Basic Methods: Positive Thinking

“Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” - Abraham Lincoln
“For myself, I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else.” - Winston Churchill

Let's be honest: Most people hold the belief (whether consciously or not) that happiness is a shallow and fleeting thing, but that unhappiness is abiding and reality-based. If you don't believe me, just look around you at how people react to happiness, feel-good movies, upbeat ideas, etc. “Ok, that was nice. Back to reality…” Sure, happiness sometimes is a thin and brittle shell borne of denial or trying to look good, but the same can be said of its opposite emotion. I won't go into it much right now, but I want to be clear on the point: an emotion is an emotion, a sign of things and not the thing itself. It should ideally be based on what is, but is easily and often derailed by misconceptions.

The various benefits of happiness will have to wait for a later article, as will a discussion of its artesian source, joy. For now, I ask you to take as granted that even a fleeting sense of happiness is inherently good and useful.

It's also the first and most obvious result of thinking positively. By “positive thinking” I mean a general sense and specific vision that things will go well, will improve, will recover, or will otherwise bring a brighter future. As many wiser heads have observed, you can be as vague or as precise as you desire with your optimistic mindset, and each level of precision carries its own benefits. All, however, lead directly to an improvement of mood.

Adopting positive, “can do,” “will happen” stances toward the world on a longer term begins to convert the bright future into a bright present, simply because we become what we believe we are. This is ancient wisdom, proven over and over every day throughout millennia. Again, look around and you will quickly see that it's true.

“As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.” - Proverbs 23:7

What do you want to be? Believe that you not only can be it but that you are already on the road to becoming it, and it will begin to be so. What do you want to do? Believe that you can and you eventually will.

“Yeah, right,” I hear from the curmudgeon in the back. “Nice new age fluff you have going on, there. Your own in-skull cheering team. Rah rah rah, sis boom blah. Wishful thinking sets you up for a fall.”

In some ways, the curmudgeon is right. Wishful thinking is worse than useless. What comes of saying “I wish I was a better person, more self-disciplined” other than reminding myself that you aren't better, aren't what you know you should be, reinforcing the fact of it? It lets you think that something might happen while preventing motion that direction. Good thing we're not talking about that, huh?

No, Positive Thinking looks like its hapless, helpless cousin Wishful Thinking, but doesn't act like it at all. It says, “You can - and you are!” It draws you forward into the light, and more than just promoting dreams, it encourages all of your mind, conscious, subconscious and unconscious alike, to see the ways to the goal that come along and which are already there. Like magic, you will begin to become your true self.

It's a pretty well-known fact that once you're aware of a thing, you will suddenly see it popping up all over. You may never have noticed Australia in the news, but plan a trip there and I promise you'll see references to it all over. And yet a Lexis-Nexis search will show that there's no sudden up-tick of Aussie news. Develop a concern with (to grab something pretty random) corn-based products and they'll start practically throwing themselves at you. This applies in so many ways it's hard to comprehend. Most importantly for this discussion, (a) think about good things and your world will be a brighter place, (b) focus on bad things and your world will be downright depressing, and (c) keep what you want to be and do in your mind as a will-happen notion and the path to get there will present itself.

Really, it's as simple as this: “Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.” - Willie Nelson