In the mind's eye

Mind matters because life is much more than what meets the eyes. And if you believe that the mind is a function of the brain, wait till the story gets even juicier. Neurologists have located that emotions are processed in certain pre-frontal areas of the brain called the amygdala and the anterior cingulate. Individuals who suffer damage to these areas have great difficulty maintaining a sense of responsibility for themselves and others. These people know but they cannot feel. They have difficulty planning their future as social beings.

Another example. Alexithymia refers to a psychiatric disorder whereby patients are unable to appraise and express their emotions. An individual who loses this ability buries his real self under a false image. If you know someone who acts like a king and has grandiose views of himself, someone who thinks he is the best in the world, most powerful, wise, and God's greatest gift in mortal package, then also know that we have got our man.

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If the world is a stage, then life is a script, God is the producer, the brain is the director, we are all actors, the eyes are the cameras, and the mind is the screen. Understand it is all about stimulus and response, what you see is what you feel, what you feel is what you think, and what you think is what you do. This is where paradoxes come, when damaged brain brings distorted mind, and different people perceive different things in different manners. In other words, the same stimulus can get different responses from different people, which is why one man will try to reason with you during an argument, another will lose his temper, some will break down in tears, and others will chase you with gun or knife.

When human beings grow, they grow like trees, growing tall and branching out their minds while still rooted in the ground. Mind starts from where it begins and the Freudian analysis always goes back to man as a child. Marlon Brando, one of the greatest actors in Hollywood who recently died, said that at times he felt that his life was a long journey to come out of his childhood experiences with a cruel father and an alcoholic mother.

Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, is the second richest man in the world, yet he behaves in an erratic manner and cannot stand his competitors. Once when he was entertaining on his yacht off the coast of Capri in the year 2000, a smaller yacht caught his eye. It belonged to the world's third richest man, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Within minutes Larry urged his captain into hot pursuit of the other yacht and left a huge and unexpected wake that sent Paul and his guests falling to the decks. It is believed that Larry is still trying hard in his subconscious mind to prove wrong his adoptive father who had told him as a boy that he would always be a failure.

But then the mind and the eyes always play tricks on each other. Illusion is when the eyes want the mind to believe what they see. Obsession is when the mind turns the tables on the eyes, and wants them to see what it believes. J. Edgar Hoover was the Director of FBI in the United States, whose chauffeur used to take three right turns to make one left to avoid any reference to communism. The same Hoover liked to dress up as a girl in the privacy of his home. Looks can be deceiving, because what the eyes see is not always what the mind believes and vice versa.

The former U.S. President Ronald Reagan succumbed to Alzheimer's disease ten years ago, entering a psychological twilight when he would rake the leaves out of the pool for hours without noticing that his Secret Service agents were quietly replacing them.

His mind was disengaged from the eyes, the connection between seeing and believing lost in that tragedy.

It is said that the mind is like a parachute, which works best when it is open. One of the dominant concepts of modern management is that one must approach it with an open mind to see all evidences, hear all opinions and weigh all options before coming to a decision. But the saints and the monks work in the opposite way. They close their eyes and meditate to find enlightenment in their improvised darkness.

The irony is that while you can see with closed eyes, you may not always believe with an open mind. At times open mind leads to compromise, which dilutes conviction just like the way seeing too much dilutes focus. The politicians, however, walk the middle path. They make compromises to drive convictions, running ideology like a business model. The rest is history as modern politics slides down the roads of hypocrisy, because leaders no longer practice what they preach.

Blindness and mental disability, if taken in perspective, are two afflictions, which, more or less, do the same thing. A man who cannot see is probably the better of the two, because he can at least hear, smell, touch, and feel. For the mentally disabled, the world shuts out in a crueler way because he does not realise what he sees, his deluded mind having no grasp of reality. One lives in the darkness, while the other wobbles between the flashes of cloud and lightning, his mind forever floating like a boat in stormy sea.

It is hard to find people who are 20/20 both in sight and sensitivity. Some are born with the damage, and others acquire it in the course of living. But flawed as they already are, human beings become further flawed when response and stimulus cannot transact properly. How can you see a straight face in a shattered mirror? Or, what would you see if a disfigured face looks in the straight mirror? The windows cannot bring light if blocked by an adjacent wall outside of the room. The room cannot receive the light coming through the windows if it has walls propped from inside.

Average men and women go through life without knowing which works for them and which does not, their eyes and minds largely ignored in the fracas of living. It takes exceptional minds with exceptional visions to come to their rescue as leaders, revolutionaries, prophets, messiahs, and reformers. That happens perhaps once in a hundred years.

For rest of the time, it is up to us to balance the act. Break the matter, you find atom, break the atom, you find quark, and break the quark, you find string. You must have the urge to look beyond what you see and that urge comes from within. You cannot look beyond your urge, because you can only act as far as you think. Love or hatred comes from the mind's eye, because it is not what you see, but what you believe.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.