Shards of Consciousness

People who are trying to grow and improve themselves read a lot. We can end up with shelves of books about philosophy, self-help, human potential, metaphysics, magic, personal development, time management, developing goals, meditation, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Too much reading can be as bad for you as eating too much food at a meal. If you take in too much information, too many ideas without digesting them you end up with a severe case of mental indigestion. Or worse. You read and read and read and read without doing or thinking.

Knowledge, no matter how wise, is worthless unless you own it. Without making it your own, incorporating it into your world view, what you read in books remains something you know, not something you know.

When you finally know something, that aha! feeling hits you. It's like riding a bicycle. One minute you're wobbling and falling, the next minute you're cruising. Steve at the the Fast Lane recently had a moment like this that he describes in The Amazing Secret to Success.

Though they all say it a little differently, most of them are saying the same thing–practically yelling it at me:

Thoughts become things

How much more simple could it be?

Yes, it is simple, but until it becomes our own, it's the secret hidden in the open for everyone to see, but only a few to know. And amazingly, it's like water in a sieve. Many of us, including me (especially me ) have to learn and relearn it.

In Why Don't More People Do This? Antonio Thornton at the Law of Attraction blog talks about two reasons people don't use the law of attraction.

The first is that many people don't know about it. In Western culture we are taught that we are victims. Our family instill our values and shapes our personality. Peer group pressure makes us do things we wouldn't do otherwise. Society makes us what we are.

The second is that people don't want to accept the responsibility. In many way, it's easier to be a victim. Less is expected of you. You expect less of yourself. You can sleepwalk through life, operating on automatic while someone else drives.

And that is the crux of the matter right there. Awareness. Just because your eyes are open and your mouth is talking doesn't mean you're awake. The manifestation of thought in the external world is always happening, but as long as we are asleep, we aren't aware of how we shape our world. Our thoughts and dreams come and go, whispering among themselves just below consciousness, the inhabitants of our mind that set up residence while we weren't looking. Occasionally we wake up and see what we were doing. Aha! I get it now. And for a while we are happy. We are effective in our world. Then slowly we let our consciousness slip away until we are asleep again. Depression and senselessness sets in. We don't understand why this is happening to us until something we do, or dream, or read, wakes us up again and we can say Aha!

But like riding a bicycle, if we continue to get back up eventually staying awake can become effortless, a habit of thought, an attitude we have made our own. Eventually we own it.