True Positive Thinking
When Jesus talked about the truth making us free that he was not talking about a single piece of data. On the other hand, neither was he talking about some single ultimate truth (which would be a glorified piece of data), but about the principle of truth. He who discovers the door of the soul discovers the way to recognize truth and is no longer deceived and thus becomes free.
Of course, the trick is staying in the soul amid all the distractions.
Some question my statement that truth is neither on the outside or inside so let us examine a simple truth to see.
2+2=4
One is unable to go inside to the pure essence of our being which is ONE and discover this because there is nothing but oneness there. Anything more than one is meaningless.
To even create more than one on the inside the One Life had to create an outside as well as inside. All form on the outside is dependent on the sustaining power of the One inside.
2+2=4 has no meaning or cannot even exist without an outside division of form combined with an inner recognition.
Technically there is no inside without an outside. To say that all is within is no different than saying that all is without for both are interdependent.
“But,” says one, “I can go inside and see that 2+2=4.”
Answer: You are seeing this using the mind which is an outside vehicle of the real you just as much as is your body. Take away your body, feelings and mind and you still exist, but you are unable to assimilate the truth that 2+2=4. All truth is created and recognized through the duality of outside-inside.
Now let us deal with this popular belief:
Things on the outside can only hurt us when we believe they can hurt us. If we “free ourselves” from negative thoughts and energies no harm can come to us.
One of the reasons this is a popular belief is because it is indeed a comforting belief to hold. If protecting ourselves from harm were indeed this simple then yes, by all means, let’s go for it.
But is it that simple or is this another illusionary trap that catches many?
Again, we must check with reality, or things as they are and see if this belief really works.
For one thing, most of us go through life with nothing of great negativity happening to us for six months or so and maybe some type of major crisis every five or ten years.
Therefore, if the average person adopts this belief then he usually goes about six months before his faith is tested, but even here he has explanations. He just let his guard down for a while or there were some hidden fears that were so deep that he never noticed them before. It isn’t usually until the major crisis comes along that his faith is really tested, but even here his belief system often remains intact.
I also find that many (not all) of those with this belief system are quite judgmental. I have found that when I have described some negative occurrence in my life that they will often respond with something like this:
“Now JJ, what have you been thinking to draw this occurrence into your life? If you were more like me and did not allow negative things into your consciousness you would not draw these nasty occurrences into your life.”
Some of you may recall that a year or so I go I related to the group how I fell down some stairs in the dark and banged myself up. I was then met with this kind of flack – that I must be suffering from my negative thinking. The funny thing is that the person who was doing the most preaching to me fell down her own stairs about a week later and shortly thereafter suffered a life and death health crisis. This did not alter her belief system, however.
One of the things I look for in formulating my own beliefs is how they play out in the real world and here is what I observe. I notice that those who attempt to avoid the negative by erasing it from their belief system have as much or more negativity in their life as anyone else.
I have noticed that those who have this belief system will downplay smaller negative occurrences for a period of time, but then the suppression often builds and when something big comes along there is difficulty in facing it.
There are three general attitudes in dealing with the negative.
(1) The negative attitude. This person is pessimistic and always expects the worst and a negative occurrence is amplified in his mind.
(2) The positive attitude. This person acknowledges the negative as well as positive, but has a good attitude and always looks for the best to occur. Because of his positive outlook the negative occurrence does not seem so bad.
(3) The negating (as opposed to negative) attitude. This person seeks to avoid the negative by eliminating the negative from his thoughts and belief system.
From my observation all three categories of people have negative occurrences come into their life, but the least affected by the negative is number two – the one who does not negate the negative, but just makes the best of each situation and always hopes for and looks for the best to occur. For this person a negative happening always has a silver lining.
But for number one a negative occurrence is devastating because he dwells on his victimhood.
In addition, the negative occurrence is often difficult for number three because it is shattering for his belief system.
I said that this was a dangerous belief and to back up my words I will point out two times in history where this belief lead to disaster.
A notable one is the decade which lead up to World War II. During this period there was a resurgence of interest in Spiritualism and the idea that perpetual peace could be had by laying down arms and avoiding the negative. Many groups were meditating, praying and sending love for peace.
This thought process had a wide effect and influenced many world leaders and three crucial nations -the United State, Britain and France disarmed themselves thinking that by not paying attention to these negative armaments that the rest of the world would follow on.
This sounded good, but one man named Hitler only saw opportunity for himself in such a belief system. He armed the Germans to the hilt while others were thinking peace.
Now the interesting thing is this. Right up until a week before the war broke out every single noted spiritualist was predicting there would be no war – that their meditations were working.
But then Hitler invaded Poland and the world woke up to the fact that it sometimes takes more than either positive thinking or avoiding the negative to handle the likes of a dictator bent on conquest.
