Month: January 2020

Lift Up Your Thoughts…

On By Papa TonyIn Thought2 Comments

The other day, a close friend (brother) of mine posted a quote from one of my favorite authors, James Allen, that truly resonated with me. “A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts. He can only remain weak, and abject, and miserable by refusing to lift up his thoughts.” If you want to do life like you would like your life to be done, you have to learn to lift up your thoughts.

If you lived a little and experienced some things, you’ve begun to learn that the mindset you maintain is entirely within your control. Oh crappy things still happen to you. Things go south inexplicably. Circumstances marshall together and bite you on the ass. But, what you do with your thoughts is always, always up to you. Sometimes you want to stay in your funk. Playing the victim has its own reward in absolving you from all personal responsibility. The reality that life is often unfair seems justification enough to stay down in the misty flats. But, at the end of the day my friends, you know deep down that you are refusing to lift up your thoughts. Thoughts and emotions change at such a frequency that you might forget whatever clouds are blocking your sunshine, forcing you to willfully recall the source of your trouble and get back to acquiescing to it. In such cases, you are refusing your own happiness and reaping the results of your own decision.

The difficulty involved with lifting up your thoughts is not a matter of discipline or self control, but rather a matter of being afraid. You’re afraid that it won’t matter what you do and that no matter what you do things will continue as they are. You doubt the outcome. Fear has you ensnared and trapped. You wish and pray and beg God to change the circumstances but refuse to own the part for which you alone are responsible. You want to win the lottery or for some other miraculous event to solve your problems in one fell swoop. You want to lose the weight by taking a pill and still eating bad foods in excess. You want the happiness you have hoped for without doing the things that happiness requires. In short, you are not cooperating with your own solution. In stubborn rebellion, you want good from bad and blessings from cursings (your own mental cursings). In the immortal words of Emerson, “We need only obey.”

Your thoughts connected to your mind, connected to your heart, form the basis of the life you live. If you want better you have to think better. You have to change your mind. You are waiting for God and God is waiting for you! God’s part is to provide all that you need to be successful. Your part is to think accordingly. You can’t hang around in the darkness and expect to see the light. God doesn’t change. He is not found in the darkness. He lives in the light. You have to march your mental butt over to the light, where He is, and then you can finally see. Lifting up your thoughts means to take your thoughts to the light. You don’t walk over to the light because everything looks good or feels good or because things are finally looking up. You walk over to the light in order to see the good and experience the good and then and only then do things begin to start looking up. Do you understand what I’m saying? You act first. You take the initiative. You make the right move! Change your mind! Refuse the abject negativity and doom predictions and get yourself to the light!

Lifting up your thoughts is not blind faith or anything that cannot see what’s ahead. Instead it is a mental decision to think something different and stop thinking in accordance with the presentation engendered by the darkness. You may not realize it, but thinking negatively is actually a form of obedience also, but you are obeying the wrong source. You are cooperating knowingly or unknowingly with the wrong source. Cooperation with evil, even if you have never considered it that way, is a recipe for a life of abject misery! It is not how life is or being realistic or any other bullshit you have rehearsed in order to justify your wrong thinking. Instead it is deception artfully crafted to make your life suck! And, if your life sucks, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Look, you cannot control the events of the world. You cannot control the economy. You cannot control the evil things that happen to people in this life. But, you can control your thinking. You can decide to lift up your thoughts and you owe it to yourelf to do so!

It is an absolute shame what happens to people in this life. It is awful and painful and terrible. People are blown about from pillar to post by an enemy they can neither see nor discern. They feel helpless and lost and defeated. Yet, they fail to recognize the one thing they can control, their minds. They do not see or understand the connection. They wrongly assume that thoughts are just thoughts and as such don’t put much stock in the importance of controlling those thoughts. God has not left you without remedy. Jesus was always successful because he controlled his thoughts, perfectly and at all times. You and I will not accomplish that incredible feat, but we can sure as hell make an incredible impact on the lives we live on Earth today.

Lift up your thoughts! When you recognize that you are dwelling in the darkness, change your mind. Stop it! Stop rehearsing every wrong done, every thing that isn’t right, every problem that confronts you. Stop living in and getting comfortable with evil. Instead, choose light, choose love, choose good thoughts. “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” Philippians 4:8 and I didn’t write the book!

