Positive Thinking

TORRENTIAL PRONOIA THERAPY

Experiments and exercises in becoming a blasphemously reverent, lustfully compassionate, eternally changing Master of Transgressive Beauty.

1. Take inventory of the extent to which your "No" reflex dominates your life.

Notice for 24 hours (even in your dreams) how often you say or think:

"No."

Then retrain yourself to say "YES" at least 51 percent of the time. Start the transformation by saying "YES" aloud 22 times right now.

Don't wait for inspiration. Go after it with a butterfly net, lasso, sweet treats, fishing rod, beguiling smells, and sincere flattery.

(Slightly modified Rob Brezsny passage.)

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Watch out for FALSE statements like the following and oppose them when you are able to spot them emerge in your mind:

• "I fear they will not do my work."
• "My future is doomed."
• "Something or the other is going to destroy me soon."
• "This life is not worth living."
• "I am worthless."
• "I keep making the same mistakes over and over."

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PASSAGE 2:

When the spell is broken, you will be able to tap into resources you've been cut off from. When the spell is broken, you will finally notice the big, beautiful secrets that have been lying in plain sight.

When the spell is broken, you will slip down off a clean, lofty perch where it has been hard to relax and arrive at a low, funky spot where you'll be free to feel things you haven't felt in a long time.

When the spell is broken, it will be because you have decided to break it.

What is that spell?


-- Rob Breszney passage.
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The mind, out of habit says no to everything we want to do. It is its habit to oppose. And it attacks all our vulnerable points.

This is nothing to worry about. Through positive thinking, the mind can be conquered.

A lot of people's thinking turns very negative when thinking about pending issues...

There is nothing to worry about, only an initial hesitation. Once you start getting your work done, your thinking will become more positive.

THROUGH POSITIVE THINKING AND CAREFUL WATCHING OF THE MIND'S RESISTANCE, ANYTHING CAN BE DONE.

Positive thinking is pushing against the mind's negativity on a continuous basis. Like pushing against a dilapidated piece of furniture that resists you but starts moving eventually when sufficient force is applied.

YOU HAVE TO PUSH AGAINST THE MIND'S NEGATIVITY AND RESISTANCE CONTINUOUSLY. IT IS NOT DIFFICULT.

WHY?

Because the energy to push against the mind's negativity comes from nowhere but the mind itself.

It's an enemy that empowers you to overcome it. On a continuous basis.


Fear Vs. Intuition by SacredUproar

Text of the above Audio Clip:

"I wanted to let you know that this is a perfect time for you to learn more about the difference between your fearful fantasies and your authentic, accurate intuitions.

It's always a good time to do that, of course, but even more so right now. This is an exciting turning point, when the future is up for grabs. Worn-out old habits of thought are unraveling. Structures that have kept us enthralled to fake values are crumbling. The coming months and years will be ripe with opportunities for us to lay the foundation for a new world that's actually fit for the human soul.

And in the midst of this grand mutation, it's predictable that so many so-called leaders are trying to fill up our imaginations with scary visions and angry emotions. They want us to buy into their visions that the sky is falling.

In the face of their toxic paranoia, it's wise to remember that we always have the power to turn away from their fear-mongering and tune in to the guidance of the still, small voice within us -- the still, small voice of intuition that will, if we allow it, lead us very capably through every twist and turn of our destiny, even when our destiny brings us right into the thick of our civilization's massive transformations.

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Knowing the difference between your fearful fantasies and your authentic, accurate intuitions is one of the greatest spiritual powers you can possible have. So let's explore what it means: knowing the difference between the frightening, alienating pictures that sometimes pop into your imagination, as opposed the simple, warm, clear direction that is always available from the deepest source within you.

Strangely enough, many people get these two things confused. They are especially prone to believing that the frightening, disempowering images that erupt in their mind's eye are coming from their intuition.

