There have been some interesting convergences lately. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who I wrote about a couple of months ago, is back on the New York Times “Most emailed” list. In an article written about her, “A Superhighway to Bliss,” she is quoted as saying:
“Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.
Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”
“There is no doubt that it is a beautiful state and that we can get there,” she said.”
In case you don’t remember, she’s the brain scientist whose stroke gave her a different perspective on the brain and reality. But wait, there’s more…
Also on the list today is an article called, “Lotus Therapy,” which discusses current research on a hot trend in psychotherapy in which various forms of meditation are used. My favorite quote:
“It’s a shift from having our mental health defined by the content of our thoughts,” Dr. Hayes said, “to having it defined by our relationship to that content — and changing that relationship by sitting with, noticing and becoming disentangled from our definition of ourselves.”
You may recall that I wrote a few days ago about how we acquire our identities in the course of our personal history, and that by understanding how that process occurs, we may get a different perspective on who we are. But wait, there’s more…
In my previous post, I talked about an article in the June, 2008 Discover magazine about building humanoid robots, how the effort would improve our understanding of ourselves, and the necessity of coming to accept ourselves in all our robot-ness. But wait, there’s more…
There’s another article a few pages later in the same issue of Discover called, “Acid Test,” about the recent increase in research on the use of psychoactive drugs to treat various mental disorders. A key quote:
“The cortex basically takes all the information coming in and synthesizes it into reality,” says David E. Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who has done animal research on hallucinogens. “When you alter that circuitry, you’re essentially changing your perception of reality.”
I think the planets must be coming into alignment or something–just kidding. All these ideas have been favorite subjects of mine for some time, and it’s encouraging to see so much popular interest in them. The truth is ultimately inescapable, because decisions made on the basis of mistaken assumptions have haphazard and often unpleasant consequences. The more reliable our information about who we are and how our brains work, the more effectively we can deal with the difficulties life presents us with.
Many of the old Zen guys used to say that Buddha mind and ordinary mind are the same mind, and I think the value of science is in showing that no matter how profound and transcendent an experience we might have, there is nothing mystical about it: we are just accessing a part of the brain, a particular configuration of neurons and neurotransmitters, that is not a part of our everyday experience.
You don’t have to be some extraordinary human being to have such experiences, but our everyday, practical sense of reality often has such a grip on our perceptions that it is difficult to escape. Meditation and drugs, used with the understanding that we are just shifting the brain into a different state, can give us a more graphic, dramatic experience of our options than we might get by simply reading about the possibilities. It takes something a little out of the ordinary to free us from the obsessions, depressions, moods, etc., that our ordinary lives have endowed us with.
Reality is more than what we think.
Spiraling Convergences