To use positive affirmations without getting down to what is underneath is like putting sweet icing on a cake of mud. Your task is not to seek for love but to find and remove all the obstacles to the awareness of love’s presence. Everything you have built against love needs to be exposed and released. Any authentic spiritual path is more a journey through the darkness into the light. As you go much deeper, you realize that the ego set up a dualistic thought system of opposites to cover over the truth of being, the truth of pure Oneness. In that sense, the positive and negative were set up as a trick. Positive thinking may have initial benefits but people are then usually faced with dark unconscious guilt that is underneath the positive and the negative. They are both part of a defense mechanism that covers over the pure truth.