AFFIRMATIONS HARMLESS OR NOT?

CLAIM: Affirmations, positive thinking mantras, can be used to make good things happen. Using them for healing or wealth really works.

The following is an argument that reciting affirmations has magical effects:

Word affirmations carefully

The best affirmations are worded carefully. For example, instead of, "I do not steal anymore", you say, "I am a wonderful honest person." See the difference? See how the second is more positive and cheerful than the first? Philosophies such as Jesus', "The Pharisee praised God for making him such a good man and went home rejected by God but the poor tax collector who beat his breast and called on God to have mercy on him went home forgiven and accepted" are demeaning. We do not harbour such humiliating teachings in our hearts. We harbour their opposites.

There is a big problem with using, "I don't want to steal", "I don't want to be shy" as affirmations. There is a hidden meaning. The meaning is, "I fear them. I would not fear them if they were not a threat." You are affirming that they are a threat because you may be too weak to handle them. What you are really doing is affirming that you fear these things and are affirming that you may do them. The affirmation may help to a degree but it is nonetheless defective and harmful.

Put your affirmations in the present tense!

Why do you put your affirmations into the present tense? Because if you say, "I will be a wonderful confident person" this could happen thirty years from now! You are putting it far out of your clutches in the future. You are putting your progress off instead of commanding it to come to you right now. It is important to keep it in the present. There is always an improvement even if you feel there is none. If you were able to have an intensely strong belief in the power of affirmation the changes would be very dramatic. It is your faith that heals you.

About Negative Affirmations

Negative thoughts are necessary to help you keep in touch with reality and to perceive what is really happening. Allowing some negative thoughts can help you progress into a better mood. But even allowing a negative thought can be a positive affirmation if you have the right attitude. Your attitude needs to be ,"I need to think about the negative side. I have the courage to do so. I know I am helping myself in doing so." But don't dwell on negative thoughts any more than necessary. Be careful that you don't become avalanched with other negative thoughts for negative thoughts unless carefully policed always lead to further negative thoughts.

If you try to affirm to yourself, "I accept myself as perfect", and you feel tense and angry and disbelieving you will need to deal with the negatives to be able to say the affirmation and feel and know that it is true.

The goal of negative thoughts is to rise above them and need them no more. This takes time. Be patient with yourself.

If you think evil thoughts, you are sending evil forces into the world that influence other people and cause destruction. We create the forces of temptation - not God. We have ruined the creation of God with our bad deeds and evil thoughts.

Negative affirmations are sometimes stronger than positive affirmations

It is thought that negative affirmations are more powerful than positive affirmations. Sometimes they are. When our self-esteem is very low it can take a lot of work to promote it to a healthy level again. If our self-esteem is very poor, we make negative affirmations more powerful than good ones. If it is very high, we make positive affirmations more powerful than negative ones. It depends on us. It is hard to make good for good is order. It is easy to make not-so-good. Not-so-good is disorder. It is making what cannot be controlled until it is turned into good.

Affirmations can give you self-esteem!

Positive affirmations state what we want to be and what we can be. They are about making you the person you want to be. They have that power for they can programme your thoughts and mind to achieve great wonders. Whatever you want ask for it, believing that it is yours, it will be yours.

If your self-confidence is low for example an affirmation will help. Affirmations always help unless we put blocks in their way.

You might say, "I am a wonderful confident person." You will keep repeating this for the more often you do so, the more the deeper parts of your mind will start believing it and you will find great changes and feel so much happier.

Be confident that you can look after yourself with your occult powers.

Know that you trigger your occult powers by having the confidence to give knowing that you will receive.

Express your affirmations by your good actions, you don't need the words.

Affirmations to solve emotional problems

If you use affirmations to solve an emotional problem, you must be sure what the problem is.

Sit down and relax. Close your eyes.

Ask yourself questions such as, "Is there anything that is keeping me from feeling happy right now?" And if you get a feeling that there is then ask yourself, "What is it that is stopping me from feeling happy?" You may realise the answer. If you don't then you may feel the answer. Check how you feel inside. Then ask, "How is it able to stop me feeling happy?"

