your life experience: Thought

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Circumstances, and your experience of them, are two very different things.

Photo by Manuel Meurisse on Unsplash

The beginning of your current life experience is thought. Some form of thought is required to actually experience something. Animals and babies acknowledge life through intuition. It’s not clear how and if plant life can sense experience, although science seems to suggest it’s possible.

But human adults create experience by using thought to give meaning to an experience. For instance, right now in 2020, not only is there a worldwide pandemic occurring, but a major shift in white supremacy and systemic racism is also playing out.

The thinking brain

There are over 7 billion human brains on the planet, and of those that have reached or are past the age of reason (the point where a child can reason and practice moral responsibility), thought is guiding them on the journey of how they are experiencing all of this. 

The thinking brain is like an intricate sieve, filtering information as it is perceived by your sensory factors and instructing you how to feel and react to things. Typically you rely on preformed thought patterns, or neural networks (brain cells) for instructions from your brain on how to feel and what to do about something.

The confounded brain

But sometimes you are confronted by circumstances that confound your brain, because you don’t have brain cells at the ready to give you instructions on what to think. If you suddenly have information coming in that you’ve never truly had to confront before, the quickest reaction for the brain is to just consider it a threat.

These reactions, this guidance from the brain, is based in thought. If a situation occurs that you’re not familiar with, your brain might think something like:

  • I don’t know what to do.
  • I’m confused.
  • This could hurt me.
  • I’m scared.

These are thoughts. These are red flags your brain uses to warn you that something could go wrong, even if nothing is going to go wrong.

It’s important to know this because your thoughts about everything in your life are the genesis, or beginning of your life experience. Yes, there are situations, or circumstances that happen outside (and inside) of you all the time. But your thoughts dictate how you EXPERIENCE those circumstances.

There is a difference

Circumstances and your experience of them are two very different things. When you learn how to separate those two things out, your life experience will start to change, because you will be able to start controlling the experience at the very root of it: your thinking.

In the next blog post we’ll dive into this a bit deeper, and prompt you with a question to help you see how you are creating your own experience.

 

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