Controlling the Mind, the storehouse of infinite power
Humans have gone through millions of years of evolution, and so has the human mind. What was once a primitive, “survival centred” piece of mass lying between the ears has now become a powerhouse possessing infinite energies and infinite abilities. However, most of the people never realize the power of the human brain.
Human mind works and works, it doesn’t quieten down. In his remarkable book The Monk who sold his Ferrari, Robin Sharma says that human mind thinks about 60,000 thoughts in a day. That’s huge. But most of the thought force is wasted by the general humanity. Imagine 60,000 ropes pulling you in different directions. What would happen? You would be torn away, right? That’s how thoughts are. They are impulses, they compel us to act. So now imagine: if such a huge amount of impulses keep coming up in our mind, each wanting to pull us in a different direction, each wanting us to do something different, are we gonna proceed? Nope, no hope. We would be torn away mentally.
So unless we learn to take control of our mind and concentrate our thoughts on a few things that are really important for us, the random thoughts will pull us relentlessly in different directions. And at the end of the day, we will discover that we have run and run and run, but our steps were all in different directions, and we haven’t covered much ground. We haven’t moved ahead, we have just moved.
So what’s the solution, you must be thinking. Well, the solution is: you will have to learn to control your mind, to command your mind to do what you want it to do. Now you would say that it’s not possible to control the mind. The general belief is: Thoughts just come to us; we have no control over them. But that isn’t true. Mind can be controlled through unflinching practice, and great men have brought their “supercomputer” under their complete control, and this enabled them to be extraordinary in their lives and passionately push the human race forward.
Even you can do it.
But it isn’t easy.
Because mind control is simply something that we haven’t been taught in schools. The importance of mind control is very often over looked, and that’s the great tragedy of our times. Consider the below words of Vivekananda, a man centuries ahead of his time:
The present system of education is all wrong. The mind is crammed with facts before it knows how to think! Control of mind should be taught first. If I had my education to get over again and had any voice in the matter, I would learn to master my mind first, and then gather facts at will if I wanted them. It takes people a long time to learn things because they cannot concentrate their minds at will.
(At this point, I should mention that Vivekananda himself was a legendary learner. Once, a set of Britannica Encyclopaedias was brought in the Ramakrishhna Math. His disciple said to him that one cannot read all these thick books in a lifetime. He didn’t know that Vivekananda had already read 10 of those books inside a week, and was then reading the eleventh. Vivekananda frankly challenged his disciple to ask him anything from those 10 books, and to the disciple’s utter bewilderment, Vivekananda knew every single answer with unbelievable details.)
So now are you curious to know how to exercise control over your own “supercomputer”? Actually, I have read a considerable lot on this idea of mind control, and I have come up with my own 3 point system. It’s really simple, but it’s quite insightful. (You know, Da Vinci once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.")
THE THREE POINT-SYSTEM
1. Tell your thoughts that you are the boss.
2. Regularly exercise your mind.
3. Have complete control over what goes in(You will automatically have complete control over what comes out)
Tell your thoughts that you are the boss.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
One thing that stops a person from competing in the race is the belief that he won’t be able to win the race. He thinks it’s just not possible. Same is the case with us. We think that it’s just not possible to control our thoughts. We think that if our thoughts are pulling us in a thousand different directions, not letting us to work, we can’t do anything to help it. We are at the mercy of our thoughts- that’s our general view.
But that’s wrong. We are the masters of our mind. That’s the fact, and we need to first believe in that. The moment we do that, the moment we believe that We have the power, we take back the power that we had given to our thoughts. So go ahead, tell your mind that you are the boss. Tell it that it can’t just think anything that it wants. Tell your mind that “You are mine, now stop rushing around and do what I wish you to do.” You are the one in charge, and not all the hundreds of distracting thoughts. Common on, reclaim your power. Assert your authority. That’s the step number one.
Regularly exercise your mind.
We don’t take out the time to train our mind. In fact, if someone says that mind also has to be regularly drilled through mental exercises, we would laugh the idea off. But it’s totally true that we have to exercise the mind. What happens when you don’t exercise your body for a week? Initially, nothing of significance will happen. But as days become weeks and weeks become months, and you don’t give your body the necessary workout, you are bound to become lethargic. You won’t feel like getting off the bed in the morning, because your body just won’t listen to you.
