What Was I Thinking?
In my experience, people deal with three types of thought:
(a) Emotion
(b) Intellect
(c) Intuition
One year, I gave a lecture at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. My half-hour talk was about the story structure I developed and taught in my book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Screenwriting. I adapted the first edition of the book – which was later translated into Russian – into an online screenwriting course that was eventually available in 1,500 schools, colleges, and universities for almost 10 years.
The lecture is called Skip Press on Screenwriting and the Hero's Journey and Elliott Wave in the Arts and Sciences. You can view it at this YouTube link.
In Hollywood, movies start with an idea. Maybe the idea is to buy the rights to a successful novel and adapt it into a film or TV show. Perhaps someone writes an original screenplay with a clever story, and the script is eagerly bid on by producers. Maybe it’s an idea to make a movie similar to another box office success. That’s why, after the success of Die Hard starring Bruce Willis (1988) we got “Die Hard on a ship” which was Under Siege starring Steven Seagal (1992). There were other similar Die Hard imitations.
Ideas – thoughts put into action – can be highly profitable. Consider all the soft drink concoctions that started with an idea. Coca-Cola was originally a drink with flavors of the African kola nut (caffeine) and the cocaine leaf (stimulant). The drink changed drastically over the years and had an altered destiny. John Pemberton, the original creator of Coca-Cola, had a medical degree. Addicted to morphine, he created his original drink as a substitute for the drug. By the time the drink was first bottled in 1899 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Pemberton ownership was long gone as was the cocaine content of the drink. Cola syrup had originally been concocted to soothe an upset stomach, but it became a popular refreshment. By the time the first cans of Coke appeared in 1955, the drink was a national icon known and consumed all over the world.
Let’s examine John Pemberton’s possible thoughts that might have started him on Coca-Cola’s destiny road. Which of the three thought categories above does it fit? Pemberton had an intellectual idea to create a morphine substitute. Since he was addicted to the drug after being wounded in the American Civil War, we may assume a substitute was a bit of an emotional idea as well. However, he owned a drugstore in Columbus, Georgia called Pemberton's Eagle Drug and Chemical House, and had a product known as Pemberton's French Wine Coca nerve tonic. So, it’s more likely his primary thoughts in creating Coca-Cola were intellectual.
I’m not planning on inventing a new soft drink, and I have no addictions, so as I describe a thought to fate story from my own life, let’s put aside intellectual and emotional and take up an intuitional thought that occurred one day when I was about seven years old.
My family lived in the small Texas town of Palmer, which was a partial setting for the movie “Tender Mercies.” One autumn day, I was walking home from my girlfriend Diane’s house and was about to cross the street when I stopped to admire falling leaves swirling magically in the wind. I already thought Palmer would be my whole life hometown and I was generally a very happy kid but then, seeing the leaves dancing before my eyes. I felt a distinct sense of spiritual peace and contentment. I thought, “This will be a remarkable life.”
At that very moment, I was destined to be a writer. I began mentally chronicling all people and moments and things in my life that I considered important or at least memorable. Perhaps everyone does something similar, but I had a feeling I would be telling many stories in times to come, and I was gathering memories for later use.
Maybe my memory-gathering was not specifically geared toward future story material, but once I became a professional writer, I realized that’s one thing I did in life, and where it started out.
That intuitional thought worked out well, although it was two decades before I began making money as a writer. After my first sale, I edited a Hollywood entertainment magazine and two others, produced and directed well-reviewed plays, sold screenplays and teleplays, sold hundreds of articles, was a staff writer for a network kids show and other shows, published novels and non–fiction books, and for almost a decade I taught that online course from my screenwriting book that was available in 1,500 schools.
There are over 40 books published with my name on the cover and dozens more that I either edited or ghost-wrote. Many won awards, and some hit #1 in their category on Amazon.
Prior to writing this book, I was concerned about what seemed like a bit of a career standstill, so I used my Destiny Re-Do formula and sorted something out. I had no idea if it would make a big change in my life, but I certainly felt better about my situation and was much more confident going forward. Then something amazing happened.
While posting on Facebook, I came across an ad and pursued it. Without listing out the details, I’ll just say that within a week, I had a $30,000 deposit in my bank that I’m certain would not have happened if I had not used my formula and then seen that ad.
