Our Brain
How our brain is currently wired is the greatest challenge to a spiritual practice. Our brain creates diversions, distractions, and dead ends through its current wiring for physical and social survival. While there are parts of our brain that help us connect to our Source and experience transcendent experiences, for most of us, those parts of our brain are undeveloped and need focused energy to take their rightful priority in our lives. Our culture is currently not built for spiritual development, but the tsunami of Consciousness sweeping the planet is rapidly changing our priorities.
Deeper Inquiry
The good news is humans have survived as a species, so each of us finds ourselves in physical existence as a human being. The bad news is that our brains have been primarily wired to maintain that physical existence and must be rewired to live as a spiritual being in the physical world. Through the millennia of human existence, our experiences have wired our brains for survival: physical survival and social survival. If it had not been so, we would not have survived as a species. One of the ways we survive is to remember negative experiences far easier than positive experiences. As Rick Hanson says in his book, Hardwiring Happiness, negative experiences are like Velcro in our brain and positive experiences are like Teflon in our brain. Negative sticks and positive slips.
- Amygdala = physical safety
Our amygdala keeps us safe. It is in our mid-brain, the second oldest part of our brain. It creates the fight or flight response that has helped countless numbers of our ancestors (and many of us today) survive physical threats to our existence. While certainly useful, it can also be trained to respond to perceived threats, not just real threats. Think phobias, like fear of snakes, fear of flying or fear of public speaking. These perceived threats create diversions of our life force energy away from connecting with the Source of our being, using our energy to guard against illusory dangers.
- “Social brain” = social safety
Brain scientists are closing in on a concept of humans having a “social brain,” a set of structures or regions in our brain that attend to and regulate our social behaviors. Interestingly, a leading trauma researcher, Bessel van der Kolk, identifies our prefrontal cortex as part of the social structure of our brain, stating:
Our frontal lobes are created to get along with other people and so we tell stories that pleases or makes connections with people around us. . . . The only function of the frontal lobe is to create a common reality. . . . The frontal lobe is not meant to tell the truth. The frontal lobe is to get on the same ideological wavelength. [From: Bessel van der Kolk, Trauma Training, week 3, part 1, ~20:00 minutes]
While it is true that humans are social creatures and need some form of human contact for survival, directing our life force energy into “fitting in” as a social being creates distractions of our life force energy away from grounding ourselves in Source, the true place of personal power.
In addition, our social brain can direct us down dead ends. Underdeveloped humans create religious and spiritual structures that place themselves at the pinnacle of the structure as a way to gain power from other humans. Any claims of “salvation” through adopting a particular belief system, from televangelists, to get-rich-quick schemes, to gurus, to snake oil salesmen have created dead ends that in themselves never lead to spiritual development and enlightenment.
- Our heart = pathway to Source
No one and no thing can create a connection for us to our Source, because the pathway resides in our heart. The inner sanctum. The temple of which we are the sole attendant. Our responsibility as an active participant in the evolution of human consciousness is to purposely and intentionally reduce travel along the neural pathways of our brain and increase travel along the neural pathways of our heart. As our basic physical and social survival neural pathways become less traveled, the higher, more integrative functions of our brain connect us to the unseen world, providing ecstatic experiences of oneness. As our brains evolve, our heart takes its rightful place as the center of our physical being, providing all our days with purpose and connection and directing us into a world that works for all beings. Not just all human beings, but all of creation: animal, mineral and vegetable.
Creating breakthroughs
In closing, here are some statements that I know to be true for me. Test them out in your heart to see if they ring true to you:
- An overactive amygdala creates diversions of our life force energy away from spiritual development.
- An overactive social brain creates distractions of our life force energy away from spiritual development.
- Solely following someone else’s path or system creates dead ends.
- The temple of your heart has only one attendant: You!
This is part 12 of a 12-part series. If you have enjoyed the series, I invite you to do two things: 1. Share your favorites with friends, family and social networks by clicking a link below or finding them on my website here; 2. Send me a short email telling me what you enjoyed at challenges@thomascapshew.com.
In three weeks, I will begin a new series in this blog on “Senses of the Heart,” based on a section in my new book, Consciousness Rising. I am in the process of obtaining a publisher, so if you can offer any assistance in bringing this book to print, I would be grateful!
May your path be filled with health, joy, clarity and Love! Tom