Affirmations.

The purpose. The practice. The potential. The power.

Affirmations have been around since the first human got hungry, remembered and started to play with the thought of that sweet sweet orange fruit they had found yesterday, hanging off the trees in the meadow close by. “Sun Balls. Yeah there’s something there” they probably thought. “I remember the sun balls sweetness and how stingy the juice was to my cuts. I remember this time to not eat the outside and to spit out the seeds.” “I want that tasty sun ball! Oh how delicious and satisfying it is!”…obviously not in english but the ancient time period equivalent.

That right there is an affirmation process that is as natural as the summer day is long and the orange is juicy.

The purpose, at least within that brief description above, of affirmations is self evident. There is something you want, something that the very thought of it brings you pleasure. You ruminate over it, savoring each bit of specificity from your perceived experience, and (now please read with a warm yet pleasantly piercing, pan spiritualist sound in a flowy white robe with beads everywhere kind of tone) in so doing you are attuning and engaging your mind, seemingly to the collaboration with the generative forces of the universe that you’d like some more ‘sun balls’ please and thank you very much. (ok turn off the voice…for now)

That, in my findings, which are varied and come with definite but fairly often a surprisingly ‘mixed nuts’ bag of results- Results none the less!- is it…in a nut shell…

If there were only a way to get to the mind set of someone akin to whose primary concern is how to get more delicious sun balls. With our modern society having us do everything but relax and take our moments one at a time, just as the come, it’s no wonder we laugh at affirmations when we don’t see immediate pay off/results.

I put gas in my car and now I drive. I turn on the tv and now I’m entertained. I put tasty food in my belly and now I poop. Why is it that when I ‘think happy thoughts’ of the things that I want that I don’t get them? Completely understandable.

However if we take a moment, modern science itself has stated that time is not linear as we may perceive it to be and strongly theorized that retro-causality is a thing. I know right?

So what is stopping us from sitting down, or at least purposely finding moments within our days, and using our own ability, our own full on mental capacity to imagine into our own internal experience exactly what we want? Also why not? At the very least it brings with it myriad positive sensations, beneficial biological shifts and it’s time much better spent then scrolling through any app, but I digress.

As mentioned above, relaxation is the key. We have to be relaxed enough to allow for the clear intent of our thoughts to flow. Once you find that relaxation, the ability to inform, shape and mold your mind, your consciousness and by extension your inner and outer experience becomes yours for the taking and shaping…And tasting, as the case may be.

Back to the present, where sun balls or almost any desire can be satiated with a click of a mouse or a trip to the store, as long as you’ve got the dollars. How can we clear our minds, relax and focus on what we truly desire with our whole hearts and minds, not just our stomachs and our sex organs.

One answer: Affirmations.

The term, in my opinion, is a catch all. What it means: any statement, in the affirmative, repeated with the purpose of benefiting the individual engaging with the affirmative thought. Something akin to, but but slightly different from mantras and therefore unique.

“Accept yourself, love yourself, and keep moving forward. If you want to fly, you have to give up what weighs you down.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Doctor Maxwell Maltz author of Psycho-Cybernetics equates the human mind to something like an error correcting mechanism. Something like the homing system within a torpedo, which when launched towards its target, repeatedly makes errors and mistakes, all the while self correcting, making less and less drastic mistakes, aiming more and more accurately until it eventually hits its mark and bam, Success.

As long as our minds are relaxed, without anxiety and excessive stress, we are able to give our minds a target, paint it vividly with our attentive imagination, repeat it until it becomes familiar to the point of forgetting and allow our subconsciousness to orient ourselves to what we had previously enjoyed attending to. This along with a few other minor pre-requisites, brings to us the potential ability to will into reality and attain what we desire.

On that note I wrote a book providing several pathways to allow beneficial thought to become familiar and settle deeply within your own mind. Bringing benefits unimagined until experienced. At least I was surprised when they worked for me. Over the many years of enjoying mental exploration, affirmations have been a way for me to begin to lay down new tracks I want my mind to ride on and enjoy the benefits from.

If ever you’ve enjoyed someone speaking pleasant words into your ears, you might just enjoy my audiobook. A change in direction to pleasantness, if only for a short while, can work wonders.

Click any of the links and enjoy all the surprises.

(For the Next 60 Seconds)

Can you remember the last time you felt really happy? The last time you felt joy?

The last time you laughed? and I mean really hard, belly guffaw haw haw haw laugh?

Remember how it just seemed to bubble out of you? Remember the warmth of that good feeling, spreading from deep in your center to the tips of your fingers and tips of your toes. How it electrified the hairs on the back of your neck and tickled the best parts of you into feeling like everything was just great, just as it is, just for that moment.

Be there for 60 seconds.

This is the premise for a book I am writing.

What would happen in our lives if we decided to dedicate a small portion of the day, each day, to feeling the best we could possibly feel for 60 seconds?

On the one hand it is one of the laziest ways to dip a toe into the deep waters of what reality is, what our thoughts are and by extension what we are. Whether or not we are our thoughts (sneaky suspicion we are not) whether or not our thoughts can inform our waking lives. Whether or not we have any say in what our lives really are at all. All by just diving deep into the best feeling you can find for yourself for 60 seconds. No breaks. Ugh.

