Mind Over Matter!

By Park Nahm-Sheik

Mind over matter – This line makes a neat and tidy guidepost for seekers of wondrous things in life such as fitness, hipness, and contentedness. The mind is a fertile seedbed of all the riches that do count in our quest for true fulfillment. It holds the key to getting our physical self to fully participate in translating all our worldly wishes into reality. Hopeful people tend to live better, happier, and longer than their less hopeful companions. In fact, hypertension, diabetes, and other serious medical conditions are more often attributed to negative turns of mind than to positive ones.

It is enlightening that a cheerful disposition is thought to be instrumental in speeding up recovery from adverse medical events. Also, the quality of the recovery observed here is normally a function of the power of hope in play. Additionally, worrywarts are considered more likely to be cancer-prone than their easier-going counterparts. These observed interconnections between mental dispositions and various health issues apparently cast huge shafts of light on correlations that link mind and body into one and the same entity.

Worth tons of efficacious medication, a sunny disposition appears to be capable of helping to tackle myriad medical issues that stubbornly refuse to respond to other remedies attempted. This is a truly miraculous phenomenon, far from easy to account for without recourse to something like “mind over matter.” It may very well be the case that mind is innately omnipotent, which is seemingly simply beyond analytic interpretation or rationalization.

Of apparent relevance to the topic under discussion here is the rationalist philosophy of Renee Descartes (1596–1650). His theory centers around the underlying principle that is quite eloquently summed up in Latin as Cogito ergo sum (“I think; therefore, I am”).

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) also comes to mind here. In his philosophical magnum opus Pensee, this French philosopher cum mathematician pontificated, “Man is but a reed (the feeblest thing in nature); but (he is) a thinking reed…. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, not by space and time we cannot fill. Let us endeavor then to think well; this is the principle of morality.” Humankind’s innate capacity for cognition and cogitation is genuinely a one-of-a-kind heavenly blessing. Humanity is gifted with this serene, sublime blessing by boundless divine grace.

The amazing power of the human mind is convincingly attested to by the popular saying “Where there is a will, there is a way.” Also bearing witness to the extraordinary traction of the mind: Nothing is impossible to a willing heart; Where your will is ready, your feet are light. Whatever the mind/heart bids, the body is always there ready to do that in the blink of an eye. The body is to the mind what a foot soldier is to the commanding officer.