CHAPTER 5
IF WE CAN ONLY FEEL WHAT WE'RE THINKING,
DON'T WE NEED TO THINK POSITIVELY TO FEEL
THAT WAY?
“We are ever only one thought away from peace, love, and joy —
which come from a state of no thought.” — Dicken Bettinger
There is a caveat that I haven't mentioned
yet to the principle that we
can only feel what we're thinking. The more accurate way of
describing it is that we can only ever feel negative emotions when
we are thinking.
The goal isn't necessarily to completely
stop feeling negative
emotions. Some of the negative emotions can be helpful, such as
feeling fearful when deciding to walk down a dark alley alone with no
one else in sight.
These negative emotions are only
helpful to us in terms of
survival, but if we don't constantly encounter life or death situations,
negative emotions are more unhelpful than helpful for most of us.
We're going to be moving forward with the context that we're not
struggling for physical survival, so we'll be using the context that
negative emotions are not necessary most of the time.
When I mention that we can only ever feel what we're
thinking,
most people assume that we must think positive to feel positive
emotions.
Instead of convincing you if this is true or not, let's do another
thought experiment so you can experience the truth for yourself.
Recall a time when you felt the most joy and love you've ever felt
in your life and feel the feelings that you felt at that time as much as
you can for at least 30 seconds.
What kinds of thoughts were going through your mind at that peak
moment when you felt the most joy and love? (I'm not asking what
you
were doing at the time, but what thoughts were going through
your head at that exact moment.)
For many people that answer this, they realize that they didn't
have any thoughts during that exact moment. For others, they say
that the thought was that they were so grateful or happy.
For those that answered that they had the thought that they were
grateful, did you feel that joy and love before you had that thought or
after?
Take 10-15 seconds to answer that question before moving on.
What insights and epiphanies did you have?
What's crazy is that most people didn't
have any thoughts going
through their mind when they felt the happiest and the most amount
of love in their lives. For those that had the thought that they were
grateful, they felt that way
before
having that thought.
If they had that thought, it happened after they felt the feelings, so
the thought could not have produced the feeling.
This brings us to another truth:
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