The Pollyanna objection to “thought power” has been, I trust, on your mind since you’ve been reading the last series of posts. The thought power thesis states that positive thinking is more powerful and truer than negative thinking, and it doesn’t flinch with regard to the twin implications. One, your life is “the product” of thinking. Two, your world is “created” or, at least, “strongly colored” by the quality of your thinking.

And now let the scoffing commence. You can’t help but feel that you’re too sophisticated for this canard and, quite frankly, that the world just doesn’t work this way. In a word: Rubbish. Bollocks. A loud of [insert favorite pejorative here].

The truth is that I have you right where I want you. Go back and try to experience “the energy tax” you feel when you state that it’s all a bunch of malarkey. What is the “energy toll” exacted as you go over these deep, negative thought grooves?

“But that doesn’t make them true! I’m committed to truth! Even if a thought is lower voltage, it still may be true!”

Repeat the exercise once more. To begin with, I only need for you to experience, directly, how enervating negative thinking is. More than this isn’t necessary in the first stage.

As we come to the second stage, I need to convince you that denotative utterances aren’t at stake here. In How to Do Things with Words, the philosopher of language J.L. Austin draws a distinction between denotative utterances (“locutionary acts”) and performative utterances (“perlocutionary acts”). An example of the former: “The cat is on the mat.” Let’s say that it’s either true or false. An example of the latter: “With this ring, I thee wed.” No question of truth value is in play here. Rather, the utterance “does what it says.”

My invitation is for you to regard more and more speech acts as being enactive or performative. And here’s the thing: what if many, many thoughts do what they say? If that’s true, then thinking is more often “magical” than it is propositional.

If you’re open to this interpretation, then it’s not just the case that thinking that “the world is falling apart” is an innocent, innocuous, and no doubt (you think) true statement. Rather, the thought is performative: that thought engenders a sense of doom and other thoughts (due to the law of association) shall come in and make it seem as if, yes, the modern world is quite shitty. And–look–so is that untrustworthy guy, that shady gal, that suspect group, those dubious nation-states. Hell in a handbag, right?

I realize that I’ve said nothing about metaphysics, and I don’t think that just here at the end of this post is the right spot for that investigation. I’d like, in the future, to argue that “right thinking” goes up the five sheaths about which yoga speaks. Consider this a promissory note.

Instead, I offer some light prodding.

At this point, you might be open to the possibility that positive thinking is more powerful than negative thinking (it has more oomph than the latter), and you might be interested in exploring whether a positive thought invokes a higher truth (call it for now: “the goodness of being”) than the negative thought. If thinking is somewhat like magic in the sense of a “making happen,” then what might “right thinking” effectuate? There’s no harm in seeing for yourself.