Negative Thoughts are Negative Affirmations

A negative affirmation, what is it? " Frightening thoughts are negative affirmations."  This, from a sentence out of Louise L Hay’s book, The Power is Within You. Strange how we can read about positive affirmations, learn how to use them; study and apply them, but seem to forget almost entirely about their opposite: negative affirmations. “Frightening thoughts are negative affirmations.” What could be clearer than that.

Most people are caught up in mind-talk all the time. I certainly fall into the category where I spend a lot of my time “thinking” verbally. You’ll note the apostrophe’s around that word thinking. For a lot of it is not real thought, just reactionary stuff which is coming in from somewhere because of a passing interest in it. It is drawn to me, much as a magnet draws iron-filings, because of a latent, or passing interest. It is a case of one’s attention being pulled this way and that, weakly, like a windsock in a breeze. There is no direction here. One could say the attention is in neutral. Yes, most people spend their around ninety percent of their entire lives in this way. I include here, of course, those moments when they’re watching television, being entertained in some passive way; not having to direct their attention, not having to will it to do as they want.

In another Hub I spoke about voluntary and involuntary attention. In this Hub I gave a couple of examples of involuntary attention: e.g. man sticks a gun under your nose and says, “Gimme yer wallet.” Your attention is immediately there, but it is involuntary. It is drawn by our desire to survive, not be killed or injured. Getting your attention drawn by something on television is also involuntary attention. You don’t will it. These two instances might seem different but, from one’s attention point of view, all that is different is the degree by which one’s attention is drawn. In both instances, the attention is involuntary. Your own will power hardly enters into it.

In voluntary attention is means you pick something out out of your own volition; you choose it. Anything from choosing to go out for a walk, or to buy a particular book, newspaper or CD entails a certain amount of voluntary attention. So, too, does determining to sit down and spend sixty minutes with your eyes closed to concentrate on your incoming and outgoing breath with the choice to ignore the rantings of passing verbal thought. This last, of course, is serious meditation. I say serious, not the airy-fairy stuff of sitting relaxed and letting the mind wander which sometimes passes as a meditative exercise.

No, serious meditation entails your to volunteer your attention to your will – your real will. And this real will is the part of your little self which is as close as you can be to knowing yourself without having been in communion with your Higher Self. In serious meditation the little self is making a determined effort to bring certain elements of his or her mind: thought, imagination under the control of the will. It can be quite a battle. For thought – or the conglomeration of thought that makes itself to be you – has a will of its own. Often it is a very strong will. It knows that if it loses this battle it – the thought entity claiming to be you – will cease to exist. It will die. And it does not relish this idea.

I can recall on day seven of my first ten-day Vipassana Meditation Course a terrible feeling on dread coming over me. I was losing me. If I went on, I would suffer a terrible loss. I went on. Nothing was lost. In fact, I gained only more peace, more tranquility, felt just that much more equanimous. My ego-mind was sending out warning signals to itself, not to the real me. Thank God I had the courage and common sense to ignore it.

The ego tries all sorts of ploys to convince you it is right and what you are doing trying to bring your mind under the control of your little self’s will is dangerous, fool hardy, or downright ridiculous. It will cajole. It will plead. It will attempt logical argument. It will employ all manner of intellectual reasons why you should not proceed. And if you give into it you’ll be not only back where you started from but will be saddled with a stronger, more demanding ego and a weakened and littler real self.

If only people would realize that they are not their mind, not their thought. That they are not their bodies or their emotions. These things are experienced by the real self. But until they do, their suffering at the hands of an ego-mind that only wants to survive will continue.

I hope you enjoyed reading Negative Thoughts are Negative Affirmations.

Keep smiling,

Tom