The Philosophy of Life, the Universe, and Everything

Nov 2017: Epiphany, Part 2

Imagine there's a boulder rolling down the hill.

You are not physically capable of stopping a boulder of this size.

Now stop it.

If you were able to stop the boulder, it's because you recognize that this is a mental exercise.  It doesn't matter how strong you are physically, because the boulder exists only in your mind.  All it takes to stop that boulder is a thought.  It could be any thought—maybe an imaginary you had the muscle to stop it, or maybe it was actually a pebble that you stopped with your imaginary finger, or maybe it simply stopped moving without any imaginary outside force.  It doesn't matter.  It stopped.  You stopped it.

However, there are some of you, a lot of you, in fact, who, when told to "stop it," imagined it stopping, then realized that wouldn't happen in real life and imagined it continuing to roll.

The problem here is that we aren't always taught to exercise our own control over ourselves, over our mind, and in some cases, we aren't even taught that we have that control ...but I'll get to that later.  An imaginary situation is, by its very nature, not real life.  This imaginary situation in particular, while resembling real life (a boulder rolling down a hill), was never meant as a substitute for real life, or a "true-to-life" picture of it.  In different words, the fact that the boulder has stopped moving is just as valid, just as real as the fact that it had been moving, the fact that it even existed in the first place.

If you're only imagining something, why can't you imagine something "impossible"?

If something exists purely within your own mind, why can't you control it completely?

Answer: You can.

Anything existing within the mind, exists at the whim of the mind—the mind controls if it stays or goes, if it changes and what it changes into.

Thus, you have complete control over your inner state—over your emotions.

Emotions are, quite literally, all in your head.  The physical world has nothing to do with them, except through indirect pathways: your subconscious mind processes external influences to produce a suggested course of emotion.  Your conscious mind is not all that different from your subconscious, and the latter is, ultimately, subservient to the former, especially in this regard.

"Fake it 'til you make it."

Keep telling your subconscious to accept a thing (an emotion, say), and eventually it will.

With practice, your subconscious will accept things quicker, you'll find you repeat yourself less and less often.

But the first step is recognizing that you are in control.  In common practice, we're never taught this, and we learn instead to treat emotion as a separate entity in and of itself and allow it to control us.  Once again, allow me to remind you that emotions are all in your head, and are therefore subject to the whim of your mind—your subconscious gets first say, but your conscious gets the last word.  And so, in the end, you, the consciously-aware you, are in charge of, have complete control over, your own emotions.

Don't get caught up in what's possible or impossible.

Do it

and by the very fact that you have done it, consider it possible.