On a discussion forum, someone recently shared with me this video of Esther Hicks “channeling” a group of beings called “Abraham” in what she calls a “rampage”:
If the content of this video makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it doesn’t make sense to me either. The language is hypnotic, artfully vague–i.e. devoid of content–yet obviously very expressive and passionate, carrying a sense of urgency and intensity. It’s an energized, shamanic rant to stir you up, and obviously geared towards those with a New Age worldview (who else would go see a trance channel for advice on living).
Esther is co-author with her husband Jerry of a series of popular books on “manifestation”–Ask and It Is Given, The Law of Attraction, etc. that teach you how to get what you want (manifest) while being “in the flow.”
The similarity to Tony Robbins–with a New Age twist–is striking:
Apparently the Hicks’ teach a method of positive thinking called “pivoting,” where you switch out what you see in the world that upsets you (e.g. someone’s disapproving glance) for something you’d rather see or experience (e.g. the same person smiling). In it’s less shallow versions, this ends up being another form of positive thinking, focusing on the positive when everything around you is bleak.
Personal development has developed advanced methods for doing similar things that used to just be called “positive thinking.” Tony Robbins’ version he calls “state management”–the ability to change your feelings or moods in any moment by changing your body (physiology: breathing, movements, posture, etc.), internal images, or internal dialogue. This is a particularly powerful way of taking control of your inner experience. However, it is not without it’s side effects.
Is Happiness a Feeling?
Hedonism is the view that life is basically about feeling good. Most people who have not reflected too much on what life is about basically live according to this view–which means you probably do. Personal development literature usually does not question it, except for some rare authors who emphasize the development of virtue as the good life.
There are subtle forms of hedonism that postulate that the ultimate pleasures come from service to others and contemplation of philosophy and art, but most hedonists (i.e. most humans) want physical pleasure, creature comforts, endless full-body orgasms, and positive emotions galore more than anything.
If you basically think pleasure is what life’s about, you have a couple main options for maximizing happiness. One is to control your environment to be maximally pleasurable–obtain big lounge chairs, delicious foods, wine, women, some fancy cars, a big plasma TV, some drugs, and royally enjoy yourself. Most Americans are attempting to live some version of this goal.
For those lower on the socio-economic ladder or who see themselves as more “spiritual,” one can learn how to endogenously generate chemicals of pleasure through techniques like state management, or even subtle spiritual pleasures of bliss from intense concentration. The advantage is that these are generally free and don’t run out when the money does. They also can seem “spiritual” in that one can renounce worldly pleasures for the pleasures inside, and often one enters a kind of flow state when playing around with self-generated feelings.
Personal development tends to be a blend of the two, learning how to be worldly successful so that you can have all the things that bring physical pleasure and the pleasure of social dominance, while simultaneously learning how to amp up your internal feelings so that you can go about this quest in a state of mania with delusions of grandeur. It’s the American dream run amok.
Why I Learned Positive Thinking, and Why I Unlearned It
I studied Philosophy in college, was a member of several activist organizations, and generally thought the world was screwed up in numerous ways and needed to change bigtime. After I graduated, I found the only job I could get was working for a credit card processing company, working on the phone at the Helpdesk, in a cubicle where they pumped in white noise that gave me a massive headache.
One day I got sick with something like mono and I lied in bed for 3 weeks. My unconscious had decided that I was not going to work anymore for my corporate overlords, but I had no idea what to do. I was depressed and lost, with no hope for a positive future, and no idea how the hell to integrate my intuition that the real world was a terrible place to live with actually making enough money to support myself as an adult.
A friend loaned me some tapes from Tony Robbins, and I listened to the whole Personal Power II series–which is supposed to take 30 days–in 21 days. By the time I was done, I was so excited about my future and how successful I was going to be, I was pissing adrenaline.
I began practicing a similar moment-to-moment practice like pivoting that I learned from Tony Robbins called “state management,” a sophisticated form of positive thinking.
Basically the idea is that you can change your state/moods/thinking in any moment if you don’t like the current one. Kinda like changing the channel. The technique is easy enough: change your physiology (body), your internal images, or what you are saying to yourself.
