Using Mind Power To Get Positive Results

The journey to Mind Power is there in this title: "get positive." The effect of getting good results first requires a ton of positive thinking. So many books in the area of success motivation have emphasized "the power of positive thinking!"

This writer believes now that such books and their writers' thoughts form a type of subset of the spiritual model. That is, the world's great religions were the first sources of all of this motivational material. Mind Power was apparent in The Bible, The Upanishads of Buddha and The Bhagavad Gita of krishna, The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, The Koran, The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, etc.

Powers of the mind are implicit also in the martial arts. Zen Buddhism influenced the Japanese towards having "a blank mind" when taking effective action in war. The memories stirred up may not be pleasant, I know. But spiritual teachings are paramount here because they start with balance of the body and clarity of the mind. Activities like prayer and meditation are perfect training approaches to a realistic form of mental power augmentation. You see, harmony, balance, health, clarity and emptiness must come first before specific skills can be added like block, punch and kick. 

Or, of course - in the business world, skills like purposing, planning, controlling resources and money and maintaining the momentum of marketing actions.

The point is with regard to mind power ... isn't this ALL the same game?

Geoff Dodd, Australia 6168

Any proper and complete treatment of Mind Power ought to include some discussion about the levels found in the human nervous system, from the spine up to the neo-cortex. Starting lower we have the reflex level where stimuli enter the spinal column via nerves from the body. For basic functions, a reflex response can issue at that level with a signal to the body to act or to change something. This faster mode of response is crucial for survival in lower order animals where you see lightning fast action and response. There is no filtering or 'thinking' happening through higher brain levels.

Next we enter the brain stem at the top of the spinal column. This is where autonomic functions are mediated such as heart rate, breathing for survival, and digestion, etc. This brain stem works away unconsciously without the need for conscious awareness or human thought. It is truly just like a computer or micro-processor.

One step up brings us to the hypothalamus, or 'just under the thalamus.' This hypothalamus is - with the limbic system - the center for human emotions. Observe that emotions are not structurally high in the human anatomy. Buddhist monks tend to believe that emotions are 'contained' in the highest states of spiritual enlightenment. This writer agrees because spiritual experience has a transcendence about it which is like floating way, way above those animal emotional responses. Don't read this wrong, though. Emotional outbursts can also be highly adaptive responses in the right situational context. We get angry to force a change in someone.

Higher still we go... the cerebral cortex is a great storage area for long term memories acquired as a little child. The cortex also is a place for integration of sensory impressions with more complex thinking and programming features. Social appropriateness is monitored in the frontal lobe of the brain. Light and visual aspects - seeing stars - is happening at the back of the brain.

Up one tiny step to the neo-cortical human brain. This is the most recently evolved area neurologically and mind power is most likely to reside here! Why do we believe that? Well, many animals lack much white and grey matter in this area: the neo-cortex. The same animals cannot exert much intelligent mind power in the sense that we define our powers of mind. Creativity is the central defining feature of real mind power. You can blend in spontaneity - yes, the animals have a quick, spontaneous response, but being truly creative in our planning and complex behavior is a human-only characteristic. Geoff Dodd