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The Mental Tree
Bob Graham has been known around New Orleans for a long time as a world-class artist and a vagabond with a story to share. However, he is also a deep thinker and philosophical man with years of study in spirituality, wellness, and eastern religions. In this book, he combines his visually-oriented sense of awareness with his spirituality to create a form of wellness and self-concept dubbed the “mental tree.”
The great grandson son of a Scottish immigrant who founded a church in small-town Texas, Bob was raised in a traditional Christian environment. Despite being the leader of the local Church youth group, he knew that he marched to the beat of a different spiritual drummer at a young age.
Graham searched far and wide in an era when spirituality was in vogue. He joined an ashram in Atlanta and co-ran a commune in Cincinnati, before landing in India where he picked up the collected works of Ramana Maharshi who introduced him to the concept of non-dualism and transformed his life and turned him onto seminal yoga texts such as Patanjali and Swami Vivekananda.
A master of spatial intelligence, Graham doesn’t just write about the mental tree but draws it out in intricate detail. The mental tree has three main branches-physical, emotional, and moral- from which he spells out anything and everything that affects a person’s self-concept and the world around them.
In the mental branch, for example, he lays out the interconnectedness between dreaming, logic, ego, intuition, devotion to truth and many other elements of a person’s personality. It’s a fascinating way to get the viewer to reconsider the organization of their mind and the priorities therein. Graham encourages the reader
At the center of this is the idea that the entire world around the person is a product of the thinker.
“Nature is a vast undifferentiated potential of possible ideas. It is not the same as the ‘World’. The World is a set of ideas that interconnect and are to a large degree shared with other people….In fact, it requires a world in which to exist and a person, me, to inhabit that world. That world is entirely in my mind,” he writes.
If the world is created by the thinker, than the tools of yoga that Graham preaches are what Graham refers to as such: “Yoga is a preparation for vigilance against the affliction of thought.” “The Mental Tree” is a valuable tool for reframing those thoughts.
The great grandson son of a Scottish immigrant who founded a church in small-town Texas, Bob was raised in a traditional Christian environment. Despite being the leader of the local Church youth group, he knew that he marched to the beat of a different spiritual drummer at a young age.
Graham searched far and wide in an era when spirituality was in vogue. He joined an ashram in Atlanta and co-ran a commune in Cincinnati, before landing in India where he picked up the collected works of Ramana Maharshi who introduced him to the concept of non-dualism and transformed his life and turned him onto seminal yoga texts such as Patanjali and Swami Vivekananda.
A master of spatial intelligence, Graham doesn’t just write about the mental tree but draws it out in intricate detail. The mental tree has three main branches-physical, emotional, and moral- from which he spells out anything and everything that affects a person’s self-concept and the world around them.
In the mental branch, for example, he lays out the interconnectedness between dreaming, logic, ego, intuition, devotion to truth and many other elements of a person’s personality. It’s a fascinating way to get the viewer to reconsider the organization of their mind and the priorities therein. Graham encourages the reader
At the center of this is the idea that the entire world around the person is a product of the thinker.
“Nature is a vast undifferentiated potential of possible ideas. It is not the same as the ‘World’. The World is a set of ideas that interconnect and are to a large degree shared with other people….In fact, it requires a world in which to exist and a person, me, to inhabit that world. That world is entirely in my mind,” he writes.
If the world is created by the thinker, than the tools of yoga that Graham preaches are what Graham refers to as such: “Yoga is a preparation for vigilance against the affliction of thought.” “The Mental Tree” is a valuable tool for reframing those thoughts.
72 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 17, 2020
About the author
Bob Graham
96 books3 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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