A couple of weeks later, while trying to figure out why I – like many writers and self-employed people – have had “boom or bust” times in my life that largely determined whether or not I had suitable housing. I used my formula once again and it backtracked to a time two years after my “interesting life” thought in Palmer, Texas. My envisioned future life in that town was upset when my father lost his job. My mother had four young boys and no outside job, and we ended up living in an abandoned shack in the country until rescued by relatives.
At the age of nine, I was too young to be able to do anything to help our circumstances. My thoughts expressed in words to my parents didn’t lead to positive actions, and I got into a habit of being at the whim of others regarding living conditions. I grew accustomed to taking the best I could get. That characteristic caused me fateful problems in life, even as an adult.
So, after using my formula, I realized that not planning ahead and being proactive about an ideal place to live as an adult had been my downfall during good times. I resolved once more to write out my ideal living situation and be proactive and vigilant and never again have the thought that I couldn’t do anything to improve my circumstances. In short, I had developed a long-term subconscious apathetic conviction that worked against my desires.
When I was married, my wife and I could never figure out where we wanted to live, ideally. Oddly enough, that had contributed to the demise of the marriage, and I’d been indecisive for years after the divorce about where I wanted my permanent residence to be.
After I used the formula about housing, I felt finally positive about my ability to work out a new place to live that I would love, one that all my friends and loved ones would enjoy. I had peace of mind about it all, which may sound trivial, but it was a great relief to me.
As you might imagine, my thoughts when living in the isolated shack in the country were very emotional. Circumstances got so bad that we ended up having nothing but white bread and margarine sandwiches to eat, with one glass of milk each day, and then we had no more milk. That’s when the relatives arrived to move us to a better place, several counties away.
This echoes the Yuen Method results that I mentioned earlier, hearing from people I helped who felt powerless and had a thought that crippled their mentality about certain situations going forward, not realizing the mechanism they had put in place mentally. In our country shack in Texas as a young boy I, too, “felt like there was nothing I could do.”
The thing is, though, I remember praying for help more than once. Maybe my mother overheard me and then walked to that farmer’s house up the road. She asked to use the telephone and called my grandfather and uncles, and they came to the rescue. What moved her to do that was never explained to me, but I certainly did pray out loud.
Prayer is words, thoughts that can be silently expressed or openly stated, but before we move on to words as the next step of the formula, here’s a bit more about thoughts and emotions.
What type of emotions are people least likely to express in words? Most people I know have trouble speaking about heavy emotions like shame or guilt. That is why people seek singular audience for comfort, like with a pastor or priest or psychologist – or even a trusted friend – when something is weighing heavy on their mind.
Anger is a heavy emotion which sometimes has its place as motivation to rectify an undesirable situation, but if someone is regularly seen as an angry person, they will often be avoided. Heavy emotional situations like that can make things even heavier mentally.
The emotions we most likely respond to favorably are lighter ones like joy, love, and peace. A baby’s smile or laugh can move a parent to want to do everything they can to give their child a great life. Similarly, people in love will go to great lengths to express their thoughts. Romeo’s glowing evening speech to Juliet in Shakespeare’s play is an example. When a leader moves crowds with messages of peace, like Mahatma Gandhi did, amazing things can happen. He was able to free his country, India, from British rule.
The lesson here is, when contemplating a situation, if you have a thought that prompts you to words and results in action, ask yourself if it’s an emotional thought. If so, is it a positive, light emotion, or is it a heavy emotion like revenge, which is likely to have a bad result.
These days, with life coaches and all kinds of “positive thinking” gurus on the Internet and television, the general consensus is that light emotions have the greatest impact.
Many advisors, like Joe Dispenza, will tell you that, once you’ve planned a goal, you should function in life as though you’ve already achieved it, and God or “the universe” will bring your envisioned reality to pass. They’re basically saying you should maintain personal certainty about the achievement of your goal, and in my experience that does work. I had a thought I would live an interesting life and another that I would be a writer, and despite many obstacles (such almost everyone in my family being against the idea of my chosen occupation), I made it.
Even in our sad family circumstances in the country shack, I was able to maintain an attitude that life would improve. I formed a mentality of trying to survive one day at a time. When I saw my younger brothers anguish about our circumstances, I drew pictures for them on lined school paper, or made up stories for them, or took them on adventure hikes in deep culverts near the house. I felt grief and apathy at times, but I never gave up, as illustrated by my prayers.
