“What you are, so is your world. Everything in the universe is resolved into your own inward experience. It matters little what is without, for it is all a reflection of your own state of consciousness. It matters everything what you are within, for everything without will be mirrored and colored accordingly.” — Path to Prosperity

Although we rarely want to admit it, the world (as we see it) is simply a mirror, reflecting back to us our own inner state. If we are inwardly in turmoil then we are certain to see a tumultuous world. Just as certainly, a seemingly joyful world is only returning to us our own inward joy.

Those days when everything seems to go wrong from the moment we wake up, usually begins with one bad event (car won’t start, alarm didn’t go off, etc.) that we allow to affect our state of mind. That leads to another, and then another and before you know it, the world looks like an ugly place to us.

Put enough of those days together and life can become almost unbearable. Yet, nothing in the world created our misery — it was our response —- our own state of consciousness — that created the ugliness.

In the mid-1990’s I allowed a few negative events (brought on by living by the wrong principles) to drastically change my state of consciousness. In the middle of one of the greatest economic expansions in the history of the world, I barely lived above the level of poverty. Where others saw opportunity, I saw lack. It was simply a reflection of my inner state.

By 1998 I had gained control of my inner self and, accordingly, the sun once again began to shine in my world. The same circumstances that had once appeared as lack, now appeared as opportunities. Today there are so many opportunities in my life that I am only able to act on a tiny fraction of them. My table truly overfloweth.

During my dark days I came across a tiny booklet called 12 Ways to Develop a Positive Attitude. The author, Dale Galloway, writes from experience. He was a well-known pastor whose wife suddenly left him one year a few days before Christmas.

One of the many gems he offered was: “No matter what happens, look for the good and you’ll find it. A positive thinker does not refuse to recognize the negative – he refuses to dwell on it. Positive thinking is a form of thought which habitually looks for the best results from the worst conditions. It is always possible to look for something good; to expect the best for yourself even though things look bad. And the remarkable fact is that when you seek good, you will find it.”

And that’s worth thinking about.