Understanding the Mind as per Vedic Psychology

According to vedic psychology, we are not disturbed. We are indeed the source of that disturbance. Understand this well, you are not tensed but you are tension. You are not stressed but you are the source of stress. There is a big difference between the two. Let us look deeply into it. Then you will understand. You are not in tension. You are the tension. There is a very big difference between ‘you are disturbed’ and ‘you are the disturbance’.

The moment you start believing that your life is depressed, your life indeed becomes depression.Please under-stand that it is only what you believe to be your past that you will reproduce in the future. We all know that we can’t fly from our past experience. How can we believe that we can start flying from tomorrow onwards? No, we can’t. Whatever we believe to be our past, only that we will believe can be our future. So once we start believing that our past was filled with depression, we have created the unconscious faith that our future will also be depression.

When we believe that the mind is just a thing, a bio-machine, we have created hell for ourselves. Fortunately for us, the mind is not a thing. There is hope. The truth is that mind is not a thing as we all have been taught, it is a process. It is not a noun but a verb. When we believe the mind is a thing, we create problems that do not exist. We need to understand the basic truth that the mind is a process; we are not in tension but we are tension.

The doors of entry to our mind are our sense organs. Without the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin we will not be able to give any input to our mind. The sensory inputs are the foods that the mind thrives on. We assume that all that we see and hear are authentic. We believe that the sights we see and the dialogues we hear are the way that things happened. A little reflection will show how untrue it is. How many times have you interpreted a scene to be very different from what it really was based on your own conditioning? For instance, the moment you see a man and woman in close proximity interacting emotionally with one another, perhaps hugging, you immediately jump to the conclusion that they are lovers! They could be friends, brother and sister, father and daughter or mother and son.

It is the conditioning that we carry in us that drives us to interpretations of what we perceive through our senses. That is why I say that we first decide on the judgment and then collect the evidence to support the judgment we have already made. We have made the judgment already. All we need is a few bits of data to support that conviction, that’s all.

It is as if our mind is a projector. We have a number of slides we have gathered along the path of our life, some even from our past births. These slides are the projections with which we live our lives. Each time the slide is repeated it gets more powerful. The first few times it may have to be shown for several minutes for it to impact us. As the samskara gets engraved deeper into our mind, all that is needed over time is having a quick glimpse and our mood changes and we decide based on that samskara.

Molecular biology experiments have revealed a startling truth that each time we experience a powerful emotion, like anger for instance, new cellular transmitters and receptors for anger get activated in our body-mind system, not merely in the brain but everywhere in the body. The first few times the emotion happens in the system, it may be a brief drizzle. Once more and more cellular structures get built for this emotion, the drizzle turns into a shower, then into a storm and finally into a tsunami!

Only about ten percent of what we perceive through our senses gets recorded in our conscious mind. Everything else goes directly into our unconscious mind. This is why many times we do not even remember a place that we pass every day. So long as this sensory perception does not interest us in some way, it does not get recorded.

Let us now see what happens to those sensory perceptions that do get recorded in our conscious mind. These impressions are sorted out by parts of our mind and identified. Your conscious mind records whether the person you see in front of you is known to you or whether he is an unknown stranger. How you would like to interact with him is no longer a decision made at the conscious level. In case you know him, your attitude towards him and your action would be based on the engraved memories that are grooved in your mind. In case he is unknown to you also, the appearance of that person would trigger unconscious responses.Either way the file moves into your unconscious for a decision about what you should do.

For most of us, less than ten percent of the mind is conscious. Less than ten percent of what you perceive through your senses gets recorded consciously. It is possible that less than one percent of what you decide is a rational decision! What do we do then? Do we continue to allow our unconscious mind to control us or can we do something to regain conscious control?

There are two ways in which we can regain control. The first is to reduce the conditioning that binds us by meditation, we can work on the removal and dissolution of these samskaras that bind us. The second way is to be in the present moment, in total awareness and control.

Transcend time - be in the present

If you observe your thoughts carefully, you will understand two things. One is what we talked about earlier about thoughts being unconnected. All you need to do is to sit down and write down the thoughts that arise in your mind for ten minutes. You will realize that there is very little connection between your thoughts. They seem to jump from one to another.

The second point you will notice is your thoughts are always about your past or your future. You can only think about what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. Your thoughts of the past are usually regrets about what you did not do or guilt about what you did. Thoughts of the future are about what you wish to do.

Please understand, neither the past nor the future is real. The past is dead and gone. Most often we do not even learn from the past. All we try to do is use our past to steer the future. It is like driving a car looking only at the rear view mirror! You know for sure where you will end up!

The future is even more unreal. It has not happened. You have very little control over your future the way you are, because all your actions are steered by the unconscious mind. You are driven by the embedded memories of your past. Your thoughts are nothing but the movement of your mind between past and future. Your mind never wants to rest. If it rested you would know you could do without it!

If only you allowed the mind to rest or even persuaded your mind to rest, you will find that you reach a blissful state. That state is the present moment. All your future has to happen in this present moment. It is what you decide now in this present moment that makes your future. Once you take care of the present moment, once you live this present moment consciously, you no longer will have cause to regret your past or feel guilty about it.

TPS - Thought Per Second

You are oscillating at a high frequency most of the time. You are always excited, even when you think you are resting. This is why Buddha calls it the ‘monkey mind’. As the thought frequency or thoughts per second or TPS comes down, you naturally rest into the present moment.

In the diagram, the shaft in the center represents ‘time’. At any given time, the greater your TPS or Thoughts Per Second, the more far-flung you are from consciousness of the present moment. You are simply worrying about the future thus allowing it to slip into the past, without ever getting a glimpse of the present.

When your TPS comes down, you enter more and more into the present and when this happens, you have a clearer vision of the past and the future. You may wonder what is there to be clear about the past. One can understand that the future may not be clear, but why the past? I have lived it, so why should it be unclear! You need to understand that what you now remember of the past is your judgment of the past, not the way it happened. How many times do we talk about the golden past? How much has been written about the ‘golden past’! There is nothing golden about the past. We just choose to remember the good parts, so it looks golden.

When you are in the intuitive state, for those few moments, your TPS has dropped and you are more in the present. When your TPS is zero, you can clearly see the entire past and future.

The point where the future meets the past is the present. This is where your thought frequency is zero and you are in a no-mind state. You have not merely controlled or suppressed the mind, which is impossible. You have transcended the mind, which is possible.

Not only can the mind not play its games on you anymore, but you also reach a state where you can play with the mind and make it do what you wish. We can choose to be in this state. This is the state of meditation. Meditation brings the mind to rest. Meditation disengages the mind so that the mind cannot play games.