Talk Takeaways
If you don't participate in life, there is no reason to be here.
For you presently, so-called "positive" is figuring out how you can escape from the "negative."
You sink into the very negative state that you are trying to reconcile in thought.
The path is to free yourself from yourself, not to free yourself from the condition that you don't want. "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." -- New Testament
The path is not about adding something to yourself. You are dragged down into the negative every time you try to add something to yourself.
Virtually every moment there is a part of yourself that says, "I object! I object! I object!" And your life is predicated upon escaping from the conditions that you are objecting to. This is why we all judge other people so mercilessly.
Negative reactions are born of something that, without knowing it, you came into the moment with. It is service to a will that is not your own.
If something in you has already decided how the moment should be, then it has also already been decided who you are.
Become interested in your negative states in the sense of understanding them, rather than blindly doing whatever those negative states command you to do.
There is nothing worthwhile in a negative state, but they are valuable to the self that feeds off of them. Because it needs them, that self must justify negative states.
You have to see the negative so that you can see that, as you are presently, you SERVE the negative.
There cannot be a negative state without identification with something that is being threatened by prevailing conditions. Similarly, negative states cannot exist without unconscious comparison.
We incarnate negative states by identification. And we are identified with what we are resisting. Identification and resistance appear together.
What is it inside of us that would incarnate something that serves nothing good? We would never consciously, voluntarily "do the evil that we dont' want to do."
There are images of ourselves, made by an image-maker, that we deem as necessary. Therefore we serve the negative state that defends that identity.
The 'I's' of personality lie dormant, coming to the surface when corresponding conditions call them out. The 'I' that is stirred compares the image of itself to the condition. Each 'I' brings with it an entire world that was built unconsciously, mechanically, in the dark.
Temptation is the promise to escape from yourself, to escape from something you cannot bear to see in yourself.
To try to not be negative is not the same as freedom from negative states. Be as present as you possibly can to what talks to you through temptation, promises, and threats. Do that and you will receive help from above.
The punchline of the story of the people who each served their own individual evil wizard: "We will no longer suffer for your sake. Not once have you delivered on your promise of freedom. Now we understand that real freedom is freedom from you. What we are going to suffer from here on out is the end of our relationship with you." Catch that dark wizard talking to you.
The 'I' that can see is what rescues you from the legion of negative 'I's" that can't see.
At the end of trying... is seeing.