Which Brain, Which Mind?
Starting in later January 2007, for days I/we wended our way through books, magazines, and articles about science, scientists, evolution, and the scientific method, some of which we’d already read. “We” also watched video tapes about evolution and the lives of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. Then, using a feeling tone of appropriateness for that time, we set aside some of the related books and other materials to be explored more thoroughly later on. They included books containing overall worldviews from prominent current-day scientists, and would mean extensive studies.
Next an additional new chapter emerged, to include a group of materials which seemed significant at that point. To start off, there was an article wherein the author wrote that we humans don’t feel we are our bodies, rather we feel we occupy them, possess them, and own them. Now I think that’s an interesting perspective, and again I question who/what is the I being talked about here. That article connected with materials I wrote about in a previous chapter, “Moving On,” describing a current-day cultural worldview that we are our brains, out of which consciousness emerges.
Another article was from the January/February 2007 AARP magazine, highlighting best-selling science writer Daniel Goleman’s new book, Social Intelligence. Goleman is saying the brain itself is social, a conclusion drawn from scientifically observed brain activity. He goes on to say that one person’s inner state affects and drives the other person, and we can catch other’s emotions like a cold. As I understand it, these interactions can be positive, negative, and a mixture of both.
Then one of Oprah Winfrey’s daytime television programs in early February was about the book and DVD, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. The secret is said to be the law of attraction, the law by which we are creating our lives, where like attracts like, based upon what we’re thinking and feeling. I heard Oprah say she’s lived by this. There was a panel of people who talked about these concepts from various angles.
And all the above leads me to a written transcript I sent for from a Diane Rehm NPR interview on January 31, 2007, with Sharon Begley, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. Begley’s book is talking about a groundbreaking collaboration between neuroscience and Buddhism. Diane Rehm began her interview by saying we have the power to shape our own brains.
As background, my interest and relationship with Buddhism began in the Sierras in 1976 when I began to explore what had been taking place culturally in the realm of spirituality. In those years, after we settled in our new locale, it didn’t take Jim and I very long to gravitate to a nearby yogic ashram. This was a natural outgrowth for me personally, stemming from my years of practicing hatha yoga starting in the summer of 1967, when I began taking weekly classes at the local YMCA. At the time I was immersed in a very difficult divorce process, and in subsequent years I felt that yoga quite likely saved my life. (It was within its comforting environment that I began to purposely go inside, while removing my conscious connections from external stimuli.)
In addition to Jim and my Sierra yogic ashram experiences in 1976, at home I began to experiment with some Zen Buddhist patterns of intuitive direct knowing, as I interpreted them. That started a decades-long process of playing with many Buddhist designs. Even though I have never formally taken a class or workshop that is Buddhist-based, I've read a lot of books about various forms of Buddhism, done my own experimentation with some of the patterns, including meditations, and have read many accounts of how others have translated what they have learned into their daily lives.
From the time when I read a small paperback book by Joseph Gaer in 1976, titled What the Great Religions Believe, I was impressed with the Buddha’s Eightfold Path: right belief, right resolve, right speech, right behavior, right occupation, right effort, right contemplation, and right concentration. And over the years I’ve admired the Buddha as a designer, a craftsman of what I consider to be a well-done and coordinated belief structure, one that also emphasized Loving-Kindness and Compassion for others.
Then in 2001 I read religious scholar Karen Armstrong’s recently published book, Buddha. She placed the Buddha’s life into the context of his culture at that time, and the active choices he made. Her book also described what was happening in other cultures. According to Armstrong, after earlier explorations, Gotama had been trying to find a new way of being human, insisting that vaster states are entirely natural to humanity. One emphasis in his quest was “mindfulness,” where he continuously focused on being aware of the ebb and flow of his thoughts and feelings. He concluded that the personality had no fixed or changeless core. His goal was to develop a procedure for achieving liberation from the human suffering he saw everywhere.
It is said that in later years the Buddha claimed that the new yogic method he had developed (out of his search and explorations), brought to birth a wholly different kind of human being, one who was not dominated by craving, greed, and egotism. That is, from his point of view he was teaching men and women how to reach beyond, and awaken themselves to their full potential. His emphases were upon personal explorations and practical, effective results. He refused to affirm a Supreme Being (such as was conceptualized during his era).
Back to 2007 and the written transcript I sent for from Diane Rehm‘s interview with Sharon Begley, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. Begley was introduced as a science columnist for the Wall Street Journal. The book’s foreword was written by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader who has been living in exile in northern India. He has a long history of being fascinated with science and technology.
Many years ago, when I first read accounts about Western scientists and others who were meeting with the Dalai Lama, I was intrigued as the various Western and Eastern worldviews were presented in conversations. And over the years, I’ve read some of the books the Dalai Lama has written. What I’m seeing is an interrelated connection with Daniel Goleman, mentioned earlier, who was one of the Westerners participating in cross-culture conversations with the Dalai Lama. Furthermore, Goleman wrote the preface for Begley’s book. Sharon Begley said she too has been a participant in one of those conversations with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala.
Returning to The Diane Rehm Show transcript from January 31, 2007, Begley said the Dalai Lama has been encouraging monks and others around him to volunteer for scientific experiments in which they meditate and their brains are analyzed (using current-day scientific imaging tools).
Refuting previous claims that the brain is hard-wired, Begley stated that through Buddhist mental training the Dalai Lama has been able to essentially eliminate emotions such as anger, jealousy, and hatred from his personal experience. That is, they just don’t arise. Later in the Rehm program a caller asked about denial or repression, where negative thoughts simply stay in the unconscious. Begley answered by looking at the capacity for empathy, altruism, calm, and openness among those she had met in the Tibetan Buddhist community.
My perspective about the Dalai Lama is that he has spent and spends many hours every day in extensive meditation and prayer, in addition to previous decades of studies and practices. I certainly do not see myself comparable to him. Nonetheless, my personal experience is that the results of the combination of emphases I have made—effectively removing most oppositional duality, hierarchies, One Truth, and fears, including emptying everything at least once daily from my psychic structure and body organism—I rarely experience what are culturally described as negative emotions, and if I do they are minor. When such an emotion arises, after being aware of my experience and getting the appropriate messages I can from it, I know how to effectively let it and the associated thoughts all go into the open field of divinity, as energy to be used in other ways.
Begley talked about “mindfulness” and mindfulness meditation, where an individual steps back like a third party observer from their thoughts. These have certainly been very effective tools and processes in my Life!
From my point of view, there‘s a lot more in The Diane Rehm Show interview with Sharon Begley that is valuable, including “neuroplasticity,” which means being able to change one’s brain processes, and other interesting perspectives.
The title of this chapter is “Which Brain, Which Mind?” Here again, I see everything we humans set forth as potentially a conscious spirit-being choice—that is, which me, which matrix, which wavelength, and which reality am I deciding to energize? And what concepts of mind and brain do I choose to empower?
My personal choice at present is to see the mind and brain as connected, with a flow back and forth within a DCIO reality, where everything is freshly opened up to what emerges, while continuing to explore what my body organism is basically.
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