Most of us misunderstand brain and mind to be the same. Our brain is part of the visible, tangible world of the body and our mind is part of the invisible, inspirational world of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs and imaginations. The brain is the physical organ most associated with mind and consciousness, but the mind is not restrained to the brain alone. The intelligence of our mind permeates every cell of our body besides the brain cells. Our mind has incredible power over all bodily systems. We can do wonders if we learn to use the power of our mind. Did you know that our mind is multi layered?

I love this quotation by Isabel Allende it is awesome:  “We don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that deep hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome”.

The biggest truth of our life is that we are the product of our thoughts; think what you want, think what you want to be and you shall become. What thoughts run in our mind becomes part of the manifestation of our destiny. We waste a great time in our life misusing the power of our mind. Not everyone believes in the avid power of their thoughts. They brush it off while thinking of the past or fearing the future, not quite understanding that the very things that they are thinking about, they are inching closer towards.

1. Transformation takes place in the mind, not the brain: Our Mind is layered deeply. The seven layers of human mind have been explained by Upanishads by comparing them with the ‘Seven Horses of the Sun ‘. In the deep layers of our mind, as proposed by our Sages, the first layer connects us with the outer world. It called conscious mind. Every thought, choice, planning etc that arises in our brain is only because of the support of our conscious mind. In fact, every action, thought or desire that is arising in us in this very present moment is also getting possible due to our Conscious Mind.
2. The second layer is called subconscious mind. The thoughts we have in this current moment get stored in our subconscious mind even after this moment passes. For example, if someone hurt us, labels us with some unwanted tag, our reaction to it will be in the present moment. But even after that moment passes and even if we get busy in other actions, our reaction to that instance of cheating gets stored in our subconscious mind. We store all pleasant and unpleasant experiences in subconscious mind.
3. The third layer is called unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories which are outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict etc. Our reaction towards others or their actions gets repeated by us in our thoughts or in our words in talking with others or if we continue to feel emotions of anger, sadness etc towards them, then these reactions and feelings of ours gets stored in our Unconscious Mind. The feelings gathered by us in our subconscious mind undergo a change in character and intensity at the level of our unconscious mind.

4. The fourth layer of mind is called super conscious mind. When we are born, our birth is in a grand stage of a super conscious mind. The whole of consciousness here has a loving character and that is why we find that a child understands the language of love only. The super conscious mind is the aspect of consciousness which is limitless or “Infinite” in nature and which depending on any number of infinite possibilities concerning what you have been taught to believe. This quote by Anonymous describes super conscious mind so well. “The super conscious mind is soul, source, love, the authentic you. The subconscious mind is what you are. And the conscious mind is what you do.”

5. The fifth layer of mind is called collective conscious mind. It is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. In general, it does not refer to the specifically moral conscience, but to a shared understanding of social customs. At this layer of our mind, there is an intensity of the ethos, moral norms, values etc collected by us over our various births, believes Upanishadas. Their intensity cannot be changed. Our Collective Conscious Mind has the power of awakening in the divine presence.  The deeper layers of our mind enable us to penetrate and experience the secrets of our infinite existence.

6. Sixth layer of our mind is called spontaneous mind. Spiritually our heart is known as our spontaneous mind; when this layer of our mind is awakened nothing can hold us back. It is formed only in the foundation of unselfish deeds and actions.

7. Seventh layer of our mind is called ultimate mind. The Zen expression meaning the Ultimate Mind is mind without mind and is also referred to as the state of “no-mindness”, when all identity with the mind is dropped. That is, a mind not fixed or occupied by thought or emotion and thus opens to everything. It is in this last layer of our mind where we get enlightened. It is also called our soul in the purest state, our union with God. The ultimate goal of all spiritual practices is to experience our own Godly Existence and here lies the value of reaching inside to our state of our Ultimate Mind.