The same happens in the case of mind. We don’t exercise it, we don’t train it, and after so many years of negligence, our mind just won't listen to us! It isn’t disciplined; it has become a spoilt child. But again this spoilt child can be disciplined, this “super-computer” can be brought under our complete control. We just need to be serious about it.
Below are 3 extremely useful mental exercises that, if practised daily with diligence, will undoubtedly help you to gain back the reins of your powerful mind.
Take up any pen. Any. Actually, this exercise can be done with any small object, though pen is preferable. Now, sit down at a quiet place. Make sure that there are no disturbances around you. (Don’t sit in a room with T.V!) Now, with your surroundings being quiet, you are ready. Sit in a comfortable position, and bring the nib of the pen to your eye level, a few comfortable inches away. Now just focus on the nib. Immediately, as you sit down to do it, thoughts with rush into your head. Unimportant issues will come up; vilest things will occupy your mind. The reason is simple: nib of a pen is such a simple thing that your mind immediately decides it’s not worth looking at it. Here is the important point: you didn’t decide, your mind decided for you. That’s the problem: we don’t use our mind, our mind uses us.
So now, you got to tell your mind to sit there, and just look at the nib. Initially, in the first few attempts, your mind will get distracted. Gently pull it back. Make it look at the nib, think nothing else. Making your breathing rhythmic will help a lot. Gradually, you will be able to do it. Steadily, your mind will come under your grasp. You will start noticing that less and less thoughts are rushing into your mind.
What we are trying to achieve in this exercise is simple: We are telling our mind to do what we wish it to do. Sitting and looking at the nib surely isn’t a productive exercise, but it’s a great way to start the process of regaining the control over your supercomputer by commanding it to do what you want it to do. Similarly, you will start to notice that you are able to command your mind regularly when you sit down to study or when you wish to work on a task with total focus. I will use an analogy here. Suppose that you go to a gym and strengthen your biceps by doing regular push-ups. Now, these same biceps will aid you when you are lifting some heavy object back at home. The same is happening here. We are strengthening our mind with that exercise, and the mind will surely aid us when we sit down to do some other important work.
Special note: It’s of paramount importance that we remain consistent in this exercise. You have to do it daily. Initially, do it for 5 minutes, and then raise the level. But do it everyday.
No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
- Voltaire
When a distracting thought enters your mind, attack on it. Fill your mind with thoughts of productivity. Think how great you will feel after having completed the task with masterclass perfection. If one distracting thought enters your mind, launch a counter-attack then and there, because one distracting thought is immediately followed by 100 more. One thought isn’t enough to distract you, but you will surely get diverted if 100 thoughts act on you, one after the other. So grab the very first thought by its throat, and squeeze the life out of it by sustained positive thinking. (Sustained is the important word here.)
Think of your mind like a house (which you own), and the thoughts as guests. Now, you can entertain any guests that you wish, because it’s your damned house! But we have lost control over our house, i.e. our mind. So any thoughts come in at any time, wreak havoc inside and disappear into thin air.
That’s not how things are supposed to be.
And you can change it.
Now, keeping the philosophy of atithi devo bhava aside for a while, think what you would do to make sure that the unwanted guest doesn’t return. You will ignore the guest, right? You will make the guest feel that it is unwanted. You will make it realize that it isn’t welcome. So go ahead, and do the same with unwanted thoughts! Ignore them. And ignore them with absolute ruthlessness. Just give complete and total attention to the good thoughts inside your mind. In a few days, you will start to observe that the unwanted thoughts have stopped coming.
Have complete control over what goes in
What comes out is completely and totally dependent on what goes in. We keep watching those nonsensical serials on television (Damn them!), we keep gossiping with our friends, we keep reading stupid things, and then we hope that we will be able to keep our mind quiet. What a hopeless hope! If the seed has gone in, and if you keep on watering it and providing it with adequate care, then the plant will come out. As you sow, so shall you reap, as the bible says.
We keep our mind open to all the garbage. We allow all the nonsensical things to go in. (Damn those serials on television once again!) In addition to that, we water and provide nourishment to all that by constantly being exposed to those very ludicrous things. Then it’s not possible to avoid the consequences. The plant has to come out- it’s the law of nature.
So you must stop all the nonsense from going into your wonderful mind. Stop watching television for your own sake. Read books instead. Let only the best information enter. Slap the door shut on anything that’s negative. Fill yourself with positive thoughts, with highest ideas. And if you do all this and sow such seeds, and keep on watering by constantly and consciously being exposed to positivity, the resultant plant has to sprout out. And I promise you on this: the plant will become a towering tree one day.
