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Archive for the category “meta-choice”

01 May 2012

TBM36: Fix the Brain, Love the Soul

If you want to fry your brain and turn yourself into a person who’s incapable of living a life filled with empathy, forgiveness, healing, and humbleness, you can choose to follow the instructions given by Neale Donald Walsch in his bestselling Conversations with God series of books. Although Walsch apparently no longer claims his “dialogues” are channelled, he still maintains they’re “inspired” by God. A lot of people have read these books and been gravely misled by his claims. I ought to know. I was once one of the naive spiritual seekers who trusted his words about non-judgment and re-creating myself and being part of a great Oneness that’s really just God experiencing himself in different ways.

In Book 2 of Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 1997), Walsch is musing on the question of how he should relate to disadvantaged people. His “inspired” dialoguing partner (i.e. God) says this in reply:

“Now, within that context, when you come across a person who appears, in relative terms as observed within your world, to be disadvantaged, the first question you have to ask is: Who am I and who do I choose to be, in relationship to that?

In other words, the first question when you encounter another in any circumstance should always be: What do I want here?

Did you hear that? Your first question, always, must be: What do I want here? — not: What does the other person want here?

. . . the reason your relationships are in such a mess is that you’re always trying to figure out what the other person wants and what other people want — instead of what you truly want. Then you have to decide whether to give it to them . . . . In this game of I’ll Trade You, you set up a very delicate balance. You meet my needs and I’ll meet yours.

. . . [yet] the purpose of your Holy Relationship with every other person, place, or thing is not to figure out what they want or need, but what you require or desire now in order to grow, in order to be Who you want to Be.

That is why I created Relationship to other things. If it weren’t for this, you could have continued to live in a vacuum, a void, the Eternal Allness whence you came.

Yet in the Allness you simply are and cannot experience your “awareness” as anything in particular because, in the Allness, there is nothing you are not.

So I devised a way for you to create anew, and Know, Who You Are in your experience. I did this by providing you with:

1. Relativity — a system wherein you could exist as a thing in relationship to something else.

2. Forgetfulness — a process by which you willingly submit to total amnesia, so that you can not know that relativity is a mere trick, and that you are All of It.

3. Consciousness — a state of Being in which you grow until you reach full awareness, then becoming a True and Living God, creating and experiencing your own reality, expanding and exploring that reality, changing and re-creating that reality as you stretch your consciousness to new limits — or shall we say, to no limit (pages 157-158).”

This quote is the essence of what Walsch repeats in a barrage of clever words and cliches spread over many books. Again and again he insists there’s no “right or wrong,” no objective moral Truth you must obey. You are a spark of God, says Walsch (though I can’t say for certain that Walsch ever uses the Gnostic term “spark”) and your job is to decide who you want to be and then go into the world and continually re-create yourself without being afraid that you’re doing something wrong or immoral. In fact, says Walsch, your only real responsibility is to embrace your “right to be right.”

But . . . if Walsch decries the human tendency to decide what’s right and wrong, then surely he would also object to a person who claims “the right to be right.”

Right?

Let me ask you this . . . What does it mean to you that Walsch uses no references to other researchers in his early books? (I haven’t read his later works, so can’t say for certain there are no such references in his later books.) What does it mean that he offers no back-up for his theories from science? Or from history? Or psychodynamic theory? Or biblical research? Or archaeology? Or pedagogical theory? Or neuroscience? Or even from the dubious annals of mysticism?

If Walsch isn’t a scientific researcher, and he isn’t a theological or religious scholar, and he says he isn’t even a bona fide channeller, then what the hell is he? Where did he get his theories, and what is the nature of his own personal meta-choice?

What gave him the right to mislead readers and imply through deliberate repetition (not to mention the titles of his books!) that two consciousnesses are having a dialogue in written form through the medium of his books: the narrator (Walsch) and God?

Did God get a say in these books? I’m thinkin’ not. I’m thinkin’ that Walsch likes the sound of his own voice. I’m thinkin’ that Walsch loves the story he’s created for himself about who God is and who you are. I’m thinkin’ he’s created an internal fantasy world to explain to himself why he felt “a vacuum, a void” earlier in his life. He’s come up with an explanation that works for him — an explanation that helps him avoid messy emotional issues like right and wrong, forgiveness, soul blueprint, empathy, and courage — and he’s telling everyone who’ll listen that he’s right about God and everybody else is wrong.

He’s also encouraging his readers to become self-absorbed, self-entitled, narcissistic brats who can be “anything you want to be” because fighting and clawing your way up the ladder of success is really just “the act of God being God . . . Me being Me — through you! (Walsch, page 159).”

A person who is continually redefining himself/herself — continually “re-creating” himself/herself, as Walsch describes it — is a person who has no strong internal sense of self. From a neuroscience point of view, this is a dangerous thing.

The most recent issue of Scientific American Mind (May/June 2012) has an excellent article by Carrie Arnold called “Inside the Wrong Body.” Despite the confusing title — the title makes me think of changelings! — it describes recent research into a little known human sense called interoception. Interoception is the awareness of the internal state of one’s own body — that is, an internal sense of self. Interoception relies on parts of the brain I’ve written of elsewhere in the context of boundary issues and relationships: the parietal lobes, the insular cortex, and the occipital lobes. These are the parts of the brain you can see on my own brain scan as being highly active in the normal baseline state of just kinda hangin’ and being relaxed (the so-called default network). These parts are normally active in my brain because I have a very strong internal sense of who I am and who I’m not. (Please see SPECT Scans of the Author’s Brain.)

When a person has difficulties with interoception (i.e. when the parietal lobes, the insular cortex, and the occipital lobes don’t work together the way they should in the healthy human brain) a number of dyfunctional behaviours arise. Those who lack a strong inner sense of self are very poor at consciously noticing their own pain, thirst, hunger, body temperature, and emotions. They don’t notice when they’re shivering with cold. They don’t notice they should go to bed and get some sleep unless they look at the clock. They often become obsessive about food and eating. (Hence a strong link to anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and body dysmorphic disorder). They don’t look after themselves unless they’re retaught as adults. (Interestingly, in a strict ascetic religious community, these people would be hailed as heroes and saints for denying the needs of the body — another example of the differences between traditional religion, which I don’t endorse, and the soul-and-science-based faith which I do endorse.)

Blowing with the Wind (c) JAT 2015

An even more insidious issue arises from interoception difficulties, however. As author Carrie Arnold reports, “Those who lack a keen awareness of their internal state also seem to be easily swayed by the opinions of others [emphasis added]. They may evaluate their goals and attributes based on how they think others perceive them rather than by their own standards (page 40).”

In other words, if you don’t know who you really are as a soul, if you can’t recognize yourself in a mirror, if you can’t stick to your own soul purpose and your own personal story, if you can’t work from your own inner set of sheet music and be proud of it, if you can’t see your own personal boundaries and your own deeply encoded sense of right and wrong, you’ll blow like a leaf in the wind for your entire adult life. You’ll never feel safe, you’ll never feel grounded, you’ll never feel proud of who you are because you’ve never allowed yourself to know who you are as a soul.

You have a story. You have a soul purpose. It’s not something you can “create” or “invent” as you go along. It’s hardwired into your DNA, and you can’t change it. Neither do you want to change it if you’re living your life from the core of your own selfdom — your soul. Your soul ain’t’ broke. So why try to fix it? It’s just your biological brain that ain’t working so hot. Fix the brain, love the soul. That’s one of my mottoes.

Neale Donald Walsch wants me to believe that God has given me the gifts of Relativity, Forgetfulness, and becoming a True and Living God. Thanks very much, Neale, but I’m real happy with my gifts of objective, non-relative, scientific reality, combined with full remembrance of God’s divine love and complete knowledge of my humbleness and courage and worthiness as one unique child of God among trillions and trillions of angelic children.

Panentheistic Oneness is seriously overrated.

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Posted in boundary issues, brain-soul connection, Gnosticism, intent, interoception, meta-choice, mysticism, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic, the right to be right and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

22 Apr 2012

TBM35: "The Right To Be Right?"

