1 result for (heading:"615 septemb 18 1972" AND stemmed:limit)
[... 35 paragraphs ...]
(Pause.) You must be convinced that you can alter your beliefs. You must be willing to try. Think of a limiting idea as a muddy color and your life as a multidimensional painting that is marred. You change the idea as an artist would his palette.
The artist does not identify with the colors he uses. He knows he chooses them, and applies them with a brush. So you paint your reality with your ideas in the same manner. You are not your ideas, nor even your thoughts. You are the self who experiences them. If a painter finds his hands stained with pigment at the end of a day, he can wash the stain off easily, knowing its nature. If you think that limiting thoughts are a portion of you, permanently attached therefore, you will not think of washing them off. You would behave instead like a mad artist who says, “My paints are a part of me. They have stained my fingers, and there is nothing I can do about it.”
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
Previous limiting ideas, accepted, figuratively form a restraining bed, gathering other such material so that your mind becomes filled with debris. When you are spontaneous, you accept the free nature of your mind and it spontaneously makes decisions as to the validity or non-validity of data it receives. When you refuse to allow it this function it becomes cluttered.
No apple tree tries to grow violets. Quite automatically it knows what it is, and the framework of its own identity and existence. (Pause.) You have a conscious mind, but this is only the “topmost” portion of your mind. Much more of “it” is available to you. Much more of your knowledge can be conscious, therefore; but a false belief, a limiting one, is as ambiguous to your nature as any apple tree’s idea that it was a violet plant.
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
Often you quite consciously decide to bury a thought or an idea that might cause you to alter your behavior, because it does not seem to fit in with limiting ideas that you already hold. Listen to your own train of thought as you go about your days. What suggestions and ideas are you giving yourself? Realize that these will be materialized in your personal experience.
Many quite limiting ideas will pass without scrutiny under the guise of goodness. You may feel quite virtuous, for example, in hating evil, or what seems to you to be evil; but if you find yourself concentrating upon either hatred or evil you are creating it. If you are poor you may feel quite self-righteous in your financial condition, looking with scorn upon those who are wealthy, telling yourself that money is wrong and so reinforcing the condition of poverty. If you are ill you may find yourself dwelling upon the misery of your condition, and bitterly envying those who are healthy, bemoaning your state — and therefore perpetuating it through your thoughts.
If you dwell upon limitations, then you will meet them. You must create a new picture in your mind. It will differ from the picture your physical senses may show you at any given time, precisely in those areas where changes are required.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]