POSITIVE THINKING

POSITIVE THINKING means seeing a certain thing and yet denying what you have seen; it means deceiving yourself and others.

Positive thinking is the only bullshit philosophy that America has contributed to human thought -- nothing else. Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and the Christian priest, Vincent Peale -- all these people have filled the whole American mind with this absolutely absurd idea of a positive philosophy. And it appeals particularly to mediocre minds.

Positive thinking means being untruthful; it means being dishonest.

Dale Carnegie's book, How To Win Friends and Influence People, The very idea that you want to influence people is the idea of a salesman, and that's what Dale Carnegie was -- salesman turned philosopher. If influencing people and winning friends becomes your ideology, you will have to do, you will have to act, behave the way people wish you to act and behave. That's the simple way to influence them, there is no other way. The whole philosophy can be condensed into a simple sentence: if you want people to be influenced by you, just behave the way they think is the right way to behave. You prove to be their ideal.

And if you are going to influence many people, then of course you will have to have many personalities, many masks, because each person is influenced by a different mask. If you want to influence a Hindu, you have to have a different kind of personality than when you are trying to influence a Christian.

The philosophy of positive thinking says:

"Take everything positively. The negative should not have any space in your approach, there should be no negative part." This is making a part, the positive part, almost the whole.

Don't see the negative part, don't see the darker side. But by your not seeing it, do you think it disappears? You are just be-fooling yourself. You cannot change reality. The night will still be there; you can think that it is daytime for twenty-four hours, but by your thinking it, it is not going to be light twenty-four hours a day.

The negative is as much part of life as the positive. They balance each other.

The same is true about negative people, although there are none who preach the philosophy of negative thinking, because who is going to listen to them?

Am I against positive philosophy? Yes, because I am also against negative philosophy.

I have to be against both because both choose only half the fact, and both try to ignore the other half. And remember: a half-truth is far more dangerous than a whole lie, because the whole lie will be discovered by you sooner or later. How long can it remain undiscovered by you? A lie, of course, is a lie; it is just a palace made of playing cards -- a little breeze and the whole palace disappears. But the half-truth is dangerous. You may never discover it, you may continue to think it is the whole truth. So the real problem is not the whole lie, the real problem is the half-truth pretending to be the whole truth;

I teach you transcendence -- neither positive nor negative. Be a watcher: witness both. When there is day, witness the day, and when there is night, witness the night -- and don't get identified with either. You are neither the day nor the night; you are the transcendental consciousness. Become more and more centered there in that transcendence. True religion is not positive, nor is it negative. It is neither via negative nor via positive; it is via transcendence.

If you look for the negative you will find it, because the negative is there in the same proportion as the positive.  If you look for the positive, you will find the positive. But by finding the positive, you cannot destroy the negative; the negative is there, side by side.

They are always there, side by side. They are always together like negative and positive poles of electricity. You can't have electricity with one pole, you will need both. Life needs both: thorns and roses, days and nights, happiness/unhappiness, birth/death. Be a witness to it all and you will know something that is beyond birth, beyond death; something that is beyond darkness and beyond light; something that is beyond happiness, beyond unhappiness. Buddha has called it peace, nirvana