A Cup of Tea

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If this is your first time receiving our newsletter, welcome! We send brief anecdotes just once per month, aimed at keeping your learning fresh and relevant. This month, we’ll see how a simple cup of tea can be a metaphor for insight principles. We hope you enjoy.

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All of us at Insight Principles

A Cup of Tea

We used the metaphor of a cup of tea in a recent program to describe how the life forces of thought and consciousness come together to create reality. The tea bag represented the power of thought, and a cup of hot water illustrated the power of consciousness. When a tea bag is put in a cup of hot water, the water becomes tea. There is no stopping this process. Once the tea bag hits the water – it’s tea. Likewise, whenever we have a thought, consciousness turns that thought into our reality in the moment. There is no stopping this process either. Whatever we think will look real to us. We will experience that thinking and we will feel it.

I was reminded of a moment I once shared with my mom. We were at the kitchen table having tea. I happened to glance over at her and notice that every time she sipped her tea, she grimaced. I asked her why and she said, “Oh, I don’t like the taste of this tea.” Turns out she mistakenly used a kind of tea that a visitor had left in her cupboard.

“Why don’t you dump the tea out and make a new cup?” I asked. My mom, who had lived through the Depression and never wasted ANYTHING replied, “It’s fine, I’ll just drink it.”

We are often like my mom when it comes to our thinking. We’ll have a thought and be in the experience and feeling of that thought. The feeling may be unpleasant, but we keep thinking the same thing and feeling the same way because we can only feel our thinking. Although a new thought – and therefore a new feeling – is possible at any moment, it doesn’t happen. Why not? What keeps us from metaphorically dumping our bad-tasting tea and getting a new cup?

We misunderstand how our thinking works.

Thought and consciousness work so quickly to create our sensed reality that we don’t see what is actually happening. It looks like we are experiencing what is being done to us, from the outside – in. And it looks like we are stuck with it. But, we are never stuck with any feeling or any experience.

There is a constant flow of thoughts available and ready to bring us something new. The moment we realize we mistakenly made the wrong kind of tea, most of us dump it out (unless we’re like my mother). When we realize in the moment that we are feeling our thinking and we are not feeling what is happening out there, our mistaken thinking gets dumped. We are then available for a new thought and a new experience to come to mind.

-Sandy Krot

©Insight Principles, Inc.