A dialogue with your head

It is no longer news that the original seed of every concrete thing that surrounds you is thought. I call it the thought seed. It is not such a hard task to think; so long you are a human being, your head cannot be free of thoughts every second of the day.

There is practically no way you can go through a day without being bombarded with a barrage of thoughts. No wonder concentration is often a challenge for many people. Even demented people are said to have private thoughts.

Try this thought exercise: blank your mind for a whole minute. Done it? How easy was that? Try this: mentally pick an object around you and fix your mind on it for sixty seconds. Did you have any extraneous material escaping into your mind in the last sixty seconds? If so, you have already flouted the rule. This thought thing is believed by psychologists to be one of the factors responsible for many of the things you see in your sleeping hours.

Dreams happen. It’s just another way of accepting that thoughts happen. Thinking is nothing but a natural response to human biological functioning. This makes many of our daily actions automatic. You may not note it but before you get up from your bed in the morning, a thought happens; before you pick up your toothbrush; a thought prompts you, before you pick the shirt to wear; a thought happens, before you even scratch your head; a thought propels you.

The most insignificant of your day-to-day activities are governed by thoughts: conscious or subconscious. You probably regret a lot or spend a lot of time thinking whether to make or unmake a decision. You waste a great mental power on trivialities that shouldn’t take up a minute space on your mental hard disk.

However, there is another level of thinking that is beyond the functioning of biological processes: a deliberate and constructive thinking. This is not easy to form into a habit. The older you grow, the harder this becomes. Yet, your physical or spiritual life cannot have a different colour other than that of your thought.

What you constantly do in your skull is what you will inadvertently find yourself doing in your physical and spiritual realities. You know how you eventually become your habits. There is no trait exhibition that does not come from your head. This calls for an active deliberation on the way you often think.

Do you think actively (taking a charge of your destiny) or you are content with being the natural animal man with an eternally drifting head? The doer can never master the art of action without a mastery of the art of active thinking.

An active and constructive thought is not complete without an active and constructive action. When you live your life in the coast of active thoughts, there is a natural attendant yearning for action. It is the man produced in that rare coast that can emerge the lord of other men.

What is the difference between a civil engineer and a brick layer on a building site? Thought. One is thinking near, the other is thinking near and far. One is more skilled at constructive organic thinking than the other.

The engineer is well placed to instruct other site workers because he is looking at the finished building not the just erected few sections of the building. By rule, those whose major tool is in the constructive use of their mind earn more than those whose major power resides in their body.

That is why the site engineer may not lift a pebble at the site, yet he is heavily paid because he is doing the constructive thought work. Manual workers do the physical labour work. Theirs is to follow instructions, execute the constructive thoughts of the architect, engineer and other civil constructive workers often involved in the erection of a building.

Greatness is first of all a matter of habit, the habit of a deliberate, constructive and active thought life. You are the weakest of men if your thoughts drive you instead of you driving your thoughts. Your thought is a crucial force of your existence. It determines what and who you become. Your thought is a generator of unprecedented power; start using it so that it can stop using you.