I Couldn’t Help But Wonder: What is the difference between positive thinking and wishful thinking?

Spoke recently with Stephen Mitchell, internationally respected translator of the world’s great wisdom texts, who has published versions of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Gilgamesh. His wife is Byron Katie, author of Loving What Is, among other wonderful books about wakefulness and joy.

I talked with Stephen for my upcoming book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, which will be out in Jan 2010. I wanted to talk to him about stuff like The Secret and the idea that thinking positively could effect outcomes. When your heart is broken, you want to rearrange your thoughts so that they’re not so ridiculously painful. You want to have faith in something, to believe that what you’re experiencing is leading you to something “better.” And I really believe that it is–but I also believe we can’t know what that something is, so imagining so-called positive outcomes as a way of escaping current pain could actually be more confusing. Not to mention dulling and silly. I mean who wants to ignore reality and instead insist everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, if I only think the right thoughts, I can have everything I want. Yet gaining dominion over your thoughts is critical to working with heartbreak to end up wiser than when you went in.

So I couldn’t help but wonder (if I may pull a spiritual Carrie Bradshaw; cue words scrolling across computer screen):

What is the difference between positive thinking and wishful thinking?

Here is an excerpt from the chapter in my new book called “Have Faith.”

In this sense, faith is not so much a belief that everything is somehow going to work out for the best, which can be very, very difficult to imagine when your heart is broken, when you are literally—and understandably—desperate to believe that what you’re feeling is some kind of divine redirection away from what was bad for you and toward what is going to be way better than you ever imagined. This isn’t really a good state of mind to walk around in. First, it presumes that you know what’s best for you and, honestly, I’ve never found evidence that this is a big enough point of view.

I know that there is a lot of emphasis on thinking positively and believing that you can make good things happen by expecting good things to happen. Recently, I had occasion to speak to my friend Stephen Mitchell about this. He is an internationally respected translator of the world’s great wisdom texts, has published versions of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Gilgamesh. I asked him if, in his lifelong study of the core teachings of all religions, he’d ever come across this idea. I wrote down what he said, because it was so excellent. Here it is:

The teaching of every one of the great sacred texts is that control is an illusion. When you understand that ultimately you are not the doer, you can step back from yourself. That is the only path to serenity.  In other words, letting go of the illusion of control, and realizing that you never had it in the first place, allows you to live in the most dazzlingly intelligent, beautiful, and kind reality that you could ever have imagined—and beyond what you could have imagined.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll have what he’s having. When I thought about it, I realized that all the many things I had longed for throughout my life and had been lucky enough to get—like a good relationship, great friends, and a cool job—hadn’t exactly made me into Mahatma Gandhi. In a lot of ways, I was just as riled up and dissatisfied as ever. So maybe I wasn’t the supreme arbiter of all things good for me. Now what?

According to Stephen, actually, all I had to do was relax, to allow the world to dazzle me instead of the other way around. So I’m trying. When I can relax enough, I see that, just like me, everyone—regular people, great superstars and profound sages—probably all started out worrying that the world was going to eat them alive or that they simply weren’t lovable enough. We are all just looking for some kind of happiness. Sometimes things work out for us and sometimes they don’t. It really doesn’t matter. Eventually, all our hopes and fears are going to dissolve and at the end of our lives, according to all the deathbed reports we’ve ever received, the only thing that will matter is how loving and brave we’ve been. I mean, come on, all those dying people can’t be wrong. They seem to be saying that all the things you want and all the things you dread are just like waves in the ocean. Eventually, they just become reabsorbed into the vast play of the ocean. And you know what? The ocean doesn’t care. It never gives up. It can accommodate it all, gentle waves that lap the shore and those that roil up ferociously, tiny tidal pools and great, freezing depths. The real secret, the great ones say, is that we are much more like the ocean than the waves. Underneath all our hopes and fears is profound stillness and the memory of how to return to it. You can bank on it.