- Do you remember what you thought a few minutes ago?

- Do you know how many thoughts pass through your mind in 24 hours?

- Do all your thoughts originate in your mind? Are they your own thoughts or other people’s thoughts that you think are your own thoughts?

Thinking is very useful in every area of life, but people go too far with it. It has turned into some sort of slavery. Instead of thinking on what you want, when you want, you think all the time, every hour of the day. Every word you hear, everything you see brings thoughts to your mind. The mind is always busy, most of the time thinking meaningless thoughts as a reaction to external stimulus.

People have lost the ability to stop thinking when they don’t need to. Thoughts come and go whenever they want, distracting the attention, spoiling concentration, and keeping the mind in a state of endless mental activity. It is like a machine that is never switched off.

Many of these thoughts are negative, causing anxiety and worries, wasting one’s time and energy.

Instead of using thoughts to help in your affairs, you are being used by thoughts. They take your time and they take your energy, without giving you anything in return. They constantly produce noise in your mind, preventing you from experiencing real inner peace.

Are you able to stop thinking negative thoughts? Are you able to stop all those thoughts that keep moving your attention from one thing to another? Do you keep worrying, and do you expect the worst? Does your mind keep busy with what someone said about you, and do you keep thinking how life is bad for you, because someone at work got promoted, and you were not?

Do you keep thinking about other matters while studying, talking with someone, driving your car or travelling by bus or train?

You deserve to give your mind some rest, at least for some moments during the day. You can learn to resist the temptation to be always thinking. When thoughts stop for a little while you don’t lose consciousness! You become more conscious and more aware. You become more alive. The mind is afraid to stop thinking, afraid of what will happen if it becomes quiet. There is great peace and happiness inside, but constant thinking hides it, like the clouds hide the sun.

When the number of thoughts go down, there is no vacuum, instead of the mind’s activity, there will be inner peace and inner happiness, which can be experienced even in the midst of activity, at work, at home and everywhere else.

Here is a basic exercise that will help you learn about the process of thinking:

Stop what you are doing, and for ten minutes watch your thoughts. You don’t have to be alone in practice this exercise. you can practice it at your work, in a park, at home, or wherever you happen to be, but not while driving.

For this exercise you don’t need to relax your body, sit in a certain pose or breath in a special way.

All you have to do is try to be aware of your thoughts, and find out where they came and how. Don’t analyze them, just watch the process, how they arise in your mind, and how they change or are being replaced by other thoughts. You will be surprised to discover that many of them arise as a reaction to events, environment or other people’s words or thoughts. Some of these thoughts that arise automatically in certain circumstances, triggered by certain people, events or other external stimuli.

After going through this exercise, I want to ask you, are you free? Is your mind free? Do you experience inner peace or a state of endless thinking, often unaware of what you think? Do you choose your thoughts?

I invite you to comment and write what you think, here at the blog, or at the forum.

Learn how to focus your mind

Learn how to gain inner peace

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“I cannot concentrate on things, and I get some things in my mind which really come again and again while doing things, and this makes me very sad. Please help.”

What you focus on grows. If you keep focusing on worries, you only encourage those disturbing and distracting thoughts.

Acknowledge, without letting this worry or discourage you, that you have a problem with concentration, and resolve to do your best to solve it.

Tips on how to overcome disturbing and distracting thoughts:

1. Get enough sleep at night. Some say that one needs 8 hours of sleep, but this is an individual matter, as some people require only 5-6 hours of sleep, and wake up energetic and refreshed.

2. Whenever possible, without avoiding your duties and responsibilities, stay away from what stresses and worries you.

3. Believe that you can change the situation. It is just a matter of dedication, desire, inner work and time.

4. Read the article about concentration at:
www.successconsciousness.com/index_000004.htm,
and then start practicing the first concentration exercise at:
www.successconsciousness.com/index_000005.htm

5. When you can perform the first exercise as required, move to the next exercise.

6. When thoughts disturb or distract your mind, try focusing on what you are doing more attentively. Don’t use force or fight the thoughts, just pay more attention to what you are doing at the moment.  If these thoughts persist, analyze them, see what they are, and acknowledge that they are just thoughts, and there is no reason in the world to be controlled by them. If you can treat them with disinterest and detachment they will go away.

7. Keep positive, and don’t get discouraged if you fail to practice these instructions or if the disturbing and distracting thoughts persist.

Peace of Mind in Daily Life

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If you let your thoughts become negative, if you feel despair, will this help you in any way? Absolutely not! You may say that the world conditions have changed and you can do nothing about it. You may say you are too old, or too inexperienced to get a new job, and that new jobs are sparse and hard to get. All this might be true, but there have always people who became successful even in difficult times.

You limit yourself by your thoughts, ideas and beliefs. Thoughts can be like shackles, tying you to the ground, and they can be like wings, taking you far away. It is your choice. A better life starts in the mind.

