According to Julian, protagonist in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari , “If you take care of your mind, if you nurture it and if you cultivate it just like a fertile rich garden, it will blossom far beyond your expectations.  But if you let weeds take root, lasting peace of mind and deep inner harmony will always elude you.”  Unfortunately, most of us are cultivating a weed garden.   In Eye of the I, Dr. David Hawkins suggests that for most of us the mind is a non-stop talking machine.  Thoughts appear out of nowhere unconsciously and many times unwanted.  All of this might seem quite innocent and normal; however, this mental morass makes it difficult to focus and concentrate for longer than a nanosecond.  According to David Kundtz, author of Quiet Mind:  One-minute Retreats from a Busy World, most people spend too much of their days staring at “The Mountain of Too Much”, so it’s easy to become overwhelmed.  He suggests that one of the results of this mountain is shorter and shorter attention spans, simply because we have less and less time to accomplish everything during our hectic days.

To live life to the fullest, we must stand guard and let only the very best information enter.  We truly cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought – not even one.  The most dynamic, contented and successful people – the ones who do more than just exist – the ones who fan the flames of human potential and truly savor the magical dance of life have adopted a positive paradigm about their world and all that’s in it.  They do not engage in impoverished, unconscious thinking.

Those of us who think the same thoughts every day, most of which are negative or unnecessary, have fallen into bad mental habits.  Rather than focusing on the positive or the task at hand, we are captives of our pasts.  We worry about failed relationships or financial problems.  Others fret over our less-than-perfect childhoods or fears of future catastrophe.  We block the enormous potential of our minds to work magic and deliver all we want emotionally, physically, and spiritually.  We have to realize the enormous power of our minds.  Even the best-conditioned thinkers only use about one-hundredth of their mental reserves.

How do we focus our mind on a single thought when it’s been running non-stop and out of control?  Why is the mind engaged in interminable frenetic activity?  Why does it dread even a moment of silence?  Psychologists suspect that thoughts emanate from instinctual drives and early programming rather than deliberate intention.  In fact, it takes considerable effort to push aside the nonsense swirling about to organize our thinking into a meaningful sequence of coherent thought.  At best, chaotic thoughts enter the mind randomly and without forethought.  Moments of clarity enter the mind just as spuriously only to be replaced with noise and insanity once again.

Even periods of intelligence seem to appear chaotically.  Like reveries, fantasies, and daydreams, the mind just randomly selects short periods of reality-focused, mental processing.  Intuitive leaps and epiphanies happen without warning, many times while we sleep.  Very seldom do we control the information that whizzes through our minds at hyper-speed.  And even if we do, it’s difficult to overcome the stream of incoherent thought that seems to be ever-present.  One thing is evident – the mind is totally unreliable.  Its performance is inconsistent at best.  It loses the car keys; forget birthdays and anniversaries, telephone numbers and appointments and where we parked the car.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Next posting I will share a simple process for harnessing the powers of your mind.  In fact, I have long used the phrase; “Success comes to those who first conquer the powers of their mind.”  Stay tuned to learn how.