The pure in heart are distinguishable from the toxic in heart by their thoughts and behaviors. Your sacred self desires you to have both pure thoughts and pure behavior. Your ego strongly resists purity and campaigns for toxicity in a multitude of ways. In order to engage this conflict, you must understand how you can identify and challenge yourself in these two areas.
PURIFYING YOUR THINKING
What you think about expands into action. The more conscious you become of the ways you use your mind, the more you will be able to leave behind toxic ways of thinking. When you know that your thoughts expand into action, you become very careful about what you think because you know that your thoughts literally poison your life.
Purifying your thoughts is a variation on the theme of higher awareness. So you might want to start with a review of the keys to higher awareness found in Part II. The first three—banishing doubt, cultivating the witness and shutting down inner dialogue—are essential to taming the ego and beginning to recognize and change toxicity to purity.
Toxic thinking is a habit of using your mind as an interpreter. Let go of that habit of constant interpretation and begin to live your life free of ego’s comments. Your willingness to confront the ways that you have been thinking is your opening to the purification process. The ability to suspend judgment will allow you to reach the higher ground (where you know the presence of the divine force) and experience the richer awareness that goes with the triumph of the higher self over the ego.
Just knowing that you can choose less toxic thoughts is an important insight. Many people have never had this insight. Consequently, they spend their entire lives defending the position that their thoughts are unchangeable. You, on your sacred path, know better. You know that who you are is something grander than the thoughts you think and more divine than the body where the thoughts occur.
Your thoughts and behaviors are habits. The ways that you have allowed your inner world to work are habits resulting from your experience of your life, including the beliefs that you’ve received from all the well-meaning people who taught you about life. To purify your thinking and make your mind work exactly as you want it to, be willing to examine these habits of thought. Then you will begin the purifying process and see the opening to your sacred self.
Freeing Yourself of Prejudice
The word “prejudice” means to prejudge. We engage in toxic thinking whenever we allow ourselves to be in a judgmental mode. And when we judge in advance, our thoughts are even more toxic.
When I was doing research for my book What Do You Really Want for Your Children? I was intrigued by data indicating that children who were taught to believe, without question, what authorities said were children with the highest rate of prejudice. That conclusion is understandable when you realize that prejudging, based only on what others have said, prevents developing a mind of one’s own.
Prejudiced thinking comes from treating your mind like a rental space for the thoughts and beliefs of others. Learning to furnish your mind with your personal interpretation, even for a moment, frees you to know yourself and others through your higher self. When your mind is occupied by prejudice, ego is the landlord.
Prejudging is a way of interpreting the motives and behaviors of others according to your ego-influenced standards. It is not restricted to the racial or religious antagonisms that we’ve come to associate with the word “prejudice.” Whenever you define members of a different generation as inferior or outlandish or outmoded, you are engaging in prejudice.
To free yourself of prejudgment habits, which come with the territory of the ego, take an inventory of your thoughts and keep track of how much of your inner energy is devoted to prejudging others. Ask yourself if you are willing to continue renting out your mind for others’ thoughts to occupy.
The antidote for having toxic prejudging thoughts is to suspend your ego and listen to your higher self. You will begin knowing that no one on this planet is superior or special in the eyes of God, just as no one is nonspecial.
Purifying your thinking is really nothing more than practicing seeing the fullness of God in everyone. The moment that you sense a prejudgment entering your mind, suspend it and replace it with the thought that you do not want to poison your mind. Shift the thought to a witnessing position of accepting and seeing the loving presence within all. The sacred Sanskrit greeting “Namaste” is a reminder of this kind of pure thinking. It translates loosely to “I celebrate the place in you where we are both one.”
Purifying your thoughts in this area of prejudgment happens when you are willing to acknowledge the presence of uncounted beliefs that you have received from others and when you want to be in relationship with the pure thoughts emanating from your sacred self. You are then willing to begin breaking the habits of prejudgment and replacing them with the idea in the Namaste greeting.
Freeing Yourself of Your Libido
Your higher self urges you to view a person of the opposite sex as a soul who has a body. Your ego, however, is determined that you see that person as a physical body.
Your libido represents your basic biological urges and sexual desires. They are vital and are not to be viewed with contempt or scorn. However, when the libido becomes the controlling influence in how you use your mind, your thinking can become toxic and drift far from the bliss and harmony that your sacred self offers. To purify your thinking in this area, you will have to carefully examine all that you have learned about your sexual nature, beginning with childhood.
When I examine the beliefs about male sexuality that I grew up with, I realize that I was exposed to toxic thinking that couldn’t help but interfere with my spiritual development. Movies, magazines, songs, advertising and adult males all sent messages teaching me to relate to a female as a physical body. The goal was the conquest of her body. Sex and sexual innuendo were considered the penultimate objective of my human quest.