You can lift up your thoughts and every good thing you have ever imagined can be found there! It’s your mind and your thoughts. Cooperate with God! Obey!

Just some good thoughts…

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Is People Pleasing, Pleasing?

On By Papa TonyIn ThoughtLeave a comment

Everyone applauds kindness extended towards fellow human beings. All of us grew up in some capacity endeavoring to please our parents or other caretakers. And, I can’t think of anyone that doesn’t take some pleasure in making other people happy. But, what happens when your desire to please people comes at the expense of your own pleasing? Have you become a people pleaser and if so, could there be something behind it that isn’t very pleasing at all?

In childhood, our behaviors were distinctively shaped by our parents. We learned very early on that certain things we did were met with stern disapproval. While other things seemed to garner their favor. The more we behaved badly the more we subjected ourselves to unpleasant correction. But, when our behavior touched on those things deemed good, we were rewarded for our good behavior. We were perhaps too young to recognize that both the good and the bad were often subjective. Some good behavior was represented by sitting still and remaining quiet while bad behavior may have included horseplay and uncontrolled giggling. So on we plodded by trial and error urgently seeking for those things that were approved. As we grew older, if we were healthy and well-adjusted, we began to understand that the approval of others, while always encouraging, wasn’t necessarily the measure of how well or poorly we were doing. Conversely, if we grew up in an environment where the chastisement was arbitrary and capricious, rendering us unsettled and confused, we likely assigned too much merit to the opinions of other people. Thus, the people pleaser was born.

People pleasers always appear noble and beneficent. In fact, they are likely some of the most popular people you know. Who does not love them? They mold and alter their opinions to match the majority and are loathe to reveal their true feelings about a thing. They pretend to enjoy music they don’t enjoy. They laugh at jokes that aren’t funny. They feel a sort of false superiority in their benevolent approach evidenced by their unique ability to sublimate their own ideas for the ideas of other people, or their stellar self-confidence found in allowing others to take shots at them, while never shooting back in return. People pleasers often make the best employees and the best followers in their profound unwillingness to make waves or present dissenting ideas. In the end, these ignoble characteristics reveal formerly unrevealed pain, festering wounds without a salve, unresolved childhood issues, and an unusual, extraordinary over-reliance on the approval of others. People pleasing is not pleasing at all!

While all of us have to start somewhere, the true measure of a real man or a real woman is found in their learned ability to stand for themselves. As Emerson once eloquently penned, “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.” Until then, you will find yourself acquiescing to this and capitulating to that… You won’t be a real person at all. You will be merely a shadow of a human, plagiarizing other people’s feelings and desires. You’ll be all hat no cattle, fraudulent and duplicitous, rain without clouds, unsubstantial, inconsequential, fake! And, you will be damned unhappy! The lie in people pleasing is found in a faulty starting premise, namely, that you need the approval of others to be found okay. No-one does anything of magnitutude or consequence while also pleasing all the people. There will be times when you will need to exclaim, “I have had about enough of this shit!” There will be moments when you need to turn into the wind and press forward. There will be flashes of clarity that only you and you alone can see. In so trusting, you will find what is only yours to find; to give; to offer to the world!

When you peel away all of the layers, the people pleaser is afraid! He is the victim of pervasive disapproval he erroneously assigned as from himself based on something he did or did not do. He fails to see the disapproval for what it really is, the opinion of another imperfect being or collection of imperfect beings also much like himself. But, he need not remain a victim if he so manfully desires as he must but consult with himself, honor himself and what his soul has to say to the world. He already knows how he feels and what he thinks. His task is simply to say them and express them and stand behind them no matter if the entire planet disagrees. He must decide to please himself and only from that honest platform may he be in a position to actually help his brothers and sisters. It’s the conviction for which a man stands that defines him, not the fleeting and whimsical opinions of the moment! People pleasers are not born, they are made!

