You’ve probably heard of the idea that thoughts create your reality. By reality, what motivational speakers and best-selling New Age authors refer to is the events and circumstances of your life, not just your state of mind.

In the real world, you’ll find it’s not so simple.

While we are strong proponents of positive thinking and we believe you can make the most of your life by changing what you can and how you view that which you can’t change, conscious thought is only part of what influences your life.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just think positive thoughts.

One major problem with it is your subconscious mind. We’ve learned a tremendous amount over the years about how the subconscious mind works through our study of handwriting analysis, hypnosis, subliminal audios, and past life regression. Your subconscious mind will generate thoughts all on its own through the ever present, hidden fears, defenses, and biases. You can detach from those thoughts through meditation, and work with them through hypnosis, subliminal audios, and past life regression, but since the subconscious mind is incredibly powerful, it’s not always possible to rise above them.

The process of thinking positive thoughts also competes with what your heart, intuition, or higher-self actually believes or knows to be true.

For example, if you’re intuiting that there’s no way you’re going to change your boss’s mind, and that’s how it turned out in the end, thinking positive thoughts is futile, unless the positive thoughts are for accepting what you can’t change and working instead on what you can change.

Below we ask seven questions that indicate thinking positive thoughts only creates some of your reality.

1. Did children in the hospital (or their parents) battling terminal diseases create that reality through their thinking?

2. Did Syrian war refugees create their current reality through their thinking?

3. Did rape victims think about rape too much, thus manifest it?

4. Will preaching mind over matter to a paranoid schizophrenic cure her of her mental disease?

5. Did generations of poor people in developing nations think their way into poverty?

6. Did a lack of happy thoughts create a record high murder rate in the summer of 2015 in the city of Chicago?

7. Are plane crashes the result of too many passengers not thinking positive thoughts about arriving safely at their destination?

Our long-term findings show that positive thinking, although important, takes a back seat to the unforeseen and predestined (positive and negative) events and circumstances in your life. No matter what you think, you can work with fate, but you can’t cheat it.

We’re asked sometimes why we focus on fate to the extent that we do. We want you to avoid being unexpectedly disappointed or hurt by the sometimes vicious hand of fate, and we frown on New Age opportunists selling escapist myths packaged as truth.

It may seem depressing at first, but in order to make the most of your life, you need to first do four things:

1. Avoid the “anything is possible, you can do anything” mind-set, beyond the occasional daydreaming or “dream-castling” about your aspirations and goals. Why? Because when you are at least moderately realistic about your goals, you’ll avoid wasting time and setting yourself up for major disappointment, or worse.

2. Accept that there are many things in your life that you can’t change, such as how others think and act. Whatever it is you want to manifest through conscious creation and, or the law of attraction, if your goal depends on the behavior of others, think again. You may be able to persuade a million people to buy your new software app if that type of success is part of your predestination, but if not, it won’t happen (or if it does you’ll eventually experience a reversal of fortune), and there’s nothing spiritual about attempting to control and manipulate others.

3. Get to know yourself. Self-knowledge, including your subconscious strengths, fears, and defenses (which are outlined superbly by handwriting analysis), along with your timing (which is outlined terrifically by comprehensive astrology and numerology), allows you to prepare for life’s inevitable challenges and get the most out of the rewarding phases in your life.

4. Make an effort to react to people and events as positively (or neutrally) as you can whenever possible. Strive to remain detached and compassionate. This will help to stop creating any additional difficult karma for the future.

The notion that thoughts create 100% of your reality is deceptively comforting. Like all delusions, you’ll find that it eventually crashes against the rocks of reality. Children like to believe that Santa can leave whatever they want under the tree, but eventually they grow out of that fantasy.

Alas, you can prepare for life’s challenges and make the most of your fate, and it’s up to you how you view that which you can’t change.

Copyright © Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo

Author's Bio: 

Scott Petullo and Stephen Petullo offer vital, 
yet sensible and practical
 spiritual guidance and tools, including their Spiritual Detox and Let Go MP3 meditation audios. Get their free report: 13 Spiritual and New Age Myths and 13 Other Spiritual Laws Besides the Law of Attraction http://www.spiritualgrowthnow.com