I got really, really good at this. It was useful at the time, and in difficult circumstances, I still use it today.
I found two problems though, in working with this as a way of life. Two things that really screwed me over for a while, which is why I’m writing this blog post in the first place–so you can learn from my dumb-ass mistakes.
1. In my quest to live a life of ecstasy (not unlike Ms. Hicks or Mr. Robbins in the above videos, I was capable of such charismatic displays, mostly through dance), I developed intense mood swings, from the highest of high peaks, to moderately low burnout (not full-on depression, because I had used cognitive-behavioral methods to transform my inner dialogue pretty fully).
I learned to run my neurology so well that I came up against the limits of my body’s ability to keep up. Eventually this cultivation of hypomania lead to adrenal fatigue where I was too tired to get out of bed 2 or more days a week, which I hoped would be on the weekend so I wouldn’t miss work, but I wasn’t always so lucky.
It’s taken about 4 years to recover from living this way, with lots of help from my herbalist, eating well, and generally living less intensely. I’m still exploring the extent to which I can experience intense moods without depleting my adrenals.
2. Because I was so good at changing my state, I developed intense psychological shadow elements. I became very, very good at repressing or denying aspects of myself or my life that I didn’t want to look at.
There’s a well-known technique in hypnosis where you create anaesthesia–especially useful for getting dental work without drugs–called hypnotic pain control. This is a useful technique, but if you use it to ignore the message the pain is giving you, the problem can get a whole lot worse.
I similarly was able to create a kind of emotional anaesthesia, ignoring the messages that some of the discomfort or difficult emotions were telling me. After a while, this incongruence or lack of inner ecology made the techniques I was using less and less effective, leading to total breakdown–the techniques I had been using to get happy no longer worked, and simultaneously I had a lot more problems in my life as a result of not listening to the alarms that had been going off in the form of negative emotions.
Core Transformation, with it’s focus on listening to every part for it’s deeper positive purposes, has been deeply healing for me because of that. Surprisingly, I’ve found Core Transformation to also help quickly change my state–not by swishing out a different feeling or image, but by going into the core of the existing feeling to it’s source, the Self in Jungian psychology.
The Cultivation of Delusion
When anyone first hears of positive thinking, they immediately think it’s cheesy and stupid. There is wisdom in this intuition.
Pivoting, positive thinking, and state management function by changing your focus from what you see to what you imagine. This can be helpful, especially in emergency situations or severe mental imbalance where thinking positively can determine the difference between life and death. It can also be a natural functioning of our ability to choose what we want and to make plans for the accomplishment of our outcomes. This ability is largely only present in human beings, and is responsible both for our outstanding technological success as well as our outstanding ability to destroy our life-sustaining environments.
In contrast to pivoting and positive thinking, Buddhism and other eastern philosophies would consider these practices as the cultivation of delusion or ignorance. There is a kind of freedom in being able to create one’s own delusion (”I create my own reality”)–but it’s a freedom that comes at the expense of truth. I found that when I practiced state management that the price was ultimately too high to bear, and I became addicted to the chemicals spinning in my neurology that I endogenously generated, eventually hitting “rock bottom” as they talk of in 12-step groups. I never got into drugs as a kid, both because I was afraid of the dangers and because I simply couldn’t afford them! But I learned how to get my highs for free.
Perhaps these methods will work out better for you. Some people seem to like drugs, and don’t have any apparent problems coping with the highs and lows of regular drinking, smoking, or what have you. Similarly, some people seem to be cool with denying reality and are more comfortable and functional with their delusions. If that’s you, then continue to ignore what I write about, and go read some other personal development blog! 
If on the other hand, if you see signs that perhaps your positive thinking, pivoting, or state management is having side-effects that are more significant that the cure, I’d recommend checking out Core Transformation, mindfulness meditation, or some other approach that cultivates wisdom through accepting things fully, and finding that in doing so, they also change.
Duff is a transpersonal development life coach specializing currently in the Core Transformation process–an extremely effective method of rapid change with few to no side-effects. To get a 1/2 price Core Transformation session (only $50 for 90 minutes! Only good until Nov 31st) email duff@precisionchange.com or call him at 303-520-8658.