I doubt anyone would argue with the idea that fully and effectively using our mental faculties will help us reach our highest potential.
However, few people can name and properly explain what their mental faculties are:
- Imagination
- Will
- Perception
- Intuition
- Reason
- Memory
Although you’re already using each of these faculties, there’s a good chance that you often use them unconsciously, and you may be using them in the wrong direction.
It’s not your fault
It’s not surprising that so few people understand how to use their mental faculties properly.
In school, we learn about the five physical senses we share with the rest of the animal kingdom—the ability to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.
But we were never taught about the mental faculties that separate us from the other animals.
Every other creature must blend in with their environment. However, humans can create any environment we want using our imagination, intuition, memory, perception, will, and reason.
Exploring and strengthening these faculties greatly improves our chances of creating and enjoying the life we want. So, we’ll be spending a lot of time on this all month.
Today, we’ll start with a brief introduction of each faculty and a simple tip to start strengthening it.
1. Imagination
Your imagination is incredibly powerful. It allows you to create something out of nothing. It’s what you use to take an idea, something that is non-physical and turn it into something physical.
We all use our imagination to create things, experiences, and circumstances in our lives. However, many times we unconsciously use it the wrong way by imagining bad things happening to us or other things we don’t want.
The key is to learn to use your imagination to create the experiences that you want most in life.
A Tip for Using Your Imagination in a Positive Way
• Daydream: Daydreaming is more deliberate than merely dreaming, and that makes it more effective in opening your mind to possibilities. Edgar Allan Poe put it very well when he said, “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
So, take a break from your daily tasks each day to relax and let your mind wander.
What would you do if you turned your annual income into your monthly income? What would a perfect day look like for you? Who would make an ideal life partner?
Amuse yourself by speculating on ways you would like to see your life improve, and it will soon become a habit. And one day your daydreams may become your reality.
2. Intuition
Intuition is the small voice inside that speaks your truth. As you learn to turn down the volume of the noise around you and the voice of your paradigm, and turn up the volume of your intuition, your life will become fuller, and you will feel more connected to others.
A Tip for Getting In Touch With Your Intuition
• Stop and Listen: It’s hard to tune in to your inner wisdom when you’re constantly busy.
So, take some time each day to slow down and be more open to your higher self. If you’re looking for an answer to a question, or you have a decision to make, start looking inside yourself for the answers before you choose which path to take.
Intuitive messages are subtle and can fade from your conscious mind very quickly. So, write them down or record them immediately even if you can’t act on them right away.
3. Memory
“Everyone has a photographic memory. Some people just don’t have any film.” – Anonymous
While you may see that as just an amusing quote, it’s true. You’ll learn more about this throughout the month, but for now consider that we’ve all got a perfect memory. We just need to train our mind properly to realize it.
A Tip for Developing Your Memory
• Use your senses. The more senses you involve when you learn or do something new, the easier it is to remember it.
For example, if you want to remember someone’s name, it may help to look them in the eye when you repeat their name and offer a handshake. That will engage four out of your five senses.
4. Reason
Our faculty of reason is what we use to think—to analyze, compare, and evaluate ideas. It’s the primary way we choose, and we use it in every choice we make.
However, it also has one other really important capability – it can take all the information it has and stir it up and come up with brand new ideas.
A Tip for Developing Your Reason Faculty
• Practice Being UNreasonable. Most people think being reasonable means stifling or sacrificing their own dreams and goals out of fear: fear of disappointing someone, fear of being laughed at, fear of going against the crowd or disrupting the status quo.
However, neuroscience has shown that we use only about five percent of our brain. So, venture into unchartered territories and practice being unreasonable.
Write down the ways you are holding back on going for (or even acknowledging) what you really want in life because you’re afraid it might be unacceptable or impossible.
Then, relax and come up with a list of new ideas and strategies to get what you want.
5. Perception
Perception controls what you become aware of in your environment, and how you choose to see it. Perception has both conscious and subconscious mind functions.
There is duality in most everything – front/back, up/down, in/out, and good/bad in everything. The good is not always in the thing itself, but what comes from it. And we always have the choice of what to focus on.
In the subconscious mind, perception determines what we become aware of. We’re flooded with billions of bits of information every second in our conscious mind, and we can only process a tiny fraction of them.
Two main criteria determine what gets through – what agrees with our beliefs, and what our mind believes is important to us.
A Tip for Developing Your Perception
• Open up your camera phone and go into any room in your house. Stand at one end of the room and take a picture. Turn around, walk to the other side of the room, and take another picture. Then compare the two images side by side. One room; two totally different pictures.
Now take that lesson and apply it to one of the “rooms” in your life. Pick a different vantage point from which to view your primary relationship, your career, or your financial situation.
A singular perception in your life can prohibit your growth. A different one can exponentially expand it. Keep shifting your position until you find that one, then stay there.
6. Will
Will is what we use to focus our attention. Many people have trouble staying focused, and they bounce around from one thing to another, and never finish anything.
The will—used properly, as it was designed to be used—is really what we think of as sustained concentration. What a person concentrates on, they think about. What they think about, they become.
A Tip for Discovering How You’ve Been Using Your Will
• Spend a few minutes answering the following questions with complete honesty:
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- Where in your life are you using concentration to sabotage yourself?
- Are you spending more time focusing on what was or is, and what you don’t want, or where you’re going and your current goals?
- If you knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that your will alone could change your present circumstances, would you have the discipline to focus on the good?
Become a Conscious Creator
To achieve your goals and dreams and create the life you want, you must stop focusing on external facts—things you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell—even if you consider them to be “good.”
That is thinking from the outside in and, at best, it limits you to what you’ve achieved in the past. At worst, it sabotages any chance you have at achieving your dreams.
Instead, you’ve got to start thinking from the inside out. Thinking from the inside out is using your mental faculties, starting with imagining what you want and then using your will to keep your attention there.
It’s listening to and acting on the voice inside and seeing the good in everything.
And it’s creating future memories and continually seeing and feeling like the person you want to be.
Each time you do those things, you plant your desire in the garden of your subconscious mind. With increasing repetitions, the image becomes fixed there.
And then, by law, it’s only a matter of time before it moves into form.
Unlike the other species on this wonderful planet, we are not mere spectators in an objective world. We are co-creators involved in forming not only what we experience, but also how we experience it.
Doesn’t it feel freeing to know that?
To your success,
Bob Proctor
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