Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Feb/Mar 2020 Aspire Magazine FULL Issue | Page 50

This steady stream of experience that
makes up your life is like a river. New
thoughts, emotions, and other experiences
are always flowing toward you and then
away. The source of the river is something
beyond the psychological, human realm.
The nonphysical, spiritual side of life is the
source of our physical, human experiences.
Water splashes onto the banks of the river at
times, but water that comes to shore always
returns back to the river. There is a constant
ebb and flow, coming from the source and
returning to the source. The nature of the
river, beneath any surface waves, is calm
and clear. The nature of you, beneath any
surface waves (thought, emotion, other
experience), is also calm and clear, with
unending peace of mind and clarity.
Although we bear an extremely wide variety
of experiences, they all stem from thought.
Everything you experience—from what you
feel and see to what you hear and taste—
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comes to you via your own thinking. In other
words, your thinking determines what you
experience in each and every moment. You
will see that this is true if you look at how
personal and subjective our experiences are.
No two people see the same movie, hear
the same song, or react to any circumstance
in life exactly the same way. We experience
everything through our own thinking, and
then our thinking creates a picture of life that
we assume reflects objective reality.
To see this truth in action, notice how your
experience changes when your thinking has
changed. When you’re sitting around the
dinner table and your sister tells a detailed
story about a vengeful waiter spitting in a
patron’s meal, the next bite you take suddenly
isn’t as delicious. The food didn’t change, but
your thinking created a different experience
of it. Or imagine you’re engrossed in a movie,
just beginning to tear up as the lovable hero
lies dying, and a cell phone rings behind
you. Your thinking immediately shifts. You
are reminded that it is only a movie, and the
emotion you were feeling so strongly isn’t the
same. We don’t directly experience any kind
of external “reality”; rather, we take in sensory
information from the world around us and our
own internal kaleidoscope uses it to create a
picture that we then call “the way life is.” This
is how it is that every person who ever walked
the earth has his or her own unique version of
reality. The dreams we have at night provide
an excellent metaphor for how our daytime
thoughts work. When you dream, it is clear
that you are experiencing nothing but your
own inner world—an inner world that does not
match the outer, physical world. Your mind is
projecting a series of images and experiences
that appear to you—in your dream state—as
reality, while, in the physical world, you are
soundly sleeping in your bed. You feel fear,
joy, or confusion in your dreams. You see
colors and vivid, lifelike images, just as you
www.AspireMAG.net | February / March 2020