The mind business

New education mantra

The socio-psychological school of research and training is fast growing across the world—particularly in the USA and Europe. This school is focusing on mind change and personality development. The modern technology is pushing people into enormous amount of  stress. Mind is the most critical organ that needs updating and training so that it can adopt to changes that pose challenges. In this context the psycho-analytical schools are working on several mind adjustment agendas that are gaining a lot of importance.

Recently I was in Seattle, Washington state where there is an institute called the Pacific Institute. It is working on developing a mind change curriculum and disseminating it through lectures, videos and other teaching aids. The co-founder of this institute is Lou Tice, a psycho-analyst. He has developed a curriculum for training the people to focus the mind on adapting to changes of life.

Lou Tice’s training has acquired global attention in government circles, education institutions, corporate companies and teachers who believe in helping to develop a focused mind and achieving higher targets or to develop a mind to ‘bounce back’ from failures.

About 15 members of the Truthseekers International group, including this author, recently visited his institute for three days. He took us by his jet to his ranch located in a beautiful valley of mountains on the borders of USA and Canada. Living at this ranch was itself is an experience.

To our pleasant surprise, he not only offered a free flight in his  luxurious small jet aircraft, but he and his wife Diane Tice were with us all the three days. At 74, Lou Tice takes each session for four hours at a stretch to teach the principles of mind change. His teaching was a treat.

He starts with a detailed explanation of fundamental principles as to how the mind perceives things. He takes the participants through a journey of conscious, sub-conscious and creative sub-conscious process of mind. He says that the fundamental problem of mind is formulating pictures and translating those pictures into reality.

Since reality is a perceptional problem, he says, there is no one reality but there are many realities that keep occurring to our senses at a time. Because of scotomas ( mental black spots) some times many minds do not perceive what they see. Overcoming scotomas is possible only through a systematic training of the mind.

The mind change principles are based on the cognitive science and social psychology. Lou Tice applies them to day-to-day process of perception and explains quite lucidly that human beings’ perception of reality is based on his/her status and confidence levels.

Overcome backwardness

As an Indian group we were interested to learn how the caste mind could be changed and a country like India could overcome the backwardness; we were keen to locate that theory in Indian caste context. I discovered that his teaching focuses more on achieving targets in business and executive operations.

Social inequalities and training of mind to overcome such inequalities is, though not part of his teaching exercise, he thinks that once the lower castes of India overcome their low esteem they do not tolerate iniquitous treatment.

 If we apply his theory to our context one could, perhaps come to a conclusion that the upper castes and lower castes suffer from several scotomas, hence cannot perceive what they see around them as reality and also its changeability.

At yet another level though the caste or the structures of subordination of social forces are conditioned by social violence and the theory of scotomas may not explain it. Lou Tice, however, thinks that if his principles of ‘mind change’ are made part of Indian school curriculum and the children of the oppressed castes are made to overcome their inferior status they would move from a position of caste to castelessness. But that is not an easy proposition. However, it is good that India tries this curriculum.

For every thing he tries to find out solutions through his theory of mind change, thus undercutting the role of violence in change.

All theories involve a principle of mind change in one form or the other. For example, even Marxism also deals with mind change but that change is seen as possible through a mass struggle against oppression. Lou Tice operates within the capitalist paradigm of socio-psycho analysis and does not approve of violent transformation or mass action. His theory of mind change is individualistic. Though Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar were not cognitive psychologists they too wanted to change the Indian social system through a process of mind change.

Perhaps India should operate at two levels of mind change—-individual and collective. Though Lou Tice recognises the role of collective consciousness he does not approve of mass action—agitations, strikes or of violent wars. If a modern theory produces a model for peaceful transformation, we should welcome it. After all there is nothing that science cannot achieve.