YOUR OWN BRAND

Emmet Fox provides a wonderful visual for this teaching. Ranchers place a brand on their steers so they can be easily recognized. If a steer from another ranch finds its way into the wrong corral, it is turned out. We do the same thing with our thoughts. What we dwell on, we brand. Every time we think “my bad luck”, “I’ll never find a good job”, “the kids won’t…”, “my (insert your favorite recurring pain or condition)”, “I hate…” or any other thought or negative emotion/utterance about something we really don’t want in our lives, we open the corral of our consciousness and invite in steers we don‘t want, putting our “brand” on them. This is the Law of Unintended Consequences demonstrated. Being a law, the converse is true as well. Thoughts of peace, kindness, love, service and God will fill our corral; dominate it, if we choose to dwell on them.

Do not misunderstand. Jobs are lost and found, our kids will act up (probably not as bad as we did though), conditions affecting our health will increase as we age (and one of them will be the last one) what matters is how we address these things in our consciousness. Bad luck or good luck for that matter is an observation in the moment. Singular occurrences do not a life make, many times seemingly good luck brings pain (the stories of lottery winners trials has become almost cliché) and bad luck led to a new path or awakening. Remember this truth: When all other avenues have failed, pain is the only instrument sharp enough to cut away the excess of self.

Hate and its cousin resentment are 100 per cent effective in shutting us off from the sunlight of the spirit, their only purpose to produce more hate and resentment. Remember the analogy of the one bad apple? Apples are placed in a barrel that is filled with water, to keep them through the winter. If a single apple in the barrel begins to rot, the rest of the apples are tainted and become inedible. Hate and resentment have the same effect on our consciousness. Although we need to turn out all the steers of negativity and limitation, hate and resentment are particularly destructive.