» brain-soul connection The Spiral Path

14 Sep 2012

RS33: The Way of the Cross

“For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him (Psalm 22:24). Pictured here is the garden at St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, which for some reason reminds me of the Garden of Gethsemane. Photo credit JAT 1997.

A: Tell me more about the practice you taught of “taking up the cross.”

J: We got a little side-tracked last time, didn’t we?

A: As usual. No straight lines around here. Always curves and meandering paths.

J: Funny how the clearest and truest path to the heart is never straight.

A: It took me a long time to figure this one out. But there’s so much freedom, so much peace, in understanding that love isn’t linear and isn’t supposed to be. It has its own strange rhythms. But in the end it’s stronger than anything I’ve ever known. It’s so . . . so . . . strong. It’s so complex. It’s not a pure strand of anything. It’s this amazing tapestry, as you’ve described it before. A tapestry with so many colours and so many songs and so many tears. All woven together into this picture, this portrait, of life. Life filled with passion and wonder and awe. Life where you’re constantly surprised. But also life where you don’t mind being surprised.

J (nodding): It’s very important, the idea of being surprised and not minding. It’s the “not minding” part that sets apart a person who’s listening to his/her soul and a person who’s not. The soul doesn’t mind surprises. The brain’s Darwinian Circuitry hates surprises. You can tell a great deal about a person’s brain health in the small moments when surprise strikes. The soul takes these unexpected events in stride. The Darwinian Circuitry seizes up and panics and can’t take swift, wise action. The soul continues to be able to act during a crisis. The Darwinian Circuitry comes to a grinding halt.

A puzzling thing happens when the Darwinian Circuitry panics. Inside the brain there’s a sudden “disconnect” between the decision-making centres and the movement centres. People literally freeze like a deer in the headlights. This is when they’re most vulnerable to lies — to words spoken aloud with authority by people who are in a position of trust. This is when mobs can be persuaded to riot. But it only works — and I want to emphasize this — it only works when people have already panicked. It only works when people have stopped listening to their own souls. You can’t force people who are listening to their own souls to join a mob. They won’t do it. They find no pleasure and no safety in the ridiculous idea that’s floating around of “homo duplex.” Mob mentalities — hive mentalities — are dangerous to the goals of healing, peace, and redemption. Mob mentalities lead to Crusades. Crusades are never a positive thing in the eyes of God or God’s angels.

A: It’s interesting how individuals stop taking personal responsibility for their own actions when they’ve agreed to hand over their own free will to a mob leader.

J: For those who can’t hear the inner wisdom of their own soul, it’s a relief to hand over their free will to somebody else.

A: It’s a difficult process, reclaiming your own free will. (Sighhhhh.)

J: Yes. There’s probably no greater challenge for a human being. Nonetheless, it’s the challenge that all human beings are called to. They must wrestle with what it means to have free will. They must question it, be confused by it, be angry at it, reject it, and finally come to terms with it.

A: What you just said reminds me of the stages of grief.

J: That’s exactly what the process is. It’s an experience of working through grief. And, by god, you need forgiveness to get you through it, because somewhere in the middle of the process you’re going to come face to face with the reality of all the times when you didn’t apply your free will in loving and trusting ways. You’re going to feel like a shit. This is where forgiveness sees you through. Forgiveness is the act of free will that allows you to keep going, to get up the next day and keep going even when you’ve stopped denying the harm you’ve created here on Planet Earth.

A: This is where you really need a mentor.

J: Yes. You need to know that somebody else has already forgiven you so you can find the courage to forgive yourself.

A: That mentor can be God.

J: Yes. If a person trusts that God the Mother and God the Father forgive her even when she’s been a shit, she can lean on their strength as she struggles to learn from her mistakes and forgive herself. It takes time to learn to forgive, but that’s okay. People have to believe that God doesn’t expect instant results. Indeed, instant results aren’t scientifically supportable or biologically possible. God only expects consistent effort. God will help you if you’re willing to make a consistent effort to be the best person you’re capable of being.

A: Warts and all.

J: God doesn’t mind warts. Human beings end up covered in warts and scars and cracked bones and broken hearts in their time on Planet Earth. God forgives you anyway. I can’t emphasize this enough. God sees past all the warts and scars and cracked bones and looks straight into your broken heart. You can’t hide a broken heart from God. Nor should you want to.

A: It’s so difficult for regular human beings to believe they’re worthy of God’s daily forgiveness. I really struggled with this in the beginning. But I’m glad you persisted!

J: It changes everything when you’re willing to accept God’s forgiveness. Everything. You find the freedom to move — really move. So instead of being nailed helplessly to the cross, immobile, desperate, unable to flow with the changes and surprises of each day, you begin to be able to move. Sure, at first you have to drag the damn cross with you, and it’s heavy, and it hurts. But at least you’re moving! And you’re starting to reclaim your sense of your own self, your own true potential. After a while the cross you’re dragging around starts to feel different to you. It starts to feel less like a heavy burden and more like . . . gravity. A place where you can feel the weight, the seriousness, the reality of honest truth and not be afraid of it. A place where honest truth is your ally, your very foundation. Your centre of gravity.

A person who has chosen to pursue status (“gaining the whole world” at the expense of honest truth) relates strongly to the image of the crucifix — Jesus nailed to the Cross — because this is the way he or she feels in relation to the world and to God. He feels trapped. Nailed down. Impoverished of health and happiness. Stuck in an endless circle of pain and self-sacrifice. So he thinks the image of the crucifix is right.

By contrast, a person who has chosen the path of knowing free will, love, forgiveness, healing, and redemption sees the cross in very different terms. He sees a symbol of freedom from the self-enslavement of status addiction, a symbol of the courage to be yourself and know yourself and trust yourself in a world that tells you this is impossible.

To be disenfranchised from Empire is not necessarily a bad thing.

+23

-3

Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, conscience & morality, courage, Divine Love, forgiveness, free will, honesty, Jesus' teachings, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Realspiritik, relationship with God, Son of Man and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

01 Sep 2012

RS27: The Way, the Truth, and the Life

New Brunswick (c) Jamie MacDonald 2012

A: Tell me about the healing miracles that took place around you.

J: A lot of people over the centuries have tried to figure out the healing miracles reported in the Gospels. Not many have noticed that the claims made by Mark are very different from the claims made by the other gospel writers. To understand the healing miracles that took place during my ministry, the only reliable source is Mark’s gospel. My friend Lazarus — the beloved disciple — was also a reliable source. But his collection of essays and parables and sayings — the collection that’s been tentatively reconstructed by scholars and labelled the “Q source” — no longer exists in its original format. So for anyone who wants to understand what I actually taught about healing and illness, they’d need to look more closely at what Mark says.

A: I did an analysis of the healing stories in Mark, Matthew, and Luke for a New Testament course.* My professor got very huffy with me because I launched into a very un-scholarly attack on Luke’s motives in the middle of the paper. But I don’t regret pointing out the truth about Luke’s desire to paint you as a “Divine Patron of Healing.” Luke had an agenda, and his agenda had nothing to do with teaching regular people how to be in relationship with God.

J: Luke was a disciple of Paul. Young, brilliant, devoted to the cause of the Seekers of the Rock. He was very young — still in his mid-teens — when Paul died. As he grew older, he earned more responsibility in the “great cause” of spreading the agenda of “The One True Religion.” When my great-nephew wrote his anti-Pauline book — the Gospel of Mark — Luke got the job of undermining Mark’s message. The last thing the Seekers wanted was another resurgence of interest in what I actually taught (as opposed to what they said I taught).

A: Well, you were a difficult fellow. And according to them, you were seriously broken. So from their point of view they were helping you!

J (chuckling): With friends like that, who needs enemies?

A: You said recently (“The Messiah Who Misbehaved”) that Paul looked at the miracles of your ministry and decided you really had been the prophesied Jewish Messiah. But not in a good way, because you hadn’t followed the proper script, the proper path that was expected of you. So what did you do instead? What did you do that got everybody’s knickers in a knot?

J: Well, that’s the thing. What I did was so simple it’s been missed by most Christians all this time. What I did was get off my ass, stop feeling sorry for myself, stop wasting time on useless religious rituals and prayers, and go out and help people.

A: Come on. That’s way too simple.

J: The complete story is that I went out and helped other people in a holistic way, using all my heart, all my mind, all my talent, and all my strength to forge a bridge of healing with others. In other words, I helped people soul-to-soul. I helped people recognize the “rainbow bridge” within themselves, the pathway to “the kingdom of the heavens.” People were so shocked at this idea that sometimes they burst into tears. This one idea was — is — so powerful to the process of healing that I could see dramatic changes in their physical and mental state overnight. People need to know in their gut that God actually believes in them.

A: You’ve mentioned the rainbow bridge within, and this makes me think of the sign of the rainbow in God’s covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:8-17).

J: This covenant between God and all Creation as it exists on Planet Earth — a covenant of trust and healing with humanity plus every living creature and the earth itself — is the only covenant that appears in the Bible that I actually endorse. And the enduring sign of this covenant is the rainbow. So naturally, when I spoke of people entering “the kingdom of the heavens,” I had the sign of the rainbow in mind. In my day, the rainbow was seen by all cultures as the pathway that connected Heaven and Earth, the pathway travelled by divine messengers. In the Greek world, the messenger who travelled the rainbow bridge was Iris. In the Egyptian world, the messenger was Hermes Trismegistus. In the Jewish world, the messenger was Abraham.

The main point here is that almost everybody, regardless of religious tradition, believed that God or Spirit or Source or Oneness or whatever label you used for the Divine, was somewhere far away, somewhere not of this Earth, somewhere not of this place or this time. Sometimes the distance between Heaven and Earth could be closed, said the priests. But this “closing of the gap” was believed to be rare, an event reserved for extraordinary events and times such as the birth and death of a great king. It was unthinkable that God would enter the world, quietly and humbly, to heal the scabrous skin of a “leper.” God just didn’t do that sort of thing, said the great theologians of my time.

A: How did you see the connection between Heaven and Earth?

J: For me, God was not “up there.” Neither was God “in here,” in the way the Gnostic tradition speaks of “the spark within.” God the Mother and the God the Father were — are — the world around me. The world outside all other beings. Neither pantheism nor panentheism, but something different. Creation as family. It’s the closest analogy there is. Creation as family, with God the Mother and God the Father as parents who create a vast home for us, a home of “earth and air and water and fire,” parents who then step back from us, their angelic children, to allow us to understand and know ourselves as unique beings, unique consciousnesses within the family of Creation. We are not them. And they are not us. But together we live and work together as a family. They need us and we need them. It’s as simple as that.

This what your inner soul believes about who you really are.

A: So for you the world around you was not a tainted and corrupt lower sphere, a vile place to be controlled and transcended, but a strange sort of family home. A place with many rooms to be explored and understood. A place where God speaks in many languages and many voices.

J (nodding): Yes! A place where we experience the trajectory of true healing in ways that are difficult to express in words alone.

A: Including the mysterious role of forgiveness.

J: It felt to me, during my time as Jesus, that building a relationship with God and God’s angels is very much like building a bridge. Building a bridge between your heart and another person’s heart, even if the other person is a person-of-soul who has no physical 3D body! You are you, and she is she, so you can’t be that other person. But you can build a bridge to that other person. You can build a bridge of words and choices and actions and memories, a bridge of courage and devotion and gratitude and trust, and the bridge is a great source of strength, a way to “close the gap” between Heaven and Earth so you never feel alone. The bridge “feels” like the rainbow that lights your heart when you look into the sky after a passing storm. Maybe it sounds like a mushy Hallmark card, but I don’t care. This is what it feels like to know God’s presence in your life. It feels like this ephemeral thing of great beauty that alights upon your heart and soul in those times when you most need to feel the quiet touch of God’s hand upon your shoulder. What travels along this rainbow bridge is not a messenger but Divine Love itself. If you could see Creation with the eyes of an angel, you would see networks — highways — of rainbow light, bridges that connect the heart of each soul to the hearts of all other souls.

A: Like an angel Internet.

J: Actually, that’s exactly what it is — a world wide web of pure Divine Love that’s been built one small bridge at a time.

This is what I meant when I talked about the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It’s not what Paul meant when he talked about the Way, and it’s not what John meant. But, for me, the covenant with Noah was the only scriptural proof-text that made any sense. The Way means helping God in the great and mysterious and multiple tasks of healing.

First step: help heal the physical body — the physical bodies of humans and other creatures and the planet itself — as Noah once helped God heal the bodies of all creatures on Planet Earth (metaphorically speaking, of course, since the biblical account of Noah and the Great Flood was not an actual historical event ).

Second step: start to build the rainbow bridges of the heart so you can hear what God is actually saying to you!

_________________________________________________

*Excerpt from a 2009 paper entitled, “RADICAL MESSIAH: AN EXAMINATION OF HOW THE HEALING MIRACLE STORIES ARE USED IN MARK, MATTHEW, AND LUKE”

. . . The basic shape of Mark’s argument is presented in his opening verses (Mark 1:1 – 2:12). These verses offer five different healing miracle stories in quick succession after a brief introduction that starts in the countryside (not the Temple) with John the Baptist (not with a priest). These five narrative healing stories (plus eight more individual healings and assorted crowd scenes in Mark) have distinct features that make unique claims for the Jewish Messiah: (1) Jesus heals the most disadvantaged and scorned of people – the mentally ill (demoniacs), women, lepers, and paralytics (and in later chapters, Gentiles), most of whom are likely extremely poor (cf. the Beatitudes in Luke 6:20-23) – using only authority, forgiveness, word, and touch, but not prayer. (2) He heals them in synagogue, household, and outdoor settings, far removed from any sanctioned Temple, whether Jewish or Gentile. (3) All but one healing in Mark – the healing of the Syro-Phoenician girl (Mark 7: 24-30) – require that Jesus be physically present beside (or at least in visual proximity to) the person who is being healed, thus emphasizing the importance of personal relationship and compassionate presence as part of the miraculous healing process. (4) He heals on the Sabbath, regardless of what Torah and priestly custom say. (5) He rejects the purity codes of “uncleanness” as they pertain to illness, and does not equate “cleanness” with healing. (6) He does not follow the traditional medical treatments recommended in either Greek medical texts or Jewish mishnah (Cotter, Appendices A & B), and he does not use either magical amulets or Jewish religious rituals (eg. sacrificial offerings), all of which suggest he is getting divine assistance in a novel form that bypasses all previously known ways of God’s acting in the world to relieve suffering, and that obviates the need for the Jerusalem Temple. (7) He does not ask for monetary payment, and he usually does not ask for an “honour payment” of public recognition; both of these values subvert the honour/shame paradigm. (8) He does not heal everyone who comes to him in the beginning, only “many” of the people who gather in the crowd scene of 1:32-34 (although by 6:53-56, he is healing everyone). (9) Jesus does not himself bring anyone back from the dead. (In the story about Jairus’s daughter, in Mark 5:21-24, 35-43, Jesus says the girl is not dead, but sleeping; and in the Passion sequence, the young man at the tomb says that “Jesus has been raised,” not “Jesus has raised himself”). (10) All of the diseases that Jesus heals are attributable, in modern terms, to disorders of the endocrine system and central nervous system, and none involve sudden regeneration of lost limbs (which would be a truly non-Newtonian event!) (11) Jesus has no patience for “supernatural appurtenances” or the praise and honour that accompany them, yet is able to heal his patients instantly – no waiting period is required, no cleansing period is required, no special invocation of biblical memory is required, no special anything is required, except for one thing: faith on the petitioner’s part (plus, it goes without saying, divine intervention on God’s part).

Mark’s claims pose problems for the growing Christian community. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is clearly chosen by God to carry out a mission of (1) healing and (2) teaching, but he’s not very sellable. He’s not very divine. Further, he is a Jewish Messiah who is in the Torah’s face, who is blatantly cherry-picking which laws of Torah to keep (eg. Exod. 20:12-16; Deut. 6:4-5; Lev. 19:18), and which ones to reject (eg. Exod. 31:12-17; Lev. 13:9-17; 15:25-30). (This tendency of Mark does not go down well with Matthew, who is intent on showing that Jesus fulfilled Jewish prophecy and preached the proper understanding of Torah.) In addition, Mark does not try to link the way Jesus healed people to the way in which Hebrew prophets such as Elisha healed people. Elisha, by way of contrast to Jesus, never personally meets with his illustrious patient, the Syrian general Namaan, but instead sends messengers to tell Namaan that he can be cleansed of his skin disease if he ritually bathes seven times in the Jordan River (2 Kings 5:1-14). A short while after this, Elisha punishes his greedy servant by giving him Namaan’s leprosy (as if leprosy is wrapped up in a neat little box that is within Elisha’s power to give!). Mark’s Jesus, one intuits, would not have taken kindly to a healer who claimed to have the power to purposely afflict a man and all his descendants with leprosy (2 Kings 25-27); nor would Mark’s Jesus have appreciated the way in which Elisha commissions his servant to take the staff of the man of God (a staff presumably imbued with divine healing powers) to try to heal the Shunammite woman’s dead (or possibly comatose) son. Elisha’s commission fails, and only when the boy’s mother insists does he physically visit the boy to say prayers, and so bring him back to life. According to Wendy Cotter, the Shunammite woman is not Jewish (52); however, the passage in 2 Kings shows she has faith in the god of Elisha.

