A kind stranger
I was pondering that question and I wonder what goes on in the brain anyway, is it just thoughts?
Then I saw a documentary in which a man got his brain scanned, you could see different parts of his brain light up, all depending on the question asked or stimuli given. For instance when he was asked to fabricate a story a different part of his brain was active then when he was asked to remember something and when his feet got tickled a whole new area lit up.
Recent studies have found the part of the brain that lights up when compassion is experienced, a discovery that happen quite by chances when a man was brought in with a knife stuck in his brain, he was “fine” no brain damages except one part of his brain was no longer active and he lost the ability to be compassionate. After researching this they located that part of the brain that lights up in most humans when compassion is experienced. Just to side step a little…they went further and even found that specific area in dog brains.
By now we know that different parts of the brain help us see and hear, store memories or solve mathematical problems.
The labeling of what we see, hear, store or solve is going on in our brain as well. We need labels to make sense of our sensations.
I felt down the stairs a few years back and badly twisted my ankle, a friend of mine found me at the bottom of the stairs screaming in pain. He called the ambulance and sat with me while waiting for it to arrive. This man happened to be a hypnotherapist and we had dabbled with different kinds of awareness for a long time, so it was not strange to me when he ask me to go to a different state of mind, he asked me basically to label the sensation I felt in my ankle not as pain but as a healing and I did. The excruciating pain dissolved in a sensation of warmth and when I arrived in the hospital I could no longer experience the pain. This made it very difficult for the doctor, who had only the labels of pain, to understand the severity of my injury.
My mind thought pain so I sensed pain, my mindset changed and the sensation changed. So now what?
For me I feel that the answer lies in the labeling of the chain of events we call experience. When we dissect and label every link in that experience we almost feel that we can take out one link and understand the whole. It is like saying the engine is the car and can function separate from the body work as a car.
Labeling and dissecting in it self is not a bad thing, when used right it can even help us to experience the whole on a deeper level. But when we get stuck in a label or the need to know the whole while dissecting just one link, we get lost in discussions about right and wrong, left or right, me or you.
For sure there are parts of the brain we don’t use or don’t have access to when we feel we need it. We all have those moments that you know the title of a book, it’s on the tip of your tong, you can almost feel your mouth form the words, but…nothing ...and then when you least expect it a light goes on and you know. So no doubt that there are more parts of the brain that are still in the dark.
Maybe the only way to make full use of our brain is to stop seeing it as separate from the rest of our senses and exercise our ability to be whole, complete with our experiences of creative and linear chain of events. Like an athlete exercising his body or a mathematician exercising his thoughts so we need to exercise our wholeness. So to experience the whole we need to lighten up.
Or as it was so eloquently put by the same kind stranger
As humans, we have the gift of consciousness and the ability to focus our minds on the act of witnessing our existence without judgment or the need to define or know. That’s when we feel God, truth, love…
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