The Pitfalls of too much Positive Thinking
Can positive thinking also have some drawbacks? Is attitude adjustment all that it's really all about? Is it all that simple?
It's been said that the thing that really separates the biggest winners and the most happy people from the saddest losers and the most unhappy people is how they respond emotionally inside themselves and physically with action on the outside of themselves. In short how they react internally to what is happening externally.
There are a lot of great quotes that back this sentiment up quite nicely in their own words. One that I remember goes something like this.
The difference between can and cannot is only three small letters. Three letters that often can determine your life's direction, but when you are looking at your life backwards from the negative direction, these three words then weigh a ton. You see only the heaviness of your life, and the word "not" stops you even as backwards it adds a "ton" of dead weight to your life for you now to carry as well.
Is this really true? Is life more only about seeing from the positive side, or do both sides really serve our life purpose, and so is it better to approach our life and live it from a more evenly balanced perspective?
The way we respond to things solely governs our outlook, or is this only mostly true because we are connected to all. We are part of everything and we are connected to everything in the Universe in some way, and so this implies that we are connected to outside events as well, and so they must surely be affecting us in some way.
The outside world must effect us in some way, or else aren't we really as good as dead to it?
We can certainly learn from the outside world. Its input coming in to us affects us and it allows us to grow through this learning. If it really never effects us and if it is solely only our attitude about what is happening that effects us, what is the point of the outside world anyway? It's basically ineffective and can't effect or touch us really then in any real way.
I have also heard that one way or another we are always programming our subconscious minds in some way, so it might as well be in a good way. I have read that the subconscious mind is supposed to be literal in it's interpretation, and so just blindly follows all directions given to it. If we keep confirming to ourselves that everything we eat seems to turn directly into fat on our bodies we are programming our subconscious to actually then do this to us. Then in reverse if we tell ourselves that everything that I eat is providing me with perfect health and vitality, maybe we are programming our mind to start to give this state of health also to us then.
These people then say that because of this power in our subconscious minds we must all become much more aware of what we are telling ourselves both outwardly in our conversations, and inwardly to ourselves in our innermost thoughts, whether they be unconsciously or consciously found within us. In short, we need to know ourselves better.
Is this entirely right I ask myself?
It doesn't quite seem the whole truth to me. It seems too simplistic. What has the subconscious really got to do with the body functioning mechanism of weight control or health? To me no matter what I believe or think, if I try to think that the extra food that I'm eating will go straight to my big toe rather than to increasing my protruding belly, this will never really happen as the body naturally has its own system for allocating excess weight onto the different parts of us.
Am I solely right here or only partly right and both systems interact and effect each other? But both systems do interact and the subconscious doesn't have sole control, it's more a working together of the many functioning parts. It's an interacting system, and one part affects another, but one part can never fully control another part. Our subconscious mind is a tool for us to utilise, but it is not the whole of us, can we ever control the whole of it?
Then the positive thinkers will tell you something more that goes like this:
"You must choose to believe that you can do absolutely anything you can set your mind to - anything and everything - because, in fact, you can!" Positive thinking creates more energy, gives you more initiative and brings you more happiness. Positive and negative are really only directions, and you can always fully choose your direction?"
Are these sentiments all entirely correct, or are we really all limited in some ways while in this earth plane and in our physical bodies and within our life here on earth?
I do think that self belief or believing in ourselves is a real choice we can make. It's really a type of attitude that we can learn to develop with time. We are all responsible in the end for our own attitude, our self-concept and our beliefs. In short we are all totally responsible for our lives or are we? Totally is a very big all encompassing word isn't it now?
Affirmations have been said to be an aid to building self-confidence and in changing our attitudes. A powerful technique for building self worth and re-establishing our self-confidence is the continued repetition of positive statements to ourselves so that they can become ingrained in us as a natural part of the way we will then think and even to begin to think before we think.
These "affirmations" act to drown out or to suffocate and replace the negative thoughts and beliefs and the self doubts that we have been putting into and feeding our subconscious with over a long period of time, sometimes for most of our life.
So what is the real truth about affirmations and their usage?
I tend to discount their effectiveness, because it's only using one part of the subconscious to overpower or change another part, or to reprogram it in some way. Isn't it always better to recognise when we are running a program of say for example negativity, and then to ascertain why we are doing this, rather than to just crowd out and force it away by stuffing ourselves with the opposite?
We push these positive thoughts into our subconscious mind and its workings. How could anything then work for us when we are just ruining one program, by negating its effects in this way by trying to throw some spanners into their works? Even if they are perfectly positive spanners and useful in other ways and other applications, what is their usefulness here? Surely the program itself will then only still remain in us dormant for now, but only to raise itself up again, and to run again when we have a particularly difficult experience where we might forget all of our affirmations at that time.