Two weeks ago I met with a woman named Linda who had asked me to do a Soul Purpose reading for her. I spent only 20 minutes talking with her face to face, but I can still feel the knives of anger and righteousness she stuck in my heart.

My meeting with Linda was a timely reminder of what it feels like — emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually — to try to talk to someone who is filled with righteous anger. You may as well be talking to a brick wall.

Let me describe this brick wall. It’s a wall that a person, either male or female, chooses to build brick by brick, layer by layer, inside his or her own brain to keep out all data, all memories, and all learning experiences related to empathy. This brick wall is a conscious construct. It is not, as so many people would like to insist, an involuntary process or a fluke of nature except where documented major head injury is involved (eg. a car accident, an assault, or a Phineas-Gage-type occurrence). The brick wall is built on purpose because the person in question has decided he or she doesn’t want to “hear” or “see” any information that would inconveniently contradict an internal set of beliefs.

The brain, as I’ve discussed before, operates like a symphony orchestra that needs both the sheet music (your meta-choice*) and the conductor (you and your conscious will, choices, and actions) to keep everything running smoothly. The brain cannot hold itself together without a solid set of sheet music for all the parts to follow. If you don’t give your brain an opportunity to work from the sheet music you were born with (your own Soul Purpose and Soul Blueprint), it will make up a set of sheet music. It will invent something. It will pick a story — a set of beliefs, a set of software instructions — and it will cling to that story for the simple scientific reason that any software is better than no software as far as the brain is concerned.

A brand new CPU loaded with all the latest memory and video card and wireless capability is a useless piece of junk until goal-specific software is loaded. The software tells the hardware how to handle incoming data, how to assess it and organize it and store it and use it. Without the software package, there’s no interface between the data and the hardware, no “meta-choice” to guide the processing of huge volumes of data. There’s no framework. There’s no sheet music. There’s no internal cookbook. There’s nothing to guide the processing.

The brain must have a coherent set of sheet music to follow. Otherwise, it can’t decide what to do with the vast amounts of data that come into the human brain every day — data from your hearing and your seeing and your movements and your relationships, etc.

The brain can’t keep everything. There just isn’t room. So it has to “triage” all the incoming data. It has to rank the data in terms of relevance and usefulness. It does this by comparing data at almost lightning speed to your internal software package, your internal set of sheet music, your internal set of beliefs. It compares the data to your meta-choice and then decides what data to keep (and where to store it) and what data to dump with the nightly trash pickup. (When you sleep, your brain is supposed to do its nightly mopping up of unwanted connections between brain cells — which is why you need a good night’s sleep every night if you want your brain to stay healthy.**)

So you can see why the story you tell yourself inside your own head is so important. The story you tell yourself about your own life — your meta-choice, your sheet music — is guiding the way in which your brain builds itself.

In other words, inside your own head, “your wish is your command.”

If you say endlessly to yourself that nobody loves you and nobody treats you fairly and nobody listens to you and you have a right to be angry and vengeful, then your own brain will respond at a scientific level to preserve the “truth” of your belief system. Your brain will do what you’ve told it to do. It will triage all incoming information. It will keep all data that seems to “prove” your belief that you’re a victim. It will dump everything else in the trash bin. At a scientific level, you literally won’t even “hear” or “see” the neighbour who is treating you with kindness. You’ll hear and see only what you want to hear and see, instead of what’s actually there. The brick wall you’ve erected around the Soul Circuitry of your own brain has no doors or windows in it through which you can feel another person’s heart. So you believe your own propaganda, and you walk around telling anyone who’ll listen how unfair life is. It’s like you’re living in your own little fantasy world.

I found this lone delphinium blooming away in the garden on November 5, 2014. No self-respecting Ontario delphinium flowers in November when the nights are cold and the leaves have already fallen (as you can see in the background). This perennial blooms in the warm weather of Ontario summers. Right? If you’re determined to be right, you’ll have to conclude that I doctored this photo. After all, delphiniums just don’t do that, right? It’s not normal, right? For the record, I didn’t doctor this photo. Photo (c) JAT 2014

It took me years to understand this simple biological reality. It took me years to understand that a person who has chosen righteous anger as a personal belief system is impervious to divine love. It took me years to understand that the last thing a righteous person wants to hear is anything resembling objective Truth or objective reality. His or her brain simply can’t handle it.

I’ve seen it said again and again by well-meaning (but untrained) spiritual teachers that if you always treat other people with unconditional kindness and never challenge other people’s beliefs (“turning the other cheek”), they’ll feel the truth of your love and they’ll be changed by it because everyone is already trying as hard as they can to be loving.

This. Is. Bullshit.

I treat everyone with unconditional forgiveness, but this requires me to be honest about their actual meta-choices. When I meet someone like Linda, whose meta-choice is righteous anger — in other words, someone who has an entrenched belief that “she has a right to be right” — I stop talking. I don’t try to persuade. I don’t try to cajole. I don’t try to sweet talk. There is nothing I can say that will penetrate the brick wall. I will defend myself. I will speak honestly in my own defence (as I did by e-mail when I got home from my painful meeting with Linda). I will speak honestly in defence of others. But I will not tell people such as Linda that all their beliefs are worthy of respect when some of those beliefs are abusive. Some belief systems really suck. It’s naive and not very loving for those on a spiritual path to pretend otherwise.

It’s not my job as a spiritual teacher to spare people’s feelings by hiding the Truth. If you want a teacher who’ll never ask you to wrestle with your own mistakes and your own belief systems, there are plenty of them out there who’ll take your money and never teach you a darned thing. Learning means change. Learning is only possible when you decide for yourself that you want to take charge of your own brain and your own ability to change. Learning means you’re willing and able to deal with new data that conflicts with your existing belief system.

No one has “a right to be right.” No one. This is why we have bodies of law written over time by large groups of people on a consensus basis (one hopes). No one is infallible. Not even famous religious leaders you may be thinking of. Democracy flourishes wherever individual leaders understand that the road to hell is paved with libertarianism.

As a human being, does God give you any rights? Of course. You have a right to be you (the real you, meaning your soul self, with your own individual quirks and traits). You have a right to use your own free will. You have a right to learn, change, grow, and love. You have a right to consider yourself worthy as a child of God. But you don’t have the right to assume that you have all the answers and that you don’t need anybody else and that you can do whatever the hell you want in this world because you think you’re right and everybody else is wrong.

Right now the newspapers are filled again with stories about Anders Breivik, the Norwegian psychopath who consciously set out to prove his “right to be right” last year by killing 77 strangers in cold blood. Perhaps you think this example is too extreme. After all, many people have filled their own heads with righteous anger, but only a few of them have gone out and actually killed someone.

Well, you know, physical assault and homicide aren’t the only ways to bring suffering into the world. Emotional and spiritual and intellectual assault also bring suffering into the world, and these effects far outlast most physical effects. Right now, Anders is trying to use his very public trial to continue inflicting harm on others.

People like Anders Breivik don’t turn themselves overnight into mass murderers or serial killers. They start small with righteous anger, and when they’re not challenged or corrected, their behaviour escalates. The belief system is allowed to grow like a cacophony of brittle drums inside the brain of “poor little Anders who must never be told he’s made a mistake because it might wound his self esteem.” Meanwhile poor little Anders never learns how to deal with his own emotions, and, more importantly, his own mistakes. He never learns he has a much more effective blueprint or set of sheet music inside his own DNA. He never learns how to use his own brain. So it runs amok, lost in the fantasy world of righteous anger he himself has created, unable at a scientific level to cope with any “conflicting data” at all.

Note, however, that Anders Breivik is not a stupid man. He’s fully capable of planning and organizing and getting what he wants. He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to deceive. He knows how to use anger. He knows how to manipulate other people’s guilt. He knows how to use technology. He knows how to use geography. He is not mentally incompetent in a medical sense.

He’s just very, very sure of his own rightness.

* For more on intent and meta-choices, see “Knowledge” versus “Truth” and Pelagius and Personal Responsibility

** For more on the importance of sleep to your brain’s health, please see Jason Castro’s article called “Sleep’s Secret Repairs” in the May/June 2012 issue of Scientific American Mind. See also “Perchance to Prune” by Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli in the August 2013 issue of Scientific American.

