To manage the mind, regulate the mind’s diet

I welcome all of you to the evening's program and I am honoured to be here at IIST University and I will be speaking on the topic of managing the mysterious mind. So most of us are quite diet conscious, quite often because we are figure conscious. So in some ways we live in a culture which squeezes us both ways.

On one side we are presented with images of people who have perfect figures and then there is also the advertisement of all kinds of foods if we eat which having that kind of figure is impossible. So eat this and have a figure like this. It were impossible and both demands come on us and we watch our diet.

Now suppose if while eating our diet something invisible was put into the diet which say increased the fat content enormously or which increase the unhealthy content of the food enormously and it's all unknown. Now we would ourselves be eating the food, we would be paying to eat the food and we would practically be paying to ruin our figure and health. We would want to be very conscious about what is there in the food that we eat.

Just as we have a physical diet, we also have a mental diet. Mental diet means what are the kind of thoughts that we chew on, that we digest internally. Now normally how do we know if the kind of diet that we are having is right or wrong? We will come to know this by its effect.

If we find that the diet which we eat is causing bad health, maybe it causes us to get some stomach upset or some ill effect happens, we understand something was wrong in what I ate. Now if what we take in mentally is unhealthy, is counterproductive, how would we come to know about that? We would see what is the kind of output that is coming from the mind. What kind of thoughts, what kind of desires, what kind of intentions are coming out.

So now one of the most sobering statistics of our contemporary times is given by the World Health Organization. It states that around 1 billion people commit suicide every year. This figure of 1 million is more than the total number of deaths due to wars, murders, homicides and all violent crime combined together.

That means more than the number of people who are being killed by others are the number of people who are killing themselves. 1 million figure works out to be something like one suicide every 40 seconds. That means from the moment we started this talk, probably 10 to 15 people have already committed suicide.

So the WHO calls suicide a tragic social health problem and of course it can have many causes and it is a complex issue. But seen in a broad perspective, we see that all living beings are driven very strongly by survival instinct. In the smallest of flies, if you try to swat it, it develops the most remarkable reflexes to try to save its skin.

So among all the various species that are there in the planet, no species commits suicide except the human species. Animals will sometimes pine away, say a cow may pine away if its calf is taken away or a sheep, while one sheep walks off a cliff, the other may also walk off the cliff. But they are not doing this with the intention of knowingly ending their lives.

Only humans do suicide like this and that too in such a huge number. So what is it that is making a person do suicide? In some cases it is because there is so much shortage of food or basic necessities that they commit suicide. But quite often it is not so much because of physical issues as because of emotional issues.

So essentially when a person commits suicide, quite often it is that the mind is killing the body. It is the mind, it is our own inner force which is dragging us towards self-destruction. And this same phenomena is seen at a lesser level in many of the self-defeating addictions that people get into.

A fish is caught by a bait. A mouse may be caught by a cheese. Now in both these cases, these animals have excuses.

Whatever is the bait looks like their food. And they don't know in advance that it is a trap. Now we humans have neither of these excuses.

Many times when we may get into alcoholism or drugs or sex smoking or whatever it may be, there are various forms of self-defeating behavior. Quite often we know in advance that it is harmful. Nowhere does a bottle of alcohol or a shot of drugs look like food.

It's not necessary. We know it's dangerous and yet we get into it. So why is it that again in this case the danger, the harm is self-inflicted.

And if you look within, if you analyze the person, it is the thoughts that are driving a person towards such actions. So if this sort of thoughts are coming out and a person is being impelled towards such actions. Now we can see this at a lesser level in all of us that whenever we do something, if we are trying to do something positive, something ambitious, there may be a voice within which seems to sabotage us.

Student goes for an exam and when we are going to the exam, maybe the voice says, you are going to forget everything. Or it may be a very simple thing. Just carrying a glass of water and suddenly the glass flips and falls.

Okay, the glass has slipped and fallen, some water has spilled, that's it. But a voice says normally, you are a useless buffoon. You are a useless buffoon.

We will see from one incident, there is something within which quite often makes it into a statement about ourselves. Now if someone else said the same thing to us, if we slipped and fell and somebody said you are a useless buffoon, now we would feel insulted. We would try to counter it.

