The Brain is like an Attic – Protect it

 

Photo Credit: Platform thing | Neuroscience of an e-book

The Brain is like an Attic – Protect it

Our brain contains so much of information, most of it useless, which we absorb through the five senses that it assumes the role of a mental attic! When I was growing up, we went to nursery school at the age of 5, today in India, children are bundled off to play school at 1.5 to 2 years. They are being literally deprived of the fun years and parents too are losing out on watching the child grow, its reaction when introduced to new stuff, its love, its tantrums, etc – I personally feel that the growing child teaches us a lot more than we can teach the child.

When your mind is filled with useless information it starts overflowing, the compartments in the brain get stressed with information overload – the best way to get rid of it is to put in a mental filter to chuck out unimportant information. As Charles Hannel said, “The subconscious mind does not engage in the process of proving. It relies upon the conscious mind, ‘the watchman at the gate’, to guard it from mistaken impressions.” It is critical to understand that it is not important how much you know, rather than how skilled and adept you are at acquiring the right knowledge and keeping it inside your head.

Your subconscious works on information which is stored in your attic at the material level and in your chitta at the subtle level and then gives you the optimum solution and guidance, provided of course you are at a level where you are in a position to listen to your subconscious mind. As a child the subconscious mind is in regular touch with ‘you’, but as you grow up and with increasing ‘education’ the brain is overloaded and slowly layers of muck of useless impressions start building on your soul and subtle mind that its sound gets more or less permanently muted. It does not ‘talk’ anymore!

It is extremely important what kind of information you store in that attic for quick retrieval in critical times, else that information takes a long time in coming out as you rummage through loads of useless information! Today’s world is in the information age – print, TV, social media – you are being bombarded with all kinds of news, fake, managed, agenda driven – and all this at the cost of truth – because today truth is what the people in power want the people to believe!

Just as we use firewalls to protect our computers to keep them safe from virus attacks, strengthen your mental defences by installing firewalls against corrupting your mind from useless noise and information that the media perpetrates. Meditation and mindfulness practise helps you in keeping the mind quiet and building the necessary firewalls to protect the brain. Awareness helps you in keeping your mind empty and focused on useful information as and when you need it. Stay balanced, stay focused, firewall your brain and thereby enjoy the peace and silence away from the ‘continuous noise’ which is out there!