There are two ways of looking at a mobile accessory (say touch screen, battery or memory card). View it as a distinct component with its own functional modularities. Or as an integral component whose functional capacity depends entirely on its ability to align with other components effectively.
For a moment, think of the battery of your mobile or memory system. As distinct components, they have certain unique potential. For the battery -to store energy, for memory- to store and consolidate data. But this potential is useless if the battery or memory does not know how to work in unison with other components.
The mind as such, is one of the accessories of the human machinery you are. It is stuffed with data from your past experience. The mind creates myriad combinations of already stored in data intermittently. Within this fixed data set, the mind is blind and dead in the sense that it cannot produce anything new. Just as the memory of your mobile can not come out with anything that has not been entered into it, the mind can only regurgitate what it has chewed and digested.
ILLNESS IS NOT DUE TO THE CONTENT IN THE MIND
When one is mentally ill, the accessory called mind is active in a special way. The mind begins persecuting the person. In depression, the mind the drains the vitality of the individual, in OCD it puts him in a compulsive mode, in anxiety the mind lies to the individual that he is in threat and survival is at stake. The mind creates wrong permutations and combinations one must say.
The salient difference between a mentally ill and mentally fit person is in the degree of control the individual has on his mind. It is not the content of the mind that makes the man mad in the first place. But it is the degree of control or the way in which he aligns himself with the accessory called mind. Criteria for sanity lie in the quality of alignment but not that of content.
ALIGNING WITH MIND
From the time immemorial, attempts to figure out the best ways for aligning with the mind have been in vogue. History of it is as old as human existence itself. Meditation, practicing detachment, immersing oneself in spirituality, doping with drugs and other scientific explorations are some of the ways tried and tested by all generations. But nobody has come to a valid conclusion regarding the right way of aligning with one’s mind.
Experimenting goes on and on. In the modern world, it has now assumed a different course. There is a proliferation of “workshops” for uplifting one’s ways of aligning with the mind. Mindfulness workshop, four-day hypnotism workshops, one-week mentalism course it goes on like this. All promise mastery over aligning with one’s mind in a better way within a short period.
If we closely observe, we can see that all these experimentations have one thing in common. In these experiments, it seems there isn’t enough clarity regarding the objective. The so-called spiritualists, scientists, sociologists or psychologists do not have enough clarity regarding “what they want to or capable of attaining through these experiments”.
Can they kill the mind? NO. Can they stop the mind from forming unwanted permutations and combinations of thoughts and impressions? Can they still the mind for sufficient time? Can they come out of the mind?
All these are wishful thinking. As Padmasree Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev opined how can a mobile function when one of its accessories is stilled or separated from it?
CREATE A DISTANCE
The inbuilt accessory called mind which the human machinery is provided with is capable of poisoning him to death or madness if not dealt with caution. At the same time, it cannot be tamed by quick fixes like religious rites, spiritual practices, and scientific healing techniques like counseling or therapies or even with pharmacology. For sure these techniques provide temporary relief and give the individual a pseudo feeling that he has succeeded in taming his mind.
The only way out is to learn to look at the mind just as an accessory in its own right. Cognize it as an inbuilt, irreplaceable accessory with which we have to run our life till death. Actually, we don’t know how our mind functions or going to function in different contexts. At a given moment, it may take any turn. Most often, its movements decided by “what it wants” not by “what you want from it”
Though, we are not entitled to have control over the more or less automated functioning of the mind, we can have total control over the consequences/effects of its functions. To be precise, we can not control what thought is likely to pop up in our mind at a point in time. But we can have mastery of how a particular thought or emotionally charged thought piece is going to affect us.
Never try to blame, placate, control, and suppress what this accessory has in its store. Once you start perceiving it as a machine with limited capacity for holding data and as an inert entity capable only for recycling what it has been fed with, you can create a distance between you and your mind. This distance will help in loosening its grip over other components of your system. Beware; do not misunderstand distancing the mind as detaching the mind. Distance happens as a consequence of increasing clarity dawned on the individual regarding “what the real stuff called the mind is”. Detaching the mind is impossible!!!
Let our education system have enough space for librating generations from the ill-effects of their minds. Let us introduce our students to a new way of perceiving their mental transactions. Train the young minds to view their mind as a tool attached to the human system mainly for survival purposes. Train them, to allow their mind to function just like any other organ say kidney, heart, and lungs in its own fashion. Nobody is conscious of the functioning of these organs. It simply happens. Just as they have an inbuilt distance between the functional modalities of these organs, they can create an intellectual distance from their mind too. Exhort them to master the art of not becoming influenced by their mind’s content. Rather learn to use it for their advantage, without disturbing mind’s freedom to be chaotic and even immoral in content. Never suppress its tendency to create as many permutations and combinations of thoughts and impressions. Create the distance by permitting the freedom it wants.
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