We humans are a superstitious lot. There is one insidious form of superstition, pessimism, that is the hidden culprit behind many of our disappointments in life…
It all starts with an inner attitude that goes something like this: “If I believe that something good may happen, I will be disappointed because I will chase it away with my believing in it. Maybe it’s a safer bet to believe that nothing good will happen to me”. This is the game we play with ourselves…
At some point, this playful game starts to go sideways. And then the fun gets lost in its tragically painful effects…Because there is power in our thoughts, and there’s no playing with that power without getting hurt…
There’s no limit to the many things we might be applying this to in life. Perhaps it’s regarding the healing of an illness…Maybe we’re lacking funds or the satisfaction of a fulfilling profession or relationship. So we comfort ourselves by saying “I’m going to believe it has to be this way, so then maybe it can come to me out of the blue”…
After a while, we get so far down the rabbit hole, we begin to believe that the negative manifestation is reality. So what started as a fun little superstitious safety valve has turned into a belief on another level of our awareness. This is what now creates reality and keeps us stuck in a lousy place. Curiouser and curiouser…
We need to counter our habit of tricking ourselves, wherever it exists in us, by finding new pathways for our minds to follow…This next step is the real nut. On the surface it may sound simple but it may also require us to marshal a fair bit of courage—the courage to believe in the good…Without any assurances that things are all going to turn out fine, we’re going to have to venture into unknown territory where we believe in the positive. Gleeps…
We can pick our path. The road of Eeyore-style gloom, denial and defeatism. Or the road of faith in the innate nature of life to unfold with beautiful possibilities. The anchor holding us back from manifesting awesome possibilities lies in our own soul. There’s nothing we can’t realize if we truly give ourselves to it…We have the power to remove the anchor…
The nice thing about our old superstitions is that we just speak negative beliefs and they come true. No waiting…It’s tempting to lean on that instead of investing in a very uncertain waiting period…For the journey to having faith in a positive unfoldment takes a bit of time to ripen…
We need the patience of a gardener who understands that a gestation period is required. With experience, the gardener learns that after sowing seeds, one must wait for the plants to sprout. It would be hard to trust this process until we’ve seen it in action…
There is a pitfall to watch out for: it’s easy to confuse this courage of which we speak—a vigorous faith in good outcomes—with wishful thinking. But they’re not the same…How do we distinguish between the two? With wishful thinking, we spin fantastic dreams of fulfillment without having any price to pay…In our daydreams, happiness comes our way magically and gratuitously…We think we can game the system…Daydreams, then, are nothing more than the flipside of the superstition of pessimism…
But what if we took all that mischanneled energy and creativity and sunk it into a commitment to life and ourselves? We could actually then accomplish the very thing we are daydreaming about…We need to find the courage to believe in our own riches, and have faith in the best life can be.
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Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #236 The Superstition of Pessimism