Down deep, don’t you always admire the man or the woman that says the thing that needed to be said despite the onlookers; the awkwardness; the tension? Don’t you love the rare soul that will tell you what they like and do not like? Don’t you trust those dear associations that are willing to speak up out of love for you, though you’d rather not hear what they had to say? In light of this, you owe yourself authenticity. You owe yourself truth and honesty, sincerity and candor. Stop bending your back for other people who aren’t bending their back towards you. Stop holding supreme the approval of people from whom, despite your arduous efforts, you will not gain approval. Stop living for and out from the fallacy of other people’s opinions concerning what is best for you and your experience! Instead do you, be you, without apology! The world needs you, not some charlatan falling in line with every whim and idle wish of the masses. The world needs you; the unique, strange, different, inimitable you! That person you will find sublimely pleasing in every way…

Just some good thoughts…

Connecting the Dots…

On By Papa TonyIn belief, Thought2 Comments

Life in its basic essence is spiritual. It originated from a spiritual source (God) who embodies love in every capacity possible. The creation is infused with order and laws that do not change. There are principles that cannot be altered. When the proper chain of reasoning is applied, you cannot fail. But, in order to be successful, you have to connect the dots.

The main reason that people suffer is from not knowing nor understanding the truth. In not knowing, they fall prey to a wicked despot working through the systems of the world to bring heartache and loss. He succeeds by introducing error, which when believed and practiced brings defeat. Though immensely intricate and well thought out, it can be summarized simply as those things that contradict the truth. Fear, which rules the world, is always error. Though it be justified and rationalized and even accepted as part of the human condition, it is man’s basic enemy which must be defeated. In the proportion that men overcome fear, they enjoy health, prosperity and success. In those areas where fear is permitted to remain, they suffer loss. Fear is the primary weapon the adversary uses to control and enslave people. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it is fear. In order to connect the dots, you have to recognize those areas where fear prevails and defeat it.

Fear feeds on and works according to principle; an unchanging principle that God set up for mankind; namely that those things a man believes in his heart will come to pass in his life. When operated positively, a man can overcome any challenge, achieve any result and see the impossible come into reality in his existence. However, believing also has a dark, negative side called fear. Fear is wrong believing. Fear is believing in reverse. Fear is becoming persuaded of some negative, potential outcome and holding onto that imaginary outcome until it too comes to pass in your life. The enemy parasitically leeches off this basic principle to bring evil and pain upon all people. The reason it has worked so successfully is because of man’s ignorance of the truth. Worse, many people aren’t even cognizant that they are afraid as fear has many, many disguises. It shows up as procrastination, as anger, as settling for less than the best, as a loss of enthusiasm and energy. It produces stilted actions, shame and all manner of ingenuine behaviors and hypocritical stage acting. It is life that has stopped moving forward, frozen in place and unable to move freely. It is the antithesis of love and as such is only overcome by love. Properly connecting the dots means to choose love.

Of all of the principles a man can employ in his life, love is the most powerful. God is love. Love activates believing; positive believing which yields phenomenal results. The actions you take in love cannot fail. Love is the great overcomer, able to heal and deliver and rescue from any situation you find yourself in. Love, when properly applied from your heart, melts fear away exposing it for the illusion it always was. Love isn’t just warm feelings but more so warm actions directed towards other people and yourself. Love is a decision made not from repayment but as a free-will offering expecting nothing in return. Love is the truth exemplified in actions. God so loved that He gave! We so love that we give. All men need God’s love and until they receive it are unable to fully love themselves. God loves us into loving ourselves. He looks past our foibles and our failings. He loves us unconditionally without any merit on our part to earn it. He forgives the unforgivable and sets us free from guilt and condemnation. He gave us His son, the perfect for the imperfect, forever liberating mankind from a cruel and hateful opponent. In this life you triumph as you connect the dots that God is love, the source and the originator of it.

Connecting the dots in your life means opening your heart to the truth. It means applying God’s system of logic rather than the world’s dog eat dog logic. It is refusing the endless pursuit of number one in favor of the pursuit of helping meet the needs of number two and three and four. It is shifting your focus away from yourself, your unmet needs, your problems, your difficulties and frustrations and turning them over to someone else; namely God. It is choosing to give instead of always trying to get and then receiving because of it. It is the polar opposite of how the world propounds things work! It is unselfish because it isn’t terrified its own needs won’t be met. It places its trust in the hands of another instead of always trying to figure out everything for itself. Connecting the dots means doing things God’s way, with God’s heart of love and concern for all people.

In these tumultious times we find ourselves in today, don’t fret and get anxious or worry how things are going to turn out. Learn to connect the dots spiritually and see for yourself that God is love and that in Him is no darkness at all. In so doing, not only will you enjoy the life that now is, but also the life that will never end. Connect the dots!

Just some good thoughts…