The Illusion of Positive Thoughts
Acharya Prashant: Thought serves a great purpose: it eats away your time. Otherwise, time will become such a burden. Thinking, thinking, continuously thinking, you comfortably let days, months, years, and decades slip away. And then you are so thankful that death arrives; otherwise living 80 years and that too in awareness would have been such a pain. You’ll have had to go through the rigors of right action.
Thought facilitates an avoidance of the right action; thought is helpful. Someone comes to you and demands, “Now is the time to climb up the hill. Are you ready with your trekking gear?” And you say, “No, I’m still thinking.” So, all the effort and the pain that would have come with climbing the hill has been successfully avoided, you are still thinking. Thinking is nice, scaling the heights is arduous.
Have you ever asked yourself, “If a positive thought is really positive, why are there ever any negative thoughts after a positive thought?” If a positive thought is really positive, it should have ended even the possibility of any future negativity; but that possibility remains, and vice versa.