How Your Mind Works (or Doesn't)

It's hard to understand your own mind in the same way that it's hard to see your own eyeball. But there are lots of optometrists out there who know what their own eyes look like, and in the same way there are many people who have gained understanding about various aspects of the human mind. We use similar techniques, too: mirrors, magification techniques, science, philosophical hypothesis, and (most importantly) a strong desire to help people feel better.

Here is an overview of the basic and general things that are known about your mind, how it works, and what to do when it doesn't work the way you'd like.

Your mind isn't what you are... it's something you have

Just like you talk about having a body and a brain (which is part of your body), you have a mind. You aren't your mind, it's just something that you have ownership of, something that's physically linked to your you-ness.

We can know this because your mind isn't my mind. Different things take place in our two minds. Therefore there's a physical separation between them. If there can be a physical separation between two things, they must be physical things. Therefore your mind is a physical thing.

by A.

Your mind is not an aspect of your brain

Though your mind is associated with your brain, and relays non-physical ideas to your body translated through your brain, it's not your brain or even a part of it. It's only linked to your brain in the same way that your brain isn't you, it's linked to your you-ness.

Your mind operates upon your brain, and thereby operates upon your body because your brain is the central control of your body. The reverse is also true: your body collects sensory information and gives that information, via your brain, to your mind. So your brain affects your mind, too.

But it mostly goes the other way. Every feeling, symptom, lump, bump and metabolic process in your body is a physical action directed by your brain, which gets all its ideas from your mind's interpretation of your experience. Your body is a physical expression of your mind, faithfully relayed by your brain. There is no illness, emotion or sensation of the body apart from the mind.

Your mind also uses your brain for storage of information, just like the software programs on your computer use your computer's hard drive to store your place in a game and your organized bits and bytes called "documents."

Your physical mind - a servant to your needs

You have to respond to and interact with your physical world physically. You have to make thousands of comparisons per second to determine which options that life currently presents to you will best fulfill your physical needs. Over and over again, all day long, you make choices to gain yourself the most energy for the least expenditure of energy. It's part of being a living creature: you have to manage your physical energy. The first step in good management of energy is maximum energy efficiency: getting as much benefit for the least expenditure of energy.

Your physical mind works like a computer program, receiving data from your eyes, ears, skin and other sensory apparatus, and comparing this information to ideas already on file in your mind from previous experience. Best guesses are made based on this complex process, and the mind directs the brain to direct the body, which enacts the best possible response from there.

Bit by bit, and starting at conception, your physical mind develops just like your physical body does. After a while, your most important data are organized into a complex structure that organizes information according to ego and identity, conscious and unconscious, beliefs and open questions. You have some sense of your role in your family and community. You have likes and dislikes. You use your mind to serve yourself and others in a way that works best for everyone.

Whenever you're confronted with a nonsensical circumstance, it acts like an obstacle for your mind, demanding your attention. This means it demands your mental energy, which is a type of physical energy. The less experience your physical mind has with life, the more of these surprises you have to deal with. That's why babies sleep 22 hours a day.

As children we get a lot of surprise data from the adults around us because the adults have much larger physical minds than we do. It takes about seven years for a human being to get the hang of conserving his physical energy in an optimal way. Most of our limiting beliefs are formed during these first seven years of our lives. Our minds are made up.

Your mind is not under anyone's control but your own

As much as I might want to, either to help you or to manipulate you, I can't affect your mind because sensory information collected by my brain can't physically get into your brain. I literally can't "make" you feel anything.

When it comes to controlling your own experience, you're about as alone as you can be. Your mind is strictly your own. Whenever you avoid someone because she "makes you feel bad" about yourself or when you're delighted to see someone because he "makes you happy"... you're lying to yourself. You've given meaning to experiences based on the content of your own mind.

by limaoscarjuliet
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How we influence one another's experience anyway

Even though my mind cannot influence your mind, human beings still manipulate and help each other all the time. How can that be?

