Positive thinking (Page 1 of 2)

I believe in creating your own reality. If you think positively, you attract the positive to your life. It can be as simple as that.

Some people are ignorant with their positivity. This is due to their foundations in thinking being not flexible enough to allow new knowledge to reshape their minds at any given moment.

Others are positive due to the life-long act of collecting knowledge.

This will be a rare time when not only do I fully understand BB but I agree with him as well.   He's not talking about saving the world, he's talking about creating your own individual reality, good or bad.   No need to jump on him - or anybody else - for not saving the lives of people in Africa.   Really, that's a bit much.

This is a touchy subject, from my experience.  At least it's an ongoing debate with one friend.

Do you really attract the positive into your life if you think positively?  And what is 'positive thinking', exactly?  Is it, "I'm going to get this job"?  Or, "The world is on my side?"

So, the question is not, does positive thinking attract positive experience, but rather, does thinking thoughts influence reality.

Lisette Larkins certainly says so.  She's an outspoken and published abductee who thinks you can 'invite' the friendly grey's into your life merely by thinking it.  And also, that you will have a positive experience with the grey's if you think positive about the experience.

Again, it's a touchy subject.  While Lisette is totally off base and is merely justifying her negative experiences with 'negative thinking', but is also suggesting that a 'negative experience' is merely so due to the thought surrounding it.  ie. It's really not bad, I just think it is.

Then again, watching one's thoughts is a critical exercise.  How much do they make sense?  How easy is it to convey these thoughts to others?  What is the subject of these thoughts?  All important to ponder.

But what is "positive thinking" exactly?  And when does it become "wishful thinking"?

Perhaps we should clarify that when we say "creating my reality" we're not talking about changing the collective reality. In other words, I can "create my reality" and you can "create your reality" but in both our realities more people got killed in Iraq. In what ways would our realities actually be different? Say I had negative and ignorant mindset, and you had a positive and aware mindset - things then always go wrong for me, and you instead have lots of positive synchs with things just working out for you - these are purely personal differences in our experiences, nothing more. Everyone else's experiences would not be directly impacted by how you or I choose to "create our own realities" although according to Bringers of the Dawn the frequency that you hold does have a spill-over effect into your local environment.

I know that in the New Age community some do take "creating my reality" very literally, to the point of believing that in their reality no one is dying in Iraq because they choose not to acknowledge it. I think that's delusional. And yet, it would be equally as delusional to take this example and believe in its polar opposite, that our mindset has no bearing on the experiences we attract and we should therefore always have a negative mindset because the world is a negative place. Both such viewpoints are traps, in my opinion - the first is delusion that seems valid until reality catches up with you and bonks you on the head, and the second is purposely ignoring the metaphysical "B influence" principles that show you how to transcend mundane realms of experience.

I guess a better phrase instead of YCYOR would be "creating your personal realm of experience" - in which case I find it true that choosing to have positive emotions ends to attract positive experiences. Sure, it doesn't necessarily prevent negative ones, but that's where awareness comes in. Who says we can't be both aware and have positive mindsets? So thinking positive is ONLY a trap when you suppress awareness instead of employing awareness from a positive perspective.

Ermolai, here's an idea that crossed my mind while reading your first post on this thread: when you try to talk yourself out of a negative mindset, say by giving yourselves reasons to snap out of it, you're automatically using the intellectual center via because of the internal chatter you create. According to Castaneda, that internal chatter is merely the predator talking. There is a more direct route: the emotional center. If the problem is in the emotional center, then only the emotional center can get you out of it.

I use a technique learned from the Kybalion, which works for me. That is, whatever negative emotion I find myself in, I meditate upon its polar opposite. So frustration would have contentment as its polar opposite, fear would have courage, reluctance would have enthusiasm, hate would have compassion, and anger would have love. The trick is to concentrate upon the polar opposite emotion in its pure form, not by using affirmations or trying to search your memory banks for reasons why you should feel it. You get there using your emotional center - you take that positive emotion and focus on it.  Try to evoke within yourself even a tiny semblance of that emotion - this forms a seed crystal that grows with every passing second as you continue to focus upon it. It's using your willpower to directly flip your emotional center from a negative to a positive state.  Maybe this will work for you, maybe not...just suggesting it here as food for thought.

And for anyone frowning at this being merely a trick to buffer yourself against the truth, let me say that once you're in a positive mindset, you'll be able to acknowledge that truth in a far better context and apply it more efficiently than when your judgment was biased by negativity.

This gets me thinking...

A 'negative' or 'positive' thought never stands by itself - as thinking requires a subject.  Thought might, more correctly, be considered necessarily attached to an emotion.  This is where most of the misunderstanding seems to lay.

There is, or course, a direct correlation between one's thoughts and one's emotions - but which comes first and what does one really have to do with the other is the question.

- One can approach objective thought of universal principles.  This, I argue, is also connected to an emotion - albeit not of the frequency of most day to day emotions.  As if to say: one can feel a truth.  One is not really 'thinking' (as in using solely the intellectual center).

