We’ve all heard of the five senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. It is with these five senses that we interact and communicate with our environment.
But how many of us have heard of the six faculties of the mind?
Here are the six faculties in order of vibrational frequency:
Will
Memory
Perception
Reason
Intuition
Imagination
Will: The Will is the first of these faculties and is at the lowest vibrational frequency. It is first for a very important and significant reason; the will is our ability to choose. It is our ability to focus, to concentrate, to commit to something or someone. Courage, loyalty, discipline and perseverance are all a part of the will. If we didn’t have the will as the first of our mental faculties, we would probably just sit around like a vegetable and do nothing. We use our will to set our direction and determination to do things.
Memory: As human beings, we all have perfect memories! Everything that has ever happened to us, around us or by us is permanently fixed in our memories. We haven’t forgotten anything! We may not have developed the ability to recall all of those memories, but they are there! And we can develop the ability to recall things better, quicker and more reliably by developing our memories.
Perception: I mentioned the five senses and stated that it is through our senses that we interact with and communicate with our environment. But do we really see with our eyes? Or do we hear with our ears? The answer is, “no, we don’t”. We see through our eyes and we hear through our ears, but we see with our mind and we hear with our mind. It is our mind that perceives what is seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelled. Two people can be in a room, experiencing the same sensory inputs and describe completely different perceptions of what is going on. And perception uses memory to help it in the very process of perceiving. It has been stated that if we will allow ourselves to add someone else’s perception to our own, we will actually increase our own intelligence. This doesn’t mean that we necessarily agree with the other person’s perception, but that we can see it from their point of view.
Reason: This is the first of our mental faculties that involves the mental activity that we call intelligence. Our ability to reason, to use both inductive and deductive logic, is a very important mental faculty. This is where we “connect the dots” and figure things out. It’s an important aspect of our mental faculties, but it is still on a lower vibrational frequency than the last two of the six mental faculties.
Intuition: This faculty could be described as being very much like the “action at a distance” that is studied in physics. Albert Einstein called action at a distance, “spooky”, where two or more things influence and affect each other at speeds faster than light. Intuition, just like action at a distance, is the interaction of two objects which are separated in space with no known mediator of the interaction. Intuition has to do with pure energy and the perception of that pure energy. The fascinating thing about pure energy is that it never lies; it just is. As we develop our intuitive faculty, we can come closer and closer to the answers we seek. We ALL have an intuitive faculty. And we can ALL develop and increase our ability to use it.
Imagination: Napolean Hill called imagination, “the most marvelous, miraculous, inconceivably powerful force that the world has ever known.”. And Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” We have the ability to think independent of circumstance. At any moment, we can imagine ourselves somewhere else, doing something else. Creativity and vision are both aspects of the imagination.
Each of these six mental faculties is important. No one of them is better than or more important than any of the others. And like all physical faculties, they can be neglected, forgotten and allowed to waste away. Whatever we don’t use, we lose. But the other side of that coin says that each of these mental faculties can be developed, strengthened and improved. Whatever we use, we strengthen. By being aware of these faculties, and by exercising the first one, the will, to get us started, we can raise each of these faculties to higher and higher levels.
Coupling these mental faculties with the physical faculties we possess, we can DO great things in this world!
