Mind, “Energy” and Soul
“Prana is implicate to matter but explicate to mind; mind is implicate to prana but explicate to soul; soul is implicate to mind but explicate to spirit; and the spirit is the source and suchness of the entire sequence.”
–Ken Wilber )American Philosopher, 1949-)
Separating the Psyche and the Brain
“We must completely give up the idea of the psyche’s being somehow connected with the brain.”
–Carl G. Jung (Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, 1875-1961)
Becoming Fully Alive
“These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man ‘completes his partial mind’. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.”
–Colin Wilson (English Novelist and Writer on Philosophy, Sociology and the Occult, 1931-)
Heart, Mind and Soul
“The intellect of man sits visibly enthroned upon his forehead and in his eye, and the heart of man is written upon his countenance. But the soul reveals itself in the voice only, as God revealed Himself to the prophet of old in the still small voice, and in the voice from the burning bush.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American Poet, 1807-1882)
Dogs, Infants and Imitation
Human beings have a remarkable ability to be able to understand the goals and intentions of others. This ability develops gradually during infancy and early childhood and is known as the theory of mind. This ability seems often to go wrong in people with autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. Psychologists have tended to think that this is a purely human ability, yet every one who spends a lot of time with animals is sure that they have a similar ability.
New research from the University of Vienna and the University of Budapest, have found striking similarities between humans and dogs in the way they imitate the actions of others.
The researchers were examining a phenomenon known as “selective imitation.” Dogs were given the task of opening a food container by pulling a rod. Normally dogs prefer to use their mouths for this kind of task, but a female dog was trained to open the box with her paw. When the other dogs watched how she did it, they imitated her to get the food. But the dogs only imitated selectively.
When the “training dog” used her paw while holding a ball in her mouth, they used their mouths instead of their paws for manipulating the rod. But when the demonstrating dog’s mouth was free, the dogs once again imitated her and used their paws. This implies that they assumed that she was only using her paw because her mouth was otherwise occupied.
It also indicates that dogs are like human infants in that they do not simply copy an action that they observe, but they adjust the extent to which they imitate depending on the situation. Neither dogs nor humans blindly copy what another creature is doing: they copy what is appropriate for the task at hand. The research has just appeared online in the journal Current Biology.
After their millennia of association with humans, dogs may be a special case. But I doubt it: this is yet more evidence that the gap between animals and humans is shrinking much more rapidly than many of us realize.
Music and the Mind
The next book in the Healing, Meaning and Purpose cycle will be entitled Sacred Cycles. One chapter is entitled Music and the Mind. I am in no doubt that music can produce incredibly powerful healing.
I was interested to read about a small study published in the journal Brain.
Canadian scientists from McMaster University compared 6 children aged four to six who took music lessons for a year with 6 children who did had no music lessons outside school. The six who had lessons attended a Suzuki music school, using a Japanese approach that encourages children to listen to and imitate music before they attempt to read it.
They found the musical group performed better on a memory test also designed to assess general intelligence skills such as literacy and mathematical ability.
The investigators also measured changes in the children’s brain electrical responses to sounds during the year. They measured brain activity using a technique called magnetoencephelography while the children listened to two types of sounds: a violin tone or a burst of white noise.
All the children recorded larger responses when listening to the violin tones compared with the white noise – indicating that more of the brain’s activity was being deployed to process meaningful sounds.
All the children responded more quickly to the sounds over the course of the year of the study – suggesting greater efficiency of the maturing brain.
However, when the researchers focused on a specific measurement related to attention and sound discrimination, they found a greater change over the year among the Suzuki children.
In the group having music lessons, there were measurable changes in as little as four months. Previous studies have shown that older children given music lessons recorded greater improvements in IQ scores than children given drama lessons, but this is the first time that such young children have been tested.
Though this is only a small study, it strongly suggests that music is good for children’s cognitive development. I ifnd this particularly interesting after researchers appeard to have dismantled the "Mozart Effect." Perhaps they were premature in doing so.
I also take my hat off the researchers. As someone who’s done a lot of scanning and measurement, I know only too well, that to get young children to stay still enough to get meaningful readings must have been a Labor of Hercules!
