Postive vs. Negative thoughts

[Kevin]

Theory on why The Secret, LOA, Manifestation, etc. can be accompanied by frustration/disappointment.

I have been reading some posts that I am not sure I agree with completely. In fact, I am pretty sure I disagree with some of them.

It seems that The Secret puts forth the idea that Positive thoughts are much stronger than negative thoughts (in their power to create or destroy). Statements have been made that they are hundreds or thousands of times stronger?

Also, analogies have been made between light and darkness and postive and negative thoughts.


A principle that I have seen proven true time after time that is a bit at odds with the above theories:

Everything has equal power to do good or harm.

The more powerful a tool is to do good, the more powerful it is to destroy.

Example: A hand-saw can cut wood at a certain speed in your work to build a house. A hand-saw can also slip and you can cut your leg with it (but probably not too badly).

A power-saw can cut wood MUCH FASTER in your work to build a house...it is much more powerful to do good.

However, if a power-saw slips it can do MUCH MORE damage to your leg than a hand-saw...it is much more powerful in its potential to destroy.

I have seen this principle-The more powerful a tool is to do good, the more powerful it is to destroy-demonstrated over and over again. It seems to be a universal "law".

The question is, why would it not apply to thoughts also? My theory is that it does apply to thoughts...at least to some degree.

Negative thoughts fueled by fear can (and in many situations do) bring immediate manifestation of what is feared. (LOA in action). This is a basic psychological understanding that has stood the test of time.

Fear is a particularly powerful emotion that combined with a negative thought is as powerful, or MORE powerful, in manifesting a thought, than a thought combined with Love or hope or gratitude.

Of course the argument against the above may very well be that, as a rule, we humans have a much more developed emotion of fear than love and that is why a thought fueled with the emotion of fear may seem to manifest more quickly than one fueled with the emotion of love.

In any case, let's say that is true...it still is a long way from being able to conclude that a positive thought is 100 or 1000 times more powerful than a negative thought.

Perhaps it is not the thought (negative or postive) that is more powerful or weaker. Perhaps it is the emotion that the thought is fueled with that gives positive or negative thoughts their strength.

If this is the case, then it still seems to me if one has a thought fueled with X strength factor of fear, it will manifest just as strongly as a thought fueled with X strength factor of love.


I 100% agree with the principle that light "chases" darkness away and darkness cannot "chase" light away. (If there is a lit candle in the room there will be light...no amount of darkness can overpower the light from the candle).

Carrying that analogy over to positive and negative thoughts is flawed.

Yes, a positive thought will replace a negative thought. A positive emotion will replace a negative emotion. HOWEVER, a negative thought can replace a positive thought, and a negative emotion can replace a positive one. This is a fact that we have all experienced....feeling good one moment, and then a negative thought or feeling is introduced and all of a sudden we can be feeling bad.

(Of course this does not take into consideration that it is said that "The true definition of genius is the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head at the same time." But this is another matter entirely. )

In any case, light can chase darkness....darkness cannot chase light...but positive thoughts can chase negative, and negative can chase positive.


To fully appreciate and benefit from the Law of Attraction (it is, after all, a tool) it is important to properly understand how to use it and what to expect.

If my theory that negative thoughts, when fueled by strong emotions, are just as powerful as positive thoughts fueled by strong emotions, then we will realize how very important it is to exercise control over what we think and how we feel about what we think.

We will realize if we have 100, or 1000, minutes of negative thoughts/emotions, we need to have even more minutes of postive thoughts/emotions to see a net gain.

I believe that this understanding of The Secret, of LOA, is in keeping with all the teachings that have stood the test of time and been proven to build happy successful lives over the millienea.

Comments, critiques, thoughts, questions, lambasting all welcome!

