The dark side of positive thinking

“You attract what you think and what you are.” 

Imagine if someone told this to Jesus before he received the last nail! Or to the victims of the Inquisition, or to women in general since the dawn of time burn at stake just because a neighbour was jealous and reported them as working with the demon. Or to the child being born in Africa, or to the parents who lost their child in a bombing spree in the Middle East.

And while a positive and hopeful outlook on life helps us get through our moments of struggle and keeps us from falling prey to despair, that’s just not enough to write the wrongs in our society, to offset the balance of injustice of which most of us suffer. No matter what Doreen Virtue, Esther Hicks, Bob Proctor and all the Law of Attraction gurus are trying to sell you on.

There is a bigger truth out there that’s been staring us in the face since the creation of mankind. Is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to see: the world we live in is ruled by a dark force. You obey it, you play by its rules, you get through life quite undisturbed. You try to expose it or to challenge it, it will destroy you and all your efforts, or at least will do all in its power.

If you think, this wave of positive thinking “get rich beyond your dreams” started with individuals like Napoleon Hill, a man who’s been struggling his whole life, who has been commissioned by nobody else but a mega-rich individual – Carnegie – to write “the secret formula to riches”. The main tenets being, “don’t concern yourself with occult matters” (i.e. don’t try to learn about the unseen truth), and “you have to want money so badly that you can think of nothing else”. Pretty straight-forward and obvious formula: “You can join our ranks, but you have to do what we’ve told you!”

The New Age positive thinking started with Alice Bailey, the founder of Lucifer trust, who later changed to Lucis trust, and who now is advising the UN on spiritual matters. If you don’t believe me, go and do your own research. It’s public information on their websites.

This idea of “light warriors” comes from her. Since her whole movement is based on the recognition of Lucifer being the god of this world, and since he was “the light bearer”, “light workers” became its disciples, whether they knew it or not.

And what did they teach the ignorant masses kept in the dark? “The power of your mind” of which Carnegie was teaching Hill. In the early days of psychology, the mind was discovered to have at least two components, which they called “the conscious mind” and “the unconscious mind”. The conscious mind was the one from which you operated in your daily life, the unconscious mind being the place where all your problems take place and the one keeping you poor and miserable. And voilà! Once again, mankind has been blinded to adhere to another belief, much more “evolved and scientific” than the religious superstitions who saw the world…well, as it was: divided between two forces, good and evil playing with your mind.

The two angels on your shoulders, one advising you how to live an honourable life, and the other whispering in your ear and presenting you with all kinds of temptations to deviate you from that course, and the two wolves in the Indian lore are not just metaphors. They are the representation of the two forces at play behind the curtain of the “conscious mind”. That’s why you have positive and negative, even in electricity, let alone man. That’s why you have a feminine and masculine side, that’s why we have day and night, good and bad, rich and poor, etc. The world is not just a shiny little ball of pleasures and riches which you can “attract” at will. In fact, your mighty free will has been so tampered with along with your mind that you became domesticated to function within certain parameters. Just try to will yourself to a higher position in your job by just maintaining a good positive heart and see how far you get. Or try to will yourself to eat only healthy stuff, you know, no sugars, no coffees, no little pleasures… Or will yourself to speak, act, feel and think only the truth, your truth, and see how far you get.

The point is, you are not in charge of your thinking, of how you feel, of how you act, and not even on what you believe! And not because you are disable, but because you have been disable-ed.

The world is shifting. The cosmic energy is advancing at high speed and is forcing the poor human to keep up the pace. People have started to feel all over the globe this thirst for knowledge of who we truly are, this inner call towards a more spiritual meaning of life. And “they” have highjacked that wave and presented it to you under their light, or should I say, under the light-bearer’s.

