The Seven Day
Mental Diet
(Pg. 2 continued)
by Emmet Fox
In other words, you choose your
life, that is to say, you choose all the conditions of your life, when
you choose the thoughts upon which you allow your mind to dwell. Thought
is the real causative force in life, and there is no other. You cannot
have one kind of mind and another kind of environment. This means that
you cannot change your environment while leaving your mind unchanged,
nor-and this is the supreme key to life and the reason for this pamphlet
-can you change your mind without your environment changing too.
This then is the real key to life:
if you change your mind your conditions must change too- your body must
change, your daily work or other activities must change; your home must
change; the color-tone of your whole life must change-for whether you be
habitually happy and cheerful, or low-spirited and fearful, depends
entirely on the quality of the mental food upon which you diet yourself.
Please be very clear about this.
If you change your mind your conditions must change too. We are
transformed by the renewing of our minds. So now you will see that your
mental diet is really the most important thing in your whole life.
This may be called the Great
Cosmic Law, and its truth is seen to be perfectly obvious when once it
is clearly stated in this way. In fact, I do not know of any thoughtful
person who denies its essential truth. The practical difficulty in
applying it, however, arises from the fact that our thoughts are so
close to us that it is difficult, without a little practice, to stand
back as it were and look at them objectively.
Yet that is just what you must
learn to do. You must train yourself to choose the subject of your
thinking at any given time, and also to choose the emotional tone, or
what we call the mood that colors it. Yes, you can choose your moods.
Indeed, if you could not you would have no real control over your life
at all. Moods habitually entertained produce the characteristic
disposition of the person concerned, and it is his disposition that
finally makes or mars a person's happiness.
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