When you realise or feel you have answers you can start formulating suitable affirmations. Formulate your affirmations in the present tense. You want the good feelings to come now instead of them putting themselves off to the future.

Reinforce and strengthen the good feelings. Become aware of them. Use affirmations to make them stronger and to help keep them in your mental orbit. You have bad feelings too. Don't try to destroy them. You don't need to. The bad feelings will turn into good feelings if you search for the good feelings. And everybody must feel good even a little about something.

Do not make an affirmation like, "I do not feel bad." Reword it to make it positive. Change it to, "I feel good." That way you are not even mentioning or thinking of anything unpleasant. You are not involving the horrible feeling that comes from thinking of something you consider bad.

Can affirmations make you sick?

Are your health problems caused by emotional state and your negative emotions?

There is no such thing as a person say causing their own cancer by holding resentment. There are healthy centenarians who have went through life despising many of their neighbours.

If you have the wrong attitude to sickness, you will make yourself feel more horrible.

There will be testimonies to the healing power of the affirmations. Healing is summing it up in one word. Even a love-spell is healing a situation where two people who could happily love each other do not. A money spell is healing a situation where more money is needed.

Eating can be a healthy affirmation too!

Bless your food. Eat healthy most of the time. Healthy food need not be boring. See your food as blessing you and making you healthy. Then eating it becomes an affirmation that brings healing and well-being. To eat junk food is to tell yourself you are not worth much. But occasionally eating it does no harm. It is a treat then.

Clearing the Space for Omnipotent Affirmations

Magic is the reason all things exist - it is the maker of all things.

Use affirmations to reach your goals. Do not put barriers up to stop them helping you or that may delay help.

The power of my faith will be enhanced if I use the affirmations in unity with others. I will assemble together with others as a family. We are more powerful together when we create affirmations.

We might do things that we consider bad but we might like ourselves despite that and like those "bad" things we do. Yet we can so easily ridicule and detest other people for doing those same things. But by being spiteful and condemnatory to others for what we do ourselves is to call punishment upon ourselves. It is an affirmation that can inflict considerable harm on us. Release your heart from the burden of grudges. Then blessings will follow.

Be independent for the one who is not free is one that is not free to receive all the blessings that the law of attraction can bestow. Abandon all religions, gods and authority. But what about your boss? You can do what your boss tells you and still be independent. When you do what the boss says, you are doing it because you want to and not because he commanded it. And certainly not JUST because he commanded it. Your intention is to do what you want and not to obey. So you only seem to obey.

Regular exercise, healthy diet, coffee with friends, dancing, music and movies you enjoy, sex, falling in love, making babies, making money, all these things that improve your life or are part of its joy are sacraments. They are magic spells. They tell you that you are worthy of the best and that you will take the best of what life has to offer. They manifest further blessings in your life.

Prayer

People say you should pray for those who hate you and who hurt you. It is not prayer that works but the sense that you are doing something for them to heal them. Prayer only does that when it is really magic disguised as prayer. When you pray, you feel that energy is going out of you to help others. Why does real prayer not work? Because it gives the responsibility to God to help. It keeps you out of it. Even if you ask to become God's instrument to help others, it is still giving God the responsibility. You will not feel bad if you fail to help for it is his responsibility. Be responsible. Send them healing magic. Send them grace.

Manifesting is not attracting what you need or want but attracting what you are

Some "spiritual" writers say that using the law of attraction is about "manifesting is not attracting what you need or want but attracting what you are." Technically you are still trying to manifest what you need and want but you see this as being about who you are. For example, to manifest expensive clothes reflects an attempt to make your identity the identity of a rich person. You want to be defined as the things you ask for! This is outrageously dehumanising and consumerist! To attract say the virtue of compassion does the same thing. You end up diminishing yourself as a person for the sake of a quality becoming you and being attracted because it is you!

Time

Objective time is a hard thing to talk about for Einstein showed it is not strictly true. The time on the clock and the time in your head normally coincide but affirmations and prayers and fasting can alter the time in your head. This makes you feel good and safe for it is like you think you are mastering time. You are not. It's an illusion and you know it for you don't take it with you into your daily business.

