By David Magallanes / Guest columnist
I’ll admit, I was not a normal adolescent. As a teenager growing up in a Los Angeles suburb, I would spend hours underneath the night sky. Or at least as “night” as it would get in one of the largest cities in the world.
I was an amateur astronomer at age 13. Hardly normal. Most teens don’t stand in their driveways looking upward for hours at a time. Sometimes I got up at the hour before dawn. The police sometimes wondered what I was up to as they drove by. Since I didn’t run when they showed up, they never stopped to question me. They must have figured I was either a) demented; b) a very talented criminal; or c) a future Carl Sagan.
Speaking of which, this astronomer-author once said, “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.”
I never grew up to become a “Carl Sagan,” but as I grew to become very familiar with the night sky, this “vast cosmic arena” and all its wonders, I could associate with David’s sense of awe in the Old Testament when he proclaimed: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.”
Standing underneath a clear, starry sky, especially on trips to the mountains north of Los Angeles, where I could see the heavens blazing in all their glory, I felt tiny — almost trivial — as well as humbled. I had made my own telescope and mounted it on a sturdy tripod. On nights like this, I would approach this optical instrument with a slow, almost reverential stride, as if I were drawing near to something sacred because of the glorious views of the cosmos that it afforded me.
Throughout high school and especially in college, I studied the cosmic laws that governed the motion of planets, moons and stars, atomic probabilities and forces that were mostly unseen. I revered these laws although I knew that we would always learn something that could upend the apple cart and scatter the apples that everyone in the scientific community wanted to believe were morsels of absolute truth.
Although I had learned the essence of these laws over so many years, I had never learned the laws that governed our thoughts. I had no inkling that these laws were as established and immutable as the laws that kept the planets in their orbits and brought leaves to the trees in spring — i.e., the laws that ruled the cosmos. There was no such college course as The Laws of Thinking 101, or Power of Thought I. Nothing in my formal education ever touched the topic. “Critical Thinking” is not the kind of course I’m referring to here.
No one had ever taught me that our thoughts are the rudder in our life journey. Seeing what many of us have to experience to learn our lessons, I have to wonder: Do we have a tendency to throw ourselves into life effectively rudderless, vulnerable to the crashing waves and the tempest winds (or at least to the erratic Santa Anas that blow through these parts) that toss us about and take control of our direction by default because we fail to take control of our own lives? Do others take control of our lives, whether that be friends, spouses, bosses, entire institutions … because we don’t?
Or is it that in fact we do steer our lives at all times, but that our dark, spiteful, negative and destructive thoughts are just as powerful as our joyful, grateful, positive and constructive thoughts? Which kinds of thoughts are most prevalent in our work or school environments, in our homes, in the media with which we are bombarded at all hours?
In his bestselling book, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Dr. Joseph Murphy, suggests: “Never use the terms, ‘I can’t afford it’ or ‘I can’t do this.’ Your subconscious mind takes you at your word and sees to it that you do not have the money or the ability to do what you want to do” (p. 29).
Once we become aware of the awesome power of our minds, it’s interesting to listen to ourselves and others as we dangerously proclaim to the powerful mechanism of the laws of thought, “I’ll never be able to do that,” “You can’t trust anyone,” “I’ll always be poor,” or “I’ll never be able to retire.”
I’ve read that life has a frightening penchant for saying, “Your word is my command. So be it.” There is a grave lesson in the tale of Aladdin’s Lamp. It’s not just a child’s fairy tale. But we have a tendency to ignore the laws of thought, despite the historical and contemporary illuminated teachers, great literature, and the fables and fairy tales that attempt to educate us.
Going out on our life journey without being grounded in the laws of thought is very much as if a person like me, untrained in the use of sophisticated weapons, were to be blindfolded, pick up an automatic weapon capable of great destruction, start pointing it haphazardly and pushing buttons and pulling triggers randomly, and then wonder why I’ve wrought destruction. Such is the sophisticated power of our minds, which are capable of great devastation in our lives if pointed in the wrong direction at the hands of an untrained user. Let’s not become our own worst enemy.
Our life path might well be the one “less traveled by,” as Robert Frost states in his poem, The Road Not Taken. But whichever path we decide to take, let’s do so with full awareness, if not complete understanding, of the laws of thought so that we might construct a life that is truly worth living.
Murphy, Dr. Joseph, D.R.S., Ph.D., D.D., L.L.D. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. New York. Bantam Books, 1963 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan, viewed March 15, 2011.
— David Magallanes is the creator of his own enterprise, Real World Projects, a business primarily dedicated to building marketing business networks for the creation of affluence. In this pursuit, Real World Projects constructs distribution outlets for highly reputable products that offer a healthier life and a more vibrant lifestyle, as well as free training and guidance for those who wish to create their own similar enterprise. David is available for speaking opportunities. To contact him and for more information, you are invited to visit and explore the Real World Projects website at www.realworldprojects.info.
Editor’s note: Please click on links on the right-hand side of the website to see previous guest columns by David Magallanes.
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