Why not root out the old program itself, and establish new programs rather than just have positive affirmations floating around and so as a result no new directions or programs are actually being established in reality. It's a bandaid approach rather than a real healing and growth, or am I wrong and it is indeed a first step and all helpful to move you away from negativity and to negate its effect, so that then you can at least see its effects, and so be not so blinded by it and so be more aware of new directions and guidance that they have blocked you from seeing before.
Where is the truth here please, I keep asking myself? Are there any real pitfalls or traps that too much positive thinking can lead us into, or is all positive thinking only ever leading us out of our traps caused by our negative thinking?
That's a lot for me to comment on all at once here in this short article.
Where can I start to begin to show you to and to allow you to grasp some real truth here, and then to help you see through to the way that things really work, more correctly, more efficiently and as they do really work?
Affirmations are a method of repetition of sayings to your subconscious mind from your conscious mind and are using the power of the universal mind power to try to enforce these new commands and to make them stick into your own subconscious mind. This is certainly effective up to a point, but it all loses its way after that point and it can take you no further after that point.
If you are already badly unbalanced in a negative direction this can be a good step to inject some positivity into you and to bring you back to an equilibrium and so to begin to balance you out some more again. The danger is if you also start to obsess in the other direction by using affirmations obsessively, and so you will then be overbalanced and over stimulated in a positive direction. You will remain still basically unbalanced in your overall direction and you are really still being controlled by the universal mind power techniques of influencing by overriding, rather than your living the middle path of soul and self awareness.
The middle path will utilise both negative and positive directions some times, and at different times all to help you to achieve your true purpose of real and sustaining spiritual growth. This then leads to an increased conscious understanding of love for you, and allows you to know the way that love works which is now gained for real from your experiences, and not just seen from only one sided views that are only seen from one side of life, be it the positive or the negative side.
This all then achieves a balanced direction for your growth and so this is always allowing for increased consciousness to take place within you and to grow properly in you then only in a loving way. Real love is neither positive or negative. Real love contains all and love is ever just itself, love.
Soul is the sole overriding important key aspect here and rather than overriding set habits and patterns soul is really better off becoming aware of these patterns and growing from them by learning how they are serving it. For all serves all even from the beginning stages of our growth. This is why we have habits and life experiences, including the negative and so the called bad habits or programming. They all only ever started in their way to serve you.
At the time they served you in some perhaps unknown way but they acted beneficially for you at that time. Later though they can stop serving you and mostly when you just repeat the same old lessons rather than moving on past them, by learning what they have brought you to learn. To concentrate on just blotting half or sometimes the whole lesson away with positivity will never really achieve truth growth, because soul needs always to learn what it has to learn before it can ever take its next step forward.
On the other hand it is better to come towards balance from the positive side, rather than the negative side, and to err if you are going to err on being too positive rather than too negative. The life of soul is all about experiencing all the various states of itself and of love though, and so it is better to live as balanced as you can, and you do this by always looking for the positive in every negative experience, and the negative in every positive experience. Every experience contains all aspects of love, if you are just aware enough to see them in the differing degrees of itself.
And where does love fit in here?
Love is the pursuit of truth through living as soul. The universal mind powers and the subconscious and the use of positive thinking and affirmations are techniques of mind control rather than of love.
Even though, love is still in them all, and they can bring more love to you, and in the end all only ever serves you and all and everything brings love to you in one way or another. This is because love is in all things and love is the sole force creating and bringing you to a new you and a new level of consciousness, awareness and truth.
Love is neither positive or negative, but it is all things and contains all things and all possibilities and is limitedless in its scope and infinite in its reach and its direction. Love can serve you both positively and negatively and in the end it is all only ever up to you to obtain the spiritual growth that is possible from all of your experiences and to grow, and then to grow some more in love and in truth.
The more positive thing about positive thinking is that it hurts nobody, but the person using it. Negative thinking tends to hurt everyone involved. This is good and bad at the same time, because it allows the negative people to deflect away from you, and it allows the power of positivity to work for you. But the natural position from which all masters work, is a balanced allowance of being neutral or from being detached from wanting either a positive or a negative outcome.
All events are plausibly possible and can be beneficial for you, this is seeing the positive aspects. All events can be negative for you by allowing them to build karma for you, and when you either react negatively or positively, karma good or bad is always then being created.
The command or advice given to people whom Jesus had healed in the bible, to go forth and do no more evil, means to sin no more, or to incur no more karma. This command means then for us and for the person that Jesus advised it to, for us all to live a more balanced life by treading the middle path of compassionate love. Negative and positive streams of love combine into compassion as humbly as you accept the full experience in which you are being immersed and which always contains both elements of positive and negative loving within it.
