A mantra is a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that is considered capable of "creating transformation". Every Monday I will post a new thought, idea, or focus for the week. When you need a breather from life, when you need a little inspiration, or when you're about to jump over the conference table and strangle your co-worker, remember the mantra. Monday Mantra: The world is in you The feeling of gravity keeps us down Deviantart While Secret #1 taught me many things about what I believe and why (and that, currently, I absolutely, positively cannot sit and do nothing for 10 minutes everyday without going crazy), it's time to move on to Secret #2. Secret #2: The World is in You We were taught to follow a set of habits and beliefs that totally disregard the mystery of life. These beliefs are contained one inside the other like nested boxes: There is a material world. The material world is full of things, events, people. I am one of those people, and my status is no higher than that of anyone else. To find out who I am, I must explore the material world. This set of beliefs is binding. It leaves no room for soul-searching, or even for the soul itself…as convincing as the material world looks, to the great embarrassment of modern science, no one has been able to prove that it is real…any neurologist will assure you that the brain offers no proof that the outside world really exists... For all anyone knows, the entire outside world could be a dream. Whoa, what? Did you catch that? The entire outside world may not actually exist?! The idea held within Secret #2 is this: The world you experience is what you create, what you make of it, your perception of everything, good, bad, or otherwise. It is magical and unexplainable and in so many ways, limitless. However, over time we've been taught to isolate ourselves in order to search out exactly who we are and, in doing this, we've separated ourselves. We've lost the connection to the world within us. We've created an Us vs. Them situation in almost everything we do and, by doing that, we've separated us from ourselves. The world is within you. You are not in the world. It's complicated and beautiful and intriguing and, somewhat, overwhelming. To live and learn Secret #2, you're asked to change your reality and bring the world home to yourself. You're asked to look around you and notice how everything you see is a part of you. How your color choice of wall paint is a direct reflection of you and how you feel about your world. How you observe happiness around you and how the people in your life all play a role in that happiness. My favorite exercise is where he asks you to get a rose, hold it in front of you, and understand how this rose is created by you. "Without me, this flower would have no fragrance." Never before that moment had I realized that I give fragrance to flowers, color to walls, vibrancy to the world, just because of the sensations my brain generates. The world is within me. I am not within the world. In an attempt to live this secret, I'm going to start focusing on my surroundings and asking myself how I connect to them, how my perception of them has shaped them. How, if I were to alter that perception, they would completely change. What will you do, observe, notice to uncover the world within you? A shout out to my work hubby, Daniel, for going secret-by-secret right along with me!