Intuition is the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning. Different people give the word “intuition” a variety of different meanings, ranging from direct access to unconscious knowledge, unconscious cognition, inner sensing, inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition and the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.

Most of us believe that we are rationalists, we insist on logical conclusions for almost everything in life. But, not everything in life is logical and rationale.  A naturalist is somebody who assumes that everything which occurs in the world has an explanation in terms of natural causes. Rationalists put this point another way: everything which happens has a rational explanation. For lack of a better word, there are laws of being and there are laws of nature, and it is impossible for anything to act in ways that are fundamentally exact and are logically explained. At times some instances in our life are illogical, absurd, or aberrant.

Intuition is a gift that each of us possesses, trust me, it’s a biggest gift of all abilities and all talents. It’s famous that Henry Ford used to follow his intuitions and gut feelings. When the automobile sector started experiencing falling demand for his cars and high worker turnover, in 1914, he did something that probably made other barons of industry go pale: he doubled his employees’ wages. Many felt he’s gone crazy. Well, within a year, turnover dropped by a factor of more than 20 while productivity nearly doubled, and demand for Ford cars boomed because Ford’s own workers could now afford the product they were making!

Another example is:  In 1954, Ray Kroc, a seller of Prince Castle brand Multi-mixer milkshake machines, learned that the McDonald brothers were using eight of his machines in their San Bernardino restaurant. He became very curious and he went to take a look at the restaurant. Ray Kroc suggested McDonald brothers to franchise their business throughout the country. He didn’t stop after suggesting; Kroc offered to take the major responsibility for setting up the new franchises elsewhere. Kroc’s lawyer cautioned him, but he ignored his lawyer’s advice, just because of his gut feeling at that moment. He borrowed $2.7 million to buy out the modest fast-food franchise he helped build. Rest is history.

When we don’t work on our intuition it goes waste. Intuition is for real and whether you believe it or not, it does not change the fact that it exists. Explore the amazing depth and power of your intuition. In 1965, Paul McCartney hears a tune in a dream “the most magic thing!” He thinks a lot about where he has heard this song………but it’s so unlike anything he’s written, he worries that he’s recalling someone else’s song. McCartney plays it for anyone who will listen, but no one can identify it. So the Beatles record the track and title it “Yesterday.” It became super duper hit! Often, intuitions appear in our dreams.

Another interesting example of human intuition comes from Jose Silva, founder of the Silva method, which is aimed at attuning individuals to their unconscious mind to solve their daily problems. In a dream, Jose saw two sets of numbers, 3-4-3 and 3-7-3. Then, he saw the image of Christ and the book “One Solitary Life” which is an essay detailing the effects of Jesus Christ on humanity. He asked himself what exactly did these numbers mean that appeared to him in the dream? He started looking for license plates, telephone numbers on the telephone book, home addresses, etc. but there wasn’t any relationship of these with the sets of numbers he dreamed of. He became restless, and kept questioning himself the relevance of the numbers he saw in dream. That night, his wife asked him to go to the store to get a bottle of wine. On the way to the store he met a friend and told him about the whole experience. His friend suggested that maybe that number belonged to a winning lottery ticket. Jose Silva then went to the lottery agency and bought tickets with the numbers 3-4-3. The 3-7-3 weren’t available as somebody else had already purchased them. The end of the story is Jose won over $10,000!

The Indian Ayurvedic medicine practitioners agree that both intuition and intellect are necessary to give a person a correct diagnosis and treatment of their specific disease. Pulse diagnosis which is done by the physician placing three fingers on the patient’s pulse allows him to know the types of energetic imbalances he has and to some extent how to correct them. The mind and heart of the doctor have to be in tune while this takes place. Do you know that pulse diagnosis has been used for over 5,000 years and it continues to be used even today?

Getty museum is an art museum in California housed on two campuses: the Getty Centre and Getty Villa. The museum is famous in world and has been visited by millions of people so far. In 1983 the Getty Museum received a statue that was thought to be original. However, when experts in the field came to check it, they all declared that the statue was phony or fake. They didn’t specify any particular reason but only recognized that a gut feeling told them there was something wrong with it.

