By Anoop Bose, Advocate, Supreme Court of India
When the Mughal army under Emperor Akbar’s titanic Commander Raja Kunwar Man Singh was hesitating to cross the turbulent Indus River at Attock, the legendary poet Goswami Tulsidas proclaimed:
‘Sabe bhumi Gopal ki, ya men Atak kahan / Ja ke man men Atak hai, so hi Atak raha’ (All the land belongs to God, where is the obstruction? But if there is an obstruction in somebody’s mind, the obstruction will always persist).
Hearing these galvanising words, the heroic Raja fearlessly crossed the river and his army followed him. This was the historic prelude to his spectacular victory over five powerful Afghan tribes.
The human mind is a powerhouse of unimaginable depth, dimension and direction. To accomplish real success in this world and to use your mind power, you have to know exactly what is it you want to do in life.
To harness your mind power, you need to possess a clear and well defined goal. This might not be an easy step and may require incisive thinking, investigation and introspection. After discovering what you really want to accomplish, you need to necessarily devise a viable plan for action. After deciding on a goal and coming up with a plan, you need to hold in your mind a clear mental image of your goal. This means using the power of the mind.
Affirmations constitute another useful mental tool for achieving success because of their ability to rewire our brains. They raise the level of feel-good hormones and energise our brains to form new clusters of ‘positive thought’. The word affirmation comes from the Latin ‘affirmare’, meaning ‘to make steady, strengthen.’ Affirmations help purify our thoughts and restructure the dynamics of our brains so that we really begin to think nothing is impossible.
What you affirm sinks into and becomes a part of the subconscious mind and consequently affects your behaviour and actions. The charismatic American blogger Tia Walker succinctly observed, ‘Affirmations are our mental vitamins, providing the supplementary positive thoughts we need to balance the barrage of negative events and thoughts we experience daily.’
Another important mental tool is telepathy. Telepathy means the transference of thoughts from the mind of one person to the mind of another person, or several other persons, usually subconsciously. The word ‘telepathy’ is derived from the Greek terms ‘tele’ (distant) and ‘pathe’ (occurrence or feeling). The term was coined in 1882 by the venerable English poet, classicist and philologist Frederic William Henry Myers, who was one of the founder members of the London based Society for Psychical Research.
Brain-to-brain interface is made possible because of the way brain cells communicate with each other. The concept suggests the communication of affects so powerful that they bridge the spatial distance between persons.
The renowned Czech born Austrian neurologist and the father of psychoanalysis Dr. Sigmund Freud was interested in and eventually accepted telepathic communication as psychoanalytic. What Freud meant by telepathy is what contemporary psychoanalysis refers to as unconscious communication, and the peculiar, often inexplicable forms it assumes in clinical contexts.
Cell-to-cell communication occurs via a process known as synaptic transmission, where chemical signals are passed between cells resulting in electrical spikes in the receiving cells.
The amazing power of telepathy has been vividly portrayed by the notable Glasgow born Scottish-Canadian short story writer and novelist Robert Barr: ‘No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another.’
You need to have the capacity to effectively transmit your thoughts to other persons, who would fortify your hands in leading your plans to fruition. It is not enough just to sit back and communicate with them. You need to believe in what you are communicating and be enthusiastic and persuasive, otherwise they won’t listen to you at all or care about the fulfilment of your plans.
Motivation is another mental and emotional tool that you require for achieving success. How can you achieve anything at all if you are not motivated enough? The celebrated Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis aptly observed, ‘In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.’ The prodigious Russian-born American novelist, philosopher and playwright Ayn Rand penned, ‘A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.’
The Power of Imagination which can also be called ‘inner vision’ is a cosmic power that can transform your whole life. Imagination makes it possible to experience a whole world inside the mind. It gives one the ability to look at any situation from diverse angles and enables him to mentally explore the past and the future.
In your imagination, you can travel to any destination literally at lightning speed without any debilitating hindrance. Imagination includes all the five senses and feelings that are indefinable. It is possible for a person to imagine a sound, taste, smell, a physical sensation or a feeling or emotion. Training of the imagination gives the ability to combine all the senses.
