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Develop positive thinking for 2008Published by Nitin_shah on 2007/12/27 (114 reads)"To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun," reads Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. In this "most wonderful time of the year," as the song goes, I find it a great time to reflect. I replay memories of the past. Some make me sad, some make me smile. I project into the future and find both happy and some not so happy thoughts. to wallow in regrets or self-pity. I remind myself of the wisdom, "Learn from the past, but don't live there," and "Live life rather than letting life live you." And I think of spiritual and political leader Mahatma Gandhi's words, "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." "Sing, hum, whistle," my One-day-at-a-time Therapy booklet tells me, "This moment is the only moment you have. Respect its possibilities." The booklet urges the reader not to feel stuck with the past about things that cannot be undone, nor bogged down projecting into the future about what hasn't happened and may not happen, and forget to live the present. Living the present? Worth reading is the Dec. 3 Time Magazine cover story, "What Makes Us Good/Evil," by Jeffrey Kluger, who writes about "the savage and the splendid" that coexist in the same person: "Morality and empathy are writ deep in our genes. Alas, so are savagery and bloodlust." Sense of moralityA human's sense of "morality" -- a "sense of moral grammar" -- built on empathy is developing from the time of birth, but it's people around him who teach him how to apply it. Apes have group norms; human communities have their own behavioral expectations of each other that allow us to live harmoniously with each other -- most of the time. The "overwhelming majority" of people don't "run off the moral rails in remotely as awful a way as serial killers do," but people nevertheless "do come untracked" as Homo sapiens deal with those "outside" their tribe. The story of three delinquents in Yonkers, New York, one of whom said "an old lady" should not be mugged because she could be his own grandmother, while "a Chinese delivery guy" can be mugged as he is "alien, literally and figuratively," illustrates dark and terrible similarities to the "dehumanization of the outsider" that occurs in wars -- in Hitler's Nazi Germany, or in Milosevic's Yugoslavia "manipulating tribal sentiments to create mass murder." There are people who follow the leaders; there are those who refuse to murder even when ordered to do so. "Our opposable thumbs and big brains gave us the tools to dominate the planet, but wisdom comes more slowly than physical hardware," concludes Kluger, who hopes that while "We surely have a lot of killing and savagery ahead of us before we fully civilize ourselves," maybe "the struggles still to come are fewer than those left behind." Martin Luther King, Jr., a teacher of nonviolence, says, "There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us." Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, says, "religion . . . facilitate(s) love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, forgiveness." As usual at this time of the year I recall the "highway of humanity" presented at a conference in Manila by New Zealander John Sax: We, individuals, are travelers on his highway, we can chose to get off on Exit "Great" that has a series of stations called love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, humility, honesty, truth, generosity, forgiveness, and self-control; or Exit "Miserable" with stations called hate, misery, conflict, cruelty, meanness, unfaithfulness, brutality, pride, dishonesty, falsehood, misery, unforgiving, and no self-control. Which exit do we choose? As thoughts create humans, what they think they become, it is important to develop critical and creative thinking, which is necessary for improving the quality of what we do. A positive mind makes us strong spiritually and physically; opens doors to new things and different views, and provides opportunities where a negative mind sees difficulties. German physicist Albert Einstein says, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." While arriving at a different outcome requires doing things differently -- it means change -- the late American professor Henry Steel Commager posited, change does not necessarily mean progress, but there cannot be progress without change; education is essential for change for it "creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them." Be positiveI found in my 1994 dog-eared pocket book "Positive Charges," by Alexander Lockhart, great inspirations. As I flipped the pages, one page reads, "Attitude is a habit of thought," and another page, "Nothing great was ever achieved without a positive attitude." As thinking shapes attitude, and attitude exposes and reflects what we are to the world, our attitude toward the world depends on our thinking, based on ideas, opinions, information, experiences, values, and beliefs, acquired from family, school, peers, religious faith, occupation -- something I taught in classes and write much in this space. As we enter the New Year 2008, remember these: positive attitudes breed positive results; you cannot always control your life circumstances, but you can control your attitude toward those circumstances; what whips you is not defeat but your mental attitude toward it; a positive attitude produces a positive perception and changes the situation for the better; thoughts can be developed. A New Year's resolution should include developing positive thinking. A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com. Source: Click Here
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