An Operating Manual for Your Mind

Description

If we don't know how to operate our minds, others will do it for us. Here is a basic manual on how to gain more control of your mind and emotions.

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Video Transcription

remember that we're immersed in a culture this is so important to remember we're immersed in a culture that if you don't take control of your mind this culture will take control of it for you there are advertisers and media and all kinds of people that benefit from selling you things that are going to try to get your mind to be open to the grooves that they're selling you that make sense so first-person shooters right the video games the more I can get you into that groove as a video game designer the more you're gonna want to buy my game alright so I want to keep you going there but it's your choice whether you're gonna take that bait or not it's your choice it's always fun when you find somebody who's taken an idea that you use in your life and expand it on the other day I came across a video on YouTube a TEDx talk by net man named Don de Pawnee hope I'm saying that correctly and I will link to it at the end of this video and he actually was outlining a way of thinking about how our mind works that is very similar to something that I've used with students in the past but he cleaned it up

he made it even nicer I would highly encourage you to check out that video if you are kind of us a culture he's dressed like a monk he's very much a monk and in the Hindu tradition and so be open-minded what he's talking about is really

basic stuff in our culture we are not what I would call a meditative culture and I don't mean just meditating I mean that we are not aware in our culture that our mind is just as easy to forage as our body we're all used to the you know knowing that I I can sit on a couch and I can eat all kinds of junk food and my body is going to turn out one way I can jump around in the woods all day and devote myself to primal fitness and exercise my body is going to turn out a different way

he points out very simply that our minds are the same and that most of us are engaged 8 10 12 hours a day in teaching our minds to be distracted he's encouraging us to learn how to focus our minds and he says why don't our minds come with an operating so today I would like to offer my version of a basic operating manual for the mind for your mind my mind it's I'm riffing off of what he was talking about but I'm adding some elements that I feel are very very important ok here's how it works to begin to understand the operation of our mind it can help to think of our mind is divided into two portions two parts one is awareness the other is our mindscape our mindscape is the landscape or the terrain of our mind with all the places that we can explore our awareness is the is the act actually of putting ourselves visiting some place in our mindscape my mindscape is filled with all sorts of interesting things

there's thoughts right now I can be thinking about making a video I can be thinking about what's going to be for dinner I can be thinking about some issues that I'm facing and how I'm going to deal with them I can be thinking about how beautiful that tree is outside of the window another place I can visit in my mind art or judgments and when I look around at the world I'll find that I can place judgements on all sorts of things on other people on myself on the food I'm eating on my actions another common place that we can visit in our mindscape our memories and we have all sorts of memories about yesterday and years ago and things that were that we're done that wronged us and and things that really made our day so here's our mindscape and our awareness enters into the scene in our awareness we can place wherever we want I can take my awareness and I can place it on the judgment mmm like I can say mmm boy this meal is so delicious or oh this meal sucks

I can take my awareness and I can place it onto a thought so I now place it onto a thought in this very moment of oh look I'm making a video I can take that awareness and place it onto memories our mindscape doesn't just have three places we can visit it has all sorts of places that branch off of of these three so here we can see a person who's wronged us and

