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What’s Wrong With Positive Thinking.

We all have Attitudes, Beliefs, Concepts, Denials and Expectations about life – I call them ABCDEs.

Deeply ingrained and often unconsciously held, our ABCDEs control our internal landscape.  By creating, reflecting and reinforcing set mental and emotional positions they frame our experience of life.

“Frame” with its associations of confinement and enclosure is an appropriate word.  Our ABCDEs often limit us.

This is especially true of  those we hold unconsciously — the ones that we don’t know we don’t know.

These associations are much deeper than surface thoughts. The interconnections between our inner and outer worlds are complex and multi-faceted and it is simplistic to say, as so many New Age “gurus” do, that creating a new, more positive life is merely a matter of thinking new, more positive thoughts.

The late, brilliant, creative, eccentric British psychiatrist, R.D. Laing put it this way: “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change — until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

A key requirement of creative intelligence is accepting that you don’t know what you don’t know.  Paradoxically, the moment that you understand that is the moment in which you begin to know more.

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