We all experience negativity — the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and throughout there is a sense of one's own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul-smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.
Negativity breeds tension, friction, gossip, discontentment, but it is also very accurate, deliberate, and profound.
— Chogyam Trungpa, The Essential Chogyam Trungpa by Carolyn Rose Gimian, editor