Just A Thought

compassYears ago, I began to gain an intellectual understanding that thoughts are things and that there can be positive and negative results from thinking thoughts. “Well of course, that is obvious, everyone knows that!”, you might say (or probably just thought). You are correct, it is very common intellectual knowledge these days. I found it laid out in self help books such as Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill; in Alchemical treatises by Paul Foster Case and others; in The Science of Mind, by Earnest Holmes; in the Bible and  numerous other books and sources far too numerous to mention here. So, can we agree that thoughts are things? Okay, good. With this agreement, my first assumption for this and future writings in this series is: Thoughts are things and have power.

Now, I asked myself a while back, and I want to ask you also, has this intellectual knowledge made a demonstrable difference in your life since you came across this knowledge and intellectually accepted it? Have you demonstrated increased abundance, happiness, greater freedom and confidence in your daily life because you intellectually know the first assumption? When I asked myself and tried to answer honestly, I must confess that I answered not merely no, but an emphatic NO!  When I queried:”Why?”, my honest response was:”I do not know.” Fortunately for me, that answer caused me to want to find out why. I began mulling it over and kept coming to the words,  intellectual knowledge. To me intellectual knowledge is something or some idea that I read, or heard that my conscious mind took to be a fact, or at least reasonably true.

When I am trying to figure out something, I often go to what I know best as a place to start gaining understanding. I am a classical guitarist by training and trade, and I do know being a guitarist. So I applied the words “intellectual knowledge” to the craft of playing the guitar. Let’s see, you mainly play seated with the left leg elevated to support the guitar. The left hand moves up and down the finger board depressing the strings at various frets while the right hand plucks the strings. When reading music, the notes are on a treble clef staff and the instrument sounds an octave lower than the written notes when they are played. There are 6 different diameter strings with note names of E, A, D, G B and E from largest to smallest. This is intellectual knowledge about playing the guitar. It gives me an understanding of how to play the guitar, but does it make me able to play the instrument and play it well? As above, the answer is not merely no, but emphatically NO! What is takes to become a proficient musician is learning and working at it day after day, month after month, year after year until it becomes built into your very being. Being “built into your very being” is far more than an intellectual knowledge of something. Can we agree on that? Excellent.

Now that we are again in agreement, perhaps there is another important assumption that should be mentioned here. My second assumption can be stated: Intellectual knowledge is simply a starting point and not enough for success at any endeavor.

As a result, we now have 2 assumptions:

  • Thoughts are things and have power.
  • Intellectual knowledge is simply a starting point and not enough for success at any endeavor.

In my next entry, I plan to move a bit closer to proving to myself and perhaps to you that a concrete belief of thoughts are things and have power actually can change our life. The very best to you!

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