[Keoi]

Kevin,
I completely agree with you a though is like a power tool. Depending on what you plug it into, is going to direct the course of the tool.
A conscious thought is just a thought and only has the power that you fuel it with, ie emotions. You can have a negative thought without emotion and it will have no effect on you,( just like that unplug power tool). But, if you apply the emotion of anger, fear, hate to it….oops it pops into your sub-conscious and now you are in the land of Law of Attraction. You can even do this with Love. Let’s say you think of Love but instead of Loving Love you apply pity for yourself a negative emotion, what will you get? No love.
You can chant day in and day out that you are the richest person on the planet, but if you don’t plug in the right emotion of good feelings, happiness, and love with the chant, you won’t be the richest person on the planet.
So the real power behind the power is how you feel. You subconscious will take direction from your feelings!
Also, light is the presence of all the spectrum of color so it contains all possibilities, dark is the absence of color and therefore a void, which is also a place of all possibilities. Which is shown when you bring a lighted candle into a dark room, a possibility is born.
They are equal. Law of Attraction works perfectly, it just whether you choose to plug into 220 or 110

Aloha
Keoi

[Viviana]

Hello everyone!

I agree with Kevin's theory on positive vs. negative thoughts and the emotions that come with them. I want to believe that positive thoughts are indeed stronger than negative ones but I have struggled with that notion from my own experience, those negative thoughts feel PRETTY strong to me!!

And to add something to the discussion, what about what Neale Donald Walsh ('Conversations with God') describes as sponsoring thoughts, i.e., the thought behind the thought, which has become operative. Every thought is creative to the degree it is held as truth for you, so you might have a positive thought in your conscious mind but if the thought behind that thought is stronger that is the reality that will manifest.

This really becomes an exercise in introspection as I'm sure many people have wondered why their manifestations aren't in line with their new positive conscious thinking and are unaware of those pesky sponsoring thoughts, those "truths" they are holding on to that aren't always that apparent.

~Viviana

[Ann-ticipatingSuccess]

A few months ago, I would have said that I thought positive thoughts were more powerful than negative ones.

What I'm about to share tends to validate your theory, Kevin. Although I would prefer to think that positive thoughts are more powerful than negative ones, the opposite appears to be the case. :/

In Lynne McTaggart's book, The Intention Experiment, Chapter 10 is entitled "The Voodoo Effect". In this chapter she tells about experiments to amplify and direct life energy with orgone accumulators that were performed by Dick Blasband and Fritz-Albert Popp. They performed the experiments on algae. Here's an excerpt:

Blasband carried out four experiments, placing the algae in the accumulator--first for one hour, and then continuously for two weeks--with no result. Popp's equipment recorded not the slightest alteration in the light emissions. Blasband wondered if this was because the plants were already so healthy that the boxes could not improve their state of health. Perhaps he would see a larger change in a subject that needed help or improvement. He and Popp decided to try making the Acetaularia "ill" by depriving it of most of its vitamin supply for 24 hours before treatment. This appeared to make no difference. The plants' biophotons didn't change. No amount of exposure to an accumulator of any variety seemed to make one bit of difference to the health or well-being of any of the plants.

Blasband and Popp then decided to test whether a mental intention could boost the action of the accumulators. In his new series of experiments, Blasband sent an intention for the energy within the accumulator to be beneficial to certain seedlings and harmful to others. These results were disappointing, too. There was only one significant difference in the number or quality of biophoton emissions before and after treatment of any of the plants: the only effective intention appeared to be the one he had sent to stunt their growth. In both experiments, negative intention was more powerful than positive intention. Thoughts to harm had the greatest effect. (emphasis mine)

Now I would have thought that thinking about depriving the plants of their nutrients would have qualified as a 'mental intention', but that didn't have an effect on them. Perhaps the algae 'knew' that being deprived of nutrients for 24 hours wouldn't do any significant damage?

McTaggart goes on in the next paragraph:

Blasband's little study highlights perhaps the most disturbing consideration of all about intention: that bad thoughts, as well as good ones, can have an effect on the world, and indeed may be the more powerful of the two. (emphasis mine) After all, in many native cultures, prayer and intention have a shadow component in hexes, voodoo, and curses, which are reported to be highly effective forms of negative intention.