Use your intuitive power for the best results in your life. When it comes to making decisions about what to do with the rest of your life, with your career, with your relationships, the societal and household pressures that seep into our unconscious are irrelevant. It is our intuition alone that can play the pivotal role. Turn to your intuition in these times, turn inward and ask yourself what feels right and what feels wrong. You will never be let down.

Sigmund Freud the father of psychology said that mind is landscaped. Like a landscape, mind has a structure and each structure has function of its own to play. In Freud’s model of mind the conscious mind (everything that we see and are aware of) is seen as the tip of the iceberg of our unconscious mind. Our unconscious mind is like a storehouse of our primitive wishes, ideas, and impulse which are kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area. According to Freud the structure of the unconscious mind is like a large metal pot ‘cauldron’. So all that we desire but are scared to speak of and some events which have left lasting effect on us of which we are unable to speak because of fright are locked away in the unconscious mind. The ‘locking away’ process happens through suppression/repression. Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind; he stated that to a great extent it governs behavior of people. And, the objective of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious (aware).

In 1923, Freud developed a more structural model of the mind comprising of id, ego and superego. These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions.

Freud said that the id expresses pleasures which comprises of two kinds of biological instincts or drives which Freud labeled as Eros and Thanatos. Eros helps the individual to survive; it expresses life-sustaining activities such as respiration, eating and sex. The energy created by the life instincts is known as libido. In contrast, Thanatos is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in all human beings such as hostility, aggression and destruction. Freud believed that Eros is stronger than Thanatos, thus enabling people to survive rather than self-destruct.

The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego’s goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in a safe manner which is socially accepted and does not harm others.  In contrast to the id the ego follows the reality principle as it operates from both the conscious and unconscious mind.

The superego develops during early childhood when the child identifies with the same sex parent and is responsible for setting moral standards to be followed. The superego operates on the ethics and morality principle and motivates us to behave socially in a responsible and acceptable manner. The superego makes us self-governed; we feel ashamed for cheating others or harming others and feel guilty if rules are not followed by us. When there is conflict between the objectives of the id and superego the ego acts as a referee and arbitrates the conflict. The ego can thus organize various defense mechanisms to prevent it from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety.

Freud has explained that our brain guards us from disturbing thoughts and memories by holding back them and he believed that we are almost entirely driven by unconscious sexual desire. So Freud used to say that our dreams are a secret outlet for these repressed desires. Sigmund Freud used dream analysis to interpret the fundamental language of dreams; it is very different from normal conscious thinking. Freud intelligently used id, ego and super-ego to support his research on dreams.

The study of dreaming is called Oneirology; its psychoanalysis runs through neuroscience, psychology, and literature. Do you know, till today the plain fact why we dream is still unexplained. But that hasn’t stopped scientists from coming up with some pretty fascinating premise; each study has come out with variety of reasoning.

Dreaming allows wish fulfillment: After examining and analyzing dreams of hundreds of his patients, Freud came up with a presumption that dreams are wish-fulfillments. Any dream, no matter how terrifying, can be looked at as a way of getting something that you want, either literally or symbolically. If you dream of falling from height, which is the most common dream, the dream suggests that you may have lost control over a particular situation in your life. The situation can possibly be linked to job, work, and school assignment, home or even in your relationship. Falling dreams are usually vivid ones that you can recall them quite easily and are able to remember most of the symbols.

Dreaming is storing an idea in memory: Famous psychiatrist Jie Zhang said that dreams are not just randomly-generated stories caused by neural impulses. Perhaps, there are also more reasons for dreaming them. He said that our brain is always storing memories regardless of whether we are awake or asleep. Dreams are a kind of “temporary storage” area of realization, a spot where we hold memories before we move them from short-term to long-term storage. A dream flashes through our mind before it is filed in our memory.

