Open Minds
A good idea can never drop into a closed mind.
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Author: John
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Original of the Species
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Soul Traveler
The Road to Anywhere/Nowhere
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
Curiosities
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Life Loves Rain
Celebrate the Weather Every Day
Some people walk in the rain. Others just get wet. – Roger Miller
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Forget Positive Affirmations
Positive Affirmations Are Negative in Nature
What do we do with the fact that almost 100% of positive affirmations are negative in nature? You disagree with the numbers?
Most affirmations I see being mouthed are being initiated from a place of deficiency, a wanting to change our state or circumstances to some idea of better. A large part of the effort exerted in positive affirming seems to be an attempt to convince ourselves that we (or life) are more than we believe ourselves to be in the moment – I’m successful. I’m lovable, the world is abundant, God is on my side, etc.The whole motivation is coming from an unacknowledged and under-explored sense of lack and deficiency. More than that, it is a complete rejection of reality as it is in the moment – the reality that we believe we (life) are lacking.
As I write this, I am sitting in my office. I don’t know of anyone who could come over here and move this building 6 inches with their physical strength much less with a positive affirmation. And yet, there are many people trying to push the entire universe around, to warp and shape it to meet their ideas of what they think they need to be whole or complete or happy.
Why are positive affirmations so appealing? Mostly because they help us avoid pain and suffering – or so we think. Much of the effect of positive affirmations is nothing more than hiding from what we really believe deep down inside, in the dark places we wish to ignore.
It’s a sad, tragic and, at times, a comic affair.Imagine a lion walking around affirming – I’m king of the jungle, I’m king of the jungle. And yet this is exactly what people are doing with positive affirmations most of the time. The lion’s very nature is that it is a lion. Being king of the jungle is mostly an idea .
Fortunately lions are not as confused as human beings. Lions mostly walk around being lions without suffering from being disconnected from themselves and having a bunch of ideas about who or what they should be.
The most affirming experience we humans can have is to land in our true nature. A moment of perceiving the real is more powerful than a lifetime of words. Well intentioned, but misguided efforts at positive affirmations would be better spent in learning how to settle down and allow what is truly real in us arise into consciousness.
The world is abundant. Life is on our side. We are awesome and wonderful. It’s the true state of affairs. If we can’t see it, then the more productive course of action is to explore – why not. Trying to convince ourselves that the sky is blue when, in fact, the sky is blue – is crazy behavior.
As the saying goes – the only way out is through. Explore the deficiencies, the hidden beliefs. Open them up to the light of awareness. The truth will set us free. The false dissolves. Only the real remains.
Related Posts
- How Good Friends Can Keep Us Down
- Why Affirmations Don’t Work
- Why Affirmation Works
- Coming to You Soon Through Understanding
- What’s Wrong with This Life?
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Existence is In the Present
The Present Moment Contains Insight & Wisdom
I was reading an editorial in Newsweek that contain this quote from Marcus Aurelius:
If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything – as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.Very few of us really seem to understand the present moment. This is because most of the time we view and experience it from a linear perspective in time. The experience then becomes reified and the whole lot is reduced to the realm of dualistic thinking.
If we really see and experience the present in the NOW, we will experience it from the non-dual perspective which is beyond linear thinking and time. It is this timeless experience that Marcus’ words point to.
The article goes on to list what Marcus sees as characteristics of the rational soul:
- Affection for its neighbors
- Truthfulness
- Humility
The author, Jon Meacham, explains Marcus’ perspective:
Human beings, he writes, “were made to help others.” Nothing is good “except what leads to fairness, and self-control, and courage, and free will. And nothing bad except what does the opposite.”
A perspective still worthy of serious contemplation.
Items of Philosophical Interest
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- The Unfolding Now
- Lighting Up the NOW
- Eckhart Tolle & PBS
- Coming to You Soon Through Understanding
- How Easy Is It to Be in the NOW?
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