The Mysterious Driver

Part 4

Mind is one of the most common and mysterious word we have been hearing from long time. We use it every day but no one in the world understands it fully. Is Mind and brain same thing? If they are same then why there are two voices come from our inside? Why we are not able to make decision logically? Why our impressions are subjective? Scientist doesn't know the answers about it. Neuroscientists have their own limitation while there is Indian philosophy that is entirely based on mind and very clearly distinguishes between mind and brain. Krishna said in Gita that our body made of eight elements: fire, earth, water, air, ether, mind, intellect and ego.  Aitaraye Upanished talks in detail about how mind was created and how it functions. Mind and Brain are two separate entities and both are involved in judgement making. Their brief characteristics I explained in my second article “Fast Mind and Slow Brain”. In this article I will describe in detail about Mind. Every day we make our 95% of decision by our mind so Mind is the main driver that drives us in our life journey and most important thing about it that we still know very little about it that makes it the most mysterious driver.

Position of Mind in body

In Gita 5.27, Krishna says :

“Shutting out all external sense objects, keeping the eyes and vision concentrated between the two eyebrows, suspending the inward and outward breaths within the nostrils, and thus controlling the mind, senses and intelligence”.

This verse hints that position of mind is at frontal lobe of the brain at forehead, just above the nose the same place where Shiva has third eye basically mind is dynamic and it keeping changing its position. It has three positions. When we are awake and make conscious judgements mind is at forehead, when we are in dream it goes to neck (Cerebellum part of Brain, this is also place of subconscious mind) and when we are in dreamless sleep it goes to heart and connects to cosmic mind (Aitrey Upanishad) and it is revitalized and re energized

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Working of Mind

Mind receives the thought from the five senses and stores them into subconscious mind as Impressions. Thoughts are always stored in our Subconscious mind as impressions and when we need to make a judgment by mind, subconscious mind automatically sends the suggestion that we already have stored there. You can compare it with the Google search. As you write in google search box, it will automatically give you suggestions about search. This auto suggestion feature is fundamental difference between brain and mind since brain doesn’t have this auto suggestion feature there it has to manually retrieve the information from memory that’s why ego depletion is not applicable in case of mind but most important drawback of mind is that you cannot turn off its auto suggestion feature it works 24x7weather you want it or not so when you see some dirty thing it will automatically give u the impression that you have stored earlier. When you see an angry face and instantly suggestion come into your mind “Angry” that is auto suggestion feature of your mind even when we you sitting ideal and thoughts are coming in your mind are the thoughts from your sub conscious mind that are popping out automatically. Let’s understand it with this diagram entire process how we capture thought and how same thought is stored and retrieved by brain and mind and how do we make judgements

We received the information (thoughts) from our five senses and that information is processed by these two processors brain and mind. Suppose you see and taste a chocolate than your eyes, your skin, your nose and your tongue will send the information about chocolate to your two processors and they will process and store the information in their respective memory folders in this format:

Brain	Explicit Memory
	Brand name of chocolate, company, color, size, calories, nutrition info
Mind	Implicit Memory (Subconscious Mind)
	Taste (good or bad), smell (good or bed) appearance (good or bad) like it or don’t like it, image

This information will be kept stored in your memory so when you see same chocolate next time and you have to make judgement weather you have to eat it or not your two processors will retrieve the info about the chocolate from their respective memories. Since retrieving function is automatic in mind so the first information will you get will be from mind that information will be in about the impression of chocolate in your mind like you like it or don’t like it. Retrieving function is manual in brain so here brain will send the command to explicit memory and required memory will be searched from the huge memory stored in your brain and after some time you will get the information from brain about its name, calories etc and now you will make the suitable judgement and now there may be two case:

Case 1: your brain and mind both are agree or disagree that you should eat it or not it

Case 2: your brain says eat it due to nutrition and your mind says no due to its taste or your brain says don’t eat it due to calories but mind says eat it due to taste