Dream often cleanses our mind: In our dreams we get rid of undesirable connections and associations that build up in our brains throughout the day. Basically, dreams are garbage collection mechanisms, clearing our minds of useless thoughts and making way for better ones. Essentially, we dream in order to forget the bad actions and deeds. Dreams help us get rid of the information overload of daily life and retain only the most important data. Yes, that’s the truth.

Strengthening what we learn: One theory suggests that we actually dream to remember rather than forget. It’s based on a number of studies that show people remember what they’ve learned better if they dream after learning it.  It supports Jie Zhang’s theory about long-term memory storage; our dreams help us retain what we’ve learned.

Psychiatrists suggest that we should keep people awake and talk to them for hours if they have experienced a trauma. The theory is reinforced by recent studies on trauma, which suggest that when people go to sleep right after a traumatic experience, they are more likely to remember and be haunted by the trauma.

Preparation for threats: Neuroscientist Antti Revonusuo of Finland suggested that dreams play a biological function often to replicate threatening events which prepare us to face it. People who have threatening kinds of dreams are better able to face threats in their waking hours, because they’ve already run through these in their dreams. Harvard medical researcher Deirdre Barrett suggests that dreams are a kind of theatre in which we are able to solve problems more effectively than when we are awake. This happens partly because the dreaming mind makes connections more quickly than the waking mind does. This idea is based in part on experiments she did where people were asked to solve problems while “sleeping on them.” The problem-solving outcomes were better for the candidates who dreamt.

Processing painful emotions with symbolic associations: solving problems in our sleep is itself a kind of Darwinian process. Basically, dreams are natural selection for ideas and this can broaden to the level of emotions, too. One group of researchers suggests that dreams are places where we run through situations and try to select the most useful emotional reactions to them. Psychologist Richart Coutts suggests that this is the best way to react to those situations emotionally. And, we often feel better about painful issues the next morning after a night of dreams. While a Darwinian model of dreaming suggests that we aggressively transform our ideas to weed out problematic and awkward emotions, a new model of dreaming suggests that the process is more like therapy. We don’t aggressively select for the most adaptive idea or emotion, we just run through those ideas and emotions and place them in a broader psychological context. Often, the brain does this by associating an emotion with a symbol.

So friends, dreams play an important role in our emotional, psychological and physical health. We have the romantic, terrifying, emotional, funny, awkward, loving, uniting, separating and weird dreams. What we may not realize is that these dreams are common across cultures and their seemingly wacky content is both important and meaningful. We spend an average of eight hours a night sleeping, which is basically a third of our life. About a quarter of our sleep is spent dreaming, which in an average lifetime represents about six full years of dreaming. Most of the researchers conclude that dreams play a central role in our emotional health, our memory, our learning and to help us to find solutions to our problems.

Psychologists say if a person laughs too much, even at stupid things, he is lonely deep inside. Loneliness is a composite and usually unpleasant emotional response of many people. While, some people like to be alone; they enjoy isolation. I think, even when you are surrounded by many people, you can be lonely. Loneliness comes because of lack of connectedness,company, when you feel you don’t belong to the crowd. Don’t we all feel this sometime? I have seen people sitting quietly in corner in marriages, parties, get-to-gathers or a concert etc. I think when you really don’t feel like mingling with others, you are feeling lonely. One can feel lonely even marriage, relationship, career, friendship – a vacuum is felt. The causes of loneliness are varied which include social, intellectual or emotional factors. It’s better to come out of the loneliness phase as early as possible. It’s better to realize that loneliness is a feeling and not a fact.

Psychologists say if a person sleeps a lot, he is sad. Not necessarily. Some people when they are sad sleep a lot, while others struggle to sleep. But, why depressed people lie in bed most of the time? It’s not because they want to snuggle under the blankets, but it’s because depressed people can’t bring themselves out of the bed. For them almost any action, bustle or task becomes a painful ordeal. Even a simple task such as taking a shower, brushing teeth, or even getting up to go to washroom or getting dressed becomes difficult for depressed people. Lack of motivation, lack of any direction and lack of enthusiasm keeps them in bed.