- Both 'positive' and 'negative' emotional experiences can be beneficial.  If fact, learning comes from 'negative' emotional experiences as well as 'positive' emotional experiences.  The emotional experiences exercises the emotional center.

- Negative thinking is done when one thinks about a 'negative' or 'positive' emotional experience with negative awareness.  This could be a thought of a past, present, or future experience.  Negative awareness might be considered lacking awareness of the lesson the negative emotional experience intended to bring to light.

- Positive thinking is done when one considers a 'positive' or 'negative' emotional experience with positive awareness.  The awareness of the experience is positive when the learning lesson is contemplated.

- Awareness of one's experiences (whether past, present, or future; emotionally negative or positive) seems like the key to learning from these experiences.

- The important point is that thinking is done, as said above, with the intellectual center.  Thoughts are used for self-reflection and analysis of emotional or motor experiences.  They should not be used to influence emotional experience, but rather, should be reflections of that experience.  In other words, positive thoughts can get in the way of positive experience.

As Montalk said above, it is possible to invite positive emotional experience into one's life -- but not through the intellectual center alone.  Rather, meditation or contemplation occurs with free will intent of the emotional and intellectual centers in balance.

Thank you all for your comments, very insightful. Here are some more of my thoughts regarding "positive thinking", again according to my definition of this concept and how I've viewed it over the years (BTW I want to point out that I do not condone "negative thinking", my problem is with the "thinking" part)

One important problem I see is that it's based on a missunderstanding of how emotions work. Energies can never be suppressed, they can only be transformed. If you try to block/deny emotions through positive thinking (putting a veil on them, and thus hiding them from consciousness and pushing them in the darkness), then these energies get stuck in your body and you will have to release them sooner or later. During several years I repressed emotions of grief/sadness and it was very harmful, it's only recently that I was able to release them through recapitulation and self-hypnosis.

I want to thank Montalk about reminding me of this transmutation trick, I had read about it several time and tried it successfully but each time I have forgotten it for some reasons...? It requires a lot of concentration but it really works, I tried it again today and it's amazing.

To talk about another problem I see, I have to share a story. Last year I "fell in love" with a girl with whom I had a lot of things in common. Everything appeared to work wonderfully between us at first, however I was very afraid and used tons of positive thinking to move myself through this experience. I also did lots of heart chakras meditations, which I consider just as bad, since it forces to open this center in a non-natural way.

In the end it all turned out as a big failure. Not only she didn't love me, as I "positively thought", but she also heavily used/abused me. I think the reason why I didn't notice the abuse was because of the veil of "positive thinking" I had put. If I had just observed the situation and had faith that whatever had to happen would happen, it wouldn't have had to turn that bad. Also I wouldn't have put expectations so high and wouldn't have felt such a deception (I was far from balanced).

This brings me to another point. The reason why I met this person, as I later understood, was to learn a very important lesson about love. It was not meant to "work out", but my ego (which, of course, thinks it knows everything ) decided to force its way through it. So a real problem I see with positive thinking is that it buys into the fear/desires of the mind/ego instead of having faith in the higher/infinite self to guide us. (To take the charioter analogy, the driver stops listening to the master and thinks he knows where to go, which of course gets him lost.)

Furthermore, as it turned out in my story, the ego (conscious mind) does not have any control of the situation (even if it think it does), it's the higher self which defines the game. Thus most of the "positive thinking" is, as cameron pointed out, nothing but "wishful thinking". It makes us "feel good" (before making us feeling bad) but does not really affect important outcomes in our life. When our "positive thinking" does not work, we can always find new things to "think positively" about, but it's just going to keep on making us miserable and lost in the illusion.

There is, however, possibilities to really "create our reality" and this is by changing directly the unconscious, ie through magick. I have already mentionned it elsewhere and I think this is a very STS thing to do. For me, STS is about modelling our reality so that it fits the needs/desires of our ego, while STO is about modelling ourselves according to reality (and we do so by listening to our higher self which knows exactly where we best fit in the universal patterns of consciousness).

To go back to my story, I could have used magick at that time to force things up (fortunately I didn't do it because my intuition sent me a big no-no) but that would have been violation/manipulation of the free-will of the other person and it would also have negatively affected me since it would have pushed me away from an important life lesson (maybe so far away that I would not have been able to find my way back).

I guess this is fine if the STS path is your choice, but it's not mine. BlackBox, I have to strongly disagree with your explainations on STS/STO. Yes, I have decided to incarnate on a STS planet in a STS body. However my path is STO and I'm sure that I decided to come here to purify my dedication toward this path. What better way to do that when everything around you is STS? So if you want to "climb the pyramid" and go STS, fine, but please don't assume that this is the case for me and others. I do not wish to have anything to do with pyramids-climbing, and despite the mistakes I have done in the past (for which I'm thankful, since I learnt important lessons), I do not wish to manipulate the free-will of others to fit with my ego's desires.

Long post, I hope I didn't go too off-topic but I felt this was important to note.