Have you ever gotten angry at a knot? Maybe you couldn’t get your shoelace undone, or clear that fishing line. A knot in a thin gold or silver neck chain can be especially difficult. When you fight with a knot you feel frustration. Now, if you think about it logically, clearly the knot has no intelligence of its own with which to thwart your intentions or make you feel angry. Yet when you fight with it, you fall under its power. You feel yourself to be at the mercy of the knot.

Since the knot itself has no power to act upon you, where is the power coming from that puts you under the influence of the knot? From one place only: your perception. Your perception of the knot is the only power it has, and that power is not in it; it is in you! 

You cannot be free of the frustration or anger you feel in not being able to untangle the knot until you learn to separate the fact of the thing from the power of it. It is a fact that the rope has a knot, but it is not a fact that the knot has power. It is your perception that attributes power to it.

We frequently feel ourselves to be under the power of things. We feel we are the victims of an unfair social system, economic upheavals, painful relationships — even a lawn chair that won’t unfold right.

We fight these conditions, feeling ourselves to be under their “dark” influence. The fact is, however, these events do not exist as negative events except for our perception of them. The only power they have is the power we give them.

What is the proof? Someone else observing the same event may not see it as negative at all. If we separate the facts from what we perceive as a thing’s power, we are on the way to freeing ourselves from all things that bother us. Your wish to understand your pain by shining the light of Truth on it will show you where to break the thought connection through which you give your life energy to events that would otherwise have no power over you. If you truly wish to be free, you can even shine that light back into what feels like your own hard or cold past, and the warm light of Truth will melt all those long past difficulties dwelling there until eventually nothing about your life will have the power to bother you again.