Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Power of Thought

It's our thinking, not our circumstances, that determines how we feel.

William James, the father of American psychology, once said, "Thinking is the grand originator of our experience". As we think about something, we feel the effects of our thoughts.

Every experience and perception in life is based on thought. Our thoughts and consequent actions are shaped by ourselves, what we learn, and the world around us. We have innocently learned to interpret our thoughts as if they were reality, but thought is merely an ability that we have. We are the thinkers (the ones who produce) those thoughts. As Shakespeare said, '"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". An example of this is the placebo effect, which shows that placebos can have real, measurable effects on physiological changes in the brain.

When we realize that thinking is an ability rather than a reality we can dismiss negative thoughts that pass through. As we do so, we can maintain a positive feeling of happiness, because we no longer feel compelled to seriously follow every train of thought that comes into our heads.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

In The Beginning

As a species on this planet our lives are insignificant. In relative terms, our time on this planet and the scale of our achievement is nothing.

We live in a universe that is difficult to comprehend. Our sun is one of an estimated 300 billion stars in the Milky Way that is approximately 100,000 light years across. Astronomers estimate there are 500 billion galaxies in the universe. This does not include the countless number of planets and other celestial bodies in the expanse that is space.

At the other end of the scale, current thinking is that fermions (quarks and leptons) and bosons form the elementary particles of matter. Then there is antimatter and dark matter, which have yet to be explored [1].

In the infinity of space and the infinity of time infinitely small particles mutate with infinite complexity.

Sometimes we may get caught up in thinking that the world revolves around us. Yet, so much about the world we live in is unknown. Let alone the universe or what lies beyond.