Mindfulness Meditation – A Canvas Without Any Boundaries
Our mind is more than our thoughts. A living mind need not ‘think’ but it always ‘feels’. What we call stimulus is external, but the mind has subconscious and conscious impulses that originate from within.
Philosopher Karl Popper proposed that the mind has three tiers. The first is occupied by things one can see and touch. The second houses the conscious and unconscious states. The third accommodates thoughts and ideas. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins gave us the concept of memes, the smallest unit of cultural information. Just as genes get carried forward through physical reproduction, memes spread laterally from one mind to another.
It is an assumption on our part that our thoughts inhabit the mind because no one knows exactly where.
We know that the brain as an organ is located in the skull, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind travels the whole body in the form of its signalling agents - hormone and enzymes- busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision. The brain doesn’t see any colour, it recognizes nothing, it tastes nothing, it hears nothing. All that the brain receives are impulses. It is only because of these electrical impulses and the action of billions of neurons acting to relay them that we make sense of the world and ourselves.
Mindfulness teaches us to be conscious of our mind. To reflect on our ‘being’. One can close one's eyes and concentrate on trying to locate just where one’s mind is.
The mind dreams even when our brain sleeps. Our brain is a relay race of consciousness. The physical organ itself grows, matures and atrophies with age. It learns new things, forgets and unlearns as well. It changes with every impulse. Even a single photon of light changes our brain. TV ads and movies and books and talks and ad jingles and all the stuff that your mind eats change our brain. Our brain has 100 billion neurons or brain cells and ends up with several billion fewer by the time we live our life. That's about as many stars as are in the Milky Way galaxy or as many galaxies as are in the known universe. The neurons do not act as computer memory sites. You can pull out any cell in your brain and your mind will not change. You could pull out a few million cells at random and not miss them. Our brain is run thanks to the wires between the cells. They account for about 40 percent of our brain mass. These synapses or neural connections can each connect to 10,000 other neurons. That gives us synapses in quadrillions.
Each culture has its own idea about he seat of one's intellect. Ancient Egyptians located thought in the heart whereas Greek drama deemed it to reside in their bellies. Modern men think that we think in our heads, and now scientists think it can be done in a box - or more specifically in a machine. And we have barely scratched the surface on AI.
How the brain works, where our thoughts come from, or how we register memories, remains a mystery. There is no reading possible to read a person’s brain to give an idea of his mind. Einstein’s brain looked exactly the same as that of a mere mortal. It's not a matter of size, weight or dimension. Neanderthals had larger brains than modern man. Our average brain is the size of two closed fists brought together. The one and a half liters of protein and fat floating above our shoulders is the most remarkable structure in the universe.
In terms of the evolution of the brain, it is important to treat it as being constituted of 3 parts: the earliest and ancient part, the intermediary piece, and the modern bit. These have been referred to as the alligator, the horse and the man. The alligator or reptilian brain responds to primitive urges such as anger, fear and lust. The horse copes with the commonplace needs. The man is the cortex - the top and most recent layer - which deals with more elevated thoughts like love, greed, ethics and envy.
Freud called the beast within us, the Id [Latin for 'it']. Intelligence is no guarantor of the quality of the mind. The more we learn and think, the more thoughts become fickle, like butterflies, hovering over one thing or the other. Mindfulness meditation is about calming, centering and focusing the mind. It enhances the ability to harness mental processes, consciously. Once –through active practice – the mind is trained and mindfulness is achieved, such a practitioner is able to observe his thought process and reactions.
Of all the living creatures, humans are the only species that can ‘think about thinking’. This is a huge distinction but one that doesn’t unfold by instinct. It requires deliberate training. Mindful self-observation gives a huge fillip to our conscious and unconscious mental abilities. With mindfulness comes the supremacy of will over mind. It lets one be actively in charge of one's thoughts. It enhances our ability to imagine. Correspondences and analogies are brought forth more easily in the mind. A deeper mindfulness allows one to excel at logical thinking but also freewheeling lateral thinking.
An end state for mindfulness is the ability to process things in a fluid manner. Left to ourselves we all process information rigidly and act rationally. We take in facts like rocks – solid and one on top of the other. However, a deeply conscious mind takes in everything in a more fluid, hypothetical way without pre judgment or rigidity. It leads to more substantive assimilation and more objective evaluation. We elevate the human differentiator and suppress our animal instincts. The world is in dire need of this. We are all well served by becoming more mindful of our failings.
I invite you all to leap to a new discovery of your minds through mindfulness meditation.
The sky is the limit, the lower limit!
