Building ones mental power: Music and videos
Songs and music play an important role in individual and group lives. Political rallies, religious services, campaigns and movements are often not complete without songs. Songs are used to put people in a certain mood and to prepare them for action. Songs like stand up and rise up for your rights empower people. Songs like you can get it if you really want it fire people up with determination. Songs can also have a negative effect. Songs like I am a poor man. I have no money disempower people. Songs like Me and Mrs. Jones may confuse and mislead some people. This is true for all songs including religious songs. Songs can empower or disempower. They can be positive or negative. They can also be constructive or destructive. Songs that glorify poverty, disease, death, crime and vulgarity are incongruent with the achievement of ones definite chief aim. It is not possible to feed ones sub-conscious with negativity and expect positive results. What goes in into the sub-conscious is what will come out. When positive and negative messages are fed to the sub-conscious the negative tend to dominate because the human mind catches the negative much more easily than the positive. It requires more effort and discipline to keep the mind on a positive rather than negative diet.
It is amazing how much money goes into mindless songs and entertainment that glorify violence, crime and vulgarity for example and how little money goes into what others have called ‘clean entertainment’ that is constructive and aimed at building humanity. In this regard self development is an uphill and solitary task. Once an individual has developed their definite chief aim, they must revisit their music, CD or video collections and ask themselves a few strategic questions:
- How does this song or video bring me closer to my definite chief aim or not?
- How does this song or video build my values and character or not?
- What does my possession of this song or video say about the type of person I am today and the __
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Dr Malunga is in Oxford, UK attending INTRAC's 20th Anniversary and the contributing editors meeting for the Development in Practice Journal.