This section looks at how your mind works. Your own mind is the main thing that’s preventing you from doing what you want to do, being what you want to be, feeling how you want to feel. Your own mind is also the instrument with which you can make changes.
“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”
Mahatma Ghandi – Indian Philosopher
Scientists will acknowledge that there is still a very poor understanding of this part of the human ‘being’ – about what the mind is and even where it’s situated. You can point to the heart, the liver, and even neurons in the brain, but you can’t point to the mind – it’s intangible. What is generally agreed though, is that it’s responsible for us being who we are as individuals.
Here are some of the descriptions of the mind you may find if you search the internet:
- The mind is sometimes seen as the personalisation of the brain, depending on the unique pattern of links between brain cells which builds up over our life time as we grow and develop according to our individual experiences.
- The mind extends to, and can affect every cell in the body.
- Mind refers to the collective aspects of intellect and consciousness which are manifest in some combination of thought, perception, emotion, will and imagination.
- The mind is responsible for one’s thoughts and feelings; the seat of the faculty of reason; it refers to the cognitive processes of thinking.
- The mind collectively refers to the aspects of consciousness and intellect which manifest as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination; mind is the stream of consciousness. It includes all of the brain’s conscious processes
Does that make it clearer? I think not – but it does make clearer just how complex the subject is!
- Consider for a moment just some of the things we’re aware that our mind does:
- Thoughts ‘pop’ into our mind – but from where?
- We sit and think and work out problems – how?
- When you’re watching a quiz or doing a crossword puzzle – where does the answer come from when you didn’t think you knew it?
- Your mind can enable you to imagine you’re sitting on a beautiful Mediterranean beach with the heat of the sun and the sound of the sea – when in fact you’re in the garden of a uncil house in Halifax.
- It reminds us we have to do something or buy something when we weren’t even thinking about it.
And then it becomes even more fascinating when you recognise that the mind can be divided into 2 parts: ‘the conscious mind’ and the ‘subconscious mind’.
So, our minds are wonderful and complex parts of ourselves that, when understood can be used on purpose to enable us to get more of what we want into our lives.