Power of Positive Thinking

By G.D. Budhiraja

Leading a split life has been one of the greatest problems down the ages and that is why the humanity seems sick today. We view worldly and non-worldly things as separate endues. Meditation and love, loneliness and relationship, sex and silence cannot be viewed separately. Whether it is a monk or family man, both suffer equal amount of pain. We need to develop an integrated personality. Only an integrated person can be authentic. When there is chasm between awareness and expression in our behaviour, we become un-authentic. Retain your individuality and recognize your uniqueness. Then you will be an integrated and happy person. Born in 1931, G.D. Budhiraja is a graduate with an in service diploma in management-equivalent to an MBA. He retired as a Senior Management Analyst from the Ministry of Planning, Government of India, in 1989. Presently, he is a name to reckon with as a management consultant in the private sector.

Fully trained in yoga for over 30 years, Mr. Budhiraja has been doing research on topics related to health, happiness and self improvement. Many of the observations made in this book are based on his practical experiences. Mr. Budhiraja is also the author of the books The Natural Way of Healthy Aging, Art of Happy-living and Stay Younger for Longer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diamond Books
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9788128828041

Book preview

1

Get High on Yourself

Love starts with self

* * *

The new focus these days is to ‘love ourselves’. We are moving away from the old ‘martyr’ ethic to suffer and sacrifice for others, to one of realizing that if we are to love humanity as whole, we must first love humanity in our unit -our own self. Before we give our judgment on this attitude, we must first reflect on the question - what loving someone really means ?

So how do we define love ? What does it means to love someone? When we love someone, we desire his/her happiness. Do I desire my own happiness? Well of course I do, at least on first reaction basis. I obviously don’t desire my unhappiness. But do I follow upon it? It is one thing to say that one loves someone and desires their happiness. But when we have to make choices that prove us truthful, we have to assess how we are successful in this effort.

Many times I wonder why do we say falling in love rather than saying rising in love. The obvious answer as it appears to me is that we fall in love because love implies total surrender. Unless we surrender our ego to the person we love, we cannot realise the power of love.

There are two basic emotions, among others, in every human being - love and hate. All our relationships are affected in some way or the other by these emotions. Love is a very powerful force that holds us together. Personal love, family love, country’s love are its different manifestations which can bring powerful feelings within us. Selfless love has been exalted down the ages. Physical love which flows out of attachment to a given object ends when the object itself dies. That love cannot be everlasting. Love is the energy which helps us heal whether we give this love to ourselves or receive it from another, says motivator and international author Wayne Dyer.

When we love someone or some cause, we are prepared to sacrifice anything for that person or that cause. In that context, what does loving oneself imply? To me that means to discover yourself We come to this world to experience our own reality, to learn who we are and what would be best for us. A time comes in our lives when we are not content with doing the same thing again and again. Although we may realise it, yet we go on the same way until we die discontented. This is not the way life was intended to be. Life is intended to be full of joy and wisdom with energy abounding. Generally we are following someone else’s mandate or beliefs. The ideal thing is that we should look deeper inside ourselves and discover where our joy is dormant. Look until you find the things which bring you joy and then begin doing them. This may not happen immediately. It usually takes years for one to open fully to oneself after prolonged self denials. This is the time to seek ourselves in the external world. Our truths are within us. You must go into the new reality which may be unknown and possibly a little frightening. As Joan Marques, the noted author, has said that many of us are now at the place where we have no alternative but to be true to ourselves. Do not worry if with some of the things you are still doing, you do not feel entirely enlightened. As you become more aligned with your truth, you become happier with your life and your life comes more into balance only you can know why you are here and can learn to be happy. No one outside you has any of the answers you seek.

We have to nourish our beings with positive feelings and embrace life with gratefulness and gratitude. This is the secret of the art of living - and Jiving consciously. The art of living needs a conscious choice. It is not about drifting unconsciously in all directions. One is not as weak as one starts assuming in the state of misery. One carries within oneself a vast treasure of godliness. One has to tap it. And the art of tapping is what meditation is all about. Then life becomes a celebration, a carnival of joys.

Life has been given to you to create, to rejoice and to celebrate. When life is easy, comfortable and convenient who cares? Who bothers? You have loved someone and then one day that person is gone. Crying in your loneliness, that is the occasion you can become aware. The pain is not to make you miserable, the pain is to make you more aware and when you are aware, misery disappears.

Only you can know why you are here. Only you confine happiness inside of you. Only you can discover your own truth and learn how to be happy. No one outside you has any of the answers you seek. In order to really like yourself, you really need to embrace your good points and divide your bad points into two groups.

There is a group of bad points which you can change and one you cannot change. There are lots of things in life you cannot change. In order to be happy you need to accept them and learn to live with them. Change which you can and look at what you cannot from a different angle. There may be some advantages in them. Even the most successful people have weaknesses. I do not mean that you should like your bad points. I say like yourself Soon you will relax. This is when the miracle occurs in you. Your appearance changes. Everyone will recognise your talents. You will be a person full of contentment and you will be happy. Always remember, you are never as bad as you sometimes think. Appreciate your own strengths. Do whatever keeps you fit. If you do not want to do a thing, say no. Do not feel guilty about spending time, money on yourself. In short always say YES to yourself

2

Live in the Present for

A Happy Future

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.

- The Buddha

* * *

Don’t worry about the future, it will only come one day at a time and the future is Now, says Eckhart Tolle in his book Practicing the Power of Now. The more you are able to honour and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain.

