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THE ART OF POSITIVE THINKING
everyday occurrence; there is nothing very astounding about it. When one comes to accept the ways of the world, there is no more perplexity,
Each man's sensations are different. So also are his experiences and physical processes. Birth, childhood, youth, old age, death-all these relate to the body and are distinctive in case of each individual. Each particular organism has its own childhood, youth, old age, birth and death which are unique to that organism. All these are conditioned by that particular organism.
Our life has two aspects-individual and social. That which is personal is individual. But we live in a world where everything is related to everything else, where contagion spreads from one organism to another. Thoughts are also transmissible. A particular thought arises in an individual. Sometimes the same thought arises in the minds of thousands of people simultaneously. Thought, like some diseases, is contagious. And since we are organisms open to contagion, no individual can live alone, in perfect isolation. Our individuality thus comes to have two aspects personal, that is, particular to an individual, and social that relates to society as a whole. If both these aspects are taken into consideration, then our thinking is wholesome and our approach to ourselves and the decisions flowing therefrom are right. If our thinking is entirely personal, isolated, it cannot be said to be right. Nor can it be right if it is wholly social, completely ignoring the personal factor.
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There are thus two patterns of living-the social and the individualistic. The social pattern discounts the individual. The individual is like a mere cog in a machine and has no intrinsic worth of his own. Those subscribing to this communistic way of thinking give all the importance to society, even to the point of total extinction of individuality. Whatmatters is the state; the individual is not at all important; he is expendable, can be hanged or shot dead at will. He is merely a part of the machine. As long as a part has utility, it is maintained. The moment it ceases to have utility, it is dispensed with and replaced by another. It was customary at one time in Japan to convey the old, superannuated parents to a forest to die. A superannuated doting fool had no utility whatsoever. Only that which had utility had the right to exist. For many ages this tradition was prevalent in Japan. Old worthless parents were conveyed by their own children to the forest to rot and die. Man is capable of strange things, caught in a stream of utter selfishness. Even a social approach to a problem then becomes woefully partial and inadequate.
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The other extreme is the totally individualistic approach, in which a person thinks only of himself. The individual alone is of value to the exclusion of everything else.
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