The Danger In Certainty

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When you think you are sure about something, how can you be certain? And what is the cost to you if you are wrong? 

There are actually two kinds of certainty – one kind is healthy and the other is not. Here’s a recent example from the Hill household which shows the unhealthy sort in action. 

My wife has a faith in machines which I don’t share. She believes in the possibility that machines can repair themselves. I have a different view which comes from indelible memories of having to fix old cars in my youth. 

So when our fridge/freezer started to make high-pitched screaming noises, it did not take me long to write it off. I argued that modern appliances are not designed for DIY maintenance so it was obviously time to buy a replacement. 

She, on the other hand, made practical precautions. She transferred all our stock of food to her mother across the village and then switched off our fridge. While mealtimes now entailed more travelling than usual, she became curious as to what could make the noises.  

The internet was strangely unenlightening but, after a couple of days, a chance conversation at a dinner party(!) opened a new front. Our dining companion had a similar fridge which had previously made very similar noises. The cause had turned out to be accumulated ice. 

The next day, our fridge was plugged in again. Surprisingly it ran silently and, as it started to cool, it remained silent. Once at operating temperature, we cautiously retrieved our food. Now four weeks later it is still silent, functioning perfectly. 

So maybe machines can heal themselves! Either that or my belief that it was broken was never true in the first place. 

You can see that my certainty almost cost £600 upwards on an unnecessary replacement. Yet this cost is trivial compared to other ways we close our minds.  

For instance, what is the cost of believing you are the sort of person who can never be successful in life? Or, what is the cost of being certain you can’t reach your dream? 

Such unhealthy certainty is reached by biased thinking. It’s supported by partial evidence and jumps to conclusions. And we cling to this sort of certainty with a feeling of vulnerability so that we have the need to defend and argue our case. 

Healthy certainty is the opposite. The accompanying feeling is quite different – it’s calm and comfortable. Healthy certainty comes from our inner wisdom rather than an intellectual process so we don’t feel vulnerable. Instead we have a deep sense of knowing. 

The great news is that your inner wisdom is always available. It just gets hidden when stale thinking clutters your mind. When you stop giving those thoughts so much attention, you open an opportunity for your inner wisdom to be heard. It’s like when an orchestra falls silent and allows the soft flute, which has been playing along, to become clear. 

You can always use your feelings as a guide. If you think you are certain but feel resigned or defensive, you are misleading yourself. But if you feel calm with a deep sense of knowing, then you are listening to your healthy wisdom.

Life Lesson From A Rescue Dog

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(How exactly can you let go of a thought?)

Four months ago Finn joined the family. As a rescue dog he is still learning how to behave with us and he’s making good progress. But there is one thing he is not very good at yet – dropping his ball.

Finn loves playing ball but once he has it in his mouth, he hangs on to it for dear life. He likes to hold it, gnaw it and scrunch it but he’s very reluctant to drop it.

He reminds me of what we all do with our thoughts sometimes. We can become so fascinated by what pops into our head that we hang on to it. We roll it around our minds, repeatedly ruminating on the thoughts.

This is fine when the thoughts make us feel good but it’s a real downer when the thoughts make us feel bad. When we get a bad feeling because of what we are thinking, the logical thing is to drop the thoughts – to let go.

But there seems to be something hard about this. How exactly do you let go of a thought? It seems to have a life of its own and keeps coming back.

This is where Finn can give us a clue. All it takes for him to actually drop his ball is to relax his jaw and gravity does the rest. But for this to happen he has to change his dog-thinking from ‘this ball is the most important thing’ to ‘there is something more important than this ball in my mouth’.

Dinner time is good example. When a bowl of food suddenly becomes available, the ball is soon forgotten!

Back in the human world, as soon as you become aware that your thinking is making you feel bad, you have a choice:

1. You can keep thinking those thoughts, believing they are important, and continue to feel bad

Or

2. You can recognize that those thoughts are just thoughts and you don’t have to take them seriously

Now you might read this and think “Come on Trevor, if I get a letter from my bank telling me my account is overdrawn, I feel bad and it is important!”

