Magic Mind

BREAKING up is hard to do, even when false truths have betrayed us, they still cling like cotton candy, resurrecting like the mythical Hydra. For each head cut off, it grew two more.

“By the early Middle Ages, it was widespread knowledge throughout Europe, that the Earth was a sphere,” Wikipedia reports.

Yet against all odds, The Flat Earth Society lives on, with buzzing bees of believers.

Not to forget the geocentric clan, and  creationists insisting the Earth must be only ten-thousand years old. Such beliefs persist in the face of hard evidence.

Linear thinkers are found in many fields: evolution, genetics, consciousness, physics, cosmology, biology, education, sociology, neuroscience–the list is long.

The history of sacred cows in science is littered with the heads of hundreds of once fiercely defended but failed theories, often wildly exaggerated, and stubbornly defended by their inventors.

Once brain cells die, the high priests of neuroscience insisted, they cannot be replaced, and the territory of the brain they served can never be repaired!

It was standard model neuroscience that the brain cannot grow new cells, and for a very long time this was an unquestioned scientific fact.

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You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the saying goes, but surprisingly, science now must admit that our adult brain cells, by a process called neurogenesis, keep on growing after all! One can only conclude that the immortal mind of man knows what it is doing, and does it in an extraordinary way.

This is not your Father’s neuroscience. “The apocryphal tale that you can’t grow new brain cells just isn’t true,” LiveScience reported back in 2005. “Neurons continue to grow and change beyond the first years of development and well into adulthood, according to a new study.”

Amazing Connectivity

The truth today is that neuroscientists are completely baffled by how the brain is able to organize itself so perfectly. Says the narrator of the below video clip: “Every cell in its place, every link between cells carefully organized. Nothing random, nothing arbitrary.

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“What we would really love to understand is, how the brain during development, generates millions and millions of neurons, sends them to the right position in the brain, and then, somehow, instructs each of those individual nerve cells to form very, very specific connections with one another.”

East ↔West

Senior scientist of IONS, Dean Radin answers: “The Eastern view…is ‘everything is mind,’ in which case matter is an emergent property of consciousness … Western science has been listening to some of the claims of Eastern Science about the nature of consciousness…and find that it’s true.

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“Consciousness may be more fundamental than matter or energy … internal experience begins to bump into clairvoyance. From a Western perspective this is not acceptable, because we don’t know how the brain and mind can separate, which seems to be necessary.”

Back to Basics

“The scale of change is much smaller than what goes on during the critical period of development,” said the studies co-author Elly Nedivi, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) —

“… but the fact that it goes on at all,
is earth-shattering.”

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The word Science comes from the Latin word Scire, which means to know. It is supposed to be a systematic, organized way of investigating the world.

The catch is when specialized learning turns into a dogmatic worldview, it then becomes an end-in-itself — distorting what might have resulted in a more holistic truth. The truth is that neuroscientists today are completely baffled by how the brain is able to organize itself so perfectly:

Plastic Cells

In the emerging science of neuroplasticity and growing brain cells, we’ve come full circle again — in this case back to Buddha, who maintained it is “thoughts” that reign supreme over the physical brain and body. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought,” says the opening verse in the Dhammapada:-

“… all that we are is founded on our thoughts and formed of our thoughts.”

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The dogma of standard neuroscience is that the brain’s neurons manufacture our thoughts. In reality, what initiates and orchestrates these neuronal interactions, says occultism, is the elusive, background “thought-producer” — the ever active perceiver or thinker projecting into the brain.

Therefore Theosophy maintains there is a higher directing power, above the intellect and functional brain mind.

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If our thoughts can evolve, and they must, it follows logically that the medium through which they are expressed, the neurons (brain cells), should also grow. Because of the intimate interplay between actor and action, the first impression to a materialist is that neurons are the ‘creators’ of our thoughts.

Tibetan Monks

A clip taken from the History Channel documentary about a Buddhist monk of Tibet who some how mummified himself through meditation, and whose body has somehow been miraculously preserved. Scientist set out to discover what happened and study the monks preforming meditation under scientific test conditions, with amazing results.

Brain Plasticity

Is there really a Master Planner working behind the scenes in our brain? One of the most convincing proofs is our brain’s almost limitless resilience and capacity to

…adapt to changing conditions, to heal itself and restore order in the body from within, attested to by experienced mediators.

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“We are beginning to harness the brains incredible ability to invent itself, and then reinvent itself throughout life,” says the commentator in the below video clip.

This is the true story of young girl, Jody Miller, who “leads an idyllic life for a nine-year-old girl.” Yet she underwent, when all other measures failed to cure her life-threatening illness, some of the most drastic surgery imaginable — half her brain was removed.

Plastic Atoms

Brain cells, like all substance, is built on the notion of “atoms” which were once thought to be “indivisible,” over the objections of H. P. Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine.

Laboratory scientist Dean Radin describes in his book “Entangled Minds,” the relationship between mind and body as seen through both Eastern and Western sciences:

“If West meets East, could science verify our deep union with the universe that mystics have been talking about for thousands of years?”

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The reductionist view of atoms changed completely in the first few years of the 20th Century. The idea of rigidly unchangeable brains may well have been a stubborn carry-over from the earlier view about atoms, and had simply not been challenged until recently. It’s ironic how similar the words “neutron” and “neuron” are.