Why Release Private Thoughts?
Cape Town – Private Thoughts—Why Release Private Thoughts?
The Living Miracles community guidelines emphasize the importance of not holding on to private thoughts. We are not the thinker of the thoughts. When private thoughts are protected, the identification of being the thinker of the thoughts is also protected. By expressing private thoughts as guided, we are supporting each other in letting go of the false identification and coming to an awareness of truth.
Gold Nugget:
“What are private thoughts? That is a question that a lot of people bring up. What do our guidelines mean: no private thoughts and no people pleasing? Does it mean you shouldn’t have private thoughts? Does it mean you should always express your private thoughts? What is the context for the private thoughts?
In the early part of the Workbook of A Course in Miracles, Jesus says, you have no private thoughts, and yet that is all that you are aware of. So when you have the monkey mind going, all the gibber, gibber, gibber, judge, judge, compare, judge, judge, that is all that we are aware of, and then there are our real thoughts, the thoughts that we think with God, that are covered over by all of these judgments. When we say our guidelines are ‘no private thoughts,’ we are asking for the permission and the allowance to let them up, particularly when you have tried to hand them over to the Holy Spirit. They just are habitual, and you feel bad about them, but you don’t know how to get out from under them. There just seems to be systematic judgment going on. We find it’s a step if you can relax with the desire to let them go, let them up, even to talk about them. That is something in our communities that actually has been very very valuable and very helpful just to put the mind in the direction of not repressing them, not hiding them, not protecting them.
You know that idea that there is a pink elephant in the room but nobody is talking about it. It is like trying to pretend something is not there. We have all been raised in families where there are certain things you can talk about and certain things that were off-limits, and yet those things that were off-limits were still there in the mind, just whirring around there. They can become grievances and can become quite heavy. There has to be a way to free the mind then. The reason that they were suppressed is that they were believed to be true, and then the mind tries to just push them out of awareness. Just like somebody who has, for example, sexual abuse memories. Oftentimes it is so horrifying that they’ll just get pushed out of awareness, and that is what we talked about in the break, the unconscious mind, that’s like a storehouse for these unconscious private thoughts. So really the guideline is designed to help the mind to be free of this.”
Recorded at the 2014 LM South Africa Tour on December 5, 2014 in Cape Town, South Africa
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