Mind Power

"Be still and know that I am God", the bible says, but the big question is how does one silent one's mind. The mindful spiritual path traveler can actually do a lot to raise her mind power, though the eventual stillness of mind comes after a lot of practice and a long journey of mindful living. On my path, I have found a few ways of directing my thoughts.

You cannot control the stream of thoughts that hit you all the time, they come from your conscious mind activity as well as the subconscious and will probably always have some randomness attached to it, that you as the thinker simply cannot control. However, mindful living will affect the thought process. Let me give you an example. You happen to walk down the road on a hot summer day and you happen to see an incredibly sexy specimen of the human race. Your eyes probably zoom into her body - I presume this example has more relevance for the male audience - but you definitely have the choice to move your vision up. As you zoom into her face and eyes instead, a completely new novel will open up. With your perspective your stream of thoughts is changing as well. Mindful living tailors the world of perceptions, the events that you are attracting into your life as well as the thoughts you generate. So in effect you still don't have much control over your thoughts, but you can at least flip the subject channel.

The second avenue you can take is to mentally interrupt a train of thought. Say a random thought is hitting you and it happens to be one of your pet worries, triggered by an event that has just taken place. Surely you must remember a time when you were lost in mental torture, anticipating one bad outcome after the other when you suddenly you feel a gentle tap on your shoulder and a friendly voice says to you "sister, where are you right now?". If you practice mindfulness over some time and happen to know your weak spots and the events that trigger them, you can stop this train of thought from leaving the station very effectively.

Living in the now is a popular concept these days and indeed seems to the answer to bring the conscious and the subconscious together. If you completely embrace the now, if you are dying to the moment as J. Krishnamurti always used to say, you will experience that your mind goes into overdrive. All the signals, from your environment as well as from the inside are processed at an incredible speed until there is literally no space left to think. At that infinite moment there is silence, and with it, the capacity to observe the creativity that lies beyond.