New Year’s resolutions are all about wanting to change old habits in order to form new habits. So how does this happen? We’re creatures of habit you know, with wave upon wave of repetition in our thoughts and behaviors. “Bad” habits, right? Perceived problems, in need of fixing.

What’s the problem unless you think about it? What problem do you have unless you’re thinking about it? An essential idea of nonduality is that thought entertains ideas that do not exist.

EXAMPLE: Fear is the ability to entertain possibilities that have not happened and are not real.

Reality, prior to our perceiving it, is an undivided whole. It is one thing, without any other thing. One, not two or many. Being as it is.

And yet we experience two: myself & world. We perceive, we divide reality into self and not-self, we learn how to do this and we become accustomed to it. And then beyond all-that-is, we entertain many possibilities that could be real but are not yet real.

Perceived problems, in need of fixing. Do any of us really have a problem? Or is it all in the mind and not real? Is there really some problem to fix, some bad habit to break, or do we instead use this perception as a pretense because we simply desire to experience changes for the sake of change, to experience something new and different?

Poppy - Close Up

Ask. Believe. Receive.

If you think there’s something to that (and I do), how do you figure out what you want? What you REALLY want? Taken to the limit, nothing occurs but represents your wish. Nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in every detail – your reality. You’ve made it everything that it is, and continue to do so, moment by moment.

So then, how will you make it — this all-that-is that you are experiencing — into something different?

ANSWER: You alter a repeating wave of behavior by creating other waves that interfere with it. A habit is only erased by replacing it with other habits. (An addiction is a habit that you’ve decided is bad, either in yourself or in others. It is simply a habit, a repeating wave of behavior.) A habit is a repeating wave of behavior. You will never stop the wave, but you can disrupt or alter the behavior by creating other waves.

So then, we figure out (somehow) what we want to become our reality, and then we begin establishing some new habits. Don’t think much about the old habits you want to change. (Remember, thinking makes it real to us, whether it’s real or not.) Don’t necessarily think of the new habits as replacing the old habits. They will, by raw force of interaction between waves moving through the universe. There does not need to be any obvious relation between the old habits and the new habits. Cessation of the old habits happens because we cease thinking about the old habits; we occupy our mind with thoughts of new habits that are in the process of forming. Happy New Year!

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1 Comment on Resolutions

  1. Tame Bear says:

    How do you decide what you want? And what new habits will get you there?

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