Embracing the negativity bias

A friend of mine recently was talking about a concept of a negativity bias. Instead of noticing that we have at a lake with a beautiful view, we are trained to stay safe, and so we notice the crocidile first.  This is an intelligent design - we are trained to think about the objects in our world that could create a risk of our own survival. In Unity there is a tendency to shy away from anything negative because of Law of Attraction. If thoughts held in mind produce after your kind, paying attention to your thoughts becomes an important task.  With the concept of a bias towards being negative, and the general idea that we would only want to create positive things, how do we move forward without beating ourselves up when the evolutionary safeguard pulls our consciousness into negative thoughts? Could this be the reason that positive thinkers often times are seen as unrealistic? 

One possible idea in all of this moving forward is this: that instead of using the negativity bias to create better, we attempt to ignore, downplay, or pretend it doesn't matter. Often times this can create the opposite of it's intention - by trying to avoid our tendency to the negative, we focus on it more, thereby giving it more power. This is where life becomes sticky and confusing - we avoid a natural tendency, and create through this avoidance. 

Charles Fillmore says, "Thinking PLUS feeling equals demonstration". The avoidance of negative feelings creates more negativity, because a pattern is created whereby we use our energy to create MORE negative feelings and situations into our lives. This is almost an elmentary Unity mistake - a rookie mistake if you will - of thinking that the way to create the life we want is to pretend it's the only thing that exists. 

The way to move forward is to use the negativity bias. In the movie Princess Bride, when Wesley and Buttercup are reunited, they end up in a swamp. The swamp has a few dangers, and because of that, they figure out the way to work around them. If we learn to work with our enviornment, with everything that is going on, we have a better chance of really creating the life that we want.