Why can't I change my thinking?

There are libraries of books encouraging people to understand themselves better; providing useful insights into various aspects of human behaviour. Given this abundance of knowledge, and given that humanity has been around for as long as it has, one wonders why we remain so far from understanding ourselves.

This isn’t to say that books haven’t ever improved people’s lives, but many of the changes we make are only superficial and many of our problems are still there, year after year.

And even when you can identify the problem, why is it that you are not able to make long lasting changes and, crucially...stick to them!?

It’s because you have a Mind Erosion!

Imagine that a man is walking across a field. If he walks across the field three or four times a month, he will leave no impression on the field at all. However, if he walks across the field more often, a path eventually will begin to form. This is a type of ‘land erosion’. In time, the path makes it easier to walk across the field than any other part of it and our guy gets comfortable choosing it. Why would he walk any other way?

Imagine that the field is your Consciousness and the path is a thought…let’s say a thought about life, that it is lonely. If you think this thought once or twice a day then it probably won’t have a lasting effect but if you think this thought more often, then it becomes a problem. It’s a problem because each day these thoughts are thought they are gently but consistently ‘digging’ a Mind Erosion of the thought ‘Life is lonely’. The more you use this thought the easier it becomes to 'walk this path', and the more you get used to thinking, ‘Life is lonely’, it begins to feel normal and eventually even comfortable.

When you repeatedly walk a country path, it becomes a ditch. It’s the same with a thought, but in a Mind Erosion the ditch gets deeper and deeper, so that eventually it gets hard to climb, or even see out of. This is how it becomes near-impossible to think any other thought in a given situation and why people will often insist that their ‘Life is lonely’ or ‘…unfair’ or ‘…hard’, no matter how much evidence or encouragement they are given otherwise.

You see, although you might think you want to change the way you live, having a Mind Erosion means in some sense you don’t. You are in fact so comfortable with living/thinking the way you do, that to change would make you feel insecure and put you out of what you (unawarely) consider your ‘comfort zone’. This is why, when you are given the opportunity to take another ‘path’, you (often greatly) resist it. And this is why people can find it so difficult to change patterns of thinking/behaviour. If you want to change your life you need to accept this and encourage yourself to try new ways of thinking even though they will feel uncertain, insecure, unnerving, or even frightening. Keep coming back to the fact that your thoughts are only thoughts, and not necessarily a reflection of reality. Just because you have thought particular thoughts repeatedly over a long period of time, this doesn’t mean that what you are thinking is any more real. Thoughts are just thoughts, your life is what you make it.