01 Dec How Thoughts Shape Our Destiny | Inspiring Podcasts

Podcast Transcript: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast, brought to you in part by Book of Zen, makers of wearable inspiration for a better world. Today’s podcast has been edited and adapted from the essay As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, published in 1903…

The world is your kaleidoscope. The varying color combinations are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts. You are literally what you think, your character being the complete sum of all your thoughts.

As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every action springs from the hidden seeds of thought and could not have appeared without them. This applies equally to those acts called “spontaneous” and “unpremeditated” as it does to those which are deliberately executed.

The beautiful truth is that you are the master of your thoughts, the molder of your character, and the maker of your condition, environment, and destiny.

As a being of Power, Intelligence, and Love, and the master of your own thoughts, you hold the key to every situation, and contain within yourself that transforming and regenerative power by which you can make yourself what you will.

All of this can be proven if you begin to closely watch, control, and alter your thoughts, tracing their effects upon yourself, upon others, and upon your life and circumstances, linking cause and effect by patient practice and investigation, and utilizing your every experience (even the most trivial, everyday occurrence), as a means of obtaining that knowledge of yourself which is Understanding, Wisdom, and Power.

Your mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild. Just as gardeners cultivate a plot, keeping it free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which they desire, so may you tend the garden of your mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and angry thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and kind thoughts.

By pursuing this process, you will sooner or later discover that you are the master-gardener of your soul, the director of your life. You will also discover within yourself, the laws of thought, and understand, with ever-increasing accuracy, how the thought-forces and mind elements operate in the shaping of your character, circumstances, and destiny.

Thought and character are one, and as character can only manifest itself through environment and circumstance, the outer conditions of your life will always be found to be harmoniously related to the condition of your inner state. This does not mean someone’s circumstances at any given time are an indication of their entire character, but that those circumstances are so intimately connected with some vital thought-element within themselves that, for the time being, they are indispensable to that person’s development.

Every person is where they ARE due to the law of their being. The thoughts which we have built into our characters have brought us here. In the arrangement of your life there is no element of chance, but all is the result of a divine law which cannot err. This is just as true of those who feel “out of harmony” with their surroundings, as of those who are contented with them.

As a progressive and evolving being, you are where you are so that you may learn how to grow. When you learn the spiritual lesson which any circumstance holds for you, it passes away and gives place to other circumstances.

You will feel controlled by your circumstances, only so long as you believe yourself to be a creature of outside conditions. But when you realize that you are a creative power, and that you have control of the hidden soil and seeds of your being OUT from which circumstances grow, you then becomes the rightful master of yourself…..

Read The Entire Essay in Evergreen: 50 Inspirational Life Lessons

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