I Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought | Steve Beckow

By Steve Beckow, October 7, 2020

(Golden Age of Gaia)

The change of vote from hostility to harmony has been a landmark for me. (1)

I’m seeing things from an entirely-new angle. Just to give you an example….

John-Roger and Peter McWilliams co-wrote a book called, You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought. I’m beginning to see why we can’t.

As I left my apartment this morning, a negative thought arose. And in its train came a Pandora’s box of other negative thoughts, strategies, assessments, grumbles.

I watched myself at a store checkout counter, annoyed that the clerk was having me wait. I was annoyed at the coffee shop for getting my order wrong. I was annoyed at ….

I saw at that moment that the real pain and suffering I experience I bring on myself with and by these thoughts. I’m the one who’s doing it to myself.

Now, with this heightened awareness, the experience of suffering that went along with my hostile thoughts was intolerable. And I could no longer overlook who the author of it was.

***

Previously these thoughts and strategies were hidden because they fit with my agenda of guardedness and suspicion. But now they don’t and so they stick out in my experience, like obstacles on the way forward.

Mostly they serve to remind me of what I don’t want – the various feelings that arise when I decide to be hostile.

AND if I respond with hostility to the various feelings of hostility that arise in me, same diff. Hostility is hostility. The target of it doesn’t matter. I’m still causing the whole reaction to go off again.

I have to be harmonious and be harmonious about being harmonious if I want to live in the divine state of harmony.

It’s only hard for the part of me that may still be hanging back. The part of me that changed its vote to harmony just feels itself expand. It absolutely depends on, rides on, my choice.

***

So, for these reasons, I can’t afford the luxury of a negative thought. I really do get it now. It’s only taken me a few decades since first hearing the book’s title and wondering, but I do get it.

It overturns much that is sacrosanct to males, what has been referred to as the male-domination script. But following that script is, in the end, so painful that I’m glad to be rid of it. What was it the Mother said?

“It is painful for a being that seeks power for themselves or power over another, whether it is a parent over a child, a husband over a wife, a man over an army. It matters not.

“The yearning [for], the exercise of control never gives joy. The pain simply grows. And so the actions become more grotesque, larger, until the breakdown is and has [been] and will be occurring.” (2)

I know her words to be true from experience.

***

I used to think that only vasanas (or core issues) caused this kind of character degradation over time. But hostility is a structure totally made up of vasanas. It’s vasana-born, vasana-laden, and vasana-driven.



All we have left is our vasanas.

This kind of stimulus-response structure leads over time, as the Mother says, to us becoming coralized, petrified, inflexible and opinionated, like the figure to the left.

We run the same hit tunes often enough and our lives become a reflection of them. We know nothing else after a while.

So all of that is now left behind by a change of vote – a really-deeply-felt, deeply-meant change of vote.

Footnotes

(1) See “From Hostility to Harmony,” Oct. 2, 2020, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=313728 and “Breakthrough,” Oct. 4, 2020, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=313764

(2) Transcript ~ The Divine Mother: Take Up Your Divine Authority, AHWAA, February 23, 2017, http://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/02/28/transcript-divine-mother-take-divine-authority-ahwaa-february-23-2017/.