Wormy Thoughts And The Law Of Substitution

How do we manifest clarity in our thinking when clearly we have no control over the thoughts that float up into our consciousness? Vigilance. There is no practical way of shutting down the flow of thoughts, so the course of action is to immediately recognize the negative and supplant it with the positive. Consider: If we decide not to think about elephants, we are in fact thinking about elephants, the subconscious then proceeds to remind us of elephants at every turn. The subconscious mind processes "think" (the action) and "elephant" (the subject) as the desired demonstration. Doubt this? Consider the last time a song or annoying jingle stuck in your mind. Try as we might every attempt to “not think about it fails,” it finally fading away when we become interested in something else, our attention diverted, the Law of Substitution in action.

Now consider prayer. One of the eternal questions is why some prayers are seemingly ignored, yet we are promised that if “we knock, it will be answered, ask and we shall receive.” Now we have the key. Thought being causative (remember the jingle) if we pray but continue to place our interest, focus, on our lack, pain, discord, illness, the jingle etc is it any surprise that that which we place our focus on manifests? When we pray with joy, keeping our focus, our interest on the positive, we reap the positive. Simply put, any prayer that begins “I need” only reinforces the sense of need, not the hoped for solution. This lesson manifests when we begin  “to think from the end”, to imagine what we will feel like when the prayer is answered and hold to that feeling. When negativity tries to worm its way back in, and it will, reinvigorate the positive feeling, expunging the negative immediately with the positive mental equivalent, like replacing that annoying jingle by substituting a tune we love, not fighting the negative, but replacing it with the positive demonstration we desire.