Human Mind is a wonderful masterpiece that has immense potentials. Most of its potentials, however, remain unused in most people, since it is not us who are in charge of things, but our Mind takes control of us. In order to control something, we first need to know the thing concerned — so, we must know our Mind so as to be in charge of it.
What do we need to know about the mind? Here are 16 important things everyone needs to know about the workings of the human mind.
1. The most important thing we need to about our Mind is that it is not something that exists separately, individually, like some inanimate object. The Mind is not an object – it is a process. The process of constantly streaming thoughts. This stream of the thoughts is what we perceive as the Mind. The very basic nature of thoughts is that they are in a constant move, and this motion, almost automatically, creates the Mind.
2. A characteristic feature of our Mind is that it keeps roaming, wandering; it operates in something like an automatic mode. Thoughts come and go all the time.
3. In most of our waking time, our Mind wanders either in the past or in the future, in our thoughts we deal with our experience of the past, offences we suffered in the past, or with our future plans, goals and fears.
4. In most cases, our Mind is locked up in the prison of the past by an event the outcome of which is unpleasant to us. Our thoughts turn toward that event in the past, we would like do change the course of the events, or we worry what others might think of us because of our improper behavior in that past moment.
5. Another way of becoming prisoners is when our Mind puts the spell of an imaginary future, or the image of a desired, idyllic state upon us. Then we mobilize all our energies to make those images come true, and we tend to pass by the opportunities offered by the present almost blindly.
6. The creative force of the Mind is only accessible in the present moment, in the here and now.
7. Our Mind is constantly evaluating things. It means that we do not simply live through our experiences, but we also categorize them as good or bad. We judge everything that happens to us and everybody we meet in our lives.
8. Our Mind is constantly producing stories. The entirety of these stories comprises our personal histories.
9. The Mind is usually rejecting of, or even hostile to, the present moment. We often think that this or that should not happen that way, I should be somewhere else now, in some much better place. Why do such things only happen to me all the time? Our mind is thus in a constant struggle with the present.
10. The conditioned mental patterns of the Mind are realized as various systems of beliefs and patterns of thoughts in our lives.
11. The conditioned mental patterns have been handed down to us by our parents, our community and the society in which we grow up, and we have also borrowed some from the media.
12. We very often accept these ready-made mental patterns and beliefs uncritically, without any thinking; what is more, we identify with these patterns that will, in this way, be incorporated into our personalities.
13. The conditioned mental patterns place the development of the Ego in the foreground, and make efforts to sustain that development until the end of the life of the individual. The programmings support the progress of the Ego, they urge us to develop a powerful and efficient Ego for ourselves, and they make us believe that it is the ultimate goal in human life.
14. Our Mind itself deems our own mental image of our personal development good. At the same time, this half of the Mind deems the other half, the one we wish to change, bad. Mental images fight against each other, trying to overcome each other, using the weapons of selective perception and story fabrication.
15. Our Mind is one of the most sophisticated, most complicated instruments in the world. In this modern, rushing world, however, the Mind is bombarded with information to the extent that it virtually overflows. On those occasions the amounts of unprocessed information whirl in the Mind so fast that we are sometimes afraid of going mad.
16. The purpose of the Mind is to serve as a means of connections, to connect us to the world to each other. Through the Mind, used with alert Consciousness, creative energies are released to the world, and create a wonderful harmony there.
Nowadays more and more of us begin to realize and experience that we are more than our Minds, more that our thoughts and emotions, and the personal history these thoughts and emotions build up. Our attention is no longer completely engaged by telling our personal history and identifying with that personal history, and we become more and more sensitive to the deeper dimensions of our life. We also begin to notice the breaks between thoughts, and we begin to turn towards these gates leading beyond the Mind.
This article excerpted from the new book by Frank M. Wanderer, Ego – Alertness – Consciousness: The Path to Your Spiritual Home.
Written by Frank M. Wanderer, Ph.D
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