Develop-Positive-Thinking"How To Develop Positive Thinking, Right and Wrong Thinking & Their Results..." |
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Professor James, in his Talks to Teachers, has a very strong paragraph on this subject: "Thus, the sovereign voluntary path of cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So, to feel brave, act as if you were brave, use all your will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to say genial things. One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention to it, and keeps it still potent in the mind; whereas, if we act from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab and silently steals away." 1 James is right in what he says about " wrestling," and the reader will note that the dominant idea of this book is not to wrestle with wrong thinking, but to drop it and, having thus put it cut of the mind, let it alone forever. This is not hypocrisy. It is not done to deceive, as hypocrisy is. It is done for the purpose of banishing wrong thinking -- it does it -- and that is praiseworthy.
There is no more fitting counsel for the close of
this book than is contained in the following words from The School of
Life, by William R. Alger: -- © 2005 ~ Develop Positive Thinking |
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