…has its limits. It’s a powerful tool to help invite good things into our lives, support us in making good decisions, see things for what they really are, allow us to explore our own nature, create good environments for ourselves and others and so much more. It can help us manifest what we want in life and support our actions. The point is that it helps us with that, it doesn’t do it for us. Positive thinking is not a magic wand or a faery godmother or a wizard that can magically make things be different than they are.
When people bring up this subject and talk about it as if thinking good thoughts has the power to manipulate the world like some force field, I like to point out some real world examples of how it doesn’t work like that. If positive thinking made the world around us change, within 24-48 hours or so, then there wouldn’t be poverty. If this worked then those being molested over weeks and years would be saved a thousand times over, rape culture wouldn’t be a phrase we all know, and people wouldn’t be dying due to gun violence in amazing numbers here in the United States. If positive thinking alone could program what happens to us in our day then the Middle East would more than likely be peaceful and only the ones who want to be fighting would be affected, although their thoughts would probably cancel each other out and so there would just be furious thinking going on. Same for Ukraine.
Positive thinking does do amazing things both inside and outside. It’s one important way that we communicate with the world around us. Think of each person as a bell that is constantly thrumming the message “I am this”. The “this” which is being sent out can be negative, positive, neutral, whatever and is as specific as we are, or as vague, depending on the day. That goes out into the world and, as the tendency of people is to harmonize since we’re social animals, those who thrum like that come closer, those who don’t move away or lash out to try to make us stop, opportunities arise from the interconnection or fade from view, etc. This just highlights that we are part of an interconnected web, part of the grand conversation that helps create the harmony of the spheres. We don’t control it, we are part of it and interact with it and sometimes it interacts with us. Being connected means things go both ways and sometimes you’re the bat and sometimes you’re the ball, as it were.
And all the positive thinking in the world doesn’t do anything if you don’t act on your thoughts. Just ask anyone who has dreamed of writing the Great American Novel how much thoughts matter if they don’t act to put the words out. So yes, think positively. Absolutely. And then do something about it.