It takes place through a beautiful thing called "communication." We influence one another just by providing needed data that our physical minds can use to make decisions. "What time is it?" "It's two o'clock." That is communication, and it saves the physical mind all kinds of energy because you don't have to get up, find a clock, and figure out if it's accurate or not.

Of course, we have to have all kinds of similar experiences in order for this communication to happen. We have to both speak and understand English and know how to tell time. We have to trust one another not to be liars. But once we've got our minds made up about one another, the influence can take place.

The nature of your influence of another will also be positive or negative, depending on previous information you have about the other person and the previous experiences you've had. All information and therefore all communication is inherently neutral... but your physical mind can't help but interpret incoming information as being positive or negative, helpful or harmful. It happens in our own physical minds and not in external reality, but it happens nevertheless.

The original mind - your purpose for being

There's another aspect to your mind that is nonphysical. I call this the original mind, but others call it various things like the soul, the superconscious, or Oneness. In the original mind, there is no separation because the original mind is not bound by physicality. There is no gap. We are all connected to each other and to everything else.

Your original mind is your you-ness. Your original mind is that which has a physical mind, brain and body: there is a link between the Oneness original mind and your physical self, but they are not the same thing. The original mind is believed to be linked to the body in approximately the heart region, or between the heart and the brain.

Your original mind contains the special you-ness that has a spiritual purpose for existing. Everything that comes into your being through your physical senses, then your brain, then your physical mind, is compared with your sense of what you are here on Earth to do. If you're here to experience forgiveness, your original mind will already contain that idea and then your physical mind will analyze whether the data it is receiving contain something to forgive. If you're here to experience service, your original mind will know that and your physical mind will analyze whether its incoming data contain a task to perform.

The original mind has purposefulness, the choice, willingness, intelligence, and intention. All of your physical self - physical mind, brain, body - is inherently neutral and meaningless. But your original mind is fraught with meaning. Everything is a Divine experience to your original mind.

When you're new born, your "previous experience" comprises mostly the content of your nonphysical original mind. Your physical mind, brain, and body begin to develop at conception and are basically in place by the age of seven. Then you start to forget that original sense of purposefulness with which you were born. Your life becomes more and more preoccupied with physicality, with dealing with surprise data that don't make sense. You get caught up in energy management. You accumulate mental baggage.

The good news is that when you act upon your life's purpose - the directives of your original mind instead of your physical mind - you begin to set down that baggage. If you take this far enough so there isn't any baggage left, you experience enlightenment... you just know. Your original mind dominates your physical mind, brain and body. This is a tremendously powerful state to be in, since the nonphysical is infinite. It is also a very joyful state to be in because there is very little energy requirement in this state. Small amounts of simple food suffice to keep us healthy and vital. We feel very alive and energetic when we do not invest energy into emotional and mental baggage.

The nonphysical, original mind is also immortal. Those who have died before have only physically died. Their original minds exist for eternity.

When your mind doesn't work the way you'd like

Your physical mind is made up of beliefs and suspended questions that your brain and body constantly try to complete to maximize your energy conservation. Each of these suspended experiences in your physical mind is the result of an incomplete communication with another. These experiences are nonsensical and so they demand our mental energy, which is fundamentally in conflict with our evolved need to be as energy-efficient as possible.

Consider the difference between

"Let's eat Grandma!"

and

"Let's eat, Grandma!" 

Your physical mind gives you two very different experiences when you read these two sentences, doesn't it? (I should hope so). The only difference between the two is that little comma, but this was enough data for your physical mind to interpret two different realities and thereby give you two different experiences in your brain and body.

Every event that takes place in the world is inherently neutral until meaning is given to it. Even cannibalizing Grandma is an inherently meaningless event until some consciousness somewhere makes a decision about whether this is a bad thing or a good thing. The tree falling in the forest produces waves that move through the air and will vibrate a nearby eardrum, but it is up to the owner of the eardrum to give meaning to the vibration and call it "sound."

