Defragmenting the Mind

Ever wondered what regular clean-up and maintenance activities are required to keep up this big, complex, mulithreaded, multitasking, operating system called the Mind ? If your mind is like a strong, stable and secure OS like Linux, then probably you would need to do very little to maintain it or you might already be doing it by design. But if yours is an old, average commonplace mind like Windows 2000 Professional, then, after a while of using your mind for all kinds of activities, you might actually find, things have become slower from that first day when you had this freshly installed OS. You have been installing and uninstalling all kinds of software left, right and center. You never knew that there are these hundreds of little files with extension .tmp. You have been browsing the Net, with cookies planted three years ago still crawling in some deep non-descript local settings folder, like cockroaches in your kitchen proliferating until the Annual Cleaning Mela. If you have been acting really irresponsible, not updating your antivirus software and clicking on any link anyone presents to you, opening attachments indiscriminately and enjoying a false pride of administrative access while doing these things, then even the Cleaning Mela might not be of much help. You might be better off with an overhaul of your operating system.

Our minds too have these issues. We interact with all kinds of people everyday and sometimes, invite good and bad events and sometimes are bombarded with them. Sometimes a situation presents itself from which we can actually walk if we act like a responsible administrator, but we still don't. We know the thought cookies which others plant in us can be both good and bad, sometimes they enhance our experience by being there, and sometimes they proliferate even after their due validity. We should be knowing that we should give temporary phases in life, like temporary files, their limited value and delete them regularly, if our minds should start nifty and fast. We know opening untrusted attachments in life can have malignant effects on our mind and even worse, when someone is going to exe-cute something on us without our conscious knowledge. We seem to be enjoying administrative access but we have actually given it to away to the other person who tries to use that very pride of ours to piggyback on us and crash our mind. Keeping your mind's health often involves updating your definitions of defence against evil, regularly, so that the bad ones are knocked off by a real time protection scan even as they try to enter us.. Some thoughts are like worms, they self-replicate themselves at a furious pace and consume all your bandwidth. Some thoughts are like trojans that mask their sinister motive, look like performing one action while performing right the contrary. Some thoughts are like viruses causing visible damage to your mind and might even require an exclusive removal tool session to restore order. Even then normalcy cannot be fully restored. We run around like cats and rats from pillar to post, that even by plain regular usage of all kinds of compartments, the average commonplace mind that it is, it gets fragmented with thought pieces not lying in contiguous stretches. You wonder often why your mind sometimes is just lazing out, sometimes is so busy doing "its own" work and not your work, then you know that some unhealthy background processes are taking all the energy. You have just been on auto-pilot for a while and dozed away in a state of suspended animation causing the much-dreaded blue screen.

To keep this complex operating system nimble, use a tool regularly like Meditation or Social Work or Music or whichever tool that suits your regular maintenance schedule. Just as you might use Ccleaner to clean your computer or Lizol to clean your kitchen tiles and Mortein to kill those domestic nocturnal pests. Defragment your mind. Remove temporary baggage that has been accumulated out of age-old bitterness. Attach yourself only to trustworthy friends. Give thought cookies which others plant in you their due validity only as long as they enhance your experience of interacting with them. And most important, remember, there is nothing greater than keeping yourself alert for a real-time protection scan of your thoughts, when they are just about to enter you. For this, connect online to God from time to time and download your defences against unhealthy entrants. Be a responsible administrator of your mind. If you can't do all this (or if you can be diligent enough to do all of this), overhaul your mind and develop a strong, secure, stable mind.