POSITIVE THINKING? BULLSHIT! //I dont teach you optimism. In the West it is very fashionable nowadays; it is called positive thinking. That is a new name for optimism; the old name has become a little too out of fashion, out-of-date. The new name is positive thinking. I dont teach you positive thinking, because positive thinking carries the negative in its wake. I teach you transcendence – neither positive nor negative. Be a watcher: witness both. When there is day, witness the day, and when there is night, witness the night – and dont get identified with either. You are neither the day nor the night; you are the transcendental consciousness. Become more and more centered there in that transcendence. // (The Dhammapada, Vol. 4, Talk 2) //The philosophy of positive thinking means being untruthful; it means being dishonest. It means seeing a certain thing and yet denying what you have seen; it means deceiving yourself and others. Positive thinking is the only bullshit philosophy that America has contributed to human thought – nothing else. Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and the Christian priest, Vincent Peale – all these people have filled the whole American mind with this absolutely absurd idea of a positive philosophy. And it appeals particularly to mediocre minds. Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, has been sold in numbers just next to the Christian Bible. No other book has been able to reach that popularity. The Christian Bible should not be a competitor in fact, because it is more or less given free, forced on people. But Dale Carnegie’s book people have been purchasing; it has not been given to you free. And it has created a certain kind of ideology which has given birth to many books of a similar kind. But to me it is nauseating. … Dale Carnegie started this whole school of positive philosophy, positive thinking: Don’t see the negative part, don’t see the darker side. But by your not seeing it, do you think it disappears? You are just befooling yourself. You cannot change reality. The night will still be there; you can think that it is daytime for twenty-four hours, but by your thinking it, it is not going to be light twenty-four hours a day. The negative is as much part of life as the positive. They balance each other. After Dale Carnegie, the great name in the tradition of this positive thinking is Napoleon Hill. Think and Grow Rich is his greatest contribution to the world – a beautifully written book, but all crap. Think and grow rich… you don’t have to do anything, you only have to think in absolutely positive terms and riches will start flowing towards you. If they don’t come, that simply means that you have not been thinking absolutely positively. So these are beautiful games in which you cannot defeat the man who is proposing the game. He has the key in his hands. If you succeed by chance, then he succeeds because his philosophy – think and grow rich – has succeeded. You have been thinking and thinking and thinking and positively thinking that dollars are showering on you – these are not snowflakes but dollars showering on you – and suddenly your uncle dies and leaves you a big inheritance. Naturally, positive thinking works! But if you don’t succeed… and ninety-nine percent of the time you are not going to succeed – you know perfectly well that your positive thinking is not absolutely positive; you know that there is doubt. Once is a while you open your eyes to see whether they are dollars or just snowflakes. You see they are just snowflakes, and you again close your eyes and start thinking that dollars are showering. But the doubt is there, that these really are snowflakes. Whom are you trying to befool? All these thoughts are going on: “This is just nonsense, I shouldn’t waste my time, I could be earning some dollars; this way I am losing rather than gaining.” But Napoleon Hill writes beautifully and gives examples of how people have succeeded by positive thinking. And you can find people – this world is big enough. For everything you can find an example. Why one? – you can find hundreds of examples if you just look around and try to find them. And all these people have been doing just that: they find examples, and they place the examples in beautiful poetic prose. And of course you want to be rich, so they exploit your ambition, your desire. They give you such a simple method – and they don’t ask anything of you in return. About Napoleon Hill I remember… he himself was a poor man. That would have been enough proof to disprove his whole philosophy. He became rich by selling the book, Think and Grow Rich. But it was not positive thinking that was making him rich – it was fools around the world who were purchasing the book, it was his work, his labor, his effort. But in the very beginning days, when his book came out, he used to stand in bookstores to persuade people to purchase the book. And it happened that Henry Ford came in his latest model car and went into the bookshop to find something light to read. And Napoleon Hill did not want to miss this chance. He went forwards with his book and he said, “A