The following transcript was delivered by a essence/spirit personality known as Elias, who is no longer living but who delivers the information via an energy exchange with a woman named Mary Ennis, (or what is more commonly known as ‘channeling)  For a more in depth explanation please return to my home page by clicking on the HOME button at the top of this page.

 

”Why You Pay Attention to the Negative”

 

 

Taken from session #20151024-1

 

ELIAS: Good afternoon!

GROUP: Hi Elias!

ELIAS: This day we will be discussing some of your favorite subjects (chuckles): being present, feelings and expressing feelings, and also why you pay attention to the negative. (Reactions from group, and Elias laughs)

Why is the negative more important? Why does that always seem to overshadow the positive? Why do you remember the negative experiences more than the positive experiences? When you relate a story, why is it that you gravitate toward stories that are negative rather than positive or exciting? Why do you interact with each other and engage conversations that are more geared to what is wrong than what is right, or what is uncomfortable rather than what is comfortable, or what is not happening rather than what you are accomplishing?

Contrary to what your scientists will express to you, for it is a matter of what you observe and measure that will be an indicator to scientists as to their data, and if they are measuring and observing more reference to negative associations or behaviors or experiences, then they deduce that you are, in their terms, hard-wired to remember negative experiences and to be more drawn to negative expressions than to positive expressions. But this is incorrect.

You are not actually more predisposed to be focusing on negative or remembering negative more than positive, but this also ties very nicely into our subject of feelings and expressing feelings.

Generally, when you generate a positive experience, or some experience that is comfortable or that you like or that excites you, you do express it, or you in the very least express it partially. You express some of it; perhaps not all of it, for as we have been discussing recently, you are not accustomed to expressing feelings in any capacity. But you are more likely to express a positive feeling in the moment, and you are definitely more likely to release that energy of a positive experience immediately. 

When you have a positive experience - when you are happy, when you are excited, when you are accomplishing, generally you will release that energy very quickly, if not immediately in the moment. Therefore, you do not hold that energy, and you do not dwell on positive experiences. 

You have a positive experience. You acknowledge it. That is an action that you definitely do. You do acknowledge positive experiences when they happen, when you generate them. And in doing so, you do not dwell on that positive experience. You also do not attempt to analyze it. You are not trying to figure it out: Why did I have that positive experience? (Group laughter) No, you accept it, you welcome it and you release it. And it matters not how excited you may be in a positive experience. Generally speaking, in less than an hour after you generate a positive experience you are not feeling it any longer, you are not thinking about it any longer, you are not addressing to it, you are not holding it. It is gone.

But another significant factor is what you have learned, what you have been taught and what has been reinforced to you, much of which has been initiated by the dawn of psychology, which encourages you to think about, to analyze, to figure out, to replay all of your negative experiences. In this, negative experiences have been made to be important and that they are significant. They have meaning. Positive experiences have meaning also, but you are not taught to be evaluating the meaning of positive experiences or what causes them. You are taught to think about and analyze and dwell upon negative experiences.

And this becomes such an ingrained factor with all of you, you encourage it with your young: “Talk to me about what is bothering you. Tell me what you are feeling that is upsetting you.” And you think that you are communicating with your children and that you are encouraging them to express themselves. But you are not including “Talk to me about what you accomplished,” “Share with me what makes you happy,” “Tell me what you feel when you are excited,” “What are you interested in?” What you encourage is you notice a look that a child expresses and you immediately seize upon that and express, “Did someone upset you? Are you uncomfortable?” 

In this, you are repeating cycles of generating negative expressions as being more important than positive expressions. What is the cliché? It is impossible to turn away from a train wreck. What do you watch on your televisions? News. And what does your news express to you? Accomplishments? Happiness? Joy? Freedom? Excitement? Creativity? No. Generally, it reports to you about death and destruction and debates and arguments and crime and even weather (group laughter), that is bad. If the weather is sunny and beautiful and would be encouraging you to be happy and enjoying the day, your weatherman will likely express, “The weather will be fine,” or “It will be sunny and bright,” and you will incorporate a very small portion of your news report that occupies the weather, unless they include “but it will be hot and muggy and uncomfortable.” (Group laughter)

In this, you pay attention to negative, for it is automatic. You are so accustomed to noticing. It is not necessarily that negative is more attractive than positive, and it is also not necessarily that there are more negative experiences or expressions than positive. It is that the negative you have made into being important, and the positive is only important in the moment. Which is how it should be for both, that it is only important in the moment. 

That when you generate a negative experience, what do you do? You experience it, then you analyze it, then you share it, then you talk about it, and you talk about it again and you talk about it again, and whoever will listen to you, you will repeat it again and again and again and again. And how many times do you repeat, “I accomplished this and it was so exciting”? You may express that once. You may even express it twice. After that, you likely will be bored with it and not expressing it, for it is not dramatic. And you can create negative experiences to be very dramatic.

And why else are they attractive? For if you are expressing negative, you are hoping to elicit sympathy, compassion, empathy, attention – you want to be seen. When you experience positive, it is a very personal experience. What is good to you may be unimportant to another individual. What is exciting to you may be mundane to another individual, or they may not be interested in that exciting, comfortable, satisfying experience. Therefore, you learn very young that to be witnessed you must express in a manner that gains other individuals’ attention.