At this point, it’s hard not to think of Mark’s tale of the Syro-Phoenician woman and her gravely ill daughter (Mark 7:24-30), which is the only occasion in Mark when Jesus performs a distance healing, that is, a healing on a person he hasn’t seen or touched. This is a confusing passage. We have some of the same elements as in the raising of the Shunammite woman’s son: a Gentile mother requests a healing from a man of God; the healer’s initial response is somewhat dismissive; the mother persists; the healer relents, and the child is healed. If Mark were trying to draw a connection between Elisha and Jesus, he would have shown Jesus following the mother to her home and healing the girl with prayers. Yet Mark, it seems, would rather show Jesus doing a distance healing than a prayer healing. Remarkably, Mark places the power of faith and compassionate presence ahead of the power of prayer when it comes to healing (a point further reinforced by Mark’s reiteration in 6:1-6 of one of his major premises, where he implies that Jesus has no power to heal those in his hometown because most lack faith (cf. Mt 13:58))! In Mark, prayer is important when it comes to Jesus’ personal relationship with God (eg. 1:35; 6:46;14:32), but Mark doesn’t show Jesus speaking prayers when “healing action” is taking place. Rather, Mark shows Jesus using authority (commanding demons to come out) (1:23-27; 5:1-20; 9:14-29); giving forgiveness (2:1-12); speaking words that build on or interact with the petitioner’s own faith (1:40-45; 2:1-12; 3:1-6; 5:24-34; 5:35-43; 10:46-52); touching or laying on hands (1:29-31; 6:54-56; 7:31-37; 8:22-26); and using a combination of two or more of these (eg. 5:35-43; 9:14-29). Interestingly, when the disciples ask Jesus in Chapter 9:28 why they could not cast out the “demon” of the epileptic boy (9:14-29), Jesus says to them, “This kind can come out only through prayer [and fasting].” But does Jesus mean prayer in the midst of an exorcism (similar to a televangelist’s faith healing), or does he mean prayer of the sort he conducts in private, a practice of spiritual discipline (as we would understand that term) which gradually enhances one’s ability to hear and understand God? It is not clear from the text.

-3

Posted in Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Matthew's and Luke's intent, Realspiritik, relationship with God and tagged brain-soul connection, ethical mysticism | Leave a Comment

02 Jun 2012

TBM40: What Sheldon Cooper Can Teach You

When the writers and producers of the hit TV comedy The Big Bang Theory first envisioned the character of Sheldon Cooper, I’m sure their main goal was to craft a truly funny show. I’m sure they couldn’t have known their blend of spot-on writing and Jim Parson’s brilliant acting would end up creating an iconic portrait of the human brain’s Darwinian Circuitry. But just as the writers of The Big Bang Theory are always referencing some of my favourite series — series such as Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Wars — I’m going to reference their Sheldon Cooper character as a way to speak accurately about the realities of the human brain.

Wind Turbines (c) Jamie MacDonald 2009. Used with permission of the artist. Every time I see a wind turbine, it reminds me of the ruthless logic of the brain’s Darwinian circuitry.

Jim Parson’s portrayal of theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper is hilarious because it’s 100% accurate in scientific terms. The humour works because the science works. In this case, the science they’re showing (albeit unwittingly) is the science of a brain that’s operating entirely on its 3D Darwinian Circuitry without benefit of the soul’s gifts of empathy, heart, and dignity.

I know it sounds really hard to believe that a person can function at all without using every part of the brain. We assume a person can function with only one kidney or one leg, but it never occurs to us to ask whether the same analogy applies to the brain. We tend to think of the brain as a single organ — either a whole brain that functions wholly and properly or no brain at all — so we give people the benefit of the doubt with regard to their internal thinking processes. We assume that if they can do all the basics — go to school, get a job, make everyday decisions — then their brains must be operating the way they’re supposed to.

But there’s a problem with this assumption: the basic tasks of going to school, getting a job, and making everyday decisions require the brain to use only one “software suite,” whereas it actually has two. Basic tasks require the brain to use only its Darwinian Circuitry, a “suite” of software devoted solely to 3D biological survival. The brain’s Darwinian Circuitry carries the programming for all things related to your body’s biological needs — food, water, clean air, sleep, protection from the elements, protection from predators, procreation (which is more optional than most people think), and relief from pain. In our culture, school and jobs and money and status are regarded by the Darwinian Circuitry of the brain as essential tools for survival. So anything to do with money and status are given extremely high priority by the Darwinian Circuitry, even it means pursuing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, as our character Sheldon Cooper has done.

So efficient is the Darwinian Circuitry that it can carry out important survival tasks without any input at all from the brain’s Soul Circuitry. Of course, without input from the soul, survival tasks won’t be carried out with empathy. Or with trust. Or humbleness. Or gratitude. Or humour. Or anything resembling conscience. But they’ll be done, by god, and they’ll be done with the viciousness and cold logic of an S.S. death camp commander.

These are the kinds of selfish, conscience-free behaviours that idiot atheists such as Richard Dawkins have promoted as the “truth” about human nature. I see a lot of similarities between Richard Dawkins, philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the Christian Apostle Paul.

Dawkins has coined the phrase “the selfish gene,” and at a certain level the label is accurate. There are stretches of genetic material in our DNA that are meant to boost our awareness of our individual survival needs. Otherwise how would we instinctively know how to run away from danger?! But these are not the only kinds of coding we have in our DNA. We also have coding for unselfish traits. We also have coding for traits such as empathy, trust, humbleness, gratitude, humour, and conscience.

In the language of personality theorists (a branch of psychology), we have to be able to account for the five universally observed dimensions of personality — Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness — and we have to be able to account for all five of these dimensions in the face of aggressive arguments from behavioural psychologists and evolutionary biologists that human beings are nothing more than a collection of selfish genes seeking to reproduce themselves in the most efficient way possible.

So here’s how it actually works. The Darwinian Circuitry of your brain is responsible for expressing traits that fall within two of the five dimensions: Neuroticism and Agreeableness. The Soul Circuitry of your brain is responsible for expressing the other three dimensions: Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness.

Yeah. It really is that simple.

Sheldon Cooper is an absolutely perfect representation of what happens to a human being’s behaviour and relationships when he falls into the trap of relying exclusively on choices that score very high on the Neuroticism and Agreeableness scales, and very low on the Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness scales. He becomes, well, he becomes a Sheldon.

This package of traits is distinctive and highly recognizable. You get a person who’s highly controlling; perfectionistic; tense around other people; resistant to sudden change; inflexible; always “right”; quick to anger; thorough but lacking in imagination; socially compliant but lacking in genuine empathy; obsessive or obsessive-compulsive; politically conservative or right-wing; and rigidly obedient to the Law (dogmatic). The latter trait — rigid obedience to the Law — is especially important to understand in its proper context as a Darwinian trait because it’s often wrongly confused by researchers with traits from the Conscientiousness dimension.

The Darwinian Circuitry of the brain is very good at what it does (when it’s in balance with the Soul Circuitry) but on its own it’s very “black and white” in its thinking. It looks for simplistic “Cause and Effect” patterns. It looks for rigid “laws” that can be applied quickly and easily in all situations. The Darwinian parts of the brain “recognize” Materialist philosophy and codified religious texts and scientism (that is, treatment of scientific thought as an infallible religion). There’s NO capacity in these parts of the brain for processing complex emotions such as empathy, humbleness, courage, and forgiveness. On the other hand, logic and law are elevated to the status of the divine. You can see these patterns plain as day in Sheldon Cooper’s self-absorbed devotion to pure logic.

If you’re familiar with the Big Five personality theory, you’re probably saying to yourself that I’ve got the Agreeableness dimension all backwards and I obviously haven’t read the material carefully. I’ve read the material, and I think the scale for Agreeableness has been written backwards. High scorers on the Agreeableness dimension are harder to sort out in research studies because status addiction affects this dimension more than it does the other four. For instance, generosity and altruism may be genuine (in which case they’re coming from the Soul Circuitry and belong on the Extraversion dimension). On the other hand, generosity and altruism may be nothing more than status-addiction-in-sheep’s-clothing (which means they’re coming from the clever tactical centres of the Darwinian Circuit, and should stay right where they are on the Agreeableness dimension, since Agreeableness is focussed on social strategies that enhance 3D biological health).

A philanthropist who can’t donate money to a worthy cause without seeing his/her name emblazoned in big letters on the outside of a new research centre is suffering from a severe case of status-addiction-in-sheep’s-clothing. This behaviour deserves a high score on the “I’m-doing-it-to-survive-on-the-social-ladder” scale.

Giving, of course, is good. If you’re giving from your heart and soul, you’ll have no trouble giving anonymously and forgoing any credit for your generosity. It should be fairly obvious, though, that giving to others so you can earn yourself lots of status points is not so good from the soul’s point of view.

Poor Sheldon Cooper. He can follow the rules of social conventions by rote, but he doesn’t understand them. He doesn’t understand why he’s not supposed to call his twin sister “inferior genetic material.” He doesn’t understand why Leonard wants to be with Penny in emotional, intimate, heartfelt ways. He laughs when it’s socially appropriate, not because he gets the joke, but because he knows at a Darwinian level that he’s supposed to. He’s a classic Platonic Philosopher-King who believes in his own superiority and not much else.

He’s busted from top to bottom. But this doesn’t stop him from bossing other people around and using pure logic to abuse the people around him.

Not that Sheldon thinks he’s an abuser. In his own eyes, he’s a really nice guy.

This is why he reminds me so much of the Apostle Paul.

TBM37: Dreams – The Courage to Trust the Science of Sleep

One thing people on a spiritual path are very curious about is dreams. What are dreams? Where do they come from? Why do we have them? What do they mean? Does God send us messages in our dreams?

Sint Maarten 2014

This is a huge topic, and I can’t answer these questions in a single post, but I’d like to point out a few things you need to know about sleeping and dreaming if you want to stay healthy while you follow the Spiral Path.*

The number one thing you need to know — based not on religious teachings but on a huge body of scientific research — is that you need to get a good night’s sleep (or a good day’s sleep if you’re a shift worker). If you want to have a healthy brain, you need to set aside a single block of sleep time each day, a single block of uninterrupted time that’s 8 hours long or so. Your brain requires this time because it does a lot of work for you while you’re sleeping.**

I’ll come back shortly to the question of people who need to get up several times in the night for compassionate reasons — for example, young parents or caregivers who are looking after someone who’s ill. For the moment, I’m talking only about adolescents and adults who have a choice about their daily schedule and a choice about their nighttime activities.

Chronic sleep deprivation is currently wreaking havoc on the brains of people in our society. Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating, but this is one of those instances where I have lots and lots of scientific research on my side. So I don’t have to apologize for my strong statement about sleep deprivation. It’s the honest truth.

I have no tolerance — absolutely none — for any spiritual or religious teaching that barrels over the realities of sleep health like a tank on a military mission. I have no tolerance for any religious tradition that requires you to wake up part way through your sleep cycle so you can pray. I fully understand people’s desire to be in sincere communication with God, but if you really want to be in sincere communication with God, then please respect the way God designed your brain, and please make sure you get the sleep time God wants you to get.

You’ll be able to hear God and God’s angels much more clearly if you honour the teachings that come to you through current brain research (even though such research seems to contradict the wisdom of ancient religious teachings). There’s a reasonthat so many studies have linked sleep disorders to a whole slew of physical and psychological health disorders. Chronic sleep deprivation and chronic sleep interruption (eg. sleep apnea) are as toxic to your brain’s health as chewing lead paint off an old wooden spoon. You may not notice the effects at first, but you sure as heck shouldn’t be surprised when you start having health problems. Health problems are a biological consequence of your failure to get long blocks of natural sleep. If you already have a sleep disorder, then you know what I mean. When this major system of your body is “broke,” it ain’t pretty.

I’ve tried to emphasize on this site that everyone on Planet Earth is equal on the Spiral Path. Everyone has equal access to the wonder of it. Everyone has — or should have — equal access to the basic tools. The basic tools — free will, education, self-discipline, courage, empathy, brain health, teamwork — don’t require lots of money. They don’t require special rituals. They don’t require obedience to religious laws. But they do require trust — trust in the scientific realities of God’s good creation.

The need for natural sleep is one of the scientific realities of God’s good creation here on Planet Earth. It’s a scientific reality that can’t be circumvented by religious or cultural laws, no matter how much we’d like to believe in our own ability to “rise above” such petty biological concerns as sleep.

I know, of course, that many ambitious individuals in this world think sleep is a nuisance, and, even more significantly, that sleep is a sign of weakness, a sign shown only by needy and pathetic underlings unworthy of the right to lead others.

These ambitious Type A individuals (as they used to be called) are the same human beings who have lost all (or most) of the connections between the Darwinian Circuitry and the Soul Circuitry inside their own brains. Their brains are operating on a steady diet of status addiction, anger, contempt for others, narcissism, and denial. They no longer need as much sleep as other people because, to be honest, their own brains have less work to do at night.

This isn’t a good thing, by the way. It’s never a good thing when your own brain stops working the way it’s supposed to. It’s not a sign of strength or superiority when you only need 4 hours of sleep each night. It’s a sign that you’ve seriously fucked up your own brain.

Those who don’t sleep well also don’t dream well. Did you know that many people don’t actually have dreams? Not ones they can remember, anyway. Yeah, no dreams. It’s more common than you think. But most people who suffer from this kind of “dream disorder” don’t want to admit it out loud because they suspect, somewhere deep inside, that it isn’t biologically normal for a person to be “dreamless,” so to speak.

I’ve noticed a pattern over the years in the type of person who’s likely to confess he or she never remembers dreams. The people I’ve personally known who are “dreamless” are all high-functioning people in their waking lives, people who are meticulous, perfectionistic, highly rational, and bulldog-like in their relationships with others. These people mistrust sentiment, have little sympathy for the suffering of people they don’t know, hold politically conservative views, and cherish the values of duty, honour, obedience, and denial of pain. In psychological terms, they would score high on the “Negative Emotionality” or “Neuroticism” dimension of the Big Five Personality scale. They would also score high on the “Agreeableness” dimension of the Big Five.

These two dimensions — the Neuroticism dimension and the Agreeableness dimension — generate traits that are linked to the brain’s Darwinian Circuitry. The other three dimensions in the Big Five model — Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness — are linked to the brain’s Soul Circuitry.

A human being whose brain is balanced and healthy will exhibit behaviours that seem, well, balanced across all five dimensions. Such a person is open to new experiences, but not so open that your brain falls out; conscientious without being obsessive or controlling or perfectionistic; agreeable and willing to compromise with others, but not willing to be an enabler of addictive behaviours; comfortable in relationships with other people, but also comfortable spending some time alone (as when sleeping!); alert to surrounding situations and stressors, but not preoccupied or obsessed by them.

This is a lot to balance, and it’s very hard for your brain to maintain this balance if you refuse to give your brain the time and energy and nutrients it needs so it can sort and label and store and heal the data it receives every day through your many experiences. Dreams are a significant part of the nightly sorting process.

Human beings are born with the capacity to have three different kinds of dreams. Each does a different job. But they all share one thing in common: they activate the primary visual cortex of the occipital lobes. This is why dreams are accompanied by visual images.

The first kind of dream you can have is purely biological. It’s the kind of dream nobody remembers clearly. It’s a sort of visual record that your brain transmits as it’s doing its nightly housecleaning. It’s a bit like an Excel spreadsheet accompanied by pictures on little Post-It notes. There’s no coherent story line — it’s really just a bunch of important snapshots taken at different times during the previous day. These dreams aren’t especially memorable, and they don’t have much emotional content. (Like an Excel spreadsheet with little pictures.) Important and necessary, but not what you’d call juicy.

Second is the kind of dream that’s more personal, more emotional, and more memorable. If you can remember your dreams, you’re most often remembering dreams from this category. When you have dreams of this kind, what you’re really doing is talking to yourself. Your soul is talking “out loud,” so to speak, with pictures and words and actions. Even more important, your soul is talking about emotions — honest feelings about choices you’ve made. The soul is nothing if not truthful and honest. So if your brain has made some choices your soul doesn’t like, your soul will pipe up while you’re asleep and will express feelings such as fear, anxiety, or a desire to do better (i.e. guilt). (Yes, your own soul can be afraid of choices made by the Darwinian Circuit of your own brain. This is called conscience. If you stop listening to the voice of your own soul — and many, many people do — your brain will stop accepting input from the parts of the brain wired to help you express your Openness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion. Your brain will also stop sending you output in the form of personal dreams. You won’t have personal dreams anymore until you heal your brain.)