We would at least feel annoyed with it. But when the same thing is said internally, we just say, yes, I am a useless buffoon. Yes, I am clumsy.

We tend to accept it. So quite often there is this voice within which sabotages us. It can be in a very gross and utterly destructive way like suicide.

Or it can be in subtler and yet damaging ways such as discouraging us. So now what is it that causes such self-sabotage? Now if you look at modern science, it offers tremendous amount of explanations for many things. For example, if you look at the outer world, we use technology, we use cell phones, we use airplanes.

So all these are based on scientific advancement of knowledge. And science offers us material explanations for material phenomena. That is the premise of science which is called as methodological naturalism.

Now Martin Luther King, he said that we live in an age of guided missiles and misguided men. Guided missiles and misguided men. We have developed phenomenal capacity for controlling the world around us.

But the capacity to control the world within us, that is dangerously lacking. Now what does it mean to say that we control the world around us or world within us? What is it, right now you are observing me and I am speaking something, you are hearing it. So who is it that is actually experiencing what we are doing? Researchers have studied the brain and they have found many significant correlations.

Say which part of the body correlates with what function. Dr. Wilton Manfield is a Nobel laureate neurosurgeon. And he probed the human brain for more than 40 days.

And his purpose was to try to find out where in the human brain is the experiencer. We know that the visual areas of the brain light up when some information is going through the eyes. Similarly we can correlate different areas of the brain which become activated during different functions.

But where is the experiencer of this all? So he, I wrote a book called The Mystery of the Mind from which I have taken today's title, Managing the Mysterious Mind. So in The Mystery of the Mind, he did various experiments. I will share one experiment over here.

So he had a subject, he told the subject raise your hand. And the subject raised the hand, corresponding part of the brain got activated. I will keep things simple here without getting into technical terminology.

And then he asked the subject what happened? He said, I raised my hand. And then he asked, put your hand down. What happened? I put my hand down.

Then he externally activated using electrodes that same part of the brain. When he activated that part of the brain, the hand went down. What happened? He said, my hand went up.

Did you raise your hand? No, I didn't raise your hand, you raised my hand. I didn't raise my hand, you raised my hand. He reactivated that part of the brain.

The hand fell down. What happened? My hand fell down. Did you put your hand down? No, I didn't, you did.

So now, Dr. Penfield raises this question based on this experiment. That, say, we consider if my computer has a print button. And along with the print button, there is a printer with the hand of the printer.

As soon as I press the print button, the printer hand will start moving. Similarly, a particular part of the brain is activated. And then the hand starts going up or coming down.

In the second case, it is Dr. Penfield who pressed the print button. In the second case, Dr. Penfield who activated the brain to make the hand go up and down. Who was it in the first case? Who was the person who was the doer in the first case, who in the second case said, I am not the doer.

You are the doer, I am the observer. You raised my hand up, I observed it going up. So, although he probed the brain tirelessly, he couldn't find it.

And after four decades of research, he concluded that the source of consciousness is extra cerebral. The source of consciousness is extra cerebral. The same thing is found through various lines of research in brain science.

So, for example, now when we sleep and when we dream, at that time, researchers can know whether a person is dreaming or not by observing the REM, the rapid eye movement. So, if a person is having a dream, say a nightmare, then researchers can correspond, oh, the brain's eyes are moving like this, therefore, there must be a nightmare. But no matter how advanced our probes become, we will not be able to find out the content of the dream.

If you want to know what were you dreaming, you have to wake the person and ask. No matter how advanced our probes become, the patterns of the neurochemical cells and the patterns of the electrochemical signals in the brain cells are not going to tell us what was the content. So, what was the experience? That we will have to wake the person and ask.

What we may find out is, ok, this part of the brain is activated. We can roughly say, ok, this means the brain must have some, the dream might have some visual input mode or the dream might have some audio input mode or the dream might have some tactile input mode, whatever. So, there is this irreducible subjective aspect of the human experience which material science finds difficult to understand.

So, the Bhagavad Gita explains that our existence presently is three-dimensional. We are not just physical creatures. It's like if a person uses a computer, the computer, there is a hardware, there is a software and there is the user.

