THE NATURE OF THE MIND
Swami Sivananda once said: “Thought is a vital, living force, the most vital, subtle and irresistible force that exists in the universe. … Thoughts are living things.”
To unleash the tremendous power reserves which currently sleep within you, it is critical that you first become aware of the nature of the mind. The first step to personal mastery and successful living is to learn how to run your mind like a winner. The second step is to understand once and for all that your mind can create magic in your life if you only let it. The only imitations in your life are those that you consciously set. When you think without limits and dream great dreams, wonderful things happen and powerful forces are set into play.
The level of your success is determined by what you think every second of every minute of every day. Your thoughts shape your world – mental mastery is the DNA of life mastery. Today’s thoughts will serve to build your dreams of tomorrow. Your outer world reflects your inner world. If you want to change your life, you must start by changing the thoughts you put into your mind. Success on the outside begins with success on the inside.
You alone are responsible for what you think. Most importantly, you can change the way you think and remove any negative thinking habits by the daily practice of mental discipline and conditioning. Thinking patterns are habits and, like all habits, they can be changed when you strongly desire to change them and take concrete action towards your goal.
One of the great keys to a better life is to change your self-image. Our self-image is determined by the mental pictures we constantly run through our minds. Our minds work through pictures and when we change the pictures to show what we really want in our lives and what we really can achieve; our self-image will also improve dramatically. This leads to greater confidence and belief in our personal abilities and power. Goals are then easily achieved and the ordinary becomes the extraordinary.
Anything you faithfully and honestly believe you can achieve, you will achieve if you take persistent action in that direction. Constantly keep your dreams at the front of your mind. Repeat them all day, every day. Never, let go of them. When you concentrate all your mental and physical energy on a single purpose, dormant forces that you never knew you had are sparked into action. This is the secret of genius: finding what you love to do and then spending all your time doing it. As one wise person has said: “once you find what you truly love doing, you will never have to work another day in your life.”
The Law of Attraction is the dominant law of the mind. What you think about and believe is what you attract into your life. People who are happy and motivated attract such people into their world. People with a positive expectation of super success will attract opportunities to allow them to arrive at this destination. Your subconscious mind plays a particularly great role in the outcome of your life. You must learn how to use it for maximum achievement. Again, mental pictures and verbalization play a big role in stimulating your subconscious mind.
Your mind has the capacity to hold only one thought in its focus at any one time. Using this knowledge, you must ensure that each thought is a valuable and positive one. If a negative, disempowering thought does enter, quickly replace it with a good one. As you develop the habit of thinking useful, energizing thoughts, weak ones will no longer hold any power. There is a Success Mechanism inside your mind which craves positive stimulation. It awaits your instructions. When you realize this and start setting great goals for yourself it will spring to life and seize all opportunities to get you to where you want to go.
Scientific researchers are discovering the virtually limitless capacity of the brain and that we generally use only about 25% of its potential on any given day at best. Human beings are designed to have perfect health and perfect minds but, during the course of our lives, we learn to sabotage ourselves and exclude perfection.
But you can return to the winning mindset and rekindle the fire that lies deep inside of you. To do this, it is essential to dedicate yourself and your energies to lifelong success. Forget about past failures or problems. True changes in the quality of your life do not take a year to appear. Profound improvements in the way you feel, in your energy levels, in your financial resources and in the richness of your relationships do not take six months, or six weeks or six days to happen. Real change takes only one second – the time it takes for you to make a concrete decision from the very core of your heart that your life is more than the sum of your present circumstances.
It has also been said that you can change your life with a single idea – if it is the right one. Lasting success in life surely requires desire, persistence and practice as visible changes will not come in a week or ten days. But they certainly will come as long as you take action now! You can transform your life and have everything you ever wanted when it happens. As the age-old expression says, “sow a thought, reap an action, sow an action, reap a habit, sow a habit, reap a character, sow a character, and reap a destiny!”
Also appreciate the exceptional power of focus. Have you ever noticed that when you buy a new car it suddenly seems that everyone in the world has the same one? Whenever you hear a new name, it is suddenly everywhere. This is the tremendous power of focus. The first step to excellence is awareness and your focus is the laser beam of awareness. What you focus on shapes your life. Your thoughts form your world. Once you make a clear decision to focus on something, opportunities seem to appear from out of the blue. For example, if you focus carefully on seeking knowledge for personal development, you will start to see that information on this subject is everywhere; you simply did not notice it because you were focused on other things.
Another example is in your own home. Walk into your favorite room and look at every object in the room. You will notice things that you may not have noticed in the past because you never really took the time to concentrate on them.
Once you make the decision to focus on a perfect life and master all of its components, you will find signs of excellence and positivity everywhere. This is where knowledge comes in. Once you are on the road to self-mastery and are focusing on all that is good in your world and that which is required to make it even better, knowledge will catapult you to the highest level. When an unquenchable thirst for knowledge is cultivated, you start to see the abundant strategies, techniques and ideas that will get you to where you want to go.