This is the kind of learning that I’ve referred to throughout this book—it affects the thinking process and function. Our thoughts are trained to focus on sexual conquest. Every time we encounter an attractive member of the opposite sex, our thoughts begin to swirl around the messages of our libido.
The reason that this kind of thinking becomes toxic is that it uses up all of our mental energy in the activity of processing people as bodies rather than spiritual beings. Our minds become warped with the false idea that our own worth and value as human beings is somehow connected to the successful conquests that we collect and display to get approval from other members of our ego-based gender.
Relationships with the opposite sex become focused exclusively on appearance and external beauty. For men, breast size often becomes more important than making a spiritual connection. Having sex becomes a substitute for exchanging love and being spiritual partners. Women, too, make value judgments about the appearance of other men and women. All potential for knowing the bliss offered by our highest spiritual self is removed from awareness in favor of using our mind to see appearance rather than substance in other humans.
This has been a significant realization for me as I’ve become aware of my capacity for allowing my higher self to be the force that I respond to. I’ve found that my early training as an ego-dominated male was extremely powerful and was not easy to change.
When you are motivated by your libido, your thoughts are overwhelmed almost all the time. Your inner world is almost exclusively oriented around sexual thoughts and evaluations based upon appearances. To change your thinking in this area does not mean that you will become a prude or asexual.
What you will do is free yourself to see the inner beauty that is in each and every one of us. You will also realize that all physical appearance is temporary and constantly undergoing change. If you gain your sense of power and value through the physical appearance of yourself and others, where will your power be when those physical traits begin to shift, as they are all destined to do?
There is no inner reward in a conquest, even thou
gh you may have been trained to believe that. There is no inner reward in a conquest even though you feel like there is when you talk at length about it with your friends who have been through the same training course. When the conquest is completed, there is a sense of emptiness and a strong desire to change the scene as soon as possible.
Sexual union that is free of the idea of conquest and is focused on the sacred self that is a part of both of you does not leave you with an empty feeling or the desire to change the scene. You want to be close to each other after the physical act is completed. There is no empty feeling when you are a spiritual partner making love to the person you adore because you touched their soul first.
Becoming free from the libido in this way occurs as you purify your thoughts of others as well as of yourself. Make a deliberate and conscious effort to change the toxic, libido-based thinking of a lifetime. Do it one thought at a time. You will find yourself creating the inner peace that comes from knowing your highest self.
Remember, God does not play favorites. In reality, no one is any better looking or more gorgeous than anyone else. The only difference between a flower and a weed is a judgment. Ego-based judgments convince you that physical appearances and sexual conquests of those who are judged most attractive are of primary importance. Keep in mind that every thought or judgment concerning others as sexual objects is a thought that keeps you away from your higher self and close to ego’s domination.
If you are a woman reading these words, be careful not to allow your ego to convince you that you are beyond such thinking. I have only used male examples here because of my lifetime of masculine sexual education. I have observed women making value judgments about the appearance of other men and women, using similar innuendo and lewd conversational style.
To purify our thoughts in the area of the libido, we must commit to tackling all of the judgmental thoughts that occur regardless of our sex, marital status or physical age. I give some suggestions for how to go about this in the final section of this chapter.
Freeing Yourself of Addictive Thinking
The succinct definition of addictive thinking is believing that you must have something external to yourself in order to avoid suffering. When your thoughts are focused on the absolute need to have something, they are being subjected to ego’s training system. Remember, the ego wants you to feel that you are incomplete so that it can keep you striving for something instead of looking within and knowing the peace and harmony of your sacred self.
As long as your thoughts are centered on your incompleteness you will need to strive for something else in order to keep your ego satisfied. The something else might be our typical addictions such as alcohol, drugs, sugars, caffeine and so on. Or we might be addicted to approval, danger, money or other success symbols. The key here is to understand that striving for things is your ego at work.
When you become acquainted with your higher self, you discover that all the pleasures that your addictions provide are both counterfeit and fleeting. The pleasures that any substance offers—from nicotine and caffeine to cocaine and heroin—are all experienced in the body as sensations that disappear almost immediately. When the demand for more of the substance becomes an addiction, you are on the path of ultimately poisoning both your body and your mind.
In all instances, you need to examine your addictive thinking. Virtually every spiritual tradition teaches that your higher self is the presence of God within you. When you know this power within yourself, you no longer think in terms of anything that you must have or do with reference to external needs. In Christianity, this inner knowing is referred to in the commandment that says “…for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” In Confucianism we are told, “What the undeveloped man seeks is outside. What the advanced man seeks is within himself.” In Buddhism we are reminded, “If you think the Law is outside yourself you are embracing not the absolute Law but some inferior teaching.” In Shintoism we are implored, “Do not search in distant skies for God. In man’s own heart is He found.” And finally, in Hinduism we are told, “God bides hidden in the hearts of all.”
