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In The Soul Aflame,
Alice Howell says, “There are as many miracles to be seen through
a microscope as through a telescope.” We spend more
time looking through our telescopes. We zoom all the way back to our
childhood to look for the 25,000th time at some old nasty trauma. We
pull that telescope out to look back over and over at old slights and
hurts and heartaches. All this time we spend resurrecting pain could be
spent putting some joy of today under a microscope, adjusting the lens
to expand it until it became even bigger to us than some old
Frankenstein from the closet of our past. When we are not
telescoping backward we are telescoping forward into some imaginary
future event we desire. Imagination is a marvelous gift to us and it is
useful as a tool to expand the possibilities in present moments. It is
less useful as a magic rug to fly away into some fuzzy future
wonderland. We know we can
take a microscope and hold it over a piece of paper and it will multiply
the power of sunlight and actually set fire to the paper. Using the sun
to represent our spiritual nature, we can use the microscope of our
attention and hold it over those past painful experiences to literally
burn them out of our consciousness. We can see that pain was not our
only experience at that time in our life and take a close look at other
experiences we loved. Even if we are
microscoping an old love affair and seeing nothing but the bad in it we
can hold the microscope steady until we see some good. Do you want people to
only remember the bad you did to them when most of your time was devoted
to doing good to them? You know you do. So why think of nothing but the
bad someone did to you. Look clearly at the good, acknowledge it from
the heart, and then move on to your life as it is right now and live it
without dragging around millstones from the past. The main use of your
mental microscope is not to heal the past or rocket into the future but
to see the “little things” in your life at this moment. You will
soon discover that there are no “little things.” Anything that is
pleasant right now can be viewed through the microscope of your
awareness until it becomes big enough to crowd out the anxieties that
keep you from savoring it. Draw a mental circle.
Put your tiniest joy in it. Now expand it until it reaches the outermost
limits of the circle. Give your little joys your full loving attention
today and you won’t need yesterday’s pain or tomorrow’s unreality
to play with.
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