Inner Life and the Power of The Mind

On that subject Buddha said:
“Transcendental Intelligence rises when the intellectual-mind reaches its limit and, if things are to be realized in their true and essential nature, its mental processes, which are based on particularized ideas, discriminations and judgments, must be transcended by an appeal to some higher faculty of cognition.”
Transcending means going beyond the rational processes, just as intuition is believed to appear from some subconscious source. For religions, praying is a transcendental event which allows us to communicate with the Universal Mind.
You may interpret Universal Mind as synonymous with God or Allah or whatever name you prefer. The incredible revelation made by the Enlightened One (Buddha), is that we can “communicate” with that Universal Mind through the intuitive-mind, which allows us to reach self-realization – a term which can also be understood as seeing the light or the truth about ourselves.

The key term is “transcendental intelligence”. In other words, we must go beyond our rational intelligence in order to reach the ability that we all have and that we call “Intuition”. If asked for a definition of “intuition”, most of us would be hard pressed to explain the word. A philosopher would call it instinctive knowledge; something that we know without knowing (pardon the repetition) how we acquired it. A common person would answer the question saying: “I just know this is so”. As a matter of fact the belief in God is based precisely on intuition, since we cannot present proof of His/Her* existence.
*Note: Please do not be shocked at the use of a feminine pronoun. There is no proof that God is male and He/She could very well be both or something completely different. Using the term Universal Mind eliminates the problem of gender.

We feel a little wary when we see books that offer an easy way to boost our Mind Power, to acquire the ability to heal the most dreaded illnesses, to predict the future, to win the lottery, to seduce the opposite sex (or the same as the case may be). Indeed we should reject all types of psychic rip-offs, but sometimes desperate people will waste thousands of dollars on fruitless searches for the miracle cure.

The Great Minds of the past do not offer easy solutions; the road to enlightenment is hard, full of trying obstacles and at times, intense suffering. It is true, and surely you have read about these phenomena, that certain wise men of the East are able to accomplish extraordinary feats through the power of their minds. These fakirs, mostly from India, can control their bleeding, their heartbeats and even their body temperatures. Some were even able to levitate according to some observers. But these extraordinary men have spent a lifetime of meditation and fasting to reach such control of their autonomous nervous system (autonomous because we cannot control it, supposedly).

Most of us don’t want to reach their level of mind control; it would suffice to exercise our introspection on a regular basis to analyze our subconscious Ego and establish the necessary controls. That is the way to the Good Life, defined as our personal legacy to our children and to our society.