Positive Mind (ePub)

In the Eastern world, the positive mind belongs to a spiritual horizon. For westerners, it is a technique. In the Eastern world where it originated, Vedanta, the positive mind, is a spiritual journey encrypted in insightful stories, rich in content and filled with symbols. These symbols can be absorbed by everyone, through the path of intuition regardless of the mystic and spiritual orientation. The positive mind is a part of a philosophy of life which engages the faculties of judgement, awareness and wisdom. The easterner is open to contemplation, generous with time, and the westerner is pragmatic and eager to solve existential and even experiential problems rapidly with minimum effort and maximum efficiency. We can talk about positive mind in eastern perception and positive thinking in western perception. In other words, we conceive positive mind as a mental state and positive thinking as an active process.

Westerners utilize this notion in psychology of performance and include it in physical exercise and mental training. Cultivation of positive thinking works as a technique of self fortification through imagery and mental training, exposing the individual to positive stimulations. Here, positive thinking is a cognitive endeavor which deals with people's perceptions of reality. It is based on the reevaluation and rethinking of an experience.

The positive mind belongs to a state of mental comfort. We find the positive mind in people with little or no neurotic characteristics. In this book, the positive mind is also presented as opposed to the negative mind. The negative mind is found in people with neurotic disorders. Cognitive therapy is the psychological approach which aims to bring the depressive person, with deformed negative perceptions into the borders of reality.

In Greek philosophy, Epitectus talked about the importance we invest in an event. Not the events determine our attitude, but it is determined by interpretation of those events. In the eastern reflections we have (....)"Friendship and enmity, virtue and vice, which exist only in the mind. Every mind creates a world of good or bad, of pleasure or anger, only by its own imagination.