In his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton writes, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” The more we are learning about neurochemistry and the
power of mindsets, the more accurate Milton's quote seems to be. Our thoughts shape our experience. Two people can have the same experience; because one interprets it in a stress and fear-filled way, it becomes a traumatic event, and shapes that person's body chemistry, affects their relationships, and diminishes their overall happiness. The other person thinks about it differently, and it has little to no effect on them.
Our thoughts deeply shape our experiences, but can we shape our thoughts? Can we control our thoughts? Yes and no. All of us have "intrusive thoughts" to some degree. Things come up in our awareness, often unbidden. We encounter things, we hear and see things ... and the stimuli floods into our awareness, whether we like it or not. But we do have some control over what we focus on. And then thoughts just seem to "pop up" in our minds ...
like the old school popup ads in the early days of the Internet. But we can choose whether or not to dwell on them. We can choose to fill our minds with something else. Staying with the analogy of Internet pop-up ads ... we can choose to dwell on the ad, or close it ... looking at something else instead.
Some people have a harder time with intrusive thoughts than others. But we all have
some ability to control the things we think about. And -- this is the real point -- we can train ourselves to exert more control than we currently use.
In Philippians 4: 8 Paul says "Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or
praiseworthy--think about such things." If we're being told to do something in the Bible, apparently that must mean we can, right?
To a greater degree than most of us realize, we can control the things we think about ... and our efforts to do this make a huge difference in the quality of our lives. I've found it
interesting to read people from other eras, to see what they have to say about topics like this. Listen to the following from Robert Collier, written in 1925. (Forgive the sexist language and unusual wordings ... I thought it best to leave the quote intact):
We moderns are unaccustomed to the mastery over our own
inner thoughts and feelings. That a man should be prey to any thought that chances to take possession of his mind is commonly assumed as unavoidable. It may be a matter of regret that he should be kept awake all night from anxiety, [for example], as to the issue of a lawsuit on the morrow, but that he should have the power of determining whether he be kept awake or not seems an extravagant demand.
The image of an impending calamity is no doubt odious, but its very odiousness (we say) makes it haunt the mind all the more perniciously, and it is useless to expel it. Yet this is an absurd position for man, the heir of all the ages, to be in: hagridden by the flimsy creatures of his own brain.
If a pebble in our boot torments us, we expel it. We take off the boot and
shake it out. And once the matter is fairly understood, it is just as easy to expel an intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind. About this there ought to be no mistake, no two opinions. The thing is obvious, clear, and unmistakable. It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from the mind as to shake a stone out of your shoe; and until a man can do that, it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over nature, and all the rest of it. He is a mere
slave, and a prey to the bat-winged phantoms that flit through the corridors of his own brain.
Yet the weary and care-worn faces that we meet by thousands, even among the affluent classes of civilization, testify only too clearly how seldom this mastery is obtained. How rare indeed to find a man! How common rather to discover a creature hounded by
tyrant thoughts (or cares, or desires), cowering, wincing under the lash.
It is one of the prominent doctrines of many schools of practical psychology that the power of expelling thoughts -- or if need be, killing them dead on the spot -- must be obtained. Naturally the art requires practice, but like other arts, when once acquired there is no mystery or difficulty about it. It is worth
practice. It may fairly be said that life only begins when this art has been acquired.
For obviously when, instead of being ruled by individual thoughts, the whole flock of them in their immense multitude and variety and capacity is ours to direct and dispatch and employ where we list, life becomes a thing so vast and grand, compared to what it was before, that is former condition may well
appear almost antenatal. If you can kill a thought dead, for the time being, you can do anything else with it that you please. And therefore it is that this power is so valuable. And it not only frees a man from mental torment (which is nine-tenths of at least of all the torment of life), but it gives him a concentrated power of handling mental work absolutely unknown to him before. The two are co-relative to each
other.
