6 Mental Faculties to Strengthen
Long back I read a statement that – ‘It is our thoughts that define our habits, and habits define our behaviour, the behaviour builds our character and it is this character that gets us the results in our life”
Therefore, it seems obvious that in order to change our results we need to work on our thoughts, and the thoughts originate from our mind. It is so unfortunate that we don’t come with an operational manual for such a complex and powerful machine called ‘Body’, and most of us spend our entire life using it well under its capabilities. It is just like carrying a latest smart phone and using it just to make and receive calls. What if we come to know the power and capabilities that we possess and the ways to strengthen it so that we can do wonders in our lifetime? It is not so difficult, as it seems, as the history tells us that many of us have did so.
If we understand these 6 mental faculties that defines us and our actions, then we can bring a drastic positive change in our lives and can perform at our best.
These mental faculties are:
1. Imagination
2. Perception
3. Will
4. Memory
5. Intuition
6. Reason
Once we start working on these, we will improve exponentially and bring about a drastic change in our lives. Let us understand one at a time:
1 – Imagination:
/ɪˌmadʒɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/
noun
The faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” - Albert Einstein
This is one of the most powerful mental faculties and perhaps the most prominent one. It is this imagination that helped Wright brothers bring human flight to reality, it is this imagination that led Thomas Edison to develop the incandescent light bulb, even after failing thousands of times.
The world we are living in today, is the world once imagined by someone. Imagination is at the best when we are kids, and as soon as the so-called reality of the world sets in, we are forced to view around us rationally with the understanding of how things are and how they work, and slowly we stop exercising our imagination and it becomes weak. Our imagination becomes so weak that we even fail to imagine that we can do much better than what we are doing right now.
Just imagine, how did your reached to the position where you are working right now? If this was what you imagined someday in the past, then why can’t the same imagination take you forward? The conditioning to understand ‘HOW?’ before we start our imagination is the major block to our thought process.
Let us learn to unlearn first. Don’t waste even a single second to focus on ‘HOW?’, before you start to think, as the most important question is ‘WHAT?’. Just get wild with your imagination and think what is that you want or wish to do, the refinement to this imagination is the next task. The major challenge that we face while imagining is that immediately the question ‘HOW?’ pops up in the mind and at the same time our conditioned logical mind rejects the idea, as it is unable to conceive ‘HOW’ it can be dome. Of course, if the answer to the question ‘HOW?’ was available then we would have been flying in the airplanes long before Wright brothers imagined it. Our work is to find out How, only after we know ‘What’ we want. So, keep all the mental blocks aside and let your imagination go beyond the horizons.
2 – Perception:
/pəˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/
noun
The ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” – Anais Nin
What shapes our inner and external world, is our perception. Whatever enters our mind through our five senses are just the impulses that are received by everyone in those given circumstances but it was Sir Isaac Newton who saw gravity in the falling of an apple and It was Sir Alexander Fleming who saw penicillin in the bread mould, it is all about perception.
The good part is that, knowledge improves our perception. It is important to keep educating ourselves on wide subjects so that we are able to see the situation with different perspectives and compare them to get the correct one out of them, otherwise the situations created by others will define our perception and we will see the things, the way others want us to see. Remember, when we were kids, our perception used to change with every new fact that came across us.
Perception seriously shapes the quality of our life, therefore get into a habit of looking others and things with a different angle and then use your knowledge and wisdom to choose the right perspective.
3 – Will:
/wɪl/
noun
The faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action.
“Strength does not come from physical capacity, it comes from an indomitable will” – Mahatma Gandhi
Human WILL makes all the difference between ‘Action’ and ‘Inaction’. A person with a strong ‘WILL’ is always going to make the difference as compared to the one who has all the resources but no WILL. The person with a strong WILL always believe in resourcefulness and keep looking for the ways to make the best use of all the resources he has (no matter how less they are).
Human WILL is always backed with a strong reason of going on, no matter what. If you have a strong ‘WHY’ to do something, then you are going to do it any how. This inner ‘WHY’ is what makes all of us strengthen our WILL. Do you have a strong ‘WHY’ to what you are doing? If not, then it is the right time to ask this question to yourself and then all your ‘Wishes’ will be converted into a strong ‘Will’.
4 – Memory:
/ˈmɛm(ə)ri/
noun
The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.
“The true art of memory is the art of attention” – Samuel Johnson
Just like a hard disk in our laptops, memory records all that we learn or experience in our lifetime. It is this memory that we always refer to whenever we look for the information in our minds to retrieve or compare. Having a good memory is vital for a successful life. Just imagine the character in the movie Ghajini played by Aamir Khan, where he had a short-term memory. How important it is to remember the tasks for the day, week, month or even the year. In sales, remembering the sales figures, customers’ name, etc. is the key to a successful career.
The good news is that everyone has the same capacity of memory, but the only difference is the attention that we pay while memorizing. Memory depends upon the emphasis paid by our senses while internalizing the information and the way we organize the information in our minds. Just like a library full of books organized and indexed properly can be accessed by anyone easily, the information stored in our minds in an organized fashion is not only easy to retrieve but also stays for a long time.
Memory competitions are held worldwide for memorizing various things from binary numbers to a long list of randomized items. There is a scientific way to increase your memorizing power and anyone from a school going child to an elderly person can learn the ways of doing so.
If you wish to improve your memory, you can read a book called ‘How to memorize anything’ by Aditi Singhal and Sudhir Singhal.
5 – Intuition:
/ɪntjʊˈɪʃ(ə)n/
noun
The ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift” – Albert Einstein
This is what we call ‘The gut feeling’. We are conditioned to reason with our gut feeling, but often fail to get a reasonable answer and thus our logical mind forces us to drop the intuition and go ahead with the reasoning.
Have you ever felt that something is wrong in the home when you suddenly enter the room and see everyone sitting quiet? Even the dog in the house knows that something is not right. We all have this mental faculty called ‘Intuition’ with us but we have habitually failed to develop it. Rather than doubting our intuition, we must start trusting it and then start building it. Experience helps improve our intuition.
6 – Reason:
/ˈriːz(ə)n/
noun
The power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically.
“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead” – Thomas Paine
Reasoning is one of the highest mental capabilities that we humans have. Along with imagination, it is this Reasoning that make humans different from animals. Reasoning is what bring our imagination to life. We spend most of our life reasoning, from the child in the school or at our profession. Reasoning is that higher mental ability that helped us create all the technology around us to make our life simple. The capabilities of reasoning vary from individual to individual but that in no sense depicts the success of a person, although it is true that certain type of jobs requires high level of reasoning.
The reasoning of your mind can be tested with an IQ test and there are certain ways to improve your reasoning ability through practice.
It is not just important but crucial to work on these faculties of your mind. These 6 mental faculties, when worked upon can literally improve your life and will help you achieve success.
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