Human mind works and works, it doesn’t quieten down. In his remarkable book The Monk who sold his Ferrari, Robin Sharma says that human mind thinks about 60,000 thoughts in a day. That’s huge. But most of the thought force is wasted by the general humanity. Imagine 60,000 ropes pulling you in different directions. What would happen? You would be torn away, right? That’s how thoughts are. They are impulses, they compel us to act. So now imagine: if such a huge amount of impulses keep coming up in our mind, each wanting to pull us in a different direction, each wanting us to do something different, are we gonna proceed? Nope, no hope. We would be torn away mentally.
So unless we learn to take control of our mind and concentrate our thoughts on a few things that are really important for us, the random thoughts will pull us relentlessly in different directions. And at the end of the day, we will discover that we have run and run and run, but our steps were all in different directions, and we haven’t covered much ground. We haven’t moved ahead, we have just moved.
So what’s the solution, you must be thinking. Well, the solution is: you will have to learn to control your mind, to command your mind to do what you want it to do. Now you would say that it’s not possible to control the mind. The general belief is: Thoughts just come to us; we have no control over them. But that isn’t true. Mind can be controlled through unflinching practice, and great men have brought their “supercomputer” under their complete control, and this enabled them to be extraordinary in their lives and passionately push the human race forward.
Even you can do it.
But it isn’t easy.
Because mind control is simply something that we haven’t been taught in schools. The importance of mind control is very often over looked, and that’s the great tragedy of our times. Consider the below words of Vivekananda, a man centuries ahead of his time:
The present system of education is all wrong. The mind is crammed with facts before it knows how to think! Control of mind should be taught first. If I had my education to get over again and had any voice in the matter, I would learn to master my mind first, and then gather facts at will if I wanted them. It takes people a long time to learn things because they cannot concentrate their minds at will.
(At this point, I should mention that Vivekananda himself was a legendary learner. Once, a set of Britannica Encyclopaedias was brought in the Ramakrishhna Math. His disciple said to him that one cannot read all these thick books in a lifetime. He didn’t know that Vivekananda had already read 10 of those books inside a week, and was then reading the eleventh. Vivekananda frankly challenged his disciple to ask him anything from those 10 books, and to the disciple’s utter bewilderment, Vivekananda knew every single answer with unbelievable details.)
So now are you curious to know how to exercise control over your own “supercomputer”? Actually, I have read a considerable lot on this idea of mind control, and I have come up with my own 3 point system. It’s really simple, but it’s quite insightful. (You know, Da Vinci once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.")
THE THREE POINT-SYSTEM
1. Tell your thoughts that you are the boss.
2. Regularly exercise your mind.
3. Have complete control over what goes in(You will automatically have complete control over what comes out)
Tell your thoughts that you are the boss.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
One thing that stops a person from competing in the race is the belief that he won’t be able to win the race. He thinks it’s just not possible. Same is the case with us. We think that it’s just not possible to control our thoughts. We think that if our thoughts are pulling us in a thousand different directions, not letting us to work, we can’t do anything to help it. We are at the mercy of our thoughts- that’s our general view.
But that’s wrong. We are the masters of our mind. That’s the fact, and we need to first believe in that. The moment we do that, the moment we believe that We have the power, we take back the power that we had given to our thoughts. So go ahead, tell your mind that you are the boss. Tell it that it can’t just think anything that it wants. Tell your mind that “You are mine, now stop rushing around and do what I wish you to do.” You are the one in charge, and not all the hundreds of distracting thoughts. Common on, reclaim your power. Assert your authority. That’s the step number one.
Regularly exercise your mind.
We don’t take out the time to train our mind. In fact, if someone says that mind also has to be regularly drilled through mental exercises, we would laugh the idea off. But it’s totally true that we have to exercise the mind. What happens when you don’t exercise your body for a week? Initially, nothing of significance will happen. But as days become weeks and weeks become months, and you don’t give your body the necessary workout, you are bound to become lethargic. You won’t feel like getting off the bed in the morning, because your body just won’t listen to you.
The same happens in the case of mind. We don’t exercise it, we don’t train it, and after so many years of negligence, our mind just won't listen to us! It isn’t disciplined; it has become a spoilt child. But again this spoilt child can be disciplined, this “super-computer” can be brought under our complete control. We just need to be serious about it.