The pleasures and riches have become “your divine rights”. The poverty in which the world has been kept, presented as the fault of your untrained mind into “manifestation”. New apostles of this current have sprung all-over the earth. If you are poor, they offer you courses on “how to eliminate limiting beliefs” so you can “manifest your dreams”. Never mind if you don’t know what your dreams are. Once in their seminars, they’ll fill your mind with their examples of what they’ve “manifested”: a luxury home, millions of dollars…and, above all, idiots like you who have paid for that manifestation. Now, you go home all hyped-out, you put in practice everything you’ve learned, you become vegetarian, you meditate, you go to yoga classes, you meet your new “tribe” with “Namaste” … And?

Well, and nothing! You would be given at the beginning a lucky strike, just to settle you on this new belief course. You think, “holy cow, it’s working!” And then, life takes over just like before. You slip back into your old habits, you feel guilty, you go to more courses… You see it’s not working. You are two times more ashamed to talk about: one because you are afraid that deep down is your fault, it must be that you didn’t apply the formula to the letter (which you didn’t, because there isn’t such formula); and secondly, you are ashamed in front of other people who didn’t go to manifestation seminars, who seem to earn well enough, no problem. So, you start to analyse those. You go to personal development courses. More work on your beliefs…only to discover the same discourse: “the Universe will manifest your beliefs”. You then change the tune, go to Tony Robbins seminars, you learn to train your will by walking on hot coal, you learn to shift your perspective, to train your body like an athlete. You get super excited, you speak and act like being on drugs. You think you’ve finally found the perfect formula. You train, you set goals, you run chest-open to meet the rejections… You have a dream, and damn it if the Universe will refuse it this time! Otherwise said, you have an agenda, just a clearer one this time, with no shame or reserve, as you’ve seen your mentors have, and you will walk over everything (or everyone) with a grin of total confidence on your face to meet your destiny of grandeur and success!

What has it changed since Napoleon Hill? Nothing. You do exactly what he was taught. He did die poor in the end, but no book had been commissioned about that blunter, unfortunately.

Now take Oprah, one of the best-known proponents of the law of attraction. She tells you how she dreamt of riches as a little girl, how she imagined the big house and garden to be just like the one of the rich family she visited… She made it! But she also let slip in one of her interviews that when she started her OWN company, she thought she will do what she wanted, she will address the topics she wanted about spirituality and all…Only to discover that she could do less than before. One of her company was about to go bankrupt, she sold it… And then she let it out: “I think that at the time there was a novelty about what I did. It was just divine timing. If I were to start now, I wouldn’t make it to where I am.”

Yes, read it twice! If Oprah cannot do what she wants with all her money and fame, if the world proponent of the law of attraction and all their “gurus” says that if she had to start today, she wouldn’t make it, where are her “power of manifestation” beliefs going? Down the drain, my friend, down the drain! Because you’ve been fooled by the same bunch controlling the earth through their marionettes that “you too could achieve that glory”. That’s why it was called “the American dream”. And that’s why they select a few and put them in enviable positions, such as movie stars, music artists, writers, so you can think that if they have made it, you too could make it, if you have what it takes. Meaning, a strong self-centred approach to life, the jungle type “eat or be eaten” and the willingness to do whatever it takes to get to the top, morals be damned. Once there, you could start a charitable foundation, like them all, to wash your sins away and “give something back”.

Like the greedy personal development gurus, who have taken upon themselves alone to change the world, to help people with problems, by the thousands, in a few days, in a single place, all at once. And while this fake “good deed” may pass unobserved for the unaware masses, it doesn’t for the awakened observer.

This formula of success and riches by one “specialist” is based on amassing big numbers of clients at once. Those are the thousands of people who would have gone to see their local healer or therapist. So, the riches of one individual are built by taking away the opportunity for income of thousands of specialists and their clients. And since “he had made it so big”, those poor healers and therapists will become themselves his clients at his mass-events, hoping that whatever he’s breathing will rob off a little on themselves too.

And from there, you have the deluge of coaches and specialists using the same formula: big flashy videos, sign-up for a free this or that, download my free book, etc., and then, once “the pipeline” built (is how they call you), they’ll “drip” you with offers at various intervals of time until you’ll end up buying one or more, or you’ll unsubscribe.

