The Brain Drives
Our Brain, Our Life, Awakening, Our Lives Together
Everything we ever experience, express and learn involves the functions of our nervous system. To open that statement up a little, our nervous system is the substrate that pervades our every moment of perceiving the world, including all others, through our senses; every moment of moving, sensing and feeling our bodies; as well as the appearance of every image, distinction, label, thought, description, story, concept, insight and intuition we have ever lived through and, are living through, now. Our nervous system manages all the interconnected functions and of all the interrelated subsystems of our organism as human beings, relating in dynamic exchange with our environment and other human beings in this world.
In short, our individual nervous systems underlie our subjective experiences of being alive here. From the beginning, our nervous system subsumes all the processes we each go through adapting to and living on this Earth. Here, in this world where our subjective lives are inseparable from the inter-subjective field of others’ lives here, around us; where we interpersonally co-regulate our neural well-being. Our nervous system is the substrate of the experience of our lives; our lives, which are inextricable from the enveloping ecosystem and its myriad subsystems. These are the external half of our living organism’s metabolism.
Our experience and perception of ourselves, others, this world and all of us being together in this world as our human species of consciousness is determined by the conditioned patterns within the neurological substrate of our organism – our underlying beliefs determine our understanding , our interpretations and our consequent perception. These conditioned, neural patterns of thinking in our minds, of experiencing in our bodies and ways of being with others in the world are habits in our nervous system; they show up as repeating sequences of firings in our neural networks, as particular, repetitive cycles among our neuro-chemical shifts; as well as limited, habitual sets of oscillations within the wide-spectrum of our brainwaves; all of which can be said to be playing familiar pieces of music throughout our lives. Sometimes runaway feedback cycles within our neural systems spins us through energetic vortices into further reaches of discomfort, dissatisfaction and discouragement; or into frantic activity.
Whether we were raised in what is now called, “a dysfunctional family” or just about anywhere else within our rather dysfunctional species of consciousness, by the age of three or four, we were virtually all conditioned to adopt the fundamental premise of separation, which had been assumed by everyone around us and everybody around them, and back through the generations for millennia. As we adapted to what we found here, we each divided Reality into “us” as separate from “not-us.” We adopted reified constructs of “self-in-world,” “self-with-other,” and “me & us-vs-them.” These descriptions and stories became the basis for our identifications as a separate one in this world.
Of course, all this is mistaken. With a little reflection it becomes obvious that every so-called “thing” is both a whole in itself as well as a part/participant in a larger system; nothing is ever really separate from everything else. Nevertheless, even once we’ve conceptually understood this, we all tend to see and experience ourselves as separate and disconnected from our context, from each other, from this Earth and from the Divine Source and Substance of all being – in both Its transcendent and its immanent Infinities. Perhaps, it cannot be stated too often that this fundamental misunderstanding is the essential root of all our problems – both personal and shared – as this human species of consciousness.
This mis-apprehension of separation is the unstable foundation of our representation of life to ourselves. For the most part we live our lives from within this mind-made field of representation, which informs us about who and what we are in relation to things, others and the world. Unfortunately, this is true, even if we know of and have had experiential glimpses of our shared oneness and our interconnectedness with All-That-Is. Our consciousness becomes ensnared in our mistaken mind/world dream of separation. Neurologically, our nervous system gets pulled back into familiar cycles of resonances which are the latest version of our earliest adaptation to the inter-subjective world of separation, within which we were raised.
Whether we have a vague intuitive sense or a burning heart’s desire to come to ongoing-ly live as the experiencing expression of our shared oneness, consciously engaging our neuro-plasticity by giving attention to our intuition/vision of what’s emerging for ourselves and our world is the way to go. Engaging in an open-minded experiential exploration of the felt-sensing of our instinctive vision of our whole species living together, sustainably in peace is the direction we’re wanting to go toward. This vision involves us living together in creative collaboration for the benefit of all of us. As we attune to the whole vision or any piece of it we are drawn toward, our neuronal substrate, begins giving us experiential glimpses of what our lives and our world will be like as we move into harmonic alignment with that band of frequencies. Thereby we draw it closer.
Gradually, it appears to me that our strange human species of consciousness is getting refocused into another way of being ourselves, here together – a purer expression of the spark of infinity we always are. We are moving past the separate identities which create all these polarizing categories and descriptions we have all habitually been living because we have been taking our mistaken representational field to be an accurate map or model for who and what we are as individual beings and as a species. We are beginning to notice, we are beginning to experience the dynamic and multilayered patterning of our nervous system; we are beginning to notice ourselves recreating and experiencing duality; we are letting go of who and what we think, and have believed we are, in relation to the same mind’s version of what constitutes “you” or “them,” or “this world.” These are merely our conditioned minds’ interpretations of what this or that is and means. Something larger and more inclusive is becoming more important, more interesting.
