A Constant High Tide: Is Positive Better?

Stay positive!  Positive things happen to positive people!  Work hard and you’ll achieve positive results!  I don’t know about you, but these phrases, and ones like them, ran rampant in my upbringing.  I was taught early that positive is good and negative is bad.  If something good happened it was a positive action and if something bad happened it was considered negative.  Don’t believe me?  Go ahead and ask around, ask whoever you want if they would rather have positive or negative things happen to them.  Or you could skip the self-conducted survey all together and grab a dictionary, flip to the respective pages and have a gander at their secondary definitions.  Positive is desirable, negative is not desirable.

I would like to suggest that we have been led to believe that positive is synchronous with good and negative equates to evil, when in reality they share no stronger a connection with one another than they do with the rest of existence.  I believe it is by no accident that we have come here.  We have been trained to say positive when we intend to say benevolent, and I believe that matters greatly.

I understand there are multiple definitions for most words, but it is no coincidence that positive has taken residence with good and negative has shacked up with bad.  Positive is more, negative is less.  Being that our current society is one big, ever-growing, unsustainable market; a racket where everything from our births to our deaths are greedily sold and bought, it is no wonder why positive, the presence of having, is good and desired.  Our economics have become our religion, our order and reason for existence.  And those unholy economics require constant expansion of profits, a constant stream of more, constantly gaining, constantly positive.

And if the more isn’t present, that’s when the negative things start happening.  That’s when we start losing things.  Shiny things.  Our favorite things.  And what could be worse than that?  Surely it’s the least desirable feeling in the world to have something and then to not have it.  I mean, who thinks cherishing memories without holding feelings of resentment towards inevitable physical loss would be a good idea?  Hell no!  We gotta hold on to everything!  We worked so hard for it!  We can’t afford to lose it/her/him/you!  But that is only under the presupposition that we had it to begin with.  Our egos are easily fooled and believe that to hold something is to have something, a symptom of our bogus concept of property ownership.

You could claim that a positive attitude is one of creation and that act of addition equals and act of creation, but I would like to also point out that an act of negation can be an act of creation.  For instance, Michelangelo removed the marble to reveal David beneath.  But most don’t see profit in retraction, so we don’t see the benefit in it.  We just want more.  More things.  Material things.  A constant high tide.

And where does this lust for more come from?  Why does it exist?  It is my belief that the reason we just want more is the same reason we see positive as desirable and war as necessary, toxic masculinity; the belief that the masculine, yang, is superior to the feminine, yin.  Yang is not superior to Yin.  They are two manifestations of the same source.  The masculine and feminine, they are each other’s complement and are both required for life to happen.  Once a belief forms that one of them is superior to the other, that’s when it becomes toxic, the results of which most of us are living through today.  I could go on as to why I believe that is, but for now I think I’ll stick to offering solutions.

One way I believe we can detoxify our society is to refer to the masculine and feminine energies as yang and yin respectively, or chose any two gender neutral terms that will allow us to take a step back and see things with a bit more objectivity.  We equate male with masculine and female with feminine, obviously, as that is literally how the dictionary defines them.  But the masculine and feminine energies are much too expansive to be held in such limiting containers as human sexuality.  Go figure, a society based on a religion that finds man superior to everything on Earth wants to try and fit the universe inside of a human narrative.

Regardless, most of us identify as either male or female, so when we hear masculine and/or feminine our egos immediately start to self identify.  We easily forget, or frankly in the West, we are never told, that the masculine yang and the feminine yin exists in all of us and in everything.  Everything.  Regardless of how you see yourself, you possess both the yin and yang.  The most masculine male is still part feminine, no matter how much his bloody knuckles and big bank account would have you think otherwise.

It is my sincerest hope that we can get passed this phase of toxic masculinity without introducing it’s inverse and to usher in an age of universal harmony.  Are we capable?  Yes.  Will we do it?  Who knows.  But one thing is for sure, if you want the world to be a better place, all you have to do is be better person.  Define better then be it.

with unconditional love,

– Anthony –