17 Jun 2012
I don't believe in karma as it is being presented by the Brahma Kumaris, e.g. that everything that happens to me is because of something I have done in the past. I don't believe in their eternally repeating, identical 5,000 Year Cycle, based on the idea that whatever I do at this time will determine by experience for the next 5,000 Years, especially when it requires me to give money or work for free for them. That is just insane.
I see that we, in this universe, are subject to many random events huge and small and except for putting the bread on our table from day to day, and perhaps buying some property and saving for retirement, there is very little we can be sure about. Life is largely out of control whether from environmental factors or political factors well beyond our influence.
Is that "negative thinking" to you?
Personally, I am a person who does not believe in the indisputable power of positive thinking. I have lived too long and seen too much evidence of the opposite to do so. Bad things happen to the best of people. ******* do very well. Living for today and having no expectation is often the best we can do.
Every generation, a certain percentage of people "discover" positive thinking. A few of them turn it into a business, the majority of them join it as consumers. As with dieting, the most likely person to buy a positive thinking or motivation book or product is someone who bought one in the last year or so ... suggesting, just like dieting, the last one did not work otherwise they would not need to. Americans lead the billion dollar global industry as it suits their materialistic enthusiasm. This has been going on for at least the last 100 years.
Everyone filters out of their minds the failures and set backs which go against suggesting that it actually works, e.g. I remember the leading guru in the 80s who built a big, international business up selling positive thinking who then almost died in a plane crash. One had to wonder if he was so positive and his creative vision so powerful ... why did it happen to him then? Such things are quickly forgotten about.
When the BKs came to the West they did not immediately adopt it, they sold themselves on "Peace of Mind" but since 'The Secret' and movies like, it seems to have become more common within their circles and corporate coaching spin offs. Again the BKWSO is the USA seems to lean more to this side of being "great" and succeeding etc.
Why are the Brahma Kumaris getting into "motivating people" in corporation's who primarily goal is to make money? How can them sell themselves on one hand as "environmental" and, on the other, being about Destruction and collaborating with the most unenvironmental businesses? Boasting about it to make them seem more powerful.
I guess the answer is, it is just another marketing device they have picked up from outside because it seems successful in the lifestyle market place, and it is ... successful in attracting curious and sometime vulnerable people, and selling a few books, but not actually successful in working.
I see that we, in this universe, are subject to many random events huge and small and except for putting the bread on our table from day to day, and perhaps buying some property and saving for retirement, there is very little we can be sure about. Life is largely out of control whether from environmental factors or political factors well beyond our influence.
Is that "negative thinking" to you?
Personally, I am a person who does not believe in the indisputable power of positive thinking. I have lived too long and seen too much evidence of the opposite to do so. Bad things happen to the best of people. ******* do very well. Living for today and having no expectation is often the best we can do.
Every generation, a certain percentage of people "discover" positive thinking. A few of them turn it into a business, the majority of them join it as consumers. As with dieting, the most likely person to buy a positive thinking or motivation book or product is someone who bought one in the last year or so ... suggesting, just like dieting, the last one did not work otherwise they would not need to. Americans lead the billion dollar global industry as it suits their materialistic enthusiasm. This has been going on for at least the last 100 years.
Everyone filters out of their minds the failures and set backs which go against suggesting that it actually works, e.g. I remember the leading guru in the 80s who built a big, international business up selling positive thinking who then almost died in a plane crash. One had to wonder if he was so positive and his creative vision so powerful ... why did it happen to him then? Such things are quickly forgotten about.
When the BKs came to the West they did not immediately adopt it, they sold themselves on "Peace of Mind" but since 'The Secret' and movies like, it seems to have become more common within their circles and corporate coaching spin offs. Again the BKWSO is the USA seems to lean more to this side of being "great" and succeeding etc.
Why are the Brahma Kumaris getting into "motivating people" in corporation's who primarily goal is to make money? How can them sell themselves on one hand as "environmental" and, on the other, being about Destruction and collaborating with the most unenvironmental businesses? Boasting about it to make them seem more powerful.
I guess the answer is, it is just another marketing device they have picked up from outside because it seems successful in the lifestyle market place, and it is ... successful in attracting curious and sometime vulnerable people, and selling a few books, but not actually successful in working.
Oliver Burkema wrote:From: The Antidote: Happiness for People Who cannot Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkema and a summary review at The Guardian newspaper.
Behind all of the most popular modern approaches to happiness and success is the simple philosophy of focusing on things going right. But ever since the first philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, a dissenting perspective has proposed the opposite: that it's our relentless effort to feel happy, or to achieve certain goals, that is precisely what makes us miserable and sabotages our plans. And that it is our constant quest to eliminate or to ignore the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, sadness – that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy in the first place.
Yet this conclusion does not have to be depressing. Instead, it points to an alternative approach: a "negative path" to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.
In the world of self-help, the most overt expression of our obsession with optimism is the technique known as "positive visualisation": mentally picture things turning out well, the reasoning goes, and they're far more likely to do so. Indeed, a tendency to look on the bright side may be so intertwined with human survival that evolution has skewed us that way. In her book, The Optimism Bias, the neuroscientist Tali Sharot compiles growing evidence that a well-functioning mind may be built so as to perceive the odds of things going well as greater than they really are. Non-depressed people, research suggests, generally have a less accurate and overly optimistic grasp of their true ability to influence events than do those who are suffering from depression.
