Positive thinking alone is toxic

There's a fad philosophy going around right now, best represented by the book, "The Secret". It's a re-hash of the "positive thinking" fad of the 20th century.

The basic idea is that you can improve your life just by thinking the right way, and "attracting" positive things to yourself.

There is a small amount of truth to this. If you are not on the lookout for good things, you can easily miss them. A person with a defeatist attitude will just sit in misery, rather than take action to change it.

But, there are two really BAD things about this idea.

The first is that it encourages people to faith without action. If you can get what you want by sitting in your back yard and meditating, why go out and work for it? The truth is, if you want to be a Marine Biologist, visualizing it is all well and good, but you still need to get into the Ocean and study.
(Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote a rant on this very topic. It was called "God answers prayer; He does not grant wishes.")

The second, and worst bad thing about the idea is the unconscious way in which it blames people for bad things that happen to them. If you can attract things with your thoughts, and a tornado wipes out your house... well, you must have wanted to get rid of that house!

A friend of mine who thinks "The Secret" is something wonderful and new has a lot of trouble facing the more unpleasant aspects of reality. She was upset to hear news of the Virginia Tech shooting. So were most of us. The idea that you can be minding your own business and someone just wanders in and shoots you is not a happy one. However, it is a possibility. It's not likely, but it is possible. My friend simply could not accept that. She actually said to me, "I guess those people were ready to move on..." meaning that they were killed because they wanted to die.

THAT is the ultimate conclusion of all these "positive thoughts" philosophies.

It leads not only to blaming people for bad things that happen to them, but to believing that, because you don't want bad things to happen to you, they won't.

The world simply does not work that way.

If a meteor falls on your head, it is not because you didn't have the right thoughts. It's because meteors occasionally fall, and you happened to be standing where one fell. It's not personal, it's not your fault, it has no meaning. The important thing is what you DO about a rock falling on your head at random.

Once you have put your hands to your head to feel the knot, and said "ow!ow!ow!" you can react in several ways.

If you subscribe to "The Secret" philosophy, and you can go over and over your thinking to see how you attracted this negative event. Or you can puzzle over what great lesson the Universe has for you in this pain.

Or, you can look for the rock, find it, and think it's pretty cool that you got hit by a meteor, and show it off to your friends.

The great lesson is that, sometimes rocks fall from the sky, and if you happen to be standing under it at the time, you get a painful lump on your head.