So, like that, there is matter which is the physical shell that around us, the body we have and there is mind which is like a software and then there is consciousness. Consciousness is like the user. The consciousness comes from a source that is called in the Bhagavad Gita as the Atma which can be roughly translated into English as the soul.

So, matter, mind and consciousness. This is a three-level existence of our current being. Now, just as a computer may be perfectly functional in terms of hardware and the user may also be, in having the good intelligence and experience, use the computer.

But if the software gets corrupted, the software gets corrupted, a competent user with functional hardware will still become impaired in function. So, similarly, the mind, being like the software, can get corrupted. It says if we use computers, we are often careful that no, we don't put some pen drive which might have some viruses coming in.

We don't open unidentified attachments coming from unknown sources. We are careful, we have some security software by which if we are browsing some sites, we are careful which sites we are going. Because we know the software can get corrupted by viruses.

Similarly, at a mental level, we get corrupted. We can get corrupted by various kinds of undesirable thoughts. So, the specifics can vary.

But one of the main thing that causes the mind to have negative thought patterns is an excessively materialistic worldview. If our worldview is primarily materialistic, then what we see is that material things are what will make me happy. Material things are what will define who I am.

They will determine my self-worth. They will determine my self-identity. Now, the things which we have, material, are all different.

Now, all of you are going to have food at the end of this talk. So, suppose there is a feast in which everyone is going to get different food. Now, everyone has got good food, but everyone has different food.

And somehow everyone starts saying, what has he got? What has she got? And then, oh, I don't have that. I don't have that. I don't have that.

I don't have that. Now, we are looking at everyone else's feast and we are missing out on our own feast. So, when we have a materialistic worldview, what usually happens is we focus on what everyone else has.

Oh, this person is a better figure than me. This person has a better memory than me. This person speaks more smartly than me.

This person does this more than me. And in the process of this obsession with the external, even within abundance, we end up with a scarcity mentality. Even within abundance, we start feeling that I am lacking.

I am lacking. Actually, yes, all of us are lacking in some ways. But all of us are also endowed in some ways.

And intelligence means to focus on what we are endowed with. But unfortunately, the negative thought pattern, we tend to obsess over what we may not have. And because of this, we end up feeling unnecessarily disheartened, unnecessarily insecure.

So then we talk about a mental night. If I give a more practical example, how we become deficient. We live in an age where there is a huge amount of advertisement.

Many companies, more than they spend on the product, they spend on promoting the product. We live with so much advertisement that around 200 years ago, there were no advertisements. And for millennia before that, people lived without advertisements.

So when advertisements primarily started, when the goods started being mass manufactured during the age of industrialization. And after that, the producers had to sell many goods. So initially, for the first 50 to 100 years, advertisements focused on telling customers how good our product is.

Oh, this car is so good. This thing is so good. It has this, this, this features.

Subsequently, however, researchers found that people are more controlled by their emotions than by their reason. People are controlled more by their emotions than by their reason. So Sigmund Freud had this idea.

He was the father of psychotherapy. So he said that imagine a canoe that is there in the ocean. And the ocean is filled with turbulent water.

And on top of that, there is this thin canoe. At any moment, the turbulent waves may overthrow the canoe. So that canoe is like our rational faculty.

And the turbulent, wave-filled ocean is like our emotional side. So the emotions are triggered, the rational intelligence will get overthrown. So advertisers latched onto this insight.

And they said the way we can sell products to people is by tapping their emotions. So advertisers most often don't focus on how good a thing is, but rather how good a thing will make us feel. Oh, if you get this, you will feel so good.

Most of the advertisers focus on tapping our emotions. And for the purpose of tapping our emotions, they often create emotional insecurity within us. Oscar Wilde said that fashion is a form of ugliness.

So intolerable that we have to change it every six months. When a particular thing comes in fashion, then the advertisements are so persuasive, so seductive, that they make us feel as if we will be considered to be an old-fashioned anachronism if we don't have the new thing. And they basically create insecurity.

We shouldn't be looked at as old-fashioned. And then we get that particular gadget or get that particular thing, whatever it may be. And then after some time, it becomes old-fashioned.

And when it becomes old-fashioned, again we have to go and purchase it. Again we have to go and purchase it. And the end result of this is no matter how much you purchase, new gadgets, new things are going to come up, and they create insecurity.

