Cognition

Quietening the mind with purposeful awareness

Entering into a state of Cognition is to quieten your mind with a dedicated purpose of thought, so that you may begin to awaken your Life Force energies. Accessing the energies of your Life Force through Cognition will enable you to bring forward the many aspects of multi-faceted knowledge for greater balance and harmony.

At The Life Force Institute, Cognition is the disciplined use of focused thought to access the deeper energies of your Life Force, drawing forward deeper aspects of knowledge and wisdom. This is the accumulated intelligence of your own being, available to you when the noise of ordinary mental activity settles enough to let it come through.

More Than Meditation

Cognition, when conducted correctly with the tools of ekagrata and creative imagery, brings about a quiet and purposeful mind. Many people associate inner stillness with meditation, and while meditation has its place, Cognition goes further. The difficulty most people encounter when meditating is that the untrained mind does not simply rest. Without direction, it drifts, producing a steady stream of thoughts, pulling in memories, emotions, and worries that fill any silence the moment it appears. This is the passive intellect at work, and it rarely stops of its own accord.

Cognition addresses this directly. Rather than simply releasing the mind into stillness and hoping for quiet, Cognition assigns the mind a purposeful task. By giving your attention a clear direction, your active intellect is engaged, not put to sleep. The restless activity of the passive mind begins to subside, not through force, but through the natural effect of focused intention. Stillness without purpose is difficult to sustain, particularly for people who live active, demanding lives. But when the mind is given something specific to attend to, something that draws it inward rather than outward, it becomes possible to achieve a quieter state of mind. Cognition is, in this sense, stillness with intelligence.

The Tools of Ekagrata and Creative Imagery

Ekagrata is the capability to build and maintain focused thought to achieve the task at hand. It is a skill you develop through consistent practice, and it grows stronger the more you apply it. Creative imagery strengthens your focus of thought through your ability to imagine or visualise the end goal, giving your attention something concrete to hold. The two work together: ekagrata keeps the mind steady; creative imagery gives it something worth holding steady for.

These tools can be achieved and applied in your life, no matter who you are. They are practical capacities you already possess in some form, capable of being refined and applied in everyday life, regardless of your background or current mental habits. You are responsible for your own progress. Take the time to comprehend what they can do for you.

Cognition and the Levels of the Mind

To fully realise the complexities of the mind, you must change your preconceptions concerning it. The mind is composed of many different energy levels and sub-levels through which your persona is manifest as one complete unit. Each level and sub-level of the mind is associated with a specific range of thoughts and holds different types of thoughts and energies in storage areas corresponding to aspects within you. These levels range from the very coarse through to higher levels of conscious thought and reasoning.

What makes this especially relevant to Cognition is how quickly and easily these levels shift. Your mental state is not fixed. When you react emotionally to something a colleague says, or to news you receive, or to a memory that surfaces unbidden, your mind can drop from a clearer level of reasoning into something far more reactive in moments. You have almost certainly noticed this in yourself: how a calm morning can be undone by a single unexpected conversation, or how a stretch of productive thinking collapses the moment anxiety takes hold. A moody state and a confident state do not just feel different; they access different parts of your mind, different stored material, different qualities of thought.

The level of mind you use and communicate through is equal to the thought patterns you allow to manifest within your mind at any given time.  Your mind fluctuates across many sub-mental levels and mental levels throughout any given day. Cognition can assist by training you to choose that level rather than simply falling into it.

Reframing the Passive Intellect with Cognition

When you are emotional, the passive intellect of your mind can feed you an endless list of thoughts and corresponding emotions and feelings of self-limitations, excuses, fears and insecurities that hold you in an emotional jail. These energies of your thoughts and emotions encase you, and take their toll on your mental, physical and emotional well-being.

The relationship between your mental state and your physical condition is real, and when the mind is trapped in reactive patterns, the whole you suffers. By moving you out of the passive intellect’s habitual pattern of reactive thought, Cognition creates the conditions for you to think and evaluate more clearly. Within an unemotional and less turbulent mental state of mind, the energies of your Life Force can rejuvenate and restore the parts of you that chronic reactivity depletes. Learning to enter into a state of Cognition will help you bring greater command to your states of mind and to switch off or step back from the world whenever you need to.

The various parts of your human mechanism often vibrate at many different frequencies, which can cause interference with clear thought and make the silence of mind required for Cognition more difficult to achieve. You may have experienced this as a kind of inner noise: a feeling of being pulled in different directions at once, of finding it impossible to settle even when you genuinely want to. This is not a weakness or lack of discipline. It is the natural result of a system that has not yet been brought into harmony or one in which you have developed sufficient control.

