Mind Games
By Robert Fritz
The mind can be like a very smart dog. When the dog is bored,
it looks for something to busy itself, chewing the furniture, barking at cars,
getting into the trash. The dog doesn't really mean to be bad, it is just trying
to find something to do.
And your mind, left to its own devises, will try to busy
itself too. It will obsess about problems, theorize about mysteries, speculate
about what could have happened that didn't, ponder about how what did happen
shouldn't have, and on and on it goes. Why does the mind do this?
The mind is seeking equilibrium, in other words, the
resolution to all tension, the answer to all mysterious questions, and the
ability to change disturbing facts. If you've ever woken up in the middle of the
night consumed by worries, fears of the unknown, what you should have said
rather than what you did say, how you might avoid this or that, your mind is
bored and is looking for something interesting to do.
You haven't chosen to spend the night awake, yet on its own
your mind is deciding to deliberate, consider, reflect, ruminate, and run itself
ragged. Your nocturnal disruption is unwanted, uninvited, and unannounced. You
find yourself in the middle of it, and you don't know how you've gotten there.
Most people do not think to discipline their minds. So the
mind spends its time free-associating, flittering from one idea, image, thought,
memory, picture, word, phrase, notion, to another. What else can it do with such
little direction?
Some people try to discipline the mind by feeding it lies.
They don't call it lies, though. They call it positive thinking. They think they
can fool the mind into cooperation by telling it that good things will happen.
Yet the mind has this bad habit of discerning reality even beyond the person's
normal perception. It knows the fact, which is: we don't know what will happen
in the future. To insist that we will succeed is seen by the mind as a trick,
because the mind knows that the only time you can say for sure that something is
possible is once it is done.
The mind is creative. But creativity that is not directed can
lead to folly. And the notion that freeing the mind from judgment will evoke a
wealth of new ideas, an idea promoted by many people in the
"creativity" movement, but hardly ever used by consummate professional
creators in the arts and sciences, simply teaches the mind that it's okay to be
random, unfocused, and undisciplined. Imagine if we were to teach the dog to do
whatever it wanted to do. We might be cleaning up after it everywhere in the
house.
But we can give the mind the most productive and powerful job
there is: structural tension. We decide on an outcome we want to create, and we
are conscious of the current reality we have in relationship to that outcome.
Some people think structural tension is a metaphor. It is anything but a
metaphor, it is a structural dynamic. The mind wants to resolve tension so that
it can establish equilibrium. Structural tension is the strategic creation of a
useful state of non-equilibrium. Like an archer stretching the bow, aiming the
arrow, structural tension positions us to better achieve our goals.
There are no tricks here. Just a clear idea of what we want
to create, and an accurate view of what we have in reality. These two data
points demand a certain precision. You need to manage your mind's attention. If
you don't, your mind will wander around, gravitating to problems, circumstances,
fear of the unknown, personal ideals of how you should behave, speculations, and
freely changing the subject from what you actually want to create, and how you
might best create it, to irrelevant foolishness it will take seriously.
Once you have established structural tension, your mind will
help you create the process by which you can achieve your vision. What motivates
this true creativity is the mind's quest for resolution of tension. What we have
done is give it what it wants, and nice tension for it to work on.
©2009 Robert Fritz
Updated: 10/24/10