17) Positive Thinking

There exists a common belief system called “positive thinking”.  Its main tenet is that reality can be affected by how we think, that good things will happen if we keep a positive attitude and that bad things will happen if we think negatively.

This is a belief system fraught with pitfalls. 

First of all, there seems to be at least two kinds of positive thinking:  1) the prayer type trying to make a better future, and 2) the positive spin we can put on any event, even unpleasant.

The first says that all we need to do is pray for what we want:  health, riches, love.  Well, it doesn’t work like that.  There is karma to deal with.  I would say that we are exactly where we need to be all of the time, and sometimes it means working off karma.  Sometimes karma can be avoided and sometimes it can’t.  So wishing for “better” is missing the point.  Not to mention that it is focusing on the future instead of the NOW.

On the other hand, the kind of positive thinking where we believe that we are in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, that kind of acceptance may lead to “better”.  It has been our experience that it does.  Yani and I have found that if we pray for something, we can always get it, but it isn’t quite right, not the way we envisioned it.  On the other hand, if we live each moment as if it was perfect, we get better and better experiences, not the way we envisioned it either, but better than we could have asked for.

But even that non-asking positive-thinking is dangerous, because sometimes what we need to do next is to get out of a situation, and thinking that everything is perfect avoids what is needed.

It is a tricky subject. 

For me the answer lies in the Tao Te Ching.  “Do without doing”.  A phrase which is easy to misinterpret in English.  I think a more accurate statement would be to do what is next, without striving, to follow the Tao, which is different for everyone.  When we get up in the morning, “next” is doing what is necessary to get ready to go to work, and then going to work.  Nothing tricky about that. 

But the wrong positive thinking is the prayer that we won’t have to go to this awful job anymore.  The right positive thinking is that we are joyous about following our Tao, with the realization that there may come a time to take action to get a better job.  Timing.

Let’s start with the new brain development theory from Saif Farooqi “Born to be Sad”.  He says that there are 2 kinds of brain right from birth, with different chemicals and everything:  the ‘glass half full’ people and the ‘glass half empty’ people, born to be sad.

Everyone wants to be happy and for a lot of people it comes naturally, even when bad things happen.  But for the negative brain people, they are never happy and they want to be like the happy ones.  So they try to emulate the happy ones by positive thinking and lots of other things that they see the happy ones doing.  Of course they can never get there because it is almost impossible for them to even imagine what it would be like to be happy.  But they keep trying.  And if they don’t give up and keep trying, they can be quite creative.  A lot of the world’s great art has been created by unhappy people.  Happy people don’t need to create because they are already there.  These are huge generalizations and there are lots of variations---it’s not black and white.

By the way, another article said that there are 3 ways to get rid of depression:  1) meditation, 2) drugs, and 3) therapy.   The mood elevating drugs work wonders, changing the chemicals seems to work.  It may not be the most permanent of solutions, but not being sad all the time is very helpful.

The other big problem is trying to control our own brain, what thoughts it has.  If we can’t do it, we are adding another reason to be unhappy, the guilt. 

Meditation can help with this, but let’s look at the basic premise of meditation, no thought, the here and now, while prayer is full of yearning, hoping for a better future.

In quantum physics there is the Schrodinger Wave Equation.  Where a particle is in space and what it is doing can be described by solving this equation.  The wave function is a straight line to the past and a straight line to the future, but the wave vibrates up and down right now.  Also, the actual path a particle takes is the sum of all the probable paths.  

If we extend that concept to an event in our life, the wave function has increasing highs and lows which lead to a maximum and then decreasing highs and lows.  In other words, if we could learn to spot the initial highs and lows and understand them, we could know the future.

The big problem I have is this:  is the largest maximum on the positive side or the negative?  And if quantum mechanics tells us anything, it is that the observer influences the observed.  So maybe in this situation, positive thinking has some value.  Don’t know.  Just a possibility.

Another flaw with positive thinking:  instead of working to improve a situation, we can just be lazy and try to influence it with our attitude, although that does involve some exertion.  But it can be more successful to deal with a situation realistically if at all possible and not waste energy praying.  I am not saying that prayer doesn’t work sometimes, just not all the time.

My entire childhood I had asthma, every couple weeks for 3 days.  During an attack I could barely walk up the stairs at school and stayed awake all night sitting up trying to get air.  We were Christian Scientists at the time, so no doctors or drugs, the major tenets being that “God is Love” and “The Truth Shall Make You Free”, this truth being that any kind of negativity is just incorrect thinking, because everything is good.   I prayed a lot and read the weekly “lesson” maybe 50% of the days.  I even went to a healing “practitioner”, but nothing worked. 

Now if that isn’t karma, I don’t know what is.  Now that I look back on it, that whole experience was necessary so that I could become who I am today, plus it kept me out of going to Viet Nam.  Interestingly I was a happy child despite that, so I guess I am one of the lucky happy persons by nature.   The asthma completely went away gradually after I went to college away from home.  They said that “You resent your mother”, that’s why the asthma.  I didn’t feel like that, but nevertheless I could have felt really guilty about my flawed thinking, but fortunately I didn’t buy into that.

Then there was a California experience I had in my early 20’s.  I went on a 2-week training course by a religious group heavily into positive thinking, how to survive the coming social revolution, which didn’t come.  About 20 of us young people were coming back from somewhere at night in a school bus, and it got a flat tire.  While the tire was being changed, a young leader of the church came onboard and said that there must be some negative thinking going on somewhere on the bus.  Aha!  The perfect blaming reason, because everyone has unhappy thoughts sometimes.

It’s a survival technique programmed into the human brain, to evaluate our situation in the world, to explore possibilities so that we can avoid some unhappy consequences and if not avoidable, to at least not be too surprised if they happen.  Actually this is a very useful exercise and just because the negative outcome goes through our mind, fortunately it doesn’t mean that it is going to happen.  Wouldn’t that be a terrible world, where our thoughts could change reality at that easy level?  Scary to be that much in control where even our random thoughts become reality.  I don’t think I want positive thinking to work.

And then there is the ‘2 sides of the same coin’ problem.  We decide what is positive and at that same moment create the negative.  It is better in my mind to just accept what happens without having to categorize it.  On the other hand, it is part of nature that we have a memory which can be used to avoid the pitfalls we have fallen into before.

I guess my point is this:  positive thinking won’t solve all problems, but it can help in some.  Plus I am wary of any belief system or person that blames me for not thinking positively---it feels like they may be trying to manipulate me.