Lecture 3
Positive Thinking
We know that our minds are like parachutes; they work best when they are open. This presentation will help you to think positively if you read all these with an open mind.
When I was a student at Natabua Secondary School in 1954, one of my favourite teachers, Rohan Prasad, had once given me a very simple solution for progress. He said as a successful student I should make my life full of adventures and make my life an on-going series of rich experiences.
I had gone to this prestigious high school from a very simple country living and farming background and ‘adventures’ and ‘rich experiences’ were very powerful and distant ideas for me. However, upon enquiry my teacher simplified the ideas for me. He said that your entire life should be a process of setting effective goals and achieving fulfilment through realizing them.
I was advised to let every new day bring a spiritual triumph to me like the warm sun bursting through the clouds over the Mount Evans in the valley of the Sleeping Giants of Sabeto. My teacher told me to make a feature movie and let it be screened before me every day. He wanted me to be the producer, director, manager and the main actor of that movie but he demanded that the movie would become more realistic, relevant, and meaningful if I was also the writer, the audience and the critic of my scenarios.
This was a huge task and naturally I hesitated. My teacher said that the whole activity was absolutely possible because I was responsible for all the images and that was my drama and my creation. The story, he said, involved my happiness, misery, success, failures, laughter, tears, goodness, truth, beauty and even my evil and ugliness were to be there.
When I seemed negative about the project, my teacher emphasized that it was the calibre and standard of my self-image that would cause me to rise to the new heights or descend to the depressing depths. He added that even if I could not see my self-image and could not touch it, nonetheless it was very real. It was to be my big picture of myself.
So through the motivational efforts of one of my best teachers I understood that I had to make fine, big, and strong images of myself to succeed in life. The finer, the bigger, and the stronger the images I made of myself, the better would be my satisfaction, achievement and pleasure. From then onward I began making my images that gave me rich experiences<