Every being on this planet, sapient or not, desires something...food, clothing, shelter, a profession, a mate, etc, you name it and someone (or something) wants it. To narrow this down to just us fickle humans, we are notorious for wanting much but not really doing much about those wants. What does that come down to? Just a matter of our thought lives. Henry Ford once said "Whether you think you can or you can't, either way you are right". The power of thought is a force in and of itself that most of us do not consider simply because we cannot see it. But when you look around at the general population relative to the education system, and realise that those graduating university comprise the top 3%, is that really surprising? Work it down even further and you're like to note that perhaps just slightly upwards of 10% of that 3% really achieves success in life.
I hold a minor in Philosophy, and one of the courses I did that was rather interesting was The Philosophy of Mind. We handled such topics as the mind-body duality, the properties of consciousness, belief networks and so on. To be quite honest, I left that course with a lot more questions than I had answers. The backs of my old notebooks still have many of those questions accompanied with half-formed answers as I tried to make sense of just what the mind was really capable of. This led me to an interest in psychology which was and continues to be a rather interesting explorative waypoint in my quest for knowledge. As it turns out, we're very good at defining things in terms of what we do not want, rather than what we actually do. When I found out this simple fact, things began to make sense. Have you ever noticed that when you want something, you will immediately see it everywhere? For example, I wanted a Civic (I now own a '98 Civic Ferio). When I fixed that idea firmly within my mind, on the way to work I was suddenly taken aback by the sheer number I saw everywhere. It was almost as though they were never there (though indeed they always were). In very much the same way, I sometimes worried about being poor when I was younger. As a result I could point out any indigent within close proximity, even if they may have been hard to miss. You see...the mind doesn't care whether or not you express something positively or negatively. It serves up the subject of your notion, regardless of the emotional aspect. It behaves very much like a magnifying glass, and whether you're focusing sunlight to do something harmful or not, that's irrelevant. What you see is what you get.
So do we all carry around a genie in a bottle? In a sense--yes! But only the top 10% of the top 3% of people in our country--I daresay, in existence--have ever realised this. It almost seems that this is a jealously guarded secret. But then it begs the question, even if this knowledge were widely disseminated...who would value it? I'll give you a hint...certainly not those who believe themselves to be well off. Dissatisfaction may be uncomfortable, but it's also a good motivator. Let that be your first step. In my next post, I'll try to add some more substance to that genie.
Bless up!
Josh.