So this is just one example of how when we have an excessively materialistic worldview, our sense of self-identity and self-worth gets locked to external material things. And when it gets locked to external material things, then we tend to become insecure when those material things are not available. So nowadays, again coming to another way the mind attacks the body, another evidence that our diet is undesirable is that anxiety is skyrocketing all over the world.

And interestingly, researchers have found that anxiety levels are more among people in the developed world than in the developing world. And not only that, when people come from the developing world to the developed world, even their anxiety level goes up. So normally we think that anxiety is caused by some uncertainty.

Say I have to catch a flight. If I am not sure whether I will reach in time, then I will be anxious. In general, in the developed world, the external uncertainty is much lesser.

In India, if you turn on the tap, you don't know whether water will come out. It's not that bad. But I am just giving an example.

I don't think you have that kind of problems here in America. So external uncertainty is much lesser. And yet inner anxiety is more.

Why is that? That is because the anxiety is caused not just by external uncertainty. It can also be caused by inner instability. Inner instability means all of us, we need, just as we need shelter for the body, we need a home after we are tired, we need some place where we can rest.

We can sleep on our bed. It's a comfortable place. Like that, we need some place for resting our mind.

Where, when we are stressed, we can go and we can get relaxed. We can get rejuvenated. And unfortunately, when our worldview is materialistic, whatever we may do for relaxation also causes some kind of agitation.

So we may watch movies. We may play or watch sports. And in and of themselves, these may be enjoyable.

But these can also agitate the mind. Say in a sports match, result doesn't come out the way we want it to. Next to India is Sri Lanka.

And India is maniac about cricket. So Sri Lanka is also maniac. They are infected.

The same thing. So for six consecutive finals of cricket match, World Cups, different tournaments, Sri Lanka came to the finals and lost. The sixth time it happened, over a hundred people committed suicide.

Just because their team lost. It's tragic. But again, the point is, there is no shortage of anything material.

But there is just no inner stability. People watch sports because they want to enjoy. But when their team loses, they can become so devastated, they can even end their lives.

So we need some inner shelter. Somewhere where we can go and our mind becomes stable. And that is what spirituality offers us.

If we are in a boat, in an ocean, the boat is going to go up and down because the ocean is filled with waves. But if that boat is anchored to something stable, then the boat will not shake so much. So spirituality provides us that anchor.

So when we practice meditation, meditation is not just about sitting in a particular posture, or about regulating breathing in a particular way. Yes, all this is okay. But the essence of meditation is to take our mind from the changing outer world to the unchanging reality within.

So one of the easiest ways to meditate is through mantra meditation. Mantra is a sound, a spiritual sound. And the purpose of the spiritual sound is to elevate our consciousness.

It's like if we climb in an elevator, we stay in that elevator, we immediately go to the upper floor. So like that, when we chant mantras and focus on those mantras, try to rest our consciousness on those mantras, then our consciousness gets elevated. We rise above the stress, the anxiety, the instability, the insecurity that comes upon us because of being caught in externals.

And as we rise upwards, we can look at the same issues, the same problems, we can be concerned without being disturbed. We can be concerned without being disturbed. When we are disturbed, that means we feel personally threatened.

But when we are concerned, we have interest in what is happening. We would like things to work out in a particular way. We'll do what we can, but we don't feel personally threatened.

So just like a person is caught in a hurricane hit area and there is some water running over there, electricity, live wires are there, all sorts of uncertainties, fire may break out. And suddenly at that time, a rescue helicopter comes and lifts the person. That person is still in the same area, but is no longer threatened now.

So similarly, the sound of mantras, if we situate ourselves in that sound, that means we meditate on the sound of mantras, it elevates our consciousness. We become airlifted above our circumstances. And then we can deal with our situation with greater maturity and clarity.

So then we can watch our diet, our mental diet. So meditation is the most fundamental mental diet that can heal and strengthen us mentally. Meditation is not just about sitting and meditating for a few minutes.

We do that, that will spread over, the effect will percolate over to the rest of our life. And then we will become more observant to catch our thought patterns. As I said, initially that the diet, if somebody is putting something invisible into our diet, we will not come to know.