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Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, intent, meta-choice, psychopathy (niceness), soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic, the right to be right, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

13 Mar 2012

TBM27: Prayers Your Angels Will Refuse to Answer

Last time I said I’d talk about some of the ways in which your angels can help you. Many readers are not going to like this post.

Before you can understand the ways in which your angels can help you, you need to spend some time thinking about the ways in which your angels cannot help you.

This statement in itself will shock some people, because we’ve all been told again and again that God can do anything for us if we ask in the right way. Hence, the many books and workshops and rituals around prayer. We’ve been conditioned to believe that prayer is a powerful form of mystical energy, as it were, a powerful form of mystical energy that can change the world if properly invoked.

Indeed, so central is prayer to the experience of conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist Christianity that if you were to remove all the prayers from the worship services (e.g. the Anglican Book of Common Prayer), there’d be precious little left.

Which is exactly my point.

In a world where human beings are called upon to juggle the 4D needs of the soul and the 3D needs of the body in a balanced, holistic, seamless way, there’s something wrong with a religious experience that lets you off easy if you say a bunch of prayers. In most cases, you don’t even have to write the prayers yourself. You just have to copy what the prayer leader is saying!

Thutmose III offering two containers of incense to the god Amun. Reproduction from the 18th Dynasty (15th century BCE) original at Deir el-Bahri, Egypt, on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. The idea that you can open the door to God’s blessings by saying the right prayer or offering the right gift is very, very old. As Jesus tried to point out, the fact that a religious idea is old is no guarantee that it’s right.

I’ve taken university theology courses that teach prospective ministry students how to design worship services and write prayers, and believe me, there’s no great mystery involved. Ya just gotta follow the traditional prayer formulas and string together a lot of popular cliches about faith and peace and love, and, presto!, ya got yerself a pretty new prayer to recite on Sunday. Piece of cake.

The real question is, will God or your guardian angels pay any attention to you as you dutifully recite these prayers?

Well, this depends on two things. The first factor is your own personal intent or “meta-choice.”* The second factor is the relationship you already have with God. These two factors are intertwined with each other.

Maybe I should start by explaining that although I’m a practising mystic, I stopped praying to God years ago. In place of traditional prayer, I’ve learned to communicate with God.

But aren’t prayer and communication with God the same thing, you’re saying?

They’re only the same thing if (1) part of your personal meta-choice is to learn each day from your own mistakes and if (2) you have faith that God and God’s angels are going to intervene in your life whether or not you ask for help.

Prayer, as it’s traditionally understood, starts with the assumption that God hears and acts upon the words you say in prayer, but that until you actually “open your heart” by speaking the prayers, God is standing helplessly but hopefully on the other side of the divine door as he waits for you to ask.

In my rather large collection of books that contain what I feel are “toxic teachings,” I have a gem called Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To by Anthony DeStefano (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 2007). On the cover there’s a stamp that says, “Endorsed by the National Day of Prayer,” so right off the bat you can tell I’m going to have a problem with the content.

DeStefano outlines what he sees as the top ten questions people ask in their lives. He then offers a prayer you can use to answer each of these questions in turn.

So for the No. 1 Question — “I Wish I Could Believe” — DeStefano says you should use this prayer — “God, please show me that you exist” — again and again until “God starts to reveal himself to you (page 22).”

Says the author (pages 23-24):

“And it all starts with one simple prayer: God, please show me that you exist.

There is a beautiful nineteenth-century painting that illustrates this point well. It’s called The Light of the World. In it, Christ is shown holding a lantern, standing outside a little cottage on a dark, stormy night. He is knocking on the door of the home, waiting to be let in, but the occupant, unseen behind the door, does nothing. The figure of Christ, bathed in a golden green light, is supremely serene and looks as if he is prepared to stay outside the cottage door knocking forever. It is a striking image because of what it says about the light of truth in a dark world. But the really interesting thing about the painting is that there is a curious detail missing. If you look closely at the door of the home, you will see that there is not a knob or a latch anywhere to be found. Why? It can’t be that the artist forgot to put it in. Rather, he was making a sublime theological point: the door to the human heart can be opened only from the inside. God will never force his way in.”

Oh, let me swoon for the wonder of having a divine father who’ll stand outside knocking on a dark and stormy night because he cares whether or not I’m going to make it into heaven (page 4)! He cares what will happen to me on Judgment Day and doesn’t want me to have to go to Hell! Because he loves me sooooo much that he created all sorts of stupid things he can’t do anything about — things like Judgment Day and Atonement and angels that fall (like Satan) and Original Sin and Hell! I’m just so lucky that he cares enough to stand outside the door knocking, knocking, ever so patiently knocking!

Yeah, this sounds like Divine Love to me . . .

DeStefano thinks that after you open your heart to God, God will step through the door and into your heart. Once this happens, of course, you’ll become an instrument of God — which is Prayer No. 2 in this book. When you say repeatedly that you want God to make you an instrument (i.e. an empty vessel of service and “mercy”), what you’re actually asking for is religious humility. (Just so we’re clear on the intent of the “God, make me an instrument” prayer).

And then, because you’re now an empty vessel through whom God works, you have to use four of your “Top Ten” Prayers just to fill you up with various graces from God: “God, forgive me (No. 5). God, give me peace (No. 6). God, give me courage (no. 7). God, give me wisdom (No. 8).”

If you start your journey on the Spiral Path with the same assumptions that DeStefano advocates, you’re going to have some serious trouble understanding the messages of your own guardian angels. Why? Because angels don’t believe any of this shit. They’re operating from an entirely different set of truths, and they ain’t gonna budge on their truths, no matter how much you think they should.

Your angels know that God never enters your own core being, your own soul (i.e. “entering your heart,” as DeStefano describes it), because to do so would be a terrible violation of your own personal boundaries as a core consciousness and child of God. God is God, and you are you, and ne’er the twain shall meet. God will tap you on the shoulder. God will frequently hold your hand. God will sit beside you and talk to you for hours. God will sometimes pick you up and carry you for a while. But don’t EVER ask God to “come inside and fill you up,” because from God’s point of view this request feels like a creepy and incestuous form of contact. (Sorry to be so blunt, but you need to know what it feels like from God’s perspective, not from your status-addicted preacher’s perspective.) This is one of the few permanent rules you should keep in mind as you move forward on the Spiral Path: always treat God the Mother and God the Father in the respectful manner you’d treat your human parents. They’re your parents, not your lovers.

Your angels also know that it isn’t up to God or God’s angels to give you peace or courage or wisdom. You already have those strengths inside your core self, your own soul. Your job is not to ask to be given those things, but to ask how to remember those things which are already part of you.

(If this sounds like the plot of The Wizard of Oz, it’s because The Wizard of Oz has some timeless things to say about the spiritual journey.)

Third, your angels don’t wait for you to ask before they intervene in your life. They step in whenever and wherever they please. Why? Because they care about you, and they know it’s difficult and confusing to live as a 4D-soul-in-temporary-human-form.

If angels see a problem brewing, they don’t stand there knocking endlessly on the other side of the door (like Sheldon knocking on Penny’s door in The Big Bang Theory). I mean, what would be the good of that? Do you really want a guardian angel who stands there wringing his hands helplessly until you use the “right prayer,” the one with the “right mystical energy” that suddenly opens the door so God can walk in?

In my experience, angels don’t beat around the bush. They come right out and say what they’re thinking — even if (as is usually the case) you don’t want to hear it.

God and God’s angels are always talking. They’re a very chatty bunch, in fact. And they like to talk to each other — you know, pass along information about what you’re actually thinking and feeling instead of what you say you’re thinking and feeling.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, and a few of the people all of the time. But you can never, ever fool a guardian angel.

They always know your true intent. And they always have an opinion on your true intent. Which is a good thing, because this way they can guide you to the people and ideas and books (etc.) that can help you learn more about healing, forgiveness, and redemption.

As I said in an earlier post, angels aren’t wusses.

* For more on intent and meta-choices, see “Knowledge” Versus “Truth” and Pelagius and Personal Responsibility.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain-soul connection, ethical mysticism, free will, humility, intent, meta-choice, prayer, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic and tagged Divine Heart, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

22 Jun 2011

JR52: Pelagius and Personal Responsibility

A: In our discussions lately, you’ve been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility in the journey of healing and faith, and I’ve been waiting for somebody to jump up and accuse you of being a Pelagian. How do you feel about the Pelagian philosophy of free will?

