Beyond Positive Thinking
Positive thinking and affirmations are a great beginning to get you on a more positive path in life. A Course in Miracles is an especially great book for helping you to begin this new life. Many people find, however, that this course is simply not enough. After completing the course over the period of one year, they find that they want to start again and go through it another year or even more. The important thing to recognize is that positive thinking is only the beginning of a larger and more comprehensive spiritual path. It requires positive energy to undertake a spiritual course because overcoming challenges takes effort and strength. As you gain energy, you will naturally call up greater and greater challenges for confrontation.
People who suffer from low self image or negative thinking often carry with them a core idea that they are a “victim” of the world and they feel that they have somehow been cheated. They point their finger at others in order to feel better about themselves. The use of positive self affirmations is a great way to overcome this victim kind of thinking but it is only the beginning. These affirmations and positive patterns of thought can sometimes be misused as a way of asserting ourselves against an “imaginary enemy”. This turning of ourselves against the negativity of the world can merely strengthen the illusion that there is something out there that is negative and worth fighting against. Nothing could be further from the truth. Negativity, in and of itself is nothing. It does not have an independent existence but is really better thought of as a simple lack of positive thinking. Moving beyond the duality of Positive and negative is what it means to move “beyond positive thinking” . There is nothing out there that is trying to hurt us. This idea has been stuck in our minds and is part of an illusion that merely needs to be let go of rather than “battled”. Using positive thinking as weapon or a tool is not the way that self affirmations were meant to be used.
There is a victim mentality in many of us who suffer from negative thinking which tends to keep us feeling sorry for ourselves. We may even get a secret enjoyment by thinking of ourselves as the cheated or downtrodden which makes it easier for us to be enamored of ourselves. It doesn’t really help us in the long run to hold enemies in our minds because it merely keeps the old cycle going wherein we view ourselves as a victim and continue to feel like there is a perpetrator out there trying to destroy us. We remain similar to the way we have always been and the self affirmations eventually have no more effect. In order to make a real change and to utilize the true power of self affirmation, we need to look more closely at the manner in which we see ourselves as a “victim” in the world. This victim psychology must also be let go of if the more positive self affirmations are to truly raise a persons self esteem. This is what it means to move beyond positive thinking.
Although we love to see ourselves in a positive light all the time, it is also good to keep our humility. It should be enough for us to simply view ourselves as exactly what we are, rather than insisting on seeing ourselves as somehow “better” than what we actually are. We don’t need to engineer elaborate ideas in our minds which make us appear like something more. We are good enough just as we are!
Rather than believing we are bad and working very hard to “increase” our self esteem, moving beyond positive thinking means finding a useful strategy to simply become comfortable with exactly what is. We can sit still in our chairs and observe who we are at any given moment. This is actually the meaning of moving beyond positive thinking and can be practiced in disciplined meditation.
Although positive thinking is useful for getting us away from the destructive behavior we may have fallen into, it is not the end-all solution to raising our self esteem. Over the course of time, we can begin to see ourselves as perfectly acceptable just the way we are. We no longer need to “fight” against others to win our self esteem. We can feel confident that we are ok and have found a new way to live.