Your goal is not the suppression of mental activity, but rather aligning the different parts of your system so that a state of inner stillness becomes accessible. The activities and guidance provided by The Life Force Institute will assist you in achieving this and reaching a more complete state of Cognition.

One of the most practical benefits of Cognition is its effect on your daily mental experience. You move through many different mental states throughout the course of a day or even sometimes within a few minutes. Most people accept this fluctuation as how the mind works and passively ride along without any ability to redirect it. Cognition can change this relationship. Through regular practice, you develop the capacity to recognise how your mind is functioning and at what level it is currently operating. You learn to quieten the reactive surface of ordinary thinking and actively change to a different level of thinking. You also learn to step back from demands when your mental and physical resources need rest, not through avoidance, but through a practised ability to find stillness at will and to realise when you need to recharge.

The quality of your decisions, your relationships, your work, and your health are all influenced by the mental level from which they arise. It should seem self-evident that a decision made from anxiety produces different results from a decision made from calm clarity. A conversation held from a defensive emotional state is very different from one held from a balanced position. Cognition builds the foundation for you to operate from the higher, less reactive mental levels more consistently, not as an occasional chance occurrence, but as something you actively choose.

Stillness of Mind with Purpose

Cognition at a deeper level is the practice of releasing yourself from material worries and upsets by entering into a tranquil state. As you do, your energy vibration moves into a more refined and less emotional state. Cognition quietens the mind and instils calmness, and it surpasses ordinary meditation by providing a purpose to hold the thoughts of your mind in check. Without the mind being tasked with a purpose, you may encounter problems meditating or sticking to the practice, as the passive intellect will continually bring forward thoughts, emotions, and feelings of its own.

When you enter Cognition correctly, the habitual noise of your mind recedes, and the space that opens is not empty. Insights that were previously obscured by your mental activity may begin to emerge. Your perceptions sharpen. There is a quality of alertness that grows, which is different from ordinary wakefulness: cleaner, more open and less reactive. Accessing the energies of your Life Force through Cognition moves you out of the patterns of your passive intellect, freeing you from mental and emotional limitations. This is the place from which higher awareness and your intuition become accessible.

One of the less immediately obvious benefits of Cognition practice is what it shows you about your mind. Through a dedicated purpose, you can become a true observer within, gaining the ability to observe your mental and emotional patterns without being pulled into them. You can notice a familiar anxiety arising without it taking over. You can observe an old habit of thinking without identifying with it fully. This capacity for conscious observation, seeing your emotional responses and thought patterns as objects of awareness rather than as your identity, is one of the more meaningful developments that Cognition achieves. It is not suppression. The thoughts and emotions are still present; you have discovered how to change your mental wavelengths, staying calm, balanced, and in control.

Over time, the application of Cognition and learning to become the observer shifts the relationship between you and your mind. Instead of the mind, with its fluctuating emotions and reactions, being the effective master of your life, you begin to reclaim that position. Cognition can teach the mind, patiently and through consistent practice, who is in charge, allowing you to govern your mind, emotions, and feelings rather than them governing you.

Cognition is a journey into the silence of your mind with a purpose, allowing you to activate your Life Force energies, reach higher levels of awareness, and develop an understanding of the many states and levels within creation.  In this way, Cognition awakens capacities that have often remained dormant within your minds. In this, your intuitive perception sharpens. Creative thinking becomes much easier to achieve and problem-solving draws on a broader range of awareness than the analytical surface mind alone can access. The active intellect, which you may have trained through practice, begins to work in harmony with the deeper knowing that sits beneath it. These are practical developments with real consequences in how you live, how you relate to others, how you handle difficulties, and how clearly you can perceive what is actually in front of you rather than what your reactive mind insists is there.

Beginning the Practice

Cognition is not something you either can or cannot do. It is something you learn, and learning it takes time, honest self-observation, and a willingness to apply the tools consistently even when the mind resists. What you bring is your intention and your practice. No one else can do this for you; your progress or stagnation is yours to determine.

Start where you are. The mind you have right now, however scattered or reactive it may feel at this moment, is the instrument you are working with and the only one you have. Cognition does not ask for a perfected mind before you begin. It is the practice itself that gradually brings the mind toward something steadier and clearer. Ekagrata and creative imagery are your instruments. The activities and guidance at The Life Force Institute provide the structure and direction for their application.