Scale this at millions, multiply 2-4% conversion rate with the cheapest offer of about 47 €, and you do the math! So, the self-help industry is not about helping others but the one selling you on it. A true helper, an honest specialist takes his or her time to meet and know you, to listen to you, to find exactly the cause of your problem, and will guide you along the way. The best ones will even refuse to work with you until you do the required changes. Nothing compares as a one-to-one session where you take your time to say everything you have on your heart and mind, when you could ask questions, when you go home and put in practice what you’ve learned and come back with feedback on what worked and where you still are unclear. Or, this takes time. Yes, personal change, healing, personal and spiritual development take time. Not years, but not three days either.

This shiny new trend of getting rich and famous through personal development and healing formulas will be, in my view, the death of us all. Why? Because people will get so sick of all these newbies full of steam and young (or old desperate) ego, that will be put off forever of ever wanting to attend any course or see any specialist to better themselves. All this information thrown on all social media will give the human the false sentiment of “knowledge”, quick and cheap, and will stop him/her from enquiring further, tired of either the failed promises or of their fight to survive till the next month.

Be it the positive thinking of the New Age or the mental and physical toughness preached by the personal development world, one thing is clear. Everybody has been enchanted to keep away from meddling into the true cause of our ills and poverty itself: the dark forces behind, posing as your benefactors!

If the human had had enough of being controlled like sheep and worked in cubicles as slaves for someone else’s dream, the entrepreneurship alternative was given to them, just to keep the wheel spinning. New ideas, new promises, new techniques… new-old hopes! Just as the competition to get a job has become atrocious, the same, the competition to get ahead as an entrepreneur did. In fact, even more so. And just as man has had enough of going on the treadmill job-home-tv-sleep-job…, so will eventually this trend fall on its face, with only a few collecting the fat checks – those who started long ago who, like Oprah, benefitted from “a divine timing”, not to mention the “divine” geographical place such as the U.S.

Because gurus were talking about the power of the present moment long before Eckhart Tolle. Meditation is more than a 3000 years old thing, same is yoga. The breathing techniques employed by Whim Hoff and the cold exposure were known since thousands of years ago by the Tibetan monks. The only problem was that they didn’t have the internet nor the American vein of turning knowledge into money they didn’t need. They dedicated their lives to such studies and were not giving it away to just anybody. You had to deserve the knowledge (you still have today!) and you had to apply yourself. And that took time. A lot of it. It took material and personal sacrifice for you to truly get in touch with that divine, superhuman power. But the Americans have found a way not only to shorten it, but to package it, market it and sell it for profit. Hence, the New Age and the new wave of self-development entrepreneurs.

The shamans have been on this planet long before the American dream hit the four corners of the earth. You wouldn’t have found a worth-his-salt shaman giving his knowledge away to an uninitiated just because he was paying a fee, let alone a bunch of them, as the trend goes now for the so-called shamanic group initiations!

Science has peeped into the esoteric and indigenous spiritual healing practices; herbs and rituals have been uncovered, shipped and exported to the “civilised world”. From herbal remedies to fancy diets, sport and meditation, you’ll get an overall feeling of wellness, while deepening your state of unconsciousness to what’s really going on behind that curtain.

All you care about now is yourself, your body mass, your youthful appearance, your svelte line and your “abundance” splashed all over Facebook. They’ve given you so many examples of “success” and what success looks like —from teenagers to old-timers— that you will be forced by the “evidence” to acquiesce.

Under this trend of modern self-development, the evil, the dark force at play became just “a fabrication of your subconscious mind”. “Deep-seated unchecked negative beliefs holding you back”. Never mind how they got there; who created the negative events in your life that caused you to have a negative belief on something; who controlled the affairs of mankind and the lack of self-knowledge that caused the minds of humans to turn on themselves!

“As long as you take responsibility for everything that happened, you could change it.”

