Controlling Your Thoughts - The "Overmind" - Your Two Conscious Minds.

You are of two conscious minds, metaphorically. One mind is the conscious performer, busily engaged in thinking and acting; the other (far less cultivated and not as well understood) is the detached mind. This is the mind that can stand outside of you and observe both your conscious thoughts and behavior. It is your MIND OVER MIND, or simply, the Overmind [a convenient Lingovation].

If you can develop this overmind, you can control any aspect of your conscious mind's thought programs and actions. You can control your thoughts and decide what you'd prefer to be thinking about and doing. This requires an exercising of the Overmind.

The best way to do this is by simply being mindful in the moment of what you are doing. Do not just think and act -- use your underexercised and underdeveloped Overmind to observe, as if an outside examiner, every sensation and action and thought of each moment. This deliberate mindfulness can be cultivated to the extent that the Overmind can eventually intervene and converse with the conscious performer (the "regular" conscious mind) in order to change its thought patterns (i.e., its conditioned programming, usually in the form of a less-than-satisfactory stimulus-response loop which needs to be broken but which has become neurologically etched and ingrained due to countless repetitions of the same pattern).

When your Overmind has become so detached from the rest of your conscious thoughts and actions that it is really the external representative of your intelligent will (instead of a creature of impulse, going around in circles), you will have achieved a state of incredibly powerful control... Control over your thought cycles, your actions, your impulsive reactions and all manner of non-productive behavior.

Try being mindful and getting the "feel" of your Overmind as it separates itself from your ordinary thoughts and actions and teaches itself to reprogram your thoughts and actions as if it were an objective, wise outsider.

The Braintenance Blog Prescription? Let your Overmind play each and every day.

Douglas E. Castle

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Here are the answers to the "complete the sequence" exercises from last time. The answers are in red. The explanations are incomplete. You see, somewhere in the recesses of your mind, those patterns are quite visible -- as we work together, you will learn to access these patterns (i.e., pattern recognition) in order to complete these exercises with incredible ease.

2) Find the next number in each of the following sequences of numbers (key: learn the rule, and then extrapolate):

1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, __ 31 (prime number sequence)
1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, __81 (each number squared)
1100, 1010, 1001, 0110, 1101 __ (there is no pattern -- the last number in the sequence simply did not belong; perhaps it should have been 0101....but you tried to justify it. Right?)
0, 2, 2, 4, 6, 10, 16, 26, 42,__(68 - this is a variant on the Fibonacci Sequence)
2, 20, 200, 2,000, 20,000 __ 200,000
6, 24, 120, 720, 1,540, _____12,320 (think factorially! - 6 = 1x2x3; and 24 = 1x2x3x4; the pattern is simply factorial)