PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
The thoughts that come into man’s mind every day build his character. Positive thoughts create a positive personality. Negative thoughts create a negative personality.
Experience tells us that a human being is the epitome of innocence as an infant. However, after growing up for years, different types of corruption creep into his personality and become part of his character. The question thus arises as to how one can develop or purify one’s personality or character.
Personality or character development means preserving the same character that one had by birth. A person strives to remove the artificial curtains that later drape his character over time until his real nature, free of admixture, re-emerges. The latter way of character development can be understood with the help of an example. Iron is a pure mineral. However, due to the impact of water, it becomes covered with rust. For iron, this rust is just an outer covering. The rust can be removed if scrubbed, and the iron can emerge in its original form.
This phenomenon symbolically points to a psychological process. An individual does something terrible and then quickly becomes aware of it. As a result, he repents, and his heart becomes pure. However, if he keeps doing one evil after another and does not introspect and seek forgiveness, the impact of sin on his heart is not removed. Consequently, he will soon become an insensitive person. He will start living in evil, and nothing good will have an uplifting or moderating effect on him.
Modern psychological studies have further clarified this point. Man’s mind has three significant components present at birth. These components are the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and the unconscious mind. Whenever a thought enters the mind, it forever becomes its part. Moreover, as we know, the human mind is but another name for the human personality. It means that whenever a thought enters a person’s mind, it becomes a part of his personality forever, so even if he tries to remove it from his personality, he will not be able to do so.
Whenever a thought—positive or negative—enters a person’s mind, it first enters the conscious mind, also called the living memory. After this, when the person sleeps at night, by a natural process, the thought automatically travels out of the conscious mind and enters the subconscious mind. In this process, man has only 50% conscious control over that thought. The remaining 50% is out of his conscious control. After that, when he sleeps the next night, this thought travels further and enters his unconscious mind. When this occurs, the thought becomes totally out of the person’s conscious control.
The thoughts that come into man’s mind every day build his character. As the ideas are, so is the personality. Positive thoughts create a positive personality. Conversely, if one’s thoughts are negative, one’s character continuously becomes more and more negative.
These days, a great many people are drowned in negative thinking. If a person appears to be talking positively, it may be just superficial talk. However, if you converse with him further and try to understand his personality, you may discover that it is as negative as most others. Most people live in a graveyard of negativity, even though they are unaware of this devastating fact. In this, by and large, there is no difference between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ people.
The worst character is a negative character, and the best sort of character is a positive one. Hence, the question is how to develop a positive personality. The proper way is that whenever a negative thought enters our mind, we must finish it at the earliest. Then, we should convert that negative aspect into a positive one through a particular method. For example, if you are angry with someone, you must immediately forgive him so that anger does not take the form of revenge and your character is spared from being tainted with the negative attributes of anger and hate. If you feel upset about someone achieving something, you can try to bless the person instead. In this way, jealousy will not enter your character.
What we should do is to immediately convert a negative thought into a positive one. If there is a delay in this, the negative thinking will very quickly enter the subconscious mind and, after some time, the unconscious mind. Moreover, when that happens, it will become such an inseparable part of one’s personality that even if one tries, one will not be able to remove it.
However, few people convert negative thoughts into positive ones. Because of this, they pay the frightening price of being dragged down by a corpse-like negative personality. A negative personality is a hellish personality, and a positive personality is a paradisiacal personality. If you want to save yourself from this self-destructive and devastating situation, practice the above internal reform and cleansing method and make it a part of your daily life. Only then can you continue to develop a positive personality. There is no solution to the problem other than this.
