A beautiful mind is nurtured, maintained and reinforced. Cognition is a contested area because many other forces wish to control the way we think. Steve Biko is famous for his quote i.e., “the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”. Controlling your mind is therefore one of the biggest challenges of a beautiful mind because if you lose control of your mind and render it to somebody else, you no longer have your mind at your service but at the service of somebody else. A beautiful mind is a mind that has a stronger internal locus of control as opposed to a mind that has a stronger external locus of control. This balance defines who you are and the more you control your mind the stronger you become and the more beautiful your mind becomes because it is controlled and directed by the self. A beautiful mind works for you and not for other people. A beautiful mind begins with the self and is inward looking because the mind cannot exist outside of the self, i.e., the body, the brain and the mind.
There are many barriers to a beautiful mind, and it is important to know these barriers and manage them. The starting point is to know your vantage points or gates and to protect them. In other words, you need to know your data senses so that you can filter the data that comes into your brain to create your mind. Our weakest data source is our sense of hearing because it admits hearsay information that is not verified by actual sight, tough or taste. Hearing is therefore our weakest link followed by sight especially now that we have television that is used to manipulate our minds. Unless your mind is trained to adequately filter information that comes through your sight, you will be fooled into believing visuals as empirical and real. There is a lot of manipulation of visual data because vision is appears very real compared to hearing. A beautiful mind is therefore able to decipher both hearsay and visual information by asking numerous questions about the data. Who is pushing the data, why are they pushing the data, what are they likely to benefit by pushing such information? The owners of the media have long discovered that fear is a key factor for manipulating our behaviour. They always posit a scary scenario to draw our attention and then push their hidden agendas. To successfully push their agenda, they also use faith. Faith is the belief in something unknown and unverified. This cripples the mind from asking questions. Fear is used to intimidate the mind so that it boggles, and faith is used to force the mind to capitulate and to trust whatever is dished out.
Fear: Fear alone is the biggest barrier to a beautiful mind. Fear boggles the mind and makes the cognitive process constrained. It is through fear that people are dominated and controlled. Once you submit to fear your cognitive processes are constrained and you can’t think logically. Fear leads to many other physiological and psychological problems. Anxiety, depression, and neurophysiological dysfunctions. A good example is the COVID-19 pandemic that threw the entire world into a state of fear and panic. Many people succumbed to the pandemic because of fear and stress than the virus itself. I visited a hospital one afternoon and found a young man who was coughing incessantly. I approached him and told him to relax and allow his upper body muscles to relax so that his heart and lung muscles would also relax, and he would breathe normally. I told him that he would be okay. He took my advice and within moments his coughing subsided. I saw his eyes relax and the fear and panic disappear. His doctor came to me and thanked me for the advice. Fear causes panic and muscle tensions, and your breathing becomes constrained and in response your heart starts pacing, and your entire body moves to a state of self-destruction (cytokine storms). Fear can be fatal to your health.
Faith: Faith is defined as the belief in something that cannot be proved but is hoped for. A beautiful mind is about evidence and proof otherwise it becomes gullible and can believe anything. As stated above, our hearing senses are our weakest link and if you are faithful then you open your ears to anything that is said to you, and you are supposed to believe it without proof. Many religions use faith to dominate the mind of unsuspecting followers so that, like sheep, they just follow instructions without asking questions. It is mainly for this reason that churches were allowed to operate freely without being taxed because they created a passive society. Combining fear and faith is the formula to ensure control. You instill fear and once that is achieved you then sell faith to make sure that your audience can not question your wisdom. Many pastors have used this to sexually violate and abuse many members of their congregation. One young lady was raped repeatedly by a pastor because she believed in him or had faith in what he said. During her testimony in court after the pastor was arrested, she testified that she was afraid of the man of God because she believed that whatever he said or did was divine, not only did she fear him and the wrath of God, but she had faith and trusted him with her whole life. She was like brain dead during the entire ordeal until somebody else reported the pastor and that’s the only time that she awoke from her stupor.
