Much has been written by thinkers, philosophers, scientists, sages and preachers on the subject of mind and heart. There has been endless research on the issue of restless mind and spirit of human beings, yet the peace still eludes many of us. The world still suffers from many diseases of the mind and heart. Words like depression, anxiety, stress and phobic disorder, mental disorder, behavioral disorder are being used like the common place flu and colds happening to ordinary people. The medical world abounds by all kinds of medicines and treatments, offering little respite to those who suffer. People continue to suffer .Their restless minds and souls are constantly being tormented. Through the columns of these pages we will try to understand how do we establish better understanding of these matters of mind and heart to reach emotional stability in our lives and keep our lives balanced.
We humans are connected with the organic world with the most developed brain and thinking powers. In the organic world three kinds of living beings exist i.e., those that have the instinctual survival bereft of any emotions, those that survive only on the basis of their physical strength and display only momentary emotional awareness .Humans have been bestowed with the powers that can generate emotions in our system involuntarily and activate our thinking system whether we like it or not. We also have a fully developed mental perception, which can take cognizance of the matter and connect it to the events and consequences. We have a fully developed memory. We think, we imagine, we connect and we activate. Much as man would like to become thoughtless at times, sleep without any connection to the real world, the brain continues working either voluntarily but mostly involuntarily.
The involuntary emotional system activates our mind all the time. It forces the mind to imagine, to create and to dream. The dreams motivate us to plan which are executed by us to realize all those that we dreamt of. But in the law of our land where we have the thought, the power to dream and the power to reflect, we do have the situations that cause conflict and pain. For wherever there is a mind, the thought, the power to reflect, the analytical skill, there we have the conflict, the contradiction. No mental activity can ever be without the contradictory and opposite situation. Wherever we have the mind, we have the pain and we have the misery. Man however does not want to suffer. He wants to always be in comfort, in happiness and in the enjoyment of a happy life. This is a natural phenomenon .All living beings look for a life full of comforts. The inanimate only do not know the difference between the comfort and discomfort. The living beings who do not have a mind suffer only for a short while. Their sense of discomfort is only short lived, is unexpressed on account of lack of emotions . They do not consign their discomfort to their memory bank. Nor do they draw upon their memory bank to reflect and compare their current and past discomfort. But man being a thinking organic sensitive emotional mind feels, expresses, analyses ,compares and consigns all comforts and discomforts to his memory bank, thus in a way being always under the load of misery .
Can the mind be free from worries and miseries?
We are all part of the larger organic world in which we are all living beings like millions of other kinds of living being inhabiting the solar system. Our world in fact as compared to the world of other living beings of the universe is too small. We are very miniscule in numbers, barely a few trillions all over the globe. The other planets must be peopled with many more living beings which the science is continuously researching into. Whether those living beings too have similar emotions, thoughts, mind and heart developed like us, only the research will find out.
But humans of our dear earth are endowed with a developed mental faculty. we all think .Thinking ,reflecting is an activity of the mind. We remember, we consign our thoughts to memory bank. We imagine. We create thoughts. Creation of thoughts and imagination is a mental exercise. We plan larger things for our life by the strength of our imagination .We dream of things that are larger than our life. We aspire for making these dreams come true. we do realize some of these dreams, imagination, and aspirations yet many other remain out of reach .
In order to understand the malady that has befallen the modern mind we will have to know the functioning of the mind in the modern age .the modern times are the reflectors of the cerebral psychological problems. Every individual is involved fully into the mental day to day stresses of life. The involvement of the human mind into the cerebral problems becomes the major detriment to the peace and happiness of the human intellect. Every human being wants to become free of the mental stress that he is suffering from. We need to understand as to what mind is, in order to get liberated from the stresses and problems of the mind. Without really looking into the functioning of the mind it is simply irrelevant to solve the problems that exist in our psyche today.
What are the functions performed by Mind ?
Mind is the action centre of the conscious and subconscious both. Sometimes it acts in full associations of the brain and the heart and other times it may wander into unknown realms of its own . Our central nervous system may have a role in controlling the mind and body both. but mind does not remain restricted within the body hence it may be incorrect to say that mind is controlled by the brain and performs all those actions as are demanded of it by the brain.
Alka Mansik Pramarsh Foundation Clinical Psychologists-Family therapists Indore 0731-4263087,9179383554 