How to Live Positively In a Negative World

All great Truths must be tested in the laboratory of human experience. I am sure you will agree that we have a marvelous laboratory in which to test them: the world right outside. A student of New Thought often insists that since God is all and God is good, therefore all is good, and thus there is no evil. It is true that there is no such thing as evil as a basic force, because evil can never be anything more than the concealment of the good. Yet, the inescapable fact is that there is much in the world out there that evidences this concealment.

The Insight of Truth provides a perspective by which, though you may not be able to set things right, you can always see them rightly. If you discipline yourself to see things from the highest point of view, you may envision a world of peace and security—actually seeing the potential that is always inherent in persons and experiences, but beyond appearance. In this way, you really become an influence for good in the world. You become a peacemaker. It will take a lot of doing. But then, what achievement worth reaching was accomplished without effort?

Oh, there are many purveyors of doom in the world today. Well, if you want to begin with such a premise, there is a lot out there in the world to justify it: hopeless wars, crime and corruption, economic chaos, and the alienation of people. But of course, there is another side of things. You can look out at the world through many different windows. What you see is not illusion, but as the Apostle Paul says, “seeing in part.” [1Corinthians 13:10] On the brighter side, there is a whole picture, the partial view of which only seems negative and bleak. Positive thinking about things is not really “unreasonable optimism.” It is viewing things from a more transcendent point of view. It is seeing Wholes, in other words.

Our window on the world today is quite often the television screen or the newspaper. The appearance, in the steady stream of stories about crime and bestiality and perversion, is that the world is a jungle. But what we tend to forget is that what we see through the window of the media is news because it is the exception. If the streets were as bad as the news seems to imply, then that would be the norm, and the only thing newsworthy about the streets of the city would be a story of someone who went off to work in the morning and actually arrived home at night in safety.

There is a great deal of talk about the hopeless plight of our cities, but a city is fundamentally a state of consciousness. Problems of the city are problems of consciousness, and can be changed only by altering consciousness. Cities can be healed. Streets can be clean. Neighborhoods can be safe. Governments can govern with efficiency and compassion. Oh, it will require some changes, and more than anything, some changes in attitudes…commencing with your own. You may say, “But I am only one. What can I do?” Well…but you are one, and the city will become, for you, what you evoke from it by your consciousness of it. You live in a world of your own consciousness—when you change, your city changes, your world changes. Beyond that, by the powerful influence of consciousness, you actually become an instrument for change. Again, it is not accomplished by frantically trying to set things right, but by diligently working to see them rightly.

Life entails the responsibility of keeping in tune with the Inner Flow of God, regardless of the challenges of the world. When the crisis is the greatest, you need to extend the “inward reach.” Truth will help you to realize that the challenge in your path is, at least, partly drawn to you and into your world by your consciousness. Thus, it can be changed as you alter your thoughts.

Oh, it takes some doing to stay positive in a negative world. You may affirm the Omnipresence of God the Good, but people may not always act good. You may think positively, but those with whom you live and work may be altogether negative. You must learn to deal in love with hateful people, to do business in spiritual consciousness in a marketplace filled with attitudes of crass materialism. The only way to do this, realistically, is to know that the problem is not with persons or situations, but with your limited thoughts about them. Remember, Jesus says that you should “agree with your adversary quickly.” [Matt. 5:25] Which means: Resolve your adverse reactions about things before you become immersed in a destructive vortex of negativity.

You are never fully alive unless you are in the Flow of Love. People in cities tend to retreat into indifference, out of fear and insecurity. But one cannot be indifferent to the welfare of others and at the same time be Whole. When you frustrate the Flow of Love, you put yourself in bondage.

One way to start changing this is by making the commitment to deal with persons instead of with people. It may be true that people are all alike, but persons are unique and different. Start looking into the faces of those you pass on the street or in the corridors of business—look with eyes of love. You may be surprised at how many fine persons there are in your world. They will express more of that fineness because you see it, because you call it forth.

“Prejudice” is an over-worked word, but have you really begun to deal with it honestly? One must avoid the tendency to make snap judgments, and then work to justify the first impressions. How common it is to love and hate at first sight, and then to interpret succeeding actions as proof for, or evidence against. Take time to know people as persons. They are probably not up to your emotional “love at first sight” reaction, and they are probably not as bad as your “Don’t like him” reaction. You can never hate a person you really know, and you just can’t know a person whom you are seeing through the haze of prejudice.

Security is one of the most important urban concerns. But, how is one really secure? Certainly it is not alone by laws and locks. These may provide guidelines for the honest and temporary restraints for the dishonest, but they do not stop dishonesty. Security can be found only in consciousness. Fear attracts negative experiences, draws the worst out of relationships. Meeting life in an attitude of fear will tend to negate or offset most of the things you do for protection. For instance, if you bolt your doors and windows out of fear, there is a distinct emanation of fear that goes out from your place that is an attracting power for that which you fear. For this reason, I think it could be proven that even as people are “accident prone,” some persons are “robbery prone,” even “attack prone.”

The best protection is a consciousness of love. Meditate regularly on love, and get the feeling of being immersed in it, surrounded and enfolded by it. Then go forth…knowing that you walk in the “charmed circle of God’s Love.” When you see things from “the vantage ground of Truth,” you are enveloped in a mantle of Divine Protection, because anyone who crosses your threshold actually steps into your consciousness.

You can live positively in a negative world, if you stop seeing the negative world through the old window, using the same old labels, the same old clichés of prejudice. It is a good world, certainly with a great deal of growing to do, but with much darkness to be illumined. The need, then, is for a new emphasis on bringing light instead of cursing the darkness—a new spirit of “Can I help you?” a new wave of friendliness, of love and mutuality. As Professor Charles A. Reich [Yale Law School professor] points out in his book, The Greening of America, “It can be a peaceful revolution of concerned people, spreading the ideal and practice of community.” Certainly it means praying for change of consciousness in the city, and a disciplined effort to change your consciousness…and keep it changed. It means believing in your city and acting as though you did, believing in people and showing it through love and trust and kindness. There is hope for the cities, and it is lodged in the commitment of persons like you to touch off a new consciousness. As the poet, Edwin Markham [1852-1940, mystic and poet who stood for expression of Eternal Values and the unity of mankind, one of the most famous, and beloved, artists of the late 19^th  century, and universally acclaimed as “the Dean of American poetry” and the “Poet Laureate of the People.”], says, “Why build these cities glorious, if man unbuilded goes?”

Yes, there is work for you to do, which you can do. You can restructure the world of your consciousness, so that your world of experience is fed by the steadying Flow of Love and Peace and Justice and Order. And…no one but you, yourself, can take you out of that Flow.

© Eric Butterworth