Is positive thinking an essential aspect of spiritual enlightenment?

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Positive thinking is a technique used to maintain good emotional health. Good emotional health is useful in the process of searching for and attaining enlightenment.

Really, pay no attention to the people you find in this space that tell you you’re already enlightened. If you were, you’d know it. Imagine different planes of existence. At the top is ordinary, mundane life where if something bad happens to you, you feel bad. This constant back and forth between wanting things and then being sad or mad because you don’t have them, this is what the Buddhists call dukkha or suffering.

Just underneath is the realm one inhabits when they have good emotional health. Suffering is lessened because fewer things in life cause it. If you were to become well-off, with the ability to throw money at your problems, you could attain this state without any kind of personal development. It’s nice, friendly, but you find out eventually if you’re here long enough that the state, and yourself, are your own worst enemies. Existence slowly hollows out and you want something more meaningful.

Positive thinking can get you there and no further.

Underneath this state is the state accessed by learning the technique of spiritual surrender. When the Buddha decided to leave his palace and seek out spiritual enlightenment, this is the state he accessed when he left. Spiritual seeking means you are willing to sacrifice everything that makes you, you, in the search of something greater, something deeper.

It’s hard to move from the first state directly to the third. This is why positive thinking is useful. It’s hard to move from the second state to the third, the meaning behind Jesus’ words, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the head of a pin, than it is for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. It’s hard for anyone to give up the pursuit of the self, in search of the ineffable. Some people seem born for it, other people have to discover their need for spiritual search after it’s revealed to them that self just isn’t that fulfilling of a goal.

Maintaining good emotional health is important up to a point in the quest for enlightenment. But the practice of spiritual surrender slowly removes the need to maintain that health. One’s emotions become like everything else in life, subject to the arising and the passing. In fact that’s among the first things one figures out. but it becomes a technique like any other. Spiritual techniques all serve the self at first, then eventually the real meaning behind them is discovered, and the self itself can be surrendered.

Gradually, depending on the being, removal from the arising and passing is achieved. This is emptiness. Being can remain here as long as is needed. But it is not full enlightenment. On the other side is the self that was discarded. One can put this self on like clothing and take it off when not needed. Of what use is the emotional health generated by positive thinking when the whole apparatus can be taken off and one can be empty?

The true, authentic Self is slowly embodied. You can’t just take this one off like clothing, it’s you whether you have the old self on or off. When even emptiness is discovered to be a tool that one can use for purpose, well, it takes agency to use a tool. The former self blends into the new Self and the being’s spiritual journey slowly comes to a gentle close. What needed to be surrendered has been surrendered, so many times it’s become normal and fluid.