Mental Strength Laws of the Mind and Thoughts – Part 3

I hope you’ve been enjoying our look at the Mental Strength Laws of the Mind and Thoughts.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve explored the laws 1 – 6 and today we’ll continue with laws 7, 8 and 9.

The basis for these posts is the question, “How do we run our own mind?”

Taking control of our own mind, and thinking freely in independent ways apart from rehashing worn-out or spoon fed thoughts necessitates several things.

It necessitates that we develop mindfulness about our minds (or more accurately, our minds) so that we actually develop state management skills. It means we learn to play a new Game, “I am in control of my mind and thoughts” game.

So, with that in mind let’s continue with laws #7, 8 and 9.

#7: Minds Transition In and Out of the Present Moment – With that last induction (see previous post), did you leave where you are now and go somewhere else? If you didn’t, perhaps you could use the words to do that. Try it out. Because we represent things, we can represent realities that are not immediately present and go there.

This is the foundation of all day-dreaming, night-dreaming, fantasizing, learning, creativity, invention, thinking, conceptualizing, mathematizing, theorizing, etc. This is what we humans do best. We can leave our current situation and travel to distance places, times, and worlds.

We call this thinking. It’s also hypnosis. It’s also trance. It’s many things: imagination, fantasy, creativity, and hallucination. This means that we are not stuck or limited to his present moment.

We can represent things not present, never present, and even impossible things. What freedom of mind we have! It’s a freedom of consciousness that’s unique to our species.

We have a consciousness that can transition from our current state to other states, hence the word “trance.”

Anytime we shift our awareness to something that is not part of our current awareness, we enter a trance state.

Our minds love to zone out. Doesn’t yours? It happens when you drive on long trips, it happens even when you drive to the grocery store. It happens when you wait in line, in an elevator, and when you’re listening to a speech.

Minds do that.

It’s no big deal. Well, it’s not unless you have no guidance or control over it. Then it is a big deal. If you lack awareness of when you are present and when you’re off on some mind-trip, then you are doing out-of-control hallucinating.

We all hallucinate. Those who do so mindfully and by choice are our greatest scholars, inventors, creators, designers, teachers, CEOs, etc. Those who don’t do it by choice suffer from underachieving and the ineffectiveness of not being able to manage their own mind. They don’t run their own minds.

#8: Minds Induce States – Minds put us into neurological states. They affect our physiology, breathing, movement, and internal chemistry. To work up a good mad, we only have to think angry thoughts of injustice and violation. We only have to think about a dangerous threat and off we go into a fear state. And some representations of sexuality can induce our body to experience desire and lust.

Minds do this because they are part of the body. They sit at the top of the spinal cord and nervous system and bring in all of the nervous impulses processed by the end receptors.

Out of the structure of our multi-layered minds emerge our sense of awareness we call “mind.” Mind is an emergent property in the neurology of our mind. So it is always mind-body or body-mind, and never one without the other.

This explains why we mostly think or represent ourselves into our states but why we also can act our way into states. This gives us two royal roads into a mind-body state of consciousness whether it is confidence and joy and love or fear, anger, and sadness. We can use mind and all of our internal representations and we can use body (breathing, posture, movement, activity, etc.).

What state are you in? What state do you go into when any given stimulus or trigger occurs? You need look no further than the instructions you give yourself at the mental dimension or what you do in terms of your posture, muscle tension, breathing, etc. at the physiological dimension.

#9: Minds Go in Circles – Not only do our minds represent the world, go places, and put us into states, but minds also do flips, they roll over, they flip back on themselves, they go in circles. As there are feed forward and feedback loops in the physical structure of the mind so that nervous impulses are sent to the thalamus and the amygdala they are simultaneously passed on to the escorted and after processing there back to the lower mind structures.

It’s all inter-connected. We even have an associative cortex that keeps everything connected with everything else so that we have more cortical connections in the three trillion mind cells than atoms in the universe.

No wonder we loop around. No wonder we can worry about our humor and wonder if we are caring too much and then become afraid of our worry and then think something must be wrong with us that we are worry about something so silly as that. We get caught up in down spirals of negative thoughts and can become obsessive compulsive.

We can get caught up in positive spiral of thoughts and suffer from insomnia due to our excitement.

Our minds are not strictly logical. To think in a straightforward way and to stay on that path for more than a few seconds is very difficult for our minds. That’s why mathematics and formal logic seem so foreign to us. It’s not the natural habit of our mind. We think in circles. Our minds go around in loops and spirals. We keep reprocessing the same tired old thoughts.

This reflexivity is what allows us to layer thought upon thought, feeling upon feeling, thought upon feeling, memory upon imagination, fear upon anger, dread upon worry, joy upon learning, etc. This creates the whole domain of our meta-statesour states of thoughts and feelings about other thoughts and feelings. And that’s what creates the layering effect of our awareness so that we can create great complexity in our experiences.

We begin with a reference experience, bring it in and represent it, then develop thoughts and feelings about that, and so on until what was “out there” becomes a frame of reference, a frame of mind and then the very frameworks of four personality and orientation. This creates the Rules of the Game, or our highest frames of mind.

Start now to take back control of your mind and thoughts by picking up a copy of Develop the Mental Strength of a Warrior today!