The Magic of the Mind Commentary
Imagine what the dawn of consciousness was like for early humans, when we first learned to speak and use words. Little by little all the emotion and intuition that had been left unexpressed burst into life. The new ability to use linguistic terms as symbols for objects and ideas must have been an amazing experience, especially when it was used to identify ourselves. Suddenly we could give our self a name and a sense of individuality. We could conceptualize past and future, and slowly thoughts came into focus. It was the birth of the mind.
In the twenty-first century, evolution has brought us full circle, to a moment when we are reaching out for another level of consciousness. But this time we are ready to immerse our individual minds into the universal Mind of understanding. Our minds have the power to find a new language of higher consciousness: a silent knowledge and psychologically sound base of interpreting our highest potential. When the left brain’s rationality meets with the right brain’s intuition, a hologram is formed that reveals a dimension of ideation beyond thought: the magic of mindfulness that can program the mind to change the structure of our brains, thereby reinforcing and accelerating the powers of the new Mind.
It is likely that our old state of mind still thinks that we cannot change our brains after they are physiologically formed as young adults, and that our hard-wired mental capacities slowly deteriorate with age. The latest scientific evidence, however, now shows that our brains remain malleable and that the mere power of our own thoughts can change the structure of our brains to accommodate new knowledge, sophisticated skills and inspire transformative acts. In her book Train your Mind and Change your Brain, researcher Sharon Begley documents the convincing evidence for neuroplasticity, or how our thoughts can improve the functioning of the brain.
Every thought we think shapes our brain. As Ms. Begley states, “Like sand on a beach, the brain bears the footprints of the decisions we have made, the skills we have learned, the actions we have taken.” And every choice we make, or fail to take, also shapes the brain. As Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography: “If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use.” With that in mind, perhaps we can remind ourselves to simply remember the magic of the music and poetry arising in our minds.
We have the power to program ourselves for transformation, if only we could believe it and then let our minds be born anew, into a field of mindful oneness where the word does not name our selves, but rather it becomes the whole language of the transformed self. From the heights of spiral dynamics to the silent depths of a monk’s meditation, we can all transform our Mind.
