Positive thinking, negative thinking ...

Positive psychology has had a good run lately and is certainly worth considering .... regular reader and occasional commentator, James of Scotland, is a fan and may be tempted to add to this post ...

Clearly, persistent positive thoughts produce a happier person/reality than persistent negative ones ... and beware also of over optimism, which has a wonderful word of its own: Panglossian ... the link explains more ... Dr Pangloss in Voltaire's version represents extreme optimism in the face of misery and suffering .... some suggest that a more balanced view may be more realistic .... depending to what degree we accept that each of us creates our own reality with our thoughts ... and there is a trap in accepting this view, then finding it is not operating as expected .... commonly experienced, for example, by folks with life threatening conditions, reading that we may think ourselves well and suffering even more when it does not turn out so ... who knows what's going on ... past life karma? the residual tiny bit of doubt? Deepak Chopra tells a tale of a patient diagnosed with gall stones .... at surgery, no stones were found, but secondary cancer and a prognosis of weeks of life left ... relatives proposed leaving the patient ignorant of the discovery, to die in peace .... after a year the patient reappeared, perfectly well, and announcing she had previously worried that she had .... cancer ... hmmm ...

As one who tends towards the Panglossian approach and finding a benign universe, the question of negation proved another interesting aspect of the weekend at Brockwood. Although negation is not to be confused with negative thinking ... rather it is suggesting that thoughts and ideas are constructed or corrupted or affected by our conditioning, which is previous thoughts, whether ours or from the culture or collective consciousness.... the technique of negation looks at each question, not so much to find an answer, but to open better questions, by a process of stripping away what, upon close examination, turns out to be false ... bearing in mind that what is true in one domain, is not so in another ... for example, common sense perception may produce a consensus reality that an object we call "table" is solid, while under much closer examination, at sub-atomic level, it is mostly empty space ... which doesn't stop it hurting if we bash our head on it ... so, by this process, in dialogue, we might expose what was previously held true, leaving a new reality .... itself subject to similar scrutiny ... maybe coming to the void, the ground of being, or love, where all is energy vibrating, awaiting our thoughts for creating something out of nothing ... preferably without naming or describing that which is beyond thought ...

Anyway, all is well in this positive view of the world, Panglossian or not ....