Positive Thinking 02 – Understanding the four kinds of thoughts

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
Welcome back to our discussion on positive thinking principles. Today we will discuss about four kinds of thoughts. So positive thinking is a matter of thinking, but thinking is not just a matter of thinking.
That means that what we think about is not just something that exists simply in the head. It’s actually something, thoughts also have their own reality and analyzing not just the content of our thoughts, but analyzing the category of our thoughts and as a broad analytical principle can help us contextualize our various thoughts and then we use them properly. So we can categorize our thoughts into four broad categories.
There can be positive thoughts, there can be negative thoughts, there can be waste thoughts, and there can be necessary thoughts. So let’s discuss first from the dispositional, then we will discuss from the functional perspective. So from the dispositional perspective, we can have positive and negative thoughts.
So these are thoughts based on their content. We’re not just talking about perception, but just the content. So for example, thoughts of love, of peace, of gratitude, of joy, of good wishes.
So where we are thinking either good about others or good about ourselves. Good about ourselves not in the sense that we are being self-congratulatory or arrogant or proud, but just looking at ourselves or looking at the world positively. Those are positive thoughts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that the capacity, the ability to look positively at things. He said that essentially the measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. So it’s a measure of mental health.
Those who just look everywhere and see negative things, that could at one level be a kind of a mental sickness. It generates negativity. It takes away energy and it engenders lethargy, antipathy and overall negativity.
If one is always seeing negative everywhere. So positive thoughts are essentially thoughts. When we look at the external situation, we view it positively or we look at ourselves and view ourselves positively.
How this can be done in a spiritual context, we will discuss later. But the Vedas say that let good thoughts come to me from everywhere. That’s one of the prayers.
So the idea is a positive disposition is a healthy disposition. On the other hand, there are negative thoughts and negative thoughts are thoughts about the thoughts which engender negative perceptions and negative actions. So for example, revenge fantasies or somebody snuffs us and then we dream a revenge fantasy thinking I will snuff this person.
I will show this person. I will or revenge fantasies can be even more brutal where a person wants to physically hurt a person, physically sometimes even exterminate a person. So these kind of revenge fantasies can be extremely detrimental.
So these are akin to if a person, if we hate someone and want to hurt that person by speaking, hurling verbal abuse at that person because that person has done something wrong towards us, then that is akin to holding a piece of coal in our hands and desiring to hurl that coal at that person. And while trying to hurl the coal at that person, we are actually letting ourselves get caught in the negativity. And often the negativity that we impose on ourselves becomes far more than the negativity that we may impose on that person.
Why? Because suppose we want to hit a piece of burning coal at someone, but for that we have to carry the coal in our hands and that carrying the coal in our hands is going to hurt us more than it hurts that person. So that way often negative thoughts about others in terms of revenge fantasies may end up hurting us more than they hurt the other person. Similarly, when we give in to anger, anger dissipates our energy depending on the magnitude and the extent of the anger.
The energy that is dissipated in a good workout, in the gym or in a jog, anger may take away, may consume more than that amount of energy for us. And this consumption is actually a dissipation, whereas when we do exercise the energy is constructively used to build our body. Here in anger, whether in expression or suppression, the energy that is dissipated is simply wasted.
And in this way there are negative thoughts which affect us in terms of anger, revenge, vengeance. And similarly there can be envy, you know what others have, we resent what they have and we wish to have what they have. This can also be a highly negative thought.
And then apart from this dispositional thoughts, then there are functional thoughts. So functional thoughts can be in terms of, we can have necessary thoughts and waste thoughts. So necessary thoughts are the thoughts which talk about the things which we have to do.
For example, we can have, if we are driving a vehicle, then to driving our car, then we may have to see, okay, some vehicle is coming from here, there’s a red signal here, when do I have to take a turn? These are simply necessary thoughts. And to think about them, it’s functionally necessary and these are fine. But often our attention is distracted from necessary thoughts by waste thoughts.
So for example, if we are driving a car and we see someone, we see a new model of a car, we start thinking that, oh, if only I had that car. And now quite often stray desires just come in from somewhere into our consciousness and then they consume our consciousness, by which we are left incapable of doing anything constructive. We are left incapable of doing… we are not mentally available for doing what we are doing because our mental energy is consumed by those stray thoughts, those stray desires.
So there can be stray hankering and there can be wasteful lamenting. No, the present is all that we have and the present is all that we will ever have. But when stray waste thoughts consume our mind, then we often think about the past or we think about the future.
In the past, yes, things may have gone wrong, but often when things go wrong, when one door closes, we keep glaring at that closed door for so long that we miss some other door that might have opened. If something has gone wrong, it fill our eyes with tears and those tears can blind us to some other opportunity that might have come in that time. So both daydreaming about the future, which is very different from planning about the future and lamenting about the past, which is very different from learning from the past.
So this kind of aware, either in daydreaming or in lamenting, there is no purposeful thinking. There is just stray wishful thinking that is actually a time waster. It’s a thought waster.
So in this way, by analyzing our thoughts, they can be from the dispositional perspective, they can be positive or negative. From the functional perspective, they can be necessary or waste. So we need to cultivate the positive thoughts and we need to channelize the necessary thoughts.
So on the other hand, we need to purge out the negative thoughts and the waste thoughts. If we let our thoughts go on their default pathways, then usually the default pathway is the downward pathway. So that means our thoughts will frequently go towards negative and waste thoughts if they are left on their own.
On the other hand, if we consciously observe our thoughts, categorize our thoughts and then choose our thoughts, then we can cultivate positive thoughts. We can channelize necessary thoughts and in this way, we can increase our utilization of our mental energy by cultivating positive and necessary thoughts and in that way, we can increase our productivity. So the whole session, this whole course will focus on how to further streamline our thoughts using intellectual and spiritual principles for enhancing our control over our inner territory.
Thank you.