15 October 2010 4 Comments

What IS Positive Energy? Part 6: Hyper-Positive Posturing, Part 1

Do your beliefs help you explore life or shut down exploration and growth with pat answers?

Sept 07 Alberta 2 273This is the first of three posts that dive into and dissect beliefs and attitudes many of us have come to consider positive–just because the people who talk about them believe they are positive.

As a free thinker I am keenly interested in the difference between what we take to be positive based on social conditioning or defensive reaction, and what proves to be of constructive benefit, creating salutary and lasting life results. I have seen far too many lovely, positive people imagine they are negative because they recoil from what I call Hyper-Positive Posturing.

From natural medicine we understand that suppressing symptoms with drugs does not result in the state we call health. Neither does suppressing negative emotion and thoughts result in truly positive states.

Social media can leave us bobbing in a virtual sea of ultra-positive messages. Over-exposure to these messages causes a baffling backlash. The effect adds up to feeling that something is wrong with us unless we radiate joy in every moment. An army of enthusiasts waits at the ready with one-and-only buy-it-now solutions to every imaginable type of discomfort. Pain sells products. Marketing plays on pain, needs, and desires.

A profusion of these messages builds up the following feelings:

  • Something is wrong with you.
  • Something is wrong with feeling.
  • Something is wrong with your life if you aren’t in a state of bliss.

Please look at the entire world and contemplate what life is like instead of competing with the few people you admire or envy. Comfort and wealth do not confer happiness or purpose.

Genuine inspiration differs vastly from enthusiasm generated with the intention of hooking someone to sell something—including comforting belief systems that lull us to sleep instead of waking us up.

Indulge me by letting me dissect a few platitudes:

“Everything works out for the best.” This depends when you stop the movie. The movie goes on after you stop shooting.

“Everything happens for a reason.” This presupposes not only that we can insert meaning mechanically into any situation without stopping to FEEL it, and that being able to rationalize a situation is important.Sept 07 Alberta 2 291Carolyn Myss in “Entering the Castle”gets all over this one with mercilessly compassionate clarity. Way too often we hold faith hostage to intellectual understanding. Needing to understand with the mind in order to accept or before we can move foward is a spiritual stumbling block.

“Conflict cannot survive without your participation.” This quote is by Wayne Dyer. At first pass the message in this quote is great. Yes. We are accountable for and sustain our end of all interactions. Our participation influences what goes on around us. Great insights. So why do I pick on this even though the insights are useful? The quote can be taken to imply that conflict is bad. (See Inner Work Part 8: Inner Conflict And Transformation and 9: How To Benefit from Inner Conflict)

Whether or not conflict is useful depends on how we engage it. I am suggesting that instead of starving out conflict by refusing to participate we first take a look to see whether we can learn from it and turn it to an asset. I’m certain Wayne would agree.

As a champion for Wholeness, and Awakening, I am not criticizing Wayne or making anybody wrong. I aim to stimulate discernment, clarity, and free thought. Noticing how input or impressions impact us and being able to think outside the box are crucial to freeing ourselves from social conditioning. Choosing what we take in and believe supports self-actualization.

Inspiring quotes can be shared and received cleanly and clearly–or used to bolster Pollyanna rhetoric that puts us to sleep and stops discernment. Of course, any particular influence supports people at some levels of development and represents a step backward for others. Pay attention to the whether the influences you are exposed to contribute to you your next step on your Path or simply layer on more assumptions about life.

“A man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
~Greek playwright Euripides (485-406 B.C.)

How do YOU respond to the quotes you hear? Do you think about the way their messages impact you, or take them as truth without reflecting?

4 Responses to “What IS Positive Energy? Part 6: Hyper-Positive Posturing, Part 1”

  1. Where Do You Get Your Beliefs? What is Truly Positive? – Positive Energy Guide

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