Tapir
A tapir is a large, piglike browsing mammal, that has a short, prehensile snout, smallish ears and eyes. If you want to go see some tapirs, you'll find that they inhabit the jungle and forest regions that cover much of South America. But why on earth are we talking about tapirs when this is supposed to be an article on getting active and improving out lives?
Good question, and one which hopefully will be answered by use of metaphor.
A tapir is an animal that, in a similar manner to a pig roots around in the dirt for whatever roots and scraps of food it can find. It only knows this way of life and as far as it is concerned that is all life will ever be to it. It may get lucky and find a mate and have offspring, raise them and when they have matured, let them go on their merry way. But all life will ever be is what it has and it will never have more than that. Why is this?
This is because the tapir only knows this way of life. It has a built-in, instinctive program or conditioning if you will, that determines how it will live its life.
Humans are not like tapirs. Although when you look around you and observe the way that many live their lives, you may begin to wonder how different they are from those tapirs, busy doing little more than rooting around in the dirt.
What makes us different from the tapir is our brain, or more specifically, our mind. Just about everything else can be found in both humans and tapirs. Even though we look different, inside we're not so different.
The Human Mind
With our human mind, we are able to think, reason, learn and understand. tapirs can only act on instinctual behaviour patterns that are programmed into it. But humans can do so much more than that, merely by dint of having a mind that is infinitely more powerful.
Because we can reason, learn and think for ourselves, we have at our disposal the post powerful asset of any living thing on this planet. It is our minds that separate us from all other animals and places us at the very top of the food chain. It is with our minds that we create things to make our lives easier, more comfortable and safer for us and our families. It is our minds that were used to first imagine all the things we have today so that we could then fashion them with our hands. Later, we built machines to do the making and so could build better things. Today, you only have to look around at the marvels of invention that we use and often take for granted, to see just how incredible are our minds.
The problem is that no one uses their minds to their fullest potential. A very few enlightened people have used a theirs to invent and create the things we have today.
Like Marconi, who realized that there were radio waves that could be used to transmit signals containing human speech around the world without the aid of wires. He invented the radio, but not before he was thrown into a mental asylum for his ideas that "sane, intelligent" people deemed him a crazy man.
Like Bell, who realized that we could use wires to talk to each other and there came by the invention of the telephone.
Like the Wright Brothers who manned the first powered flight for those precious few minutes and opened up a whole new mode to travel for us. They were treated as heretics for their beliefs by so-called intelligent people.
Like Galileo, who turned his makeshift telescope to the heavens and saw that there were other worlds up there in the sky. He was imprisoned for what he revealed and called a blasphemer.
Or like Thomas Edison who conceived the first electric light bulb (among many other ground-breaking inventions) that lit up our homes at night.
There are many examples of people who came by inventions that improved our lives immeasurably and moved our race further along the evolutionary ladder. By they didn't just come by these inventions. They weren't handed to them on a plate. They had to conceive them first before they could invent them. And they conceived them with their minds. They used their imaginations and pictured or visualized what they wanted to see come into form. And then, once they had created those things in their imagination, there were then able to create them in the material sense.
So what are you doing to use your mind for good? Are you improving your life and the lives of those around you by using that incredible gift that you have been given (your mind, your imagination, your essence)? Or are you still rooting around in the dirt like our friend the tapir?
Further articles will explore these ideas and take a look at how you can get out of a "tapir" mindset and get into a creative mindset where you actually start using your mind, maybe for the very first time in your life!
