Everything we say has consequences — as does everything we do. And here is a fact that changes a great deal: a person cannot speak “without thinking”. It is impossible — speech runs from a region adjacent to thought. When someone believes they blurted something out “without thinking”, in the moment of speaking they were in fact thinking about something else — just not what they should have been. What they said, they said accurately: words are always defined by thoughts. That is why you can tell what is happening in someone’s life by the way they describe their day — and by listening to two people talk, you can see what troubles each of them. People often hide the consequences of their own thoughts because they are not sure themselves whether they like the way they think.
Why is this chapter called “Echo”? An echo is always the consequence of a vibration, and it has a fractal property: one sound has not yet ended while the next has already begun. Life works the same way: the consequences of our thoughts act on us later and at different frequencies. We send energy into space — in waves or in particles — and later receive the results of our “echo”, reflected off the invisible surface of the space we ourselves create. That is how the sensation reaches us: do we like what we think — or not.
An echo is always the consequence of a vibration.
How many thoughts are you thinking right now?
If you want to scan your own “echo”, start with a simple exercise: count how many thoughts you are thinking at once. Just count. If it is more than two, you are already running at about fifty per cent efficiency. More than that, and it may be down to one or three per cent. Even people of genius at switching are, in the moment, focused one hundred per cent on a single thought — they have simply learned to move that hundred per cent between tasks quickly. And when the head is a clutter of contradicting thoughts, half of them unreal, the resources go into friction — and sooner or later the system calls for repair. Every thought carries a task and a necessity; thoughts “just because” are a leak.
More than two thoughts at once, and you are already working at fifty per cent.
Tell the brain what to think about
The daily task is to track your thoughts and be careful with them. The moment you notice you are thinking about something you do not want, tell the brain at once: “I do not want to think about this.” And here is the nuance without which the technique fails: the brain will immediately ask — “then what should I think about?” Answer it immediately. If you do not set the next task, within ten seconds it will return to the old thought in new packaging, and you will believe you are not thinking it.
And a second instrument, for when a heaviness arrives without cause. You feel that something is off — ask yourself: whose is this? If nothing in your life right now gives any grounds for feeling this way, then it is not yours. Look at whose attention you are in: if you are in another person’s field, then most likely this is happening to them. And then the anger inside changes by itself into a wish to help — and that is already empathy. And from empathy you receive energy and grow.
Your thoughts are already sounding — right now, this second. The question is not whether there will be an echo. The question is whether you will like what comes back.
Learn to feel what you are thinking, and you will not need to grade the feedback.
The work on the cover — “Gaze” →
— Evgeny Fleysher
Artist and engineer. Author of WHY? and The Spiritual Alphabet, creator of the Art as Healing project. Paints works built on sacred geometry.
About the author and the method →