No great deed without a plan: why you should make a concrete and bold resolution for the new year.
“At Florence’s. During the meal, Jouhandou told me that he had entered an antiquarian bookshop near the Place du Palais Bourbon, where a statue of an Indian god was first displayed for sale and then recognized as miraculous. The antiquarian took advantage of this – for example, she receives commission from stenotypists whose request for a lottery win was granted (…) I am not surprised by this; we will see miraculous things in this respect.”
(Ernst Jünger, 2nd Paris Diary, January 20, 1944)
“Everything that is imaginable is real,” Pablo Picasso knew. The artist translated the possibilities opened up by his consciousness into his formal language: he saw round female bodies and painted them as triangles and squares more beautifully than anyone before him; he recognized the head of a bull in an upturned bicycle saddle. To crystallize the reality of consciousness into images and artefacts, so that they appear even more real than reality, that is the power of art and spirit. At an exhibition of the war painting “Guernica”, a Wehrmacht soldier is said to have asked him: “Did you do that?” To which Picasso replied: “No, you did.”
“Consciousness determines being”
Picasso was in Paris, the place of longing for all artists, when Max Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize for quantum theory. Planck recognized the origin of all being in spirit, energy and consciousness:
“There is no matter, only a fabric of energies given form by intelligent spirit. This spirit is the origin of all matter.”
The discovery of the power of the mind is something that has come to us again and again in different guises in all eras of time – perhaps too often to listen, because from New Age to mindfulness meditation, most people have probably already heard this insight so much that they no longer pay any attention to it. We find these ideas in Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”, in Hegel’s theory that “consciousness creates being” or in the ancient doctrine of Hermeticism, in which the first principle is that of mentalism: to recognize that all power comes from the mind and consciousness. Inflation leads to a loss of value here, too. Hardly any other idea has been profaned as much as the “power of thought”.
A simplified (for some: particularly profaned) theory is the popular “law of attraction”; there are bestselling books and countless videos about it with millions of views. Put simply, you should “wish for something intensely from the universe” and then it will come true. The “theory” exhausts itself in the eternal repetition of this principle and in the listing of alleged events that are supposed to support this. Admittedly, I found this rather off-putting, like a kitchen-sink psychological prop for people who don’t want to invest any effort, but instead live in a wish-it-were-something conception of reality. Dreaming, in other words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zvnFM2BXqY&t=1s
Or is there something to it? The American Helene Hadsell, also known as the “competition queen”, is said to have won every competition she took part in through intensive mental work. Even a house was among them. The idea of the expected event, for example the main prize in a competition, had to arise in her head in the form of a clearly outlined assumption, no doubts were allowed. Hadsell came up with her technique after reading a well-known guide to positive thinking (Vincent Peale, “The Power of Positive Thinking”).
Individual thoughts become a collective consciousness
Our collective reality is also determined by thoughts, and by all our thoughts equally. Will we achieve a bold vision? Or will we stick to the lowest common denominator of frightened narrow-minded thinking?
Let’s not forget: the power of shared thoughts gives rise to new groupings and collectives with specific interests, which in turn bring about change. Every thought, every word has an energy value that cannot be measured by clicks, likes or similar. Where many thoughts with a high energy value come together, things tend to get brighter. In today’s media world, it is thoughts more than ever that create reality. Never before have ideas, conveyed through the media, been able to merge so quickly with other ideas, exchange ideas and circumnavigate the world.
- The mind creates and models the world through language.
- These ideas are linked intersubjectively in media reality, becoming a kind of virtual network of thoughts that replicates or changes mimetically.
- Thoughts connect like-minded people, they network mental levels, give rise to communities, groupings and tribes.
In other words, we can each look at a mountain for ourselves, but it is our modeled mind that tells us what to see: a natural phenomenon; evidence of climate change because there is little snow; a natural element with magical energy; a tourist area; a hunting ground, a dangerous cairn? The power of thoughts comes with a price: individually, their power can be decisive for us, but collective thought patterns can also put our own thinking in the bag. But then again, a new thought can help.
Thoughts, what are they really? All just images in your head? Chimeras? We don’t know any more than philosophers know what reality is or physicists know exactly what energy is.
- Perhaps thoughts are a combination of several elements: A condensation of energy that can co-determine reality, a kind of mental trail followed by materialized action. Thoughts: an energy trail that attracts other energies.
- Thoughts seem to have their own communication circuit, we see this in moments of “synchronicities”, when we have just been thinking about a person for months and they are already calling.
- We also see the power of thoughts in their chain reactions: If we open our minds to inexplicable phenomena (such as synchronicities), then they knock on our door more often. The same applies to magic: if you believe in magic, you suddenly encounter it everywhere. In other words: Those who believe in miracles are (more likely to) experience them. Regardless of whether you believe in the power of thought or not, you will always be proven right and find proof of your own thoughts (“confirmation bias”).
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Self-efficacy starts with authority over thoughts
The power of thought is something of an individual self-fulfilling prophecy. But let’s look around us: wasn’t everything that surrounds us that is man-made initially just a thought? We don’t have to expect a material causal chain from pure thoughts, like magicians who can move a glass of water, but the material world would be inconceivable without the existence of thoughts, they are a sine qua non.
For me, intensive thought work is most likely a form of psychological self-programming: what I focus on today, no matter how daring, bold, megalomaniac or abstruse the thought may be, puts me on the track to realizing this thought, i.e. creates a magnetic force field that attracts precisely the encounters, events or constellations that are needed to realize the thoughts. Providence sends coincidences fleeing. Provided you are not blind to the signs that are then sent your way. Sometimes you have to (mentally) reach for the stars in order to land on the moon.
Many people may smile at New Year’s resolutions. I think to myself: anyone who forgoes good resolutions is consciously forgoing the opportunity to set themselves on a new path or closer to a new goal. Why should you give up the power of thought and see yourself as a plaything of external energies and external events?
What bold goal have you set yourself for 2025? Write to me at: milosz@pareto.space
My goal for 2025: to consign the phenomenon of censorship to the graveyard of history once and for all! It was an idea 1.5 years ago, now it has already become a reality for the first authors with the Pareto project. Here, too, it started out as just an idea that resonated with the thoughts of others (including you!), who helped turn it into reality.
It’s a kind of magic…right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p_1QSUsbsM
This article by Milosz Matuschek first appeared in German on Freischwebende Intelligenz.
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