Thought Is the Catalyst

Best-version transcript — the human transcription refined against a word-timed machine transcript of the cleaned audio. Spotted an error? Corrections are welcome.

The other day a friend of mine who is a minister asked me a couple of very interesting questions. He asked me “Why is it that love is mentioned so often in the Bible?” He wanted to know what the relationship was between love and forgiveness, and believe me you can’t have one without the other. The wise have always said that love is the answer, and believe me this is really, really true because love is a deep understanding. Love is being able to forgive and accept without judgement. Love is giving empathy for the unfortunate situation of others and—this is very important—love always comes in a positive feeling, not from the intellect but via positive feeling deep within your soul. Without this positive feeling, what some call love is only mere words and have no validity whatsoever.

What you have to see is the state of forgiveness leads your mind free to enjoy without the wear of carrying grudges from the past. Believe me, the state of non-forgiveness can be very heavy burden to carry throughout your life. It will cause you nothing but grief and sorrow and always it is self-destructive. This is why the wise from the past have always said love and forgiveness. To forgive is to forget. Now I don’t mean deny. I mean forget it. It’s not worth carrying because it’s only a memory. Forgiveness is magical. Forgiveness, like penicillin, clears the passageway of your mind which in turn cleanses the soul and brings mental health. It brings happiness. It brings all these feelings to you, not to the person you gave it away too, but to you and that’s very important. You know I truly feel sorry for anyone who lives in a world of unforgiving nature. Their burden must be horrendous. I honestly used to believe that if I forgave anyone who had harmed me in the past it would be sign of weakness. Now that I’ve got a little bit older and little bit wiser, I realise it’s the opposite.

Forgiveness is not weakness; it’s strength. This is why it’s so very, very, dangerous to go to witness groups who deal with negativity and hostility and dragging you back into the past horrors of your life. There’s no forgiveness there. Forgiveness comes from the now. Right now, you have to forgive and it’s not denial. Because once you learn to forgive, you can look to see that those things really did happen to you, but it’s a deeper understanding. It’s an understanding with love and forgiveness and this is where the secret of the ages is found. When you find love and forgiveness in you heart for those unfortunate people, who do things to you and to others, and they don’t even know they’re doing it. Because there’s ignorance and innocence, believe me and believe me, you can never, never have a happy marriage or a happy relationship with any human being when your mind is full of negativity and hate and unforgiveness. It just can’t be done. It is an absolute impossibility, and if anybody’s been leading you down that path, I ask you to really, really take heed of what you’re doing and check it out.

You look for common sense; you have love in your heart and forgiveness and that’s what you’re going to receive. On the other hand, if you’re unforgiving and full of spite and hate, that again is what you’re going to receive. You know the old saying, “What you give you receive”? I know a lot of people honestly, truly believe that to get a happy marriage together the couple have got to be upfront with each other, tell how they feel, the negativity, all the negativity they feel and all they hostility towards each other. There is no hope here. Absolutely none. That’s the old awareness group thing away from the sixties and the seventies. There is absolutely no hope whatsoever when you’re doing this. What you have to do is look for compassion toward each other, compassion towards your children, compassion toward humanity as a whole.

Stop judging and once you stop judging you’ll find your life will be much, much better. The only reason that wrongs are happening is because of ignorance of life, ignorance of the mind, ignorance of the soul. All life is a thought process. All society is created from a thought process. All rights and all wrongs are all created from a thought process. The way you act, the way you behave—they’re all created from a thought process. Forgiveness is a thought process. Love is a thought process. Hate is a thought process. You could go on and on and on, and all you have to do is change your mind. Learn to change your mind, go from negative to positive, learn to forgive because as I said before, forgiveness is the way. I know people in the psychological profession and they have patients who are full of hate, anger, distrust from experiences they’ve had in the past. So to clear these negative thoughts away what that patient has to do again is to learn to forgive, and once they learn to forgive and it clears your mind and it clears those passage ways of your soul, this is where that person will find the happiness they’re looking for. They’re looking for happiness, contentment. They’re looking for a stable life.

A life where they can live their spouse and their children and just enjoy themselves and, believe me, the way a lot of therapies are geared right now, taking those poor unfortunate people back in the past. All they’re doing is continuing the agony that they’re going through. When a couple has love in their hearts for each other, there is noting in this world that they can’t do together. Again I’d like to say, “Look for a feeling, a positive feeling.” This where the secret lies. It’s in the feeling. You must find the feeling. If you don’t have that feeling of forgiveness, then it’s not forgiving. Once you find this feeling of forgiveness, you’ve found the treasure. You’ve found the greatest treasure in the world. You’ve found something that will assist you through life. It will assist you in every facet of your life. It will assist you in your marriage, in your work, in your relationship with every human being, and again the word is called forgiveness.