Many healers routinely use a negative means to a positive end. As Dr. Larry Dossey, author of Be Careful What You Pray For..., has noted, negative intention is the very foundation of most healing. Healing from an infectious agent or a rogue cell line such as cancer requires intent to harm. It works from a desire to kill something: to inhibit bacterial enzymes, alter cell membrane permeability, or interfere with the nutrition given to the cell or the synthesis of DNA. In order for the patient to get better, the offending agent has to die.

I hadn't thought of it in this way before. An ill person's healing often requires the death of something else!

As if we weren't already worried enough about our negative thoughts! Yikes!!

Ann

[Blake]

Duality ect...

Interesting topic. This is difinately an intamately studied/experienced area of "reasearch" of mine. For the moment Im thinking a few things...

1) This made me think of the Morphic Fields and that it could pretty easily be argued we have been predominantly a reactive fear based fight or flight species in the past few thousand years. (The war thing and the us vs them world view...even in school and sports as one small example) This I would think could create a pretty strong morphic field of fear (i.e. negativity)... Stronger perhaps than love in our human collective unconcious to date... in this evolutionary round. So I'd agree there maybe.

2) A couple other factors though not in consideration would be Spirit (Ours and the Greater One) and the unseen world. That we are perhaps more than the collected totality of our thoughts? Then theres the theory bouncing around that all we are is love...the fundamental building blocks of all thought/creation. The (possibly) Ultimate Sponsoring thought. That might be harder for science to prove though so I state it as theory. (and hopeful thinking)

3) Ive also read a little about these time segments called Yugas in vedic philosophy. I dont remember exactly the amount of years but in eastern Indian cosmology they believe just like the earth goes around on its axis creating cyclical seasons, our solar system is in a symilar cycle in our galaxy-I think. A cycle of 36 thousand years or maybe thats half the cycle. And the "winter" of this cycle is called Kali yuga and is an "age of darkness" and ignorance. There are differing views of where we are exactly but many believe we are just about to cross the threshold exiting Kali yuga into the next yuga all in the upswing of increasing awareness and heading toward the "summer" side of the cycle of total enlightenment and good juju all around.
Then we all go for another ride again.

Gotta go but this is what I was thinking... that in this upswing the higher vibrations do get strionger supposedly and perhaps start to carry more strength perhaps because we start to feed more the Morphic Field of Love rather than fear...? And My feeling is we are at a tipping point of some sort for the beyond my imagination better.

Blake

[Kevin]

Interesting topic.

1) This made me think of the Morphic Fields and that it could pretty easily be argued we have been predominantly a reactive fear based fight or flight species in the past few thousand years. (The war thing and the us vs them world view...even in school and sports as one small example) This I would think could create a pretty strong morphic field of fear (i.e. negativity)... Stronger perhaps than love in our human collective unconcious to date... in this evolutionary round. So I'd agree there maybe.

Blake

I believe your point quoted above has much validity...no way I can prove it, however, it certainly seems to be true for the majority.

[Blake]

Post Script

I forgot abouut my experience with PATHS... am I right that a part of the intentions/suggestions in the Successful Living modules is the decrease in the power that the negative thoughts hold in our psyche? As well as the increase of and motivation for positive thoughts and their power?

My experience of the combined total of my modules (Mood elev, Self Esteem, SL1, ond Total Body) has been the feeling of an unplugging of a power source and/or creative strength of my negative thoughts. Even though I was still experiencing fear or depression and the negativity that came along with that, it really felt as if there was a protective layer that shielded me from the effects of it all and from "snowballing". Perhaps my intention made it so but before my mood started to elevate I felt the inner power struggle of what my energy fed greatly tipped in favor of the the positive even if I wasnt conciously feeding/thinking positively at the time.

Blake

[Sharyn]

Positive & Negative Thoughts

A couple of interesting videos that I came across a while ago which demonstrate the power of our thoughts.


YouTube - Affect other's behaviors with your thoughts _ Part 1

YouTube - Affect other's behaviors with your thoughts _ Part 2


Love & Blessings,
Sharyn

[DeAnn]

Positive Negative

Those you-tube links were great Sharyn. Thanks.

