Your Thoughts Become Things – Choose Wisely

Have you ever encountered the idea that “Your thoughts become things”? I hadn’t, until 2018 when I read the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. In the book, Mr. Hill writes that every thought we have immediately begins to manifest itself in our life circumstances. This applies to all thoughts, no matter how fleeting or vague.

This article will take apart this concept and provide some “tangible” proof of the fact that our thoughts do indeed transmute themselves immediately into things. How is that possible? Read on to find out.

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Every Thought We Have Manifests Itself In The Material World

This statement points to a profound truth: that every thought we have changes our life circumstances. For proof of this we need look no further than our emotions.

Our thoughts and emotions occur within us and are intimately related, they are bound in a perpetual feedback cycle. When we experience an emotion, say joy, the very experience of the emotion then leads us to have thoughts which compliment it, joyful thoughts. These thoughts then express themselves in the material world through our words and actions. Joyful people say and do joyful things.

And the same applies to every other emotion. In this way, our inner immaterial experience becomes transmuted into the physical world of things.

Until we have trained our minds, every time we experience an emotion it creates a thought which then feeds into the emotion. This is why certain consistent emotional states have been linked to specific health issues. For example, stress is has been identified as a risk factor for heart attacks.

When we’re stressed, our bodies relies on the hormones of stress, cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones then influence our thoughts, which then influence our emotions. Do you see how our thoughts immediately get turned into matter? By thinking stressful thoughts we create emotions (chemicals) which then create more thoughts and so on and so on.

Want a little more proof about how our thoughts immediately manifest in our physical world?

Let’s Do A Cool Experiment

Imagine a lemon. Better yet, imagine a lemon which has been cut in half. The lemon is fat and juicy, you can see the beads of juice pooling on its surface as you take it in between your thumb and index finger. The smell of the lemon reaches your nostrils, its tangy scent sending your sense of smell into a tingle. You feel the rough surface of the lemon’s skin on your fingers as you take it up to your mouth…

And bite into it.

Imagine biting into that lemon, imagine that lemon juice rushing into your mouth, coating the surface of your tongue.

What do you feel?

I know what you’re feeling, because I felt it as I wrote these words!

That tingling feeling we get on either side of our jaw are our salivary glands producing extra saliva in order to process the imagined lemon’s juices. Isn’t that amazing? Doesn’t that just absolutely blow your mind? By IMAGINING biting into a lemon we can create a physical reaction in our body, as if the event had actually happened.

It’s An Unsolved Mystery

No one knows how this happens, of course. The mind/body connection is one of the greatest mysteries of science.

But we know it’s there, because otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to do what we just did. Nor would we be able to move our bodies, speak or do anything else we do.

Can you now see how every thought we have immediately begins to manifest itself in the world?

How Our Emotions Become Conditioned By The Past

Emotions precede thoughts, you can read about this in this article. According to David Brooks in “The Social Animal”, our emotions are in charge of guiding us through our environment. They develop and play out at a level of awareness which is deeper than our normal operating consciousness. We then use the messages we receive from our emotions to make our choices.

The brain makes it seem like it’s “us” (the ego) in control, but really the vast majority of our decisions are made at a cognitive level below the ego. The ego is an illusory construct we identify with to feel safe, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. Just be aware that we are not our egos, or in other words, we are not who we “think” we are.

Sounds kind of odd, doesn’t it? It seems like there is a huge part of each of us which we aren’t even aware of, but that nonetheless guides us through our lives. If we’re not careful, this can lead us to believe that we have no free will. If our emotions are subject to our environment and our thoughts are subject to our emotions, then how can we have free will?

According to scientists and philosophers, the question of whether or not we have free will is still open. I believe we do have free will, there is no other option, nothing else makes any logical or spiritual sense. We’re each here to choose to let go of fear and be love. That can only happen if we have the free will to choose to do so.

So if we have the free will to choose then how come so many people are living lives they are unhappy with? That’s the trillion dollar question.

Free Will Is A Skill

And the answer is: because free will is a skill. Like any other skill, it needs to be developed. Like playing the piano or painting still lives of sea cucumbers.

Our bodies (emotions) react to our environment based on our previous experiences. These reactions then condition our mind (thoughts). Because of this we can get stuck in the same emotional-mental patterns and be completely unaware of it because most of our choices happen below our awareness.

Think of a person who had a traumatic experience with snakes as a child. Maybe he had an eccentric herpetologist aunt who kept a roomful of snakes in her house and one day an anaconda escaped and slithered into his bed as he was sleeping. That would scar anyone. As an adult, that person could have a phobia of snakes. Just hearing about snakes can send a person with a phobia of snakes into a stress response.

The person doesn’t choose to experience intense fear when looking at, or even hearing about, snakes. It is how his emotions were conditioned as a child.

Getting clear on how our emotions become conditioned to past experiences is crucial, because…

Emotions Only Arise Through Relationships

Every emotion we experience is in relation to something. In other words, there has to be a “something” for us to have an emotion about it. Our personal reality is not made up of “things” it is made up of “relationships.” You don’t see “A water bottle”, you see “How this water bottle relates to me.”

This applies to EVERYTHING; people, activities, things and places. We experience the world as it relates to us.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

If we have something in our life we want to change, we must change our relationships to it. In other words, change the emotions our relationship with the thing produces.

• What is our relationship to money? (If you struggle with money, the Reporgram.ME hypnosis program by Inspire3 is stupendous at changing your emotions towards money).
• What is our relationship to romantic relationships?
• What is our relationship to food?
• To exercise?
• To work?
• To friendship?

The emotions created by a relationship (or a relationship created by the emotions) determine our thoughts and hence our reactions or responses to it. In this way, our emotions set the course of our life circumstances.

If our relationships determine our emotions and our emotions are determined by our past, where does our ability to choose come in?

This is where our thoughts come in.

We Can Choose What Thoughts We Give Our Attention To!

This article talks about the supreme importance of training our minds through meditation. If you’re interested in changing your relationship with life I highly recommend you read that one.

We are awareness. We are the choosers of where awareness is directed.

We can’t choose what thoughts are produced by what emotion. But we can choose which thoughts we give our attention to. And since what we give our attention to expands, we can choose what we allow to expand in our life. While simultaneously, what we remove our attention from diminishes.

This is why becoming aware of our internal states is such a game changer. When we are in touch with our experience, with the now, we become aware of the thoughts running through our mind and can make a choice. We can not choose and remain caught up in our self-constructed stories, or we can choose to step out of them and observe them objectively.

One of these options leads to developing our free will, to making new choiceswhich lead us in new directions. The other leads to continuing along in our conditioned pasts, reacting to events in our present moment the way we always have, remaining stuck in our patterns.

Which option do you think leads to a peaceful, joyful and abundant life?

To our wealth and success.