B. L. Chakoo
While at Yale University where as a senior Fulbright scholar I was doing research on literature and neuropsychology I struck up a friendship with a Chinese psychiatrist, and I remember meeting him once at the house of a rich old woman who suffered with some serious psychic problems. When this frizzled patient asked the psychiatrist how she could be cured, the psychiatrist at once answered that one way would be for her to commit suicide, and if she thought it would certainly be the most difficult for her to do so, then another way would be to fix her gaze on the freshness of the doctor’s complexion, and her thinking on the youthful gaiety and energy with which he overflowed. In short, if she could feast her senses on another’s flourishing state of health, her own condition might improve. Actually, the psychiatrist wanted to emphasize the over-riding importance of learning and practicing of the art of positive thinking which is probably the only way in today’s highly competitive and stressful world that the individual can practice for preventing disease, promoting vitality and prolonging life, while cultivating pure wisdom and insight.
Positive thinking is a new term that has emerged over the past few decades. In an exceptionally short time it has taken its fair share of the research enterprise in neuropsychology. For example, recent research on the innate human healing response known in Western medical science as “psychoneuroimmuninology” has now revealed that positive thinking is an exciting field to be in because those who enter it are committed to discussing, and more importantly to seeking solutions to the most pressing contemporary health and social problems. In fact, it is a basic axiom of internal alchemy with very real and significant therapeutic powers. In a personal communication Professor J P Henry of Loma Linda University once told me that the power of positive thinking has in itself the placebo effect. The patient is given plain sugar pills and is told that the pills have great curing properties and because he now believes he gets cured. Speaking psychologically, as he believes his mind activates his own innate responses, and he makes a full recovery.
Whereas the patient who is given “the real drug” but does not possess such a positive attitude fails to realize any therapeutic values and remains ill.
However, there are some drug researchers (both in the US and India) who still think that the placebo effect is “a real nuisance and an unfortunate quirk of nature.” But a moment’s reflection will reveal that these scientists are not paying any attention to a significantly important psychological fact that the body heals itself only when the mind completely intends it to, “with or without drugs.” Around the world today many neuropsychologists involved in this research are reaching a conclusion that no drug in itself can “generate a healing effect without the mind’s active cooperation.” The mind with positive energy conquers all.
The most powerful healing energy of all is triggered when the mind experiences the radiant warmth of positive thinking which is as good for human health as for human relationships. The specific energy frequencies and wave patterns that arise in the human mind under the influence of positive thoughts and positive imagines have potentially powerful properties that, on the social and political sides, can solve even the unattractive and undesirable problems the contemporary world faces, from poverty, through exploitation, corruption, injustice and the forms of warfare such as terrorism, to rogue politics which institutionalizes and politically sanctions violence and religious arrogance.
Positive thinking does miracles. On the medical side, there have been cases of miraculous recoveries from the very dreadful mental and bodily diseases due to “the timely ministration” of positive feelings. A Yale University cancer surgeon writes: “If I told patients to raise their blood levels of immune globulins or killer T-cells, no one would know how. But if I can teach them to love [which is a forcible positive feeling] themselves and others fully, the same changes happen automatically. The truth is, love heals.” In fact, we have today many detailed, wide-ranging and accurate scientific studies which demonstrate that whenever the accomplished and wise doctors treat their patients with a great sense of love and hope (which enables them to express their wholesome feelings of happiness), there is “an immediate rise in their white blood cell count, endorphin and serotonin secretions[ which play an important role in the treatment of chronic stress, violent emotions and depression as well as the susceptibility to suicide], hormone balance, enzyme activity and other measures of active immune responses.” The disheartened patient becomes encouraged by the first sign of the doctor’s smile, which shows him without a word that his problems are neither so complicated as he thinks nor so difficult as to be incurable.
Despite the fact that affirmative emotions are immensely difficult to engender and express in today’s atmosphere of atomistic individualism and impersonal sophisticated hospitals, nursing homes, radiation clinics and other places of modern medical therapies which often, as some medical studies tell us, work against “the human body’s own innate healing mechanisms”— a little bit of the doctor’s positive attitude towards the patient goes a long way, because it soothes his or her brain and mobilizes and stimulates the secretions involved in the body’s own curing responses.
Actually, the aim of positive thinking and the affirmation of happy feelings is to remove any concern that arises as a result of a person’s negative states of mind or negative social circumstances. Negative thoughts and ill feelings generate the fire of Hell, and playing with that fire means to provoke demons. Callousness, greed, jealousy, malice, grief, worry, resentment, anger and envy, all pollute the human society, the human system with the sort of annihilative energies associated with that state of mind. We cannot ignore the fact that habitual anger and envy, for instance, leads to liver dysfunction, for its unkind energy comes to settle in the liver and corrupts it just as alcohol and dangerous drugs do. (I think anger is more pernicious than an alcoholic bout.) Neuroscientists have discovered that negative emotions cause the discharge of chemicals from the brain called “neuropeptides” which have “a profound immune-suppressive action.” Some have even scientifically proved that negative emotions invoke dishonesty, disbelief and a wide range of ailments. Not only this, negative ideas diametrically generate malicious energies the aggregate of which contradicts the universal need for harmony, respect for humanity and peace in the human world for survival. Negative mind is cold, blind, calculating, often cruel, arrogant, aggressive and always self-serving. Unfortunately, in today’s world we have already demonstrated in every field of life a commitment to the negative states of mind.
In brief, the power of positive thinking is a rare frame of intelligence, and possibly it is this intelligence which is, to quote St Augustine’s words, “the prime author and mover of the universe.” When practiced intensely, it generates in the human brain wisdom, love and power– which are the three inseparable virtues that bring, according to the Taoist system of thought and practice, the human body vibrant energy and its mind into “balanced synchronicity and harmonic resonance with the primordial forces of Heaven and the temporal elements of Earth.” In fact, of all human pursuits, the pursuit of positive thinking is the most sublime, the most useful, and the most acceptable. The most acceptable because in so far as one gives himself up to this pursuit, to that extent one enjoys already greater portion of true happiness. Plato was right in calling positive thinking a great and powerful goddess. Probably he thought that it purified and potentiated his or her “personal energy field” so that it resonates in harmony with the most powerful energies in the universe.
I hold a conviction that man becomes both materially and spiritually advanced when he turns off his “internal dialogue” concerning negative thoughts and feelings, which continue to appear and dissolve on their own accord once you let the stream of positive thinking flow naturally in the background of your mind. Everyone feels the negative energy’s impact, but some are knocked over by it. On me it makes a great impression, and my practice is rather to avoid it than to resist it. Disease as it is, I give it not lodging in myself. For I believe happy shall be the man who purifies himself by practicing positive thoughts.
(The author is former Head and Dean of languages, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar)
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