The third kind of dream is the kind of dream that’s experienced least often and is written about most. The third kind of dream is the message dream — the direct communication that takes place between you and God, or between you and God’s angels. Message dreams are only possible if you’re in an “open” state.

If you’re never in an open state (because you’ve chosen to reject input from the Soul Circuitry of your brain) you won’t get this kind of dream. Message dreams can only be received by a brain that’s relatively healthy and balanced. (Sorry — no exceptions.) So-called “oracular dreams” that come to you after you’ve used drugs or alcohol or intentionally induced trance states DO NOT COUNT. If you use outside means to try to receive a dream message from God, you’re likely to hear and see many fantastical things, but none of them will be messages from God.

Just because you can’t receive dream messages from God, it doesn’t mean God has abandoned you. Far from it. God never abandons anyone. But you have to accept the scientific reality that a closed brain can’t receive clear messages — either awake or asleep — and you have to work around this particular form of disability. There are plenty of other ways that God can — and does — communicate with you. If you can’t dream at present because your brain is in need of some serious healing, please be patient. Help is all around you.

Last, I’d like to return to the question of sleep deprivation in situations that can’t be helped, such as feeding and caring for an infant at night.

A young infant has strong biological and emotional needs that must be met by the parents or caregivers, and in a case like this — where you’re getting up in the night because someone else needs you and because you care — God and your angels will lend you extra support. You don’t have to ask for this support (though a prayer of thanks and gratitude is always appreciated!!). All you have to do is get up in the night because your heart tells you it’s the right thing to do. As long as you stay “in the zone” of caring and worrying about another person, God will look after the relevant wiring in your brain.

If, on the other hand, you’re getting up at night solely because you “have to” — solely from a sense of duty or obligation or feeling sorry for yourself — you won’t get the angelic support your body needs. Why not? Because you’re not being your true self — the loving, emotionally supportive person you’re capable of being. God has free will, and God does not enable choices or behaviours that snuff out the messages of the soul and replace those message with ideologies of perfectionism, superiority, victimhood, or obedience to religious law. So if you’re getting up in the middle of the night to recite traditional prayers so God will be properly “assisted and nourished,” you’re shooting yourself not in the foot but in the head. You’re ruining your own sleep cycles — intentionally and on purpose — because you believe you’re “helping” God, but all you’re doing is making it harder and harder for you to ever hear God’s quiet voice in your life.

God doesn’t need this kind of “help.” And neither do you.

One great thing about being asleep is the quiet. Once you’re finally asleep, it’s quiet in the kingdom of your own biological head. It’s in this place of quiet that God’s voice is most easily heard.

God the Mother and God the Father are very quiet and shy, you see. They love to laugh and they love to sing, but they’re both very quiet. They laugh and sing in some places, but in other places they’re the quiet of dew-laden rose petal, the quiet of the morning mist, the quiet of deep waters, the quiet of the sun’s rays silently bearing life to this wondrous planet we live upon.

If you’re very quiet and very open to the Heart of God the Mother and God the Father, you’ll feel the joy and tenderness of their embrace as a deep inner sense of comfort and safety that’s hard to describe.

I invite you to slip into quiet sleep tonight and feel the kindness and shyness of their love.

* Since I first wrote this post, there’s been a tidal wave of articles on the importance of sleep. Here’s a sample of recent articles that have appeared on the BBC news site:

** For more information on what your brain is doing while you’re asleep, please see “Perchance to Prune” by Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli in the August 2013 issue of Scientific American.

Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2012 on The Blonde Mystic

-1

Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, conscience & morality, healing, Mother and Father God, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection, science & faith | Leave a Comment

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.

-4

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.

+43

-1

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

31 Mar 2012

TBM32: Three Spectrographs of Consciousness

The human brain is sometimes called the 3-pound universe, and for good reason. There’s a lot more going on in there than you realize.

Your brain is a one-of-a-kind creation, the one place in all Creation where you can be you, the one place where you actually get to decide what you want to think, feel, do, and create. It’s the place where you feel love. It’s the place where you feel your tears and your laughter. It’s the place where you experience your relationship with God.

But brains are more than just a bunch of uplifting words and pretty pictures. Brains are hard science. Brains are physics, chemistry, biology, and math. Brains are quantum theory — probability wave functions, conscious observer rights, non-locality, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and all the other forms of quantum weirdness you may have been reading about if you’re a science geek.

Hey, I’m a science geek, and proud of it. Blondes can have fun with quantum theory. Who says you have to be a white male German physicist (or theologian) to understand the real science that lies behind all Creation?

Why am I bringing up the topic of quantum physics? Because there’s one aspect of this field that has deep relevance to your everyday life as a regular person trying to walk the Spiral Path hand in hand with your guardian angels. The aspect I’m interested in is wave theory — the behaviour of probability wave functions. You need to have a basic understanding of wave theory (in a simplified form) so you can understand how your own sense of intuition works and why it sometimes seems to fail you.

Don’t worry — this isn’t going to be as scary as you think.

Take a careful look at the three diagrams below. The first is a schematic of the major kinds of choices made inside the biological brain of a typical adult Status Addict. The second shows the major kinds of choices made by an guardian angel (which would include you, as a person-of-soul, when your time on Planet Earth is complete). The third represents the major kinds of choices made by an adult Whole Brain Thinker — a person who’s relying more on input from his/her soul and less on the purely “Darwinian” kill-or-be-killed choices made by certain parts of the biological brain.

Each of the spikes on these “spectrographs of consciousness” represents two things: (1) a particular “radio channel” that your brain, operating as a wireless Blackberry-type device, can pick up, and (2) the strength of each “radio channel.” A short peak means there’s a signal you can pick up, but it’s not strong. A tall peak means there’s a signal you pick up clearly and consistently with little interference (almost as if the transmission tower is next door). The absence of a peak means your own personal Blackberry-brain can’t pick up this particular station at all, no matter how hard you try.

Compare the diagram of the Status Addict to the diagram of the Guardian Angel. The Status Addict, over time, has chosen to change his brain’s priorities so he can focus on getting more status points. This means he’s had to give up certain other choices. He’s had to give up empathy, forgiveness, and humbleness because these would interfere with his belief that he’s better than other people (i.e. his belief that he deserves more status). He’s decided to use the tools of denial, narcissism, anger, and contempt for others to prevent himself from feeling empathy, forgiveness, or humbleness. He’s practised using these destructive tools a lot. And now he’s so good at it, his biological brain has stopped generating any energy waves that would come across to other people as genuine empathy, etc. So now he can’t give empathy to others, but even importantly, for our purposes here, he can’t receive it, either. He has no channel left inside his biological brain where he can “hear” the intent of empathy. He can’t receive on this channel because he’s told his brain — repeatedly — to stop making this particular wave.

In wave theory, you see, there’s all this interesting stuff about waves being amplified and waves being quenched. If you take two tall empathy peaks and add them together, you get — surprise! — one combined peak that’s tall. If you take one tall empathy peak and add it to an equal-sized “trough” in the empathy spectrum, you get — oops! — invisibility. The trough cancels out the peak. So in the Status Addict’s brain, the trough in the empathy region of his spectrograph spells trouble for his guardian angel. His angel can send him all the empathy waves she wants, but his brain isn’t going to hear them. Because it can’t. There’s no channel there.

Meanwhile, the Whole Brain Thinker above has worked very hard to keep his empathy, forgiveness, and humbleness circuits well exercised. Sure, he still makes mistakes, and he still has some anger, narcissism, and denial to work on, but they aren’t very strong compared to his other choices. So they don’t interfere much with the incoming waves of empathy, etc., from his guardian angel. This man can “hear” his guardian angel loud and clear — NOT in the form of words, of course, because most people who are hearing actual words are suffering from hallucinations and need immediate medical care. But the Whole Brain Thinker can “hear” others (including angels) who speak the language of empathy and forgiveness and humbleness. He can both give and receive on these channels. These are the mysterious feelings of the heart.

In the case of our Status Addict above, his guardian angel doesn’t have much to work with, to be honest. I’ve shown small peaks for courage, self discipline, and service to others on the spectrograph above — as you’d see in the profile of a typical evangelical Christian who has listened to traditional Church teachings on humility. These three channels are the only channels where the guardian angel has any hope of being “heard” — and not very clearly at that. This person can go to church every day, say prayers for hours at a time, memorize the whole Bible verse by verse, and STILL not be able to feel God’s presence because he hasn’t built strong useable soul channels inside his own biological brain.

So who is responsible for this lack of useable channels? The status addict or God?

Well, the status addict is the one who holds the responsibility. Why? Because your consciousness (which includes your brain while you’re here on Planet Earth) is the only part of Creation that belongs entirely to you. It’s your own little Kingdom (as Jesus once called it). It’s your corner in God’s Spiritual Kitchen. It’s yours to cherish, yours to care for. It’s also yours to heal — with help from others, of course.

You may not want to hear this, especially if you’ve got to the point in your life where you’ve lost all control over your own thoughts, feelings, actions, and creativity (as happens to too many people, in my view). But healing follows insight. And insight follows facts. So you need to know the facts so you can figure out what to do with them.

Healing a brain that’s fallen into the destructive patterns of status addiction is no easy task. So unlike most of my theological peers, I promise no easy fixes for you if you decide to go out and look for God. Easy fixes are a favourite food for status addiction. So you can imagine what I think of faith healers’ promises! On the other hand, I can promise permanent emotional healing if you’re willing to slowly and patiently regain control of the parts of your brain that are causing you so much suffering. This may require medical intervention, but such intervention is okay with God and your guardian angels. There’s no shame in needing help. Everyone needs help! Learning to receive help with gratefulness and humbleness is a big part of the journey.

When you compare the spectrographs of the Status Addict and the Whole Brain Thinker, you may be tempted to say it’s impossible for the brain of a Status Addict to ever be transformed to the pattern of the Whole Brain Thinker. You may be tempted (as so many religious teachers have been) to claim the Status Addict was born this way, and nobody can change it, and you may as well resign yourself to it. You may be tempted to say that only a saint who’s specially chosen by God could ever manage to do all that hard stuff like . . . like . . . caring about other people every day.

Fortunately, this miraculous transformation is not restricted to saints. And it’s not restricted to those who seek help from ordained clerics. It’s open to anyone, because all of us are children of God, and all of us are equally worthy of God’s help as we struggle with the difficult challenges we endure as human beings.

Trust in the fact that inside your confused and miswired human brain is your true self — you as a soul — who already lives and breathes everything you see on the chart for the Guardian Angel. You, as a person-of-soul, DO all these cool things like empathy and forgiveness and service and humbleness and self discipline and courage. You DO! You may not remember today, and you may not remember tomorrow, but that’s okay — just hang onto this uplifting divine truth about you as a child of God.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. The brain science speaks far more loudly here than any religious text that’s ever been written. Science is one of God’s many languages. Don’t be afraid of it. The love and the science go together in one astounding package of wonder and mystery and awe and creativity (not to be confused with creationism, which is bizarre beyond bizarre).

What’s this? Talking about God the Mother and God the Father as if they’re brainiac scientists who know what they’re doing when they bring quantum waves and particles together in new creations that actually work?

Yeah . . . such a kookie idea.

+11

-2

Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Favourite Posts, Kingdom teachings, quantum theory, Soul, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

14 Mar 2012

TBM28: When You Are Forgiven, You Are Forgiven

Over a year ago, in a post called “More Thoughts on the Soul,” I wrote that it’s better to be confused for a while on the Spiral Path than be caught in a nightmare of perfectionism and Divine Law.

So today I’d like to tell you a bit about the early part of my journey, a period when I felt confused most of the time.

The year 2000 was a challenging time for me. This was the year when I learned to develop my natural channelling skills. This was also the year when I left my husband after 20 years of marriage. Sandwiched between these two major events, I got quite ill. In June 2000, I had an acute episode of gastrointestinal inflammation. At the time, I assumed it was an exacerbation of the chronic ulcerative colitis I’d been suffering from for 20 years. But there were some extra symptoms, too, including intense nausea and vomitting that weren’t part of my normal pattern of G.I. upset. I treated my symptoms at home (apart from one brief visit to the emerg for rehydration), which meant, in the context of my spiritual studies at the time, that I spent a lot of time praying and calling upon Reiki energies and asking my guardian angel, Zak, to help me “clear” the negative energies that I assumed were the cause of my acute illness.

In retrospect, this was a dumb thing to do. But, you know, I was so sure I was right.

Eventually my body managed to heal itself — no thinks to my arrogant spiritual assumptions. There were, of course, no attacks taking place upon me from negative energies (e.g. past life karma) or negative entities (e.g. fallen angels). On the other hand, it seems there were plenty of attacks initiated by me upon me by my very own self.

In other words, I was doing it to myself. I was stressing myself out and didn’t even realize it. I was freaking out my own soul with all my untrusting, unloving, cruel talk about negative energies and negative entities, and my own soul was speaking up — speaking up through the biological medium of stress hormones. It was my own stress hormones that were making me sick in the early summer of 2000.

Many of us these days have accepted the reality that stress hormones are something of a mixed blessing. During times of great external stress, we’d be toast if we didn’t have stress hormones to kick us almost instantly into overdrive. But during times of great internal stress, we can pump out so many stress hormones for such a long period of time that we start to damage our own biology from the inside out. This is why stress has been linked to so many autoimmune disorders (including the one I used to suffer from, ulcerative colitis).

You can read more about the long term effects of chronic stress on learning, memory, immune function, rate of healing, and brain repair (neuroplasticity) by googling the topic. It’s not my intent to go into the medical research here. It is my intent, however, to highlight for you the biological reality — the actual biological effect on your brain — when you insist on accepting as “truth” certain theories that your own soul abhors.

Your own soul doesn’t like it at all when certain parts of your brain and central nervous system (what Jesus has described as your “Darwinian Circuitry”) try to gather “proof” for theories about God and the soul that feed the ongoing cravings of status addiction.

There’s coding in your DNA that’s designed to trigger the release of stress hormones within your own body when the Darwinian Circuitry of your brain tries to “take over” and muscle out the messages of your inner Soul Circuitry.* Naturally, this is an excellent design strategy, because it means you always have access to the natural wisdom of your own soul. Live according to your soul’s needs and you stay relatively healthy; reject your soul’s needs and be prepared to wage war with your own body’s DNA.

In short, you’re always getting feedback about your footing on the Spiral Path from your own biological body. If your immune system is constantly fighting infections and internal inflammatory processes, it means you’re out of balance. It may also mean there are too many stress hormones circulating in your body.

So finding different strategies to help your body reduce its levels of stress hormones will be highly beneficial for your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Many well-established stress-reducing practices make excellent spiritual practices, too — practices such as getting together with friends to play old-fashioned board games or shinny hockey, watching uplifting films that make you laugh and cry, sitting outside in the fresh air and sun with a good book, having an afternoon nap, and giving and receiving hugs each day.

You can try meditation if you like, as long as you keep this practice in balance and don’t exceed the “total of 2 hours per day” rule. I should tell you, though, that I myself don’t meditate. At the stage in my journey when many spiritual masters would have urged me to meditate in earnest, I tried something entirely unexpected at the insistence of my guardian angel, Zak. I tried the practice of forgiveness.

Learning to give and receive forgiveness was the very first spiritual practice I embarked on that Zak actually endorsed, encouraged, and insisted on with unrelenting and exasperating diligence. He just wouldn’t let up on this one. And because I was a channeller by this time, and could hear every word he said on the topic, I had to listen to him go on and on about the importance of forgiveness to, well, to everything I hoped to achieve on my spiritual journey.

Very early on in this series of lessons, Zak had me write out and stick to the fridge this note:

When you are forgiven, you are forgiven.

This simple truth left me in agony for months. But each time I went to the fridge, I had to look at it. And be reminded of it. And struggle with it emotionally and intellectually.

It was a very sneaky tactic on Zak’s part. But it was also extremely effective. I couldn’t get away from the issue. I couldn’t sweep it under the carpet and pretend I hadn’t heard Zak. Several times each day I had to think about forgiveness and what forgiveness might actually mean.

Learning to forgive was not an overnight epiphany, let me tell you. I really had to work at it. I had to question old assumptions. I had to be honest with myself about my own past mistakes. I had to find my own courage. Most of all, I had to be willing to receive forgiveness from Zak and from God and from other human beings, which was the hardest part.

It’s not easy to believe you’re worthy of God’s forgiveness, especially once you start to be deeply honest with yourself about harm you’ve created for yourself and others. In fact, it’s so painful to stare your own mistakes in the eye that you absolutely MUST learn forgiveness FIRST so you have the inner means to cope with your own past, your own history, your own mistakes.

You also need somebody to help you with this part of the journey. You need a mentor, somebody you can talk to in trust and faith, because during this part of the journey a lot of painful questions will rise to the surface. It’s best not to try this alone. A professional counsellor might be appropriate. Or a small group of trusted friends who operate according to the principles of the Twelve Step program. I wish with all my heart that I could recommend your local minister or priest, but I simply can’t, because I have yet to meet an ordained cleric who understands what forgiveness is.

