In India, it is believed that a human being has to take a total of 84 lakh births before being born as a human. He starts with the lowest level of bacteria and moves up gradually as plants, animals and then as the developed type existing to-day. What makes him more efficacious than the other species on this planet is the ability to reason, the talent to question, the finesse to think rationally and the passion to hunt for elegant solutions. Thus, the greatest blessing to man from the Al Mighty is the human “Mind”, residing in our three pound brain. Whatever happens in this world begins with a thought hatched in the fountainhead of our brain!
The Power of thoughts- often we read or hear these four words from our spiritual gurus, motivational speakers or inspiring writers each day. The crystallized version of all positive thinking books ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne was on Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers list for over 1000 days. The data affirms that not only a handful of esoteric people but also a lot many of us are aware of this fact that each thought counts to shape our lives. Each thought that emanates from our thought process moves to the universe and has a dynamic force to create what we desire, eventually improving the quality of our life.
But I am not going to recapitulate those top notch mantras of positive thinking. Neither I am going to discuss any popular nostrum which is already known to us and nor am I going to bounce off the psychological research of neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to restructure itself after training or practice.) Rather, I am going to talk about negative thinking! At the face of it, I might sound staggering for an iota of second, but later you would understand that just by making the phrase “think positive” a part of our vernacular doesn’t purport that we have stricken the chord.
We are always guided to think positively and asked to choose our thoughts carefully, but there is hardly anyone who tries to steer us to ‘conquer’ our negative thinking! It is tragic when people recommend us to stop ruminating when we are in a maze of doubt, which is quite an absurd idea because an organ like brain can stop working or become dormant but mind is a procreator of thoughts, perceptions, visions, consciousness, memory and imagination which can desist at Samadhi or death bed only. Thus, the mind needs a great deal of groundwork to cultivate constructive thoughts.
In the first place we need emotional untangling for personal growth and self development. To understand each emotion and to balance & integrate the head and heart is the most vital step towards removing the negativity from our minds. We need to acknowledge and make sense of our feelings so that we can accurately respond to them, but this requires a lot of tolerance and patience on our part.
The conditioned mind can not be changed within a few days by babbling “think positive”; as a matter of fact it requires a lot of meditation, introspection, spiritual peace, avoidance use of negative words in our speech and effort to read inspirational books regularly to nurture our mind.
The mind conditioned to think negatively distracts us from our focus and drains our energy. Here I would like to cite an example of a female sphex wasp who leaves her egg sealed in a burrow alongside a paralyzed grasshopper, which her lava can eat when lava hatches. But before bringing the grasshopper in the burrow, she leaves it at the entrance, inspects the burrow and then drags the grasshopper inside by its antennae. But Charles Darwin discovered that if the grasshopper’s antennae are removed the wasp will not drag it into the burrow, even though the legs could serve the same function as the antennae.
This explains how a slight change in the quotidian work makes a human being fall into pieces. As human beings, we have the endowment to think perspicaciously and make better decisions; unfortunately we end up behaving like the female sphex wasp. It is the conditioning of our mind that dictates our perceptions of reality.
To gain control over the functioning of our thoughts, primarily we need to de-condition the mind and stop behaving as if we were programmed. Indelibly it is a slow process but once we start believing and practicing it religiously, we can decrease or eventually finish the momentum of our negative emotions and thoughts. When we start convincing ourselves not to follow certain type of behavior during adverse circumstances, we start heading in the vicinity of neutral ideation from the negative. This is a watershed moment in our lives as we bulldoze our ways to bring a constructive change in our thought process.
When the snake charmer removes the poisonous fangs of the snake, his attitude towards the snake double back because he becomes a dauntless commander from a petrified hunter. Though the snake remains the same, it hisses, shows the teeth, flicks its tongue but the feeling that it has got no poisonous fangs, alter the outlook of the snake charmer. Similarly, when we remove the poisonous fangs of negativity from our emotions, thoughts or consciousness, we become bodacious like the snake charmer and channelise our mind towards optimism.
Quoting a beautiful saying by Guru Nanak Dev (the founder of Sikh faith) “Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets.” The Guru conveys a mesmeric message that a fly feeds itself on sweets, but when it consumes too much of it, the very sweetness becomes the reason for its death. Likewise, humans are controlled by a negative emotion called desire. This covetousness makes man selfish and kills the enrichment of mind. In the same way if we keep feeding our already conditioned mind with negative thoughts, the negativism would exterminate our peacefulness by making us feel suffocated and squelching our spiritual growth.
Make a wise decision from today to heal ’thy’ mind by eliminating negativity and embracing proactive outlook towards life. In any case, it doesn’t mean that our life will become a bed of roses, but it will give us more fortitude, optimism and persistency to ameliorate the thorny phases of life.
