Being positive is much more than just being optimistic - Lent 2023: Day 27

I wake for a pee at three-thirty three; Intuition comes to me: 

"The power of Positivity is much more than merely 'thinking positive'; it comes from you being positive right through to your very core. Positive down to the subatomic level."

In the morning, I look upon these words in my notebook to develop this intuition further - positivity must come balanced by possibility; you can only be truly positive in mindset if you're aware of all the things around you that can go wrong - illness, accident, crime, war, global cataclysm. Positivity that isn't placed within the context of all the chaos that can disrupt or end your life is nothing more than naive, innocent optimism.

Quidquid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem - the wisest words my mother transferred to me. It is literally an injunction to stay alert whatever you're doing - and think it through to the end. "Whatever you do, do it prudently, and keep the outcome in mind." 

While on the subject of my mother, she was optimistic, but the optimism wasn't grounded in observation, something that became clear after her death when we looked at her reading matter, with the title Think Yourself Slimmer being an exemplar of her approach to life. More exercise and less cake and she might have lived a lot longer than her 88 years. Both of her elder sisters outlived her, surviving well into their 90s.

So often we do things automatically, especially routine actions, without really thinking about what we do, and how we do it, and what the outcome should be. Willing a positive outcome from anything we undertake - wanting it consciously at the outset - even it it's only grinding coffee beans and transferring them to the funnel of my Bialetti without spilling excess grounds all over the worktop - helps bring about success. 

"Yeah, it's gonna be fine. No need to worry." Climate change, nuclear war, biological terrorism, supervolcano eruption, asteroid strike, artificial intelligence dominating mankind - it would be wrong to ignore these. Człowiek, który się nie zastanawia - 'the person who considers not'. Optimism is only slightly less dangerous than pessimism; being positive is also about acknowledging the dangers, so as to consciously forestall or preclude or mitigate them. 

A plane-full of people that crashes probably didn't contain any one person that consciously considered the possibility of that crash. Sure, there'll be pessimists thinking "we're all going to die" without really mulling it over. And many more optimists thinking that every previous flight they'd been on landed safely, so the possibility of a tragic end to this one isn't something that would have entered their mind. A highly controversial, but unfalsifiable proposition.

Think it through, intuit the answer, and then seek to draw out a positive outcome for us all!

Positivity involves plugging one's Consciousness into the Purpose, into the flow. In a weak way, it works. Yet over tens of thousands of incarnations of spiritual evolution, your Consciousness's powers of positivity will seem utterly miraculous to you today.

If science can grapple with the concept of retrocausality - the future being able to influence the past - maybe there's a theoretical path open there for reconciling science with spirituality. More on this tomorrow.

Lent 2022: Day 27
God and Nationalism

Lent 2021: Day 27
Consciousness in other creatures

Lent 2020: Day 27
The Physical and the Metaphysical