For the record, Pelagius was born sometime in the late 300’s CE, and died around 418 CE. He and his followers drew vicious attacks from Augustine of Hippo and Jerome, and Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy in 431 CE.

J: Without getting too much into the details of the debate between Augustine and Pelagius on the nature of free will, I’d have to say that both of them were wrong.

A: How so?

J: Neither of them had a balanced view of what it means to be a human being. Augustine had no faith at all in the ability of human beings to consciously change their lives and their communities through human initiative. He thought people would be happier if they just accepted their miserable lot in life. Acceptance of Original Sin and concupiscence was the best they could hope for, in his view. His views on human nature have created no end of suffering for devout Christians over the centuries.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Pelagius preached the opposite extreme. He taught the path of spiritual ascent — anagogic mysticism — which says that people can achieve a state of holiness and perfection if they just try hard enough. He placed the entire burden on the individual. This is no less damaging to people’s lives than Augustine’s idea. Neither man understood — nor wanted to understand — that the path of healing and relationship with God is a path of balance. There must be a balance between personal responsibilities and group responsibilities, a balance between personal responsibilities and divine responsibilities. In particular, there must be a willingness on the part of individuals AND on the part of groups to be honest about their own limits. This honesty is the foundation of great strength for souls-in-human-form. Unfortunately, both Augustine and Pelagius hacked away at this foundation with all their might. They both snatched away a source of deep courage and strength for Christians, and insisted on despair and self-blame in its place. It was a cruel thing to do.

A: So your understanding of personal responsibility isn’t the same as what Pelagius taught.

J: It’s important to note that in the Peace Sequence we’ve been discussing, I’ve placed personal responsibility as the third “gear” in the sequence, not the first gear. Pelagius and others have tried to place personal responsibility in the first position on the Peace Sequence, not the third position. They’ve tried to equate free will with personal responsibility, as if they’re synonymous, as if they’re exactly the same thing. But they’re not.

A: Can you elaborate on that?

J: Personal responsibility is perhaps the most complex, most advanced skill set that human beings can learn during their lifetime here on Planet Earth. It’s not a single skill or a single choice. It’s what we referred to earlier as a “meta-choice” — a pasting together of several smaller choices into something bigger. A meta-choice is so well integrated, so cohesive, so holistic that it often seems like a single choice. But actually it’s a blend of several other choices. It’s a blend of the choice to be courageous, the choice to be empathetic, the choice to be humble, the choice to be intuitive, the choice to be well organized, and the choice to be self disciplined. It’s all those things together.

A: You mean . . . maturity. Emotional, psychological, and physical maturity.

J: Yes. It’s maturity. It’s individuation. It’s compassion. It’s Whole Brain Thinking.

A: Using the whole toolkit of the human brain instead of isolated parts of it.

J: The human brain has long been treated as a single organ, though really it’s an interconnected series of semi-autonomous sectors, each with its own specialized ability to “choose” on behalf of the whole. When all the different choices work together towards a common goal, the human brain works smoothly. If “feels” like a single whole, a single choice. But really it’s a combination of choices. When a person has arrived at the stage in life when he or she “gets” the concept of personal responsibility, it means his/her biological brain is working in a balanced, holistic way. The fruits of this long process should — if all goes well — START to be visible in the actions of people 16 to 18 years of age. The process isn’t normally complete, however, until about age 21 or 22. If all goes well.

A: Last week, after Vancouver lost to Boston in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals, large crowds of young people — many of them now identified as coming from “good” families — rioted in downtown Vancouver. There was a lot of looting and vandalism. Something tells me these young people haven’t developed the Whole Brain Thinking approach to personal responsibility.

J: There were some people in the crowd who stepped forward and did the right thing to protect others who were being beaten. These Good Samaritans are the individuals who instinctively know “the right thing to do” in a crisis. Their sense of personal responsibility, of right and wrong, of courage and compassion doesn’t desert them in an emergency. In fact, it may only be during an unexpected emergency that they themselves realize for the first time that they “get it.” They act first and ask questions later — fortunately for those they can help.

“Do not give what is holy to dogs, or they might throw them upon the manure pile. Do not throw pearls [to] swine, or they might make [mud] of it” (Gospel of Thomas 93). Jesus taught several centuries before either Augustine or Pelagius, so of course we don’t expect to see any reference to these later theologians in the Gospel of Thomas. On the other hand, Jesus had unflattering things to say about both the Pharisees and the Herodians, whose teachings resembled those of Augustine and Pelagius respectively. It seems likely that in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was using the metaphor of “dogs” to refer to the Pharisees and the metaphor of “swine” to refer to the Herodians. It seems Jesus wasn’t impressed with either group’s approach to God’s holy things. Recently, I visited a Toronto Conservatory where several generations of cardinals have learned to enter and exit through the automated roof openings so they can build nests for their young in a warm, safe place. These birds not only provide basic food and shelter for their offspring, but also, in this case, are teaching their young an unusual and complex skill set that calls upon them to maximize their latent potential without exceeding their limits. In other words, the parent cardinals are mentoring their offspring. Photo credit JAT 2017.

A: You’re saying that maturity — personal responsibility — is the product of many years of education and mentorship of children. Is that right?

J: Yes. Education is the first “gear” in the process, but education alone isn’t enough to guide a child towards maturity and personal responsibility.

A: As the well-educated youths who rioted in Vancouver proved all too well.

J: Along with education there must also be appropriate, mature mentorship. It’s the older mentors who are supposed to guide children in their emotional growth with firm, consistent, boundary-respecting compassionate tough love. Parents, grandparents, teachers, sports coaches, medical professionals, and many others can all be mentors for children if they so choose.

A: What about ministers and priests? Can they be mentors?

J: Ideally, yes. However, realistically speaking, they rarely are.

A: Why not?

J: Because most of them have deeply embraced either Augustine’s idea about human nature or Pelagius’s idea. Neither approach helps a young person learn how to find the balance they so desperately need. In addition, those ministers who try to inject balance into their youth work are also the ones most likely to have rejected the idea of the soul and the spiritual life. It’s lose-lose for ordained clerics.

A: Unless they’re willing to accept new doctrines of faith.

J: For that to happen, they’d have to apply their own God-given free will. It’s a choice each cleric will have to make on the basis of his or her own conscience. That’s what divine courage is all about.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Church of today, conscience & morality, empathy, free will, honesty, Jesus Redux, meta-choice, Original Sin, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged The Peace Sequence, Whole Brain Thinking | Leave a Comment

05 Jun 2011

JR47: "Knowledge" Versus "Truth"

A: Tell me how you would explain the difference between “knowledge” and “truth.” There seem to be a lot of different theories floating around.

J: Here’s one of the problems with relying too heavily on words. One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “truth.” One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “wisdom.” One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “fact.” Words can be very messy, very sloppy. It’s important for individuals to be clear about their use of abstract words like these.

A: Okay. How do you, as a soul-in-angel-form and speaker of the English language, use the word “knowledge”?

J: I use the word “knowledge” to mean an accumulation of facts. Lots of raw facts. These facts may or may not be connected to each other. But there are lots of them. Lots of different facts that can be accessed from memory or from sources such as books or computers to answer specific questions of fact.

A: Like the question and answer pairs on Jeopardy.

J: Exactly. These question and answer pairs rely on logic and reason. But there’s usually little emotional content. And there’s no need for “insight” or “understanding” or “truth.” The facts speak for themselves. Of course, as human Jeopardy contenders recently discovered, a honkin’ big computer can access raw facts — “knowledge” — faster than most human brains can.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear(respect) the Lord, and turn away from evil. It will be a healing for your flesh and a refreshment for your body” (Proverbs 3:5-8). If you really want to heal your relationship with God, try humbly accepting you probably have a lot of old beliefs that are messing up the way your brain works. Certain beliefs about God can “freeze up” your neural networks and prevent your brain from being able to process Divine guidance. Without easy access to your Divine guidance, you’re limited to the ideas inside your own brain. And let’s face it, some of those ideas are probably pretty stupid (like Young Earth Creationism). The Truth about you and God (a wonderful Truth!) is already deep within you, but first you have to melt the ice that’s keeping you from feeling your Soul pathways. Photo credit JAT 2022.