As we go through our day to day life, our physical minds give meaning to everything we experience, judging it positive or negative with respect to how likely it will be to provide us with an optimal energy supply. But when you get two or more conflicting pieces of information in which one message negates the other you're in what's called a double-bind. A successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that you're screwed no matter what you do. You cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore you cannot resolve it or opt out of the situation. Your physical mind is presented with a paradox and it goes into a loop the way that your Windows operating system grinds to a halt every once in a while just because you asked the bloody thing to do more than two tasks.

People get presented with these paradoxes all the time:

• father glares and shouts that he loves you, you little sonofabitch
• your employer tells you to do a job, but doesn't allow enough time for you to do it, and you are in danger of losing your job if you question the situation
• if you don't know why I'm mad at you, I'm certainly not going to tell you
• you have to clean your room, but only because you want to
• speak when you're spoken to, but don't you dare talk back to me!
• you have the right to remain silent; anything you say will be used as consent to take away your rights; do you understand?
• sister teases you and mother shouts at you to leave your sister alone
• sex offender tells his victim that it's the victim's fault for being so attractive
• This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you; I wish you wouldn't make me punish you
• no matter what you say, you will make it worse for yourself. Speak up! What have you got to say in your defense?

Your physical mind will deal with double binds by directing your brain to keep you out of situations in which this kind of thing happens. This is done by creating a belief in your physical mind, and usually a corresponding physical response in your body. Your belief and its associated bodily response will not only give you a vaguely workable solution to the double-bind (mostly by helping you avoid it), but it will then help you to never get near that paradox again. You will come up with an imaginary solution and then apply this solution as though it is the truth. For example, you might get the idea that people who love you treat you like crap; that's just the nature of love. You might accept the notion that, by being beautiful, you attract abuse. You might take responsibility for others' offensive behaviours toward you. You might avoid "talking back" by never saying anything authentic.

Sooner or later, this will screw up your life. False solutions create mechanisms which you will use to just sidestep a double-bind situation every time you feel one approaching. These kinds of solutions are only useful for you to buy time until you can muster an intelligent, real solution to the situation. But until you do that, every time you go near the double-bind situation, you'll feel yucky. So you'll have to take a bigger detour each time. You'll have to firm up your belief. Your bodily symptoms will increase. You will act offensively toward anyone who treats you kindly. You'll become physically unattractive in order to avoid abuse. You'll become increasingly embroiled in caretaking and rescuing others. More and more of your energy will have to go toward avoiding, and less will be available for just solving the situation.

At some point, your obstacle will become insurmountable.

How to make your mind work the way you'd like

by Lara Azavedo

The answer is remarkably simple. The solution to paradoxes in your mind is to communicate them to another.

Ever wonder why it feels so good when someone else "gets" you? As you communicate an idea to someone else in such a way that they can understand it completely, you have the safety to explore your own logic and both sides of the double-bind you experienced at some point in the past. Suddenly you know where to put the comma in the sentence. Suddenly you see the situation from outside yourself instead of from deep inside your own pain.

The moment the other understands you and you understand that they understand you... it's done. The paradox is gone. It just becomes a neutral situation. It makes sense. You aren't caught in that trap anymore.

In a spiritual sense, what you do when you communicate with another is you let your superconscious original mind take over the situation. You "let go and let God." By doing so, you join with another into a larger, collective mind. You rejoin with the Oneness and share the energy burden with the infinite... where it becomes irrelevant.

You can't do this inside your physical mind because it is yours and yours alone and can never be touched by another. But your original mind belongs to the source. It belongs to everyone. Therein lies the answer to everything.

This stuff isn't just theory; it really works, and works very quickly for many people. If you would like to learn more about how the miracle of communication in problem solving works, visit my page about the clearing communication cycle.