=1 "Brain = 1"

Brain = 1

by the editors

We usually think of every individual as having a single brain, but this is misleading, for in truth we have more than one brain. That which we call the brain is made up of a number of brains which function quite independently of one another, frequently arriving at different decisions and conflicting conclusions. These are the brains, housed in the same braincase, which we have acquired one after another in the long course of evolution, for it has been Nature's habit simply to add a new brain to the existing ones rather than to discard the old or to integrate the new with the old established thought mechanism. Each one of these brain parts constitutes a different personality, a different level of consciousness, with its own memory, its own viewpoint, its own philosophy.

Historically, our most recent brain is that which we know as the frontal lobes of the neocortex. Anatomically quite distinct, they are positioned over and in front of the older brain parts. The greater the age of the part, the simpler its construction and the more rapid its functioning. In a decision-making situation the primitive parts have reached a conclusion and issued orders while the recent parts are still cogitating. Emotionally-charged, they speak more strongly and with greater authority than the frontal lobes. Consequently the great majority of mankind is conscious only of the more archaic brain functionings and is activated almost exclusively from this source.

Man generally lacks the necessary patience and education to put to use the more recent mechanisms at his disposal. He does not know how to activate or interrogate them, or how to recognise or respond to their voices, for to experience and utilise these more sophisticated parts of himself careful training and an act of will are necessary. The older brain parts work spontaneously and do not need an invitation or welcome interference; they are difficult to influence or educate; the latest comers, on the other hand, are more eager to assimilate new experiences, to learn and acquire new data, to enrich their memory. But they are also more demanding and easily discouraged, willing to collaborate but unwilling to assert themselves. They need a continuous stream of rarely available material and spiritual nourishment of the right qualities and quantities, from man's earliest childhood onward, if their influence is to be felt.

The archaic parts of the brain are firmly established in a dominating position and are unwilling to relinquish their powers or even share them with this newer brain material. Even so, there can be no doubt that it is this most recent addition to the brain which makes man human and which constitutes his potential.

Yet Nature does not insist that the influence of her new processes be immediate or automatic. Evolution is a gradual progression. At first the influence is slight, having to be increased and encouraged by use, stimulated, educated and aided to its full potential, to the status for which it is intended, to the crown which is its right. For this a very special technique of mental training is necessary.

Such techniques have been developed and are various in their application and nomenclature: contemplation, concentration, meditation, stimulation of body-mind relationships, systematic exploration of feelings, and, above all, silencing of the lower mechanical parts of the mind so that the higher parts may have an opportunity to function.

With the aid of these techniques yogis have gained the knowledge of their different anatomical brains or brain parts from the inside as it were, but locate them for heuristic purposes not solely in the head, but as chakras or centres of consciousness in a subtle body that corresponds grosso modo to the physical body. Their positions range from above the head to the base of the spine. In this way the yogis emphasise the areas of influence of the various brain parts and stress the intimate relationship and interaction between the mind and the body which the occidental is inclined to overlook. The fusion, the psychosomatic roles of the manomaya kosha, or mind body and the pranamaya kosha, the vital body, are graphically rendered so that these parts of our being may be more fully understood and more easily mastered. The oldest part of the brain, for example, corresponds on the yogi's chart to the ‘muladhara’, the chakra which is felt or rather ‘realised’ at the base of the spine; its concern is with the basic instincts or activities of life like sex and sleep, and it is from this center that the aroused consciousness begins its ascent. Yogic methods and practices are devised to cause this ascent and to ensure that it continues from level to level, from chakra to chakra, from one brain part to the next.

The highest level of consciousness is represented by a chakra imagined to be, and located on the chart, in a position outside and above the brain itself; the somatic activity of the neocortex is experienced in the yogi's subtle being as the unfolding of the ‘sahasrara’, the thousand-petelled lotus of Brahma. For the consciousness to reach this height, years of spiritual discipline are necessary. Will power, aspiration, patience, unfailing application of devised practices – such are the requisites for progress. Step by step the excited clamourings and mechanical monitoring activity of our bird and reptile brain parts have to be mastered and silence; they must make way for the younger, more delicate, more reticent additions to our grey matter. Only then can the ascent reach the higher branches of the tree of knowledge and our real mental being.

When we are able to look within ourselves, to observe the play of the various parts of our being, it appears that the innermost regions of our brain anatomically have the greatest influence in shaping our lives, the strongest voice in controlling thought and action, the largest capacity to assert their responses and reactions to outside situations and circumstances. They are also those which are the most intimately connected with the functioning of our body and its organs. The other regions, the later additions to the brain, on the other hand, though anatomically the outermost, are felt as the innermost and seem to be as it were interiorised, withheld and withdrawn. But perhaps this fact, that the neocortex or younger brain part is anatomically the most external, is the very reason why its circumvolutions are the first to enter into resonance with the whole of the universe. And perhaps what we call the inner vision is in fact a subtle antenna to the very heart of all-being itself.

For this alone, this latest addition to our brain of all the brain parts, is felt as our very innermost self and it is only here and by it that we are able to know, love, live and vibrate in the oneness of the universe, in a truth, a state of reality which will forever remain concealed from our other parts. Perhaps, then, when the yogi reaches this highest state of consciousness, when he looks deep within himself and lives in and from his soul, he is experiencing, in other words, the action of the neocortex, and in this connection we notice a curious phenomenon. This organ which we experience at first as our innermost being now envelops all other parts of the brain. Like soft wings around the body of the bird, the soul enfolds the other parts of our inner self, and if allowed it will uplift and carry them into the soul of the whole, into the great oneness of all being, all consciousness and all bliss.

A characteristic of the lower brain parts is that their perception of reality is discontinuous and incomplete. Colours, sounds, forms and shapes are perceived as isolated phenomena, independent objects, individual entities, separate in time and space. The ancient mystics and yogis, however, and now modern physicists have conceived a wider truth, the truth of the oneness, an absolute interdependence throughout the whole field of reality, of everything with everything else. And this realisation has been possible only because of the neocortex and its endless capacity for establishing synapses with other brain cells. Whereas primitive science upheld the reality of a complete separation of observer, observed and observation, of each atom, in fact, 20th-century science finally acknowledges that in reality they cannot be separated or viewed independently.

Human language is a creation of the primitive, emotional parts of our brain and as such describes reality and matter as corpuscular. When confronted by the new conceptions of the neocortex, where matter as expressed in the language of mathematics is a wave phenomenon, these ancient brain parts are confounded. The archaic language is verbal and, in spite of its so-called grammatical rules, nonlogical; only with difficulty can it be manipulated to express the continuous reality of things.

For this reason yogis and mystics speaking of reality as truth or oneness, or of ‘the kingdom’ or Nirvana, have always been misunderstood, because these concepts, like God, spirit and soul, have been taken to mean separate entities, individual beings; as a result untrained minds reached for them in vain. But once the frontal lobes of the neocortex are activated, the conception of this reality in terms of forms, bodies and shapes is superceded by an awareness of the one in which God, soul, spirit and matter are no longer corpuscular or separate beings, but that which they always were in truth, always are and always will be – vibrating states of being, continuous in time and space without separation of the individual and the cosmic, the immanent and the transcendent; each is a continuation of the other throughout the wholeness of time and space, and beyond time and space.

Neither can our verbal language express, nor our separative, primitive minds attain to these heights. We need for that a ‘Mind of Light’, a trained neocortex with its limitless capacities of synapses. Then the whole brain, like a well-practiced orchestra, will play a single fugue of the great whole and thus reflect and mirror the reality as it is – the multiplicity of the one.