J (Cont): Having said that, I want to make it clear that I’m not dissing the importance of “knowledge.” It’s important to be able to remember and access facts. Facts give information about things that are already known, already certain — things that are “a done deal.” Facts help ground the learning process. In fact, learning can’t take place at all in the absence of facts. This is true even in fields such as philosophy and theology. The universe isn’t reinventing itself every few seconds like some big relativistic, existential “symbol” in the sky (as some religious philosophers would have you believe). There are fixed facts, fixed historical realities that guide all choices made by God and God’s angels. The universe has a history — a factual history — that can’t be changed. The universe’s past has a measurable effect on its present. The past matters. And the past is fact — not fiction. The past can’t be altered. Time is linear. Even for God.

A: This will come as a great disappointment to fans of time travel stories. And to theologians who insist that All Time has been known to God since the very beginning. God’s foreknowledge of all that will happen in the future is the basis of Christian “predestination” — the doctrine that says God already knows ahead of time who will be saved in the End Times.

J: Another example of old lies begetting new lies, as you put it. The first lie, of course, was the lie that souls desperately need to be saved from hell and judgment and damnation. But souls don’t need to be saved. Why would God create billions of defective souls that need to be saved by . . . televangelists? Salvation-of-the-soul is a goofy idea from start to finish.

A: But a very profitable one.

J: It’s an interesting fact of neurophysiology that certain forms of serious psychological dysfunction in human beings are accompanied by damage to the parietal lobes of the brain — parts of the brain which are crucial to a person’s ability to relate to time and space. When the volume of the parietal lobes is reduced, and when the density of glial cells is diminished in the parietal-temporal regions, an individual will experience problems understanding boundaries (i.e. his or her location in space) and problems with empathy (i.e his or her location in both time and space — also called boundary issues). These are the individuals who can’t learn from their own mistakes, who can’t empathize with other people’s feelings, who constantly invade other people’s “time and space.”

A: The narcissists.

J: Yes. A narcissist is someone who’s become inwardly focussed to the point of selfishness and self-absorption because he or she has no “brain health” in the areas of time and space — no ability to accurately identify the factual boundaries that surround each soul. She literally can’t see where she ends and another person begins. She can’t see that she’s a separate entity — a separate consciousness — from her neighbour. The boundaries between her and her neighbour exist and are real and are factual. But she can’t see them. It’s all blurry to her. The boundaries exist, but she behaves as if they don’t exist. She behaves as if she and her neighbour “are all one,” as if the neighbour is merely an extension of her own core consciousness. The neighbour, of course, is expected to “behave” — to obey her needs and wishes without question and to reinforce her image of herself as a wonderful person. There’s a perfect analogy for this mindset in the realm of science fiction: Star Trek’s hive queen of the Borg.

A: See, I knew there was good reason for me to be watching the Space Channel.

J: The great thing about the way the Borg Queen character is written is her calm, serene, elevated disposition. She believes her own propaganda about making life better for all the individuals she incorporates into her collective. She goes around telling everyone “we’re all one, we’re all equal.” But what she actually means is, “I’m the only one who really exists, and all you drones are merely inferior beings who were put here to serve me” . . . which brings us to the question of “truth.”

A: The way you’ve just described the Borg Queen reminds me — none too pleasantly — of the modern apocalyptic prophet I spent too much time with a few years ago: Grace. She was always speaking “the truth” that “we’re all one, we’re all equal.” She had the same calm, serene detachment as the Borg Queen. It gave her such an air of believability — even wisdom. She seemed to have let go of all her worries about the past. Very appealing to somebody like me who was dogged by feelings of guilt and shame.

She seemed so believable — until you challenged her. When you challenged Grace’s superiority, her infallibility, it was like a switch went off in her brain. She switched instantly from calm, affable charm to vicious, vengeful violence. The smallest thing could set her off. I still remember the murderous look in her eye one day when I told her that she herself had caused an electrical short in a lighting fixture by twisting the fan/light combo while it was still attached on one side to the ceiling. I could see that she wanted to throw me down the stairs because I’d pointed out her obvious error. The mistake was entirely hers. But she didn’t want to hear about it. She couldn’t handle responsibility for her own mistakes.

J: Good example — though painful. Grace was a person with significant impairment of her biological brain function, as you know. She was able to process “knowledge” — facts — well enough to function in society. She could remember that gas needed to be put in the car, that food had to be bought and prepared. But as for “truth” . . . “truth” was beyond her capacity to grasp because of damage to her biological brain from early, unhealed, profound childhood abuse. Physical, emotional, sexual, and psychological abuse. As a result of the abuse, and the biological damage caused by it, Grace couldn’t read “intent.” She couldn’t understand or be honest about her own inner intent. Her intent was to prove to other people that she was better than they were. That’s the honest truth. The truth is that everything Grace did — all her choices — were shaped by her narcissistic intent. Her words about “oneness” and “equality” meant nothing because her actual intent said something different.

A: So you’re drawing a strong link between “intent” and “truth.”

J: Very much so. Facts by themselves are not “truth,” though “truth” is not “truth” without a foundation of facts. Truth — as I’m defining it — is an observation or insight about the way in which seemingly random facts are linked together by underlying strands of intent. The intent is like the subfloor of the factual foundation. The facts lie on top of the intent. The truth builds on both the intent and the facts. For something to be “true” in a philosophical way, it must objectively assess both a collection of facts AND the underlying intent underneath those facts.

A: Are you saying that a person’s “intent” and his/her “starting assumptions” are the same thing?

J (shaking his head): No. A person’s inner intent is more like his inner “purpose” or “goal.” Your intent speaks to the principle of time — where you were in the past, where you are now, and where you want to go. It’s more like conscious motivation. It’s the motivation that gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps you going, even when things aren’t going well.

A: So it’s teleology?

J: Again, no. Teleology implies there’s a finite, definable end goal or a purpose shaped by the Law of Cause and Effect. “Intent” is not as simple as teleological purpose. “Intent” goes to the very heart of consciousness — what it means to exist as a living consciousness who is separate from (though connected to) other living consciousnesses. Intent can be thought of as a cohesive set of interconnected choices — a series of small choices that, when put together, create one big “meta-choice.” That “meta-choice” is your intent. At a quantum level, “meta-choices” shape the way in which certain energies can and will flow.

A: Can you give us an analogy for that?

J: Sure. I’ll use an analogy I’ve used before — the sower of seeds.

A: I think I see where this is headed . . .

J: In the parable of the sower [Thomas 9; Mark 4], the person — the soul — is the sower of seeds. The seeds represent the person’s potential, the person’s ability to learn, grow, change, and create. But the sower doesn’t create out of thin air. He must plant the seeds — the seeds of potential — in the right place if he wants them to grow. His decision on where to sow the seeds is his intent — his “meta-choice.” The meta-choice is what determines which seeds can and will grow. The seeds don’t grow equally well in all intents. Where seeds fall on a “ground” or “subfloor” of rock, they fail to root and they produce no harvest. Where seeds fall on patches of thorny weeds, they don’t grow and they’re eaten by grubs and caterpillars. There’s nothing wrong with the seeds themselves. The problem lies in the choice of where to plant them. The problem lies with the intent.

A: So a narcissist’s true intent is like the choice to sow seeds on rocky ground or in thorny patches.

J: Or in a bed of fire, as the church likes to recommend.

Seeds don’t grow easily on this rocky ground. “Jesus said: Look, there was a man who came out to sow seed. He filled his hand with seed and threw it about. Some fell onto the road, and birds ate it. Some fell onto rocks and could not root and produced no grain. Some fell into patches of thorny weeds that kept it from growing, and grubs ate it. Some seed fell upon good soil and grew and produced good grain. It was 60 units per measure and 120 units per measure (Gospel of Thomas 9).” Photo credit JAT 2023.

