On the Laws of Thought
“Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life. Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.”
Seven laws of thought that got me through the storm:
What energy are you putting out into the universe?
Energy is not just your actions and your speech. Your thoughts are energy. When you are thinking angry thoughts, thoughts of revenge, envy, self-doubt, fear, all of it is manifesting itself as energy whether you realize it or not. When you stop and catch yourself throughout the day and ask yourself, “is this the energy I want to be putting out into the universe,” you will realize that most of the time, the answer is no. Now you can start thinking about what energy you do want to be putting into the universe and work backwards from there. The more times each day you can stop and check yourself, the more you will realize that your mind is cluttered with useless and self-destructive thoughts that can slowly be weeded out with years of effort. The Stoics figured this law out thousands of years ago, that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.
Go to bed feeling good about yourself.
I spent twelve months, from the day I committed my first felony to the day I got arrested, going to bed feeling like shit. This is what happens when you are not living right. All immoral, unethical and illegal behavior has victims, but what they don’t tell you is that you are victim zero in that you lose your inner peace. Seneca, letter CV: The most important contribution to peace of mind is never to do wrong. When you do wrong, you lose your peace, and when you’ve lost your peace you don’t go to bed feeling good about yourself. This applies not just for the wrong you do to others, but the wrongs you do when nobody else is looking. They follow you to the bedroom. And so once again, like stopping to check the energy you’re putting out into the universe, the quality of your life will improve the more times you can stop, pause and ask: will this make me go to bed feeling good about myself?
Be the bigger man.
In every interaction you have, there is someone who is being the smaller man and someone who is being the bigger man. You have to decide which of those two roles you are going to play. You cannot ever let small men bring you down to their level. You cannot let someone who is doing wrong to you cause you to react, lose your peace and do wrong to them in kind. That is not being the bigger man, it is you breaking law and bringing yourself to a lower level of perfection. Small men will gossip about you, they will slander you, they will say and do whatever they can to knock you off your square. Don’t let them. Stop, catch yourself, remind yourself to be the bigger man and keep it moving.
Nonattachment, Nonresistance, Nonjudgment.
The three nons. I don’t remember where I got this notion from, I think at least part of it was from some Eckhart Tolle book. Nonattachment means that everything in life is in a state of flux. Nothing is permanent. You can credit this to Heraclitus or to the dukkha of the Buddhists, it is all the same law. Friends, possessions, beauty, good fortune, bad fortune, they are all the same in that they are all impermanent. A man’s life comes in seasons. Suffering results from forgetting this immutable fact of life. Nonresistance is about pushing out your locus of control, about being water, about never getting defensive and about letting the words and actions of others roll off you. It is the never take anything personal from Don Miguel Ruiz. Everything is feedback to be evaluated on its own merits. The less you resist, the more you can appreciate the fact that the things people say tell you more about them than they do about you. The last is nonjudgment, to not prejudge those you meet and to not pass judgment on a man’s actions without knowing what factors led to those actions. Nietzsche: a single act very rarely characterizes a man…acts are mostly dictated by circumstances; they are superficial or merely reflex movements performed in response to a stimulus, long before the depths of our beings are affected or consulted in the matter. Like all laws of thought, these three require conscious daily effort because all three run counter to the way you are hard-wired.
Trajectory.
Your trajectory plays a key role in the quality of your thoughts. I do not have a source for this notion, it came to me naturally, although like any notion pertaining to living a good life, I guarantee someone else in the thousands of years of recorded human history thought of it before I did. I will put it like this. The bum on the street who goes from one dollar in his pocket to two dollars will be in a much happier frame of mind than a billionaire who is now worth just $500 million. Absolute level doesn’t matter, trajectory does. Over the last four years I have been in a sharp downward trajectory, I have been stagnant, stuck and in stasis, and I have been in an upward trajectory. The quality of my thoughts was not determined by whether I was in a penthouse or in a prison, it was determined by whether my life was getting better or worse. If you are being weighed down by low-quality thoughts, stop and examine your life. You will realize that you are either in a downward trajectory or you are stagnant. Keep it moving. I believe there are four phases to the game of life, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, and if you are making consistent daily progress in all four of these areas then your external circumstances are largely irrelevant; the winds of trajectory will carry you higher.
Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.
I could try to explain this epigram through the lens of my own actions — and I suppose I already took a shot at it— but you will get more out of it if you stop and apply it to the cumulative sum of your own life experience. What you will realize is that every time you have made an easy choice or taken a shortcut, it led to a hard life. When you have taken the hard choice, it led to an easy life. And when you tie this into law five, trajectory, you will see that the natural path of peaks and troughs throughout your life have been an output of the easy or hard choices that preceded it all. The trajectory of my life only changed from downward to upward-sloping once I committed to making every single hard choice that I was faced with on a daily basis. What makes this law so powerful is that sometimes you will be faced with a choice and not know what to do. Stop and ask yourself: which one of these is the easy choice, and which one is the hard choice? The answer will be obvious. Not only will one choice be clearly harder than the other, but you will receive internal confirmation by the fact that your weak mind will start pushing you towards the easy choice. Don’t do it. The path is clear. Make every hard choice you are faced with and your life will start improving.
Serve God.
Self-explanatory.
It’s simple mathematics,
GB
