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No mind.....

Have you ever felt apprehensive about a chore or an assignment or a Project you absolutely need to finish but dreaded it for any number of reasons – starting trouble, the quantum of work involved, fear of the unknown, fear of failure knowing that others before you have, fear of facing uncertainty or unknown faces or a difficult person, physical strain, etc. Worry not for the "No mind" method will work for you! Read on.

The insight of No Mind comes from the movie The Last Samurai (2003). In what I feel is the defining moment in the film when the protagonist Capt. Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) comes to understand his Japanese Captors. The scene is Capt. Algren having a "friendly duel" with a young officer in rebel army in the village where he is held captive. He is soundly defeated each time in spite of Capt. Algren's exemplary record as a soldier and a warrior. Unable to understand, he looks for answers only to find it the words of a village child, Nobutada - Too many mind, the child exhorts. "Too many mind..... mind the sword, mind the people watch, mind enemy - too many mind". And then the child says emphatically, "No mind" much to the surprise of Capt. Aldren. After a few more defeats, the good Captain understands and just tunes his mind out of everything else but the duel and overcomes. No mind becomes his strength.

Let me go forward to make you understand this concept of No mind. Am going to recount an anecdote of my running into Glenn in Mumbai. Glenn is an unassuming just an another face in the crowd sort of guy until you have had a conversation with him. You realize how Glenn helps tribal girls master computers and even run a BPO in tribal areas or help terminally ill patients recover rather miraculously back to health. Some of his stories are incredulous but when you look him up on the net, you realize he has been an accomplished manager at a major multinational before he started his foundation and have won awards from no less than the The Government of India for his work with tribals.

Glenn's technique is pretty much "No mind" but with an interesting twist. Glenn says the human mind is a bit of a lazy design work of evolution and am paraphrasing. Human mind, he says, is but a composite of a snake/bird brain at the core unto which the doggy brain was strapped on and then a patch of monkey brain on top followed by the human brain right on top. Glenn thinks over 99.9999% of the population live and die just tapping into the first three brains viz., Snake, doggy and monkey in different proportions and never get to the real one, the human part. Needless to say humans can survive and even run their lives pretty darn well with these first three brains. Snake brain is responsible for all our fears and keeps us alert and alive. Doggy helps us in being social animals and helps us be compassionate to our fellow beings and to care for our own. Monkey brain is responsible for all our logical thought and decision making. Thus, one can see that we could go through all of our lives with these three brains or minds and that's how the hierarchy of usage is also programmed within us. So, but for just a smattering of people, the rest of us simply don't use the human brain, the most evolved and the most unbelievably potent part!!!

Glenn speaks of an amazing experiment he uses to demonstrate the power of human part of the brain. He trains pre-puberty tribal girls, uncorrupted by outside influences, to shut off their Snake, Doggy and Monkey brains and just use the human part. Once they are ready, he shouts out random numbers at them and swears that by the time he gets to the third random number, the class already "predicts" the fourth and the fifth and so on..... How? What we think as totally random numbers, the girls are already able to "see" a pattern and predict the 4th and the remaining numbers in the series. That is the power of the Human part of our brain that we never learn to harness, caught up in the tangled web woven by the other three brains.

They say Sachin was the greatest batsman because he could, by watching the bowler's body language, simply predict all six balls of an over, its variations and what have you. His passion for the game allowed him to tap into the human brain and effectively shut off the other three.

Glenn says he cures old ladies with fourth stage terminal cancer by teaching them to shut off their first three brains and simply say stop to the disease using the human part. Once fear of death is overcome, cure comes from body's own power of immunity and it's amazing powers to heal. Glenn says shav aasana in yoga is nothing but practicing to shut off the first three brains and tap into the human part. Shav aasana is simply shutting off all thought for a few seconds or minutes. Shav aasana is "No mind".......

Think about it.... if "No mind" can cure terminal stage 4 cancer, why can't the superior power of the human brain make us into great writers or thinkers or artists or scientists?

People say you can achieve anything in this world if you put your mind to it. On the contrary, may be you can achieve anything by applying "No mind" to it. Try it next time.

Sreeram S

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