What is the link between positive thinking and life circumstance? What is this mysterious connection between abstract thoughts, fleshy neurons and the physical world? It’s hard to define how your inner thoughts can influence the physical world, but it’s a phenomenon that, in my opinion, seems to stand true. At the very least, no one’s ever said that thinking positively and visualising is bad for you… So, what’s to lose? But… Like the bright, howling flame causes a hot air balloon to rise, the absence of such, causes it to fall, crashing back to the ground. So too our thoughts influence our drift in the physical world. So that’s easy, right? Think positive, believe in yourself and life will be kind. In my opinion, the notion of positive thinking is simple in theory, but in practice, it’s incredibly bloody difficult. It seems to be a struggle of Sisyphean proportion to stop the internal, judgemental, bias and negative entity that is our putrid thought.
To stop thinking the worst possible scenario becomes a conscious and arduous task for most people every day. It’s as if an ancient and redundant brain system still exists within us, not yet cut away by the knife of evolution. We’re still programmed to recognise danger to such an extent that our thought patterns follow the same mindset of worst case scenario. Brain structures from times long past drag us back to an ancient world where beady-eyed predators lurk in the darkness and vigilance was the most important survival mechanism.
So, we sit in our dank, musty, cluttered, fearful existence of “I hate myself”, “I’m useless “and “life sucks” and we start searching for something, anything to make us feel better or give us answers. We find inspirational quotes on Google and we post our ‘motivation porn’ on Facebook. We want to believe but, in reality, we’re fucking depressed.
A typical piece of ‘Motivation Porn’ that can be found on any Facebook news feed.
We then look to others who seem successful and happy in life and we judge.
Why does this other person deserve to have everything and not me?
What have I done wrong to deserve this?
The freight train of self-fulfilling prophecy then continues to gain momentum as our internal negativity manifests in our external world as if appearing to ‘prove our point’ and we slowly descend into the sticky, addictive world of being ‘the victim’.
The fact of the matter is, if you believe in the ‘Law of Attraction’ or simply that thinking positively will manifest in your life then you need to realise one important fact. It’s a law of the universe. It’s like gravity. It does not discriminate nor does it reward dependent on who you are or what you’ve done. Believing that you deserve positivity and happiness in your life more than someone else is like throwing a criminal and a priest off a building and expecting the criminal to plummet to his death but the priest to be miraculously saved. It won’t happen because attracting things through positive thinking is simply leveraging a non-judgemental law of the universe that bubbles into action following a set of rules, the same a gravity.
I think that many of our problems in life stem from the fact that we look at things in the wrong way. We expect life to be fair, we expect retribution if we’re hard-done-by and we expect that assholes will get what’s coming for them. However, what if we were to look at life and the universe as a set of laws and see events as cause and effect rather than internalising a dialogue of pity, self-loathing and resentment. If we focused this energy on changing our own mindset, I think we would be amazed by the results. The problem is, it’s just so bloody hard!
This is why Donald Trump is where he is today. How else can a man of such superficiality, an orange, broad-faced imbecile who oozes putrid ego through every orifice… How can such a person be legitimately in the running for the most powerful job in the world?
Trump enjoying KFC in his private jet. Courtesy Twitter – @realDonalTrump
My theory is that believing in yourself, whether in the form of arrogance or humility creates a shift in the physical world and manipulates this law of attraction. Sure, Trump didn’t build himself from nothing, he was given a ‘small’ loan of a million dollars by his father, but the fact is, even after losing his fortune more than once, he’s bounced back with a style of buoyancy that could only be rivalled by his ridiculous hair.
If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2013
So, why most of us are swimming in a healthy and humble self-loathing, Trump’s out starting every day believing he’s God’s gift to America and, sadly, it’s working. Trump is not the only example of this… There are many other dictators and horrible humans who have risen to great power throughout history and perhaps it’s only for the simple fact that they believed so hard that, they were great leaders that they actually shifted the physical world, for a short time, and created a tide of followers to surge towards them beaten and battered.
