It’s snowing and my dog won’t go out in the snow. I would say that he doesn’t like getting his paws wet but how would I know that? But he has to go out. He can’t go in. So I trick him. I yell, “Squirrel!” Then I open the door and he bounds out barking as if there is no snow on the ground. He doesn’t even hesitate for a second. He is so fixated on getting that squirrel, which only exists in his mind, that he “ignores” everything else around him. Then when he doesn’t find the squirrel he does his business and comes back in. It works every time! It’s tempting to call him stupid but if you do it only means you have work to do.
When you begin to watch your thoughts with some regularity you will notice yourself doing exactly the same thing. One thought will loom enormous and you can’t help but fixate on that one thought, oblivious to all of the other thoughts that persist. Anger is the most obvious but any thought carries with it that power. Let me rephrase that. The thought has no power. We give it that power.
You will be intent on watching your thoughts and then one will take you into oblivion. Then minutes, hours or days later you will wake up to the fact that you haven’t been watching as you had planned. You gave one thought the power to take you away.
When I first did this lesson I did it from the perspective that I had to see the thoughts and analyze them to prove that they were indeed meaningless. Now I see the futility in doing that. The process of analysis gives the thought power. It may not be the power that will remove you from the exercise but none the less, through analysis, you give that thought a reality that it doesn’t have. The exercise is only to show you how you give meaning to the thought. Without the meaning the thought is nothing. If the thought has no meaning then the world it creates has no meaning, also.