Yet there are problems with this outlook, aside from just feeling disappointed when things don't turn out well. Over the last few years, the German-born psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues have constructed a series of experiments designed to unearth the truth about "positive fantasies about the future". The results are striking: spending time and energy focusing on how well things could go, it has emerged, actually reduces most people's motivation to achieve them. Experimental subjects who were encouraged to think about how they were going to have a particularly high-achieving week at work, for example, ended up achieving less. In one ingenious experiment, Oettingen had participants rendered mildly dehydrated. Then some were taken through an exercise that involved visualising drinking an icy, refreshing glass of water, while others took part in a different exercise. The water-visualisers experienced a significant reduction in their energy levels, as measured by blood pressure. Far from becoming more motivated to hydrate themselves, people responded to positive visualisation by relaxing. They seemed, subconsciously, to have confused imagining success with having already achieved it.
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For positive thinkers, this would be an argument for trying to replace your distress-causing beliefs with upbeat ones. But when thinking about the future, Stoics such as Seneca often counselled actively dwelling on worst-case scenarios instead – staring them in the face. Not only does ceaseless optimism make for a greater shock when things go wrong (and they will); imagining the worst also brings its own benefits.
Psychologists have long agreed that one of the greatest enemies of human happiness is "hedonic adaptation" – the predictable and frustrating way in which any new source of pleasure we obtain, whether it's as minor as a new electronic gadget or as major as a marriage, swiftly gets relegated to the backdrop of our lives: we grow accustomed to it, and it ceases to deliver so much joy. It follows, then, that regularly reminding yourself that you might lose any of the things you currently enjoy can reverse the adaptation effect. Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more.
The second, subtler and arguably more powerful benefit of this kind of negative thinking is as an antidote to anxiety. Consider how we normally seek to assuage worries about the future: we seek reassurance, looking to persuade ourselves that everything will be all right in the end. But reassurance is a double-edged sword. In the short term, it can be wonderful, but like all forms of optimism, it requires constant maintenance: offer reassurance to a friend who is in the grip of anxiety, and you'll often find that, a few days later, he'll be back for more. Worse, reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won't occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it.
All too often, the Stoics note, things will not turn out for the best. But it is also true that, when they do go wrong, they'll almost certainly go less wrong than you feared. Losing your job is unlikely to condemn you to starvation and death; losing a relationship won't condemn you to a life of unrelenting misery. Those fears are based on irrational judgments about the future. The worst thing about any future event, the Stoic-influenced psychologist Albert Ellis used to say, "is usually your exaggerated belief in its horror". Spend time vividly imagining exactly how wrong things could go in reality, and you'll often turn bottomless, nebulous fears into finite and manageable ones. Happiness reached via positive thinking is fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.
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Another problem with our reluctance to think about or analyse failure – whether our own or other people's – is that it leads to an utterly distorted picture of the causes of success. Bookshops are stuffed with autobiographical volumes such as the one released in 2006 by the multimillionaire publisher Felix Dennis, entitled How To Get Rich: The Distilled Wisdom Of One Of Britain's Wealthiest Self-Made Entrepreneurs. It's an entertaining read, conveying a similar message to many of the others: that to make a fortune what you need is stubbornness and a willingness to take risks.
But research by the Oxford management theorist Jerker Denrell suggests that these are just as likely to be the characteristics of extremely unsuccessful people, too. It's just that the failures don't write books. You rarely see autobiographies of people who took risks that then did not work out.
Fortunately, developing a healthier approach to failure may be easier than you'd think. The work of the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck suggests that our experiences of failure are influenced overwhelmingly by the beliefs we hold about the nature of talent and ability – and that we can, perhaps quite straightforwardly, nudge ourselves towards a better outlook. Each of us can be placed somewhere on a continuum, Dweck argues, depending on our "implicit view" – or unspoken attitude – about what talent is and where it comes from. Those with a "fixed theory" assume that ability is innate; those with an "incremental theory" believe that it evolves through challenge and hard work. If you're the kind of person who strives mightily to avoid the experience of failure, it's likely that you reside near the "fixed" end of Dweck's continuum. Fixed-theory people approach challenges as occasions on which they are called upon to demonstrate their innate abilities, and so they find failure especially horrifying: to them, it's a sign that they tried to show how good they are, but did not measure up. The classic example is the young sports star encouraged to think of himself as a "natural" – but who then fails to put in sufficient practice to realise his potential. If talent is innate, his unspoken reasoning goes, then why bother?
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The gurus of positivity and optimism cannot bear to contemplate that there might be happiness to be found in embracing failure as failure, not only as a technique for achieving success. But, as the Zen-influenced writer Natalie Goldberg argues, there is an openness and honesty in failure, a down-to-earth confrontation with reality that can seem lacking at the higher altitudes of success. Perfectionism is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not-so-secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw. Yet, at bottom, it is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At the extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live: there is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, researchers have found, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide. To fully embrace the experience of failure, not merely to tolerate it as a stepping stone to glory, is to abandon this constant straining never to put a foot wrong – and to relax.