This story might make you squirm.

Especially if you shiver at the thought of a dirty, hairy, disease-ridden rat scuttling across your floor.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

On to it:

In his book Waking Up, Sam Harris tells the story of being woken in the middle of the night while staying in a ropey hotel in Kathmandu.

What woke him?

He felt a claw scratching his foot.

Or did he?

In his own words (just after waking up in a state of terror):

The darkness of my room was perfectly still.  It had only been a dream.

And as suddenly as it had come, the feeling of terror subsided.  My mind and body were now flooded with relief.

“What a strange dream” I thought.  “I actually felt claws on my skin – but nothing was there”.

Harris breaks off this thought to relate what happened next:

Then came the unmistakeable sound of something scurrying toward me beneath the sheets.

Quick as a flash he leapt from his bed, stumbled to the light switch, hit the lights and flung back the covers.

In the middle of his bed sat a large, brown rat, staring him dead in the eyes.

The story goes on to describe the face-off between human and rodent, which ends with the rat hot-footing it behind a wardrobe.

The most interesting part of the whole story for me is when Sam says this:

In the span of a few seconds, my mind had traversed the extremes of human emotion, swinging from terror to exquisite relief and back to terror – entirely on the wings of a thought:

There’s a rat in my bed!

Oh, it was only a dream…

Rat!

So what to make of this? 

What to make of the fact that Harris was riding an emotional rollercoaster even though the rat was there all along?

How can someone’s feelings shift so dramatically from terror to relief back to terror when nothing is shifting in the outside world?

Well, to me it shows this:

Harris’s feelings had nothing to do with a rat in his bed and everything to do with what he was thinking about a rat in his bed.

Because if you can feel a sense of complete and utter relief while there’s a rat in your bed, it clearly isn’t your situation which is causing how you feel!

Taking this one stage further:

Our experience of life, our emotions and our feelings have nothing to do with what is actually happening in the outside world, and everything to do with what we think about what is happening.

Harris goes on to say:

“Thoughts pull the levers of emotion”

What he doesn’t say – and what I would add – is that they are the only thing that pull the levers of emotion.

Some people will read this and think I’m promoting “mindset", "visualisation" or the "power of positive thinking!".

But I’m not saying this at all.

I’m saying that whatever you feel, in any moment, is a direct result of what you’re thinking.  And that you can only feel a thought, not a circumstance.

I know there are those who will (very ironically!) claim they smell a rat, declare this is a load of balderdash and brush it all aside.

Well okay then.

For everyone else, this gives you a hint about what we could explore in a few coaching sessions.

For more info on that, here’s the link:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

- Tom