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Posted in "4 S's", boundary issues, empathy, End Times, Gospel of Mark, insight, intent, Jesus Redux, meta-choice, monism, My Spiral Path, narcissism, parables, sense of time & timing, Truth and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

27 Apr 2011

TBM12: Finding the Words of Your Own Promise

Daisies (c) JAT 2014

In my last post (Four Basic Practices to Get You Started), I introduced the idea that every day you need to repeat the promise you’ve written to yourself for yourself. Today I’d like to talk more about the promise part, since it’s the promise part that’s so central to the healing of your brain.

One thing that’s very important to understand so you can get yourself solidly planted on the Spiral Path is this: you’re only being asked to write and repeat one promise. The problem today is that almost everybody has too many ideas and too many lists and too many “shoulds” in their heads. This is a big part of the reason for the brain’s overall lack of coordination and balance — there are too many sets of instructions, and the biological brain can’t make sense of it all.

As I mentioned in the last post, you need to provide your brain (or rather I should say the semi-autonomous sectors of your brain) with some sheet music so your brain as a whole knows where it’s going. Your brain would really appreciate some consistency and simplicity! This is why it’s crucial to choose only one promise for now. After about a year (yes, a year) you can think about changing your promise. But if you’re like almost everyone else walking around on Planet Earth these days, you’ll need at least a year to get your brain committed to the new path you’re choosing. It’s a form of self-discipline to stick to only one promise. It’s also a form of integrity.

The promise you make to yourself for yourself will be the cornerstone of the new foundation you’re building for yourself, and you’ll be returning to it again and again in the way that people return again and again to a favourite prayer or mantra. In fact, your promise to yourself will be a positive, uplifting form of prayer — something for you to hang onto with all your might when the going gets tough.

Your personal promise doesn’t have to be long. In fact, shorter is better.

To give you an example, this is the promise I made to myself in the year 2000, the promise I made and stuck to no matter what: “I want to learn to love unconditionally the way you do.” The “you” I refer to in my promise is my guardian angel, whose intense and perfect love I was (and am) able to feel. I was awed and inspired by his love, by his ability to forgive, by his ability to guide me patiently and devotedly even when I was being a shithead. With his help it finally dawned on me that he actually believed I, too, was capable of remembering how to love and forgive! I had no idea exactly what it would feel like to be a loving and forgiving human being, so I decided the sensible thing to do was copy my guardian angel. I made a promise to myself (not to him, but to myself) that I would keep trying every day as hard as I could to learn how to love. I tenaciously held to this promise. There were days when this promise spoken morning and evening was the only thing I did that made any sense at all. But slowly, gradually, I started to notice some positive changes in my thinking patterns. (And, oh, thank God for that!)

What I didn’t know at the time, but what made a huge difference to my journey, was the focus of my promise. Somewhat accidentally, I made a promise to myself that my own soul could “get on board with.” Although the promise I made was very short in terms of the number of words it contained, it carried a lot of punch. It carried a lot of punch for the following reasons:

The promise was focussed on improving my relationships — no talk of status or acquisition of “health and wealth”.

The promise was positive and uplifting in tone — no talk of sin, salvation, or unworthiness before God.

The promise was honest — I was implicitly acknowledging the honest truth that I wasn’t being as loving and forgiving as I could be, but at the same time I was being honest about my ability to change.

The promise was clear and specific — no beating around the bush, no cliches, no vague spiritual talk of enlightenment or raising my vibration.

The promise showed that I myself was taking personal responsibility for my own thoughts, feelings, and choices — no victim mentality, no passing the buck to God or God’s guardian angels.

The promise was focussed on something “doable” and “learnable,” something realistic and non-magical/non-mystical.

The promise was easy to remember — there’s no point in having a 5-page promise you can’t remember in a pinch.

At first glance it’s hard to believe so much stuff could be packed into such a short promise, but when you compare it to some other well known prayers (such as the Lord’s Prayer, which I don’t use at all), you can see the basic underlying differences. The promise I made to myself was built on a rock-solid foundation of trust in God’s love, whereas traditional Christian prayers have been built on a foundation of fear and self-entitlement. (Have you ever noticed that the Lord’s Prayer contains nary a “please” nor a “thank you”?)

The promise you make to yourself for yourself could be something along these lines:

“I want to learn to be the sort of person my children can be proud of.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand the meaning of the Serenity Prayer.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand what it means to be a person of courage, devotion, gratitude, and trust.”

Or . . .

“I want to understand what changes I must make in my own life in order to hear the voice of God in my heart.”

Or . . .

“I believe in myself the way God believes in me.”

Or . . .

“I trust that I am a child of God and that I can make a real difference each day by trying as hard as I can to be kind towards others.”

Or . . .

“I want to learn to let go of my anger and perfectionism.”

These examples are only that — examples to get you started as you try to find the right words for your own promises. However, if one of these examples feels right for you, please embrace it and make it your own. Remember always, though, that your promise is your promise. It isn’t your neighbour’s promise or your child’s promise. Each person must find the words that work best for him or her. There is no single set of sacred words anywhere on the planet that has magical properties of transformation and healing for all people. What matters for you is that you find the words that make your heart light up with hope. These are the words of your heart and soul, your truest vision of yourself in relationship with yourself.

Each of these promises has the potential to gradually change your life and your relationships for the simple reason that each of these promises provides a clear, simple, uplifting, unified set of instructions for all the sectors of your brain to work on together.* It needs to be formulated in words, and it needs to be consciously repeated by yourself for yourself at least once each day (and preferably more often — ideally once when you get up for the day and once before you go to sleep — if possible). The reason it needs to be formulated in words is because a huge portion of your brain is devoted to language and communication. When you formulate your promise clearly and optimistically to yourself in words, it allows you to harness the language and communication centres of your brain to help coordinate the inner rewiring of your brain.

I want to emphasize that this brain-healing process takes a lot of time. Many spiritually-hopeful people have been gravely harmed by so-called faith healers who promise instant healing. I do not promise anyone instant healing, even though I personally believe that healing miracles sometimes take place. However, I do guarantee that your biological brain is not “carved in stone,” and that you have the ability to overcome great psychological and emotional adversity if you receive the right help and if you believe in your own truth as a child of God.

Just take it one day at a time. Stick with the Four Basic Practices for now. Remember that it takes about 42 days to grow a new neuron. If some arrogant religious-know-it-all tries to give you a hard time and tell you you’re “not going fast enough” or “not trying hard enough,” remember that you can only go as fast as your brain can build new brain cells. That’s the scientific reality, and you don’t have to apologize for it.

Take that, you Spirit-intoxicated evangelicals, you!

*(For a more detailed discussion of what’s possible and what’s not possible inside your biological self, please see “Foxes Have Holes, Canadians Have Gloves.”

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Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, healing, healing miracles, intent, meta-choice, prayer, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

21 Apr 2011

TBM11: Four Basic Practices To Get You Started on the Spiral Path

This is going to sound like an awful thing to say, but some of the least intuitive people you’ll ever meet are the gurus — individual men and women who do nothing all day but focus on spiritual practice.

This applies to gurus from all world religions, all cultures, and all places. Regardless of what you call these gurus — monks, priests, nuns, saints, shamans, masters — you should always bear in mind that people who spend more than two hours per day (day in, day out) on intensive spiritual practice are not living a balanced life. They can’t be, because they don’t have time to be.

Intensive spiritual practices may include fasting, meditation, prayer, journalling, energy healing work, reading sacred texts such as the Bible, chanting, dancing, or (yuck) tantric rituals. There’s a lot of interest at the moment in these topics, and you can find many books about them. You can also find workshops and seminars where like-minded people get together to hone their spiritual skills together. Apart from tantric rituals and voluntary fasting, both of which are harmful to your human brain, there’s nothing wrong with trying these spiritual practices in small doses. The workshops can be especially healing, not so much for the content, but for the chance to spend time with other spiritually-minded people.

You should be very wary of any spiritual guru who insists you have to spend more than two hours per day in total on practices that are specifically spiritual or religious and that have no other purpose. For instance, while you’re engaging in single-point meditation, that’s all you’re doing. You’re giving it your full attention. Obviously, then, if you’re meditating for three hours, you’re not at the same time cleaning your house or cooking your meals or caring for your children or reading the newspaper. You’re making a choice about how to spend your time. And time is the one aspect of Creation you can’t barter with. The clock keeps ticking, even while you’re lost in the Elysian Fields of spiritual bliss. Meanwhile, those dirty dishes keep piling up.

