Mindfulness has been gaining popularity as a subject nowadays. Or so it seems.
I’ve been practicing mindfulness, for as far back as I can remember. But, it’s only lately that I began to realize that good mindfulness comes from being in an optimal frame of mind, body and soul. Happiness and emotional well-being are integral foundations for mindfulness to occur.
A lot has been said and written about the topics of mindfulness and unconscious processing. The two are definitely related and it’s not that hard to master this technique.
Bare-bones:
The trick is to:
- Be fully present in the environment you are in.
- Practice the art of raising your level of awareness. It can be as simple as that if you try and keep trying.
- Make sure that the levels of Glycemic Index in your body remains constant. Don’t have two big meals. Break them down into smaller meals a day. Do not have big meals before an important event, meeting e.t.c. In layman terms, when you have too much food, the blood rushes to your stomach. That leaves less blood and subsequently less oxygenation for the rest of your body and your brain. This is the reason why you get drowsy after a big meal. Resist the temptation and that will help keep your brain sharp and alert throughout the day
Listen to your gut feeling. You know when someone is talking about something and you can tell relatively quickly about the amount of planning and effort that has gone into delivering a presentation, meeting e.t.c.- Do not try and absorb everything. Try and get to the gist of what is being said. Visualize a framework and try and extract the logic. This is more of an art, than a science
- If you don’t get it, then ask questions. Simple. Try and ask the question off of yourself before asking too many question.
- Practice the art of connecting dots. Also, refrain from connecting too many dots. Keep it to the subject at hand.
- Be happy. Whatever you do, don’t ignore your happiness. Everything flows from a state of emotional-well being. Emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual.
The construct:
There is more to it, then just these tips. On a very high level:
- The engine: The unconscious mind is extremely powerful. The conscious mind is merely trying to make sense out of reality. I suspect the primary goal of the conscious mind is to really ‘filter the noise’. But that’s a subject by itself. Remember, all human thought, action, consequence and reality is by and large ‘governed’ by our unconscious.
- Mindfulness is what enables you to store qualitative information into your conscious mind (at first). Separate the wheat of the information from the chaff and let the unconscious do the rest for you (milling, grinding, mixing e.t.c). I’ll try and explain what that means, later in this blog-post.
- Storage: This information is eventually stored into your unconscious mind. Stored data can only be useful, if you use it for a specific purpose at some point in time.
- Factory: Once inside your unconscious mind. You can work with this information however you see fit. You can shape it, mould it, connect it with other data-sets and try and come up with new realities. Problem is, the conscious mind cannot tap into the unconscious mind on a real-time basis for an extended amount of time. There is probably an evolutionary reason that the brain has emerged with that specific design.
- Supply: Hence, keeping the above mentioned point into consideration. All that you can really do is to provide your conscious mind with the necessary supply that it needs. Reading books is a great fuel supply. Nothing nourishes your mind more than reading books. You can go at your own pace and absorb as you see fit. If you can’t read books due to any given reason, then go for audio-books. Or view the information presented in an audio-visual format. There is a lot of good content posted on Youtube and other open-education websites (udacity, coursera, khan academy, udemy, mit opencourseware and even iTunesU). Thanks to technology, there are many ways of absorbing and acquiring knowledge in this day and age.
- Construct: Solitude and dedicated thinking time is also very important. Go for random thinking for creative brain-storming and focused thinking in order to get to solutions.
- Thought-Experimentation: The wikipedia page for thought experimentation can be a little confusing. Thought experiment are just a series of if and then statement. The trick is to narrow it down to one single hypothesis and then test that hypothesis leveraging if and then statements. These statements can be ideas, probes, strategies. Don’t limit it to boxed values.
- Eureka: What you eventually want to get to is an epiphany. The short and simple way that I describe epiphany is a “realization when things merge and compliment each other in our mind”. It’s a much enhanced form of connecting dots and it is largely processed in the unconscious mind. Stellar epiphanies always come when you least expect them.
- Move, absorb, live: Human body is a machine and needs the necessary nourishments to keep in functioning in an ideal condition. It’s needs a daily doze of fresh oxygen. The limbs need to move as that is what they have been designed to do. The skin craves sunlight, so it can start producing the vitamin D, which has it’s own set of benefits. I think you get the point. Take care of your body. No one else can do it for you.
Also, take time to stop by and smell the flowers from time to time (figuratively speaking). Expose yourself to a range of activities, sights, sounds and smells. It works wonders for your cognition and also for creativity. - Relax: You need play, leisure and perhaps some form of meditation, in order to get the mind into a relaxed state. The first two would generally suffice. Also, prayer is also a form of meditation.
Epiphanies do not come from time-slots dedicated for thinking. Epiphanies rarely come from very rigid structure of mind and networks. And if they do, then there is a tough price to pay for that. Relaxation of the mind, body and spirit is a much better alternative. It also contributes greatly towards one’s happiness. That is tied in part and parcel with success. - Imagination: This is why our sense of reality is largely limited to what we can imagine. Einstein has important things to say about imagination. But I really like this quote by Pablo Picasso and it’s very true for our day and age. So imagine good things and be hopeful of the future. In fact, go out there and create the future you want. You will be astounded how many people would be willing to join you on your journey.
“Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso
So this here is my brain-dump for mindfulness and unconscious processing. I’d be sure to add more to this content. Specially as I learn more about how the mind works, about psychology and generally how human behavior is fashioned.
I’d be curious to know what others think of some of these thoughts and also if there is something else that can be added to the list above.
Synopsis: If I was going to synthesize this blog-post into one sentence. That that would be to be mindfully aware of your surroundings. Specially when it comes to the absorption of knowledge. Soak up as much knowledge as you can and let your unconscious mind work with the knowledge that you have acquired. Nothing is truly wasted in the Universe and the knowledge that we acquire is not an exception when it comes to that statement.
Thanks
Adeel




