I understand you but be clear about what is actually happening. The letter informs you of a fact which is important. But it is not the fact that makes you feel bad – it is your thinking about the fact. For instance, you might berate yourself for being so silly – for spending too much money. You might get angry at the bank or even at the unfairness of life. It’s easy to go into a mental spin.

But the most effective way to deal with the overdraft is when you are calm and resourceful, and this can only happen when you are not dominated by thoughts making you feel bad.

So, how can you let them go? Remember Finn dropping the ball. You don’t  need to make a special effort; it just needs you to make a choice. You can choose to drop a thought by relaxing your attention on it.

When you choose to stop feeding a thought with attention, it will shrivel and fade into the background. Making this choice is the origin of the common experience of ‘something took my mind off it’. Automatically your attention goes onto new thoughts.

And if the unhelpful thoughts do recur, you know that they are just thoughts that you no longer need to take seriously.

The Solution To Your Latest Problem

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Problems in life may be inevitable but solutions are not. You know how frustrating it can be when solutions do not arrive. Yet the way we go about finding solutions is often the least likely to produce any!

When a new problem appears on the horizon, at first it seems obvious what to do. After all, we are educated from a young age to solve problems. Think back to school days – there we are taught to analyze problems so we can select the correct method from our arsenal and apply it as prescribed. The solution should drop out at the end of the process.

But there are snags with this approach, as I found recently when a friend set me this puzzle. During his holiday on Tenerife, he had visited a bar where three lights – red, blue and green – were projected onto a wall. The colours combined to make white light on the wall but, musing over his beer, he noticed that a bar stool was casting a red shadow. What, he asked, caused the red shadow?

The solution may be obvious to you but it’s a long time since I studied physics! I cudgelled my brain to remember. This marks the first weakness in our problem-solving method – as I proved, we cannot always recall relevant information.

There are other major limitations. The bigger problems in life are often novel and there is no tried-and-tested method to apply. Besides many problems are divergent – there is no single ‘right answer’.

Now, as I continued to analyse and ruminate over the red shadow, my thinking began to get drawn into a downward spiral. With any problem, it’s so easy to keep re-thinking the same old things. But a solution does not come from what you currently know (if it did you would already have the solution) but from what you don’t yet know.

So why does ‘analyse and ruminate’ remain the cultural norm? I believe the reason is because sometime afterwards a solution usually appears. The clue here is afterwards – rarely do we find a solution when immersed in the problem itself.

What generally happens, and certainly for me with the red shadow, is that the lack of solution causes negative feelings and the whole experience becomes unpleasant and unproductive. And this makes us give up. We stop thinking about the problem and, counter-intuitively, this takes us much nearer to a solution!

For over a week, the red shadow did not enter my thoughts. Then one morning, I woke to find the answer was waiting for me, clear in my mind. I was completely astonished – it was like the poet waking to a ready-made poem. I could see that if the bar stool blocked both blue and green light reaching the wall, the shadow would be red. 

Looking back, I wonder where the solution came from. It’s tempting to say that I knew the answer all along, that it bubbled up from my unconscious mind. But if that were true for all problems, it would mean that we somehow know all the answers already.

I find it much more convincing to take the view that we are able to tune into a wider intelligence. Call it collective-consciousness, universal mind or life energy, we humans have the natural ability to partner with it – in fact, we are part of it already.

When our own personal thinking quietens down, we can access that wider intelligence. This is how we can create ideas, perspectives and solutions that were previously unknown to us. This gives us a much more effective way of solving problems and it feels so much better while we are doing it!

Your Unstoppable Creativity

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You may have come across the popular myth that there are creative people and uncreative people. The ‘evidence’ usually given is by over-generalization, such as ‘I’m no good at drawing, therefore I’m not a creative person’.

Yet creativity is an essential part of being human. Creativity isn’t just about the artist or designer. We are all creative – the bigger question is what do we create?

