The Mind is smarter than we think!

Our mind is smarter than we think. I can almost hear you say “What’s new here? Tell me about it!” All of us are aware that it only with our minds that we are capable of analyzing, inventing, solving and doing a myriad of difficult tasks. This is obvious. Our mind is truly a wonderful instrument that is capable of stupendous tasks.

What this post is trying to say is that there are capabilities of the mind that are beyond the obvious ones like analyzing, solving, creating etc.

All of the above activities happen because of thought. Thought in general parlance, really refers to our verbalization of our mental processes. When we analyze a certain problem, what we really do is to reason out in words the pros and cons of the issue. When we are solving a particular problem we try to look at the problem and try to think in words of the possible solutions this problem.

But the mind is beyond simple verbalization. In my opinion there are clearly 2 planes of conscious thought. They are

Conscious Verbalization: This is type of thinking that we most commonly attribute to thought. In this mode of thinking, thoughts occur through verbalization of the issue at hand whether we are analyzing, solving or creating. We spend a fair amount time in this type of verbal thought process.

Conscious Direct Perception: Behind the conscious verbalization process is another plane of thinking which I would like to refer as “conscious direct perception”. In this plane of thought there is no verbalization. Our mind, in this mode, is able to perceive a situation almost directly and instantaneously. There is no accompanying verbalization in this process. To a certain extent this mode of thinking is almost Zen-like which really talks about direct perception of an insight beyond conscious verbalization. In fact, it is this plane of thinking which results in us feeling inexplicably sad or happy at times. We may not be able to put a finger to our feelings as to why we feel dejected or pleased. The fact is that the perceptive faculty of our mind has been working behind the scenes and assessing the situation we face during the day resulting in us feeling either good or lousy.

We generally do not look beyond our reasoning and verbal mind. But it is truly the non-verbal and perceptive mind that is really a wonder.