For many people, if they get an image of a scary future possibility popping into their imagination, they worry that it's a prediction of some event that will actually occur in their lives. For instance, they may have a fantasy of themselves getting into an accident, or maybe they dream of losing a loved one, or maybe they internalize the toxic vision of some talking head on TV who slaps them upside the head with a prediction of imminent doom. When these people get images like these stuck in their imagination, they may begin to obsess on the fear that these things are literally going to happen.

Almost every time, scary fantasies like this are not true intuition. Our true intuition is just not very likely to be fueled by fear, and it rarely if ever motivates us to act by making us feel afraid.

No. Our true intuition emerges from the wise, loving core of our being. It blooms in us like a slow-motion fountain of warmth. It reveals the objective truth about a person or situation with lucid compassion. It shows us the big picture.

Fearful fantasies, on the other hand, burn and itch and make us feel like we're coming apart. They drain our energy and cloud our judgment. They fill us with obsessive urges to run and hide or do something desperate and melodramatic.

I don't want to say that true intuition is always calm and emotionally neutral. It isn't, necessarily. But I will say this: The emotions that accompany true intuition are never alienating. They don't make us feel superior to other people or fill us with hatred and terror. They don't disempower us or make us feel helpless.

True intuition may rouse our anger, but if so, it is the kind of invigorating anger that leads to clarity and constructive action, and thus it is an anger that ultimately relaxes us.

True intuition may show us a difficult truth, but it always does so with a suggestion of how to deal gracefully and courageously with that difficult truth. True intuition may reveal imminent changes that could compel us to adjust our behavior, but it always does so in a way that empowers us.

Let me emphasize this point: True intuition may not always reveal that everything will be fine, or that we will be able to continue to live in the ways be have been living -- true intuition is certainly not falsely optimistic -- but if it does alert us to circumstances that are in flux, and how we will have to transform ourselves, it does so with love and poise and clarity, not with fear.

Here's one more thing, *. Just as our true intuition never works by scaring the hell out of us, neither does it flatter us with grandiose suggestions about how superior we are. In fact, it may often gently inform us of some correction that should be made in our attitude. It may tactfully but firmly lead us to the understanding that we have been suffering from some form of ignorance and that we need to wake up and get smarter.

True intuition reveals the story of our lives from our soul's point of view, not our ego's. In my understanding, true intuition is the voice of our own personal inner teacher, which just happens to be the divine part of us. The certainty that true intuition provides us is therefore not loud and puffed up, but rather humble and graceful.

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This is a perfect moment to think on these things, and to add some insights of your own. It's also an excellent time to flush away the fearful fantasies that may have seeped into your imagination -- and thereby make it possible for you to hear your true intuition better.

One way to facilitate this process, by the way, is to cut way back on the amount of terrifying and disorienting images you allow to flow into your imagination from the TV, Internet, newspapers, movies, and other mass media. In fact, I invite you to consider the possibility of going on a media fast for a while and spending more time in nature than you usually do.

In conclusion, my beloved companions on this beautiful, interesting planet, please get to work on seeing your fearful fantasies for what they are and enhancing your connection to your true intuition."


Prayer for Us by SacredUproar

Evil Is Boring excerpted from" PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia"

When an old tree in the rain forest dies and topples over, it takes a long time to decompose. As it does, it becomes host to new saplings that use the decaying log for nourishment.

Picture yourself sitting in the forest gazing upon this scene. How do you describe it? Would you dwell on the putrefaction of the fallen tree while ignoring the fresh life sprouting out of it? If you did, you'd be imitating the perspective of many modern storytellers, especially the journalists and novelists and filmmakers and producers of TV dramas. They devoutly believe that tales of affliction and mayhem and corruption and tragedy are inherently more interesting than tales of triumph and liberation and pleasure and ingenuity.

Using the juggernaut of the media and entertainment industries, they relentlessly propagate this covert dogma. It's not sufficiently profound or well thought out to be called nihilism. Pop nihilism is a more accurate term. The mass audience is the victim of this inane ugliness, brainwashed by a multibillion-dollar propaganda machine that in comparison makes Himmler's vaunted soul-stealing apparatus look like a child's backyard puppet show. This is the engine of the phenomena I call the global genocide of the imagination.