Anything in the human experience can become addictive. Anything at all. Pick a random topic, and with a little research you’ll stumble on the case of somebody who’s totally addicted to that topic, who’s obsessive and waaaaay out of balance around a topic that’s become “the centre of the universe” for him or her. These are the people who can’t hold a steady job, who can’t focus on higher education, and who can’t sustain long-term monogamous relationships. They drive the people around them crazy. Some of them end up on reality TV shows. And some of them end up as religious or spiritual gurus.

I’m a practising mystic, which means I have a daily mystical practice. I spend about an hour in the morning and about an hour in the evening on the intensive “mystical” aspect of my life. In between, I do normal, everyday things. I eat normal, regular food. I spend time on personal appearance and hygiene. I think about the people in my life. I go to work. I read, research, and write. I do my own shopping, my own cleaning, my own baking. I wash and repair my own clothes. I look after my car. I spend time with friends and family. Then I get my minimum of 8 hours of sleep to help me stay healthy. (I insist on a good night’s rest.)

You know how much time this takes?

Yeah, you know. Because you’re a normal person, too, and you’re wondering how the heck you’re supposed to fit time-intensive spiritual practices into your daily life.

Your guardian angels know all this. Their goal is to help you find some balance in your life. They know it’s hard for you to maintain balance when there are so many competing demands on you. They know you won’t be able to find and maintain the balance point unless your intuition is on-line. Therefore, they know it’s in your best interests for your biological brain to be as healthy as possible.

Right now you’re probably thinking, “Oh, no! Now she’s going to give a big long list of rules I have to follow and foods I have to eat and supplements I have to take and exercises I have to do, and I just feel so overwhelmed I think I’m going to barf!”

Actually, though, I’m going to suggest a very simple daily practice for you that even a busy family person can incorporate into the daily routine.

There are only four basic things you need to do each day in order to get your feet fully onto the Spiral Path of spiritual growth, healing, and transformation. These four things are designed to help you heal your brain’s intuitive circuitry as fast as possible. Of course, it should go without saying that this 4-part practice is not meant to replace the treatments your medical doctor has prescribed for you. It’s meant to supplement any treatments you’re receiving. Over time — and I stress that considerable time is needed for all forms of healing, whether allopathic, alternative, or spiritual — you may notice an improvement in your physical health.

Here are the Four Basic Steps — the cornerstone, if you will, of the new foundation you’re building for your brain and soul.

Each day, eat three balanced meals.
Each day, repeat the promise you’ve written to yourself for yourself.
Each day, reflect on three things you’re grateful for.
Each day, learn one new thing (excluding sports scores and entertainment news).

Notice that you can accomplish much of this list simply by reading the newspaper while you’re eating a balanced breakfast that includes protein, fats, and carbs.

Of the four things on this list, the one you’re probably least familiar with is No. 2: “Repeat the promise you’ve written to yourself for yourself.” You’re probably wondering what promise I’m referring to. Well, this is the promise that’s going to help certain important regions of your brain figure out what their job is.

Believe it or not, your brain is not a single organ in the way your heart is a single organ. Your brain and central nervous system actually consist of several different semi-autonomous sectors, each with a specialized job. No one part of the brain is in charge of everything. Each part relies on other parts for feedback and instructions. Other writers have likened the operation of the brain to a symphony orchestra, and I think this analogy is a very good one. All the sections are there and ready to play, but in order to create music that’s filled with balance, harmony, order, and rhythm, they need two important elements: the sheet music (perhaps memorized) and the conductor. The sheet music gives each orchestral section its instructions. The conductor provides the emotional leadership.

In the orchestra that is your brain, the promise you make to yourself each day is the sheet music.

And you yourself are the conductor.

A lot of people understand that they’re the conductor of their own thoughts, feelings, and actions. But not many people realize how crucial the sheet music is to the balanced, holistic functioning of their own brains. Take away the sheet music — the overall set of instructions that coordinates all the sections —- and you get exactly what you’d expect: an overall lack of coordination.

This may sound very simple and very obvious, but you’d be astonished how few medical doctors, neurological researchers, or theologians understand this principle. Neuroplasticity — the ability of the brain to change itself — works most efficiently when you give your own brain some sheet music to follow.

Having sheet music can be a good thing or a bad thing, of course. Neuroplasticity can work in “negative” directions as well as in “positive” directions. If you feed your brain a steady diet of grim, depressing, pessimistic, violent sheet music, the various sections of your brain will conclude that that’s their job, and that’s what they’ll play. They’ll play exactly what you’ve told them to play because that’s what they’re designed to do. Fortunately, these same regions of your brain will start to play a different tune if you give them a whole new folder of sheet music to focus on.

That’s where the promise to yourself comes in.

Your biological brain can and will make changes to its wiring patterns, but only if it’s sure you really, really want the changes. This apparent sluggishness on the part of your brain is intentionally wired into your DNA. After all, you wouldn’t want your entire brain to rewire itself every day on the basis of a whim or a passing fad. That would be counterproductive.

There’s a reason it takes about 6 weeks for a new neuron to grow inside your brain. You can’t speed up this process, but you can make sure your brain gets the message every day that it’s not a waste of precious biological resources to be building a bunch of new neural networks.

And make no mistake — you have to make sure there’s a steady supply of biological ingredients on hand if you want your body to divert resources into the energy-intensive task of building new neurons and glial cells. That’s why you need to eat three balanced meals each day.

This is also why I think voluntary fasting for more than two or three days is harmful to the brain. Put simply, you’re starving the brain of nutrients it needs in order to continually restructure interconnections between brain regions (or sections of the orchestra) for optimal “performance” (including optimal performance of your complex intuition circuitry).

I also find it most interesting that 6 weeks is 42 days — eerily similar to the 40 days of fasting and seclusion that pops up so often in the traditional mystical teachings of different religious movements. Forty days of fasting, prayer, and seclusion is just enough time to harness the power of neuroplasticity in negative ways that diminish the overall functioning of the brain.

Coincidence?

I doubt it.

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Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, gratitude, healing, intent, meta-choice, My Spiral Path, mystic, Soul, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

02 Apr 2011

TBM 10: Guys, Intuition, and "the Gut"

One of the things I want to emphasize most is that intuition is not a female prerogative. All human beings are born with the faculty of intuition, and all human beings need their intuition in order to live a balanced, holistic, healthy, happy life. In other words, men have intuition, too!

If you don’t like the word intuition, you can call it something else. You can call it your “gut.” You can call it your strength. You can say there’s “something you’ve just gotta do.” Nobody’s saying you have to light smelly candles or write mushy poems in order to be a guy with intuition.

But being a guy with intuition comes in pretty handy in an emergency.

Remember those two pilots — Captain Chesley Sullenberger III and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles — who safely brought down US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River with no loss of life to anyone? Yeah, well, if you’re looking for a clear example of male intuition, look no further than these two heroic pilots.

In a moment of crisis, when it really mattered, these two men were able to work in synchrony with God and respond immediately and effectively to the intuitive guidance being offered to them.

It’s really important to note that during this emergency these two men had no time and no attention to spare for anything but the crisis at hand. They had to give 100% of themselves to myriad tasks. They had to use all their senses to quickly and logically analyze the problem, check their instrumentation, advise the control tower, advise the flight crew, come up with a plan, and execute the plan — all within a few short minutes. There was no time for formal prayer. No time for religious ritual. No time for anything but flying. So they did what they do so well — they flew. They threw their hearts and minds and bodies and courage into flying the plane, and because they did, a miracle took place on the Hudson.

Intuition is a sophisticated brain process that involves numerous circuits in the brain. It’s not pure logic. It’s not pure emotion. It’s not pure reflex. It’s not pure genetic instinct. It’s a combination of all these aspects of the human condition. It’s the ability of your biological brain (in conjunction with your soul) to fully assess all the different angles of a problem and respond to the problem without panicking. Intuition is felt most intensely and most memorably during a crisis because that’s when you need it most. Afterwards, people often describe sensations of being “in the zone,” or of having heightened senses, or of having a strong sense in their gut that they should act now and ask questions later. This is what intuition feels like: you just know what you’re supposed to do.

