Changing the World

Many of my friends are passionate about a variety of challenges and issues considered to be hot topics in the dialogue of the day.

I applaud their passion. I often agree with their points of view. They have the best interests of the country, the earth, and humankind forever on their minds.

More often than not, any given e-mail, blog post, comment, telephone call, or dinner conversation will include a rather long list of the nation’s ills, the world’s ills, endless lists of what corporate America, the government, one political party or another, the President, big box stores, etc. etc. are doing wrong. I hear longer lists of problems, ills, and wrongs than proactive, positive solutions.

I find these discussions painful and become tongue tied because I am firmly convinced that whether one is worried about terrorism or global warming or health care or poverty or immigration, those who can do nothing but state and re-state the problems are making the problems worse.

While watching the movie “The Secret,” I heard my favorite proverb: What you resist, persists. That’s similar to Seth’s comment in one of the Jane Roberts books: Fear of robbers only brings robbers. Regardless of the fear involved, we hear this viewpoint echoed forcefully by “Abraham” (via Esther Hicks).

Last week as I was pondering the value and potential influence of “The Secret,” I wondered if the philosophy in the book/film would rub off–or at least be noticed–by those who habitually make lists of the world’s issues.

Many people would like to know why it’s so difficult to fix things or change things. I want to say: you are thinking and focusing on the negative 24/7. By doing so, you are adding strength to it and ensuring that it (global warming, poverty, health care ills, war) never goes away.

“Good” thought, “bad” thought

Jesse Kornbluth, writing on his Head Butler review site, recently discussed the popularity of “The Secret” and it’s message.

He finds real wisdom in “The Secret,” while wondering why great thinkers who are said to have known the secret many years ago were not more overt in sharing it.

There is nothing new about the concept that thoughts are things or that the world we find ourselves in is the world we’re creating by thinking “good” thoughts or “bad” thoughts.

Kornbluth notes such events as the Holocaust, the Iraq war, and Katrina and wonders if the victims brought evil and disaster upon themselves.

Many of those who say “good thoughts attract good things into our lives” and “bad thoughts attract chaos and strife into our lives” put the brakes on their beliefs when it comes to horrific events. While they can see that a single person might sabotage his or her life by a sequence of negative thoughts that lead to suicide or “accident,” they are not willing to consider that many people thinking many sequences of negative thoughts can possibly bring about large disasters.

This one-sided view of “how things work,” while compassionate, represents a spiritual hedging of one’s views and, I think, creates doubt amongst those who have the secret in their hands but fail to see it’s scope.

Focus

“In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know.” –Clarissa Pinkola Estes
 

If it were easy, we wouldn’t be needed as much as we are.