God’s forgiveness is one thing you never have to ask for. God the Mother and God the Father forgive you for the mistakes you make even before you’ve finished making them. There are no words to describe the immensity of this gift. But their forgiveness is a source of great inspiration and a never-ending source of awe and wonder for us all.

Once I understood with every shred of my being that God really did forgive me and wasn’t going to take it back — once I could trust that for God forgiveness is a permanent act instead of a conditional choice dependent on my “perfection” and “obedience” — I found the courage to move forward on the Spiral Path in the absolute certainty that I would continue to make mistakes as I struggled to learn what Divine Love means.

As I also said early on in these posts, God doesn’t expect you to be perfect. God only expects you to try hard each day to be the kind and loving person you really are as a soul.

Knowing God is in the trying.

Finally! After several years of study, I earned my M.T.S. in June 2014. For me, ongoing academic study is an important spiritual practice -- one made easier and more productive because I can forgive myself.

Finally! After several years of study, I finally earned my M.T.S. in June 2014. For me, ongoing academic study is an important spiritual practice — one made easier and more productive because I forgive myself for not being perfect.

* For more on the Darwinian Circuitry and Soul Circuitry of your brain, see The Christ Zone Model: Introduction.

-3

Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, forgiveness, healing, meditation, My Spiral Path, mystic, spiritual practices, status addiction, The Blonde Mystic, the right to be right, trust and tagged brain-soul connection, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

21 Feb 2012

TBM24: Juggling the Needs of Heart, Mind, Body, and Talent

On the Spiral Path, you’re always trying to find the “sweet spot” where the needs of your heart match the needs of your mind, the needs of your body, and the needs of your talents. The sweet spot is the place where you feel whole, balanced, calm, and complete.

Too often I’ve read books that tell you how to find the needs of your heart while ignoring the needs of your mind. Or books that tell you how to find the needs of your body while ignoring the needs of your heart. Or books that tell you how to find the needs of your mind while ignoring pretty much everything else. (There are a lot of books about the needs of the mind.)

On the Spiral Path, you need a plan that takes you forward bit by bit in all spheres of your being, not just one or two select spheres. You need a holistic plan, a balanced plan that has a little bit of everything in it.

In the Spiritual Kitchen, you’d soon fall into a rut if you had to make the same ol’ cream of potato soup every day. Not that cream of potato soup is a bad thing in itself. But every day? Three times a day? Wouldn’t that get pretty repetitive, pretty obsessive-compulsive after a while?

The recipe for healthy eating, as Canada’s Food Guide tells us, is to eat something from each food group at each meal, and, furthermore, to switch up the foods that are chosen from each food group. This way we get a wide variety of necessary vitamins, trace elements, amino acids, fats, anti-oxidants, and calorie sources.

This same sensible, balanced approach applies to life on the Spiral Path. There are four main “energy groups” you have to think about each day: (1) your soul’s heart (2) your soul’s mind (3) your soul’s body and (4) your soul’s need to use your own talents and strengths in service to others. All these are equally important to your overall health.

It would be easy to say, “Oh, so our emotional health is linked to our hearts, and our physical health is linked to our soul bodies.”

This would be the easy thing to say, but not the correct thing to say. It’s much more complicated than that because you, as a 4D-angel-temporarily-incarnated-as-a-3D-human-being, are much more complicated than that.

When, for example, you look after the needs of your soul’s heart, this improves your health at all levels: your physical health, your emotional health, your intellectual health, and your spiritual health. Why? Because you’re a holistic organism. You’re a complex biosystem with many interconnected parts. The one thing you are NOT is a bunch of different coloured Lego blocks or widgets or mechanical pieces that can be removed and treated in isolation from all the other parts. You are much, much more than the sum of your individual parts.

One body of spiritual thought I object to in every way possible is the idea that your eternal “energy self” is made up of a bunch of different layers or “astral bodies,” with some layers being “heavier” and therefore less “advanced” and less “enlightened,” while other layers are of a “higher” and “more desirable” vibration that’s closer to the Divine.

This is pure crap. It’s a form of anagogic mysticism, and, if you’ve been reading my other blogs, you know I have no use for either anagogic mysticism (the path of vertical spiritual ascent) or apophatic mysticism (“we are all One” — literally).

Your soul has a lot of different “systems” and “organs,” just as your biological human body has a lot of different systems and organs, and all of them are equally important to your ability to function as a complete and entire angel. Your soul heart and soul mind couldn’t exist if you didn’t have a soul body to hold everything in place. So your soul body is just as important to your overall consciousness as your heart, mind, and talents are. It needs just as much attention and care as your biological human body does.

Keep it simple, keep it sane, as my guardian angel has been telling me for years.

When you make the decision, as an angel-in-angel-form, to undertake the difficult task of incarnating here on Planet Earth, you have to somehow be able to squish your core consciousness — your unique blend of heart, mind, body, and talents — into a small and temporary biological package. This small package is your DNA, which carries in its helix an entire blueprint for constructing your biological body. Your DNA is unique to you because you, as a soul and child of God, are unique in all of Creation. Even identical twins, who are currently thought to have identical genes, are a unique expression of consciousness. (Poorly understood epigenetic factors play a much greater role in development than previously recognized. This is one reason why identical twins, while remarkably similar to each other, even when raised apart, are still very different people. Plus they have different souls!)

You are who you are who you are. You are who you are because you can’t be any other way. Nor do you want to be any other way — not as a soul, at least. As a soul, you’re very happy to be who you are. As a human being . . . well, as a human being you’re also supposed to be happy with who you are. Except that few people are.

Most people I know, and most people I’ve read about, have no idea whatsoever how to be happy with who they are. That’s because they can’t read their own soul blueprint. They don’t know how to interpret the inner whispers of their own heart, mind, body, and talents. Heck, most people don’t even know they have a soul blend of heart, mind, body, and talents. They think they’re just . . . existing.

The soul is not a “single substance,” despite what famous philosophers and theologians of the past have said. Nor is it unchangeable. The soul does change with time, because no one who is learning and loving and giving and creating can stay the same. Even as souls, as children of God, we’re changed by our experiences and our relationships. And this is always a good thing.

One of the great mysteries of consciousness, however, is the fact that although all of us change over the course of time as souls, none of us change in exactly the same way. We’re unique in the way we absorb new experiences and process them. We’re unique in the way we remember them. We’re unique in the way we share them. We’re all different, and at the same time, equally beautiful.

We’re all equally beautiful, but this is not to say we’re all identical or all “One.” We’re as different from each other in the way we grow and flourish as the many different kinds of flowers on Planet Earth. When we’re all put side by side, we make a breathtaking garden of passionate blooms, some short, some tall, some showy, some shy. All different. But all equally wondrous.

In no way does the family of God resemble endless neat rows of identical, unchanging wheat plants ready to be harvested by the master.

Our willingness as souls to be changed by our relationships with other souls is not limited to angels. God the Mother and God the Father are also learning, changing, growing as they live in daily relationship with us, their children. They’re expanding the size of their Spiritual Kitchen to make room for their ever-growing family of angels — core beings, core consciousnesses who reside for most of their existence within the complex folds of space and time that we, as 3D human beings, simply cannot see with our human eyes.

This is not to say, however, that they’re invisible to the heart.

-1

Posted in brain-soul connection, building your intuition, Kingdom teachings, Mother and Father God, Soul, The Blonde Mystic, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

27 Nov 2011

RS15: The Human Sense of Time & Timing

Rivers of Time (c) JAT 2013

J: Today I want to talk about the human sense of time and timing.

A: Okay. I’ve had my first coffee, so my typing fingers are warmed up and ready to go.

J: When you were growing up, what were you taught about the human senses?

A: Oh. That’s easy. We were taught there are five senses — sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. I think this is still the conventional wisdom.

J: Right. And if I were to ask a group of people today what the “sixth sense” is, what would people say?

A: Intuition. Second sight. Psychic messages. Something along those lines.

J: Right. People in this culture are taught to think of the “sixth sense” as intuition — as something vague and on the fringe.

A: There’s also the famous movie called Sixth Sense. That’s a bit more than “being on the fringe.” That’s right into the Twilight Zone.

J: The problem — the problem I want to state clearly for the record — is that all human beings are born with an additional physical sense that hasn’t been recognized for what it is. This additional physiological trait is a scientific trait, not a paranormal trait. It’s 100% verifiable and 100% crucial to the healthy functioning of the human brain. It’s so important to the healthy functioning of the human brain that when it isn’t properly supported during the first few years of a child’s life, it causes lifelong problems in most facets of daily living.

A: You’re talking about the sense of time & timing.

J: Yes. This poorly understood aspect of the biological brain is so important that you could almost call it “the missing key” — the aspect of human consciousness that, if properly developed and used throughout life, generates an inner experience of wholeness and completion, an experience that so many people are lacking in their lives today.

A: Can you define the sense of time & timing?

J: It’s the ability of the human brain to correctly place “the self” on a timeline. It’s the ability to distinguish between past, present, and future. It’s the ability — quite literally — to tell time on an analog clock.

A: Ooooh. A lot of younger people today can’t tell time on an analog clock.

J: True. And it’s symptomatic of a much wider issue — the growing choice in Western culture (and other cultures) to stop teaching children about their own sense of time & timing. The parietal lobes of these children are not developing properly in early childhood. The parietal lobes of the brain are not developing the strong interconnections they need with all other parts of the brain. The cost here will be very high. Very high for these children, very high for their communities.

A: You don’t pull your punches, do you? Most people have never even heard of the sense of time or the parietal lobes of the brain, and here you are telling them the high cost of not developing these aspects of themselves. Are you talking about a spiritual cost? Changes in the parieto-temporal regions of the brain have been linked to certain mystical or spiritual experiences. Is this what you’re talking about?

J (shaking his head): It’s not that simple. The sense of time & timing takes six to seven years — years — to develop in a healthy child whose core needs (the core needs of the Christ Zone model) are all being met.

A: Starting when?

J: From the time of birth. The template for the sense of time & timing exists at birth, but it takes six to seven years of consistent exposure to the flow of time for the human brain to finally “get it.” When the brain finally “gets it,” analog clocks suddenly make sense. They make sense because they demonstrate in a mechanical way the forward movement of time. Digital clocks don’t “model” the forward flow of time. Digital clocks show a bunch of numbers in a particular order, but they don’t show time.

A: I can remember clear as day my son’s gradual struggle as a young boy to master the sense of time. He could read a digital clock at the age of four (“You can come and get Mommy when your clock says 7-0-0”) but it didn’t mean anything to him. He was simply memorizing the numbers.

J: You’d be surprised how many adults try to get through life by memorizing the numbers. It’s a scary feeling when you don’t understand the concept of time, but other people think you do.

A: I remember my son’s favourite TV cartoon when he was four. It was Ghostbusters. It was a half-hour show, and he just loved it. He even dressed up as a Ghostbuster for Hallowe’en one year. When he asked how long something would take, his dad and I would frame it in terms of Ghostbusters. “The church service will be two Ghostbusters long.” He seemed to be able to cope with time when we used his favourite show as a yardstick. Finally, when he was about six, he started to be able to use an analog clock without help. At the time, I had no idea how significant this was.

J: His ability to relate in a rudimentary way to time through the yardstick of his favourite TV show is absolutely crucial to what I’m trying to convey about the human sense of time. Healthy human beings don’t read time the way you read a digital clock. Healthy human beings read time as a history of relationships. It’s all about the history — the learning, the memory, the growth, the change. Time is more than just a bunch of numbers. Time is . . . well, it’s almost organic. It moves forward (never backward) but it flows like a river, not like a geometric line of numbers in sequence. Numbers are two dimensional (literally). Time is fourth dimensional. It can’t be thought of in strictly linear terms, because nothing in the fourth dimension of physics is strictly linear.

A: That’s pretty complex.

J: Time is very complex. It’s intertwined with all aspects of consciousness, whether that consciousness exists in angel-form or in angel-as-human form. All of us — God the Mother, God the Father, angels who are God’s children, angels who are temporarily incarnated as human beings — all of us have strands of time woven into our very being. None of us can escape time. And none of us would want to. It’s our ability to remember events in time, to remember moments of love and joy and sorrow, that makes it possible for us to exist. The soul exists precisely because time moves forward, ever forward, like a cosmic river. The river grows, changes its course, develops new tributaries, slows in some places, rages in others, picks up sediment, drops it, creates fertile fields where new crops can grow, breaks its banks, shrinks to a trickle, but always, always flows with sound and beauty and marvels of construction. So it is with time — time as angels know it, time as God knows it.

A: So you really have to be on your toes with time. You never know where it’s going to carry you next.

J: Yes. A person who has mastered the human sense of time is, by definition, a person who is flexible and adaptable. Someone who can cope with change. Someone who isn’t frightened by the thought of learning something new.

A: I know quite a few people who are terrified of change, can’t cope with new ideas or skills, and want their lives to “stay the same.” They get really angry when they’re put in a situation where they might have to admit they don’t know something. They don’t want to say, “Sorry, I don’t know how to do that.”

J: When the parietal lobes haven’t been fully developed, the human brain does what it’s programmed to do — it shifts to its secondary circuits to pick up the slack. This is what redundancy and neuroplasticity in the brain are supposed to do. If one major circuit goes off-line, or is underactive, you temporarily shift the load to a different circuit till you can fix the main problem. Anyone who works with complex electrical engineering systems will know what I mean.

The difficulty here is that the brain shifts the load to secondary circuits (for example, to the anterior cingulate cortex), but the main problem in the parietal lobes never gets fixed. The load stays on the secondary circuits — circuits that aren’t designed to take this kind of load on a long term basis. Eventually, these secondary circuits start to break down, just as you’d expect. The cost of this begins to appear in a person’s thought, mood, and behaviour. In other words, serious mental health issues and serious neurological issues begin to arise. It’s inevitable.

A: Meanwhile, your parietal lobes are still underactive, which means you can’t learn from your own mistakes, and life is endlessly frustrating.

J: It makes you feel as if there’s a big hole inside you, a big void, that goes round and round without beginning or end. It’s feels like a hamster wheel, and you’re trapped on it. It feels awful, but after a while you start to believe it’s normal. Even worse, you start to believe that everyone else must feel the same way inside — empty and trapped and hopeless. But it’s not true. This isn’t the normal state of inner experience human beings are designed for. God is a little smarter than that.

A: Not that the Church has ever said so . . . .

-1

Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, Christ Zone, insight, interoception, Realspiritik, sense of time & timing, Soul, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection, science & faith | Leave a Comment

20 Nov 2011

RS13: One Path to Manyness NOT Many Paths to Oneness

A: A few days ago I was talking to you — complaining to you, actually — about the idea of religious Oneness, the idea that all major world religions teach the same core values through many different paths. You responded in typical Jesus fashion. You said, “There are not many paths to oneness, but one path to manyness.” You wanna talk about this new Yeshuism? (I think I just invented a new word.)

J: As an angel, I’m getting pretty tired of listening to all the excuses and all the lies that are being told by devout conservative thinkers of all religions. And I’m not alone in my exasperation. God’s angels know what human beings are capable of, and you know what? Not many people these days even care. Most people are not being raised by their families or communities to know or care about human potential.

The current trend in the West is to put all religious leaders and religious texts on an equal footing, which is to say they’re placing them all on a sacred pedestal of immunity — immunity from scrutiny, immunity from common sense. It’s a misguided attempt to prevent anyone from having their “feelings hurt.” God isn’t in the business of preventing people from having their feelings hurt. God is in the business of forgiveness and transformation, of helping each child of God to reach his or her true potential.

A: When you say “his or her true potential,” what do you mean by that? Do you mean some sort of evolutionary advancement in human consciousness, as recent writers of popular fiction have been saying?

J (smiling mischievously): Hey, it’s a great way to earn some big bucks, but it ain’t no way to make your guardian angel smile.

A: I’ve been noticing over the past few years that the writers who make the biggest promises are the ones least likely to know what it means, what it feels like, to live in the Christ Zone. I’m very suspicious of anyone who tries to sell spirituality and faith as something that exists outside the realities of normal everyday life.

J: Most people live hard lives. They suffer a lot. Their children suffer a lot. They need ways to cope. One of the most popular ways of coping is Escape. Escape with a capital “E.” Many people use alcohol or drugs to escape. Many use sex. But many, many people escape through storytelling — through books, films, plays, or religious mythology. Religious mythology and plays have both been around for a long, long time. They’re popular. They’re traditional. But this doesn’t make them true — not in a literal sense. They may be true in an allegorical sense. They may help people express and cope with their own feelings, and in this sense the stories are useful and helpful. But for human beings to make up stories about God and then peddle them as literal truth . . . this is completely unacceptable. Unacceptable to God and unacceptable to the soul of each human being. A religious tradition that teaches its children elaborate, fantastical histories of Creation — when it’s actually not possible for any human being anywhere to understand or convey the scientific history of Creation — is not teaching its followers about God. It’s teaching the path of Oneness. It’s teaching the path of narcissism and contempt for God. It’s teaching children to blindly obey their human leaders. This is mind control, not faith.

