Going Beyond Negative Influences (Part 2)

One important component that doesn’t let us remain in the healthy and positive experience of concentrated thought is the many different types of influences we are exposed to in our life. There are two different types of influences – external and internal.

➤External influences are people whom we come in contact with at home, at the workplace, at school or college, in the market, through different forms of media etc. or elsewhere. These people could be our friends, our parents, our spouse, our teachers, our guru, our doctors, our neighbours, our office colleagues, our boss, actors or sports persons whom we admire, even those people whom we read about in the daily newsreaders, etc.

➤We have been exposed to these influences right from the time we were born. The influences from all these people are not necessarily on a physical level, they can also be on a subtle level of mental vibrations from others. We interact with all or some of these people and spend time with them and whenever we do that they advise us or give us their opinion on a physical level and we also get influenced by them on a subtle, emotional energy level e.g. we spend many hours in our workplace everyday.

➤We may not interact with the head of our office all the time but his personality is constantly influencing everyone in the office on a subtle level, including us. The office environment is shaped largely by the personality of the head of the office. In the same way, we may be taking care that we come only under the positive influence of the media and we do not listen to the negative side, but the negative atmosphere that exists everywhere due to everyone being exposed to the news of violence, sorrow and impurity from the media, definitely influences us on a subtle level, even though we might not realize it. As children, we have also been under the influence of our parents, even when we were taking shape in our mother’s womb.

In tomorrow’s message, we shall explain what are different types of internal influences.