
By Jeff Bell.
The business of positive thinking has been around forever.
In 1907 the prolific William Walker Atkinson popularised the ancient wisdom known as The Law of Attraction, stating that the energy we radiate into the universe is joined by other energies that harmonise to produce the extraordinary—simply that positive thoughts bring positive results while negative thoughts bring the opposite. Napoleon Hill gave it another boost with Think and Grow
Rich in 1937, as did Rhonda Byrne in The Secret in 2006.
Among many things, Henry Ford may have said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right”—emphasising how much our attitude can determine success or failure.
In 1952 Norman Vincent Peal gained the naming rights when he wrote about his brand of Methodist faith and optimism in the bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience in 1990. Being in the flow, or in the zone, is when we are doing something that fully immerses us in a feeling of full involvement and enjoyment.
This week I’ve been reading Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, by Dr Joe Dispenza, which was published in 2012. It’s about reprogramming our thinking to change our life—if we want a new outcome, we will have to break the habit of being ourself and re-invent a new self.
Dispenza starts with a comparison of the Isaac Newton-René Descartes inspired cause and effect view of the world. This, he believes when applied to human thinking and behaviour influences us to be victims of our environment. Namely, that our external environment controls our internal environment—our thoughts, feelings and memories form which we form our beliefs and behaviours. He posits that if we endlessly rely on the past for clues on how to behave, we will be forever trapped. Instead, we need to change our internal environment in order to create the change we want to see and be in our external world.
This relies on quantum physics—that all physical reality is connected across time and space and holding all probabilities. If 99.99999% of the universe is invisible energy, he asks, why are we focused on that tiny fraction of the universe that we can see, that is matter. His thesis is that we need to send out a signal about what we want to happen in our lives. This will harmonise with other energy and create the possibilities we wish for. Conversely, if we send out suffering signals from our past, the quantum field will respond in the same negative way.
Instead of cause and effect, we need cause an effect, Dispenza says.
From this, the question will arise: “How can I think, feel and behave differently to produce the effect / results that I want?”
So, when we make this change to our way of thinking, we can change our lives. If we take care of the “what” of our future, the universe will take care of the “how”. By imagining, visualizing and feeling with appropriate clarity about what we want, we can have and be that future state.
If we think: Is being that way going to attract to us all that we desire? Then we can inhabit a new mind and observe, eventually achieving, a new destiny. This is the subjective mind having an effect on the objective world—quantum physics in action, as Dispenza says.
Our thoughts can create our reality.
To create something different to our life as it is now, we have to change the way we are thinking, now.
If we find we are stuck in our lives. If we feel that we lack the will, the time, the courage or the imagination to change our lives…the difficulty of being ourselves can be overwhelming. Perhaps we will be the beneficiary of some magical event, where everything is put right. So we sit and wait?
Or, do we bite the bullet and generate change from within?
This is not the last word in positive thinking, nor is it the last book that we will ever see on the subject, but it has many useful insights, and provides a clear path, nonetheless.