Who amongst us does not wish to become something better than what we are? We lose our temper, sometimes even with our mother and father, and it is not that we are disloyal and disrespectful to them. You start to despair, “No one seems to understand me. A hundred things disturb me. I make a mess of my life, I have no patience.” What is it in me that repels others? These are unwanted qualities which modern psychologists call negative ideas. When negative ideas are expressed in one’s character, others get repelled from that person. On the other hand, if one can bring out into expression the fragrance of one’s positive qualities, then people rush towards that individual, charmed by his beauty and grace.
People, in whatever society, caste, creed or color, are magnetically pulled by positive qualities. When I open out the sweetness of the qualities in my personality, I positively find that more and more people circle around me, love me and are ready to support my creative programs. These positive qualities are there in all of us but they remain dormant. Everyone knows what is love, mercy, cheer, kindness, joy and courage of convictions. We know that all these are noble virtues but when we act we act compromising our ideals.
The great masters down the ages have declared that unless you can master the mind, unless you have control of the instruments of expression, you cannot translate ideas into actions. Failure in the world is never due to the lack of ideas. All of us are bestowed with wonderful ideas, but when we put them into work, when we express ourselves in society, somehow or the other we do it wrongly and therefore, we cannot win the battle, and score in life.
Whatever mass of knowledge we may acquire, we can be utter failures in life unless we can produce that knowledge in the outside world. To do that, we need to direct the knowledge through our mind. Hence, mental control is most important. The student who develops a certain amount of mind control can have greater chances to succeed in life. But in order to discipline or train the mind, we must, in the first place, know what the mind is.
When you are asked what mind is, you may say “Mind is thought”. Yes, mind is thought, but this is not a definition. Whenever there are thoughts, there is the mind; no thoughts, no mind. But thought alone is not the mind. Thoughts and mind have a relationship just as water and river. Water by itself is not river. A river is water flowing. Similarly, when thoughts flow through us there is the experience of the powerful equipment, mind.
Substitution of positive thoughts and flooding the mind with creative ideas is the way we can flush out the incomplete and confusing ideas. So, recognizing these negative or wrong thoughts, reject them immediately and totally. The power of right thinking progressively expels all false thoughts and induces healthy conceptions, adding to the effectual dynamism in the seeker