Well, folks, again I hope this little piece of tape you will find it interesting. Thank you. Lately I’ve been asked to talk on the power of thought again and what thought has to do with the reality we see. Well, in actual fact, as I’ve stated many, many times, the reality we live in is a direct result of our thoughts. This is very, very powerful when you see it. For example, some people live a very happy, contented—whereas in similar circumstances, live a very unhappy life, and it’s not the reality out there that’s changing; it’s the thoughts of the person. This is why forgiveness is a very, very powerful thing, and forgiveness again is thought. This is one of the main reasons why the wise have always said, “To have forgiveness in your heart is one of the most potent medicines you can possibly get for the soul.” It’s forgiveness that shows the light at the end of the tunnel. It gives us hope, and without forgiveness you’re going to live in what you call hell.

Because if you don’t have forgiveness in your heart, you live with all that negativity from the past. I realise that many children are brought up in very, very difficult circumstances, and I also realise you can’t change that. But what you can do is you can change the way you think about it. It’s not denial. It’s actually forgiveness. It’s looking at if you had parents that you thought were bad to you. To learn to forgive is to unload a lot from your very essence of your soul. it brightens your life, and if anybody ever tells you to go back into the past and go through all that hell again and start having ill feelings toward anybody who has harmed you in the past, please be very, very careful. To hold a grudge against anyone who has harmed you in the past is like allowing a ghost to control your life now. What you have to realise is when you hold a grudge against anyone in actuality what you’re doing is holding yourself prisoner of your past. What you have to see is that the past is no longer a reality. Only the present exists, and it’s only in the present you can find your happiness. Forgiveness has magical qualities because it gets you off the hook so to speak.

It allows you freedom to start a life anew. This is why I’m going to keep stressing the power of thought because thought is the catalyst that creates the reality we live in. It is thought. It’s thought that creates jealousy, hate, envy, desire, greed. All those things are created from negative thoughts and negative thoughts are like a sickness of the mind. You’ve got to change that sickness, and to change the sickness you must change the thought and to really, really truly do that is not to go back into thoughts and think it out. It’s to realise what thought is. Once again, thought is the catalyst that creates your reality. Now all those negative things that we look for in the past to try and fix the present as I’ve said before it’s an exercise in futility. Now in the opposite direction it is once again our thoughts. Now remember, just our thoughts that create the feeling of love, caring, sharing. It is thought that makes us see life in a positive manner; therefore, I say to you beware of those who tell you to go in the past to try and fix the present.

They’re taking you back to the sickness. The sickness is created from innocence. It's innocence of life, and, believe me, we all suffer from this innocence from one degree to another. I don’t care who it is. Never forget it is forgiveness that washes away our negative thoughts to other. It brings a feeling of love and that allows us to see life in a more positive manner, and as simplistic as it sounds, all change, all positive change comes about by changing our thoughts.

I remember a few years back one person was telling me that he could never forgive his dad because was an alcoholic, and periodically when he got drunk he would beat him. It was really a sad story. He could never possibly forgive his dad. To me that was sad, but as luck would have it, a few months later he suddenly realised the hell his dad must have gone through, not just him, but his dad, to be in the state. He said that forgiveness came into his heart, and it was like a relief washed over him. He told me it was like a light had been switched on in his mind and how he suddenly burst out crying with such relief, and he told me it was the first time in his life that he felt love for his dad. Now both he and his dad are the best of friends. To me, that is what I would call a real success, a success story because this person didn’t just find the innocence toward his dad. It was he that found the innocence. He was the finder, so therefore in his heart he projected this innocence to everybody else in life.

Imagine all this happened just because he saw the innocence of his dad. Now they say love is the answer and this is true—it really is—because love is a positive feeling. Once again, the feeling of love comes via our thoughts. Believe me never, never for even a moment that a negative feeling will assist you to find happiness. This is an impossibility. I know that many groups throughout the world tell couples to get their anger out and innocently believe that this will help them. Well, it won’t. Any projection of anger toward each other, any projection of hostility toward each other will only lead you down the garden path. Eventually, this will lead to a separation or a divorce which you don’t want. Forgiveness and love are the two main feelings that will assist you to have a better marriage again. It is simply changing your thoughts from anger and resentment to forgiveness and love.

What’s really very important to realise and that is the difference between what is called our personal thoughts and the existence of thought. Thought is a gift which allows us to experience the very existence of life itself, and the freedom of thought which we all have allows us to live in separate realities in our everyday lives. But somewhere there’s a common denominator where all separate realities become one. Back to the feeling of forgiveness, and I said before forgiveness cleanses the soul. It cleanses your consciousness. It makes you feel better. It makes you see your life better. It brings a feeling of gratitude, so I’ll leave you now and I wish you all the best. Thank you.