Conclusion

Accept that these beliefs have healing powers. Recite this statement of beliefs often and more importantly let your faith and understanding of it grow stronger day by day. Try and inspire others to see the beauty of these principles for they comprise the only true faith and source of blessing and you need to see the message adored because that increases your own faith and confidence.

Evaluation:

Believers in God do not admit it, but they believe in a spirit with magical powers. He can create out of nothing. So they along with believers in the occult think that magic is the maker of all things. If magic is God's power, it follows that magic might exist by itself. It does not follow that if power exists that it must be wielded by some God or person. The view that magic made all things is actually far more sensible and simpler than believing that God made all things.

People that use affirmations get sick and die the same as anybody else. Some affirmation preachers even die young. Our brains help us to survive life by painting it as better than what it is. Affirmations are an outgrowth of that. They are essentially magical spells. Belief in affirmations risks developing the notion that if people get sick then it is somehow self-inflicted! Rhonda Byrne in The Secret implied that holocaust victims got killed because they used the power to attract things to themselves incorrectly.

Doing good for others is the best way to feel safer in the world. Do that and forget about affirmations. Simply remember that you can turn good things into better things and evil things into better things. People think affirmations work for they imagine that the good that comes is because of the affirmations. Believers in prayer think prayer has results too. Both the affirmations camp and the prayer camp err in thinking that just because good things follow their affirmations or prayers that the affirmations or prayer caused them! That isn't even logical or sensible!

I’m bad if I judge my thoughts yet if my evil thoughts are to blame for the evil in the world and in me I have to judge them brutally. That is a bad affirmation and a perpetual vicious circle!

The argument that our evil thoughts are to blame for the evil in the world not God, is really saying, "I want to believe in a perfect God and therefore I will blame humankind for evil so that I can do that." That is no better than blaming anybody without evidence. No wonder Christendom always had a problem with malicious gossip. Nasty doctrines have a dangerous effect - indirectly or directly.

The logic about magic being better than prayer in the sense that at least it is really trying to help is correct.

When you use affirmations to tell yourself that what is not true but will be is already true you are assuming that your deep mind is programmable and will work to make it true. You are guessing that it thinks that what you imagine is real. For your efforts and persistence with affirmations you hope that it will make what you want to be true really true for you.

Affirmations treat you and your mind too much like machines and that can be counter-productive. You are affirming yourself in a way that degrades you and dehumanises you and soon you will have as bad of an attitude towards others.

Affirmations cannot change the fact that you can't and don’t believe that what you imagine will necessarily and inevitably start to produce a reality to match it. Belief is a very strong thing. It is ingrained more in you and is more convincing than anything you think or imagine. A thought or image in your head cannot compare in psychological power to a belief. Beliefs are there all the time underneath it all while thoughts and affirmations only last as long as you engage in them.

Beliefs are hard to change which is why you have to decide to let them be challenged and put yourself in situations that may show if they are really as helpful or true as you think. A person or situation that is showing you the belief you love is untrue and bad will not be able to get through to you unless you let the guard down. You have to stop finding ways to hold on to beliefs regardless of the evidence.

Some people are found to stick by cherished beliefs no matter how many refutations and evidences are given to them that the beliefs are false. Religion is top of the list for that. It leads to critics giving up or not trying in the first place for they think they cannot help anybody change or discard these beliefs. If a religion is seen to have a stubborn attachment to its doctrines, worship and faith that will invite fear or persecution from secularists and activists and even religions that are opposed to it. All will see it as a prison and an obstacle to human flourishing. Each religion will fear the stubbornness of the other for it takes one to know one. Another fear is that if religion makes you obstinate then other entities such as political parties will try to get you to extend that attitude to them as well!

Affirmations read too much like attempts to force and manipulate yourself by self-hypnosis. You are not an island but a community member so it will impact on others too.

Affirmations are only good if they are looking at the really good things that are happening to you and you affirm that these things are there and helping you. That allows you to empower them by welcoming them and enjoying them better. They are about seeing the good you have instead of trying to magic good into existence.