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After pondering whether one can still maintain a positive attitude without shunning awareness of negativity, I came to some tentative conclusions. I think most agree that gaining awareness is a good thing. But different people have different opinions on what is worth knowing. So perhaps you only need to learn what you need to know, and what you need to know may not be precisely the same as what another needs to know. And because of this difference, you will not find as worthwhile to know what another finds worthy, which can be taken the wrong way if they think you’re dissing their interests by not fully appreciating what they appreciate.

But what is worth knowing, and what is not so worth knowing? For me, I don’t feel a need to know baseball statistics, what happened in the third season of Law and Order, how to crochet, how many Palestinians were killed by Israelis last month versus this month, how to write well in cursive, string theory, the latest editorials on gay marriage, or why so many people hate Obama (because I knew that already in 2008).

Yet sports fanatics could call me a wuss for not following baseball, TV fans could call me lame for not following Law and Order, and political activists could call me ignorant for not paying attention to the latest news from the Middle East. And likewise if I told them I cared to know the principles of spirituality, how to use my intuition together with critical thinking, how the hyperdimensional dark forces operate and ways to counter their methods, etc… these folks would go “Huh? You’re crazy, bro.”

So that tells me that different people have different value systems and different levels of openness to higher orders of objectivity. There’s a huge difference between degrees of objectivity and orders of objectivity. The first just means becoming more refined in your knowledge of some particular area, while the second means transcending it to find knowledge that matters more in the big scheme of things.

Political awareness is of a higher order than awareness of sports statistics, but metaphysical awareness is of a higher order than political. If you don’t know the difference between degree and order, then someone whose knowledge is of a higher order will seem to you like being of a lesser degree, and you’ll surely call him/her stupid and ignorant for not concentrating energy where you place it.

Anyway, here are some questions I ask to determine whether something is really worth knowing:

    Is this something I really need to know?
    Does it make me a better person?
    Will it save me trouble later if I learn it now?
    Does it tell me something important I didn’t already know?
    Does it help me remember what I’ve known all along but forgot?
    Will it straighten out my dilemmas, confusions, misperceptions, and paradoxes?
    Will it empower me in some way?
    Will it help me better understand myself and my relation to the world?
    Will it bring me closer to fulfilling my potential?
    Will this be important one day, even if it seems not as applicable right now?
    Does this free me from manipulation that happens solely because I’m unaware of it?
    Is this at all relevant to helping me understand and do what I am here to do?
    Does this in any way assist me being who I really am?
    What would happen if I went without knowing it?

One reason I bring this up is because certain news stories are just old news to me, yet they have a very definite emotional shock component. I mean, they are written to make you relive whatever the latest victim lived through, all in the name of keeping you informed about the world. Now, the idea behind transmuting negative to positive is that when you are given a new bit of needed awareness, it might be shocking and if you’re not present in yourself then you can succumb to a mechanical negative reaction that depletes your vital energy reserves. Transmutation is a way of getting awareness without losing energy or injuring your subtle body.

But if a news story has nothing that you truly need to know beyond the headline, then just exposing yourself to the shock is like dropping quarters into an empty vending machine. Shocks in themselves are not the point, otherwise you might as well buy and watch the entire Faces of Death DVD set and become “knowledgeable” on what it’s like to die in a hundred different ways.

So for the sake of being impeccable with your energy, you better get a return of knowledge for energy invested, which means discerning what you need to know and transmute whatever negative energy you generate into positive. But how to transmute? Well, knowledge itself is empty if merely memorized, but if you observe yourself, turn within and get a flash of insight about how that knowledge fits into the bigger picture, if you receive an inner sense of recognition that brings about true understanding, then that in itself is what reverses the polarity from negative to positive and quantum leaps you to a higher order of objectivity.

Tom Montalk - http://montalk.net/notes/negativity