I think the problem with modern society is that you’re no longer allowed to love yourself. To tell someone that they ‘love themselves’ is just a schoolyard taunt used to insult people who seem too ambitious. This is a very Western world concept, the idea that we must all be humble and respectful. Whilst I agree this is true, I feel that we’ve blurred the line between arrogance and self-confidence in fear of appearing to others that we might love ourselves… Even a little bit.
I met my wife in the Philippines. The Philippines is arguably the selfie capital of the world. When my wife first came to Australia, I used to get embarrassed when she would stop and take a selfie. She asked me why, and I replied
“because if you take selfies it means you love yourself”.
Her reply then threw me and left me without an answer;
“What’s wrong with loving yourself? You should love yourself”
I had never really thought about why I shouldn’t love myself and in that moment I stood there thinking, of course, people should love themselves… How can you love others if you don’t even love yourself? I had just been so brainwashed in trying to be humble at all costs and was so caught up in the global collective self-loathing that I’d never stood back to actually question it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m by NO means saying let’s all be like Trump, but well, at least the man loves himself. I just think it’s scary that the world is in such a dark landscape of self-hate that, if there is indeed a law of attraction spawn from believing in yourself, there’s probably not much competition for it! This is evidenced by the Trumps of the world who for right or wrong, break free of self-loathing . Then where is the line between arrogance and confidence? I’m not sure. What I’m even more not sure of is where the law of attraction stands on arrogance. It seems that if your mind is so blissfully unaware of your shortcomings and you have a genuine belief in yourself then, that it can reap massive rewards.
I’m not suggesting Trump’s a happy man… He certainly doesn’t seem it. I’m also not alluding to the notion that money and success equal happiness. All I’m suggesting is that life seems to work out for people who are able to think positively. The man’s a dickhead and he’s also got a lot of hate, but you can’t deny that he’s enjoyed his life and that his self-confidence seems to have had an enormous effect on his life.
Is this fair? Well, that’s not really the point. Maybe we should all learn to love ourselves a bit more and make the competition for yielding the powers of positive thinking a bit more of a fair race. If we all genuinely loved ourselves, then perhaps the universe would only wince at the superficial arrogance that Trump exudes. But, in a world where we’re not allowed to love ourselves and we perpetuate self-loathing… Then it seems maybe life’s for the Trumps, the Operas and the Robins’s of the world.
I think we need to stop complaining about what’s fair, right or just and instead focus on harnessing the power of our own minds. And, let’s all just hope that Trump’s power of self-love isn’t enough to win him the election!
Motivational speaker Tony Robbins with Oprah Winfrey. I’m not putting Oprah and Robbins in the same boat as Trump. I find these two inspiring. However, I feel that they have harnessed the power of their minds and turned it into a highly successful product.
I found the SECRET video quite childish and low on the brain scale, appealing to the masses that would like to believe in the Law of Attraction (LOA). I think LOA is the same as self-fulfilling prophesy, just like prayer. Belief in oneself — true belief — belief permeating into every cell of the body — THAT can do wonders.
Love him or hate him, it would be absurd for anyone to deny that Trump is a master of the LOA at this point. His ability to keep on thinking, feeling, speaking and acting the way he wants his reality to be and thus making it be that way is very impressive (with his latest success, it helps that over 60,000,000 people were on the same wavelength as him in his beliefs.)
Trump’s one big weakness would have to be his mental and emotional immaturity – he finds it difficult to handle when people and things attempt to intrude on his reality, and his reactions send out negative energy that have led to some big setbacks for him. But after each setback, he always gets right back on the saddle and applying positive energy to fix things. The whole country better hope and pray that he uses his gift for using the LOA well over the next four or eight years.
Prophetic article as of November, 9th. 2016. Good job, Ben! Very insightful, thank you.