We turn our attention away from the familiar, conditioned “known” and, we begin noticing the knower that is always here; we deliberately stop the stream of thoughts and, for a moment, just notice what is always, already and naturally, here. This awake cognizance is always here, just beneath and behind our story of ourselves in the throes of duality and separation. When we finally say to ourselves, in our own way of speaking, “WhiskyTangoFoxtrot, this is my life passing through the filters of my mind; I can take a moment out of my mind-made, self-world, my experienced interpretation, and begin noticing the underlying, experiential actuality of my being. I have an innate right to focus my attention where I prefer. It is simple to stop thinking and simply notice, to the best of my current ability, this which lies beneath, behind, beyond and, yes, within, any and all conceived and assumed interpretations.”
It is helpful to realize that repatterning the energetic field of our mistaken representation of reality as polarized, reified dualities involves what can be broadly described as two simultaneous and mutually synergistic processes. Both involve developing the muscle of our conscious attention but in different ways. The heart-essence of the path of awakening is to drop all thought, including all assumptions, to the best of our current ability. We attune to the actuality of our being here, noticing what is already here. As we begin to take such experiential short moments, we are opening our sphere of attention and retraining our focus through feeling the sensations within and around our bodies. Non-conceptually, non-verbally we attend to the felt-sense of the field of life within and all around us. We open into being the open awareness of being that is just here.
If you are anything like me, mind’s labeling, analysis, distractions won’t be gone long. The point is that we consciously choose to turn our attention away from the mind of our enslaved-to-duality-&-separation self. The point is to recognize, get used to and gradually be living as the actuality of being; this one we have always been regardless of who or what we thought, believed and perceived ourselves to have been while we imagined we were somehow separate from the One that is all of This!
As we practice taking short moments, we begin to come to rest as the actuality of our awareness/being, the one we actually and always are beneath, behind and beyond any story of duality we may have been telling ourselves, others and the world. We notice the inherently open presence of being which subtends all mind-filtered experiences; we feel what this feels like in the sensations of our body.
Which brings us to the second process of awakening which involves becoming conscious of the ways our mind had been creating and re-creating the representational field of our inevitable discomfort and dissatisfaction with ourselves, others & life. What usually pulls us out of our living rest, is the compelling stories of polarized dualities and separation that we tell ourselves. We become re-engaged with one of our mind’s habitual versions of ourselves either by life happening around us and our attention turning to it. In neuro-speak, another neural networks that correlates with one of our identities in relation with the perceived/conceived context of self/other/world breaks through the surface of consciousness,; it comes foreground and creates a dualistic and reifying interpretation of our living moment; we lose the felt-sense of the enveloping, infusing field of energies and we experience life as if our mind-made structures are reality and not just a superimposition of our enslaved version of self in mind’s world of separation.
The way I see it, as we awaken together, we are taking back our intrinsic connectedness and our primordial identity as awareness/field-beings experiencing and expressing through these organisms both with and within the interconnected field of all being. In truth it is utterly simple; we merely remember to turn our attention from whichever of our separate-identity-creating self-other, self-world dualities happens to have been running on automatic; we simply re-turn our attention and we re-tune our resonance to the underlying presence of our natural state.
Inevitably this will throw our habitual positive and/or negative points of view of me & you, or him or her or them into the foreground of our awareness. So what do we do? First we recognize this is one of the conditioned self-in-context identities we have been living through. It involves a set of feelings, descriptions, interpretations and meanings, which constitute the experiential fabric of our identity as a separate one in relation to the experiential fabric of however it happens we have been regarding our world. Neurologically we are speaking about all the systems, subsystems and processes which underlie our experiencing.
We come to take responsibility for the ways we have been interpreting and being in relation to life including ourselves, others and all the other interconnected holons here with us as All-That-Is. We begin to recognize ourselves as the author, director and star of our own movie. We begin seeing that we have been continuously living within and believing in the interpretations generated by our mistaken mind’s premise of separation and duality.
Again. In brief, we simply stop thinking for a moment and just notice whatever we are currently able to notice within the felt-sensing of just being here. As we do this, we get used to just being here as as this awareness of now. As we get used to just being here, we recognize that the binary patterns of our identifications – self-other, self-world – always and only exist within the all-inclusive space of our awareness. We sustain the experiential recognition of awareness while allowing the habitual “me-you,” “me-them,” or “me-world” field of representation, with all its charged emotional nuances, to be here within this awareness, for the time being. After all, it is just a pattern of thought that we have temporarily, mistakenly taken to be reality.
