A FAR LARGER PLACE

One of my goals as a teacher is to help my students realize how immense their minds are. It’s actually an immense task, because I’m sure most of the students feel, as probably most of us do, that their minds are the opposite of immense – not just small, but very small. They probably picture their minds as undersized appliances inside their skulls – small-scale factories that struggle all day to shove out clumsy answers to questions and second-rate solutions to problems. They probably feel wholly insecure as they attempt to keep their minute mental workshops manufacturing ideas during class. It’s regrettable, because I believe they are missing a delightful truth about their minds, and all minds -- that they are actually part of a single vast mind -- or Mind -- that has no limits whatsoever. My students think their thoughts come from a little lump of flesh inside their skulls, when in reality they come from the immeasurable universe itself. One way I can help them to understand this mysterious fact is by repeatedly asking them, “Where did that thought come from?” When they make  magnificent statements, which they often do, I can cajole them into inquiring whether such a splendid thought could have come from some scanty substance inside their heads. Perhaps in this way, I can slowly help them to glimpse the grandness of the thinking process and the vastness of the phenomenon called intelligence. Perhaps I can lead them to the realization that their thoughts (about 50,000 each day!) come from a far larger place than they have ever imagined, and that they dwell in, and are a part of, that place.