It is fascinating to realise that feeling good or happy has nothing to do with the outside world, our circumstances or material possessions. Feeling anything has to do with the quality of our thinking and the feelings that arise as a natural result of this simple fact. The less personal thinking we do the more mental space we have to allow our common sense and wisdom to emerge and with these arises a consistently reassuring good feeling.
The haunted house that we can all live in within our heads is just the result of an overactive imagination. Visiting the darker places of our past via thought is like going on a rather realistic ghost ride which is populated by the memories and figures of our lives.
Life, for all of us, has its ups and downs and some life events are more painful than others, and some stick more because of the suffering we associate with this time in our lives. So what are we to do? These events did happen, we cannot forget them! While this may be true, we can start to see that they ‘were’ real once, but now they are simply a memory brought back to life and made vivid by the power of our minds. We are still the thinker creating the haunting in our heads.
Understanding that past events and future anxieties come from thinking allows us to begin to free ourselves up from worrying about them so much. When we see it is coming from thought we can become more relaxed about it, knowing that it will pass.
Conversely, when we are less aware and have temporarily forgotten that it is coming from our personal thinking, we are more likely to be upset by these thoughts, and look for a cause or a solution in the world; in people and things that we have no control over at all.
This can be a temporarily painful place to live and so we might get the idea that it may be good to change our circumstances, thinking this will make us feel better, leave the past behind (and this may be necessary sometimes). Unfortunately if there is any relief at all it will only be temporary given that the haunted house is inside of us, because we are always thinking. In other words, changing our circumstances may temporarily distract us from having the old painful thoughts and feeling less haunted, but it is no guarantee that the spectres of our past will not return to haunt us another day, despite the new situation.
More often than not these thoughts are invisible to us just like a ghost, we get the feeling that there is something wrong, but we can’t put our finger on it, we just can’t see it. This is due to the fact that if we think something long enough we are not always aware or conscious that we are having those thoughts anymore, we just have the feelings that these same thoughts continue to produce.
Only remembering, becoming more aware or conscious of the nature of thought allows us to return, without effort, technique or application, to a place of beauty, peace and understanding; to an internal landscape of infinitely unfolding possibilities. Where the ghosts of the past begin to fade from memory and we begin to live with a greater sense of immediacy; noticing the magic of being aware, with all its vivid aliveness and in those delightful moments we can luxuriate in our connection to the Great Oneness.
