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Idea of the Week

If you could direct the fundamental functioning of your mind, how would you do it?  What metaphor might you use to describe the workings of an "Ideal Mind"?

Many of us have had only a vague notion of how our minds work. We've   struggled to understand life using our minds, often without understanding of the function of mind itself. In school we were conditioned to memorize, analyze, and regurgitate facts. Because of this conditioning we may have fallen into thinking that processing facts is what our consciousness was made for. But how many of us have actually sat down to determine -- or design -- how our minds will operate? Is it possible that this is also one of our mind's primary functions?

Throughout the ages, teachers have offered to us useful "mind metaphors":   fertile soil that grows good seed or weeds,  flowing rivers which are new every moment,  super-computers with all of the answers, frying eggs in certain situations, fingers of God,  plays of cinema,  to name a few...  

Each of these metaphors has unique properties that can be easily understood and applied, and each holds within it a prescription for thriving in hard times. Each metaphor also has a directive influence on the way we process perception and cognition.  In this way a mind metaphor gives us a sense of control in an otherwise vast sea of sensory experience.  Because each metaphor is literally food for our minds, each metaphor re-generates the composition of our consciousness more and more into its own image.

Take a moment now to choose a mind metaphor for yourself and treat it as an experiment. If you believed that your mind were a fertile field for only good seed, for example, how might your learning curve be? Or how might you use this metaphor to get completely free?

Choose wisely and enjoy the rise!

Copyright 2001 By Elizabeth Mullen. All rights reserved. May be duplicated in its entirety with contact information intact for not-for-profit purposes only. Contact: em@cornerstonecoaching.com or call toll free 1-877-532-0403.

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Ask yourself: Can you name 20 metaphors that are widely used to describe the mind?

CORNERSTONE QUOTES OF THE WEEK: Questions are creative acts of intelligence. -Frank Kingdon

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