In that situation, what situation you will take depends upon which processor is powerful in most of the cases, Mind wins the battle and the reason for it that retrieving information in case of fast and automatic and it doesn’t consume calorie while in case of brain, it sends instruction to memory and then memory search for the info and send to brain that takes times and consumes calorie so normally we avoid to make decisions by brain and make decision by mind and it must be since you can’t make all the decisions by brain. It’s just a single case now imagine how much data till now you already have stored in your subconscious mind. While brain works on request mind keeps working unconsciously and keep storing data all till now we have stored trillions bytes of data as impressions in our subconscious mind

Why Mind is Magnificent and Mysterious

1.       Mind is subjective: It is the mind that differentiates one person to other person since each and every process and store the impression subjectively in subconscious mind while brain stores the data as logics and details. Like water of Ganga River: someone can store as ‘dirty water’ and someone can store as ‘Holy water’. We associate happy feelings for some information and bad feelings for same information

2.       Auto suggestions by Subconscious mind: Subconscious mind keep sending thoughts to mind 24X7 and it is completely uncontrolled and can’t be turned off. Like when you hear the word “Apple” your subconscious mind may send you picture of mobile phone and my subconscious mind may send image of a fruit. One of my friend doesn't like pizza since his girlfriend who dumped him was crazy about pizza so whenever he thinks about Pizza his subconscious mind sends him image of his girl friend

3.       Mind doesn’t know numbers and statistics : Since number details are stored in brain’s memory so mind actually doesn't have capacity to compare by numbers so if you hear two news:

“10 people died due to swine flu”

“1 people died in bob blast”

There is very fair chance that your mind may give more importance to second news though statistically news 1 is important. The information that can be retrieved easily is more important is considered by mind. So the judgements made by mind are prone to statistical error.

4.       Mind doesn’t know the difference between reality and illusion: Do you remember the dialogue of the film Matrix “Don’t think, just believe”. Suppose you touch an iron gate and got an electric shock now when next time when you touch the gate though you are sure there is no electric current there despite it you will feel fear. Irrational Fear is the result of it. You can easily walk on 1 feet wide wall whose height is 3 feet but if the same 1 feet fall is at height of 100 feet, Can you walk it ?

5.       Pleasure and Pain: One of the most powerful and dangerous property of Mind. Mind do the things in which it feel pleasure and avoid in which it feel pain so you can do anything and get ride anything if you can associate pleasure and pain with that activity. It was the pain felt by mind that converted Prince Sidharth into Budha,

6.       Feelings: Feelings are the byproduct of cognition process of mind. We can associate certain type of feelings with certain type of thoughts

7.       Beliefs: Similar type of impressions stored in subconscious mind forms a folder that is called beliefs. Beliefs are the fundamental block of our habits and everything that we do in our life.

8.   Physiological response: Mind controls our physiological response that includes heart rate, brain waves, body temperature, blood pressure, breathing etc. By controlling mind we can control our physiological response.

9.     Dreams: dreams are the impressions stored in our subconscious mind that popped out in the mind randomly when connection to external senses are cut off

10.   Intuitions: Mind works 24 hours unconsciously, keeps storing data. Intuitions are some of the expert judgements made by us where we don’t have enough reasoning information

Due to above mentioned properties; Mind is a wonderful servant or ruthless master. It depend upon us how we take it. Mind can be controlled by brain by continuous practice and efforts. We keep making judgements and till now you must be able to understand which judgement are you making by mind and which by brain. All the actions that you take instantly or in reaction are from mind while where you take time, giving some attention, you respond are by brain. If you think you must do something but when you don’t like to do and when you try to do you feel mental pain are the cases where your mind doesn’t like to do it like your new year resolution, learning new thing, some important work, changing habits etc and in other side if you think you must not do something but still you are doing and if you don’t do you face mental pain are those cases that mind likes to do like smoking, becoming angry, wasting time etc. If we can control our mind or somehow convince the mind then we can do whatever we want.

 In my coming articles, I will write in details about the above mentioned 10 features of Mind and will also explain how we can control the mind.