Monday 21 May 2018

Seeds for the mind?

I am not a Trump supporter. 
I feel he has a lack of understanding of basic principles of life like honesty, humility, loving-kindness and respect. These are just a few of the many strong principles that, as laws of nature, tend to determine whether or not we lead a peaceful and happy life. Even though he may experience short lived pleasures, seeing his name on many buildings; true happiness and peace of mind are most likely not his share. 

Now this is not a posting meant to criticize anyone. But negative people like him, even if we do not support any of their thoughts or convictions, tend still to influence us in a huge way. While by now perhaps a majority of the American people and almost certainly a huge majority of non-Americans have seen enough to have developed a certain dislike for the man, we tend to be inundated by his ideas and his ways. 

He likes to tweet and has more than a million followers on twitter. But how about the billions of people who do not even want to think about following him and reading all his rantings, his self-praise and his illusions of grandiosity. We are almost pressed with our noses in this rotten material. We look at the news and what we see, even on the media that do think like us? "Today another tweet storm of Trump". And something inside of us, wants to see the negativity about the person we do not like.

But in this way give so much power to these negative persons, and unwittingly, we allow so much of negativity, so much of anger and hatred, so much of nonsense to enter our mind. 

Robin Sharma has written the bestseller, the monk who sold his ferrari, and in this book he compared the mind of humans to a garden. The more seeds of nonsense and anger we plant the more of the same will grow in this fertile garden. The more seeds of love and kindness and honesty and values we plant, the more of these things will govern our thinking process and thus our lives. 

I think this metaphor of the mind as a garden is a real good one. It is high time, I think that we try to stop reading all the headlines about the persons we cannot align ourselves with. This does not mean we close our mind. But once we know enough about negative persons, we do not want to give them the power to pollute our thoughts, our mind our inner world with all their negativity. 

Let us spend each day a bit less time on "the news" and a bit more time on the positive literature of olden times and of today. Investing an hour a day in positive thinking, in prayerful reflection, in nature, is so much more contributing to our personal growth than spending a lot of time following all the negative news of the world. 

Even if up to now, I have fallen in the trap of eagerly reading all negative reporting about people like Trump, I have decided for myself from now to stop feeding my mind, what persons like that think and write and reserve for my mind the food educational events, positive thinkers, charitable wisdom, and also fun events like listening to some great music.
 

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