Below are 3 extremely useful mental exercises that, if practised daily with diligence, will undoubtedly help you to gain back the reins of your powerful mind.
- Object Concentration
Take up any pen. Any. Actually, this exercise can be done with any small object, though pen is preferable. Now, sit down at a quiet place. Make sure that there are no disturbances around you. (Don’t sit in a room with T.V!) Now, with your surroundings being quiet, you are ready. Sit in a comfortable position, and bring the nib of the pen to your eye level, a few comfortable inches away. Now just focus on the nib. Immediately, as you sit down to do it, thoughts with rush into your head. Unimportant issues will come up; vilest things will occupy your mind. The reason is simple: nib of a pen is such a simple thing that your mind immediately decides it’s not worth looking at it. Here is the important point: you didn’t decide, your mind decided for you. That’s the problem: we don’t use our mind, our mind uses us.
So now, you got to tell your mind to sit there, and just look at the nib. Initially, in the first few attempts, your mind will get distracted. Gently pull it back. Make it look at the nib, think nothing else. Making your breathing rhythmic will help a lot. Gradually, you will be able to do it. Steadily, your mind will come under your grasp. You will start noticing that less and less thoughts are rushing into your mind.
What we are trying to achieve in this exercise is simple: We are telling our mind to do what we wish it to do. Sitting and looking at the nib surely isn’t a productive exercise, but it’s a great way to start the process of regaining the control over your supercomputer by commanding it to do what you want it to do. Similarly, you will start to notice that you are able to command your mind regularly when you sit down to study or when you wish to work on a task with total focus. I will use an analogy here. Suppose that you go to a gym and strengthen your biceps by doing regular push-ups. Now, these same biceps will aid you when you are lifting some heavy object back at home. The same is happening here. We are strengthening our mind with that exercise, and the mind will surely aid us when we sit down to do some other important work.
Special note: It’s of paramount importance that we remain consistent in this exercise. You have to do it daily. Initially, do it for 5 minutes, and then raise the level. But do it everyday.
- Counter-attack the distractions
No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
- Voltaire
When a distracting thought enters your mind, attack on it. Fill your mind with thoughts of productivity. Think how great you will feel after having completed the task with masterclass perfection. If one distracting thought enters your mind, launch a counter-attack then and there, because one distracting thought is immediately followed by 100 more. One thought isn’t enough to distract you, but you will surely get diverted if 100 thoughts act on you, one after the other. So grab the very first thought by its throat, and squeeze the life out of it by sustained positive thinking. (Sustained is the important word here.)
- Ignore ruthlessly
Think of your mind like a house (which you own), and the thoughts as guests. Now, you can entertain any guests that you wish, because it’s your damned house! But we have lost control over our house, i.e. our mind. So any thoughts come in at any time, wreak havoc inside and disappear into thin air.
That’s not how things are supposed to be.
And you can change it.
Now, keeping the philosophy of atithi devo bhava aside for a while, think what you would do to make sure that the unwanted guest doesn’t return. You will ignore the guest, right? You will make the guest feel that it is unwanted. You will make it realize that it isn’t welcome. So go ahead, and do the same with unwanted thoughts! Ignore them. And ignore them with absolute ruthlessness. Just give complete and total attention to the good thoughts inside your mind. In a few days, you will start to observe that the unwanted thoughts have stopped coming.
Have complete control over what goes in
What comes out is completely and totally dependent on what goes in. We keep watching those nonsensical serials on television (Damn them!), we keep gossiping with our friends, we keep reading stupid things, and then we hope that we will be able to keep our mind quiet. What a hopeless hope! If the seed has gone in, and if you keep on watering it and providing it with adequate care, then the plant will come out. As you sow, so shall you reap, as the bible says.
We keep our mind open to all the garbage. We allow all the nonsensical things to go in. (Damn those serials on television once again!) In addition to that, we water and provide nourishment to all that by constantly being exposed to those very ludicrous things. Then it’s not possible to avoid the consequences. The plant has to come out- it’s the law of nature.
So you must stop all the nonsense from going into your wonderful mind. Stop watching television for your own sake. Read books instead. Let only the best information enter. Slap the door shut on anything that’s negative. Fill yourself with positive thoughts, with highest ideas. And if you do all this and sow such seeds, and keep on watering by constantly and consciously being exposed to positivity, the resultant plant has to sprout out. And I promise you on this: the plant will become a towering tree one day.