It is generally believed that thoughts have no power. How could they? They are not material and seem to have no effect in the physical world. Yet thoughts can be extremely powerful. After all, ideas such as freedom, justice and equality are also thoughts, and many people are ready to fight, and even to die, for them.
Let us take another example. Every Christmas someone reprints an old editorial (first published in 1897) answering a little girl who asked whether Santa Claus was real. Its answer, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," has become a classic. Today both the editor who wrote it and the little girl who asked the question are long gone. But Santa Claus lives on as a thought in the minds of people all over the world.
In fact, a thought held by many people can be extraordinarily, sometimes frighteningly, powerful even if it is not true. The twentieth century offers many examples: the dictatorship of the proletariat and racial supremacy, the dominant ideas of Communism and Nazism, are only two of them. Sometimes the thought of a single person can gain power too. Imagine a green lion for a moment. You can easily do this, even though we all know that green lions do not exist. But does it exist as a thought?
Let us take this idea a step further. Suppose you are a cartoonist and the idea of a green lion interests you. You keep coming back to it, make sketches, and finally create a cartoon character who is a green lion. You also think up other characters for the lion to interact with. Before long you have a cartoon centered on this green lion, and you earn an income from it. What began as nothing but a thought has produced concrete results in the physical world.
Even so, most people make little use of the power of thought. Thoughts drift in and out of their minds almost at random. If a thought comes that makes you happy, you are happy; if a thought comes that makes you sad, you are sad. In other words, in everyday life we do not seem to govern our thoughts; they govern us. Realizing this is the first step in gaining the power of thought. A woman once had to teach her dog to stop barking, and realized that she first had to teach it that it was barking. The first lesson of thought power is similar, and it is best learned through a simple exercise.
Exercise for Watching Your Thoughts
Sit in a comfortable but alert position. Close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths and let them out slowly; then let your breathing follow its natural flow without trying to control it. Now turn your attention to your thoughts. If you like, you can imagine them as images passing across a screen in front of you, like a film you are watching in a dark cinema. Do not try to control or change the thoughts: simply let them arise, notice them, and let them pass, giving way to others in their turn. You can continue this practice as long as you like, but even five or ten minutes is enough. You have now learned that you can watch your thoughts, that you can look at them as if they were happening to someone else. So where are you, then?
You are not your thoughts, because you are watching them, as it were, from a distance. So who or what is doing the watching? This is a truly profound question, and exploring it is almost a spiritual path in itself. For our purposes, however, all you need to know is that you are not your thoughts. This is an extremely important insight and the first step in using the power of thought. Your thoughts do not control you, or at least they do not have to. If you wish, you can control them.
Working with Negative Thoughts
Controlling your thoughts is a great achievement and can give you much power. Like every great achievement, it begins with small steps. If you want to try this process, it is helpful to do the exercise above at least once a day. Again, five or ten minutes is enough, but you can continue longer if it does not strain you. The next step is to begin noticing your thoughts throughout the day. Let us start with negative thoughts. Most people think them regularly and constantly. Notice the ones about yourself: "I'm no good." "I can't do anything right." "Nobody loves me." "Nothing ever goes right." And so the list goes on.
You will soon notice that these thoughts usually come of their own accord. You make a mistake or hurt someone's feelings, and these thoughts appear as if to punish you, to make you feel bad about yourself. When we hurt someone, it is important to acknowledge it and, if possible, to make amends; but often we keep beating ourselves up over the same things even years later. This does no good at all. So the first thing to do with these thoughts is to let them go consciously. For example, you might say to yourself, "I do not choose this thought." If the thought comes with an image, you can draw a large X over that image in your mind. The next step is to put a positive thought in its place.
Sending Positive Thoughts to Others
Another step in this process is sending positive thoughts to others. You can do this by consciously calling up a thought and mentally directing it toward another person. A single word is enough: love, peace, abundance and the like. You can do this with people you know and care about, and also with strangers, or even with well-known people.
Sending positive thoughts in this way has real and significant results. Still, it is best not to expect a direct result from the process. Nor is it right to use it to steer others, for example by sending someone thoughts of love in order to get them to do something you want. Using thoughts in this way usually backfires on the sender; if you try it, you will very likely burn your fingers one way or another.
Thoughts and the Unseen Worlds
You may have noticed that we have been speaking of thoughts as if they were objects in the physical world. In a sense this is true: thoughts are objects, but you cannot see them with your physical eyes. They exist in other worlds, which Theosophy calls the astral and mental worlds (levels of existence made of the matter of emotions and thoughts, subtler than the physical). Like the physical world, these worlds are worlds in their own right, with their own laws and characteristics. You see them with the mind's eye.
One of the things Theosophists do is study these other worlds: both in theory, by reading and discussion, and in practice, by carrying these ideas into daily life as we have suggested above. The concept of thought power has many more dimensions, and you can explore it much more deeply. This exploration is not only useful but vital, because through it we are studying ourselves. It fulfills the ancient Greek maxim "Know thyself." This is also why occult meditation, in which thought is used consciously and actively, is important for creativity.