You might not be able to change you circumstances and the world around you, but you can change your inner, mental world. You can choose your thoughts, you can refuse to feel pity for yourself and picture problems and disasters, and you can fill your mind with positive thoughts and mental images.

All changes start in the mind, and you therefore need to change the way you think in order to improve your life. If you keep thinking about your current situation, of having no job and no money, you will get more despondent and unhappy and see more problems, because you focus on them, and do nothing to get out of this situation.

No matter how difficult it might be, stop your negative thinking. It will not cost you money to do so. A better life starts in the mind.

In your imagination, see yourself having a good job and earning money. Don’t say this is impossible. Believe what you are visualizing, enjoy the visualization, like you enjoy a good movie, and refuse the strong temptation to despair and say this is all nonsense.

When you focus on success you start seeing opportunities. You intuition becomes sharper, and people become more helpful. When you change your inner world of thoughts, your external world changes too, because your external world is the mirror of your inner world.

You can visualize and achieve your dreams. You can change your life, and it all starts in your mind.

Copyright © 2009 Remez Sasson Remez Sasson Blog. | Permalink | No comment

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Magicology: Casting a spell on the mind

Professional pickpocket Apollo Robbins has an uncanny ability to control minds. He can manipulate people to an extraordinary degree, drawing their attention away from his thieving hands as he purloins watches and wallets in plain sight. These days, Robbins gives his ill-gotten gains back – he has given up a life of crime to become an entertainer – but most of his victims still have no idea they’ve been robbed until it’s too late.

Watching Robbins at work is like watching somebody with supernatural powers. Yet, like his fellow conjurors, Robbins deceives his targets using nothing more than a finely honed understanding of human psychology. “I think of myself as a folk psychologist,” he says. “It’s all about developing an instinct for how the human mind works.”

After years of ignoring magic, researchers are starting to realise that the methods magicians use to manipulate the human mind might hold important insights into how it works. “We’re all thinking about the same questions,” says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We just come at the problems from different angles.”

Magic is all about appearing to break the laws of nature – making solid objects appear or disappear, sawing human beings in half, reading people’s minds, and so on. The laws of nature, of course, are inviolable, which is why magicians target the human brain instead, packed as it is with glitches and weaknesses that can be exploited to create the illusion of doing the impossible. And they’re brilliant at it: magic tricks only work if you fool all of the people all of the time.

Cognitive neuroscientists also have a long-standing interest in tricks of the mind, as these are a useful source of insight into how the brain works. Visual illusions, for example, have taught them a huge amount about how the brain processes visual information. Now they’re dipping into the treasure chest of cognitive illusions provided by magic.

Over the past couple of years, neuroscientists and magicians have been getting together to create a science that might be called “magicology”. If successful, both sides stand to benefit. By plundering the magicians’ book of tricks, researchers hope to develop powerful new tools for probing perception and cognition. And if they find any tricks they can’t explain, that could lead to new knowledge about how the brain works. Similarly, magicians hope that the collaboration will lead to new magic tricks by alerting them to perceptual or cognitive weaknesses that they didn’t already know about. “The real proof that a science of magic has come of age will be when we can use science to build a better magic trick,” says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK.

Read the Complete Article

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When you try to stop thinking, do really stop thinking, or do you just hold to the thought that you are not thinking, which is itself a thought?

Who and what it is that orders the mind to concentrate or get silent?

Can the mind concentrate itself, or is there something higher than the mind that focuses or silences it?

Concentration exercises and meditation eventually awaken something inside, some kind of silent consciousness, and it is this consciousness that focuses the mind on any chosen subject or object, and it is this consciousness that is able to cleanse the mind of thoughts and silence the mind.

This Consciousness-Awareness, Higher Consciousness is the Inner Self, and is beyond and above the mind. It is always here, but sort of hidden behind the thinking mind. There is too much focus on thoughts and sense impressions coming through the five senses, so that this Consciousness, “forgets” itself, and tend to “get involved” with the mind and the impressions coming through five senses. This is what makes it so difficult to focus the mind.

In time, as concentration gets stronger, one is able to cleanse the mind of thoughts, but this takes time and a lot of work. At this point you don’t say to yourself, “I am silencing my mind”, because this is itself a thought. You just stop thinking, but something else is there that stops the thinking. At this stage, when you stop thinking, there is no vacuum or the thought that “you are trying to stop thinking”. There is just Pure Consciousness, joy and inner peace.

From this perspective, concentration becomes simple and easy, and you are able to focus your mind easily on anything, a thought, a point on the wall, a flower, an inspiring quote, prayer, or on your work, studies, reading book or any other activity, or just enjoy being conscious, but without thoughts.

Copyright © 2008 Remez Sasson Remez Sasson Blog. | Permalink | No comment

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