Negative Thoughts

January 24, 2008

Much has been written, said and published about the Law of Attraction recently.  The movie, “The Secret”, was a run-away best seller despite its non-Hollywood origins. The Law of Attraction states that what you think about and focus on becomes reality through the energy of thoughts.  In my last post, I remarked that I’ve read Lynne Mc Taggert’s book called The Intention Experiment: Using your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World and find it fascinating. 

One of the topics McTaggert broaches in the book is the power of negative thoughts.  She calls this the gremlin effect, and relates several stories from her own life that illustrate the potential power of negative thoughts.  In the adult Sunday school class that I teach at Pathways Church (www.pathwaysuu.org), we discussed the gremlin effect and what negative implications our thoughts may have.  Participants (including me) shamefacedly shared gremlin effect stories – ranging from pregnancy miscarriages to premonitions about sex offenders to deaths.  In all these stories, we wonder if it really was our vengeful or hateful thoughts towards another or ourselves that caused ill effect.  In many cases, it appears to be a correlation between thoughts and negative effects.

If vengeful thoughts have negative consequences, must we feel completely responsible and therefore guilty for what happens?  I have some strong opinions about that.  I believe that our thoughts are only one variable in the equation.  The other variables include the other person’s thoughts, the society’s thoughts and the sacred contract of all souls involved in the situation.  Carolyn Myss, in her book Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, describes how each soul agrees to take on several lifetime challenges or archetypal situations before birth.  Michael Newton, in his book Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life between Lives, also describes this pre-birth process.  With its consent, the soul is pre-destined, if you will, to encounter situations in that lifetime that will challenge it to respond in ways that could help the soul evolve and mature.  We all are born having made these agreements in heaven.  I call these contracts lifetime pillars – the big learning opportunities we have in a lifetime.  As an example, a lifetime pillar for me is learning to take negative criticism without using it against myself, without self-recrimination.

The concept is similar to karma, except that we agree to and accept the challenge before birth.  A soul might acknowledge its need to learn compassion due to a demonstrated lack of it in a previous lifetime, so it agrees to encounter life situations in which it could feel the lack of compassion from another.

When something “bad” happens to ourselves or others, I believe we need to consider what pillar in that life is being evoked or challenged. Of course, it is only speculation on our part as to what the other person’s challenge is, but nevertheless, we must acknowledge the possibility of a pillar.  So, it is not just our negative thoughts that may have caused a “bad” effect, but the intersection of at least four elements: our thoughts, our sacred contract, the thoughts of the other person and the sacred contract that person made before birth. 

What are your thoughts?

Prayer:

Holy One, help us take responsibility for our thoughts without taking blame.  Amen.


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Posted by krisrob02 | Filed Under Intentions, Newest Posts, Prayers 

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