great book has just been published – you will be happy with it. And it is not only a book, it is a sure method of success.” Henry Ford looked at the man and said, “Are you the writer of the book?” Napoleon Hill said proudly, “Yes, I am the writer of the book.” And he can be proud: that book he has written is a piece of art. And to create a piece of art out of crap is real mastery. Henry Ford, without touching the book, just asked one question, “Have you come in your own car or on the bus?” Napoleon Hill could not understand what he meant. He said, “Of course, I came on the bus.” Henry Ford said, ”Look outside. That is my private car, and I am Henry Ford. You are befooling others; you don’t have even a private car and you write a book called Think and Grow Rich! And I have grown rich without thinking, so I don’t want to bother with it. You think and grow rich! – and when you grow rich then you come to me. That will be the proof. The book is not the proof.” And it is said that Napoleon Hill never could gather up the courage to meet this old man, Henry Ford, again, even though he became a little richer. But compared to Henry Ford he was always a poor man and was bound to remain a poor man, always. But Henry Ford’s logic was clear. No. I do not believe in any philosophy of positive thinking; nor do I believe in the opposite, in the philosophy of negative thinking – because both are there. The positive and the negative make one whole. My philosophy is holistic – neither positivist, nor negativist, but holistic, realistic. You see the whole in its totality, whatever it is. Good and bad, day and night, life and death, they both are there. My approach is to see exactly what is the case. There is no need to project any philosophy on it. … You ask me: Am I against positive philosophy? Yes, because I am also against negative philosophy. I have to be against both because both choose only half the fact, and both try to ignore the other half. And remember: a half-truth is far more dangerous than a whole lie, because the whole lie will be discovered by you sooner or later. How long can it remain undiscovered by you? A lie, of course, is a lie; it is just a palace made of playing cards – a little breeze and the whole palace disappears. But the half-truth is dangerous. You may never discover it, you may continue to think it is the whole truth. So the real problem is not the whole lie, the real problem is the half-truth pretending to be the whole truth; and that is what these people are doing. The philosophy of positive thinking says: “Take everything positively. The negative should not have any space in your approach, there should be no negative part.” This is making a part, the positive part, almost the whole. The same is true about negative people, although there are none who preach the philosophy of negative thinking, because who is going to listen to them? They will say, “If somebody is smiling, look out – there must be something he is hiding behind the smile. In fact, he must want to cry or weep. Look out – don’t be deceived by his smiling; find out the negative. If he is looking very happy, that means certainly there is something that he is trying to hide behind his happiness.” People are so miserable, who is going to listen to such a philosopher? They will say, “We are already so miserable, and you are teaching us to search for more misery! Even if a false smile is there, at least it is there. Please forgive us, we can’t go on digging and finding the tears. We have enough tears already. And just a smile – although it may be just a mannerism, a formality, just a civilized way of meeting somebody….” When you meet somebody and ask, “How are you?” – he says, “I am perfectly well.” Now, if you are a negative philosopher you have to find out what this man is hiding: “How can he be perfectly well? Have you ever heard of anybody in the world being perfectly well? He is lying!” But nobody will listen to a negative philosopher. You also say, “I am perfectly well. You are perfectly well? – good.” And you depart in good spirits. What is the point of showing one’s wounds to each other and making each other more miserable than before? So there is no school of negative philosophers. But there are more people who believe in negative philosophy without knowing it than there are people who believe in positive philosophy. In fact, all these believers in positive philosophy are basically negative. To hide that negativity they believe firmly in the positive philosophy. I am not in support of either side. I am in favor of taking the whole truth, and that’s what I would like you to do too: take the whole truth, because the negative is as essential as the positive. You cannot create electricity with only the positive pole; you will need the negative pole too. Only with both the negative and the positive pole can you create electricity. Is the negative absolutely negative? It is complementary, so it is not against the positive.// (From Ignorance to Innocence, Ch 29)
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 17:33:56 +0000
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