We do not live in a laboratory and have no way of knowing what results our actions will have. To live our life for results would be to sentence ourselves to continuous frustrations. Our only sure reward is our actions and not from them. The quality of our reward is in the depth of our response. Even though the results are unpredictable, no effort of ours is deemed to failure. And even a failure will not take the form we imagine. The most realistic attitude for us to have towards the future is it will be interesting to see what happens. Dejection assumes a knowledge of results that we cannot have.

I remember a recent case of my nephew who had passed his MBBS course and become a doctor. He had also been offered a job in a reputed hospital. However, he wanted to pursue his career in U.S.A. for which he had to clear three more examinations as prescribed by that country. Although he started preparations for these examinations, anxiety, self-doubt and uncertainty besieged him. The books he had to read for these examinations unnerved him and he wondered whether he will be able to cope with further studies. But he soon realised that our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what is clearly at hand; and he succeeded in clearing all these examinations and achieved his goal. He had realised that he should not be excessively preoccupied with the events of tomorrow and set himself in sphere of action today.

Shed the weight of the Past

The means of unhappiness are the accumulation and retention of the past. The process of taking on the weight of the past is unmistakable even within a few hours. Very early in the day something fails to go as expected and a slight discouragement is carried unnoticed into the next activity. As a consequence the new- activity is not performed satisfactorily and an additional worry is set silently into place. As the day progresses, a mounting sense of bleakness and weariness becomes unavoidable, all of which is so noticeably absent in children because for them present is what matters. One reason that children are so noticeably happy and have such seemingly impossible energy is that they have very little past to bog them down. They come into the world unencumbered by experience and free of anxiety about the implications of what has already occurred. It is difficult to get most two, three and even four- year-olds to answer any questions at all about what they did while they were away. They are so interested in, What are we going to do now? that the past is meaningless.

An emphasis on the past raises fear of the present. That much may be obvious; however, what is not often recognized is that all forms of fear transport psychological weight into the present. There is no such thing as idle worry. Worries do not idle; they grind. Fear presses upon the body as well as on the mind. By the time most of us reach the so-called golden years, the culmination of our efforts to build the best past we could, we have become so weighted down with all the miserable lessons we carry with us that we are in permanent depression and despair, as a visit to most homes for the elderly will show. So die to the past every moment. You do not need it. Only refer to it when absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of the present moment.

Stop living in the past! We all fall down. But remember, A saint is just a sinner who fell down and got up. Your past should be a reference point, not a residence. But SO many of us continuously live in the past.

Just because you made a mistake or circumstances led you to do something that you now regret, doesn’t mean that for the rest of your life you will have to beat yourself up because of it. Doesn’t matter if you made two mistakes or three. It doesn’t even matter if you made over a million mistakes in your life. What matters is today, right now.

You know the mistakes that you have made because you have that mistake as a reference point now and for the rest of your life. You weren’t born for sorrow. You weren’t born to be a doormat for others to wipe their feet on. You weren’t born to be used up and then disregarded. You were born to live a happy and abundant life. And if you aren’t living that way, it’s simply because at some point, you fell down. But now is the time to get up and start living the life that you were born to live. And that is the life of purpose. That’s a life of happiness and abundance.

Now, you ask, How do I get out of the past and get up? Well, I would like to say, it’s simple. But that wouldn’t be the truth. There’s nothing simple about it. It’s a daily process that you must work on. You have to be committed to making changes in your life. You will have to work on you. You will have to realise that what happened yesterday, is gone. You can never get that time back and, therefore, there is nothing you can do about it. But right in front of you is another minute or another hour or another day, week, month, year. Those things haven’t happened yet, so you can start to orchestrate your present so that your future will be more to your liking.

Live your future in the present

Often the desires that I think for the future are based on unrealistic concepts of myself that I want to fulfill. We are all standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities of the past and the future. We can’t possibly live in either of those eternities even for one split second; but, by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds. So let’s be content to live the only time we can possible live: from now until bedtime.

Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means. One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon, instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. How strange it is, our little procession of life! wrote Stephen Leacock. The child says, ‘When I am a big boy.’ But what is that? The big boy says, ‘When I grow up.’ And then, grown up, he says, ‘When I get married.’ But to be married, what is that, after all? The thought changes to ‘When I’m able to retire.’ And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone. Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.

The number of things just outside the perimeter of my financial reach remain constant no matter how much my financial condition improves. I believe that I would be happy if only my earnings were increased by so much and I could then have or do these few things I can’t quite afford, but when my income does increase I find I am still unhappy because from my new financial position I can now see a whole new set of things I don’t have. The problem will be solved when I realize that happiness is a present attitude and not a future condition.

3

Anatomy of Success and Failure

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

* * *

All human beings want to be successful. But 90 percent can’t. Why does this happen? What are the factors responsible for these failures? And like every other person, do you also blame others for your incapability? The fact is that you are responsible for your failures. To escape this, one unnecessarily blames one’s luck, people and circumstances.

To understand the anatomy of success, we have first to recognise the power which is within the thoughts. Imagination is that vibrant, magnetic doorway within man’s subtler being to vast creative realms. To which, if we are sensitive and receptive, through listening-in, it can speak and lead us unerringly to seek and fulfill our higher purposes.

Our imaging faculty can be defined as a process by which we create mental pictures in our mind’s eye. In fact the process by which we