The Magical Power of Thoughts

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What does a thought look like?

A baby fish watches a tasty morsel swimming in front of it. Neurons fire in its brain, and it recognizes a potential meal. Its eyes converge, it beats its tail, and it heads in for the kill.

Trillions of baby fishes have enacted this little tableau for half a billion years, but this individual is special. It has been altered by a team of Japanese scientists so that its neurons give off a flash of light whenever they fire. And since its head is transparent, any onlooker can see its brain activity. In doing the rather mundane task of capturing a meal, this fish is putting on a nifty real-time light show.

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It is showing us what a thought looks like.

These tiny animals, whose brains are a fraction of a millimeter across, have transparent bodies, giving a direct window into their brains. And those brains are small, with just 300,000 neurons compared to our 100 billion. Imagine what our brains would look like if they were as transparent.

This film was made in 2013. It was the first time we see a thought as a real thing, an electrical exchange of energy that results in a charged emission that can be measured in terms of power. This demonstrates that thoughts have the transferred power of the energy exchange that caused them.

The human brain, however, has 100 billion neurons making more connections than all the cell phones in the world. In fact, the human brain produces 125 trillion signals a second.  For perspective that is fifty times the number of fish living on/in planet earth… every second.

Numbers are hard to imagine unless we add a visual.

What is a signal?

A signal is one of two things. It can be a kinetic exchange of energy in which an energy driven neurotransmitter causes a neuro-chemical reaction that sends a message to a muscle to make a move or an enzyme to be released in the stomach. The energy of the neuro-chemical reaction gets converted to a chemical or electric message that results in kinetic movement. Energy and matter are always in constant state of change. Remember the laws of energy and the one that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted into a different form.

Of those 125 trillion signals, only 4000 an hour become thoughts. Every thought takes 500 milliseconds to form, an eternity in the microscopic world. In our macroscopic world, however, that converts to 4000 * 500 milliseconds = 33.33 minutes.

So, as Alan Watts told us at the start of this Transformation experience – here we are, here we aren’t. We are thinking only half the time. What happens the rest of the time?

How powerful is our brain?

Potential Energy is a physics term used to describe the power of stored energy within a system. For instance, a coiled spring has more potential energy than a rolled out piece of metal.

We can see and experience this for ourselves when we destroy the potential energy of a ‘Slinky Toy’ by stretching it…

or if you left it on the couch and dad sat on it. When potential energy moves it becomes kinetic energy.

In the famous Einstein equation E=Mc²  the ‘c’ part of the equation stands for the speed of light, a universal constant, so the whole equation breaks down to this: Energy is equal to matter multiplied by the speed of light squared. So how much energy is in our brain?

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). When we split an atom inside a nuclear power plant or an atomic bomb, the resulting energy releases at the speed of light. But why is the speed of light squared? The reason is that kinetic energy, which is the energy of motion, is proportional to mass. When you accelerate an object, the kinetic energy increases to the tune of the speed squared.

So what?

The speed of light squared is a colossal number, illustrating just how much energy there is in even tiny amounts of matter. A common example of this is that 1 gram of water — if its whole mass were converted into pure energy via E=mc² — contains as much energy as 20,000 tons of TNT exploding. That’s why such a small amount of uranium or plutonium can produce such a massive atomic explosion.

Back to the brain. The average adult brain weighs 1375 grams and is 73% water. That means you have 20 million tonnes of explosive power sitting on your shoulders.

But how much of that potential do you actually use?

https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/einstein-formula.htm

What happens to a thought?

As we have learned a few times already, thoughts follow the laws of energy. One of two things can happen.

1. The thought gets converted into the material equivalent of itself. Energy and matter are interchangeable through the host’s power of observation.

2. The thought remains out there somewhere among the stars as energy with the potential to be converted.

Scarily, that means every thought you ever had has either converted into its material equivalent to create the life you have now, or it remains in space ready to do so.

This is really worth thinking about!

Thoughts are real things and until now you have probably let them be random. You saw something and you had thoughts, often fearful ones like our Worry Monster above (courtesy Jess Von Innerebner). You heard something and you had thoughts. What you actually had were reactions that you produced in 500 milliseconds in the form of thoughts. Your senses sensed something and you formed a reaction.

One of the foundations of magic is the ability to observe, analyze and, react in a way that is more beneficial. That naturally creates more beneficial thoughts. See where I am going with this? You cannot control your initial reactions and thoughts. They happen too fast. Positive thinking is impossible and a silly self-help, feel-good idea. What is possible is the ability to observe your initial reaction and then change that.

How we change and choose a new reaction to the thoughts or emotions that were just triggered by, let’s say, TV news or the unexpected credit card bill, is what makes the difference. How we deliberately change the words we use, the actions we take, and the next thoughts we have is how we use the magic wand of our brains.

Is this hard? Obviously not because we are only thinking 33.33 minutes in every hour. We have plenty of time to step back, consider what is happening, and choose an alternative.

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From Jill Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight:

“Everyone’s brain is different but let me share with you some of the simple things I have found to be true for mine. It seems that the more aware I am about how I am influencing the energies around me, the more say I have in what comes my way. To monitor how things are going in my life, I pay very close attention to how things are flowing, or not flowing in the world around me. Depending on what I am attracting, I take responsibility for how things are going and consciously make adjustments along the way…

… When my brain runs loops that I feel harshly judgmental, counter-productive, or out of control, I wait 90 seconds (which is how long the chemical reaction takes to trigger, surge through the blood system and dissipate from the system) for the emotional/physiological response to dissipate and then I speak to my brain as though it is a group of children. I say with sincerity “I appreciate your ability to think thoughts and feel emotions, but I am really not interested in thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions anymore. Please stop bringing this stuff up.”

I think this is beautifully phrased. So, here is your exercise for today. Observe your thoughts especially when they are negative or judgemental in some way. Wait 90 seconds and tell your brain exactly what Jill tells her brain. Then go seek out sensory input you want in your life… car dealership, ocean view, a couple laughing and holding hands etc… and tell your brain that is what you want more of.

It is easy and enlightening to play with the power of thoughts and observe the effect they have on the universe around us. For this exercise you will play a game in your mind. To rewire your RAS you need to play both halves of the game and in the order given. You’re going to start negatively so be sure to play the whole game out.

1. Take ten minutes of complete quiet time. No sound. No talking. Then start to think about all the things, people, events that make you angry. Feel that anger that accompanies every thought about all the things and people annoying you right now. Do it for ten minutes or so. Now go to the bathroom and if you have a scale weigh yourself. Make a note of the number. Now, look at yourself in the mirror. What do you see? If there are others in the place where you do this make a note of how they behave around you while you are having such negative thoughts… even better if those thoughts are about them.

2. Now, stop with the thoughts of how old and haggered you look in the mirror. .. which is how we often see ourselves when we are full of negative thoughts. In the mirror deliberately laugh out loud and watch the age fall off your reflection. Now take ten minutes in the silence of the bathroom to think about all the wonderful stuff in your life. Imagine hugging and laughing with every one of those people who previousl annoyed you. In the mirror watch how that weight floats off your shoulders. You seem taller, straighter. Weigh yourself on the scale. Now return through the house with a light skip in your step. Notice the stark contrast with how others treat you.

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Downloads:

In downloadable resources is a podcast from the TSS blog about how mirror neurons work for and against us as well as a 10 minute video about quantum physics and what positive attention does.

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