I'm not sure which are more powerful, positive or negative. The positive seem more subtle, like you consciously have to grab hold of them. The negative seem like they will grab hold of you whether you like it or not. (In truth there is no pos or neg and we will eventually have to get past the idea of that duality---transcend that judgement. My soapbox speech )

Something happened to me a couple of weeks ago that was very interesting that might fit this thread. Most of the time good things flow easily for me and I'm surrounded by love. For some reason, on the one day I'll be talking about, I was buying into a LOT of negativity. Maybe I watched way too much news that day!

My husband and I were taking three teens to a rock concert in downtown Bakersfield. While I've never personally had anything bad happen to me when I've been in the city before, everyone I know hates that city and constantly feeds me horror stories about what a bad and dangerous place it is. (Normally I set an intention of Fun, Safety and Joy for all of my trips in the car---well that day I didn't) I had told the kids us parents were going to drive them down from our town in the mountains because I wanted to keep them safe because the concert was in a bad area of downtown. Don't you love the way I'm already instilling fear in my own children and their friends? What is the fine line between instilling fear and instilling safety and caution? As we were driving through the downtown area (I was in the front passenger seat) I was looking down all the streets into the seedy neighborhoods and imagining all sorts of "BAD", dangerous people lived there---that there were lots of druggies and thugs---and on and on. I was glad that my husband and I were there to protect the kids from the evils of the city.

We came to a stop light in the heart of the downtown area and were waiting to make a right hand turn. We could have made the turn, but had to wait for a man entering the crosswalk in front of us. I looked at him and realized he was unsteady on his feet. I figured he was drunk or high---lots of bars in that area. He got closer and began to look directly at ME. I thought he would turn and cross the other way in front of us, but no, he looked straight at me and headed for me. I made sure all the doors to the car were locked. He walked right up to my window and punched my door as hard as he could and started yelling obscenities at me. We were all shocked and didn't know what to do except to let him continue---I mean he couldn't do damage to the car and words don't hurt. He eventually continued walking past and did the same thing to a couple of cars behind us until we all started moving when the light turned green.

It scared the crap out of all of us. I said to the kids, "See, you needed us to protect you down here."

After we dropped them off, I slowly started realizing that I had manifested the whole thing. I had looked down those streets and created a monster from my thoughts. He honed in directly on me, looked straight at me, not at anyone else. Was it good that I had created him? As a lesson for the kids? Maybe. OR, could I have changed the whole day around by manifesting kind angels all around that showed the kids how loved, supported and protected they were instead?
The fact that the dude did his thing to a couple of other cars in line made the kids feel like they weren't targeted directly, which diffused the situation somewhat. And of course, we all had a horror story to tell about our trip to Bakes.

We are all so powerful. We can manifest pos or neg situations almost immediately. Do the negative ones pack more impact? They sure seem to, don't they. They really catch our attention.

It can be easy to get caught up in all the crap that everyone else is immersed in.
I'm going to adjust myself and really concentrate on my gratitude for the good around me and really think before I speak to the kids about the so-called dangers of life.
Gratitude for the good...
Gratitude for the blessings....
Gratitude for the Love that surround me and my family...
Gratitude.
Gratitude.
Gratitude.

Blessings,
DeAnn

[future pather]

Everyone's posts are really great here. I had a strong take after I read the first post.

It is probably because I've been studying The Master-Key System, JUST finished it actually, that I had an immediate answer to my opinion.

Aaron's book also helped me see things like : Bad thoughts are really just thoughts that don't have enough good. They exist, so they must be somewhat positive. They just don't have as much positivity as a good thought.

I don't know if that makes sense to everyone, but from the M-K S. thoughts are like nature's way of growing or the Universe's way of growing.

So good thoughts are stronger than bad thoughts because they are just more of the good that is in bad thoughts.

I guess if I think about it hard enough I'm kind of saying even destruction is a form of growth. . .hmm I'll have to ponder that, I'm not sure about that part.

But I very strongly feel good thoughts are stronger than bad ones.

Although that opinion wouldn't necessarily allow one to get results by itself.

I've really learned a lot from the M-K S. (I mean it's still sinking in even) about the place to be in when doing "positive thinking." I mean the state of being. That's what I feel the homework has been teaching.