A: I’ve been working for years with you on the question of Creation as a scientific and historical reality, and the more I learn the more I realize I don’t understand it. I have no interest in going “on the record” with the tiny bit I’ve learned so far. This would be hubris, in my opinion.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. You’re saying that faith and blind obedience are mutually exclusive choices.

J: Exactly. Faith, as you and I have defined it, is an experience of enduring relationship with God in the absence of sacred texts. This means that an individual who has never read the Bible is fully capable of being in mature relationship with God on a daily basis.

A: A lot of people would say it’s impossible to know God or be in relationship with God if you don’t have a sacred book to guide you. Sort of like trying to find your way to the North Pole without a map.

J: Well, here’s the thing. Everyone — and I mean everyone — is born with an inner map. The inner map is hardwired into your DNA and expresses itself through your brain architecture. If you’re raised in such a way that your biological brain is reasonably balanced, guess what? The map lights up inside your head even though you’re just a regular guy/gal who’s trying to live a humble life. In fact, the map will only light up inside your head if you’re a regular guy/gal who’s trying to live a humble life. This is the way God designed the biology of the human brain. The human brain and central nervous system are designed in such a way that there’s only one way to achieve a state of mature relationship with God. This one way is to balance the competing needs shown in the Christ Zone model.

A: Juggling the physiological needs with the safety needs, the love & belonging needs, and the self-esteem needs.

J: Yes. It is an indisputable scientific fact that when a child is raised in a way that consistently balances and honours these four main needs, this child will grow up to be remarkably stable, responsible, mature, organized, practical, funny, humble, and interested in building strong relationships with others, including God.

A: Why these attributes and not others? Why not competitive, aggressive, focussed, dedicated?

J: Because mature, responsible people aren’t competitive and aggressive. They’re hard working and competent without being competitive and aggressive. Furthermore, they don’t want to be competitive and aggressive. They prefer to be humble and happy.

A: So competitive and aggressive don’t fit on the same page with humble and happy?

J: Nope. “Competitive and aggressive” fit very nicely on the same page with traditional orthodox Western Christianity, but not on the same page with what I taught.

A: Hmmmm. The Crusades spring to mind. Plus Christian slave-owning. And Christian evangelism. I’m not too fond of Christian preaching on sin and salvation.

J: If you look closely at Paul’s theology of sin, salvation, sacraments, and separation from God, what you see is a systematic attempt on Paul’s part to undermine all four needs of the Christ Zone model. You see him savaging the soul’s need for self-esteem by telling people they’re full of sin and can’t get rid of it no matter how hard they try (which is why they need Christ’s intervention). You see him crushing all hope that regular people can be in full relationship with God — in a state of love and belonging with God — except maybe on the future Day of Judgment. You see him steal away people’s sense of safety and trust in God by preaching about grave perils and dangers and demons and cosmic forces such as Sin and Law. You see him even try to rob people of the chance to add meat to their diet through fear of committing idolatry. Small portions of meat protein are important to the physiological health of most human beings. Same with healthy, respectful sexuality, which Paul also tries to undermine by playing the guilt card.

Of course, one of the biggest tip-offs about Paul’s true intent is his attitude towards slavery. He doesn’t say that slavery is wrong, that it’s morally reprehensible. He side-steps all the brutal realities of slavery, which include the frequent withholding of proper food and shelter (physiological needs); the complete annihilation of all safety needs (safety of the core self, the psychological self, the sexual self, the relationship self, the trusting self); the replacement of true love and belonging needs (i.e. the “one path to manyness”) with false teachings on love and belonging (i.e. “we are all one in Christ” or “the many paths to oneness”); and as for self-esteem . . . well, come on, now, self-esteem is intertwined with egalitarianism and wholeness and self-respect and empathy, and a slave isn’t offered any of these things by his masters. It’s a rare slave who finds the inner courage to overcome all these obstacles on his or her own. However, it does happen and can happen. Human beings are extraordinary and awe-inspiring when they decide to take full possession of their own inner map and follow it instead of these numbskull religious teachings.

A: Just now you linked true loving and belonging needs with the one path to manyness. Can you explain that in more detail?

J: All people need love and belonging. They need to belong to families or communities or friendship groups. It’s normal and healthy. In fact, they can’t be in full relationship with God if they’ve never had any of their love and belonging needs met in their everyday human lives.

A: Why not?

J: Because their brains have never learned over time how to have relationships with anybody. They’ve never learned how to listen with all their heart to another person, how to maintain respectful boundaries with another person, how to communicate clearly without getting angry and controlling, how to compromise. Again, this is all scientifically verifiable. Thousands and thousands of books have been written on these topics. This isn’t New Age fluff I’m talkin’ here. This is the stuff of real life, real psychology, real change. People’s lives get better when they learn how to do relationships. People’s lives get worse when they ignore their relationship needs. Nobody gets out of this reality. Nobody. God doesn’t intend that individuals should be able to find their own inner map by going off into the desert to live alone for months or years. It isn’t normal and it isn’t healthy. You can only see who you are in relationship with God if you know who you are in relationship with other people. You have to love your neighbours — your neighbours on Planet Earth — if you want to know what it feels like to love your God.

A: Because God the Mother and God the Father are NOT you. They’re not One with you. They’re part of a family WITH you. But they’re not you. So you have to get to know them the way you’d get to know any of your other neighbours.

J: Yes. Angels walk side by side, hand in hand. We are the many who share the values of divine love, courage, devotion, gratitude, and trust. We are the many who are a family united in love. We are the many who can flourish in our own distinctiveness because there’s only one path to true love and belonging.

That path is the path of balance.

-1

Posted in "4 S's", "Escape", Christ Zone, Church of today, Favourite Posts, HDM Myths, Paul vs Jesus, Realspiritik, relationship with God, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection, Kingdom teachings, science & faith | Leave a Comment

07 Nov 2011

RS11: The Christ Zone Model: Introduction

Celtic Cross in Brompton Cemetery, England ((C) tracy from north brookfield, MA, USA, Flickr)

A: In January 2005, you dropped a bombshell on me. That’s when you responded to my persistent questions about human evil by explaining the Christ Zone model to me. I think this would be a good time and place for us to talk about this scientific model and what it can mean for human beings who are trying to heal their hearts and minds and bodies.

J: Sure thing.

A: I want to make sure that readers understand this model is an original model, an original philosophical and scientific model, that arose directly out of my channelling work with you. It’s not a rehash of ancient teachings. It’s not a cut-and-paste job from the writings of mystics, new or old. There’s no attempt in this model to give an answer for every world problem. The model has limits, because it’s just a model, NOT a “Complete Handbook That Will Solve All the World’s Problems.” But it’s a very useful model, and I’d like to make sure that credit is given where credit is due.

J: You sound a bit hot under the collar here.

A: Last time you were expressing your exasperation that people won’t take responsibility for what they put inside their own brains. Today I’m expressing my exasperation at some of the reactions I’ve had from certain Christians about my work as a channeller and mystic. Some people seem to believe that if I actually am talking to you, Jesus, then I ought to be able to get solutions from you for every problem afflicting the world today. Like the cure for cancer. And all I can do is shake my head and repeat what I’ve said before: I’m just one person. I have a human brain. I have limits, like everyone else. I’m not even trying to get all the answers. I’m just trying to understand a few things really well.

J: I think the recent inundation of books and films and TV shows about the almost “limitless” potential of the “evolving human mind” has created a lot of unrealistic expectations. Those who’ve never had an experience of faith or deep connection with God can end up having some very peculiar ideas about what these experiences feel like.

A: I’ve never been skydiving or deep sea diving, so I don’t think it’s right for me to have an opinion about what it feels like to be an actual skydiver or deep sea diver. Yet many Christians I’ve spoken with believe it’s okay for them to have an opinion about what it feels like for me to be a mystic-channeller. They feel they “know” what’s going on inside my head — what my intent is, what my methods are — without ever actually asking me. I don’t like being pigeon-holed like this. I don’t like being told I’m making grandiose claims when I spend a lot of my time making very ordinary, un-grandiose claims (such as the claim that everyone is born with their own powerful intuitive circuitry, circuitry that obeys the same “use it or lose it” imperative as any other part of the human brain).

Anyway . . . now that I’ve had my little rant . . . back to the topic at hand. The Christ Zone. Let’s talk about the Christ Zone.

J: The Christ Zone model is a simplified schematic that helps provide a framework for understanding the complex interaction between the soul and the biological body. Each person who is incarnated in 3D form on Planet Earth (in other words, everybody in the world!) is a marvel of divine engineering. The engineering part is seen in the diverse functions of human biology, from RNA and DNA all the way through stem cells and reproductive functions to, well, life. Life in human form. Consciousness living in temporary form in a 3D body. Soul-and-body temporarily intertwined. Fully intertwined. Not easily intertwined, nor permanently intertwined. But fully intertwined, fully integrated in a holistic way, if all goes well in childhood and adolescence.

A: Which all too often doesn’t happen.

J: Yes. This is the painful reality. Far, far too many children are raised by their families and communities in ways that make it impossible for young people to grow up to become mature, loving human beings.

A: How do you define “mature”?

J: Ah. Thank you for that leading question. I define a mature human being as one who is able to balance in a reasonably consistent way the competing demands of both the Darwinian Circuitry of the brain and the Soul Circuitry of the brain.

You know that diagram you created in Wordperfect of the Christ Zone?

A: The one that would make a PhotoShop artist shudder?

J: Yes. Let’s post that right now so people can see what we’re talking about.

A: Okay. If you think so. (Now our readers will know for sure that I practice what I preach about not living for status points, ’cause this diagram ain’t no brilliant artistic production, that’s for sure!)

Okay. Here it is. Sigh . . .

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

J: It’s not that bad. It gets the point across. The main point in the first diagram you’ve posted here is that this triangle is not the Christ Zone diagram. This triangle is Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow, a humanist psychologist who had a positive view of human beings and their true potential, proposed this “triangular” model to explain what he perceived as an overall pattern of human behaviour. He noticed that everyone tries to meet the physiological needs that form the base layer of the triangle — needs such as food, oxygen, water, protection from the elements — but only a few people seem able to arrive at the pinnacle of the triangle — the human experience of connection and completion and purpose and transcendence he labelled “self-actualization.”

A: His theories have met with some success, though Maslow couldn’t come up with a rigorous method of testing for self-actualization. He had to rely a lot on self-reporting of these rare human experiences.

J: Yes. These experiences are considered sporadic and hard to quantify by most researchers.

A: Just as mystical experiences of unio mystica are considered sporadic and hard to quantify.

J: Yes. But the peak experiences described by Maslow and others aren’t the same internal experience as unio mystica. They aren’t synonymous. In fact, peak experiences are almost the opposite of mystical experiences of “oneness” with the Divine.

A: In what way?

J: During peak experiences — experiences of self-actualization — the sense of self isn’t lost or dissolved. If anything the sense of self is heightened. Accompanying this heightened sense of self is (paradoxically) a vast awareness of your own humbleness. Not humility (as religious thinkers have defined humility). Just . . . pure humbleness. A sense that you’re very, very important in the universe, and at the same time not important. That is, not more important than anyone else. During a state of self-actualization, you lose all interest in status, chosenness, pessimism, and self-pity. You just really feel connected. Connected to everyone and everything in Creation. But without losing your sense of self. You’re able to handle the truth that it’s okay with the universe for you to be you. You no longer have to hate yourself for being “different.” You’re able to like yourself, perhaps for the first time in your human life. Once you’ve nailed this truth, you can stop worrying about all your so-called “deficiencies” and “imperfections” and get on with the business of living — living with integrity, joy, trust, and courage.

A: You stop sweating the small stuff?

J: Mmmmmmm, well, no, it’s more like you can start focussing on the small stuff that matters.

A: Like eating nutritious food with your family at the dinner table each evening. Talking together, sharing events of the day, working out problems. Spending time together as a family.

J: Yeah, like that. See, eating dinner is an important part of meeting your physiological needs — the essential needs Maslow placed at the foot of the triangle because of their importance to human survival. But getting your daily nutritional needs met isn’t the only thing that’s happening at the dinner table. Hopefully, anyway. If you’re eating dinner at a table with people you love and trust, and who love and trust you, then you’re also meeting your needs for safety and belonging & love.

A: That’s too simple. Too logical.

J: And, if you live in a family where people believe it’s important to lift you up every day instead of slamming you down and constantly criticizing you for your mistakes and imperfections, then the dinner table conversation will probably also help you meet your need for self-esteem.

A: So you can find most of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at the family dinner table?

J: If it’s a family where individuals are emotionally and spiritually mature, yes. The important point is that the family dinner table isn’t a ladder. It isn’t a vertical ladder of ascent. You don’t meet these diverse needs one at a time by first sitting silently at the table while you eat your fats, carbs, and proteins, then sitting in a self-restrained state to show your trust, then reaching out to give and receive affection and emotional support, then taking turns saying one thing out loud to dole out self-esteem the way you might dole out vitamin pills. The family dinner table is messy. It’s complicated. If you’re all healthy and happy and sane, you’re giving and receiving all these needs at the same time. Without a script. You just do it because it feels right. It’s spontaneous, it’s a bit chaotic at times, but it’s also kind and polite and respectful. Like real life.

A: I hate to say it, but that sequence you’ve described — first you do this, then you do this, and God forbid you should do them all at the same time! — this sequence sounds a lotttttttttt like the Christian worship services I’ve attended.

J: Christian worship does a very poor job of modelling the Christ Zone for anyone. Living in the Christ Zone means you have to balance all your main needs simultaneously, not sequentially. You have to balance your biological needs (physiological and safety needs) with your soul’s emotional needs (belonging & love, plus self-esteem). You have to respect both. You can’t place your body’s biological needs above your soul’s needs; neither can you ignore your body’s legitimate needs as you strive to meet your soul’s needs. God expects you to look after both. At the same time. Throughout your whole life. Until you die.

After you die, your full consciousness returns to its soul state, but even after you return Home to live as an angel-in-angel form, you’ll still have a soul body to look after. So there’s no getting out of the truth that mature, responsible, loving angels have to look after themselves. It’s a way to show God the Mother and God the Father how grateful you are to be you.

A: Here’s the diagram I made in Wordperfect of the actual Christ Zone model:

The Christ Zone Model (non-hierarchical)

It’s pretty self-explanatory. If you want to feel peak experiences, self-actualization, connection to God, or true faith (all pretty much synonymous with each other) you have to live a life of balance.

J: Yup. If you want to enter the Kingdom of God as I taught it, this diagram is the basic roadmap.

A: No wonder the Church doesn’t like you.

Addendum August 24, 2017:

I’m including a few links to articles that can help you get started on learning more about the brain and how the brain actually works (as opposed to way most of us assume the brain works). The closest parallel to the Christ Zone model is the theory of mind called Dual Process Theory. I hope that eventually researchers will see the link between Dual Process Theory and Big Five Personality Theory. In the meantime, the links posted here may help you open your mind to, well, the wonders of your own biological brain. God bless.

“Will religion ever disappear?” by Rachel Nuwer

“The Creativity of Dual Process ‘System 1’ Thinking” by Scott Barry Kaufman and Jerome L. Singer

“The Differences Between Happiness and Meaning in Life” by Scott Barry Kaufman

“Openness to Experience: The Gates to the Mind” by Luke Smillie

“Teaching the Children: Sharp Ideological Differences, Some Common Ground” by Pew Research Center

-2

Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Christ Zone, humbleness, Realspiritik, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

05 Nov 2011

RS10: The Soul’s Blended Logic

A: Hey, I like that new maxim you wrote a few days ago when I was grousing and complaining about the landlord I was stuck with until recently: “The measure of a man is how he decides to behave when the Law is placed in his hands. The righteous man uses the Law as a club to beat others down. The humble man sees that if he places the Law upon the pedestal of his own courage he will have a lever to raise others up.” Yeah, that about sums up my experience with my ex-landlord, Shane. When Ontario rental laws were “on his side,” he was all for quoting the law to his tenants and telling them the law prevented him from doing anything to resolve tensions or disputes. Of course, when the law was on our side — the tenants’ side — that was different. When the law was on our side, we were just troublesome, difficult tenants, in his view, not important enough to respond to in a timely and ethical fashion when there were issues. Not a nice man.

J: You think so. But inside his own head he thinks he’s the most wonderful guy in the world. A real “people person.”

A: If he were the most wonderful guy in the world he wouldn’t have treated me the way he treated me when I gave him notice I was moving out. He wouldn’t have treated the other tenants the way he’s been treating them. He would have responded promptly to the serious maintenance issues that have arisen in the building over the past few months. He would have kept the building in good shape, as the previous landlords did. He wouldn’t have tried to pass the buck to other people. He’s a real pro at passing the buck.

