Great Minds Are in Abundance

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“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” ~Elanor Roosevelt

A child’s view of the world

I really enjoy taking the time to listen to my young girls as they play and interact with each other.  What I don’t necessarily enjoy is when they have a dispute or concern about something, because then I usually become the mediator. 🙂  When they bring their concerns forth to me, it usually revolves around the same central issue — one of them took and/or started playing with something that the other child “owns.”  For the most part, my girls’ concerns revolve around how what other people do affects them.  Their immature and developing minds are very much set up in an egotistical way, where they rarely are concerned about larger, more global ideas.  Sometimes they discuss events, but rarely do they talk about larger issues.  For the most part, they talk about the world as it revolves around them.

Growing up

As I view the “adult” world around me, it can sometimes be disappointing and frustrating.  Sometimes it can be a bit depressing.  There are some people who still, for the most part, talk about the world as it revolves around them.  They talk (or think) about how things are or may be “taken away from them,” or how someone did an injustice to them, or because someone did something, it had a negative effect on them.  They are locked in a self-centered, victim-based mindset.  This egotistical way of looking at the world is not much of a change from the child’s viewpoint of the world.

While battling through a depression that lasted the better part of eight years, I can definitely relate to this self-centered and victim-based mindset.  My whole life revolved around the world that existed in the here and now.  I couldn’t think about the world more than a few minutes into the future, and I couldn’t recall much beyond a few minutes of the past.  I was a victim, and I only cared about how the events of the world would either positively or negatively affect me.  My life was filled of complaining, grumbling, worrying, and other ineffective and unproductive behaviors.

Wasted resources

I interviewed Sibyl Chavis a few weeks ago on my radio show, and I was so captivated by her story of how she gave up complaining for a period of forty days.  She said when she decided to give up complaining, she realized that she had extra time and mental resources available to consider the possibilities that each day brings.  It really spoke to me, because she was so right — all that time spent on worrying about people, which usually involves complaining, worrying, and gossiping, takes an awful lot of time and mental resources away from the more productive things we could invest in doing.

When we focus on ourselves, and are embattled in maintaining an egotistical viewpoint of the world, we resort to using the more simple, primitive, and reflexive areas of the brain.  Our maturity is reduced to that of more simplistic organisms, where we respond and react to potential threats.  When we fear someone may “take away” something from us, we become egotistical and self centered, and our concerns are then reduced to the individual level.  The result is that we spend so much time doing damage control to prevent our potential losses and we never advance to a more “advanced” mental state.  We remain at a more child-like way of viewing the world, and we stay at the simple and more mentally immature “individual” level.  We lack the inability to think about larger ideas or concepts, because we are investing so much time and energy worrying about and managing “threats.”

Greatness “in abundance”

If we can learn to think from a more abundant mindset, we can come to realize that our lives are full of limitless opportunities and possibilities.  There isn’t a finite quantity of goodwill, forgiveness, compassion, well wishes, or good ideas.  There are enough to go around, and then some.  If we can learn to view the world from a perspective of a spirit-based consciousness, and embrace a more abundant mindset where we truly wish the best for those around us, we can then tap into our more advanced and sophisticated “higher” brain centers, and we can tap into our creative and innovative areas of our brain.  This is where our true greatness shines through.  We transcend from thoughts consisting mainly of people and events right into an idea-based mindset.

We’ve grown physically beyond an immature state of being.  When we learn to focus on growing mentally beyond an immature state of mind, we can realize the true greatness and potential that we all possess within us.  Great minds focus on ideas, not people or events.  We can all be great!  It’s our time to be great!  Great minds are “in abundance!”