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we believe that stories about the rot are not inherently more captivating than stories about the splendor. On the contrary, given how predictable and ubiquitous they are, stories about the rot are actually quite dull. Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing in despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.

Most modern storytellers go even further in their devotion to the rot, implying that breakdown is not only more interesting but far more common than breakthrough, that painful twists outnumber vigrous transformations by a wide margin. That's just absurd disinformation. Entropy does not dominate the human experience. Even factoring in the misery in parts of Africa and the Middle East, the Global Bad Nasty Ratio never exceeds 50 percent. And here in the West, where most of you reading this live, the proportion is lower. Besides that, the fact is that a vast majority of the people on this planet love to be alive, and the preponderance of their experience is a YES, not a NO.

Still, we at the Beauty and Truth Lab are willing to let the news media fill up half their pages and airwaves and bandwidths with poker-faced accounts of decline and degeneration, misery and destruction. We can tolerate a reasonable proportion of movies and novels and TV dramas that revel in pathology. But we also demand EQUAL TIME for stories about integrity and joy and beauty and bliss and renewal and harmony and love. That's all we ask: a mere 50 percent.

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I vividly recall one of the shocks that incited me to head in the direction of pronoia. While perusing the front page of my local daily newspaper some years ago, I was startled to find a tiny oasis of redemptive news amidst the usual accounts of reeling turmoil. It reported that inner cities all over America were undergoing a profound renaissance. From Los Angeles to New Orleans to Boston, the poorest sections of town were becoming markedly safer. New businesses were opening, capital was flowing in, neighborhood clean ups were proliferating, drug sales were decreasing, and people were relaxing on their front porches again.

I was amazed that such an uplifting story had cracked the media's taboo against good news. And yet its anomalous presence as an exception to the rule proved that the rule is virtually ironclad.

At this late date in the evolution of pop nihilism, the problem is not merely the media's relentless brainwashing. We of the mass audience have become thoroughly converted to the sadomasochistic vision of the world: so much so that we've almost lost the power even to perceive evidence that contradicts that vision. The good news is virtually invisible.

Even those of us whose passion it is to champion the cause of beauty and truth are in the early stages of fighting our blindness. We are retraining our eyes to see the emancipating truth about the nature of reality.

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As we gather the secret stories of the human race's glories and success, the Beauty and Truth Lab doesn't spend much time on ho-hum data like, "Two thousand planes took off yesterday and all landed safely." We leave that to others with more patience. Our preferred evidence emphasizes the triumphs that have entertainment value equal to the bad nasty stuff.

We also want our good news to consist of more than reports about hurts being healed and disasters being averted. We celebrate the family of the deceased Israeli girl who gave her heart to be transplanted into a sick Palestinian boy, but we also want a front-page story about physicist Paul Ginsparg, who has revolutionized scientific communication by creating a free service for publishing and reading research reports on the Internet.

We cheer forest protection activist Odigha Odigha's successful campaign to preserve Nigeria's last remaining rain forests, but we want to hear more about George Soros, whose philanthropy has provided billions of dollars in support for intellectual freedom and democratic societies in more than 30 countries.

We honor West Virginia's Julia Bonds, who has made headway in her campaign to halt mountaintop coal mining before it turns more river valleys into waste dumps, but we also want sensational acknowledgment for Ruth Lilly, who donated $100 million of her fortune to Poetry magazine, even though its editors had rejected all the poems she had submitted for possible publication over the years.

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I invite you to share with us the interesting good news you come across in your travels. Not sentimental tales of generic hope; not "Chicken Soup for the Soul;" not life imitating the faux Hollywood art of contrived happy endings; but rather crafty, enigmatic, lyrical eruptions of the sublime; unpredictable outbreaks of soul that pass Emily Dickinson's test for poetry: She said she always knew when she was reading the real thing because it made her feel like the top of her head was about to come off.