J: What I’m about to say probably won’t cheer you up much.

A (sighing): Go ahead. I’m ready. I think.

J: The way your ex-landlord operates is considered normal, acceptable behaviour by many “successful” business people. And it’s nothing new. This kind of behaviour is as old as humanity itself. In each generation there’ve always been some people who think it’s okay to climb their way to the top by kicking other people down. Any history book will reveal this reality.

A: And a lot of films, too.

J: In my day it was no different. I didn’t have to go very far to see it and feel it, either. Within my own family there were plenty of unfortunate examples of this kind of behaviour. I was raised to think in positive ways about slavery, about treating other human beings as property. This was normal. Commonplace. Acceptable. If you came from a family of honour, you just didn’t think of slaves as people, as individual beings with their own thoughts, needs, relationships, and dreams. They were there to serve you. The Law said so. Religious, political, and economic law all agreed on this (though in my time these forms of law were hopelessly intertwined with each other). The Law said it was proper to own slaves. So we owned slaves. As did almost every aristocratic household in the first century Mediterranean world. It was wrong, of course, for us to endorse slavery. It was profoundly abusive and morally unjustifiable, but hey, the Law said it was okay. And the Law couldn’t be wrong, now, could it?

A: From time to time I come across Christian writings that enthuse about the “enlightened” Laws of Jubilee in Leviticus. Yes, right in the Bible it says that every 50 years a man who lost either his property or his freedom to debt-holders will get it back in the Jubilee year. “Each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his family” (Leviticus 25:10).

Yeah, right. Like that was ever going to happen. People willingly giving back land and slaves to the original owners after many decades? Don’t think so. And just who were the original owners? If you think about it logically, and add one Jubilee onto another, all property would have to revert to the one who owned it all “originally” — like, maybe thousands of years ago. So whoever could establish the strongest and oldest legal claim to the land would own everything, presumably, if you follow the logic of Jubilee. Which sounds pretty on paper but has no basis in human reality.

J: As you long as you appear to be doing something Lawful to protect slaves and indentured servants, you can still pretend you’re a nice person who cares about others. A real “people person” who’d give your shirt off your back for a complete stranger.

A: You know, there are all kinds of theories these days about the Historical Jesus — who you were, what you were teaching, what kind of relationship you had with the Pharisees and Sadducees and Romans. They try so hard to squeeze biblical verses into understandable boxes so they can define the boundaries of the particular box you were in. They seem to think that if they can define the right box they can finally define you. But it’s not like that. You weren’t living in a definable box, where certain Laws told you what to do and when to do it. You were that guy with the pedestal who wants to use the Law as a lever instead of a club.

J: When people are raised up instead of beaten down they always surprise you. You can’t predict what amazing things they’ll do. You just have to step back and let them do their thing. Human beings at their best are totally unpredictable, yet they’re not in any way illogical. Human beings at their best live according to the blended logic of heart, mind, body, and talent, and this logic is amazing. It’s the blended logic of the soul. Creative. Spontaneous but also cautious. Organized but not obsessive. Funny as hell. Capable of tears. Capable of quiet reflection. Capable of great action — but not constantly so. Deeply grateful for a relationship of love and faith and trust in God. Able to tell right from wrong.

A: Which does not describe some of the people I know.

J: Exactly so. A great many adolescents and adults have stopped using the parts of their own brains that are dedicated to advanced emotions such as creativity, spontaneity, grief, contemplation, trust, and the biggie everybody wants to know about . . . divine love. The less functional a person’s brain, the more obsessive he or she becomes about the Law. The traditions of Law — including “family honour,” which is Law in its worst incarnation — are crucial to those people who’ve stopped listening to input from the Soul Circuits of their own brains.

A: Why? Why do people become righteous about the Law when they lose access to their own empathy?

J: A full answer to that question would fill more than one book, but the simple answer is that they’re frightened to death of the void they feel inside themselves. There’s a huge cost involved when you choose to ignore big chunks of your own brain. If you were to tie your dominant hand behind your back and refuse to use it for years, there’d be a huge cost to that, too. First your hand would weaken, then it would wither, and eventually you’d get ulcers and infections, possibly leading to incremental amputation, even system-wide sepsis and a swift death. Would this be a good thing? Would a sane person do this? Probably not. Yet every day human beings choose to do this kind of thing to their own brains. They choose, under societal pressure, to stop listening to input from the smartest parts of their own brains. Then they’re surprised when they feel like crap! They profess to be totally mystified by the sense of emptiness they feel inside. Well, ya know, that’s gonna happen when you force your own brain to shrink — to literally shrink in size within the confines of your own skull.

A: You don’t sound very sympathetic.

J: I have forgiveness for their choices, but I also have a lot of exasperation. I mean, come on, folks. What you put in your brain matters!

A: A favourite theme of yours.

J: Many people get caught in a vicious cycle. They choose to stop listening to the input of their own inner wisdom. Then they start to feel restless and empty and confused.

A: And angry.

J: And angry. After a while, they may get tired of feeling this way, so they look for answers that make logical sense to them. At this point, many will stumble across various forms of religious Law. The Law gives them answers that seem to make sense if they’re suffering from big holes (literally) inside their brains, holes that make them feel lost and listless and helpless. The Law gives them an external framework to cling to. However, the more they choose to lean on the Law, the less they use the parts of their brain they most need to “hear” — their intuition, their common sense, their empathy and faith. This leads to an even greater sense of futility and disconnection from God. So they redouble their efforts to “properly understand” God’s Law through more prayer and more self-denial and more study of scripture. Which means they’re again ignoring their own inner intuition, common sense, empathy, and faith. Which leads to further imbalance in the brain’s functioning. Which can lead directly to the anguish felt during “the dark night of the soul” — a never-to-be-sought-after state of severe neurophysiological breakdown. Famed theologian Augustine of Hippo arrived at his conclusions about God and the soul through this very process.

A: No wonder Augustine’s teachings on Original Sin make no sense.

-2

Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain's Soul Circuitry, Jesus' family of origin, Law (Nomos), Original Sin, psychopathy (niceness), Realspiritik, slavery, Soul and tagged brain-soul connection, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

02 Nov 2011

RS9: Jesus and the Occupy Wall Street Movement

A: I read recently on a Christian forum the assertion that if you were alive today, you’d be right in the thick of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. How do you respond to that?

J (sadly shaking his head): I’d say that anyone who believes I would willingly join the Occupy movement has no understanding of who I was or what I taught.

A: Many of today’s compassionate Christians feel some sympathy, some resonance with these anti-capitalist protests. The underlying message seems to fit in well with assorted attempts in Christianity’s history to renew and heal the church by simplifying church practices. Trying to root out corruption. Trying to make the church look more like your vision of church (as they imagine your vision to be). Francis of Assisi is a famous example of a well-to-do Christian who gave up all his worldly goods and chose a mendicant life of service. Francis believed with all his heart he was doing the right thing. He believed he was following your own example of how to live a spiritual life of charity and love and humility.

J: You know, the Occupy Movement reminds me a lot of the radical first century Jewish group called the Zealots. I wasn’t a Zealot (or proto-Zealot) then and I’m not a Zealot today.

A: The Zealots were very anti-Roman. They were one of several factions in the Jewish civil war that took place in the 60’s CE in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria. They burned down the city archives in Jerusalem to try to destroy all the tax records and debt records. They thought this would end the grave imbalance of wealth between rich and poor, and bring about a more egalitarian economic situation.

J (nodding): What starts out in the beginning as a group of people with legitimate social and economic and political concerns can quickly devolve into rigid sectarianism: “We’re right and they’re wrong.” Black and white issues. Black and white solutions. Things are rarely that simple. Once you start burning down buildings, even for “a good cause,” you’re on the slippery road to war.

A: A few years later, there wasn’t much left of Jerusalem. Not after the Romans sent their troops in.

J: Yes, but the Jews themselves had done a fine hatchet job on themselves before Vespasian (and later Titus) arrived on the scene with their legions.

A: Okay. I think most compassionate Christians would get the idea that you didn’t — and don’t — support the idea of burning down buildings as a way to bring about change. But the protestors in the Occupy Movement aren’t burning down any buildings. They’re occupying public land and protesting peacefully. So isn’t that a positive thing?

J: During the time they’re hanging around in parks and beside churches, talking to reporters and making lots of noise, are they hard at work producing goods and services and taxable income that will help strengthen their local economies?

A: Um. Maybe some of them are. There’s probably a black market economy at these sites already.

J: Do black market economies put tax money into the communal pot so roads and sewers and schools and public hospitals can be built for the benefit of everyone in the community?

A: Uh, well, no. The whole idea of a black market economy is to stay off the grid so you don’t have to pay taxes.

J: Right. So this terrible evil — capitalism — which ultimately pays for the roads and sewers and schools and public hospitals must be brought crashing down so that . . . what . . . so that no one in America can afford to build public schools?

A: I see your point.

J: The problem today isn’t Wall Street — not at the deepest level, anyway. The traders and bankers and investors whose foolish actions led to the initial financial crisis in 2008 aren’t dealing in money or capitalism. They think they are, but they’re not. They’re dealing in the one thing I attacked with all my strength: they’re dealing in status. These financiers and traders are status-addicted individuals trading in the only thing that matters to them — status points. Like all addicts, they think only of their next high. This is why they seem to have no empathy for the people whose lives they’ve destroyed with their business actions. They’re simply unable — at a physiological level — to place the needs of others ahead of their own need for an addictive high. It’s that simple.

A: That’s pretty scary.

J: Scary, but consistent with the facts. These individuals have demonstrated clearly and repeatedly through their own actions that they’re not able to self-regulate their own behaviours. They’re not able to act in ways that lead to the greater good because — bottom line — they’re not interested in the greater good. They’re interested in acquiring status, and they can only get it at somebody else’s expense. This means people have to get hurt. Average Joe has to be hurt so Mr. Banker can feel he’s smarter and stronger and faster and better than Average Joe. Mr. Banker gets his hit of status by making Average Joe miserable. It’s just part of the reality for those who are addicted to status as their drug of choice.

A: Dopamine response in the neural pathways devoted to pleasure? Same as with cocaine addiction? Status addicts get a high when they make somebody else suffer?

J: You bet.

A: Schadenfreude.

J: Schadenfreude — enjoying the suffering of another person — is one manifestation of status addiction. But it’s not the only one. Status addiction can manifest in a number of different ways. In its most extreme form, status addiction becomes synonymous with psychopathy. But, as with all addictive disorders, there’s a spectrum or continuum of dysfunction, with some people in the more manageable range of the disorder and others in the range of treatment resistance. Like any other disorder, status addiction can present with a variety of signs and symptoms. Each case has to be looked at on an individual basis. It’s one of the hardest things to sort out from a medical point of view.

A: Interesting that neither psychopathy nor status addiction is included in the DSM-IV — the bible of psychiatry.

J: There’s no inclination among researchers to examine the reality of status addiction. It’s the garden rock nobody wants to lift up. Once you lift it up, you’re going to find a whole lot of human creepy-crawlies hiding there you don’t want to deal with. Most of these creepy-crawlies have a vicious bite and a toxic sting.

It can be dangerous to confront an addict’s core addictions. Status addicts can react in violent ways — emotionally abusive and sometimes physically abusive ways — when they suspect their supply of status is about to dry up. I know this from firsthand experience.

A: On October 15, 2011, the Globe and Mail published a fascinating article by Ira Basen called “Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics.” It begins with mention of Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims, who were recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2011.

The article says, “. . . no one who’d followed Prof. Sargent’s long, distinguished career would have been fooled by his attempt at modesty. He’d won for his part in developing one of economists’ main models of cause and effect: How can we expect people to respond to changes in prices, for example, or interest rates? According to the laureates’ theories, they’ll do whatever’s most beneficial to them, and they’ll do it every time. They don’t need governments to instruct them; they figure it out for themselves. Economists call this the ‘rational expectations’ model . . . Rational-expectations theory, and its corollary, the efficient-market hypothesis, have been central to mainstream economics for more than 40 years. And while they may not have ‘wrecked the world,’ some critics argue these models have blinded economists to reality: Certain the universe was unfolding as it should, they failed both to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008 and to chart an effective path to recovery.”

J: The rational expectations model and the efficient-market hypothesis both start with the simple assumption that human beings are all fully functional in terms of their brain chemistry. In other words, there’s the assumption that all individuals will make decisions on the basis of logical principles. This in turn will lead to logical — and beneficial — outcomes for everyone (as the theory goes).

But addiction disorders don’t operate on logic. Neither do they operate on common sense or fairness or empathy. They have their own internal logic that makes sense to them at any particular time, but the logic of an addict is like quicksand. It’s always shifting. There’s no solid footing underneath. Decisions are made for the wrong reasons. And there’s no willingness to take responsibility for the terrible consequences of these decisions once they arise.

Even worse, a status addict can’t learn from his or her own mistakes. He or she can’t self-regulate these behaviours. At the worst possible time, when she’s under the greatest stress, she’ll feel a desperate need to acquire the high of fresh status points — whether through a crazy trade or an impossible-to-keep business promise or a pump-me-up session of “positive thinking” bullshit or the purchase of a new luxury car or twenty-five visits to Facebook that day. Such a person (despite university degrees and impressive credentials) is the one least likely to be able to think clearly and effectively during a financial crisis, since a key source of her status is under direct assault.

Of course, like anyone suffering from an addiction disorder, a status addict is responsible for his or her own choices, and is responsible for undertaking the choice to change. Denial of the problem is no excuse for the harm that’s been caused.

An addict needs help to overcome the addiction, of course — lots of responsible, mature, non-judgmental help. It takes courage to confront addiction. Courage and time and commitment. And God’s help.

It’s never too late to confront the problem of status addiction. This is what I taught 2,000 years ago. This is one of the reasons that forgiveness and healing figure so prominently in my teachings.

It’s pretty hard to overcome the suffering created by status addiction without forgiveness and healing to help keep you on the path of recovery.

Been there, done that. Can’t recommend it enough.

-2

Posted in Cause & Effect, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus' teachings, Materialism, psychopathy, Realspiritik, status addiction and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

13 Sep 2011

RS7: More of a Skeptic Than James Randi

James Randi is one the of the world’s best known skeptics. He’s an experienced, talented magician who can spot a trick, gimmick, or fake at 20 paces (metaphorically speaking). He’s made it his mission to “out” all the paranormal tricksters who are stealing people’s money and trust through clever use of misdirection. I have no quarrel with him in this regard.

For several years he was offering one million dollars to anyone who could prove he/she had a paranormal ability. (He was quite confident he’d never have to pony up.) Later he changed the conditions of the “test.” He said he would only test somebody who has a media presence (I assume he means somebody like Sylvia Browne). I haven’t checked lately to see whether the prize is still being offered. I don’t know what he’d do with somebody like me.

James Randi also writes a column for Skeptic Magazine. This month he takes aim, once again, at psychic Sylvia Browne. Apparently she has a new book out (Afterlives of the Rich and Famous). I’ll take his word for it. I have little interest in anything Ms. Browne says. I own only one of her books, which is plenty enough for me to see the intent that lies behind her writings. I’m in agreement with Mr. Randi about the fatuous nature of her book material.

Mr. Randi is a trained magician, and he objects to Sylvia Browne’s writings because he’s suspicious of her motives and methods. I’m a trained mystic/channeller and I also object to Sylvia Browne’s motives and methods. But probably not for the same reasons that Mr. Randi objects.

Mr. Randi doesn’t seem to believe (if I’ve been reading him correctly) that anything atypical can occur in the Newtonian world we live in. In his view, if anything “weird” happens, there must be a simple, logical, Newtonian explanation for it. Either there’s a scientific phenomenon that hasn’t been fully explored yet, or the person who reported the “weird event” is lying or is being duped by a clever manipulator.

This makes life very neat and tidy. But not very real.

The honest truth is that we don’t live in a Newtonian world. We live in a quantum world, a quantum world we barely understand at all with our somewhat limited human thinking capacity. I say “limited” because the human brain, while complex and sophisticated and quite a marvel when it’s working well, can only go so far in grasping the nature of quarks and bosons and probability wave functions and gamma rays and dark energy and dark matter and on and on and on. I think it’s important for us to continue to develop our scientific understanding of these phenomena. At the same time, I think it’s important for us to be humble about our own abilities. It’s important for us to remember that we actually don’t know everything (though we’re often tempted to think we do). It’s important for us to remain both open-minded and open-hearted.

Each human brain and central nervous system (hereafter the brain), as Jesus and I have said before, is its own mini-universe, its own small kingdom of the soul that exists separately from but contiguous with other kingdoms-of-the-soul (i.e. other people). Within any particular human brain, the principles of quantum physics apply — including the principles of the conscious observer (in each case, the conscious observer is the person who “owns” that particular brain) plus Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. When consciousness is understood from this point of view (instead of from the Materialist point of view), it’s a lot easier for us to accept the challenges that are part and parcel of “being human.” We have a better starting place for understanding why we do the strange things we do — for the simple reason that we’re not expecting easy cookie-cutter solutions. We’re not expecting easy Newtonian instruction booklets that can guide us through the complex quantum realities of our own brains.