I expect you have met people who create conflict wherever they go. It’s as if they are a black-hole of negativity, sucking dry the efforts of those around them. Fortunately there are people who create the opposite; they bring cooperation and harmony into being.

Some people improve our environment – they build gardens, clear rubbish, plant trees. Others damage our surroundings with vandalism, pollution and exploitation.

Each of us sometimes creates results that are a benefit to others. At other times we create results which – let’s face it – are less than helpful. So what makes the difference?

This is where there is a strong link with inspiration. When we are inspired, we act from our best selves. We are energized, generous and focused on what really matters. Whatever we create will be a positive contribution to the world around us.

And how do you know when you’re inspired? That’s easy – it’s the feeling of being fully alive!

Now we know that we are always creating something, there’s no need to leave it to chance, or to the whim of someone else. You have a choice; what would you like to create?

Notice I’m not asking what must you create? Or what should you create? The wording is quite deliberate: what would you like to create?

This is all about the future. It’s about getting actively involved in creating your future. Don’t wait in vain for some fairy godmother. This is about what you can do, not what you can’t.

Think about your dreams – what would you love to see around you? What talents cry out to be expressed? What brings you that feeling of being truly alive?

Inspired creativity is fulfilling in itself. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You don’t need to wait until you reach the destination; the journey feels worthwhile and engaging from the start. And, of course, you’ll bring benefit to your fellow travellers.

What would you like to create?

How To Get Out Of Your Own Way

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Most of us are looking for inspiration because we have some kind of challenge or a problem to solve. We want to improve life or work in some manner. Yet we often get in our own way by spending much time and energy on cranking a handle that is not connected to what we want to change! 

For me, a huge step forwards has been to see that the only way we get to experience life is through our thinking (you can clearly see this in action when two people have different experiences of an identical situation).

Previous posts have touched on this in different ways, so here I’d like to share an analogy that I hope you find helpful. When you see it happening for yourself in real time, it can be life-changing. 

Imagine For A Moment That It Is Nighttime

Buildings always make noises at night – in mine there is the background hum of the refrigerator, the creaking of floorboards as the temperature cools, the breeze blowing around the eaves. Your home will have its own repertoire. 

Sounds as familiar as these don’t bother us; we can sleep peacefully through them. Yet it’s quite different when we hear a sudden sound. Then we wake with a start, instantly alert, listening for what may follow. We may run through a mental checklist to identify the cause. 

If we’re able to work out what caused the noise – perhaps it’s the new letterbox rattling in the wind or a noisy car in the street – we can relax. Because we know the reason for the noise, we can lie back and go to sleep again. 

But if we can’t come up with an explanation, we stay on edge. The noise represents a threat because we don’t know what it is. Most probably we get out of bed and look out of the windows. We listen carefully to see if the noise occurs again. We may tentatively check each room in turn. It’s only after a period of time, if all is quiet, that we allow ourselves to creep back to bed. Even then we do not sleep well. 

So How Does This Apply To Life? 

When you have a good experience, you don’t want to change it – you simply enjoy it! Just like a familiar background noise, you feel no need to trace the cause. You happily carry on with what you’re doing. 

It’s when you are confused, frustrated or unhappy that you want to improve things. This kind of experience is like a sudden noise in the night – you want to know the reason (or what to blame) so you can fix it. If you can’t find the cause, it’s disturbing. It can even feel threatening. 

But when you see that the experience you are having comes from your thinking, it’s like a sudden noise that you recognize. You no longer have to take it so seriously. And there is no work to do because you don’t have to go searching through the house to find the cause. 

Ultimately, the thoughts you think are just thoughts; with different thoughts the same situation looks and feels entirely different. You don’t have to suppress or control your thinking because new thoughts are always flowing. Fresh thoughts will naturally arrive unless you fixate on what you are already thinking

Of course, knowing this does not immediately make the experience go away (any more than a noise goes away just because you know what causes it). Yet you can be sure that as your thinking moves on – which it naturally does – so your experience will change for the better. 

Please don’t take my word for it – prove it for yourself! In your current situation, look for how your experience improves as your thinking changes.