If you examine each of these spiritual traditions and many others, you will see that addictive thinking is that which violates the very basic principles of your highest self. Within each and every one of us is a divine power that needs no substance or anything external to itself to know bliss (unless one seeks out counterfeit, fleeting bliss that demands more and more of the substance to remain satiated).
The advanced man that Confucius referred to is the person who has looked within himself, discovered that he is more than a body that craves things and then is able to witness the body. When you become detached from the belief that your body is who you are, you also detach yourself from the demands that your false self places on you.
To become free of any and all addictive thinking, you will find it necessary to let go of ego’s demands. Get quiet and become the observer of your body and its cravings rather than be the craving or the poison. You will then be able to see the celestial light of God giving you the strength to leave the addictive thoughts.
As you witness the craving, you can see it come and go. You know that the false self is weakening at the same time that it continues intermittently to whisper warnings about falling for the “spiritual stuff” and suggest that you deserve the bliss now, in this moment, just one more time. This is all part of ego’s conditioned thinking telling you that without that external something you will be denied bliss and pleasure.
To get free of this thinking, you need to abandon your ego for the moment and take solace in your newfound bliss in your strength of resistance. Call upon your higher self and engage in a conversation with God in which you surrender this problem.
When you begin resisting ego’s domination and demands for addictive behavior, you will know a far superior and longer-lasting bliss than any external substance or dose of approval can ever provide. You will know pure rather than toxic thinking for perhaps the first time in your life.
Freeing Yourself of Contrary Thinking
Toxic thinking is that which sees the bad rather than the good in the world. Here again, the ego is at work encouraging you to avoid anything that tells you that this is a divine place. Once you begin to see the good in all and to know that even the things that none of us can understand are in some mysterious way a part of God’s plan, your ego will wither away and lose its influence over you.
When your thinking is pure you begin processing the world in a new way. World events are not what brings you down; rather it is the way they are interpreted. Practice releasing your need to interpret.
Toxic thinking tells you that you must make an issue out of something because your ego is invested in being right. If things are not going the way your ego thinks they should, you have a reason for being upset. This creates internal dissonance, which is the goal of the ego. If you are internally disrupted, you are unlikely to adopt a peaceful or tranquil viewpoint.
Minor irritation can and will keep you from experiencing the peace of God, just as surely as anger and hatred will. Any time that you value something more than you value peace, you know that your ego is exerting its influence over you.
If you want to know supreme happiness, you must work at removing contrary thinking from your life. You must surrender the interpretation of people and events and leave behind negativity and pessimism. Victor Hugo once wrote, “The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.”
When you are negative and contrary, you send out a message that you are uninterested in receiving love. Negativity will bring more of the same back to you. When you make the shift to your higher self, when you are experiencing bliss within, the ego moves aside, albeit reluctantly, and makes way for positive, loving ways of experiencing life. You know that your higher self will bring you the supreme happiness that Victor Hugo mentioned.
I sometimes think of myself as a sort of reverse pa
ranoid. People who are paranoid believe that the world and everyone in it is out to harm them in some way. I think of reverse paranoids as people who believe that the world and everyone in it is out to provide for them, to protect them and to do them some good.
This is simply a shift in attitude that reassures us about the divine intelligence. Our higher self reminds us to keep our thoughts on serving and in that way to realize the fulfillment of our desires. Everyone you meet—in some unproven but known manner—is a part of the conspiracy to make your life divine and blissful.
Try thinking of yourself as a reverse paranoid. You will see your contrary thinking and all of ego’s tricks disappearing only to be replaced with your sacred self bringing to you the love that is the supreme experience of happiness.
Freeing Yourself of Comparison Thinking
It is common to hear people talking about the uniqueness of each and every person. Our egos would have us believe that each and every one of us is special and a one-of-a-kind creation deserving individualized attention from everyone, including God. I cannot argue with this position other than describe it as a surface interpretation of ourselves. On the surface—that is, when we judge by physical appearances, talents, behavioral quirks and personalities—each person is unique and indeed quite special. But the focus of this book is the spiritual dimension beyond surfaces.
The ego-driven person judges by appearances in the physical plane and consequently uses comparisons. The person who is grounded in his or her higher identity knows that all of these differences are merely surface observations, and at our core all of us share the same universal essence. The force that flows through you sitting here reading these pages is also flowing through me. There is not a separate God for each of us. It is our egos that convince us of our separateness from each other.
When you begin to view people in terms of their divine essence, and literally see the fullness of God in each and every person that you encounter, you stop comparing. The idea that other people should be judged based upon how they compare with you is tantamount to the idea that you are a favorite in the eyes of God. It is as if you believe that God’s creations that are unlike you in appearance, personality, interest or talents are errors.
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