You all want to be witnessed. In this, you all want to know that you are important, and to have that validated, that you are important. And if other individuals are not interested in what excites you or what is satisfying to you or what you have accomplished, then they will listen and pay attention to you if you are uncomfortable, if you are sad, if you are anxious, if you are angry. Why is that? It is easy to echo. It is not easy to echo positive experiences, for you are all so very different and your interests are different, and what excites you and what is good and what is satisfying to you or what is an accomplishment to you is different with each of you. And therefore, it is more difficult to echo another individual in their accomplishment, in their excitement.

If you express, “I am so proud of myself. I painted an entire wall!” (Group laughter) “I accomplished that in two hours, and I feel so good,” many other individuals will respond to you of “That is nice.” (Group laughter)

ANN: “Good for you!”

ELIAS: “I’m happy that you are pleased with yourself.” They may not be interested in painting an entire wall. That may not seem to be an accomplishment to them, for they would not do it. Therefore, they do not know how to echo you. They can pretend to echo you, which you and they both know would be very false. The other individual could pretend to echo you and jump up and down and express, “That is so exciting!” (Group laughter) “I’m so happy that you painted the wall!” And you would know that it was false, and they would know that it was pretend. It is not an actual echo.

You pay attention to echoes and you are drawn to them, for they validate you. They validate you that the other individual is connecting with you and relating to you, and therefore you are important. They see you. They hear you. They understand you. And that is important. And when you express an accomplishment, it is difficult to echo that. When you express, “I was engaged in a conversation with Sally yesterday, and she irritated me SO MUCH, because she always talks about herself and she never hears any other individual,” and the individual that you are speaking to will likely express, “I KNOW!” (Group laughter) “I have the same experience!” And you are validated, for you have been echoed.

And in that, this occurs very frequently. You either pay attention to conversations that you engage with other individuals when you incorporate common interests, therefore you are generating a very specific method and action when you generate a conversation with another individual. A subject is expressed, one individual presents the subject, the other individual listens, and while they are listening, what are they doing? You think you are listening. You are partially listening. And what are you doing? You do not even know. You are accessing. You are immediately accessing. You are not thinking. You are accessing information: What memory do I hold that is similar? What is my experience that is similar that I can understand and relate to this other individual? It does not require any thinking. You do not think. You access.

And in that accessing of information, as I expressed, you are partially listening. You are accessing information to echo. For that is what you do. You want to be echoed and you want to echo the other individuals, for this is your method of connecting and relating and validating each other. 

You engage your thinking if you are debating. Debating is a very different expression from a conversation. If you are debating, you have set yourself in a position of opposition and you have engaged a competition in which it is clearly established that one or the other will win. One will be right and one will be wrong. And the debate is the competition to establish who will be right, who will be accepted as right. That is very different than a conversation. And you do think in a debate, for you are calculating how you can out-right the other individual, how you can be more right than the other individual and be convincing in your rightness.

But in a conversation, you want to be connecting. You want to be witnessed, and you want to be witnessing. Therefore, your method to do that is to echo each other. And the easiest and most effective manner in which you can echo is in negative experiences. For you can share those. Even if the experiences are different, the feelings are the same. Therefore, the experience in itself does not actually matter. For one individual can express, “I experienced this and it was awful,” and the other individual will offer an entirely different scenario and express, “I know what you mean, because I experienced this,” and it is an entirely different experience, but the feeling is the same. And that is what they are echoing. And that is what you are connecting with.

And in that, you generate that expression of importance. You witness each other. You acknowledge the importance of the other individual, you connect with them and you connect with their feeling.

Positive feelings, because you do not dwell on them, because you do not hold to them, because you do release them and they seem so fleeting because you are not holding to them, it is much more difficult for you to access that information within you and to express that in the same manner: “I am excited that I painted this wall!” And the other individual responds, “I know what you mean! I drove to another state yesterday and I was so excited!” (Group laughter) That would be an example of sharing that feeling of accomplishment and excitement and generating that action of relating to each other.

But with positive experiences, because they are not encouraged you do not automatically know how to express that relating to another individual. You do not dismiss the subject and address to the feeling and express your connection with the other individual through the feeling. You focus on the subject, and you cannot echo with the subject. 

You are not echoing with the subject in negative expressions; you are echoing the feeling. But you do that much more easily, for it is so automatic. But it is not because you are predisposed to pay more attention to that; it is because you are taught to pay more attention to that. You are encouraged to pay more attention to that, and you are encouraged to question yourselves continuously. 

And therefore, even when you are offered information that encourages you to be empowered and to be expressing in positive manners and accomplishing, you turn it to question yourself: “What am I doing wrong?” “Why am I not as accomplished as I should be?” “I incorporate much information, and I am not accomplishing,” or “I am stuck.” “What is wrong with me?” “What am I not doing?” rather than “What am I doing?”

Part of this also is very much connected to that factor of not knowing how to express yourselves. You have learned so well that you have forgotten how to express yourselves, how to express what you feel. Or you have been taught that it is inappropriate. You can express yourself at times, but not always. There is a time and a place in which you can express yourself and express your feelings, and other than that it is inappropriate and do not do it, or do it alone. 

But if you are alone, how do you do it? What would you do if you are alone? You can, but I would wager to say that most of you do not, for most of you do not know what to do if you are alone. Then once you are alone, the moment has passed and you have explained it away or you have overridden it and you have expressed that it is unimportant. 

And what does that do? It holds that energy. You did not express it, you did not release it, therefore it continues to be held. And that is another reason that you pay more attention to the negative than the positive, is that you continue to hold the negative energy, whereas you release the positive energy almost immediately. Therefore, the negative is always a reminder, for that energy will be expressed.