People are often puzzled by the
idea of making life more enjoyable by changing their viewpoints. Let’s examine
it:
Suppose you are not feeling well
one day, yet you accompany some friends on a leisurely drive through the
beautiful countryside. Someone calls your attention to a lovely lake, but
because of your illness, you cannot give it your attention or interest. Someone
else remarks about a magnificent mountain in the distance, but you hardly hear
him. You pass one lovely scene after another, yet they have no meaning to you.
Because your illness has taken all your energy, you have none to spare in
enjoying yourself. It is the same to your mind as if these natural beauties
didn’t exist at all. In your present ill state, they have neither existence nor
attraction.
But the next day you recover. You
feel fine. There is no inward attention to anything; you are outward bound once
more. So again you go on a drive; you visit the very same places. But now,
everything is completely different. You enjoy the lovely lake and magnificent
mountain. You respond to them. You enjoy yourself.
How come? It was the very same
scenery both times. But on the second trip you were different. You saw
everything in an entirely new way. You had the inner freedom to see and
appreciate your outer world. Like magic, your changed mental viewpoint changed
the world for you.
It is difficult for people to
grasp that the very same principle holds true elsewhere in life. Yet it is
absolutely so. When we are inwardly ill at ease we do not really see things as
they are; we see them as we are. And there is a world of difference – an actual
world of difference – in the two viewpoints.
As we elevate our mental viewpoints
we also elevate our world. How is this accomplished? Enjoyment results from
discard, not from acquisition. Discard of what? Of the very things we really
want to lose – our acquired negative attitudes.
Enjoyment of life is
not the presence of something outside us; it is the absence of something within
ourselves. Gloom is a state of inner blockage of your True Self; enjoyment is
its release. Just as a balloon rises to greater heights by discarding weights,
so do we ascend as we toss out negativities.
Vernon Howard
From Psycho-Pictography
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