Psychic-medium Sylvia Browne is doing some strange things, to be sure, but I doubt very much she has the level of intentionality James Randi ascribes to her.

She has her very own kingdom of the soul — her brain — and she’s using her brain as the primary tool for her “psychic work.” Regardless of what she says about her sources of information, at the end of the day all the information she “receives” goes through the circuits of her own brain. She can’t detach herself from this scientific reality. Her brain is the processing centre, the combination of hardware and software that determines how data is perceived, analyzed, stored, and transmitted. She’s responsible for maintaining her own hardware and software. All of it. This is what it means to be the master/mistress of your own Kingdom.

It’s her own brain that decides what information she’ll pass along to other people. She’s responsible for what she decides to tell other people. It isn’t her angel’s responsibility to decide, and it isn’t God’s responsibility to decide. It’s her own responsibility. Her brain belongs entirely to her, not to some cosmic force that’s guiding her or taking over part of her brain as an “indwelling spirit.” (Believe it or not, this is a frequent claim among mystics, psychics, and prophets in all religions.) Whatever Sylvia Browne chooses to put on paper is her responsibility — not God’s — just as whatever I choose to put on paper is my responsibility. Sylvia Browne is choosing to try to write about the quantum universe without knowing a darned thing about the quantum universe. (If you’re looking for hard science in her books, you’ll be looking in vain.) I would love to see what her brain looks like on a SPECT scan while she’s talking to her spirit guide, Francine. If she’s certain of her ability, she has no cause for concern.

The International Olympic Committee requires that all athletes who win medals at an Olympic event be tested for banned drugs. I would suggest that anyone claiming to be a mystic or channeller or psychic or prophet or whatever be required to undergo rigorous medical assessment and have his or her brain scanned by an objective third-party professional. This would immediately root out the psychopaths and the seriously mentally ill, such as the woman I tried to learn from in the early years of my spiritual journey.

Grace had a personal history of mental illness, a family history of serious mental illness, and a history of being horribly abused as a child. She was a binge drinker, had a probable eating disorder (she weighed about 250 pounds when I last saw her), took antidepressants and Andriol for a mood disorder, and was easily triggered by rage. (Her own rage, that is.) She was also manipulative, cunning, and adept at “cutting and pasting” other people’s ideas into “new and divinely revealed tapestries of spiritual truth.”

Yet never once did she come up with an original insight. She couldn’t. Her brain was too damaged to do anything except copy. She could barely learn any new facts from the newspaper let alone learn new facts from her guardian angel.

She said she was a channeller. She very much wanted to be a channeller. But she couldn’t pass the very first test of ethical mysticism, which is the ability to feel empathy for others. (Schadenfreude was one of her favourite ways to brighten up the day. Even better than a few shots of vodka, thought she. And cheaper, too.)

I hope she’s been receiving the professional medical care she needs. She went through a lot of horrible things during childhood, and I hope she’s been able to find some healing and forgiveness.

God bless you, Grace.

P.S. The brain’s hardware is very sensitive to alcohol. If you meet a mystic or channeller who abuses alcohol, run for the hills. This person has damaged his or her brain and is in need of healing. Chances that he or she is a bona fide mystic are pretty close to zero. People who can’t or won’t look after their own brains are in no position to give you advice about how to look after yours (though your compassion for their suffering is always important.) Spiritual connection with God depends on the brain. Look after your brain and you’ll be surprised at how much inner common sense you actually have!

-4

Posted in ethical mysticism, Kingdom teachings, Materialism, mysticism, quantum theory, Realspiritik and tagged brain-soul connection, Kingdom teachings, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

07 Sep 2011

RS6: SPECT Scans of the Author’s Brain

Day 1: Baseline SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

Day 2: Concentration Task SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

Day 3: Channelling Task SPECT scan, 3-D Active View

In December 2004, I flew to Orange County, California, to participate in an ongoing Normal Brain Study at the Amen Clinic.

Dr. Daniel Amen is a psychiatrist who finds it remarkable that psychiatry is the only field of medicine that doesn’t actually look at the organ it’s treating before starting treatment. He has amassed the world’s largest database of SPECT scans of the brain. Somewhere in this vast database are the 3 pictures of my brain posted above.

I first became familiar with Dr. Amen’s work shortly after the publication of his book Healing the Hardware of the Soul: How Making the Brain-Soul Connection Can Optimize Your Life, Love, and Spiritual Growth (New York: The Free Press, 2002). Dr. Amen has published several other books since then, but the 2002 book continues to be the one I find most helpful. Most recently he’s been working on a project to talk about the dangers of head injury, especially concussion. I think this is very important work.

You can check out the homepage for his clinics at http://www.amenclinics.com. He has tons of information there. He also has an on-line version of his professional SPECT image atlas. If ever there were a place where a picture is worth a thousand words, this would be it. You can check it out at http://www.amenclinics.com/brain-science/spect-image-gallery.

In the summer of 2004, I was scrolling through Dr. Amen’s website when I came across the call for subjects to participate in a Normal Brain Study. I immediately wrote to the Research Director. In the initial e-mail I sent, I was candid about the fact that I’m a channeller. This didn’t seem to phase the Research Director, who promptly wrote back and asked for more information.

Because I was asking to be enrolled in a Normal Brain Study, I had to meet the criteria that applied to all members of the study — no history of head injury, no major mental illness, no family history of major mental illness, and so on. The questionnaires were quite detailed. In addition, psychological assessments were carried out, both by phone interview and by additional written questionnaires (some of which went to a family member and to a non-family member who knew me well). After several weeks, the research team agreed that I could come to California and have my brain scanned as a research subject at no cost to me other than my travel costs.

At that time, the procedure was for research subjects to come to the clinic on two consecutive days. On the first day, a final interview was carried out, then the subject was injected with a radioisotope and asked to lie quietly in the SPECT scanner and “not think about anything in particular.” (In other words, try to rest and relax while staying awake). This was the Baseline scan that gave information about which regions of the person’s brain were most active during a resting but alert state (which tells a great deal about overall brain connections). My Baseline scan is the top series of 3-D Active Views shown above.

On the second day, research subjects would return for a second scan, this one designed to capture the function of the brain while focusing on a concentration task. A computer tossed random symbols onto a screen, and the participant was supposed to press the space bar on the keyboard when one particular symbol appeared. I remember that on the first few tries I was trying to anticipate ahead of time when the right symbol would appear, and naturally I was flubbing the test. So I made a conscious decision to be “present in the moment” and wait patiently for each symbol to appear before I made a decision on how to act. Whatever that conscious decision was, it improved my test scores immensely, and the corresponding brain activity which resulted from that decision is reflected in the second series above, the Concentration Scan.

Normally the testing would have been over at this point, but the research team asked me to come back for a third test. This was done the next day. They wanted to record my brain physiology while I was channelling Jesus. This was no problem for me, because I channel when I’m fully awake and alert, and I need no special preparation or external tools in order to talk to Jesus through my channelling circuitry. They asked me to ask Jesus a specific question and then “listen” for the reply. This process was captured in the third series above, the Channel Scan.

After the team reviewed the results of all three scans, they told me I have a very healthy brain, and my scans would be suitable for inclusion in the database of normal brains (as opposed to the database of dysfunctional brains).

They gave me copies of all the scans, which is what you see posted here. I had my birthdate removed from the information column for privacy reasons. Other than that, these scans appear exactly as they did at the Amen Clinic in December, 2004.

I haven’t yet included any of the surface views (the highly colourful scans posted all over Dr. Amen’s website) for the simple reason that I haven’t got round to scanning them into my computer yet. I’m really not all that comfortable with computer stuff. So first I have to figure out how to use my new scanner. (Not my idea of a good time. I’d much rather go read the latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.) But for those who already have some familiarity with 3-D Active View SPECT scans, you can see right off that I have full, even, symmetrical activity, and all major parts of the brain are intact and fully interconnected.

Aren’t you already curious why my primary visual cortex is so active in the channelling scan?

And I’m not even a visual channeller.

-1

Posted in brain-soul connection, Favourite Posts, mystic, mysticism, Realspiritik, SPECT brain imaging, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

15 Jul 2011

JR58: The "My Fellow American" Interfaith Initiative

A: I was contacted this week by a person who’s working with the Unity Productions Foundation on an interfaith initiative called My Fellow American. The goal of the initiative is to encourage Americans to think of their fellow Americans who happen to be Muslim as fellow Americans. There’s a 2 minute film produced by Unity, and there are also uploaded videos and stories from various supporters of the idea that all Americans are equally American, regardless of religion. What do you think of this project?

J (grinning): I think you should post the address.

A: Oh yeah. Good thinking. The address is http://myfellowamerican.us/

I discovered when I went to watch the film how truly outdated my computer really is. Computer updates are not my thing. Good thing the computer at work has more juice in it.

The person who contacted me also wondered if I could maybe Tweet about the project if I checked it out and liked it. I don’t know how to tell her this, but I don’t even own a cell phone. So the Tweeting is pretty much out.

J: Everybody has their own way of communicating with others.

A: Anyway, I certainly can’t argue with the basic principle of treating all your neighbours with dignity and respect and compassion and kindness regardless of religion. This is what makes a society internally strong.

J: The one thing people have to remember is that all human beings are children of God. A Muslim woman is just as a much a child of God as the saints of Christian history. To deny a woman dignity and respect simply because she’s Muslim is to withhold divine love from your neighbour. It’s as simple as that.

A: I think some people are afraid that if they love and accept the woman with an open heart they’ll be required to love and accept all the religious teachings that are part of her tradition. At least that’s how they view it.

Regardless of religious affiliation, we’re all children of God. Photo (c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

J: Religious teachings are very much a human thing. Divine love, on the other hand, is a soul thing. Divine love always trumps religious teachings. Every religion on the face of Planet Earth today has problems — problems with abusive doctrines, problems with gender issues, problems with “law,” and problems with balance. Every religion. Islam is no different from Christianity in this regard. Sure, Islam has some problems. But so does orthodox Western Christianity. This is no excuse for failing to love your neighbour and failing to believe in his or her best self. Everybody’s struggling. People of all religions have to hold each other up. People have to work together. It’s the only way to find healing.

A: The 10-year anniversary of 9/11 is coming up. Some people haven’t got over the shock. They’re still looking for someone to blame.

J: If they’re looking for someone to blame, then they should be looking at the unassailable laws of neurophysiology, not at religion. Only a seriously, seriously dysfunctional individual thinks it’s okay to blow up buildings “in the name of God.” This applies across the board to all religions and all cultures. Christianity has had its fair share of psychopaths in martyrs’ clothing, too. Psychopathy is a social, medical, and educational issue. Psychopathy is about as far from genuine relationship with God as it’s possible to get.

The vast majority of Muslims and Christians and those of other faiths are doing their best to get closer to God — not farther away from God and faith — even though they make mistakes along the way. People of all faiths are constantly learning, changing, growing. Traditions change. Religious teachings change. The one core truth that doesn’t change is the reality of the good soul, and the potential of all human beings to help each other understand this reality. If you allow yourself to be open to this truth, amazing things can happen in your community. Whatever community you happen to live in.

A: There are some psychopaths in positions of religious authority.

J: Yes. But there are also psychopaths in positions of political and economic and educational authority. Psychopathy is an entirely separate issue from the question of faith. Inherent to the definition of psychopathy is a total lack of conscience and empathy — in other words, a disconnection from all that enables true faith, true relationship with God. A psychopath seeks status, not faith, when he or she chooses to blow up buildings. It’s entirely a question of status addiction. Can we say this status addiction is true of “all Muslims”? Well, OF COURSE NOT. This would be the same as saying that every person who lives in Boston must be a status-addicted psychopath simply because he or she happens to live in Boston. It isn’t right or fair to make such a claim.

A: Claims such as this have been fairly common over the course of history, though.

J: True. These claims fall under the umbrella of the HDM Myths that you posted about on Concinnate Christianity. (http://concinnatechristianity.blogspot.com/2010/11/it-takes-village-non-hdm-village-that.html ). Group myths of Hierarchy, Dualism, and Monism. Again, these are human myths, human choices, that have nothing to do with the faith of the soul. Challenge the myths and heal the soul, remembering always that the soul is not the aspect of the self that’s perpetuating these myths. It’s certain parts of the biological brain that have gone off the rails, so to speak, and now enjoy the addictive high of schadenfreude. For a person suffering from status addiction, there’s just nothing better than a good hit of mental revenge and religious hatred to get you through the day. It’s cheaper than buying whiskey and cigarettes.

A: That’s a pretty tough statement.

J: Addiction is a pretty tough reality. Addiction destroys lives. Better to be honest about its effects.

A: Because, as you often say, healing follows insight.

J: My hat’s off to the My Fellow American participants because they’re doing their best to help others in their community be their best selves. And they’re working together as a team to teach and share and communicate in relationship with each other. As an angel, I can’t ask for more than that.

Addendum, October 16, 2023: It’s been 12 years since I wrote this post with the soul who lived as Jesus.

The world has changed greatly during this time. One of the unfortunate changes has been an ideological shift towards monism within many educational institutions and humanitarian organizations in Western nations. This shift has taken society further away from the idea that people hold individual responsibility for their own choices. In place of the long-held Judeo-Christian value system built on free will, personal responsibility, and accountability to your own inner wisdom (what we call “conscience”), there has been a push to impose a value system based on “group banners” behind which individuals can hide.

No one can be his or her best self if “group banners” (especially religious “group banners”) are used as an excuse for hanging onto harmful traditions, hateful actions, or justification for revenge.

Mother Father God and your angels don’t care what your religious teachers say. What matters to God is how you choose to use your free will as a human being during your time on Planet Earth. If you decide it’s a great idea to hate other people on the basis of their religion, that’s not okay with God. The recent resurgence of anti-Semitism is therefore not okay with your own soul or your angels.

Anti-Semitism isn’t the only example of extreme hatred in today’s world, but right now it’s a cauldron of suffering, especially for those who are doing the hating.

It’s your job as a human being — as a soul in human form — to learn how to look past the “group banners” that breed hatred and divisiveness. Seek the best in others and stand your ground as a child of God. Treat each person you meet as an individual who is responsible for his or her own choices towards others and towards God. This probably means you’ll have to reject some of the destructive religious doctrines that are causing problems in the world today. But if that’s what you have to do so you can hear your own conscience, that’s what you have to do.

-2

Posted in conscience & morality, faith, free will, hatred, HDM Myths, Islam, Jesus Redux, monism, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, Soul, status addiction and tagged brain-soul connection, Divine Heart | 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.

+24

-1

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.”

-2

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.

-1

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

04 Apr 2011

JR30: Foxes Have Holes, Canadians Have Gloves

A: I’d like to go back to some concepts we were discussing a few weeks ago about the soul (Saying 67 in the Gospel of Thomas). At that time, you stated that souls aren’t malleable. Yet you’ve also said that the soul is hardwired into human DNA, and elsewhere we’ve talked about the reality of neuroplasticity — the ability of the brain to grow new brain cells. These three concepts seem to contradict each other. Can you explain?

J: It’s not that hard, really. I’m going to use the analogy of a hand in a glove.

A: Okay.

J: The core aspect of a person that’s eternal — the soul — can be likened to “the hand” in our analogy. Once you reach adolescence, your hand reaches its adult size and stops growing. It’s yours for life. Everything about your hand is shaped by your DNA –the size, shape, flexibility, skin pigmentation, fingernail growth, and, of course, your unique set of fingerprints. (For those born without hands, the same principle would apply, though obviously the analogy would pertain to a different portion of the biological body). The characteristics of the hand are not malleable. You don’t have a small-sized hand one day and an extra-large hand the next day. You don’t have a pianist’s hands one day and a mechanic’s hands the next. Even the fine details, such as your fingerprints, don’t change. You have the hand your DNA says you’re supposed to have, and that’s it. You can’t change the overall form or function. The form and function of your hand are pretty much “carved in stone.”

A: Except if you can afford plastic surgery.

J: That’s a surgical intervention intended to override your DNA. For the purposes of our example, we’ll stick to a more basic example — a person who lives in Canada and needs to wear a glove in the winter because it’s cold.

A: Hey, count me in. I carry my gloves in my coat pocket from October till April. Just in case it suddenly gets cold.

“Jesus said: Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay down his head and rest” (Gospel of Thomas 86). February Snow, photo credit JAT 2015.

J: The soul is like the hand of the hardy adult Canadian in our analogy. Its overall form and function are fixed. And there’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s very helpful. Can you imagine how confusing life would be if your hand were very small on Monday and very large on Tuesday? How could you get anything done or decide what tools you need? How could you make long term plans? How could you decide on a career, a hobby, or a hands-on pursuit? You’d be in a constant state of anxiety because of the lack of certainty. It’s good to be flexible and creative, but you can only afford to be flexible and creative if some things in life are certain. Like the size of your hand.

