Supercoach - Michael Neill [11]
Regardless of whether you use scientific or spiritual language to describe it, this energy is the source and substance of all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.
2. Consciousness. What allows us to make differentiations between ourselves and others in this “spiritual soup” is our individual consciousness—the ability we all have to experience our own separate version of the unchanging whole. Without light, we wouldn’t be able to experience the beauty of a sunset (or even a picture of a sunset); without sound, we couldn’t hear the birds twittering in the morning or our friends twittering in the next room. In the same way, it is our consciousness—literally our ability to be consciously aware of something—that allows us to experience whatever it is we’re experiencing in our lives.
3. Thought. If source energy is the paint, thought is the paintbrush. Our life is the canvas, and our consciousness is what allows us to appreciate the painting. Because different thoughts come in and out of our heads throughout the day, our experience is continually changing. But because we tend to focus on the same limited range of thoughts throughout the day, there is a sense of cohesive reality to our experience.
Of course, just because a thought pops into your head doesn’t mean it will immediately manifest in your life. (If it did, there would be more deaths by roller coasters going off their tracks, people falling from very high places, and heads exploding due to stress than any other cause.) That’s because in and of themselves, thoughts have no power. It’s only when you invest your own energy and consciousness into them that they begin to become real. A thought without your personal investment is no more powerful than a tea bag without boiling water. It’s only after you add the water that the tea begins to infuse and create the flavor, and it’s only after you add your agreement and energy to a thought that it begins to impact your life.
What makes thoughts appear to be so powerful is that the more we invest our energy into them, the more “real” they start to feel.
(This is why positive thinking so often backfires— it energizes negative thoughts by making them into “things” that must be avoided. Simply noticing your negative thoughts arising and allowing them to fade away will nearly always work better than bringing in the thought police to try to control them.)
So to review, there are three things necessary in order to experience anything:
1. There needs to be a ground of being—I’m calling that energy, but you could just as easily call it “spirit” or “source,” or even “Jethro,” and it would work just the same.
2. There needs to be a creative force—in this case, thought.
3. There needs to be a way of experiencing and understanding all that is happening—our current level of consciousness.
Our formula is now clear:
Energy + Consciousness + Thought = Creation
Let’s go back to the projection booth. . . .
Whatever is happening on the screen is your experience of life. What’s being projected onto that screen will appear real to you to the extent that it fits with the movie you’re used to seeing.
The projector is your consciousness—it simply shines the bright white light of awareness on whatever is projected in front of it. If that light isn’t on (i.e., if you’re “unconscious”), you’ll have no awareness of and no direct experience of your thoughts.
Each reel of film running in front of the projector is made up of your thoughts. If you have scary thoughts, you’ll see scary things on the screen of your experience and experience scary feelings; if you’re projecting romantic thoughts, you’ll see romantic things on the screen and tend to feel romantic feelings in your heart. Comedies will usually make you laugh and tragedies make you cry—that’s just the way things work.
What powers it all? The electricity behind life—the underlying energy of the universe. (We could just as easily say the whole