Released on 23rd August 2019
This week’s shot of clarity is from The Little Book of Results: A quick guide to achieving big goals (©2018 Jamie Smart, published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd). It’s about your self-correcting mind, and finding your bearing when you get knocked off track. It also includes one of my *favourite* metaphors.
Enjoy!
Your mind is a self-correcting system
We all lose our bearings from time to time, whether it’s dealing with a difficult relationship, handling an unexpected situation or supporting a challenging client. But fortunately, your mind is a self-correcting system. We each have a kind of ‘inner sat-nav’ that allows us to keep our bearings when the going gets rough, and return to clarity quickly when we do temporarily lose our way.
Imagine a river that’s being polluted by sewage from the outflow pipe of a factory. Upstream from the factory, the river still flows clear and pure. But downstream, the river is contaminated with toxic waste and the wildlife is suffering.
Downstream, you could do your very best to clean the riverbanks and heal the wildlife, but your efforts would have no lasting effect while the factory is still contaminating the water with its noxious sewage.
The solution is clear: shut down the factory! As its toxic output starts reducing, the river becomes less and less contaminated, and something wonderful starts to happen; the natural ecosystem starts to cleanse and heal itself.
And how is it able to cleanse and heal itself?
Because at the river’s source is a flow of fresh, clean, pure water. Whenever the outflow of contamination is stopped, even for a moment, the source of fresh clean water starts refreshing the ecosystem and clarity emerges. Why? Because clarity is the water’s natural state.
Clarity is your mind’s natural state.
I don’t usually ‘unpack’ analogies, but this one is worth looking at directly. . .
- The outside-in misunderstanding is the ‘factory’ that contaminates the river.
- Contaminated thinking is the ‘sewage’ the factory produces.
- The river’s source is Mind, the intelligent energy behind life.
- The river is the principle of Thought, creating our perceptual experience and connecting us to that source.
- Attempts to clean the river are the additive, outside-in methods we use to try to change our felt experience, after it’s been contaminated (the psychological equivalent of trying to unbake a cake).
- Shutting down the factory represents the subtractive effect of a deeper embodied understanding of the principles behind clarity.
Sydney Banks points repeatedly to the principle of Thought as the creative agent that unites us with the world we perceive, and with the source of all experience, saying: ‘Thought is the missing link that gives us the power to recognize the illusionary separation between the spiritual world and the world of form.’
Your experience flows from and is directly connected to Mind, the source of fresh, pure perception.
When you fall out of contaminated thinking, even for a moment. . .
That source of pure being starts refreshing your awareness, and clarity emerges.
Thought is the river that unites you with the world you perceive, and with the source of pure being.
How to clear your mind
Your mind is a self-correcting system. The only thing that ever slows the process of self-correction is the mistaken belief that we’re feeling something other than Thought in the moment. So what do you need to do to clear your mind? Keep your fingers out of the machinery and continue deepening your understanding of subtractive psychology. As your insights and realizations continue to update your embodied understanding, you’ll find your mind’s self-correcting system restoring you to clarity more and more quickly and easily.
If you want to read more about this, it’s from Chapter 14 of The Little Book of Results: A quick guide to achieving big goals.
To your increasing clarity!
Big love,
Jamie