A: And the shape of your soul.

J: Exactly. The shape of your soul is fixed. Knowing this can give you great courage, great strength. Knowing who you are as a soul gives you the courage to say “yes” to the things you ought to be doing and “no” to the things you ought not to be doing. It helps you avoid the years of pain and frustration you feel when you’re in the wrong job or the wrong location or the wrong relationship. The job you have may be a perfectly wonderful job from a logical point of view, but if it’s not the right job for you as a soul, you’ll get stressed out, and then you’ll get sick, angry, depressed. If you believe you are a soul, and if you believe your soul has a unique blueprint, you have a terrific foundation of certainty and constancy to build your life on.

A: And nobody can take it away from you.

J: They can’t take away your core self, your core blueprint, your soul. These belong solely to you. What they can take away, however, is the biological functioning of the parts of your brain linked to your human physiology. What they can take away is the glove that protects your soul during your human lifetime.

A: Explain how the glove works.

J: In our analogy of the hand in the glove, the glove represents the parts of your human biology that keep your temporary 3D human body functioning properly. But, like the glove that prevents warm-blooded fingers from freezing in minus 30 degree weather, the glove is essential to the health of the hand it protects. The glove isn’t the same substance, if you will, as the hand, but it protects the hand and is absolutely indispensable. After the glove has been worn for a while, it starts to mould itself to the unique shape of the hand it protects. Eventually you can recognize it in a pile of similar gloves because it has a unique combination of bend marks and stains and the like. It takes on the characteristics of its owner’s hand because it’s malleable.

A: You’re suggesting, then, that some of the circuitry in the brain and central nervous system is “fixed” — not malleable — because it’s linked to the soul’s blueprint. The rest of the circuits — the parts that deal with human survival needs — are not fixed and are instead intended to be malleable. Have I got that straight?

J (nodding): The human brain isn’t a simple blob of jello where all the parts inside your skull behave exactly alike. The human brain isn’t even a single organ — it’s several semi-autonomous organs working together. At least that’s the theory. What happens in the case of major dysfunction is that one or more of the “essential services” in the brain goes off-line. Without input from these “essential services,” other sectors of the brain don’t do their own job as efficiently as possible. They may go into overdrive and try to make up for the loss of the other services by doing more work than they’re designed for. Some parts of the brain end up underactive, and other parts end up overactive. These realities are now visible on brain scans.

A: What’s the final result of these imbalances?

J: In most cases the final result is a person who’s standing outside in bitterly cold weather and wearing a glove that’s covered in holes — big, ragged holes that let the icy wind in and make you want to retract all your fingers into a ball in the end of your coat sleeve. It doesn’t work very well.

A: So the thing to do is to fix the glove. Mend the holes and put new insulation in.

J: Mending the holes is what neuroplasticity is all about. The “essential services” that have gone off-line in the brains of many of today’s adults can be gradually healed and restored. Eventually it becomes possible for them to hear what their own inner self has been saying all along. Eventually it becomes possible for them to hear what God has been saying, too.

A: This is a very helpful, hopeful message. It’s much easier to begin the journey of healing when you have faith that your inner self is worth the trouble. It’s also easier when you have a basic understanding of what it is you’re trying to do.

J: I can’t emphasize enough the connection between insight and healing. The simple experience of achieving insight is not only emotionally and spiritually transformative, but it lays the groundwork for your biological brain (your “glove”) to rewire itself in positive, healing, holistic ways. Healing follows insight. Therefore, if you’re a tyrant who wants to cripple the people around you so you can acquire fame, money, power, and sex, your most effective strategy is to prevent people from acquiring their own unique healing insights. People can’t oppose you and overthrow you if they’re busy dealing with all the holes you’ve put in their heads.

A: Holes caused by HDM strategies (It Takes A Village – A Non-HDM Village, That Is).

J: Yes. Status-based strategies. Plus choices like slavery. Intentional withholding of food and resources to drive up prices, increase poverty, increase fear, and reduce political opposition. Subjugation of women. Refusal to educate children — either boys or girls or both. Burning of books. Controlling access to information. Lack of judicial transparency. Claims of religious infallibility. These are the strategies of tyrants.

A: What you’ve just described reminds me a lot of Hitler and his SS goons.

J: Actually, as I was talking, I was thinking of the religious tyrants of my day. The ones who were oppressing the regular people. Some things haven’t changed much in the last 2,000 years.

Addendum February 6, 2018: A February 3, 2018 Globe and Mail investigative piece called “Cracks in the Code” by Carolyn Abraham highlights how little we currently know about the relationship between our own DNA and our own biological realities. It’s not the simple cause-and-effect “Lego” model we’ve taken for granted. Instead, as a recent study from Canada’s Personal Genome Project shows, each individual has a surprising range of unique DNA quirks, puzzles, and mysteries. In my view, these DNA puzzles point to wider questions about consciousness, soul, and quantum biology.

+46

-2

Posted in ethical mysticism, Favourite Posts, HDM Myths, healing, insight, Jesus Redux, psychopathy, Soul, soul blueprint, theodicy, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged brain-soul connection, science & faith | Leave a Comment

14 Mar 2011

JR22: Why You Need To Know Yourself (Mystical Commentary on Saying 67)

A: Can you please explain as simply as possible WHY it matters that each person has a unique soul blueprint and WHY it’s important for each person on a spiritual journey to uncover the specific details of his or her own unique blueprint?

J: Let’s use an imaginary person as an example to make this simpler. I’m going to call this imaginary person Jane Tamaguchi.

A: Okay.

J: Like all human beings, Jane is a soul. She doesn’t have a soul. She is a soul. She’s an angel — a child of God. Like all angels, she was born as a soul long before she decided to incarnate as a human being. Soul energy isn’t visible in the third dimension — the dimension that human beings live in during their temporary lives as incarnated souls — but soul energy can be felt in the third dimension.

A: Can you give some examples of “feelable” soul energy? (I think I just invented a new word.)

J: Yes. When you feel a deep sense of connection with another person, that’s soul energy. When you feel empathy for other creatures, that’s soul energy. When you feel committed, romantic, monogamous love, that’s soul energy. When you give or receive forgiveness, that’s soul energy. When you’re willing to trust in a loving and compassionate God, that’s soul energy.

Thomas 67: One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing. (Photo credit JAT 2015)

Thomas 67: “One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.” (Translation by Stevan Davies, photo credit JAT 2015)

A: Those are all emotions. Positive emotions. Uplifting emotions.

J: Yes. All souls are intensely emotional in positive, uplifting, creative, intuitive, loving ways.

A: So much for Christian angelology, that says angels have no emotions of their own and are simply instruments of God’s work and God’s will.

J: Yes. That’s another Christian doctrine that should go the way of the 8-track recording system.

A: But angels also have minds, as you’ve said previously. They have minds plus emotional hearts.

J: Yes. Christians have long believed — based largely on theories of the soul put forward by Plato, Aristotle, Tertullian, Augustine, and others — that the soul itself consists of a single indivisible substance. Arguments raged as to the exact nature of this substance. But the basic idea was that the soul was made of just one thing because — as the theory went — the soul couldn’t really be a soul if it could be “divided” into two or more substances. It should go without saying that this is a ridiculous supposition. There are no analogies anywhere in nature or in the quantum world for a complex lifeform made of a single element such as pure hydrogen or pure gold. All lifeforms, whether they exist in the third dimension or in higher dimensions, are extremely complex. A soul is a quantum being whose “biology” is far more complex than that of any 3D creature — which is pretty much what you’d expect for children of God who were born in the fourth dimension, and who will spend most of their eternal existence in parts of the “implicate order” that can’t be seen or measured by human beings in the third dimension.

A: So people just have to take it on trust? On blind faith?

J: I wouldn’t say that. Individuals who want to take the time to do intensive research into quantum physics and quantum biology will soon discover that the universe being studied by today’s scientists is extremely complex. This isn’t the cosmology of Plato or Thomas Aquinas. It’s breathtakingly complicated and interconnected. There’s plenty of room in there for a modern doctrine of the soul that doesn’t in any way violate the laws of quantum biology.

A: Okay. So tell me about Jane. Who is she as a soul?

J: Jane is a female angel, and for the purposes of this discussion she’s heterosexual.

A: I know what this means for human beings. But what does this mean for angels?

J: It means exactly what it sounds like. All angels are one of two sexes: male or female. Just as with human beings. There are no “in-between” sexes or alien sexes. All angels are either male (the same sex as God the Father) or female (the same sex as God the Mother). This is pretty much what you’d expect by looking at life on Planet Earth.

A: Some creatures on Earth are able to reproduce without a sexual partner. Komodo Dragons, for instance.

J: There are different modes of reproduction for creatures that live on Planet Earth. Reproduction is part of the 3D biological package. It isn’t part of the 4D soul package. We’ll come back to that at a later time.

A: But sexual orientation is part of the 4D soul package. Why is sexual orientation necessary for angels?

J: Because each angel has a soulmate. One true eternal love partner. A divine spouse. The one partner in all of Creation who’s a perfect match in every way, including intimate, private ways. Each angel in God’s Creation is paired with his or her perfect eternal partner. For many angelic couples, the perfect partner is of the same sex. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

A: So God the Father and God the Mother are not a same-sex couple themselves, but it’s okay with God if their children choose a same-sex partner to share eternity with.

J: Yes. God’s children are not carbon copies of their divine parents. God’s children come in every size and shape and colour imaginable. Yet every soul couple is blissfully happy, blissfully complete. This is what God the Mother and God the Father want for their children — bliss. Everybody’s different. Yet everybody’s happy. It’s the perfect divine family when you think about it.

A: So Jane has a specific sex — female — and a specific sexual orientation — heterosexual. What else does she have?

J: She has a soul body. Her soul body has a unique size and shape that’s perfect for her. Her soul body probably doesn’t look too much like her current human body, but that’s okay. She’s very happy with the soul body she has.

A: What else?

J: She has a soul mind. As a soul, she’s pure consciousness — by that I mean she has full awareness at all times of her own thoughts and her own feelings and her own choices and her own needs and wishes. Part of her unique mind lies in the way she thinks, the way she learns, the way she remembers, the way she expresses herself. These attributes lie within the soul mind. Jane doesn’t “know” everything. Nor does she want to. She has certain interests that are hard-wired at the very core of her consciousness, and these are the things she learns fastest and remembers best.

A: Can you give an example of what Jane might be interested in as a soul, as an angel?

J: Okay. Let’s say for argument’s sake that Jane is a gifted musician.

A: There are some angels who are more musically gifted than other angels?

J: All angels enjoy music to some extent. But not all angels want to spend most of the day in classes devoted to advanced musical performance and interpretation skills. As with all things in Creation, it’s a continuum. All angels appreciate music. But some angels want to devote most of their time to it. Which means they can’t be devoting their time to other interests, other skills. There’s only so much time in a day, even for an angel.

A: What other interests does our imaginary Jane possess as a soul?

J: Jane likes to be around a lot of other angels. She gets very lonely if she can’t hear other angels singing. She’s happiest when she’s with a big group of noisy, laughing angels.

A: Are there any angels who are more quiet in temperament, who wouldn’t feel comfortable in large groups?

J: Yes, lots. And that’s okay, too. These angels are quiet, but not in any way unfriendly or unloving. They just need more quiet than other angels do. Nothing wrong with that.

A: Let’s give Jane a third unique attribute. What would you suggest.

J: She doesn’t like the colour red.

A: Huh?

J: All angels appreciate the fact that everything in Creation is beautiful and deserving of respect. So Jane respects the colour red, and she’s happy for her friends who love all things red. But angels have their own taste, their own “likes” and “dislikes.” And Jane herself is under no divine obligation to like red. It happens that she doesn’t. God the Mother and God the Father respect the fact that Jane just doesn’t happen to like red. On the other hand, she can’t get enough black. She’s crazy for black.

A (grinning): I know a certain male angel who happens to love black! And a particular shade of charcoal grey.

J: Yeah, I do like those colours. Can’t deny it.

A: Okay. So we have our angel Jane, who’s passionate about music, loves to be around large groups of people, isn’t fond of the colour red, but likes black. Jane decided a while back to incarnate as a human being on Planet Earth (her choice), and right now she’s 35 years old, is working as a nurse, is taking night school courses so she can apply to law school, and lives with a female partner who has painted the bedroom red. Tell me about Jane’s current brain health.

J: All the things we talked about — Jane’s true soul interests — are hardwired into her human DNA. That’s the junk DNA that geneticists are puzzled by. Her soul’s blueprint is hardwired into her brain and central nervous system. Her brain stem, cerebellum, hypothalamus, thalamus, basal ganglia, and glial cells contain coding that’s unique to her, unique to her true soul personality. If Jane were to make conscious choices that “matched” or “lined up with” her core blueprint, her biological brain would function smoothly. It would function the way it’s supposed to. Her mood would remain stable. Her thinking would be logical and coherent. Her memory would be pretty good, especially around music and musical interpretation! She would have excellent social functioning. All in all, she’d be pretty happy, healthy, and well adjusted.

A: Okay. But right now Jane isn’t making conscious choices that “line up with” her own soul’s core identity. She’s working as a nurse, not as a musician. She’s around lots of people, which is good, but the people aren’t singing. She’s in a lesbian love relationship. And every night she has to go to sleep in a room that isn’t healing or calming for her as a soul. What’s happening inside her brain at this point?

J: There’s a software conflict. On the one hand, the so-called “primitive” parts of Jane’s brain are saying “I want to craft music, I want to find a loving male partner, I want to be around the colour black.” Meanwhile, Jane’s forcing the outer cortical layers of her brain to make different choices — choices that seem logical to her peers or to her family, perhaps, but which make no sense to her core self.

A: So how’s Jane doing?

J: Her brain is pretty messed up. There are competing signals from the different regions of her brain and central nervous system. The signals contradict each other. By now she’s feeling confused and upset with her life, and she doesn’t why. Things seem okay on the outside. But on the inside she’s not happy. She may be having trouble with headaches or poor sleep or depression or one of the many other signs of imbalance that can emerge via human biology.

A: A lot of these medical issues would begin to clear up if Jane were to seek professional counselling and appropriate medical care to help her uncover the choices she’s making that aren’t working for her.

J: Yes. Jane has been making choices based on other people’s priorities rather than her own core priorities — the priorities of her soul. Over the long term, her poor choices have begun to affect her health and her happiness.

A: Can she force herself to “be” a nurse and “be” a lawyer if her soul isn’t wired for healing or for case analysis?

J: No. This is what I meant when I said the soul isn’t malleable in the way that clay is malleable. Jane can only be who she is. If she tries to be somebody she’s not — if she tries to be a lesbian nurse-lawyer who wears red power suits — her biological brain will begin to sustain serious damage from the continuous push-and-pull of her internal “software conflict.” She’ll literally fry her own brain from the inside out.

A: Okay. That’s pretty clear. Be yourself — be the person God knows you to be — so your brain and body will function the way God intended.

J: Simple in fact. Simple in reality. But not always easy to implement.

A: At least it gives people a starting place on the journey. At least it helps them understand where they’re going and WHY. It helps so much to understand WHY.

J: Insight is one hell of an amazing miracle.

Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Davies (Stevan), gender and sexuality, Gospel of Thomas, insight, interoception, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, orthodox teachings about the soul, Plato, quantum theory, Soul, soul blueprint, soul purpose, Thomas 67 and tagged brain-soul connection, Gospel of Thomas | Leave a Comment

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the tag “brain-soul connection”

RS35: The Calculus of Consciousness

RS33: The Way of the Cross

RS27: The Way, the Truth, and the Life

TBM40: What Sheldon Cooper Can Teach You

TBM37: Dreams – The Courage to Trust the Science of Sleep

TBM36: Fix the Brain, Love the Soul

TBM35: "The Right To Be Right?"

TBM32: Three Spectrographs of Consciousness

TBM28: When You Are Forgiven, You Are Forgiven

TBM24: Juggling the Needs of Heart, Mind, Body, and Talent

RS15: The Human Sense of Time & Timing

RS13: One Path to Manyness NOT Many Paths to Oneness

RS11: The Christ Zone Model: Introduction

RS10: The Soul’s Blended Logic

RS9: Jesus and the Occupy Wall Street Movement

RS7: More of a Skeptic Than James Randi

RS6: SPECT Scans of the Author’s Brain

JR58: The "My Fellow American" Interfaith Initiative

JR47: "Knowledge" Versus "Truth"

TBM12: Finding the Words of Your Own Promise

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

JR30: Foxes Have Holes, Canadians Have Gloves

JR22: Why You Need To Know Yourself (Mystical Commentary on Saying 67)

All Posts

Posts by Date

Most Liked Posts

JAT Publications: The Spiral Path

Find Key Words

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the tag “brain-soul connection”

Post Navigation

Categories

All Posts

Posts by Date

Most Liked Posts

JAT Publications: The Spiral Path

Find Key Words