Is Your Consciousness Flexible?

Many of us today are interested in keeping our bodies flexible and fit, but how many of us are interested in developing neuroplasticity?

What does it mean to have a flexible consciousness? What is neuroplasticity? Observe your own mind for a few minutes. What do you find? Is your mind flexible and open, or is it filled with thoughts and caught up in the patterns and habits of everyday living?

Flexibility is everywhere in nature. It is the same quality, whether it is found in a plant, a building, a human body or a human mind. Flexibility is the ability to adapt, to be willing to change, to be open, to bend and to respond with sensitivity. It is the opposite of rigidity. A rigid mind is full of fixed habits and strong views on what is right and wrong, good and bad, intelligent and stupid, just and unjust, etc. A flexible mind is open to new ways of viewing the world; it is not prejudiced.

Spiritual traditions value mental flexibility for our wellbeing and evolution. It is not hard to understand why, as it is through the mind that we observe the inner life of the heart. The spiritual journey of the heart is full of wonder, taking us into a vast inner universe. There is no room for rigidity when venturing into the unknown!

Neuroplasticity and Emptiness

In Zen Buddhism it is called shoshin, original mind, or beginner’s mind. Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki says: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” He continues: “People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy.”

What is constancy? Perhaps it is the ability to cheerfully accept things as they are, with a mind that is soft and open. It is also that unchanging, immutable base of fluidity. Suzuki also says: “It is the readiness of the mind that is wisdom. Wisdom is not something to learn. Wisdom is something which will come out of your mindfulness. So the point is to be ready for observing things, and to be ready for thinking. This is called emptiness of your mind.”

The spiritual journey of the heart is full of wonder, taking us into a vast inner universe. There is no room for rigidity when venturing into the unknown!
Carlos Castaneda writes: “We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior (meaning spiritual aspirant – n.n.) is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.”

What Prevents Neuroplasticity?

We clean our houses, our cars, our clothes, and our bodies, so they don’t become dirtier and dirtier. Imagine a house that has been lived in by a family for thirty years and has never been cleaned! Yet how many of us clean our minds? Do we remove the build-up of mental patterns that we accumulate through our senses, our emotions, and our reactions and attitudes to the world?

Imagine all the past experiences and emotions that have accumulated throughout our lives. As they accumulate and form patterns, we become more and more fixed and inflexible. It is difficult to transform unless we remove them.

When we are born we are innocent, open, and flexible. As babies we are like a painter’s fresh clean canvas, full of potential. Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari says: “Observing little children growing up around me, I have nothing but wonder, and a sense of tremendous gratitude, for the amazing rapidity with which they shed memories of persons, places and things.” He also says: “For me, spirituality is nothing more than becoming like a child, because the ego is what is associated with becoming adult.”

He describes this openness and flexibility of mind as being “like the wonder in the eyes of a child – anything it sees is wonderful. Is wonder in the things that we see, or in the way in which we look at things?”
Wonder is the way yogis have always observed the world and developed their philosophy of life, based on practical experience.

As we grow up, we learn values from our society and family. We learn what is right and wrong. As childhood turns into adulthood, we become more and more set in our ways, creatures of habit. When we are confronted with new situations we resist transformation. When we meet someone who is different from us, we react with prejudice. We think that we are right and they are wrong, or we are better than they are. We are not flexible and open, unless we do something to reverse the accumulation of habits.

yogaesoteric
December 23, 2017