How to Turn Your Life Around

One of the most revealing discoveries—which is also an absolute prerequisite to turning your life around—is that when it appears that your are plagued with people picking on you and conditions disturbing you, the real problem is within yourself. You may say of someone, “It is a fact that he is always upsetting me and hurting me!” But the truth is, you upset yourself over what he does or what he says. So you need to ask yourself, “Why do I hurt myself, and drive myself into such a turmoil over things that are really exterior to me?” If you are self-honest, this can lead to some discoveries about your inner feelings of insufficiency and unworthiness that would be of inestimable value in turning your life around. But most important, this discovery can lead to the realization that the locus of control is always within our own consciousness and not in people or events. This can lead to a developed awareness, in which we are completely impervious to external circumstances.

However, for today, let’s look at the fact that our lives do tend to move in continuous patterns of experience, much as we try to alter their course. If you reflect carefully on the past years and trace the course of your life up to now, you may well see a trend, a kind of momentum. And, projecting this into the future, how will you be in five years if things continue in the same way—or in ten years? Are you happy about this? This is not necessarily bad. You may be experiencing a ceaseless flow of good, and so you may be grateful to know that this good will continue on.

In physics, there is a “law of inertia” that says that a body will remain at rest, or in uniform motion in the same straight line, unless acted upon by some external force. I am convinced that this same law works in our mentality, in what psychologist, William James, calls, “streams of consciousness.” If you are not happy with the things that are repeatedly happening in your life, with the directions that you seem to be moving in, you can change. One clue is in the word, “metanoia.” The word “metanoia” comes from “meta,” which means “transformation,” “beyondness,” “transcend,” and “noia,” which means, “mind.” So, the word literally means: “transformation of the mind.” It refers to a new mind, a new way of thinking, a new perception of life, the awakening to a new reality. This means getting on to a higher level of consciousness, setting a new force at work, experiencing freedom from the limiting cycle of causation. This is achieved through metanoia.

Life is consciousness. You stand where you do today, wherever that may be, because of your consciousness, and there is only one way you can come to stand anywhere else: by changing your consciousness! If you wish to go up higher, you can do so. And there is no limit to the heights to which you can climb.

One of the most effective means of turning your life around is through employing “The Law of Reversibility.” In physics, an expression of force is always reversible. Sounds impressed on audio or videotape can be played back to reproduce the sound or image. Experiences tend to cause feelings, and if the feelings can be reproduced in the absence of the experience, it will tend to bring the experience back again, in fact and expression. Through mental imagery in meditation, you can experience being in the center of a Sea of Substance, and this will tend to open the way to its Flow in your life. It is no magic thing. Substance is ever-present, but it can only flow through a receptive consciousness. The feeling of it leads to the reality of it.

The great fundamental of this New Insight In Truth is that the directions of life are governed by consciousness, by the images and beliefs that we hold about ourselves and which become the “rudders” that determine the directions of our life. If you are not satisfied with the direction your life has taken, or the kind of personal experiences that continuously manifest in your life, you can change…by getting into the kind of attitudes and moods and feelings that you assume you would have if you already were experiencing the desired condition. “But if I feel tired and feel old and feel defeated, how can I help that?” But you see, feelings are not beyond the control of the will. You are not your feelings. You have feelings! And, the “you” that has feelings can control them…and can reverse them.

So, it is never too late to turn your life around, to break the patterns of negativity that keep manifesting themselves as age and deterioration, as inharmony and loneliness, as illness and physical discomfort, and as financial insecurity and lack. You will have to follow the higher way of living and thinking, but to wake up from your self-limiting, horizontal thinking and living, to self-releasing, vertical thought and life in the ceaseless Flow of your own Good. In a way beyond explanation, if you work at this, you will suddenly find that the old pattern has been broken—old thoughts and old conditions are as waters that have passed away.

Eric Butterworth