Infinite mind

I've always be intrigued with the power of the mind from as far back as I can remember. I appreciated the fact that there were people out there who could figure out advanced mathematical problems faster than a calculator or that a human could beat a high-tech computer in a game of chess. Even more so, I was astonished by the fact that what these people were doing was just a result of where you end up when you get really good at the basics. A lot of people like to take these anomalies of a human being and call them gifted or naturally talented, but after years of studying about the potential of a human being, I'm beyond convinced that the idea of a "natural talent" is utter non-sense. Everything that someone has or doesn't have is the direct result of how much effort they put towards it, and how much they put into it, is a direct result of what they think they can accomplish.
Now, I can imagine a lot of people arguing with me at this point claiming how there are child prodigies out there who are absolutely amazing and who couldn't have possibly put in the time required for that skill level, but I would have to disagree. One classic example is Tsung Tsung, a young piano prodigy from Hong Kong, who by the age of 8, could play piano better than most masters. It's easy to get fooled into thinking that since he is so young, he must be special or an exception to the rule, but I want you to consider for a moment how much time an eight-year-old really has accessible to them. Not only did he start playing at the age of 3, but he practiced almost every waking hour outside of school. If you could practice something for ten or more hours every day for five years straight, you would be beyond incredible as well.
In Malcolm Gladwell's book, "Outliers," the author illustrates that once someone has deliberately practiced a skill for ten thousand hours, they have developed such an incredible level of efficiency, that they can be considered masters of that art. In just five years, if Hong Kong's Tsung Tsung practiced the mentioned ten hours a day for five years, that would bring him to a total of 18,250 hours; almost double a master's level. Even if he missed a couple days due to illness and only practiced 7 hours instead (which is being really conservative,) that would still bring him close to the 13,000-hour mark which is still well into the master level. Is this beginning to come into perspective? What he had was a result of what he did.
My question is this: "If a little boy can become a master of the piano by age 8, why is it that so many people don't master anything in their lifetime?" This question has bothered me for some time because of how silly it is when you consider how the advantages you get by being a master far outweigh the time you need to invest. Masters in any field make a dramatically higher salary than entree level or novice people do and by being a master, your art form comes to you naturally meaning that it is, in a sense, effortless.

When I think of masters, I'm reminded of the Shaolin monks; specifically, the ones who have practiced their whole lives and who live in the temple. I have a great respect for them because they are masters of their mind, which by extension, means that they are masters of their bodies as well. Much like most people in the Eastern regions, they believe in an energetic system beyond the Westerner's understanding of the biological body called "QI." With this energy, they are able to train their bodies to be able to absorb an unheard-of amount of force without incurring any damage and to project unfathomable amounts of force with their blows. They are an incredible group of people and many of their practices such as Qigong, to the outside world, may seem like something supernatural. Is it though, or is it more likely that they are only perceived as incredible because they’re masters of skill sets that most of us aren't even aware exist? Since we are unfamiliar with their lifestyle, we often blow what we think we know about them out of proportion. Shaolin monks practice diligently to strengthen their bodies to such an extent that they can demonstrate unreal levels of power behind their movements and can even perform what seems to be the impossible. After just a few months of training with them, one would be able to resist the sharp end of a spear with their throat. After practicing with them for years, some suggest that you could learn to move objects without touching them or see without using your eyes. To most people, it would seem as if these monks are more than just mere mortals unlike the rest of us, but the opposite is true. They train to become strong and have practiced techniques that teach them how to do the incredible. More importantly, they have been taught that it is possible. Knowing that something is possible eliminates almost all of the barriers that stop the rest of us from attempting what we can’t understand. Sometimes, what you know inevitably decides what you are capable of doing and in some cases, it's what you don't know that can help you most.

