#5 Love and Influence

As we walk through the world we are constantly influenced by everything that we interact with. We bring outside influences into our being, consciously or unconsciously. We allow them to enter into our being and they have an effect on us. For instance, the mere act of opening a newspaper in the morning is allowing outside influence into your consciousness. How often have you opened up the newspaper and responded to the headline with, “O my God?” Turning on the television in the morning and watching the news or whatever it is that you watch, is allowing an outside influence to enter into your being and to influence you. As you walk down the street in a large city, the occurrences that happen on that street are going to influence you. The things you see in stores, the marques from the movie theaters that you pass by, the advertisements that are stuck on the walls that you pass by, the billboards that you see are all going to have influences upon you.

The mode of the people that you interact with and their opinions and their points of view and the way they interact with you are going to have influence on you. Everything that we see, hear, eat, smell, influences us somehow. The sugar in a candy bar may taste sweet to us, but the influence twenty years from now of too many of these candy bars is going to be something other than sweet.

We need to know that we as a being are physically, mentally, and spiritually being constantly influenced by what our senses interact with. So, what do we do and how do we protect ourselves? Recently I was away and where I was there was no television, there were no telephones, and there were no newspapers. And within two days I noticed an enormous change in my being. There was a calmness in the morning when I woke up that I really wasn’t used to. There was a difference in my thought patterns as I walked through the day than I had been used to. Two days without newspapers, telephones, and television. The question comes, why can’t we learn to be on retreat in our everyday life? What is it that stops us from doing what’s right for ourselves while we are in the midst of our everyday life? Why do we allow ourselves to be susceptible to everything that influences us? When we can choose, just as if we chose to go away, to be not involved with all of these things. What’s to stop you from not reading the newspaper in the morning? What’s to stop you from not turning on the television? What’s to stop you from not engaging in things that distress you? What’s to stop you from doing that?