“Mind is like a lake, and every thought is like a wave upon that lake. Just as in the lake waves rise, and then fall down and disappear, so these thought-waves are continually rising in the mind-stuff, and then disappearing, but they do not disappear forever. They become finer and finer, but they are all there, ready to start up at another time, when called upon to do so.” – Swami Vivekanand

You must have seen or heard of movie ‘Inception’ where it was possible to enter in someone else’s mind and seed an idea of your choice. In real life, however, the challenge is not to control other’s mind but to control our own. Just like the quotation above, our mind always keeps finer waves of emotions or thoughts. Broadly, I like to describe our emotions or thoughts in two categories –

Positive Thoughts such as love, friendship, peace, trust etc Negative Thoughts such as enmity, violence, distrust, anger etc.

The need for mind control arises to keep the negative emotions in check while nursing the positive ones. Thoughts are our motivational forces – positive thoughts propel a man forward while negative emotions drag us backwards. As Vivekanand has further said – “The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really know the power of thoughts”.

What is mind control?

Our mind has continuous interaction with outer world. It is in constant communication with things around us. A mind control is the state where we focus on things of our choice rather than the choice of the outer world. For example you will feel scared in the dark. Darkness is the ‘outer world’ and ‘fear’ is the choice of the dark; Dark wants us to fear it. However, with mind control, we can be at peace even at the darkest places. Because peace is our choice; the action is in our control and not in the control of the darkness. With the mind control, we try to enhance positive thoughts and trim down the negatives ones.

Concentrate

Does your mind wander a lot? Do you find it difficult to focus at one idea? Such are the traits of a common mind. The challenge in mind control is to grab the unstable mind and make it focus on one idea. And once we do this, this should be repeated again and again. It is going to take considerable willpower and hard work to make our mind focus on one idea, but we must try it. It is not an easy job and certainly not something which you can try today and discard it later on. Vivekanand pointed aptly – “This is no child’s play, no fad to be tried one day and discarded the next. It is a life’s work; and the end to be attained is well worth all that it can cost us to reach it.”

A pure mind is always easy to control than a complicated mind. Assembly of many thoughts – both positive and negative, makes a mind complicated and hence makes it difficult to control it. “Forget” and “Forgive” are two effective methods of getting rid of unwanted emotions and making our mind pure and simple.

Forget

A large part of mind control is actually memory management as well. We have loads of memory – some good and some bad. The idea is to get rid of unpleasant memories; free the mind for more pleasant memories. We need to forget unnecessary memories which cause pain and create negative thoughts. Brahmakumari Shivani, A spiritual teacher, has said ‘“Collection of bad memories only leads to anger, jealousy, and hatred toward others. Finally it also spoils your happiness”. Hence forgetting bad memories and focusing on our good experiences is a fine way of generating positive thoughts which will assist us finding the mind control state.

Forgive

There are emotions which grows stronger by given time. If you like someone for an extended time then ‘liking’ converts into ‘love’. Similarly, there are negative feeling which given a chance to nurture can become far dangerous feelings. If ‘anger’ persists in the mind then it converts into ‘vengeance’. Forgiveness is a method of getting rid of negative emotions in time before they can harm us. So if you are angry with someone, just forgive and the anger will never turn into the vengeance.

In short, forget and forgive are two methods which gives us more control over our mind. With these methods we filter our unnecessary and harmful memories and give a chance to other positive thoughts to flourish.

If you like this article, then please comment and let me know how you find it. It will give me valuable feedback and hopefully I will be able to write better article. Please also share how do you check your Negative thoughts in control?

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