Feel free, too, to take up the cause of zoom and boom as you resist the practitioners of doom and gloom in your own sphere. Demand equal time for news about integrity and joy and beauty and pleasure and renewal and harmony and love. In your personal life, be alert for stories that tend to provide evidence for the fact that all of creation is conspiring to give us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.

P.S. Part of our task is to hunt down and identify the interesting good news that's going on now. But we've also been charged with the job of creating the good news that's coming.

"The Buddhist View Of Life as a Dream" (Guest Post)

From LifeAsAHuman.

Author Rick Bateman.

It is often heard from Buddhist teachers, that this life is nothing more than a dream and awakening no different in either case. Having studied lucid dreaming in a dedicated way for about two years I have to agree with this assessment. Let me make a couple of key points in this regard but importantly explain why this insight is of any practical use.

First of all, lucid dreaming is when you are dreaming but you know you are dreaming. You are fast asleep, dreaming and fully conscious. In order to learn how to have more lucid dreams, I read everything by Dr. Stephen LaBerge, joined his Lucidity Institute and practiced diligently. Dr. LaBerge has probably conducted more clinical research into the phenomenon of lucid dreaming than any other scientist. His book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, reviews the history of the phenomenon and provides a detailed training program to teach anyone how to have lucid dreams. Having followed that program I can assure you it works and I was able to conduct a variety of experiments while lucid dreaming.



What is lucid dreaming like? Think Neo in The Matrix. Whatever you expect and believe to be real will be real. I mean as real as the waking world. While lucid dreaming I would check to see if things had the same physical characteristics as the real world. Of course they did and in as fine a level of detail as I cared to examine. They did because I expected them to. However I learned to work with this. Can I pass through that wall over there? Bonk! Nope. Ah, change the mind. Its not a wall but a veil and there is another room on the other side. This time, no problem.

Because the training required ‘round the clock practices, I also became highly aware of the nature of my regular dreams and gained a heightened awareness of the nature of the waking state of consciousness. I became very aware of how the waking state was different or similar to the dream state. Here is the key insight: although the physical characteristics of things in the dream state are different than the waking state, the state of consciousness is no different.

Why do we not normally realize when we are dreaming, especially when such odd things happen? We go blithely along with whatever happens as long as it is not too frightening. The reason is that we are not in a different state of consciousness than when we are awake. When we are dreaming, just like when we are awake, we accept everything that happens as normal. Let me turn that around for its real significance to be seen; when you are awake, you are in the same state of consciousness as when you are dreaming.

We are aware of the random flow of events in dreams but suffer the illusion that our waking life is different. It is not. Our life, just like our dreams, is nothing more than a constant series of responses to completely random events. We do not perceive them as random because we view our lives from a certain perspective in space and time. Our lives are a momentary formation like a swirl in billowing smoke or an eddy in a stream. However because we view our lives from within that formation, we suffer the illusions of permanence, separateness, meaning and control. Yet just as a cloud forms from random events in the atmosphere, changes and then disappears due to the same forces, so do our lives.



Buddhism teaches that all things are temporary due to their dependence on other things for their existence. This is only a part of the truth however, and the less difficult part to accept. Not only are all things temporary but their creation, existence and dissolution are all driven by random events.

Just as lucidity enables you to awaken in a dream, so you can awaken to the waking dream. This is nature of The Buddha’s awakening. This is enlightenment and nirvana. He saw that all things are temporary. He stopped doing what everyone else was doing, which was grasping at temporary things in the belief they will make one happy. He saw that, ironically, it was in fact the grasping that caused the very unhappiness we seek to avoid. He saw that all things depended on other things for their existence and stopped believing things could be controlled and instead saw that they must instead be accepted. To resist reality only makes us suffer and to accept it is the only path to the end of suffering, or what we call happiness. This is “Right View” and this insight is the goal of all Buddhist practice.

So how does one awaken? Just as I trained with the program offered by Dr. Stephen LaBerge to awaken in my sleeping dreams, there is another program available to enable you to awaken to the waking dream. That program is called The Eight Fold Path.