Do or Do Not -- There is no try - Part 2.

While preparing the post 'Do or Do Not -- There is no try - Part 1' for publishing, I had a thought. Technically there is only one choice in that statement. DO. As I said in Part 1 TRY is a weasel word. It gets you off the hook for the results, or lack of results of an action. But 'DO NOT' (hmmm donuts!) is even worse.

Have you ever tried to NOT do something? Here is a thought experiment. Try really hard with all your might to NOT think of Elephants. You know those big lumbering grey land animals that weigh upward of 2000 pounds with a long nose and ivory tusks. By now your cranium is jammed full of precocious, prancing pachyderms.

You see the logical conundrum we put ourselves into by NOT doing something automatically opens up the possibility of doing EVERYTHING else. Since we are creatures limited in time, space and energy it is much easier on our perception of reality if we ignore the NOT qualifier and simply engage in elephant watching.

As a default it is better to train ourselves purge the word 'NOT' as a qualifier from thoughts and speech. The more energy you apply to not doing something just makes it more possible that is what you will be doing in time. I will NOT eat that donut translates into I will eat that donut. This is so reality can be preserved, and the space-time continuum spared from collapsing into a singularity. That last part was an exaggeration, but you get the point.

So how can we preserve reality and the space-time continuum? By stating intentions in the positive. Reality can't remove the NOT if you remove it first. Examples:

Reality Destroying Statement	Reality Preserving Statement
I can not eat that donut	I can eat some fruit
I do not want to hit that pothole. It will destroy my tire.	I will steer around the pothole and avoid it.
I can not live without you	I will be fine without you, eventually.

If you notice a theme with my blog posts it is this. Our thoughts and beliefs control our feelings and our actions. What we tell ourselves manifests into reality eventually. Every self help book, and I have read a lot of them; every therapy, coaching, or discussion session; all point to this truth. Change your thoughts, change your reality. ----TTFN