I did go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as a nine-year-old country boy, but I didn’t completely lose faith.
Intellectual thoughts pursued seem relatively simple to understand. I’ve found that meditation helps bring about a state conducive to better thinking and planning. When I say meditation, that could be as simple as a long hike. Thomas Jefferson reportedly walked five miles a day, and he did well enough. Even time spent in contemplation on a front porch or another comfortable place at the end of the day aids in excellent decisions. A walk on the beach can affect wonders; just ask most women who write online dating profiles.
As we grow older, we continually learn that thoughts are one thing, but research and testing of ideas are very important. This is why there are so many research and study groups out there. In the wealthy environs of Silicon Valley, data is king. Basically, the attitude is okay, good idea, but let’s examine it.
Which brings us to intuitive thought. How do we deal with that? Are some people simply lucky guessers, or can intuition be nurtured and trained? The “remote viewers” of the famous Stanford Research Institute, which inspired the movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats” had proven innate psychic abilities. I met some of those people – Ingo Swann, Hal Puthoff, Ed May – and I also had the good fortune of knowing the late Alan Vaughan, who picked my resume out of a pile of 250 sent in from a Los Angeles Times ad. His friend Joe Brown was overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start picking a ghostwriter. Alan handed him my resume and said “Hire this guy. He’ll do a good job.”
The book I wrote for Joe went to #1 in its category on Amazon.
I regularly use my intuition on scratch-off cards and my Instagram is filled with notices of wins of various amounts. The most I’ve won is $1000 – first $10, then $100, then $1000 – all within about 15 minutes, three scratch-offs in succession. I play the scratchers to practice my intuition, convinced that one day I’ll be a multi-millionaire from the lottery.
If you can find a copy, I highly recommend Alan Vaughan’s 1982 book The Edge of Tomorrow where he describes how he went from being a skeptical journalist investigating psychic abilities to an internationally recognized psychic who predicted the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the Watergate scandal, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
According to neuroscientist and psychologist Joel Pearson, author of Intuition: Unlock Your Brain's Potential to Build Real Intuition and Make Better Decisions, the “superpower” of intuition is “the learned, positive use of unconscious information for better decisions or actions.” He’s correct, and I keep learning about it and using it positively.
While reading the book The God Effect about quantum entanglement, I learned that light is a combination of an electrical wave and a magnetic wave. That seemed to me to illustrate how some people associate more with the intellectual approach to life while others are more emotionally orientated. In storytelling terms, I equate the electrical wave to intellect, and the magnetic wave to emotion.
When movie and music stars are described, they're often called magnetic, and a great many of them make a living based on emotion. In contrast, we generally think of scientists and business people as having a more intellectual approach to life.
Truthfully, life needs both intellect and emotion, just as electrical and magnetic waves must be in balance for us to have light. So, while many see men as more “logical” and women as more “emotional” the truth is, we need both to keep the human race alive.
Do the sexes operate differently with intuition? I read once that the idea of “trust your gut” applied more to men, while empathic accuracy in women had more to do with “trust your heart.” If so, that might align with the idea of a chakra, the Sanskrit word for an energy center in the body. According to this Indian science, the Manipura chakra located in the solar plexus area concerns confidence, self-esteem, and helping you feel in control of your life. In contrast, the Anahata chakra in the heart area is about the ability to love and show compassion.
Naturally, I’ve known both men and women who demonstrated an intuition concentration at both areas of the body. So, where are your thoughts coming from? Your stomach, your heart, of your brain? Or is it possible a thought could come from all three places at the same time?
I’ll let you sort that out for yourself. Regarding watching our thoughts, I admire the words of Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who believed Christian prayer saved his thirsty army when "water poured from heaven" and he and his troops immediately “recognized the presence of God." After that, he requested the Roman Senate stop early Christian persecution.
This author of the famous self-improvement book Meditations once said: “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
Thoughts are powerful, sometimes more than we realize, so it does pay to watch them very closely. I also watch what kind of thoughts I’m starting off with in any major endeavor, and if the thoughts I’m having are most appropriate in pursuit of my envisioned end goal.
And with that thought, let’s go on to the next great aspect of my formula – words.
