If my mind is happy, I can reasonably conclude that I am living a happy life. If my mind is miserable, I lead a miserable life in the midst of all the luxuries I may have. As the mind, so the man. In the mind, thoughts flow. Thoughts can be positive or negative.
You may ask, “Why does my mind tend towards negativity, whereas my friend’s mind is positive?” It is God who gives us the variety of minds. Then you grumble, “I do not know why God is resorting to this mischief of giving me bad thoughts for no fault of mine!”
The reality is that I am what my mind is. If my mind entertains negative thoughts, my actions are detrimental to myself and to others in the society, whereas if another’s thoughts are beautiful, his actions are a blessing to himself and the society. Think about what orders the quality of one’s thoughts. Why bad, negative thoughts in me and good thoughts in others?
I know the ‘mind’ is the performer and my actions in the outer world are bad, ugly or beautiful according to the quality of the thoughts that I entertain in my mind. But how is that a particular mind often thinks negatively? Why does this mind have fear and hesitation? Why does it lack the dynamism and courage to take up a particular project? Why? The reason is that the quality and quantity of the thoughts in our mind are determined by our values. The texture and quality of our thoughts are governed, ordered, determined and ruled by the values we accept.
Every one of us has certain values – certain conclusions – that your intellect has arrived at, regarding the direction of your life and its goal. Adolph Hitler valued the superiority of the German race and sought power above everything else, and that value created negative thoughts in him. His actions brought immeasurable destruction and death to millions, including a shameful end to his own life. Mahatma Gandhi is hailed as Mahatma. Why? His values and motives were noble. The thoughts that arise in you are ordered and governed by the values you own. Therefore, if your values are healthy, your thoughts are gracious, and naturally your performance beautiful.
Our values have been wrong, and the negative idea that money can purchase everything has landed the country into corruption and chaos. If the values in us are not healthy, the quality of our thoughts will become negative and poisonous, creating only sorrow, death and disaster in the outer world. Therefore, we must change our values. It is for this reason that the human intellect is given to us.
Unless the values of individual life are changed, the contours of our national life cannot be changed. That is how all great revolutions have occurred. The revolutionaries made people think in a new direction. Where the values are changed, the quality of thoughts is changed, and thereafter their behavior, their relationships and their attitude to happenings around, are all changed. We can ignore this path only at our collective peril.
