This is my final installment. If you happen to be reading, I'd love to know your thoughts. I found this book to be wildly inspiring and fascinating.
from Life After Death, Chopra
A compass needle moves because it's responding to the Earth's magnetic field. What if the same thing is true for brain activity? What if the mind field is sending signals, and billions of brain cells arrange patterns in response to what the field is saying? A team of innovative scientists has proposed exactly that. Henry Stapp, a theoretical physicist from Berkeley; Jeffrey Schwartz, a neuropsychiatrist at UCLA; and Mario Beauregard, a psychologist from the University of Montreal, have crossed disciplines to formulate a workable theory of "quantum mind" that may revolutionize how mind and brain relate to each other. Central to their theory is "neuroplasticity," the notion that brain cells are open to change, flexibly responding to will and intention.
They acknowledge, to begin with, the usual scientific explanation that "the mind is what the brain does," but there are many flaws in such an explanation, as we have seen. They propose, therefore, that exactly the opposite is true. Mind is the controller of the brain.
In their view, the mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the
nucleus of an atom. Until an observer appears, electrons haev no
physical identity in the world; there is only amorphous cloud. In the
same way, imagine that tehre is a cloud of possibilities open to the
brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images
it could choose from.) When the mind gives a signal, one of these
possibilities coalesces from teh cloud and becomes a thought in the
brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron. Like the
quantum field generating real particles from virtual ones, the mind
generates real brain activity from virtual activity.
What makes this reversal important is that it fits the facts. Neurologists have verified that a mere intention or purposeful act of will alters the brain. Stroke victims, for example, can force themselves, with the aid of a therapist, to use only their right hand if paralysis has occurred on that side of the body. Willing themselves day after day to favor the affected part, they can gradually cause the damaged sites in the brain to heal.
In other words, the process of reflection and insight through therapy changed the patients' brain cells. This is exactly what was predicted by the new theory of quantum mind. But the answer was there all along. The mind has always been able to change the brain. If a person suddenly loses a loved one or is fired from his job, sudden severe depression often follows. Depression is rooted in abnormal uptake of the brain chemical serotonin. This physical imbalance is what antidepressants are typically designed to correct. Yet when someone loses a loved one or gets fired, isn't it obvious that the chemical imbalance came about after the bad news? Reacting to bad news is a mental event. Indeed, the entire world we inhabit of words and thoughts creates infinite brain changes in all of us every moment.
If mind comes before brain, then what if mind belongs to all of us? I can say "my brain," but I can't say "my quantum field." There is growing evidence that in fact we do share the same mind field. This would go far to support the existence of heavens and hells, Bardo and Akashic memory, extending far beyond the brain. To begin with, we need to examine the kinds of ideas that people share as a group. The brain belongs to "me," but if ideas belong to "us," then we are participating together in a field, sometimes quite mysteriously.
Ultimately, dying will carry each of us into the mind field, which we will experience directly. Yet our beliefs, being stored consciousness, will follow us.
1. Know that you are going to identify with your world view at every stage of personal growth.
2. Accept that these identifications are temporary. You will never be truly yourself until you reach unity.
3. Be willing to change your identity every day. Take a flexible attitude. Don't defend an "I" that you know is just temporary.
4. Allow your ability to quietly observe without judgment to replace the ingrained ideas you reach for automatically.
5. When you have the impulse to struggle, use that as an immediate signal to let go. Open a space for new answers to unfold on their own.
6. When you can't let go, forgive yourself and move on.
7. Use every opportunity to tell yourself that all viewpoints are valid, every experience valuable, every insight a moment of freedom.
We need to see that we are all entangled in the same reality. Isolation has been outmoded on every front, from ecology to the Internet. We need to remember our common source. The human spirit is degraded when we confine ourselves to the span of a lifetime and the enclosure of a physical body. We are mind and spirit first, and that places our home beyond the stars.
Knowing that I will return to the field one day to find my source provides me with immeasurable confidence in the purpose of life. As fervently as any devout believer, I have faith in this vision. My faith is renewed every time I have a moment of witnessing, in which I can touch the silence of my own being. Then I lose all fear of death - indeed, I touch death right now, gladly. Tagore said it so movingly:
When I was born and saw the light
I was no stranger in this world
Something inscrutable, shapeless, and without words
Appeared in the form of my mother.
So when I die, the same unknown will appear again
As ever known to me,
And because I love this life
I will love death as well.
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