The Story of Cliff Young

Between the years of 1983 and 1991, Australia held what they referred as an "Ultra Marathon." It was an extremely long-distance run that reached out to a total of 544 miles and took roughly 6 days to complete. Some of the most athletic people of the world would come to this endurance race, but in 1983, a very unlikely candidate entered with them. Cliff Young, a sixty-one-year-old potato farmer dressed in overalls and galoshes walked up to the runners and to everyone's surprise was there to race. When the media found out about this, they covered the story and followed him thinking in advance that he was for certain going to need medical attention during the race if he didn’t die. The way an Ultra Marathon works is that the participants run for 18 hours and rest for 6 for six days straight. Nobody however, told Cliff, so he instead, ran the entire six days only to stop for bathroom and water breaks. It never occurred to him that he was supposed to sleep because he ran so slow that everyone else was asleep by the time he caught up. As a result, when everyone was asleep, he was running. Long story short; even though he was going slower than the others, his consistent pace won him first place. Not only did he finish the race, he broke the record by twelve hours. Cliff Young won the race simply because he didn't know he was supposed to stop running.
People in general have several kinds of fallacious thought patterns that hinder them way more than help. We have the poor habit of taking things that we don't understand and making them into grand things filled with unnecessary mysticism. Realistically, the reasoning in the background is often more simplistic than what we would like to make it out to be. Most likely, the more mystical something seems, the less you actually know about it. As you start to look into it further, it's less about “if” it's possible, and more about “how” it's possible. Keeping this in mind, the impossible can't really be defined unless, of course, we know with all certainty that everything we know right now is absolute truth. Even in today's age, however, I would say that seems farfetched. To put it more bluntly, we really can't dismiss anything, because there is always that possibility that something is out there that we don't fully understand.
In the instance of Cliff, his competition looked at their 61-year-old competitor as a joke because of his age and how he was dressed. What nobody could have possibly known however, was that Cliff had run around non-stop for several days already giving him an incredible amount of endurance that nobody could have expected. As a farmer without much technology, he often found himself constantly having to chase after his animals over great distances to corral them. What’s astonishing, is that to Cliff, nothing was unusual about what he was doing. During the race, he just envisioned himself chasing after his cattle and he didn't need much more motivation than that. Nothing was particularly special about Cliff Young other than he wasn't bound by the false ideas that there is only one way to go about running the race. People who didn't know Cliff could easily fantasize and make him out to be an untouchable legend after witnessing this nearly seventy-year old man dominate a race filled with healthy twenty-year-olds. The real truth behind it, and the more rational explanation however, was that he was just a man who trained for a while and built up his strength over the years.

Occam's Razor

Occam's razor is a technique in philosophy that essentially states that if there are multiple explanations for why something happens, the simplest one is usually the best. This is usually a good tool to discern the bologna from the beef, but it's only as useful as the person using it. A caveman would most likely explain a fire as being magic, more quickly, than being the quick oxidation of a material through the process of combustion. A cave man has limited knowledge of fire and because of this, has to confabulate the details to bridge the gap from seeing to understanding with his own observational critique. We too, millions of years later, tend to make up the details about the world when we encounter holes in our knowledge and because of this, it's impeccable that we continue to learn, especially when we try to discount something’s authenticity.

Going back to the Shaolin monks and their "QI," a lot of Westerners deny that such an energy even exists because no device can detect it. Out of all of the tests used by the disbelievers, no form of electrical signal has shown up on the monitors. The only problem with this though is that "QI" as the Eastern culture states, is not the same as electricity, therefore will not show up on any device testing for it. This leaves us in a particular situation, because the effects can be demonstrated, but the reasoning behind it isn't clear, which to a lot of minds, is unsettling. The big question here is what’s going on in the background? Are Easterners aware of something that we aren't, misrepresenting what they are doing, or mistaken about what’s really happening?
After studying the monks and energetic systems and intricacies of them (like chakras and all that other stuff), I was pretty convinced that the Easterners had it right and the rest of us had our heads up our asses. As I continued to do more research however, I realized something very interesting. There were several different cultures around the world that talked about an internal energy that wasn't inherently biological, inside of humans, and they all described it in a completely different way. In India, for example, they describe something they call "Prana" as a kind of life-force flowing through the body. This kind of sounds like the same thing as Qi, right? Whether it's called, Qi, Prana, Orgone, Spirit, Odic Force, or Ka, these words seem to be describing the same thing, but at the same time, have a different lore associated with them. Is one of these systems more accurate than the other, or are they all true in their own ways? I don't believe for a second that there are 20 or more independent energies out there doing their own thing. I'm convinced that there is only one kind of unexplainable force, but each one of these different systems are equally as effective to accessing it. This may at first seem like a wild card statement and I'm not going to accept or deny any one of the particular beliefs around the world because I'm not qualified to judge who's right and who's wrong. I have however, noticed one definite link between all of them and that is a beautiful thing we call the mind.

As we delve deeper into our mind, or more specifically, our thoughts, it will seem as if we have the uncanny ability to adjust our reality based on what we think. When our perceptions change, the world appears to change with it, suggesting that the outside world is just a gauge to measure our inside turmoil. Have you ever noticed that when it rains, it pours; maybe when you wake up in a good mood, everything just seems to work out for you, but when you start off on a sour note, the world around you seems to collapse? Thoughts are multi-dimensional. They travel from our physiology, into our society, and even effects our biology. It can explain why we act the way we do in a situation, as well as how our opinions can alter an experiment, even if we swear we are being objective. In modern sciences such as quantum mechanics, it even sheds light on how an individual's thought could impact the external world around them, making the idea of telepathy and telekinesis seem not so farfetched after all.

Thanks for reading and keep steeming!