4 – Doors In The Mind
"'Mind your mind."
To know yourself and to always be the sole master of your own thoughts.
It is based on the philosophy that logic is perception, and nothing can compete with the power of self-belief. For example, you cannot convince a sentient being that they do not exist. To empower your mind you must employ the same principle: to conquer another's mind you must know that your mind is stronger than theirs. And to protect your mind from invasion, you must do more than believe-- you must know, in every fiber of your physical body and every room of your mental house, that you are who you are, and no one rules here but you. It is the power of realization of self.
Yamanaka children are taught to organize their minds in terms of rooms. Your mind is your house, and guard it well. It began with the centermost room, the Dogan. From this one's consciousness connects to one's body. To move every muscle, to pump lifeblood through the warrior's heart, to send air through the lungs to fill the chest, to send waves of charka out beyond yourself: all these things were controlled in that central room—the heart of the mind, as it were. The appearance of the room often changed with emotions: sometimes it was a cave, and sometimes it was a tree house, and sometimes it was library.
From the Dogan one could take three doors. One door lead to memory, which stretched beyond the conscious into the unconscious, and further still to the lost fleeting thoughts of infanthood. This door was to be guarded always. The second door lead to imagination, to dreams of the future and plans both great and small. This door was passed through often, whether it be to ponder what life held in store or to sort out the answer to a riddle on a cereal box, for with imagination came creativity. And with creativity came fear, for fear was just another kind of imagination. The last door was the door least accessed and most fiercely protected. It was the door out.
Yamanaka children are not born able to conceive of the third door. They try and try but they can never hold it in their thoughts, never give it form and shape. It does not come to them until they learn the first jutsu of their clan, the jutsu of projection called "Winged Self." A precursor to "Shintenshin no Jutsu", the "Winged Self" allows your consciousness to separate from your body, without a precise destination in mind. And it is with this first separation that the third door of the mind is created-- because if one wishes to travel, there must first be a way that is open.
Yamanaka children are taught that the mind is a fortress, a castle, a house, and guarding the house, guarding the mind, is paramount. After a Yamanaka ninja completes the first jutsu of the clan, she begins extensive mental training to protect this new weakness. For while a door is not needed to enter an average person's mind, if a door has been created then forever after that door is the only method of passage to that mind, and a door that leads outward leads inward too.
Mind your mind, they tell little Ino, then you will learn to conquer others.
The concept of a Dogan and halls of memories and dreams is not restricted to the Yamanaka clan, although they remain the only family in Konoha to refine the concept and practice it till they temper their minds to a fine and lethal tool. It is an idea that comes easily to sentient beings, and other humans create their own versions of it sometimes with no training at all. The Konoha village has its share of these—
—the last great scion of Uchiha saw his mind as a desert meeting an ocean, and pulled his victims into this wasteland with a steady gaze of blood red eyes—
—a young girl of a civilian family but a ninja heart shared her fortress with aspects of herself, where she was often at war; her mind was no good for conquering, because to conquer a divided mind required a level of mental discipline that few achieved in their own houses, much less another's—
—and deep on the fringes of the society of The Leaf People, a little boy lived with a mind of tunnels and traps, and below his version of the Dogan lay a maze so vast it could imprison a god—
—but they are few and far between, for who but the eccentric Yamanaka clan, small and not particularly noteworthy or famous, would view a partitioned mind something to aspire to?