There is more to life than just the world that your 5 senses tell you about.

Your thoughts and emotions are as important as anything you see outside of yourself. In fact they are more important because they can effectively stop you from perceiving the world. In order to gain control of your life and direct it to your will you must explore how thoughts and emotions effect your ability to perceive the world. You must explore your inner world.

Let me show you the best way to perceive the world.

Effects of Perception

When something happens in the outside world, information is sent to you through your senses. Once it reaches you two things can happen in your mind.

1. It can pass through leaving no trace
2. It can create a ripple

For most people, the world causes a wave of ripples on them. Each thing they see causes thoughts and emotions to shoot off at such a rapid pace that most of the time they can’t keep track of it.

During your day you have thousands of unintended thoughts occur and thousands of emotions erupt both large and small.

Thought and Emotion Ripples Domino

When you see something often a thought occurs. When that thought occurs it generally causes another thought to occur or an emotion to appear. Which in turn leads to another thought or emotion. The first thought sets off a whole chain of thoughts and emotions. Often snowballing into bigger thoughts and emotions. An example:

You see a fruit stand on the street as you are walking.

‘That apple looks nice and ripe’

‘I’m rather hungry’

‘Should I buy it? Do I have any change on me?’

‘No. I have to remember to pay my insurance this week’

‘It is so expensive’

(Anger)

‘Takes out a large chunk of my paycheck’

‘I wish I earned more money’

(Sadness)

‘Why does my boss get more than me, I’m smarter than him’

(Envy, Jealousy)

If you watch yourself carefully during the day you will probably notice that this is not much of an exaggeration.

What happens is that we go through most of our lives with thoughts and emotions taking our attention. Consequently we often spend our time in useless thoughts and lower emotions, missing out on living our life.

There is another way of perceiving which allows perception to occur without thoughts being triggered. You don’t have to think about what you see in order to receive it. Your mind processes everything without you needing to think. It is a much healthier way to live in the world.

A Better Way of Handling Perception

Earlier on I mentioned that it is possible to let perception pass through our minds without leaving a trace. By this I mean that no thoughts or emotions are triggered.

When we see things, they are understood and put into memory without any thought required. Whenever we pay attention to something we understand it on a certain level and memorise what we see. In order for this to happen we must be open and paying attention to the world. If we are instead involved with a chain of thoughts and emotions we will stop effectively processing the outside world.

Have you ever been driving, got caught up in thoughts and then realise that you have missed your turn off and cannot for the life of you remember what happened to get where you are. I think it has happened to most of us at some stage. This is what all of life is like when we let our internal world run wild with our attention.

In order to perceive the world we need to be actively observing the external and internal world.

Active Observation

By active I mean paying attention.

I say observing because you are not required to think thoughts about what you see.

You observe the external world by letting all the sights, sounds, smells etc enter you on their own.

You observe the internal world by listening for the occurrence of any thoughts (in the mind) and feeling for any emotions (in the body, generally the chest). You can see them because they are like something new flashing onto the scene, disrupting the natural state of clarity.

You have to look both internally and externally at the same time. You look externally to see the world. You look internally to keep a track of your thoughts and emotions. Whenever a thought or emotion appears you let it go and go back to observing.

This takes a lot of practice. You have to change the way you live.

Bring some attention inside yourself, it is well worth the effort.

The Benefits of Handling Perception this Way

By observing your internal and external world you steadily develop:

• Objectivity - Ability to see the world without judging it
• Peace - Developed by the separation from thoughts and emotions
• Conscious Living - A chance to live your life consciously, without it being automatically run by thoughts and emotions
• Happiness - A new type of happiness, which comes from peace

There is a lot more to the internal world than what I have outlined.

Before you can explore the rest you must start by being able to live in the external world at the same time as observing your own internal world. It is the foundation for everything else.