I’d also like to mention a conference in November that sadly I shall not be able to attend, but promises to be a splendid event. It’s the International Sound Healing Conference, taking place on November 10-14 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They have a stellar group of presenters, including Jill Purce, Don Campbell, Fabien Maman, James D’Angelo, Master Charles Cannon, John Diamond and a host of other experts in the fields of sound and healing. It should be quite an event!
“Words are the pen of the heart, but music is the pen of the soul.” –Shneur Zalman of Liadi (Rabbi and Founder of Chabad Lubavitch, 1745-1812)
“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.” –Robert Fripp (Musician, Guitarist and Spiritual Seeker, 1946-)
Dark Matter and Subtle Energies
There have been many attempts to explain observations about subtle energies, Qi and Prana. Amongst the most promising scientific candidates is dark energy and dark matter. The trouble has been that it is a fundamental mistake to try and explain one mystery – subtle energies and subtle systems – with another: dark matter and dark energy.
So I was delighted to see that Scientific American is reporting on a new paper in the coming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
For almost 75 years, astronomers, cosmologists and physicists have deduced that ordinary matter must be surrounded by vast quantities of an invisible substance that is not substantial enough to collide with atoms or stars but massive enough to keep galaxies from flying apart. Named dark matter, this mysterious material has eluded the most careful means of detection, but has been assumed to exist because of its gravitational impact.
Observations of a relatively recent collision of two galaxy clusters have finally proven the existence of dark matter. The discovery is a triumph of perseverance, creativity and rigorous mathematics.
My own understanding about all this is that dark energy and dark matter may indeed be the mechanism by which these subtle energies interact with our universe. But beyond or within that lies something else: Consciousness, Mind or the Informational Matrix. This is the realm of the One, the First Cause.
Why all this matters to us, is that this new research provides further evidence that there is more to the Universe than the things that we observe with our normal senses. It already has us thinking of ways in which this will likely impact our maintenance of health and management of illness.
We had to learn about dark matter from observations of the unimaginably large, but it has implications for the very small: the fundamental structure of the systems and materials that constitute our bodies.
“We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.”
–Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)
Dissing Descartes
Every clinician has been asked the question, “Is the pain in my body, or is it all in my mind. Am I imagining it?” I have seen countless students and young doctors get themselves into a hopeless tangle over that question. And the answer to “is it the body or the mind?” should be “Yes.” If a person is suffering, they are suffering, and pain coming form the mind is every bit as real to them as pain coming from any other part of their anatomy.
But hidden within this question is a mistake that can be traced back to the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes who, in 1641, proposed that there was a neat split between the soul and the body. He actually envisioned an independent soul that inhabited and interacted with the body by opening little trap doors in the brain. This later became interpreted as a neat split between the mind and the body. He was by no means the first person to propose this. Twelve hundred years earlier Numidian-born Theologian, Saint Augustine of Hippo proposed something very similar. This idea of a clear split has informed our thinking for over three hundred years, yet it is probably wrong. And as with the opening question about “is my problem in my body or in my mind,” it has great practical implications: falsely locating the nature, origin and priority of symptoms.
Another practical implication of this artificial split is that by imagining a mechanical clockwork universe divorced from mind or spirit, we have removed value and meaning from the world. Indeed, some scientists take an extreme view, and say that there is no place for value, purpose or meaning in the universe, and that they are simply artificial creations of the mind. I have had some interesting discussion with people who have gone to far as to say that consciousness itself is no more than a set of reflexes in the brain. It will not surprise you to hear that I believe that they are wrong. when scientists say that they have found that the temporal cortex of the brain lights up when someone is having a religious experience, that does not mean that you can reduce a person’s faith and belief to a lit-up piece of brain. It is merely that the area of the brain corresponds to the experience.
I am a firm believer in the notion of nonduality, that essentially there is no fundamental distinction between mind and matter. Consciousness is the primary underlying force in the Universe. There is a very good resource here. So why do I take this position?
1. Personal experience of nonduality
2. The insights of modern theoretical physics
3. Independent, empirical research from a number of reputable scientists around the world. I have just constructed a list of recommended books at Amazon.com. You can access it here. If you take just a little time to examine the research reported in these books, I think that you will begin to be convinced as well.
“The energy of the mind is the essence of life.”
–Aristotle (Greek Scientist and Philosopher, 384-322 B.C.E.)
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