The sad truth is that most if not all religions begin from a premise of fear and authority whereby the recipients of scriptures are not expected to question the information that they are fed. This creates a mind that is docile and unable to process information to develop what we term a beautiful mind.
Religion must be understood as part of philosophy and the urge to explain existence and all other phenomena around us. It is an early form of consciousness and an attempt to explain the universe. Many wars and many people lost their lives during the rise of the monotheism (existence of one all-powerful god that is Omnipotent (infinitely powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), The most common monotheist religions are the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity; Islam and Judaism).They all originate from the Middle East and trace their origins from Abraham as the father figure. No archaeological or genetic evidence exists to prove that all the people of the middle east evolved from this single father. However, the power of this religion has permeated many spheres of our lives and minds such that it has become a way of life for millions of people. Please don’t get me wrong here; I’m not anti-religion. I am trying to demonstrate the relationship between the monotheist religion and the mind development process. The chosen descendants of Abraham became the chosen children of God in these religions and all other people from other walks of life became the stepchildren of God. This is where the problem begins whereby subtle discrimination begins to creep in and this affects the development of the mind. Immediately when people believe that their capacities are eternally constrained because they are not the chosen race, they capitulate and accept their fate because of fear and faith. Religion has destroyed the mind of many people who have remained chained in beliefs developed centuries ago by people who had little if any understanding of the complexity of our universe. It is a fact that many of the scriptures that we read in the holy books were written by shepherds who at times depended on dreams and optical illusions to describe social phenomena. Some of the examples given demonstrate this ignorance for example the statement that the Lord will come back riding on a cloud. The beautiful mind needs to go beyond antiquated explanations of existence and must search for more proven and tested theories of existence. Step number one is to deal with Fear. It is only when you overcome fear that you can start thinking logically. Religion has instilled high levels of fear to many people such that they even feel guilty to think and to feel.
Culture, custom and tradition: These three words have been used interchangeably to mean that which is inherited from the past or something that is inherited by birthright; or beliefs that have been transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth or behaviours and activities of a particular group of people linked by some common values or variables such as ethnicity; age or place of origin. The key factor that ties all three together is the past and how the past is imposed on the present to behave in a particular manner. It is only when we look at the past and try to understand how these behaviours and beliefs were produced that we can start to understand their role. Traditional leaders of past society were obsessed about control of land and resources such as stock, agricultural produce etc. They used their powers to develop beliefs and customs to entrench their control on such resources. Moreover, there was little scientific knowledge used to interpret social phenomenon and they used rule of thumb to produce social values that often fitted their intentions. These rulers were often elderly people who always required young people to respect them. They were males who always required females to respect them. So, in a nutshell most traditions, cultures and customs have a bias in favour of the rulers who were elderly and male. Any thought process that was contrary to such traditions or questioned such traditions were discouraged thus mind development was stifled. The enlightenment revolution in Europe started by destroying these old ideas to open way for a new society that thinks outside of such controls. Unfortunately, many colonised nations did not go through this process and still find themselves caught up in these beliefs of antiquated cultures, traditions and customs. Under English colonialism, these were deliberately reaffirmed through their system of indirect rule, and they used customs as a way to control the colonised. They encouraged the colonized to celebrate the past and forget the future. They told the colonized to wear skins as their traditions when in fact they also used to wear skins before stealing the idea of weaving cloth from west Africa and India. But nobody told them to continue their tradition of wearing skins. A beautiful mind in enlightened and must know some of this history and its intentions. A beautiful mind should be able to ask questions about some of the so-called cultures that still persist and see if they still make sense in the modern era of free thinking.
Mind development is not about imbibing all data at your disposal, but it is the ability to dissect, discern, interrogate and ask questions about reality. That is a beautiful mind.
Thank you for having followed me on this journey of the beautiful mind and I hope and believe that you found id useful. My book will be published soon, and I will duly announce it in due course. Thank you once again.
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