A lesson inspired by Neville Goddard’s teachings.
Often when people first learn the Law, they learn that you need to avoid negative thinking or else you’re going to manifest negative experiences. It’s not entirely wrong, but it can start to create a taboo around any negative emotions or moods. People will repress their negative emotions and then the emotions start to build up inside, leaking out, causing more problems. And the numbing out also numbs them to good feelings.
It IS true that negative thinking will affect your state of consciousness and can manifest as negative experiences. Indulgence of bad moods with negative mental stories and complaining is not recommended. BUT thinking is not emotions. Emotions are a body experience. Emotions are neither good nor bad in themselves — they are signals. Emotions alert you to what you’ve been dwelling on, either entirely in your mind as thoughts about the past or future or in response to present external stimuli.
So-called negative emotions tell you that you’ve been thinking about stuff you don’t want and that it’s starting to feel true or already does feel true, which means it can and probably will manifest. This is a warning signal. Positive emotions show you that you’ve been thinking about things you love in a way that feels true. (That’s different from thinking about what you love but still treating it like fantasy, which can feel good but also leave you sad or envious). These good feelings act as reinforcement, encouraging you to keep thinking this way.
But given that emotions are a body state, they also only take on the meaning you give them. If you don’t have a mental story created for the emotion, then you can reinterpret it and/or simply release it. Feel the negative emotion in the body with no mental narration and it typically passes in seconds, maybe minutes. By quieting your mental thoughts that may seek to explain it, you will also likely become aware of what truly triggered the emotion. The trigger is usually negative thoughts or interpretations of reality (reacting) just prior to it. Once you release the emotional energy, you can reinforce your new story.
Okay so that’s great for releasing… but it still regards the negative emotion as something bad to get rid of. Can you actively USE negative emotions positively to manifest desires? YES.
Neville Goddard discusses this in a lecture called “Be Master of the Mood.” He tells the story of a temperamental artist who discovered that by imagining a minor inconvenience — a “peculiar twist” that implied his desire was fulfilled yet also annoyed him — he could manifest what he wanted! This artist didn’t try to force himself to feel good all the time. You can’t do that; your subconscious always knows what you really feel, and it will just manifest more situations for you to endure while you fake being happy. Instead, this artist gave his bad mood a new story with a new reason. He created a context for his negative emotion that implied he already had what he wanted.
So you too can imagine your negative emotion or bad mood was triggered by something minor that implies your desire is fulfilled. I emphasize making it something minor, perhaps something to also laugh about later. Practicing mindfulness meditation will keep you aware of your mental stories so you can observe them in real time and redirect your mind at will, even before the thoughts take on emotional energy. But sometimes, emotions emerge seemingly on their own, and not uncommonly as “old energy” from past emotions you never fully processed nor released. Sure, you can simply release them, without story, and finally be free. But instead of treating all negative emotions like they’re toxic, you can also give them a more desirable meaning.
Manifest with Anger
Giving an emotion new meaning works particularly well with anger. Anger is very energizing, which can even feel good for some people. If you have trouble feeling anger, it could be that you need to recognize where you’re playing small in life and allow yourself to get pissed off about it. What crumbs have you been accepting, trying to be a good little girl or boy by being grateful for them? I am not knocking gratitude, which is so powerful for manifesting. But people confuse the virtue of gratitude as the power that manifests, when it’s being in the state of the wish fulfilled that manifests. Gratitude is not about being virtuous, but feeling satisfaction, normalizing the feeling of getting what you want. The state of humbly accepting less than what you want is not the state of the wish fulfilled. The Law doesn’t care if you’re a “good person.”
So channel anger to energize your desire. This is brazen impudence and how “bad people” manifest. They aren’t goodie-goods expressing thanks to the universe. They boldly claim their desires, without any sense of needing to earn it somehow. I have noticed these people are often in an angry energy; but their story around their anger is a justification to get what they want. They aren’t really focused on a perceived violation so much as their recompense. They feel RIGHTEOUS and ENTITLED.
I am not telling you to become a vengeful, angry person. But I am telling you to try a technique of what I call “angry momentum,” which is a motivational self-talk that energizes you with anger (check out a manifesting success story using “angry ranting” on Reddit). And you will get into this state naturally if you allow yourself to identify what you’re not genuinely happy about. For some of you, you will feel sadness arise first, a sad disappointment, but this is a feeling that is sitting above the anger, pushing it down. You have been scared to feel anger. Anger has power and it fights. Sadness is giving up (but more on using sadness below). Allow yourself to enter anger, but with triumph. Get worked up about what you want while in that energy.
In the Bible, there’s a story where Jesus goes into the temple and he gets angry when he sees moneychangers set up there, seeing them as corrupting the pure worship of the temple; so he throws their tables over and drives them out. That’s how you need to act with your old story. Get angry and drive it out. The temple is your mind. Jesus is your imagination, your savior. Drive the corruption out. Your mental dialogue should center around claiming your desire as done. The energy is: “I am DONE with that old victim state. I am taking what’s mine NOW.”
Manifest with Sadness
What about sadness? Sadness is typically from a sense of loss or hopelessness about the future. But as with any emotion, what it means depends on what you assign it. Sometimes we feel sadness when we are entering a new, desirable phase of life and leaving an old one. So the sadness is actually about leaving an old self behind. Not hard to see how you can use this to manifest. When you feel sad, make it about your OLD self dying, because you are becoming a new better self. While you may have no fondness for your old self, this reinterpretation also simultaneously creates a sense of a better past too. It’s assuming the old self isn’t so bad — a great revision. But if most of us are being honest, we did have some attachment to our old self. So feel the sadness as a brief mourning of the old you as you embark on your new better life. The energy is a wistful waving goodbye to the past, while knowing that a wonderful new adventure awaits.
Manifest with Fear
And before something new happens, what might you feel? Excitement? Guess what feeling excitement is similar to in the body? Fear. Transmute your fear of the worst into an excited anticipation for the best by giving it a new story. This is “standing in line for a rollercoaster” energy. You’re nervous but excited for the fun ride.
All of this may be easier said than done. But transmutation of emotions allows you to vitalize your desire with an energy of REALNESS. Neville indicates that a cause of failure is a lack of burning desire, because it’s the burning desire that makes you willing to transform, which requires persistence in imagination. I think it’s not just about being willing, but being able to transform, able to deeply and strongly impress your subconscious. You need to have motivation to persist. So begin to harness negative emotional energy for your transformation by selecting a meaning and narrative that claims your desires as yours NOW.
The essential points in the successful use of the law of assumption are these: First, and above all, yearning; longing; intense, burning desire. With all your heart you must want to be different from what you are.
Question: I find it difficult to change my concept of self. Why?
Answer: Because your desire to change has not been aroused. If you would fall in love with what you really want to be, you would become it. It takes an intense hunger to bring about a transformation of self.