Conscious Negativity

The search for a path through life

[Some thoughts on the nature of negativity that I had prior to the recent episode of idiots and fools on the subject.]

In the Gospel of Thomas, there’s a peculiar passage as follows:

(98) Jesus said, "The kingdom of the father is like a certain man who wanted to kill a powerful man. In his own house he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall in order to find out whether his hand could carry through. Then he slew the powerful man."

What could this possibly mean? Well, let’s take a look at that.

We’re filled with negativity in the course of our life. All of our relationship to the negative parts in ourselves is generally automatic and specifically unconscious. This is one of the reasons that negativity does whatever it wants with us; it’s a machine that has been built to operate wholly on its own and without the active participation of real feeling or actual thinking. It simply serves as a reactive substance with the outer world as a catalyst, and that can make it a remarkably explosive substance.

Lucky for us, then, that most of the time it just produces corrosive stuff, acids and poisons that decay and degrade the nature of ordinary life. Every once in a while it explodes, and then a person kills someone else or what have you.

All of this takes place automatically, because negativity in the ordinary person is a totally mindless substance.