Today's quotation:

I am not a victim of the world I see around me.  Above all else, what I see around me reflects what I am.  I project the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that are important to me in the world.  So I can see the world differently by changing my eyes and deciding to see what I want to see.

Gerald Jampolsky

Today's Meditation:

It's so easy to get caught up in the type of thinking that says that the world does things to us.  It's easy to think that we're victims, that the things that happen to us are the result of some sort of grudge that life has against us, and that the good things are simply some sort of coincidental accident and that we just got lucky.  The hard thing to do is to keep in mind that the attitude and feelings and emotions that we bring to the world help to shape our own worlds, and if we see only the negative, we're going to think negatively, and thus we're going to bring more negative things and occurrences into our experience.

When we watch someone who is genuinely positive, we see that most of what they do seems effortless and that more positive things come to them as they go through life.  They know that their positive approach to life is part of what shapes their experiences, and that their own thoughts that they project into the world come back to them.  Focusing on failure brings more failure; focusing on hope brings more hope; giving more love and compassion brings more love and compassion, while sowing seeds of anger and resentment brings more. . . guess what?. . . into our own lives.

There are many terrible things in our world, and it would be an awful idea to ignore them and pretend they don't exist.  But acknowledging them isn't the same as dwelling on them.  Accepting that they exist and learning about why they exist helps us to fight them, but focusing strongly on them and thinking that the whole world is that way can truly bring us down to debilitating levels of negativity.  What I choose to bring to the world is also what primarily comes back to me.  There may be some bad mixed in with the good-- there always is-- but we can shape our own worlds by focusing and projecting the good.

We aren't made to be passive victims who sit around and wait for life to make us miserable in new and different ways.  Our greatest action may be to adopt a positive perspective and share it with others who need positive energy in their lives, for doing so will make our own lives much more positive, also.

Questions to consider:

How do we learn that we're victims of life, unable to shape it at all?  Is this perspective true?

How does your perspective differ from those of your closest friends?  Are the differences inherently bad?

What does it mean to "see what I want to see"?  Is this a form of denial, or a form of discernment?

For further thought:

It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.

George Gissing

more thoughts and ideas on perspective

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