Here’s the clincher: intuition — your ability to work with God during a crisis to achieve a positive outcome for the people you love — requires that your brain be prewired in a reasonably functional way. It has to be wired in a reasonably functional way before the crisis takes place.

The pilots on Flight 1549 had prewired their brains in a number of crucial ways. They had prewired their logic circuitry by willingly undertaking the study of physics and math and meteorology and navigation and aeronautics. They had prewired their physical reflexes by willingly undertaking rigorous flight training. They had prewired their problem-solving skills by willingly practising their emergency drills. They had prewired their empathy circuits by choosing to care about the people who were literally under their wing. Both these men had worked very hard over the years to get their biological brains “in line with” their souls’ intense love of flying. They were doing what they loved to do, but they didn’t learn to fly through sudden revelation or mystical vision. They had to work their asses off.

Fortunately for the passengers and flight crew of Flight 1549, Sullenberger and Skiles were gifted pilots at the soul level who had chosen to integrate their biology with their unique soul talents through hard work. This meant that they were fully equipped in the intuition department when it came time for them to work in full synchrony with God. The circuits were already there. The circuits were already in place and ready to be “pinged” by God. God saw the problem and God acted to help them act.

Note, however, that God wasn’t the only one acting here. God was acting in concert with two of God’s children. You could say it was a team effort.

Of course, it’s only a team effort if you, as a human being, have the same goal, the same intent as God. It’s only a team effort if you want to help other people for the sake of helping other people, not for the sake of acquiring status for yourself or your clan. The intuitive circuitry of your brain will only help you in a crisis if you’ve chosen ahead of time to make balanced choices that reflect your soul’s true nature.

God isn’t going to suddenly swoop in during an emergency and rewire a psychopath’s whole brain so he/she can hear God’s guidance. Many people — including frightened psychopaths (and it takes a lot to scare a psychopath) — have requested such immediate divine intervention during a major emergency, and many have hoped to get it. But most of those who think they got such an intervention — who believe they got a one-time divine intervention so strange and wondrous and different from anything they’ve known before that they become obsessed with it and start chasing after it for the rest of their human lives — probably got something that’s quite scary from a biological viewpoint. They probably gave themselves (albeit unintentionally) a trauma-induced psychotic break.

Many are the mystics who have a psychotic depression in disguise.

In short, intuition is a normal, natural part of everyday human life for both men and women. It’s a product of the everyday choices we make as human beings. At the same time it’s a puzzling and mysterious experience that helps us feel closer to each other and to God. It’s one of the great joys of the human experience.

Intuition makes you want to smile and beam from the inside out with the joy of knowing you’re actually, truly, honestly, and undeniably loved by God.

Intuition helps you find the courage to find redemption. Intuition helps you be your best self — a person you can actually like and trust.

Now wouldn’t that be a miracle?

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Posted in brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, Favourite Posts, intent, meta-choice, soul blueprint, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged building your intuition, ethical mysticism | Leave a Comment

02 Jan 2011

TBM3: The Five Basic Goals of the Spiral Path

Would it help if I told you that God doesn’t expect you to be perfect?

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. And you can’t progress on the Spiral Path unless you’re willing to make a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes are going to be part of your spiritual journey. Some of these mistakes are gonna make you laugh, and some of these mistakes are gonna make you cry your guts out. But you’re gonna make mistakes. And that’s okay with God. After all, you’re only human. Sort of.

It’s a lot more accurate to say that you’re an angel-in-temporary-human-form. A soul-temporarily-downshifted-into-3D-matter. A child of God. A temporary resident of Planet Earth. Consciousness temporarily experiencing baryonic expression for the purposes of learning. A soul who has temporarily embarked on a learning expedition on Earth with a very small suitcase of supplies (think Lost). A big soul in an itty bitty living space (think Robin Williams’s “Genie” in Aladdin). An angel who has to muddle through for awhile not realizing she has wings (think Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz). A person with a very big heart.

That’s you.

Long before you were born as a human being, you existed as a soul, as an angel, as a child of God. (I use these terms synonymously). It’s the sum total of who you really are. It’s the totality of you as a child of God.

To say that you’re a soul is the same thing as saying that you’re a person. It’s incorrect to say that you have a soul. You don’t have a soul in the way that you have a removeable, detachable, non-essential right thumb or left eye. You are a soul. Everything in you — everything that you are and everything that you know and everything that you feel and everything that you need — is you. You are a person. You are a soul. You are a child of God.

And God don’t make no junk.

Your problems as a human being are not caused by your soul. Neither are your problems caused by your human biology. Your problems are caused by the catastrophic failure of Western culture to teach you how to fully balance and integrate your soul’s identity with your human biology. You haven’t been taught how to read your own personal “owner’s manual.” Heck, you haven’t been taught that you even have an owner’s manual. So you stumble through life in a state of confusion, fear, and yearning, always wanting to understand, but never knowing where to start.

So what is the first step in beginning your spiritual journey? What is the goal of the Spiral Path?

Is the goal for you to try to transcend your humanity and detach from your human thoughts, needs, and feelings so you can feel closer to God? No. The goal is for you to understand and accept your soul’s identity so you can integrate your soul’s needs with your human biology as much as possible. This leads to the feeling of trust.

Is the goal for you to try to attain perfection of action or perfection of result? No. It’s not possible for any human being to attain either perfection of action or perfection of result. The best you can hope for is perfection of intent — the ongoing desire to be the best person you’re capable of being, despite the fact that you’ll continue to make mistakes as a human being. This leads to the feeling of forgiveness.

Is the goal for you to seek gnosis (esoteric wisdom) or secret spiritual knowledge that will raise you to a new, higher level of human consciousness and human evolution? No. The goal is for you to accept that you already have the right DNA package for your own soul. Your goal is to gradually transform all your “lemons” into “lemonade.” This leads to the feeling of courage.

Is the goal for you to receive “gifts of grace” from God by dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s of God’s Law (as dictated by your religious leaders)? No. The goal is for you to use your free will to work side by side with God and God’s angels (despite your human limitations) to create a more compassionate society. This leads to the feeling of devotion.

Is the goal for you to be saved by God? No. The goal is for you to be grateful for the gift of love that God gives to you and to all Creation. Without this love, “the person who is you” would not be possible. Neither would anything good, true, or beautiful be possible. (Sorry — couldn’t resist a dig at Plato and Paul). Not surprisingly, this practice leads to the feeling of gratitude.

You’re trying on the Spiral Path to find your own soul’s feelings of trust, forgiveness, courage, devotion, and gratitude. That’s it. You’re not seeking transcendence. You’re not seeking perfection of ritual. You’re not seeking gnosis (esoteric wisdom). You’re not seeking to earn grace through piety and blind faith. You’re not seeking salvation. What you’re really seeking is your own core self, your own core identity as a soul. You’re seeking to reclaim everything you were born with as a helpless yet incredibly loving and forgiving human child.

Strange as it may seem, it’s in seeking your own true identity as a soul that you’ll begin to recognize God as God really is.

That’s when your heart will explode with wonder. And you’ll feel the way Dr. Seuss’s Grinch feels when he finally “gets it.”

Really. I’m not kidding. This is what it feels like when you ground yourself firmly on the Spiral Path. It feels . . . good. Really, really good. Like Christmas all year round.

It’s awesome.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain-soul connection, building your intuition, healing miracles, intent, meta-choice, Soul, The Blonde Mystic and tagged Divine Heart | Leave a Comment

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

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TBM36: Fix the Brain, Love the Soul

TBM35: "The Right To Be Right?"

TBM27: Prayers Your Angels Will Refuse to Answer

JR52: Pelagius and Personal Responsibility

JR47: "Knowledge" Versus "Truth"

TBM12: Finding the Words of Your Own Promise

TBM11: Four Basic Practices To Get You Started on the Spiral Path

TBM 10: Guys, Intuition, and "the Gut"

TBM3: The Five Basic Goals of the Spiral Path

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