by Ross Bishop
Something to consider: the overwhelming majority of your intrusive thoughts simply aren’t true. Yet they occupy about 80% of your mental activity. They are like crabgrass in the mind’s garden. They refuse to budge even when confronted with a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Why is that?
The answer is that they reflect the doubts you hold about yourself. In a word, you’re just not good enough, and your intrusive thoughts reflect that. They are loaded with self-criticism: “Why did you say that?” “Why did you do that?” “Boy, that was really dumb!” You know the drill.
Let’s look at some fairly typical cons. As you do, consider the power you give to others to determine your “OKness”:
- The Sky Is Falling: In this con, you make a problem seem bigger than it is, often imagining that the absolute worst is about to happen.
- The Black-and-White con: you view everything as either great or lousy, with no in-between.
- The Pessimist’s Code: Here, you see only the negative in any situation. There is no “good” from your perspective.
- The Perfectionist’s Mantra: You focus on what you consider your flaws and minimize acknowledgment of your strengths.
- The Negative Label: You see yourself in harshly negative terms, focusing on minor aspects of yourself that reinforce your harsh personal narrative.
- The Fortune Teller: You tell yourself what other people are thinking about you—and it’s always negative.
- The Victim’s Rant: Here, you blame others for everything that happens while portraying yourself as the victim.
- Your History - replayed over and over to hold you down and make you think badly of yourself.
If it’s any consolation, we all struggle with the intrusive inner voice, and we all tend to get lost in the conflict. But where does it come from? What’s it all about? As is often the case, you have to look deeper to find the real explanation.
Put simply, you’re in school. “The School of Learning to Love Yourself.” Believe it or not, these cons are part of the Creator’s curriculum to bring you to the truth. So, what is the truth? You are a being of light, and because of that, you can only be a few things, such as compassion, caring, and truth. All these other gymnastics are because you don’t live in that space yet.
The hook is that your thoughts cause you discomfort - and this is intended. If they didn’t irritate you, there would be little motivation to change them. That may seem unfair, but that is the system you are enrolled in, and there isn’t much you can do about it. You can take all sorts of side roads before you get there, and that can consume lifetimes, but you will still end up at the only place you can go - in the truth about who you are.
Given where you are in your spiritual development, standing in the truth would make you feel very vulnerable. So you have to find ways—crutches, if you will—to get you through until you can live in the truth. All this stuff you struggle with is created by your ego to help you survive until you can stand on your own. Think about it for a minute. Today, how vulnerable would you feel standing completely exposed to a stranger? Could you open your heart to a rapist or a pedophile? Because that’s where you are headed.
And this is a group thing. Although some individuals do ascend to the truth, the teeming mass of humanity is pretty much swept up in a shared consciousness. We do help each other along, i.e., “Is that what you really believe?” But it doesn’t go much beyond that. Our leaders are political capitalists who have trouble holding the whole mess together, much less serving as spiritual guides. That is why, for example, the mystics of India don’t get involved in politics and in tribal settings why shamans don’t become war chiefs.
In the meantime, what can you do? Start by confronting your intrusive voice. Tell it that you know it is part of the false self and that you want it to leave. Ground yourself in the truth. Is any of this crap true? Sure, we’ve all made mistakes. That’s how we grow and change! But should you be punished forever for your past mistakes, especially if you have learned from them and changed? Look at your beliefs. Are you really as bad as your thoughts make you out to be? Sure, if your life is constant mayhem, maybe you need to get some help, but short of that, recognize what’s going on for what it is.
Fortunately, the Creator has equipped each of us with a self-guiding compass. At some level, you know the truth. The challenge is to live it amid swirling insanity, and that is very difficult! That’s why mystics go off to live in caves in the desert or create communities of like-minded beings isolated from the day-to-day world. There are problems with that, but that discussion is for another day.
The tragedy of this process is that some people cannot separate the dark voices from reality. Even though these voices trouble you, you know, at some level, they are bogus. These people cannot make that distinction, and that drives them into a state we call “mental illness.”
The vast majority of these troubled people are harmless; some turn to drugs or alcohol to try to cope with their inner conflict, but that’s only a temporary fix. A few get lost and turn to crime and violence, and in very rare situations will pick up a gun and shoot up a bar or innocent children at school. Politicians have closed the hospitals for the mentally ill, but they were mostly warehouses anyway, because we haven’t yet learned how to really help these people, so they have mostly been turned out onto the streets to fend for themselves.
So, now that you understand the disruptive role that your thoughts play, don’t take them seriously and recognize that they are playing a role in keeping you from a reality that you are not prepared to handle. And, do everything you can to embrace that reality and move to it.
