Great thread idea. Rio.
I'll share my personal experiences and thoughts on this topic.
But they're just one man's opinions, YMMV.
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When I got heavy into game about 5 years ago, I experimented with various self-help technologies including visualization, affirmations, subliminal suggestion, auto-hypnosis, etc.
I got
really into positive affirmations around 3 years ago. I did them religiously.
Yes,
"religiously" --- that's the right word for it...
I got introduced to affirmations by this Dating/Lifestyle coach, Brent Smith.
I thought he was the most super-positive, happy dude I ever saw.
Now I'm not so sure...seems like he's selling naive guys happiness, health and success, in a bottle.
And all you have to is repeat mantras to yourself and keep telling yourself how happy, healthy and successful you are...and you WILL be.
Talk about a low overhead business!
Anyway, my conclusion about affirmations and positive thinking after practicing them fairly consistently for about 6 months straight was that they didn't do much for me in terms of actual progress in my business or sex life.
I still had negative, self-defeating, self-sabotaging thoughts all the time. I didn't get laid as much as I wanted. And I was still broke.
And trying to tell myself that I was, for instance, successful when I wasn't (yet), just created cognitive dissonance.
I was telling myself one thing, and reality was telling me another thing.
So on top of being ineffective, I also felt like I was duping myself.
Fast forward a few years.
After reading a lot of Osho's work and studying Eastern technologies, I have a different outlook on Positive Thinking, Negative Thinking, and thinking in general.
In the West, you're considered mentally ill if you deviate from the accepted norm of behavior and thought.
In the East, however, the mind
itself is considered to be the source of problems.
In fact, the idea that you are in control of the contents of your mind is considered to be absurd in Eastern spiritual thought.
The Easterns have a different approach:
meditation.
And all meditation really is, is watching your thought processes; just watching.
Not interfering, not manipulating, not influencing, not getting involved in any way. Only watching.
So meditation is a process of dis-identifying with the mind and witnessing what's happening like clouds passing in the sky.
Sometimes the clouds are dark and stormy, other times they're white and fluffy, and yet other times the sky is clear.
But you are not the sky, you are the watcher.
My experience with meditation is totally empirical.
I tried it, I practiced it, and it improved my life tremendously.
I have "negative" thoughts all the time. And I have "positive" ones, and everything in between.
But I feel like they don't matter in any consequential way because my mind is always chattering.
I've found that the better I get at watching my thoughts, the less they tend to affect my centering.
George Gurdjeff said "the only sin is identification [with the mind]".
And he meant that thoughts can't have be negative or positive; they simply are.
The problem is when people get so identified with what's going on in their heads that they think these thoughts mean something about them.
Ok, I've rambled on enough. I'll leave off with some of Osho's (more eloquent) ramblings!
Quote:Quote:
The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless.
Positive thinking simply means forcing the negative into the unconscious and conditioning the conscious mind with positive thoughts. But the trouble is that the unconscious is far more powerful, nine times more powerful, than the conscious mind. So once a thing becomes unconscious, it becomes nine times more powerful than it was before. It may not show in the old fashion, but it will find new ways of expression.
So positive thinking is a very poor method, without any deep understanding, and it goes on giving you wrong ideas about yourself.
… Positive thinking came out of Christian Science. It talks now more philosophically, but the base remains the same – that if you think negatively, that is going to happen to you; if you think positively, that is going to happen to you. And in America that kind of literature is widely read. Nowhere else in the world has positive thinking made any impact – because it is childish.
“Think and grow rich” – everybody knows this is simply foolish. And it is harmful, and dangerous too.
The negative ideas of your mind have to be released, not repressed by positive ideas. You have to create a consciousness which is neither positive nor negative. That will be the pure consciousness.
In that pure consciousness you will live the most natural and blissful life.
If you repress some negative idea because it is hurting you…. For example: if you are angry, and you repress it and try to make an effort to change the energy into something positive – to feel loving towards the person you were feeling angry with, to feel compassionate – you know you are deceiving yourself.
Deep down it is still anger; it is just that you are whitewashing it. On the surface you may smile, but your smile will be limited only to your lips. It will be an exercise of the lips; it won’t be connected with you, with your heart, with your being. Between your smile and your heart, you yourself have put a great block – the negative feeling that you have repressed.
And it is not one feeling; in life you have thousands of negative feelings. You don’t like a person, you don’t like many things; you don’t like yourself, you don’t like the situation you are in. All this garbage goes on collecting in the unconscious, and on the surface a hypocrite is born, who says, “I love everybody, love is the key to blissfulness.” But you don’t see any bliss in that person’s life. He is holding the whole of hell within himself.
He can deceive others, and if he goes on deceiving long enough, he can deceive himself too. But it won’t be a change. It is simply wasting life – which is immensely valuable because you cannot get it back.
Positive thinking is simply the philosophy of hypocrisy – to give it the right name. When you are feeling like crying, it teaches you to sing. You can manage if you try, but those repressed tears will come out at some point, in some situation. There is a limitation to repression. And the song that you were singing was absolutely meaningless; you were not feeling it, it was not born out of your heart.
- OSHO
More from Osho on Positive Thinking:
http://www.oshonews.com/2011/09/positive-thinking-osho/