I've taken my awareness and put it on to that that thought of the person that's wrong to us or I can take it down here to the memory of what I had for breakfast this is the first a very important thing to realize is that although we've been taught to believe that we don't have control we actually do have control of where we place our awareness in our mindscape here's the next very important thing to realize is that my awareness has a flavor your color it's like a lens that the awareness shines through I can have a very positive flavor that I apply to my awareness or I can have a negative flavor so using this I can go over to that person that wronged me with my negative awareness and think oh what a jerk I just know why do they even exist and I also conversely could take my awareness with a positive flavor and put it on that person that judged me boy maybe they were having a bad day maybe there's a way that I could actually help them out a little bit to have a better day because probably they were mean to me because you know their cat just died or something the same with that memory of breakfast I can put a negative awareness on to it oh man I just had it now such a rush I didn't get to enjoy my breakfast yeah or I can put a positive awareness on to it why it was really rushed this morning but I got to sat down sit down for breakfast and yeah actually was pretty enjoyable now the flavoring of our awareness is very important to understand because that flavor it's not caught in a single container of our awareness it sort of bleeds out so here I am and I'm having those negative thoughts about how rushed my breakfast was and as soon as I put myself there or visit that place with that flavor to my awareness that negative flavor starts to bleed out and it starts to feed into other things and so here it's reaching out them to my judgments and it's reaching up into my thoughts and eventually it becomes so infused with those that sort of negative bleeding out that I may not even remember that breakfast was sort of the cause of all of this this mind activity this negative mind activity that I've been perpetuating inside of myself it just starts to look like everything is bad a very similar thing happens when we have a positive flavor but in my mind's working at least it's a little bit different instead of the seek-and-destroy method where a negative flavored awareness it starts on breakfast and then it looks for something else that it wants to put that negativity onto and then it starts thinking about that person that wronged me and thinking what a jerk they are the positiveness just sort of glows outwards and it starts to not look for other things to attach itself to but when we do apply our awareness to something else our awareness and that flavor of our awareness that positive awareness is stronger and so wherever I shift that positive awareness it creates more of that glow or that positivity understanding how the negative flavored awareness bleeds out and how the positive flavored awareness blows out is very important because eventually if I keep perpetuating this in my mind for instance that that negative awareness flavor then it can take over the entire background of my mind scape so that it looks like this and then everything has a negative flavor to it conversely if that positive flavored awareness keeps glowing out it starts to shine and illuminate the entire background of my mindscape flavoring everything very differently then we saw it when it was glowing red here's what we have gone over so far first of all we have a choice of where we are going to put our awareness where we are going to visit in our mind scape secondly we have a choice of what flavor what color or lens that we are going to use with our awareness so that when we visit a place we're not just visiting it we're also coloring it or flavoring it the last thing to understand about this is that when I visit a place in my mind scape with my awareness it creates a groove there in other words it's easier to visit that place again also essential to remember that if I visit it with a positive awareness then it's easier to visit that place again with a positive awareness but more difficult to visit it with a negative or Enis conversely if I visit that place with a negative awareness it's going to be easier to visit with a negative awareness but more difficult to visit it with a positive awareness so here I visited the person that wronged me and that little blue glow that is a little groove that I've created that makes it easier to visit that place again my awareness might go somewhere else

back to breakfast but I've left that little that little place for it to fit back into and it very easily can find itself drawn back into that that same place that same visitation in the mindscape so you can see the essential things to understand here that there is a mind scape and there is my awareness remembering that I can choose where my awareness is going to go in that mindscape

now as I just pointed out the more I visit a place the more it's easier to visit that place I sort of start to create a groove that takes me in the direction of that thought whether it's positive or negative and so the more I practice putting my mind where I want it the more I'm gonna be able to do that and I'm not gonna be just subject to the grooves right so we have a choice and if we realize that we have a choice then we can start to take control of where our mind goes in our mind scape if you're open to trying meditation I have a short video again I'll put a link to that at the end of this video have a short video that gives you the basics of how to meditate it's push-ups for the mind it is not anything mystical when you start to do that

you start to get your mind in shape and get it more focused that means that you have more control over where your awareness goes in your mind scape the same thing goes for the flavor of your awareness remember I talked about that earlier in the video you choose what flavor you're gonna put on your awareness when your awareness goes to a certain place in your mind scape what are you going to choose that is up to you but the more you wear grooves the more that there's gonna be a default or an autopilot the choice is going to be made for you unless you make that choice meditation basic meditation does wonders for giving you more focus and more control over this whole process so does trying just to be focused dhandapani spoke about this in the video it's real basic we've been taught do the dishes and while I'm doing the dishes I'm thinking about this or that or I'm humming a song my mind is in two places at once all you have to do is focus on the thing that you're doing if you're speaking to someone be focused on that conversation if you're doing the dishes we focused on the dishes everything you do make that your sole focus of awareness remember awareness can expand outward I don't have to be so I don't have to be task hypnotized when I'm doing dishes so that someone can come up and tap me that actually happens when I'm doing dishes but I'm thinking about what I'm going to be doing tomorrow if I'm doing dishes numb in that open state of awareness and focus then I'm aware of my surroundings and I'm developing the focus that is going to put you in control of where your awareness goes in your mind scale and what flavor your awareness brings to each of those places it's really as simple as that but it does take some discipline because remember we've been training most of us like ninjas of distraction we have been training constantly our whole lives to be distracted right now today is the moment when you can start switching that over we start devoting 10 minutes today taking that out of that eight hours of distraction take ten minutes devote it to focus if you do twenty minutes next week and you keep building that up pretty soon your whole day is focused you become in control of where your awareness goes in your mind's game and your life will change in ways that I can scarcely begin to explain we are distracted on mind is chaotic or world is chaotic we're always getting into arguments and fights with people we're not aware of our emotional state

we harbor resentment inside of us until it bursts out that comes from heart from continually developing a mind state of distraction let's start turning this around today incredible things are waiting us if we do thank you for watching

tell me about your journey in the comments towards a higher state of awareness towards more focus away from distraction what's worked what hasn't where are you right now in your life thank you my friends talk with you soon [Music]

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