Our awareness/being includes that mind-world representation but it certainly isn’t limited to or by it (except to the extent we have been believing in it.) However, now we are realizing that both our idea of ourself and our idea of the other, both already exist in our mind. So we let just be present as we regard them from the wider vantage of being the awareness in which they both happen to be appearing, just now.
If we can take off the labels and put aside all the descriptions; just allowing the polarized energies to be as they are within the presence of awareness, then, the polarized, reified duality we had constructed as “me-you,” “me-them,” or “me-world,” naturally morphs and resolves back into the unified field of the awareness of now.
Sometimes for me, this has occurred with a recognition/revelation of an early, seminal moment of being imprinted, disconnecting our mind from a soul part of ourself and creating one of our original identifications within samsara. Sometimes, I have found, as these current versions of “me-separate-from-whatever” resolve, some quality of essence is revealed within me – some peace, or presence, or quality of integrity or wholeness.
Using words as primers and pointers toward the immediate and direct non-verbal experience of being can be very helpful if we remember release our focus from the word(s), leaning into the immediacy of the already present, non-verbal felt-sensing of our being. Language can point our attention toward the living experiential domain of our unique expression of our shared oneness. Or we can get caught up in a seemingly endless sequence of verbal and nominal associations.
As a contemplation, you might find it useful to feel into the experiential possibilities of meaning in words and phrases like interconnectedness; wide-open; each-and-all-included; undifferentiated, open cognizance; nothing preferenced; opening into a non-verbal knowing of the vast unknown beneath, behind and beyond whatever confusing and painful ways we have been conceiving, perceiving and living. In these ways we can begin noticing the living sense of the openness of our being and we gradually become more and more able to rest as the awareness of being. After some time of this, we come to increasingly rely on this silent, open presence to express through us as we go through our life.
Our awakening is not usually a one-time turning of attention from the discursive, thinking mind of the slave-self-in-separation and toward the living awareness/being which underlies and enlivens every moment of our lives. We are changing the habits of our lives.
As we look at the looming spectacles of our world in our times, we begin to recognize what is at stake for our species if we try to continue living here, together, through the mistaken lens of separation; it is a paradigm and a creed that has been outgrown. We start to see how deeply we care about how we humans on this Earth are being with each other; as we find ourselves feeling the overwhelming amount of trauma and pain and destructiveness we create for ourselves and other sentient species; we begin to recognize how we humans have semiconsciously degraded the living environment of space, light, air, fire, water and earth in runaway processes with our mistaken, human-mind made contaminants, reducing the viability of our terrain – inside and out. We are now distorting the natural electromagnetic field of the earth-sun-galaxy-universe-etc. system. As we come to regard all this and more, we find a compelling reason to refocus our attention and re-attune our consciousness. I mean, we have been tinkering with the electromagnetic field in the space around us, the field that subtends our every living/neurological moment in these bodies and the enveloping sphere of our lived moment. What could possibly go wrong?
When we see the dualistic world both within and around ourselves; when we see how much so many of us are suffering by the hands of our own species of consciousness, we realize that the mind-world we have been living within doesn’t work very well for all of us. Choosing to get free, we begin to consciously relax the hold we’ve had on our current interpretations, identifications and world-views. We become willing to stop thinking and attend, noticing everything we can about the experience of our open cognizance. Getting in touch with open space of awareness in which the silent promptings of our native intelligence arise seems to be just about the wisest move any of us here during these times could possibly make. And, we keep choosing it until it is constant and we live as this inclusive, benevolent presence 24/7.
Again, this extracting attention from our ongoing narrative and noticing the non-verbal, non-conceptual, field of sensations and energies within and around our bodies will inevitably stimulate interpretive neural networks until they take center stage, capturing our attention once more, as we label and describe what we’ve been noticing. Eventually this happens within the conscious awareness of the whole field of being; but often it seems that, as soon as the mind train chugs out of the station, we are already on board and down the tracks. We may find ourselves riding the mind’s steaming and streaming along for a long time before we remember to remember. Then, we, once again, chose to turn attention away from believed thinking and notice what being here, just now feels like. Thereby, we re-tune both our nervous system & our psyche to our shared, natural state as we disconnect ourselves from our mind-world of separation and reification.
At some point we can’t help but see what this is that we came here on this planet to accomplish as a group of naïve volunteers. We re-new our 100% commitment to seeing this through by activating our innate source connection, this multidimensional spark of Infinity, which we always are, for the benefit of all of us.
