tethering clouds

Me - conception to decomposition

I have been re-reading Eagleman’s “Incognito – the secret lives of the brain”. There is much to absorb. The unconscious is having a hard time keeping up. I will give it some space and see what it comes up with.

Paradigms. The conventional wisdom of the dominant group (cowdung). In the beginning there was only myth and magic but that was good enough to help us ‘explain’ life the universe and everything (ltuae).

God and the eternal verities. The divine right of kings. The flat earth. Indivisible atoms. Counter-argument = burn at the stake.

‘Science’ is evolving and gradually transforming. It gives us not the ‘truth’ but rather the best working hypothesis in the light of evidence presently available.

Specialist classical disciplinary silos are giving way to multidisciplinary consilience (aka sociobiology). Holism rather than (as well as) reductionism. Counter-argument = a scientist’s duty and moral obligation.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
…
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
John Donne (1572 – 1631)

Me, myself, I, ego – the boundary?, No boundary (Wilber)

Conception to decomposition
What was your face before you were conceived, born, matured, grown old, dead, decomposed

Much footering

If I was to enter a Zen monastery my days would be well structured. There would be a schedule of activities lasting from dawn to dusk and beyond. The details vary between monastic traditions, but the essence is to be found in all of them. And the essence is mindfulness which means being non-judgmentally aware of the thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) that arrive, hang around, and depart from up front consciousness.

The TFM that appear to you are rooted in your nature, nurture and chance, and ‘exist’ in the memory circuits of your brain. The hard wired, natural examples evolved in the times of our ancestors and these included not only the apes but also the mammals, the reptiles, the fish, a fabulous array of invertebrates, and a host of unicellular organisms. Note – we all have the same DNA

Humans are born in a helpless condition and need to be nurtured to fit in with the group to which they belong. This process takes the form of more or less formal education although it might also be viewed as brainwashing, enculturation or indoctrination. The curriculum expanded when language evolved and collective learning came of age. Note that we do not want 100% efficiency in the enculturation process. There must be variation upon which natural selection will act.

In most human groups there are three types of people – leaders, managers and workers and there will be genes controlling the expression of group type. It is possible that all members of the group contain all the genes for hierarchy and the nurturing process switches them on and off.

AND it is possible to have a fourth group type – the outlier who is a spiritual mystic. They will once have been a useless baby but later in life their mindbrain will have experienced a range of extra-ordinary TFM such that they become liberated from their standard model.

The only constant thing is change. But most people resist it. But this is not a problem – it generates a possibly creative and popular, multi-stakeholder debate.

The mystic worldviews from times past were restatements of widely accepted myth and magic. Most of them were well off the wall. About 2000 years ago a few isolated monks independently came to realize that what people know is not reality. By sitting quietly doing no-thing the mindbrain changes.

Modern brain scientists are working with experienced meditators to investigate what happens in the brain when they enter non-egoic states. 

In short,

• the brain changes the mind which changes the brain
• the road is made by walking – use it or lose it.
• the non-egoic state is called Flow, in the groove, in the zone
• no-self (aka non-ego), no problem
• how to achieve non problematic (enlightened) thinking? – just sit
• drop off body and mind
• and know the PEACE, BLISS, ENLIGHTENMENT, RELEASE etc

I find it useful to suppose that there is a genetic basis for ‘flow’ but that it is not often switched on. This means that it is easy to “Keep the peasants in ignorance!” which would have become necessary once settled agriculture became established and hierarchies became more pronounced and exploitative as kingdoms, empires and nation states.

But now there is globalisation which is inspired by consumer capitalism and the commodification of goods and services - and the bottom line is profit. These days there is also talk of the triple bottom line – economic, social and environmental. And, as a gesture towards holism, I have outlined an 8-fold bottom line (https://sites.google.com/site/steeplessrds/ ) social, technological, environmental, economic, political, legal, ethical and spiritual. This complements the work of Minu Hemmati on Multi-stakeholder processes. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Multi-stakeholder-Processes-Governance-Sustainability-Deadlock/dp/1853838705

 

I do not have the rigid discipline of a Zen monastery. Some days the mind footers about on autopilot while on other days it is focused on reculturing my ‘self’. While TFM watching I do not always remember to drop off body and mind. But I remember to forget more often than not. The loss of memory goes along with old age.

A pig’s breakfast

I have been reading  Future Publishing (2017) “How it Works – Book of the Brain”. It is eye catching and well written. It seems to be a corporate endeavour as there is no named author.

It reinforces my growing feeling that the emerging worldview is ‘true’. The new story is based on facts and evidence.

Brains evolved because living things must locate food and avoid predators. This is true even of single celled organisms and to some extent plants. But it is blatantly obvious in many celled animals which include invertebrates and vertebrates.

There are the classic five senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell – but there are many others reporting to the brain about the position of the limbs, and the concentration of sugar, oxygen, carbon dioxide and a range of other chemicals. The rate of pumping of the heart and lungs has also to be kept in tune with the body’s needs.

Some of the sense organs, for example the eye, are sophisticated while others, for example the pressure sensors in the muscles, are quite simple -  but they all work in the same basic way. When the sense organ is stimulated it generates code which passes along a nerve that takes it to a specialist area in the brain where decoding takes place. But that is a grossly oversimple description. The massive amount of information coming in at a given moment has to be filtered and sorted so that relevant responses can be generated.

It is easy to imagine that the brain sits in the darkness inside the skull and is fed coded, electrical messages which it has to interpret and coordinate. And the system evolved rather than having been designed. So it is a bit of a pig’s breakfast - but it works.