Q. I find I become very negative when given advice and never agree with it. A. Again it is all based on your attitude: you admit that someone else can affect your emotional state. We should not admit an emotional power like that over us Now, even if you merely think about this advice you feel annoyed. You reconstruct it. But you should think in quite a different way; it is purely a matter of reasoning. Even if people give advice without thinking, even if you know better, there is no reason for you to lose your temper. You cannot get anything by being annoyed or irritated. You must stop justifying it in your mind. When one stops this justifying, one very often finds that the cause of all these negative emotions is some wrong idea. Everybody can find something wrong in one or another side of his life and generally one tends to put the responsibility on this thing. One thinks that if this thing were right, everything else would be right. Everybody has one, sometimes two or more combinations of circumstances which one blames for everything wrong one does and for all one's manifestations of weakness. But one must understand that absolutely anything in the world can produce this result. Suppose there is some definite thing that is wrong and I think: 'If it were right, I would be different'. But if it were right, I would be just the same. I speak from experience, because I know people who thought so, and when the particular thing they found wrong was changed, they remained the same and merely found another unpleasant thing instead of the first one

• circumstances
• life
• negative emotions
• reason
• power
• experience
• responsibility
• thought
• emotions
• attitude
• matter