It's a very deep post and I am genuinely curious if you can explain it a bit more in another thread? Only if you have the time no issues otherwise..
Sure. I didn't want to extend this discussion, especially not on a cricket forum
but I guess I can make 1 last reply on this subject.
As humans, thousands, maybe millions of thoughts cross our mind daily, are we aware of each an every thought? No. We are completely unconscious of what is happening in our conscious mind, let alone the garbage that has been stored in the subconscious mind. We all have been programmed through our experiences and we have all set up barriers inside our mind based on the successes and failures and other conditioning that we've had all our life. You'd be very surprised how robotic and zombie like we are in our daily lives.
Since we have already set mental boundaries of what is and is not possible, we have already programmed ourselves to fail at things we think are impossible, if we truly believe in our subconscious mind that something is impossible then no matter how much hard work we put in, we'll end up failing because our subconscious mind won't allow us to succeed as that would be contradictory to the data it has. We all are viewing life from a very limited perspective of our mind.
I have read a lot of books on this topic and applied a lot of concepts on my life since I came across this life changing subject. I don't know which was the first book which I read on this, may be it was the mindset by carol lewis, or may be it was Think and grow rich by napolean hill or may be something else. But they didn't really help me when I first read them, because I didn't fully comprehend the things that I read to apply to my life.
It wasn't until I started reading about meditation and started doing meditation, started to control ( I am not sure if that's the right word) my thoughts that I realized that how much I was being controlled by my subconscious mind. I realized that I had fixed pattern of behavior, my perspective on everything was deeply morphed by my mind. I became aware of how my thoughts were influencing my life, how everything manifesting in my life was a result of the thoughts and programming that I had.
So, if you learn to control your mind and start to use it as tool to achieve your goals, instead of the mind using you and running you like a puppet, then the possibilities are endless, you'll break barriers which you never thought was possible. Of course this isn't an overnight step, in fact I am still learning to do so, we have been programmed since childhood and it will take time to reset all that.
Positive thinking is just a minor subset of the topic I am talking about. By positive thinking, I don't mean having a few surface level positive thoughts, I am talking about a positive mindset with deep rooted, unshakable beliefs in your subconscious mind. A positive mind is one where negative thoughts can't exist, even if a negative thought arises it won't be powerful enough to influence your behavior. Positive mind is free of doubts, limitations, fears.
And you can't achieve this mindset overnight, that's why you see skeptics say that positive thinking doesn't work, of course it won't work for you if you already had doubts deep inside your mind, your subconscious mind was already telling you that this won't work. If you are used to being a failure all your life, you won't turn into a winner by having a few positive thoughts, because you are already programmed to be a failure, you lack the strong belief inside your mind that you can be a winner, that you can achieve your goal.
If you read about all the successful people of the world, all the legends, the people who achieved the impossible, you'll find one common theme, it was their mindset, they didn't just reach there goal just by hard work and skill, many people have skills, many even do hard work but no all achieve the same level of success because they all don't have the same level of strong belief in themselves. The truly elite individuals who achieved great success weren't bogged down by logic and reason which told them that it wasn't possible or the limitations that would have stopped an average person.
There is so much on this topic that I can write, but it is not something I can fully explain in this short post, that's why I told you to do your own research and do a bit of reading. There are so many amazing books about the mind out there, books by swami vivekanda are a good place to start too I guess.
P.S I don't have the time to argue further on this topic, so don't post big replies countering this post, I just posted this because this is a topic which I am very passionate about, it came up randomly in the conversation, didn't know it would extend to a whole discussion, if you find it interesting then go ahead and read more about it, if it doesn't appeal to you then ignore it, no point in wasting time by the meaningless arguments.
I'll leave you with the great quote by vivekananda: “Get hold of the mind. The mind is like a lake, and every stone that drops into it raises waves. These waves do not let us see what we are.”
