THE HUMAN MIND

Emmanuel Olaoluwa
There are lots of stereotypes attached to the human mind. The capacity to assess information, to build, to deconstruct and to create a life of peace out of the vast nothing it was birth into. This capacity holds principally to the fact that man is a thinking being. Where actions fail, and words too, the power of the mind is called upon, and it never fails. The mind is also subject to certain arsenals by which it can appreciate or depreciate, depending on which of these arsenals or seeds it is filled with. The human mind is fluid, but can be pottered to fit into a stringent dogma, a one sided thought pattern. It can take as much as we feed it, as much as we expose it to, harness it and make of it whatever it wants to. Bottom line, the human mind has the capacity to be manipulated by whatever you expose it to; negative situations and thoughts, and it would birth negative reactions, vice versa.
The crux here is that, everyday of our lives, we are exposed to a plethora of things that serve to manipulate our minds, restructure it to fit into certain perspective. Our vulnerability to these factors is next to nothing; in fact it is natural for the mind to get exposed to these thought shaping factors and situations. This is where self comes in, our ability to dictate what we want to feature in the overall corpus of our lives, our ability to be the potters/canons of the structure of our minds. It is important to note that it is the mind that dictates the trajectory of our lives. Therefore, our ability to reverse and engineer the factors that desire to reconstruct our mind is a proof that we are part of the existing nuances, the part of society that seeks to assert one’s strength against the sea of troubles struggling to bamboozle it. What do you allow into your mind?
Negative thoughts are not necessarily born out of negative situations, but out of the constancy of dwelling on the negative situations, societal issues and certain personal goals that are yet to be achieved. We are burdened with the weight of society, in measures that only serve to cripple our ability to picture the process to self actualization as worth the wait. Or we get too angry with what we see around us, and instead of seeking a positive approach; we collapse into self, and give up on the struggle for self appreciation. Negative thoughts are normal, unlike what most writers or speakers would say, they are normal. In fact, it is ridiculous to think that one can think happy thoughts absolutely or saying only good exists. Wrong! If negative thoughts were not normal, then the world would be built on mush and basically unrealistic surrealism. Simply put, we would lie to ourselves until lies become our reality. The truth is negative thoughts are as normal as positive thoughts.
What is not normal, however, is subjecting your mind to constant remuneration on the dictates of negativity. You will grow into a staunch, ugly, mentally malnourished individual. Imagine feeding your body with carbohydrate every day. True, you would have all the energy in the world, but you would become deficient of protein and other essential nutrients and you know what that means; kwashiorkor. Your mind becomes bloated with hunger and skimmed of strength. This is what it means feeding on negative thoughts all the time. Recognizing they exist and feeding on them are two different things, as you go on, you would recognize what it means to feed your mind, reprogram your thoughts and ascend the steps toward positivity.
The human mind is large and fluid; this gives it the capacity to take in any possible pieces of information, as much as we feed it, and also process any kind of situation. We are all going through a lot, most of us have mental health issues, our minds have been fed with too much negativity, willy-nilly. This implies that sometimes we don’t seem to have control over what our minds dwell on. It just happens, and in the happening, we become terribly lost, and in our matrix, we become the shadow of our former self. How do we cope with this kind of situation? How do we liberate our mind from thoughts that seek to imprison it? One of the principal ways is to live above the nuances of naysayers, to be deliberate about self and most importantly, to understand how much you mean to self and to others. Have a mind, rather train your mind to feed on the right things, and you would be surprised the amount of positive results you would birth.