So the problem with unhealthy mental diet is that we cannot, we don't catch it in time. There are certain unhealthy thoughts that come, just go on and on and on and on. And then suddenly, why am I thinking like this? We may not even realize it, we may do something and afterwards we realize it.

But when we try to meditate, not only at that time we get relief, not only at that time we get rejuvenation, but along with that we develop greater awareness at other times. And when negative thought patterns come, we can counter them. I'll conclude with one last point.

Sometimes when people have some kind of negative thought patterns, some kind of unhealthy thinking, just think positive, just be positive. Now yes, it is a good exhortation to think positive, but it is not always just a matter of going forward. Just change your thinking.

Certain thought patterns can become deep rooted. If because of a bad diet somebody's stomach is upset, will you tell them think positive? Okay, think positive is fine, but thinking positive has to be coupled with a therapeutic process. And what positive thinking should be that yes, this therapeutic process will cure me.

So just as for a physical disease, thinking positive is not enough, we need a proper process. Willpower is not enough. If somebody's stomach has got upset, and that person has got unregulated bowel motion, say, use your willpower.

Control yourself. It's not going to work. We'll be torturing ourselves and then we'll fail.

So just willpower is not enough. Positive thinking is not enough. We need a therapeutic process.

Similarly, with respect to the mental health, we may feel that I don't have much mental problems. Yes, that's also possible. But whatever level we are working at mentally, we can improve that mental level if we take in a healthier mental diet.

So meditation is not just about changing attitude or increasing willpower. Those are sub-components. Meditation is a therapeutic process which changes the diet that we are taking.

Change of diet is something which is external and has to be done. Just willpower or attitude is not enough. We have to take treatment, take medicines, take diet.

Similarly, meditation is about that change. Giving ourselves positive spiritual diet. And when we do that, we'll find ourselves becoming calmer and clearer.

Thus we'll become more productive. We all have certain abilities, but how much we tap our ability that depends on our inner stability. The stabler we are, sometimes in sports matches, if a player loses cool at the critical moment, the player may bungle and may lose the match.

Purple hampers the player's ability but is not able to use the ability. So our ability to tap our ability will be enhanced by our spirituality. I'll summarize.

I started by talking about how we are cautious about our physical diet so that we can have good health and a good figure. And similarly, we need to be cautious about our mental diet. Just as a bad diet reflects itself in symptoms of physical unhealth or disease, similarly, a bad mental diet reflects itself in unhealthy or negative thought patterns.

And that bad mental diet is a serious problem seen from the fact that we humans seem to go against our biological drive to survive and are prompted to destroy ourselves through suicide. And not just one or two but a million more number of people who are killing others are the people who are killing themselves. And even if that is not so, suicide is very drastic.

There are self-defeating addictions where again the mind impels one to do something which is unhealthy for the body. At a lesser level, the mind just disheartens us by making self sabotaging, self disparaging comments about situations. So what is the unhealthy diet that we are having? That comes largely from an excessively materialistic worldview.

In a materialistic worldview, we wed our sense of identity and self-worth on external things. And then when those external things are not available, we feel insecure. Advertisements centre on making us feel insecure rather than talking about the good of the product, they talk about what they will make us feel.

And they make us feel insecure to make us crave and sleep to get those things. So fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable it will be changed every six months. So we end up becoming like people who have feast but we are looking at what everyone else has and not noticing or tapping what we have.

So a spiritual worldview can counter this negative thought pattern. I talked about how the spiritual is not just some vague notion. I talked from two lines of scientific inference that the experiencer is not found anywhere in the brain.

As Dr. Spenfield said, the source of consciousness is extra cerebral. And further, brain science can tell us about which part of the brain is activated when we are having a dream. But what is the dream? That is subjective.

The experiencer is different from the brain and we have to ask the person. In the spiritual level of reality, we can tap by meditation. So just as we need a safe, relaxing, rejuvenating place for our body, similarly we need a safe place for our mind.

And materialism doesn't offer that. Entertainment may offer some sort of relief but sometimes it ends up agitating us more. Meditation can offer us a rest for the mind.

Meditation is like a consciousness elevator or it airlifts us from a situation of anxiety or agitation. Then we can be concerned without being disturbed. So we can enhance our ability to trap our ability by our spirituality.

Thank you very much. Are there any questions? Thank you.