A few days ago I posted on Facebook something that Wayne Dyer, the famous writer and thinker, wrote last Saturday, August 29, just one day before he died of a heart attack. It is so important that I am going to print it here again and then comment on it in my blog post.
These are Dr. Dyer’s words: I was preparing to speak at an I Can Do It conference and I decided to bring an orange on stage with me as a prop for my lecture. I opened a conversation with a bright young fellow of about twelve who was sitting in the front row.
“If I were to squeeze this orange as hard as I could, what would come out?” I asked him.
He looked at me like I was a little crazy and said, “Juice, of course.”
“Do you think apple juice could come out of it?”
“No!” he laughed.
“What about grapefruit juice?”
“No!”
“What would come out of it?”
“Orange juice, of course.”
“Why? Why when you squeeze an orange does orange juice come out?”
He may have been getting a little exasperated with me at this point.
“Well, it’s an orange and that’s what’s inside.”
I nodded. “Let’s assume that this orange isn’t an orange, but it’s you. And someone squeezes you, puts pressure on you, says something you don’t like, offends you. And out of you comes anger, hatred, bitterness, fear. Why? The answer, as our young friend has told us, is because that’s what’s inside.”
It’s one of the great lessons of life. What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside. It doesn’t matter who does the squeezing—your mother, your brother, your children, your boss, the government. If someone says something about you that you don’t like, what comes out of you is what’s inside. And what’s inside is up to you, it’s your choice.
When someone puts the pressure on you and out of you comes anything other than love, it’s because that’s what you’ve allowed to be inside. Once you take away all those negative things you don’t want in your life and replace them with love, you’ll find yourself living a highly functioning life.
Thanks, my young friend, and here’s an orange for you!
What is inside of you? What will come out when you are squeezed? Where does that come from? How do you change it? These are questions we might ask and what are the answers?
I have spent my whole career working these things out. Here are some thoughts.
Most of us are full of “mind viruses,” a term borrowed from Richard Brodie’s book, Mind Viruses. It means that we carry thoughts and old mental programs that are no longer useful or have been innocently or purposefully implanted into our minds. These mental malfunctions come from those past physical and emotional events that create outdated programs that no longer serve us.
Where do these mind viruses come from? They are programmed into our memories from our past experiences. We will call them filters. These filters are like putting on a pair of glasses that modifies what we see. One set of glasses may change the color of what we see. Another could make everything wavy. As we go through life, we have put on many pairs of glasses that alter our vision. The pure thinking of our innocent minds at conception is now altered by the presence of thousands of these filters. They cloud our ability to think clearly.
These filters come from five sources: Growing up, spiritual concepts, gender, logic, and professional. These filters create images in our minds, words in our heads, and feelings in our hearts and “guts.” They permanently alter our thoughts unless we change them.
It is important to understand that these memories by themselves are not really good or bad. They are just things that have happened to us. How we interpret these memories is what can have a detrimental or beneficial influence on our present thinking and, therefore, limit or enhance our ability to get ahead and have an amazing life.
I am going to write more on this topic in another post. You will learn some techniques how to change those filters so that what comes out of you are high quality words and actions that benefit you. Look for that blog post.
Put Your Health in Your Own Hands.
Put Your Health in Your Own Hands 