We are in the era of believing “if you think positive, positive things will happen.” From the Law of Attraction to all the feel-good quotes online, how often are we bombarded with the message that peace of mind and creating the life you desire all stems from positive thinking?
We are being told that we should avoid our negative thoughts, negative mind and negative feelings at all costs. For what we think, we create in our lives. Many of us fear anything negative and quickly try to shift our thoughts by thinking positive. Sometimes we use positive thinking as a Band-Aid instead of really going within to feel uncomfortable emotions and do the healing required to transcend through pain and limiting beliefs.
In my recent Kundalini teacher training, we did an Akara Numerology reading and I learned that there are three aspects of our mind that need to be balanced in order to create peace of mind. The Negative Mind, the Positive Mind and the Neutral Mind, and that they are all necessary and important and serve a specific purpose. Each needs to be functioning and balanced in order for one to have mental clarity and feel whole. What blew me away is that, yes, the negative mind is absolutely necessary and one can actually suffer from an overactive positive mind.
All this hoopla about positive thinking being the golden ticket to manifesting your desires is getting us into trouble because it doesn’t share the complete picture. The golden key is understanding how each part of the mind works together and how to balance the negative, positive and neutral mind so we can become the master of our own mind, instead of being its slave.
How the different facets of the mind work
According to Yogi Bhajan, PhD, the yoga master who brought Kundalini yoga and meditation to the west, says “The mind is a tool given to you as the link between Infinity and your soul.” The Mind: Its Projections and Multiple Facets by Yogi Bhajan, Gurucharan Singh Khalsa (KRI, 1st Edition).
Waves of Healing by M.D. Siri Atma S. Khalsa (Yogic Reality) differentiates the three different facets of the mind and how they work together:
The negative mind
Instinctively protects you by calculating risk and alerting you when something is wrong or could be a potential threat.
Whenever a thought comes to you, first your negative mind plays its role and assesses the real motive and risk. It protects you by negating everything no matter how positive it may be.
If your negative mind is out of balance, you cannot think about yourself or protect yourself through your intelligence. The negative mind must think negatively about anything you know, hear and see even if it is something in your favor. If you don’t understand your negative mind, the barrage of pessimist thoughts can make you fearful and cause unnecessary doubt—the worst enemy of humans.
The positive mind
Calculates benefit. The positive mind tells you what is positive in the negative thought and how things work to our advantage.
When the Negative Mind gives you a thought normally, the Positive Mind should tell you what is useful or right about that same thought. It should provide a contrast and comparison. If you do not use the positive mind this way, it starts working against you.
The way we suffer from an overactive positive mind is when your mind is full of intrigues, ego attachments and thoughts, it begins to pull every memory from the subconscious that supports the thought from the Negative Mind. When your Positive Mind goes to the past to pull out garbage that is irrelevant to the situation at hand, it prevents you from making the correct decision.
It takes information from you subconscious and your memory to support the thoughts of the Negative Mind, putting you in extreme negative overdrive. With each repetition of similar feelings and analyzing thoughts, it elicits greater feelings of negativity, fear, and worry. The danger or threat feels more exaggerated and intensified based on our thoughts and we regard the threat as being real.
When the Positive Mind accesses your subconscious to expand a thought instead of contrasting it, it can never reach your Neutral Mind and know what decision to make.
The neutral mind
Evaluates risk and benefits on the facts and not emotions. With neutral focus, we can make confident and quick decisions for our highest good.
The Positive Mind should say: “Well, this is the positive side of the real and apparent dangers that the Negative Mind suggested.” Then your Neutral Mind can say to you, “That is the negative and that is the positive, but this is you in relationship to all of that.”
The Neutral Mind was given to us so we can know how things relate to time and space. “Every thought which is realized from the Negative Mind to the Positive Mind must go to the Neutral Mind to give you a comprehensive answer of time, space, your environment and you. If you have a comprehensive mind you are never wrong.” Says Yogi Bhajan.
The ultimate goal is not to just think positive thoughts in order to have mental balance. We must develop a strong mind through meditation to give the positive of the negative and the negative of the positive. By our own grace and consciousness, we can find the neutral of it. It’s through the neutral and intuitive mind we can confidently make decisions and thus create peace of mind.
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