Is That Thought Worth Your Time?
by Barry Michels
In a webinar on “Overcoming Negativity,” a participant asked Barry how to tell whether a thought was true and thus worth paying attention to or if it was a falsehood coming from Part X that should be ignored.
I'm so glad you raised this complex, rich, and important issue. There’s been an underlying debate that, as far as I can tell, has never been truly identified between some of the more rebel philosophers, like Nietzsche and Goethe, and the more scientifically based traditional philosophers. The debate is essentially: which takes precedence, objective truth or the life force itself?
Nietzsche said, in a competition between life and truth clearly life wins because life can exist without truth. The animal world never worries about truth, and the plant world, even more, couldn't care less about truth. But truth can't possibly exist without life.
I know that's a very philosophical way of putting it, but people who are mired in trying to find the truth, almost always fall prey to Part X because Part X knows that you've adopted that metric. Part X can always use the truth to maneuver you into a dead end.
“Meaning, meaningfulness, the sense that your life matters, can never be expressed in words. It can only be experienced when you're doing something meaningful.”
—BARRY MICHELS
One of the most amazing things I discovered when I when I first met Phil Stutz was that he could shift your energy, not by saying something true, but just by saying something energetically energizing.
Once I learned how to do that with patients of mine, it wasn't the truth of what I was saying that was moving them, it was the enthusiasm, the life force, or the sheer joy that I was purveying that moved them.
This all relates to the scientific worldview that life is nothing more than a struggle for survival, with constant unpredictable threats to your existence. And at the end of this struggle, the big prize you get for enduring it is . . . you die. This is the dispassionate explanation of life based on objective truth, which science admires above all else. I don't want you to walk away from this thinking I'm anti-science. I'm not. But I don't think it's a good way to live your life.
Some of this has to do with meaning and the way that science has characterized meaning as something that must be expressed in words.
Meaning, meaningfulness, the sense that your life matters, can never be expressed in words. It can only be experienced when you're doing something meaningful.
Like, when I'm writing—or right now, when I'm doing a webinar—if you tapped me on the shoulder and asked, does life have meaning? I'd emphatically say, “Yes! This is so meaningful, I never want to stop doing it.” But I couldn't put into words what the meaning is—it's an experience that I'm having.
THE GRATEFUL FLOW TOOL
That defies the scientific injunction that you must be able to describe truths for them to be true. This is a very, very important point that goes to the heart of what the Grateful Flow Tool does: it tries to give you an experience that something outside of you is helping you, rather than discussing the truth or falsity of a thought.
When my son was young, he was really afraid of the boogeyman, whatever that was to him. He was convinced that it was a monster that was hiding out in his closet, under his bed, etc. Of course, because I was a lawyer I tried to explain to him that the boogeyman doesn't exist, it was actually a fairy tale started by adults to scare children in order to get them to comply. We would have these endless discussions, and none of them helped at all. Not at all.
What helped was holding him, wrapping my arms around him while he nuzzled in my arms. I could see and feel him relaxing and letting go of his fears. Why? Because instead of trying to get him to think differently, I was trying to get him to stop thinking at all and just experience support.
That's exactly what the Grateful Flow Tool tries to do, just without an actual physical body holding you. You're trying to feel the source of the universe and the degree to which it is constantly supporting, holding, and loving you—no thinking needed.
