The Negative Potential

‘Think positive”. It is a modern way to stay motivated, to look forward with hope and to keep on going. It is almost a spiritual mantra people declare when they feel down or challenged. To think this way is to welcome business and financial luck, to be happier in one’s career and relationship, and to be inspired in achieving success in all levels. Sustaining this predisposition is to combat the positive’s archenemy: the negative. Being positive means renouncing all negative, its expressions and their causes.

This thinking armageddon is the playing field of motivation for entrepreneurs who want to earn more, or for dreamers who want to make it big. I have often heard that the law of attraction is all about this thinking principle. When you are positive , you attract what is positive. When you are negative, you attract nothing but negative. Positive is what we connect with things and truths that make us grow, while negative makes us down and defeated. We simplistically conclude that positive is always good, and negative is always bad and evil.

What is our yardstick for this? We use the word negative to describe people we don’t like, who sabotage our ideas and never operate on our mentality. All kinds of our personal and social problems we face are also negative to us. Our emotions like fear, frustrations, anger and guilt are all negative. And many of our unwanted sufferings and pains, be it physical or emotional, are also negative. Are these negative thoughts real? Or are they just what we have learned to blindly accept?

The irony of this negative versus positive causes the things we think as negative to be more pronounced. Worse, we have extended this battle between the many universal opposites. To be a man is positive and to be a woman negative. To be strong is positive and to be weak is negative. White is positive and black is negative. More is positive and less is negative. Light is positive and dark is negative. This thinking has become a mental norm yet a contagious spiritual sickness.

Negative is never a negative. It is a neutral potential, an archetypal power that is present in all.

We rarely question our own automatic assumptions and that makes negative a truth we do not want to explore. We have never thought of negative as a positive thing, even though there are examples existing in our surroundings. When a person is positively diagnosed with a major disease, such as cancer, HIV, dengue or tuberculosis, it is a negative thing; thus, a negative diagnosis is always a positive news. How about negative ions produced by waterfalls and ocean waves? They are known to purify the air from impure particles and create positive vibes. These are stark examples that reverse negative from our frozen, polarized beliefs.

Negative is never a negative. It is a neutral potential, an archetypal power that is present in all. It is not some quality or description for something or someone we resist, reject, and repulse. It is a mature understanding of the workings of cosmic truth – that nothing can exist without the dynamics of sacred opposites. Just as a battery will never work without a negative terminal. This calls us more to see negative in a positive light. Anything we experience in the outside world is nothing but our inability to recognize the negative in us, and we cannot help but recognize them as they explode outside. We have a long history of denying the negative potential, and we have seen the worst it had caused us. We must reconcile our perception of it so we can free this negative potential from our own twisted negativity.

Once, I had an old time friend, whom I haven’t seen for years, asked me an interesting question: If the law of attraction tells us that like attracts like, why does nature tell us otherwise? Because this modern belief has taught us that thinking positive is to attract positive things in life, it seemed to puzzle her why positive and negative, like in a magnet, naturally attracts, while same poles repel. I found the answer after 3 months of reflection. These opposites never attract each other; rather, the positive embraces negative. This natural law creates power. That the positive awareness in us finally embraces what we reject as negative ignorance. This simply appears as a spiritual metaphor for our times, a union that I can conveniently call Love. With that, negative bears a new meaning, one that liberates it from our social assumptions and mental limitations.