Our Thoughts Really Matter

Our Thoughts Matter Because They Impact Matter: The Radical Implications of “We Are All One”

One cold, gray Sunday in March, two years after my trip to Tikal, I was to give a talk to the Philadelphia chapter of The Holistic Nurses Association. My talk was on how to use stress to heal ourselves. While I was driving in my car on my way to the meeting, I turned on the radio to hear Jackie Wilson singing, “Your love is taking me higher, higher than I’ve ever been taken before!” This song was followed by the group called Soul Survivor, singing the words, “I’m going to take an expressway to your heart.” These songs seemed to be messages to me from God as the Divine Beloved. I felt I was being guided regarding my talk.
That morning of the talk my car battery was dead and I had to get it recharged. I had come to associate the car battery with the heart. For just as our car is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by the battery, so our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by our innermost heart, the core of our being. It is this spark that makes our physical heart beat.

I took the battery being dead as a sign that I needed to emphasize the connection between love and stress. I thought it meant that I needed to emphasize that to truly master stress we need to access the peaceful power of love in our heart as the core of who we are. For a moment, I had a sense of how each one of us looking out of our eyes is the center of his or her universe. And yet I am part of your inner world of meaning and you are part of my inner world of meaning. I began to see how for each one of us everything that happens out there in the outer world is part of our inner world. And all that happens is to help us evolve spiritually.
As I sat with don Serillo after being in Tulum, I was introduced to the idea that we are evolving. He stressed that we were on our way to a major shift to a higher more loving and peaceful state of consciousness and perspective. In bringing about this change, don Serillo emphasized “Let not one of us be left behind.” It is our responsibility to help each other. And since we are all one, helping another is helping ourselves and vice versa. It is a matter of enlightened self-interest.
As we realize that all of us are part of a collective consciousness, we need to start taking responsibility for our thoughts. For example, so often I hear people complain about the government. They express contempt for the red tape and for taxes. The Department of Motor Vehicles and the people who work there are often the brunt of the jokes of many comedians. All these thoughts become more significant if we consider the idea that we are all one.
Right before going on MSNBC to discuss the issue of teenage runaways, I watched a news segment on Timothy McVeigh. He was awaiting his sentencing for blowing up a government building in Oklahoma City and killing so many innocent people.
Considering that we are all one can make us see the importance of facing and releasing the negative feelings we harbor in our heart. Could Timothy McVeigh be one of those impulse-ridden people who act out our collective disdain for and anger at the government? Sure he has his own emotional dynamics and agenda. But think of it, we know that there is truth to the psychoanalytic observation that children tend to express what their parents repress.
An anthropology professor told me of two instances of how his four-year-old son picked up on his hidden negative feelings. The professor and his wife and son were staying in an inn in a small village in Mexico. One day the professor was walking with his son along the street when the professor spotted a man walking his dog in the distance. Thinking he was successfully hiding his fear, the professor started to show his son the flowers on the side of the street. In just seconds, the little boy looked up and said, “Daddy, why are you afraid of the dog?”
On another occasion the little boy picked up on the professor’s hidden irritation about the housekeeper of the inn. After returning to the inn from his field study for the day, the professor was surprised by what his wife had to say about their little boy. She told him that the little boy had gone up to the housekeeper and asked, “Why doesn’t my daddy like you?”

• Today, consider the ethical implications that our thoughts matter, i.e., they impact matter in terms of the material world of people, places, and things. Just as children express what parents hold back, so immature impulse-ridden people may act out the collective feelings being held in the privacy of the minds of the rest of us. If, as the Maya and quantum physics claim, we are indeed all one and connected in some way in our consciousness, then, is it not our responsibility to monitor our negative thoughts and feelings? We can do our part not to contribute to the collective hate of one race or culture against another race or culture. Thoughts driven by strong feeling have a way of becoming manifested in concrete material reality. How we think and feel eventually become action. Our thoughts are like pebbles tossed into a pond causing ripples that travel across the face of the still waters. [Some of the above comes from A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]