A second powerful example was India. Hinduism is very big on this idea that peace can be maintained through the negation of the negative. Because this belief system placed them in peril time and time again the great avatar Krishna (who later was the Christ) appeared on the scene and gave the world the Bhagavad-Gita.
One of the main messages of the Gita is to not retreat into your inner world and seek peace at the expense of avoiding facing the real problems of the outside world. He tells his disciple Arjuna to stand and fight that which is outside as well as to deal with that which is inside.
Unfortunately, India did not learn the lesson of the Bhagavad-Gita and suffered perhaps the bloodiest tragedy in recorded history. Below is an account by historian Will Durant from The Story of Civilization.
The Moslem Conquest of India
In one day all this power and luxury were destroyed. Slowly the conquering Moslems had made their way south; now the sultans of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golkonda and Bidar united their forces to reduce this last stronghold of the native Hindu kings. Their combined armies met Rama Raja’s half-million men at Talikota; the superior numbers of the attackers prevailed; Rama Raja was captured and beheaded in the sight of his followers, and these, losing courage, fled. Nearly a hundred thousand of them were slain in the retreat, until all the streams were colored with their blood. The conquering troops plundered the wealthy capital, and found the booty so abundant “that every private man in the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses and slaves.” For five months the plunder continued: the victors slaughtered the helpless inhabitants in indiscriminate butchery, emptied the stores and shops, smashed the temples and palaces, and labored at great pains to destroy all the statuary and painting in the city; then they went through the streets with flaming torches, and set fire to all that would burn. When at last they retired, Vijayanagar was as completely ruined as if an earthquake had visited it and had left not a stone upon a stone. It was a destruction ferocious and absolute, typifying that terrible Moslem conquest of India which had begun a thousand years before, and was now complete.
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India’s boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.
The first Moslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western Punjab (664 A.D.) Similar raids occurred at the convenience of the invaders during the next three centuries, with the result that the Moslems established themselves in the Indus valley about the same time that their Arab co-religionists in the West were fighting the battle of Tours (732 A.D.) for the mastery of Europe. But the real Moslem conquest of India did not come till the turn of the first millennium after Christ.
In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became sultan of the little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew that his throne was young and poor, and saw that India, across the border, was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. Pretending a holy zeal for destroying Hindu idolatry, he swept across the frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. Returning to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying “jewels and unbored pearls and rubies shining like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates.” Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground. Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known. Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few shillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors, Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time, and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.
Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent thief, other Moslem rulers profited by his example, though none succeeded in bettering his instruction. In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi, destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi- an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind- fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “were bestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands.” In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.” Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi. When some Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conquerer of Chitor) had all the males- from fifteen to thirty thousand of them- slaughtered in one day. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to the rebel’s wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging” the victims “and putting them to death in crowds.” In order to found a new capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a desert; and hearing that a blind man had stayed behind in Delhi, he ordered him to be dragged from the old to the new capital, so that only a leg remained of the wretch when his last journey was finished. The Sultan complained that the people did not love him, or recognize his undeviating justice. He ruled India for a quarter of a century, and died in bed. His successor, Firoz Shah, invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age of eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reached twenty thousand. `
End quote
A sad story is it not? This sad tale would not have been if the great civilization which was India had placed a little more attention on the practical side of life and made the necessary preparations to defend their way of life.
For long stretches of time they were fortunate and their belief system seemed to protect them from the negative, but alas the day of reckoning finally came and even to this day India has not recovered the glory, wealth and culture which they had in those ancient times.
Now none of us want to see things like this happen to the nation we are living in; neither do we want negative or hurtful things to come into our own lives.
The question is then what is truly the best way to avoid pain and negativity? Is thinking positive, sending love and being peaceful not helpful?
Answer: Yes, they are helpful, but if your thoughts are true they will be followed by action. If they are not then there is deception in your thinking.
If you are a real positive thinker you will be taking positive action to materialize those thoughts.
If you are truly thinking thoughts of love they will materialize as loving actions that will cause the hearts of others to burn with loving thankfulness.
If you are truly thinking peace then you will take the necessary steps on the physical plane to insure that the peace is real.
Overall I have found the formula that makes for a happy life where the major pitfalls are avoided can he had by following this advice:
(1) Decide what you want to happen.
(2) Project yourself into the various stages of the future until you see the consummation of your desire. Then honestly examine every possible negative or undesirable event you wish to avoid or that would prevent you from reaching your goal.
(3) Contemplate solutions to the obstacles and how you are going to negate or overcome them.
(4) Every time you cross through an obstacle reassess your situation and reassess your path and your plan until the goal is reached.
By following this formula one can use the combined results of meditation and action to make one’s life a reasonably happy one.
Feb 16, 2001
Copyright by J J Dewey
Easy Access to All the Writings
For Free Book go HERE and other books HERE
JJ’s Amazon page HERE