The Strangest Secret Hidden in Plain Sight

Back in the 1950s, broadcaster Earl Nightingale created an audio learning record called The Strangest Secret, in that we become what we think about most.

It's strange that the strangest secret is a secret at all, since every leader the world has ever known has known this. It has been sitting right under the noses of everybody for thousands of years!

In fact, Earl Nightingale's record outsold every other non-musical recorded piece created at the time and it has been broadcast on radio to potentially millions of listeners. So if this rather badly kept secret is so obvious and if it is on full view for anyone who cares to look in its general direction, why are so few people taking advantage of it?

Is it Too Simple to be Taken Seriously?

The secret itself is simply, "We become what we think about most" and means basically that whatever we hold most prominently and frequently in out thoughts dictates who we are and how we live. It means that if we think of ourselves as happy, prosperous and healthy, then that's how we will be, whereas if we think of ourselves as sad, poor and sick, that's the way we will tend to be.

For most people, perhaps that concept is too simple for them to take seriously and so while they may hear it and think it's all very nice, in the end they just discard it and don't give it a second thought. They don't realize just exactly what they are leaving on the table!

Where is it So Obviously Hidden?

Most religious texts tell us that we become what we think about and for Christians, it can be found in the Bible in various places, although the wording may not be quite so obvious. The message is clear; whatever thoughts we hold in our minds with sufficient emotional strength and for long enough will set up a certain vibration in our bodies and dictate our actions.

It is those actions which will lead us to live the way we want to live or send us into a way of life we really don't want but we get it anyway because of the way we are thinking. Our thoughts cause everything that we do and everything we do creates the life we lead. It really is that simple!

This is one way the law of attraction works in our lives. Not so much as some kind of magic that gives us what we want (or don't want), but more like our thought processes bringing us in tune with the vibration of what we're predominantly thinking about and thereby attracting it to us.

You only have to look around you to see how people are being negatively affected by their own actions which are cause by their thoughts.

How People Are Negatively Programmed

As an example, you probably know someone who is always angry about everything, is constantly complaining about things and is always uptight. That person probably gets sick a lot, looks older than their actual years and is not someone you want to spend a lot of time with.

A person like that is angry because they are allowing their thoughts to be dictated by what they see around them. They are probably watching a lot of bad news stories on TV and reading bad new in the newspapers and getting angry about them.

The frustration of not being able to do anything about those bad news stories leads to high stress levels. The only way they can deal with the frustration is to get angry and hold a lot of angry conversations inside their heads about what they'd like to do.

They use their imagination to act out what they'd do if they could fix the problems of the world that they get from the news. But they don't do anything in real life because they can't, so it all gets bottled up inside. It puts them in a vibration of anger which causes their bodies to get stressed and attracts plenty of situations into their lives for them to get angry about.

They don't realize that if they stopped taking in all that bad news, their whole life would change for the better. They don't see that their thoughts are being lead along like a dog on a leash by what they are seeing on TV or reading in the newspapers.

They don't even know that they have the ability to think for themselves, because their minds are kept so busy by what's going on around them! Nobody has to be like that in this day and age.

You Have the Ability to Think

Think about it. We all have this amazing ability to think for ourselves yet most of the time we let other people or situations do our thinking for us. Why do we do it?

To use this secret all we have to do is stop letting the outside world dictate our thoughts and start thinking for ourselves. All we have to do is start to think.

By thinking, I don't just mean the kind of mental activity we mistake for thinking. I mean real deep, meaningful though that comes from within. True thoughts are creations that we bring into form by our amazing thought processes.

It doesn't even take a lot of effort to retrain ourselves to truly think real, meaningful and creative thoughts either. It just takes a decision that we're going to do it and then we'll start to do it and gain confidence, at doing it regularly.

Practice Makes Perfect

Just like any other part of the physical body, when we practice a thing by repetition as in exercising, the mind grows by regular use. So when we get ourselves thinking for real, we get better at doing it as long as we keep doing it!

Like we practice leaning to do a thing to make what we do perfect, we can practice thinking to make our thinking better and more powerful. There are several techniques for focusing our thoughts, such as ho'oponopono, althought meditation is one of the most powerful tools we have in our armoury to do that, so let's start there.

Make a solid decision that we're going to meditate every day and focus our thinking so that we think the thoughts we want to think and before too long, external influences will cease to be influences at all and our minds will be strong, active and useful to us in improving our lives so we can live the way we want to live.

What Earl Nightingale broadcast to the world over 50 years ago was enlightening, to say the least. The strangest secret isn't so much of a secret when we know what it is and how we can use it to transform our lives into the lives we want them to be and not what the outside world decides for us they'll be. When we do that, we are in control of our lives and we decide how they are going to be.

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