You may as well take credit for the Moon and the stars and change their course since you’re bossing “the Universe” to play by your rules.

This wave of positive thinking fluff is doing more damage to the human soul than you could imagine!

I know, I know! “How could I say that?” Well, I can, and I just did! Because I’m sick of opening my computer and being invaded by memes and posts shared on social media, all regurgitating the same crap. Because I’m sick of the mediocrity surrounding me posing as “specialised knowledge”, or worst, as “spiritual knowledge”! And, to be frank with you, I’m sick of the world I live in! Literally! Nauseated!

Everywhere I turn, I see nothing but ignorance, hypocrisy and greed. That’s the majority, whether you are willing to admit or not. The world is falling apart, the human values, well, the little human values we managed to acquire have become handicaps. Telling the truth is social and professional suicide. Telling it as it is has become a vulgarity in a world ruled by superficiality and pretence.

The human emotional spectrum, the human achievement and their vocabulary have been reduced to “happy”, “joy”, “bliss”, “acceptance”, and…the one who makes me see red, “abundance”. Show any other human emotion that is not on that list and you are forever discredited, especially if you happen to work “in the field”.

Everybody has become an overnight specialist in human behaviour and “success”. You read “Think and grow rich”, “The power of now”, and a bunch of few others, you go to a few motivators seminars, and voilà! A new specialist was born.

It used to be the case when skill and knowledge were built upon a lifetime of dedication, of sacrifice and investment in your craft. You became known only if you had results, and even then, depending on the field you were in. Treating people suffering from depression, from other human unpopular toils, for example, just as treating them from venereal diseases, was guaranteed, and it still is today, to put you in the “best kept secret specialist” category.

But there was rigour, a weight that only experience and time could give you, and it had meaning. Today, everybody can check on Google every topic imaginable, every illness of the mind or body, and you will have thousands of pages with specialised advice. You can read it from the comfort of your own home, you can learn everything there is written on the subject, you can even pose in a specialist on the subject in front of your friends and family. And yet, your problem is still there. Why? Because information never equates knowledge and skill! Being able to make a video talking about all that information you’ve read about, about those new discoveries in neuroscience, the law of attraction and personal change will never make you a specialist. Just a news reporter! Or, better, a web reporter, or better still, a greedy little shit who stills the knowledge of those who have worked their souls out to gain that knowledge, who sweat blood until they’ve reached those conclusions, of which they are still unsure… but which you grab with your tiny little greedy mind and sell it as your own.

So, why positive psychology will be the death of mankind? Because, like everything on this planet since the monkey lost its fur, it’s just another tool designed on purpose to skew the human in the desired direction. I.e. the denial of reality. It’s just another antidepressant, another anaesthetic that prevents the signal to get through.

What’s the solution? Feel the whole damn thing! Feel the pain, feel the fear, feel your smallness, let them invade you, consume you, until there’s nothing left of you; of this amnesiac you! Because pain, my friend, is not your enemy! The painkiller is! Depression is not your enemy! The antidepressants and the positive thinking crap are! They are signals that something worst is happening in your absence, behind your awareness, and are trying to shake the hell out of you to save your ass, your soul’s ass for eternity’s sake!

Stop running away from your negative emotions! If you have them, honour them, learn from them. If you feel bad, there is always a reason, and that reason is not just “in your mind”. “Your mind” was never yours, to begin with! So stop trying to fix the signal that’s trying to fix you! Be willing to admit that you don’t know a damn thing about anything and start digging. Wise-up, because the clock is ticking, and before you know it, you’d have forgotten everything about yourself; the little things still holding you in one piece right now.

Not everything that shines is made of gold. Not everything that gives you pleasure or relief is there to help you – just look at a drug addict! Well, just look in the mirror! Your addiction is either the material pleasures or the mental self-delusion of enlightenment. Either way, the addiction that will kill you, in the end, is your need to satisfy your vanity.

Hubris! Is what made your creator fall from grace, and what will keep you away from it!

© Grațiela Roșu 18.04.2019