Psychologists say if a person speaks less but speaks fast, he keeps secrets and lies. Lying is a pervasive trend which we all do to some degree. Sometimes we see that someone associated with us is a blatant liar. Many times we can spot the fibs but we decide to keep mum over them. Liars are quite often worried about being caught – therefore they speak up fast. They speak fast because they don’t want to give the correct information. They quickly jump to answers, give irrelevant details which are inconsistent. A research has proved that people lie because they want to conceal truth. When people intentionally want to hide something, they speak less and if they speak, they speak very fast. And another A research at Harvard proves that powerful people are superior liars.  If someone is constantly in powerful position, his/her lying improves. When people are given power, they are in more comfortable position while lying. And it becomes hard to detect their lies because of their positions.

Psychologists say if someone can’t cry, he is weak. More women are voicing their belief that men and boys should be encouraged to express sensitive emotions. When a man sheds tears, it means that he lives by a code of values and cares enough to show emotion when things went wrong. Medieval warriors and Japanese samurai cried during times of epic tragedy. In Western culture, a man’s capacity to cry indicates his honesty and integrity. Abraham Lincoln used strategic tears during his speeches, and modern presidents have followed the suit. Healthier men and women do not resist crying; people cry out their suppressed emotions, as crying allows them to vent out. It is very true that weaker people don’t cry.  Strong emotions cause our brains to release chemicals that indirectly lead to teary eyes. A flow of tears not only shoots up the level of endorphins – natural chemicals within the body, but it proves a sense of well-being and relieving stress. A flow of tears also release toxins from our body making us healthier. So, dear friends, crying is a healthier sign.

Psychologists say that if someone eats in an abnormal manner, he is tense. Nervous or tense people eat even when they are not hungry; they use food as a way to deal with feelings instead to satisfy hunger. It happens to all of us sometime or the other. Sometimes we finish the entire packet of chips, or occasionally we eat 4 bananas out of anxiety or boredom. I have seen children eating a lot prior to their exams. But when we eat a lot, especially without realizing it, eating can affect or weight, health, and overall well-being. It’s better to make the connection between eating and our feelings. It’s better to understand what drives us to eat so much. Emotional eating is prompted by negative feelings. Yes, people often turn to food when they’re stressed out, lonely, sad, anxious, or bored.

Psychologists say that if someone cries on little things, he is innocent & soft-hearted. Biologically, there may be a reason why women cry more than men: Testosterone may inhibit crying, while the hormone Prolactin which is seen in higher levels in women may promote it.  You will watch some people crying in theater while watching some emotional scenes or television serials. Innocent people believe Innocence implies lesser experience, lesser exposure in either a relative view to social peers, or by an absolute comparison to a more common normative scale. In comes out of ignorance, lack of knowledge, lack of experience and lack of wrongdoing, whereas greater knowledge comes from doing wrong.

Psychologists say that if someone becomes angry over silly or petty (small) things, it means he needs love. Anger can occur when people don’t feel well, feel rejected, feel threatened, or experience some loss. The type of pain does not matter; the important thing is that the pain experienced is unpleasant. Because anger never occurs in isolation but rather is necessarily preceded by pain feelings, it is often characterized as a ‘secondhand’ emotion. Remember, when a person gets angry over small things it is a sign that he/she needs lots of love. A person craves for attention/love – and when he does not get it he loses his temper over small things. Real love makes us feel vulnerable.

I love this beautiful quote by Anonymous: I am strong because I am weak. I am beautiful because I know my flaws. I am a lover because I am a fighter. I am fearless because I have been afraid. I am wise because I have been foolish. & I can laugh because I’ve known sadness.

Life is nothing but a paradox.