Thermometer or Thermostat?
Two people wake up on the same morning. One reaches for her phone before she has even opened her eyes, and as emails, news and messages scroll past, her mood is built from what she reads, so that by the time she gets up the day has already decided how she feels. The other lies still for a while and decides how she wants to meet the day, calm, curious and safe, and then gets up with that in her body. The emails and the news are the same for them both. What differs is the order in which they receive them.
That order is, at bottom, the difference between a reactive and a creative life. The reactive life starts from what has happened and builds the feeling afterwards, and it rarely feels like a choice, more as if life simply happens. The pay arrives and the mood follows, someone is kind and the day turns out well, someone is curt and it is ruined. We have learned to wait for the circumstances to be right before we can feel the way we want to feel, when the money is sorted, when the relationship works, when things have calmed down, and so our inner state becomes a consequence of the situation. A thermometer shows what the temperature is, while a thermostat decides it, and the reactive life resembles a thermometer, which is an expensive way to live because every change on the outside demands a reaction within. The energy goes into dealing with what has already happened, and what could have been created gets whatever is left over.
There is nothing wrong in that. It is how most of us learned to live, and there were good reasons for it, because the person who reacted quickly to the world survived. The logic of everyday life also tells us that the event comes first and the feeling after, and what we call realism is mostly just the habit of starting from what is visible.
A creative life is neither control nor positive thinking, and it has nothing to do with pretending that everything is fine, because the body cannot be fooled for very long. It is about letting the state come first, starting from how one wants to be, and meeting the situation from there. Someone who lives this way does not stop seeing what is happening, she simply does not receive it as an order about how she is to feel.
Why, then, is it not enough to simply decide? Much of what governs us lies outside awareness. In a diary study published in 2002 by the psychologist Wendy Wood and her colleagues, roughly 43 percent of people’s daily actions were performed out of habit, often without their thinking about them. The unconscious is an archive of conclusions that once helped us, but the archive determines how the present is interpreted. A child who learned not to be a burden reads, as an adult, a friendly “do you have a minute” as a threat, and a person who learned that money is scarce sees the receipt as confirmation. The interpretation does not feel like an interpretation but like reality, and that is why the same event can give two people such different lives. The first step is to make the invisible visible, because what has been seen can be chosen anew.
A phenomenon that researchers have known about for more than half a century, and that most have wanted to discount, is the placebo. When a drug is tested, some of the participants are given a pill with no active substance, and what was discovered was that a large share of them got better. What one usually tries to eliminate from one’s studies thus shows that expectation can change the body. One of my favourite examples is from 2007, when the psychologists Alia Crum and Ellen Langer told 84 female hotel cleaners at seven hotels that their work counted as good exercise. Nothing about the work changed, but four weeks later they believed they were moving more, and compared with a group that had not been given the news they had lost weight and had lower blood pressure.
There are reasons for caution. A large Cochrane review from 2010 found that the placebo effect mainly applies to things one experiences, such as pain, nausea and fatigue, and that it is less clear that it affects the course of a disease itself. The placebo is thus no cure for everything, but what remains is that the body responds to what we believe, and that anyone who knows this has a tool most people have never learned to use.
Neville Goddard, born in Barbados in 1905 and one of the most admired lecturers of his time on consciousness and reality, built his whole teaching on that order. He held that a person does not need to ask for, fight for or wait for anything, but should take possession of the state and assume the feeling that the wish has already been fulfilled. The difference between a wish, which points forward to something one lacks, and an assumption, which starts from the premise that it already exists, was decisive for him, since the former confirms the lack and the latter confirms that one has. It is important to be honest about where this stands. Goddard’s teaching has not been scientifically tested as such, and his ideas have sometimes been interpreted to mean that those who are struggling are themselves to blame, which I do not stand behind. What I take from him is the order, that the state comes first and reality follows, and the invitation to try it in one’s own life.
That means that no one who is struggling has done anything wrong. No one chooses their first assumptions, they are formed early, by others, in situations a child could not assess. It is a matter of something more forgiving, room to act, that there is a next choice from where one stands and that this room is larger than it usually feels.
The shift in how I understood my own role was greater than I had expected. As long as I interpreted life as something that happened to me, I stood in the role of the victim, a position that no one chooses, because it is learned early and feels like plain reality to anyone who has known nothing else. There was a kind of safety there, an explanation for most things and a place outside responsibility. When I began to see my own assumptions, I stepped out of it and into another role at the same time, the one who creates her own life. It was uncomfortable at first, a bit like walking into a room where you don’t know where the light switch is, because room to act also asks something of you. When the discomfort settled, something else came in its place, a liberation and a freedom I did not recognise, the insight that things don’t only happen to me, that I have a hand in how life is shaped, and that I can therefore create it for myself. In that insight there is also joy and desire.
You can try it in three small steps. First, listen for your own “I am” sentences over the course of a day, the ones you say aloud or silently. Then choose one of them and ask yourself what you would rather start from, something so close that the body can follow. It doesn’t have to be “I am rich”, it can just as well be “I am someone who can handle this”. Finally, ask yourself how someone who starts from that would act on an entirely ordinary day, and do one single thing that way. It won’t feel true the first time, and it doesn’t have to.
This is a condensed version of a chapter from my forthcoming book Att leva tvärtom (Living in Reverse), where I explore what happens when you let the state come first.