On the other hand, I would argue the better hand in this situation, not that there is anything wrong with the “lazy” perspective but, showing yourself, your mind, your body, your existence that “for 60 seconds, I am going to be feeling this now” is a huge step in mastery of the self. In being able to remain conscious of your self and your inner state and shaping it, regardless of the exterior circumstances. To simply but powerfully make your mind work for you. Instead of you running around all day trying to appease your mind and all its wild whims. “screw that driver.” “I want french fries. The really long ones. Freshly deep fried. Fresh!” “One more youtube video/tiktok/instagram story” “one more cookie.” “One more craving satiation.” “One more time appeasing ‘me’ .”

Not that we all haven’t been there, and don’t continually come up against these and many more arguments the mind makes to us so that we acquiesce and fall back into the reclining chair of comfort and complacency. In principle there is everything right with enjoying comfort. However, if it has become the primary driver in life then it no longer is a choice of relaxation and acknowledgement of what wonderfulness surrounds us, but a compulsive evasion of any kind of discomfort or pain. I don’t know about you but that doesn’t seem like a lot of fun to me.

To be able to direct your attention for 60 seconds to a thought that elicits a feeling you want to feel, and in so doing are feeling the feeling you want to feel, you accomplish a goal. A goal that is very personal to you, because who else could define your kind of happiness better than you? It’s also a goal that once achieved gives immediate feedback, the best kind of feeling you can feel. Not a bad trade off.

Back to the whole mastery thing. What are the implications of being able to at your whim, calling up a specific thought that you engage with in as many facets as possible? Seeing the colors and shapes, smelling the smells, feeling the feels etc. What kind of impact would repeatedly visiting in our minds that which elicits joy have for us and our lives? For 60 seconds you might have the body respond to the happy thought engagement with an uptick in happy chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and others. The heart might relax and blood pressure decrease. The breathing would deepen, spreading more oxygen throughout the body. You’d feel happy, deliberately, for 60 seconds. What would that do?

What would it do after a Week? A month? A year?

Is this not the beginnings of what some of our modern master minds, mystics and magicians stated to be the bedrock of a better, more aware life?

“Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.” – Joseph Campbell

“Above all, it is imperative to extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for the attainment of higher knowledge. It must be clearly realized that a start has to be made with the thoughts and feelings with which we continually live, and that these feelings and thoughts must merely be given a new direction. Everyone must say to himself: “In my own world of thought and feeling the deepest mysteries lie hidden, only hitherto I have been unable to perceive them.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“To be empowered—to be free, to be unlimited, to be creative, to be genius, to be divine—that is who you are…. Once you feel this way, memorize this feeling; remember this feeling. This is who you really are….”
― Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

The 60 second Happy Thought Practice:

-Find a thought that fills you with joy, good feeling, warmth, laughter and deep, wide smiles.

-Set a timer for 60 seconds.

-Devote all of your attention to this thought for the designated 60 seconds. Indulge in all aspects of the thought that elicit and amplify this joy.

(An easy *mental maneuver* see your thought playing out in your mind. Draw a border around it. Grab the border. Stretch and enlarge it with your imagination. This tends to have an amplifying effect on the corresponding emotion associated with the thought.)

-Go about your day.

-Rinse and repeat.

-Keep a journal and record your daily application as well as notable events, thoughts, experiences you have. After 30 days look back and see your progression.

There are so many things we could think about at any given moment. My training as an actor introduced me to using thought as a way to inform action on stage. Why not do it in life?

“All we are is the result of what we have thought”-Buddha.

So how about that.

Relax that’s not my name. That is my moniker. Clever right?…..Well I appreciate your honesty.

My name is Douglas Thornton. I am interested in how thinking differently, actively, pointedly, dare I say better than we currently do, can lead to better, more awake, conscious, joyful living. I am also interested in aliens (please imagine Giorgio A. Tsoukalos from Ancient Aliens shaking his gelled up otherworldly hair-dew and saying “Aliens”. Thank you.)

Why do this?

• Because I learned a lot about how to shape my perspective as an actor shaping a character for a role that has helped me shape my optimal outlook for less than optimal, and some times outright dismal outlooks on the present moment.
• Because the skills and tools I learned ring very synonymous with hypnotherapy, NLP, hermetic teachings, and a long list of esoteric subjects as well as new thought and self help works and teachings.
• Because I want to help people move through a limiting, not enjoyable interior state. Once you’ve got what that place inside of you has to give, we can move on in our journey and grow, joyfully, from this and all experiences.
• Because what was just stated above can come across as obnoxious. Like a nose so upturned it looks like I used scotch tape. That is not what I am about. Though it’ll probably come across that way at times. ugh.
• Because I enjoy expanding the mind. I enjoy thinking old thoughts in new ways and new thoughts in old ways and every way in between.
• Because I want to cultivate better, more fun thinking and living for everyone.
• And because Aliens.

I spent a decade as an attempting professional actor both in Chicago and Los Angeles. I received my BFA from DePaul University. I was introduced to the Golden Dawn through the Temple of Isis in SoCal. It may be dissolved at this point. Shortly after to hermeticism and a long, ever growing list of off the beaten path studies, practices and experiences that have all lead up to now.

Here you’ll find:

• A conversation about thinking.
• How thinking certain things, during certain events, changes your perspective.
• How best(? as far as I know. We’ll find out together.) to engage with these and other thoughts.
• Wild conversations about how this and all the other wild subjects out there *cough Aliens cough* make life that much more worth living.

I’ll leave you with the introduction to the narration of The Kybalion, a book on the hermetic philosophy I did just in case you’re interested:

Thanks for reading.

-Mist3rdouglas