Holy Spirited

A man stands at the side of the road, and talks gently to his friend who stands on the other side of the road, listening. 

Traffic thunders and beeps and roars between them. Is it any wonder the friends cannot hear each other? 

Even shouting would not overcome the layers of cacophonic noise between them. Talking on the phone would not improve things, as the speaker could still never be heard.

The speaker could raise their voice, shout at the top of their lungs and maybe the odd word would transcend the traffic din and float over the carriageway – but invariably its meaning would be lost in so staccato a delivery. Snippets, at best.

Signs could be raised adorned with giant letters, and this might offer the best chance of communication. But tall trucks obscuring the view every few seconds would make reading the signs difficult.

Add into this, the friend at the other side of the road has forgotten their glasses, and it’s started to rain.

You want to hear the voice of God. Yet you choose a busy road, at rush hour, and forget your glasses.

But the planet is not chock full of busy roads. There are quieter places where you can hear yourself think. And if you can hear yourself think, you can hear the voice of God, because your thoughts ARE the voice of God.

The thing is, you rarely, if ever, hear yourself think. You are so unfamiliar with what it means to have a genuine thought. 

And yet you’re so surrounded by the concept of having thoughts and hearing your own (and other’s) voices, that you think this is what it means to think.

There’s a difference between the sounds a baby makes and the sounds a child makes once it learns to talk in words. 

A baby babbles. There’s noise, certainly, and the baby may think it’s making intelligible sounds, or it may just enjoy the string of coos and aahs and giggles it can make.

What you need to realise is that the noise in your head, the thing you think is thoughts, is no more meaningful than the babble of a baby. 

Yet because you have added words to your thoughts, you think they have meaning.

Deciding what to buy from the shops is not thinking. Rating a friend’s outfit is not thinking. Forming an opinion about last night’s TV is not thinking. Choosing what to buy your family for Christmas is not thinking. 

All of this is babbling. It’s noise which is obscuring the clear, consistent messages coming from the other side of the street. It’s the mental traffic you cannot hear above.

I am going to give you a tool so you can stop the mental babbling for a while - long enough to still your mind so you can have a genuine thought.

Sit still and close your eyes. Focus on staying still. 

The only part of you that should physically move is your chest as it expands and contracts with your breathing.

Slow down your breathing and count, slowly, to four with each in-breath and each out-breath. 

Now focus your mental strength on imagining a triangle. Any triangle.

See it in your mind’s eye. You are going to focus only on this triangle for a short period. Look at the very tip of one point of the triangle, and go deeper into it. 

Push your mind closer and closer to this tip of the triangle. As you do so, your conscious awareness of your space lessens, and all your focus is on the point at the tip of the triangle. 

You and the tip of the triangle are becoming one.

You are aiming for relaxed focus, not too intense, not any sense of agitation. Just focusing on the triangle and sinking into it, letting everything else fade away from your conscious awareness. 

When you and the triangle tip are one, you are ready to have a thought. 

I cannot tell you what your first thought will be, for you will have entered the creative space of all possibilities. 

But the thoughts you have in this space are life changing.

Do not be hard on yourself if you cannot reach the tip of the triangle at first. You will not get there faster by berating yourself for not getting there faster.