Each week is a different sort of mental exercise or meditation and each builds to prepare you so that when you go to focus on your positive, you are like a radio tuning into the right frequency.

Most of that is kind of stilling the mind but the specific steps are really great for being able to be in the right place to let those thoughts do their most power.

-Jessica

[Sharyn]

Positive & Negative Thoughts - Effects on Health

Interesting article by Larry Dossey. MD which includes many research studies
showing how positive & negative thoughts affect health.


http://www.noetics.org/research/ch_book/files/Dossy.pdf


Love & Blessings,
Sharyn

[zartgirl]

Wow!

I love reading here! You all give me sooooo much to think about! Although, some of it is way over my head! I just keep reading... at some point it will all sink in!

I am enjoying all this... Thank you! It does help me to read here everyday as I proceed forward towards my intentions and goals!

Thankyou and Huge Blessings Sj (zartgirl)

[future pather]

I was mulling this over and came up with a few more point.

I think why this issue may be confusing is because truely none of us knows all the thoughts (including subconsious ones) that are going on inside us at any given time.

One might believe that they are focusing on something positive while all the while TONS of stuff is going on inside that they do not register. This can be everything from telling us to scratch our nose when it itches, telling our feet to walk when we want to go somewhere, healing a wound, producing goosebumps when it is cold enough, digesting food, etc, etc.

And then there are all the marginal awarenesses we have like a certain amount of fear, hunger, suspicion of something near by, and on and on.

Would you really be able to tell at any given molment whether your thoughts (including subconscioius ones) were overall more positive or more negative?

I think not.

It may seem like you are concentrating on something positive but there could be a lot else going on that is effecting your vibration.

By the same token, you could focus on a negative topic but that does not cause your body to stop breathing, living, digesting food, etc.

Also I think we need to consider a certain amount of evolution as far as our consciousnesses.

What I mean by that is, the anxiety that I may feel may be very positive relative to what choices I knew about at the time I learned to feel that anxiety.

For example, it is appropriate to have an adrenoline rush when a wild tiger apprears. That helps your body run faster!

So we can not say that anxiety is always negative.

It may have been introduced in our lives (or the lives of those we have developed from) as a very positive thing.

Now we want to banish it and call it negative. Well we have evolved to a certain level of understanding when the anxiety would be appropriate and when it wouldn't.

That's fine but it could have been the very thing that allowed our ancestors to survive.

So undoing that subconsious protective tool is tricky in that you need to somehow convince your subconscious that what was once a lifesaving feature is now unnecessary.

(Am I making any sense here?)

-Jessica

[future pather]

Furthermore I would like to propose that it may be entirely possible that EVERY thought pattern we have today resulted because the thought was more helpful to us than non-helpful.

So perhaps there are no negative thoughts, just impratical applications of thoughts, once certain things are known.

Even thoughts of destruction could have resulted from a situation where there was a need for self protection.

So rather than demonizing these thoughts, perhaps we should thank them for whatever use we (or our ancenstors) had for them.

That's another loa concept, being grateful for what you already have as a way of getting to something better.

So instead of demonizing fear, we could thank it for saving our a#*$^ a time or two. Maybe that is how we can make peace with it.

-Jessica

[future pather]

"Fear is a particularly powerful emotion that combined with a negative thought is as powerful, or MORE powerful, in manifesting a thought, than a thought combined with Love or hope or gratitude." -Kevin

Perhaps that is because fear has saved more human life (what the growth of nature / the universe cares about most) than love since the beginning of humanity until now. Think about how big that adrenalin rush is when you do what you are describing. Thank you body, you are functioning AOK!!! I think that's what we should tell it any time it does that to us. I am grateful to be able to feel adrenalin so if I ever need to run for my survival I will have a turbo speed.

By the same token, with pain, I suppose some might argue, but you could be grateful that your body is able to register pain rather than the alternative.

I mean it is ranked that way for a positive reason, to keep you alive. So the pain is positive compared to humans not having that function. Thank you pain for keeping my species alive.



Perhaps love will save more human life than fear from now on. . .

XO Jessica