A developed and strong imagination does not make you a daydreamer or an impractical being shorn of sense and sensibility. On the contrary, it strengthens your creative abilities and is a potent tool for recreating and fashioning your world and life. The prolific Francophone Genevan philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau appropriately remarked, ‘The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.’
Meditation is a yet another time tested effectual method of mind control. Meditation is an ancient relaxation practice that has been followed mainly by Hindu and Buddhist saints and sages since time immemorial. Its positive effects on the body and mind have been proved beyond a shadow of doubt and meditation has attained worldwide acceptance and popularity. When one meditates, he goes deep into himself and slowly silences his thoughts.
Meditation is the art of awareness. Any act that is done with awareness and doesn’t involve judgment or feelings is meditation. With meditation, you can increase your brain power in various ways like altering your consciousness to a higher level.
According to the well known Australian actor and singer Hugh Jackman, ‘Meditation is all about the pursuit of nothingness. It’s like the ultimate rest. It’s better than the best sleep you’ve ever had. It’s a quieting of the mind. It sharpens everything, especially your appreciation of your surroundings. It keeps life fresh.’
And the honorific seventeenth century English cleric Jeremy Taylor (popularly known as the ‘Shakespeare of Divines’) who experienced the incalculable power of meditation, wrote, ‘Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit.’
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to continuously create new neural pathways. When we repeat a skill that we are trying to master, we strengthen the neural networks that represent that action. The same happens physically in the brain whether we perform the action or simply visualise it. Your brain cannot tell the difference between an action you performed and an action you visualised.
The illustrious physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate Dr. Albert Einstein, who is credited with asserting that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge’ used visualisation throughout his entire life.
Few people are aware of the thoughts that pass through their minds. Most thinking is done in an automatic mechanical manner. If our thoughts are positive, then things will be tickety-boo, but if they are negative, they might cause enormous trouble or turbulence.
The mind is like a small untamed child, who accepts and takes for granted whatever it sees or hears, without judgment and discretion and without gauging the consequences. We are constantly flooded with thoughts, ideas and information transmitted through the five senses, other people, the newspapers, the internet and television. These thoughts, ideas and information penetrate our minds whether we are aware of this process or not.
This outside flow influences our behaviour and reactions. This means that we let outside powers shape our lives and destinies. So where is the freedom of thought and action? Why let outside influences control your mind and life? Why let other people’s thoughts control your life and mind?
If you leave your mind open to every thought that comes your way, you put your life in other people’s hands, and without realizing it, you accept their thoughts and act in accordance with them.
In the opinion of Freud, the unconscious mind has a will and purpose of its own that cannot be known to the conscious mind (hence the term ‘unconscious’) and is a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression.
In a larger historical context, Freud responded to the rise of irrational political forces in Europe that appealed to unconscious, uncontrolled and ultimately destructive mental forces that eventually dominated the middle of the twentieth century in Europe.
If a man wants to be the master of his mind and life, he should not let other people’s thoughts, desires and motives rule his life, unless he consciously chooses so.
I am now highly emboldened to share with you a few timeless quotes on the power of the human mind and how to achieve mind mastery.
‘Our life is the creation of our mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.’ – Lord Buddha
‘The greatest force is derived from the power of thought. The finer the element, the more powerful it is. The silent power of thought influences people even at a distance, because mind is one as well as many. The universe is a cobweb; minds are spiders.’ – Swami Vivekananda
‘A man is but a product of his thoughts – what he thinks, he becomes.’ and ‘You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.’ – Mahatma Gandhi
‘The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.’ – Plutarch
‘The energy of the mind is the essence of life.’ – Aristotle
‘The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.’ – Dr. Albert Einstein
‘You have powers you never dreamed of. You can do things you never thought you could do. There are no limitations in what you can do except the limitations of your own mind.’ – Darwin P. Kingsley
‘Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.’ – Benjamin Disraeli
‘The emperors of the future are the emperors of the mind.’ – Sir Winston Spencer Churchill
Conclusion
In conclusion, I am drawn irresistibly to Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s truly inspirational words from his Nobel Prize winning collection of poems Gitanjali which used to be my school prayer:
‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, / Where knowledge is free / Where the world has not been broken up into fragments, By narrow domestic walls / Where words come out from the depth of truth / Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection / Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way / Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit / Where the mind is led forward by thee / Into ever-widening thought and action / Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’