Choose to Take the Journey

Hope is a strong emotion, but it is also inconstant. On one day you may feel ready to take on the world, to do whatever it takes to get what you want. On the next, you may feel helpless, powerless to effect the kind of tough changes essential to your success. A single mishap can eject hope right out of your psyche, necessitating further self-excavation to uncover a new source. If none is found, people are often seen resorting to prayer. Because hope resides within the conscious mind, it is susceptible to vicissitudes of circumstance and fluctuations in mood. It is fickle, unreliable, and whimsical.

Faith, an emotion of the subconscious mind is far more powerful. The mere mention of the word conjures up all sorts of associations: spirituality, conviction, belief, certainty, indomitability. Faith is all of those and more. It is the engine of mental and emotional drive, the locomotive in a world of bicyclists. So how do we do it? How do we turn hope into faith?

Your mind is like a vast network of streams. Each one of these “thought streams” within your subconscious mind competes for the attention of your conscious mind. The larger and faster the stream, the more time it tends to occupy within your consciousness, thereby governing your behavior. If you have a particular hope for the future, reinforce it through repetition. By repeating your hope, whether verbally to others or mentally to yourself, you increase the flow of energy down a particular stream. Each repetition carves a deeper channel into the stream, facilitating its flow in the future. Repeat your hope with strong emotions like love or desire and the thought stream is deepened and widened until it becomes a raging river of faith.

If at first you have great difficulty in directing your thoughts, do not be disheartened. There are a multitude of streams already present in your mind that may have been developing for years. Their flows sap energy away from new thought streams that you may wish to encourage. Your subconscious mind does not differentiate between helpful streams and harmful streams. It has no value system. It merely acts upon the dominating thoughts within your mind to create doubt, fear, and poverty, or conviction, courage, and abundance. Only your conscious mind, your own moment-to-moment awareness, can slowly but surely divert energy away from a destructive stream and send it down more promising avenues.

At the point when a trickle of hope becomes a river of faith, success is all but guaranteed. Your thoughts become a self-perpetuating obsession. Your behavior will be as though you have already arrived at your destination, already in possession of what you sought. Seemingly unrelated streams will be drawn into the river, such that solutions previously unknown to you and resources previously indetectable will flash into your conscious awareness.

Doubts and obstacles become as if twigs and leaves, swept away by an unstoppable flood of faith. One tenet common to the major religions of the world is that faith is indeed the answer to your every prayer.