One of the great psychiatrists of our times is Karl Menninger. He said: “Attitudes are more important than facts.”
The facts may be that I am passing through a dark period of my life — that I suffer from an “incurable” disease — that I am on the verge of a financial crisis — that I am involved in a difficult personal relationship problem which I cannot resolve. More important than the “facts” is my reaction to them. How do I react to the problem that confronts me? Placed in similar situations, different people react differently.
The Bhagavad Gita says: “Man is his own friend: man is his own foe!”
We are our own friends and we are our own enemies. No one outside of us can do us any harm. It is very easy, in difficult and trying circumstances, to throw the blame on others. It is very easy to say that if such and such a thing had not occurred, our condition would have been different. That is not so! No one outside of us can do us harm. It is we who are our own foes: it is we who can be our own friends. If we would be our own friends, let us adopt a positive attitude towards life.
The positive attitude is the friendly attitude.
What is it to have the positive attitude? It is not that the man of positive attitude refuses to recognise the negative side of life. Life has a negative side, a dark side. Life is full of difficulties and dangers. But the man with the positive attitude refuses to dwell on the negative side of life. Conditions may be very adverse, yet he continues to expect good things. It is an inviolable law of life, that when you expect good, good will come to you.
The man, with the friendly attitude, will not criticise. He will not see faults in others. Whatever we see in others, we do but draw into ourselves. If we consider the faults of others, we are heaping them upon ourselves. If we see the good in others, we will keep on growing better and better and our minds will always be at peace and the world around us will smile.
Dada J P Vaswani is a humanitarian, philosopher, educator, acclaimed writer, powerful orator, messiah of ahimsa, and non-sectarian spiritual leader
