Successful Living and the Thin Veil of Thought

You may find yourself dissatisfied with your life. You may find yourself trying to find a way to break away from stress, uncertainty, insecurity and anxiety. Or you may have simply reached a point in your life when you know there must be so much more to be had out of life – beyond the ordinary everyday existence that passes for living. But you are not as far from your hopes, aspirations, goals and dreams as you might believe. In fact, nothing more than a thin veil separates you from effortless, carefree, happy and successful living – it is the thin veil of thought.

This thin veil is entirely of your own making – composed, as it is, of the thoughts that rise up from your pre-programmed subconscious mind. Research shows that those thoughts tend towards the negative, you find it easier to believe the bad stuff. After all, you see enough evidence around you to confirm this view of life in general and your life in particular. But you must remember that all the people that you meet in your daily life are incarcerated behind their thin veils of thought as well – the world is awash with negative thought.

Of course, in reality, this thin veil doesn’t exist – you just think it does because, in the course of your everyday life, you cannot see beyond it. You’re trapped in a world where you may believe yourself to be inadequate or incapable of success. These “beliefs” have drawn a veil over your experience of each new situation you encounter, each new person you meet, each new opportunity that presents itself to you – you see nothing of what’s going on in reality because you’re living in a prison of your own creation.

No one is born inadequate, no one is born incapable of success. We may be born with a particular skin tone or eye colour, but we’re not born with a personality – we learn it. That learning is done during our formative years. Things done for us and to us stick in our mind, solidify into the permanent and resident thoughts that weave the veil that cuts us off from the reality of the here and now – many years later. And these permanent resident thoughts have become so much part of the fabric of your life that you’re not even aware of them – you’re unable to see them for what they are, old out-dated thoughts that have no place in your life today.

That negative veil of thought that shrouds you from reality was crafted during your childhood. But it has been embroidered and embellished ever since – by events in later life that proved to you that you were right to perceive yourself to be inadequate. Of course, the outcome of such events would have been totally different if you hadn’t grown up with this self-defeating beliefs in the first place. Because, when we do embrace such perceptions as fact, our lives become nothing more than self-fulfilling prophecies. Your veil has also been embroidered with the worries and fears of an age where things are more uncertain than ever before – the world is a dangerous place, the economy just as dangerous, a job for life is a thing of the past, your job may not even see out this year. Worry is endemic and it adds to the weight of the veil of useless thought. The more you worry, the less you are capable of being at your most effective – you may, in other words, be contributing to the arrival of the event that you are worried will happen.

What a mess – a stew of old embedded thoughts and the frenzied worries of the masses who, themselves, are carrying their own unique set of embedded thoughts. How are you to break away from such negativity bordering on madness?

You don’t have to – because it isn’t real. Your veil only exists as long as you feed it with your mental energy. And, as a grown adult, you have complete discretion over which thoughts you choose to feed. Your thoughts do not have a mind of their own! It is you who makes up your mind as to where you will devote your attention. Unfortunately, our default state of mind is one that aimlessly feeds the veil of useless thought – and it is so ubiquitous that we’re completely unaware that this is the norm for normal “living”. But having, perhaps, known for some time that something is amiss in your life, you now know the cause – and you also know the remedy.

The remedy has to be self-administered. It is no bitter pill to swallow, in fact very little work is required at all. All is needed is a daily commitment to cultivate your innate ability to pay attention to what your senses are telling you about what’s really happening in the here and now because, in developing this ability so do you dissuade your mind from pondering the embedded thoughts that have nothing to do with reality. You need to devote some time, each morning, to simply seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting – not interpreting what you think is going on, just noticing it. You can do this from the comfort of an armchair first thing each morning, it could be done whilst having your morning coffee, can be done on the bus, the bicycle or the train – it can be done anywhere at all – as long as you choose to do it.

You need to start your day by emptying your mind – because what has been crowding it up to now is self-destructive. You need to develop your clarity and presence of mind – and it must be done each and every day, otherwise you will lapse into your default state of mind. Sooner or later, as you move through the course of the routine of your everyday life, you will be stunned to find a tear in that veil – you will see life for what it is and for all the opportunities that it is waiting for you to embrace.