Oneness

Joseph P. Kauffman
any experience at all, you would have no reference, and
would not be able to form a thought.
Wouldn’t this display clearly that you are not your
thoughts, that you had to have existed before you were
able to think? Thoughts come and go, and prior to any
thought at all, you still existed. We are not our thoughts,
but unfortunately, many people let their thoughts control
their life experience as if they really were the voice inside
of their head. Their thinking is involuntary, automatically
appearing in their awareness without their volition, causing
their attention to be distracted by thought on a frequent
basis. Some people are so identified with their involuntary
thinking that the majority of their experience consists of
thought, and not of awareness to what is actually
happening around them.
When we think of something, we form a mental image
of it, and this image is then filtered through our mental
perception. How we perceive an event determines how we
will experience it. If an event happens, and you perceive
this event as something negative, you will create a negative
mental image about that event in your mind. But this
image is relative only to you. The event itself was neutral,
but you perceived it as something negative, thus making it
so that your experience of that event was also negative.
Our perception of reality determines our experience of
reality. We hardly ever experience things as they are.
Instead, we experience how we think they are; we
experience our mental image of them. We do this more
often than we think.
Words, for example, are nothing but symbols to
represent thought forms. Think of a maple tree, standing
tall in the sunlight, its vibrant green leaves spread out along
its many branches, its large trunk rooted firmly into the
earth. Can you see this tree? Where does the tree exist?
Solely in your mind. Whatever image you see of a tree is a
mental image that you yourself created. You read these
words, and you used them to form an image. But is this
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