About Being Positive- A Psychosynthesis Article by Jay Ray

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About Being Positive

By Jay Ray

A few weeks ago someone mentioned to me that they get confused about the concept of negativity. I have thought a lot about that over the years. The New Age movement has made being positive a foundation of its lifestyle. I feel that positivity is a wonderful thing. Its what we all want to experience in our lives. When it comes from an honest place inside of feeling good about ourselves and the world, it is the most precious of experiences. But when it comes from a place of denial of the truth, when it comes from a place of putting a positive 'spin' on reality, then it has its downside. It’s not possible to have real positive experiences when one is 'trying' to be positive because the effort of covering up how we really feel, makes it impossible to ever move through the pain into a really positive experience. It commits us to a limbo land of neither one thing nor the other. Neither unhappy nor truly exuberantly joyful. What many people call 'not being negative' can in fact be avoidance of doing anything about the very real things that don’t work in their lives and the world. Going into the pain and dark places is never very pleasant. But if we don’t go there, we are never able to move on from them. They lurk in our subconscious waiting to recreate themselves again at the earliest opportunity when our positive defense mechanisms are lowest. True negativity is when we are critical, judging of ourselves, being dishonest with ourselves, being envious of others, and all those old 'vices' that used to be talked about. We can witness people being 'positive', but doing all these things as well. We all do fact. Turning and facing our truly negative behavior, therefore facing the darker parts of ourselves and dealing with the outcome of that, though unpleasant, is the truly a positive action.

Another issues that I have been questioned about is the issue of 'manifesting' negative stuff in our lives if we don’t 'think positively'. It is not the negative thoughts that manifest things in our lives. It is the subconscious, undealt with patterns of behavior, that shape the choices we make bringing about consequences that are not what we would have expected or desired. The best way to manifest something positive is to look for the unworkable patterns in our lives, find out how they got there, and then replace them with something that works better for us. To make new choices from a clearer place. Now admittedly this takes more effort and a longer time. The alternative however, of turning our face away from anything we don’t like, results in things rearing up and hitting us in our face when we least expect it. Sometimes many years later! The policy of being willing to turn and face our shadow ensures that this does not happen. It enables you to have forewarning that something will need to be dealt with. I didn’t dream this up incidentally. Its inherent within the works of Freud and Jung as well as Assagioli. It is also part of indigenous practice since the dawn of time. The positive mental attitude concept as we know it today was a construct that was taken out of context from the Western Mystical Tradition and used by corporate spin doctors to get people to sell more in the late 60's early 70's. It came with book like 'The Power of Positive Thinking', and 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. They are still used by Amway and the like to get more sales. However, what it also does, is stop us from looking at our real quality of life. Are we happier with more and more sales? Do we want to work 60 hours a week? Are we happy in the job/marriage/place that we are in? Looking at that takes time away from working harder, making more. That sort of soul searching, which would eventually lead to positive experience, gets in the way of daily routine and is discouraged. So we substitute the positive spin for the real thing. We stay. We avoid. Until crisis hits. In the 80's, the years of corporate greed and obscene over indulgence on a global level, the concept was picked up with the New Age movement. Many people were getting financial results from the goal setting and ra ra of the sales world. At the same time, the New Age was looking into the Western Mystical Traditions, finding half the story, matching it with what was popular sales culture and enshrining it in the tenets of its culture.

But like all things that are avoided, the crash comes. The markets fell, The world had to do some soul searching. This it is/was ill-equipped to do, not wishing to disturb the sleeping giant of its own underbelly. Deep within all of us are our own sleeping giants. To contact them and befriend them, bringing them out into the light, enables us to see that with feeding, they can become our allies. When disowned, they will eventually wreck havoc. The most positive thing we can do for ourselves and our world is tell ourselves the truth.