14
THINKING OUTSIDE THE BRAIN
IF I DIE and the information contained in my brain survives, does that mean I will survive? Survival means remaining intact at some level—mind, personality, memory, or soul—that is “me.” To a materialist, when the brain dies, so does the person. Fortunately, over the past two decades some ingenious experiments have raised hope that the mind extends outside the brain, and that the qualities that you and I cherish, such as love and truth, may be embedded permanently in the field.
The closer we can get to showing that the field is intelligent, the more credible it will be that our own intelligence can survive after death. One way to approach this issue seems strange but turns out to be very fruitful: animal telepathy. Many pet owners will attest to the ability of a dog or cat to know what the owner is thinking. A few minutes before going on a walk, a dog gets excited and restless; on the day when a cat is going to be taken to the vet, it disappears and is nowhere to be found. These casual observations led the ingenious British researcher Rupert Sheldrake, a trained biologist now turned speculative thinker, to conduct controlled studies to find out if dogs and cats can actually read their owners’ minds. One study was very simple: Sheldrake phoned sixty-five veterinarians in the London area and asked them if it was common for cat owners to cancel appointments because their cats had disappeared that day. Sixty-four vets responded that it was very common, and the sixty-fifth had given up making appointments for cats because too many couldn’t be located when they were supposed to come in.
Sheldrake decided to perform an experiment using dogs. The fact that a dog gets excited when the time comes to go for a walk means little if the walk is routinely scheduled for the same time every day, or if the dog gets visual cues from its owner that he is preparing to go out. Therefore, Sheldrake placed dogs in outbuildings completely isolated from their owners; he then asked the owner, at randomly selected times, to think about walking their dogs five minutes before going to get them. In the meantime, the dog was being videotaped in its isolated location. Sheldrake found that when their owners started thinking about taking them for a walk, more than half the dogs ran to the door wagging their tails, circling restlessly, and keeping up this behavior until their owners appeared. No dog showed anticipatory behavior, however, when their owners were not thinking about taking them for a walk.
This suggests something intriguing, that the bond between a pet and its owner creates a subtle connection at the level of thought. Polls show that about 60% of Americans believe they have had a telepathic experience, so this result is not completely startling. The next leap is quite startling, however. After writing up his results with telepathic pets, Sheldrake received an e-mail from a woman in New York City who said that her African gray parrot not only read her thoughts but responded to them with speech. The woman and her husband might be sitting in another room, out of sight from the bird, whose name is N’kisi, and if they were feeling hungry, N’kisi would suddenly say, “You want some yummy.” If the owner and her husband were thinking about going out, N’kisi might say, “You gotta go out, see ya later.”
Greatly intrigued, Sheldrake contacted the owner, an artist named Aimee Morgana. The situation he found was remarkable. African gray parrots are among the most linguistically talented of all birds, and N’kisi had a huge vocabulary of over 700 words. More remarkable still, he used them like human speech, not “parroting” a word mindlessly but applying it where appropriate; if he saw something that was red, he said “red,” and if the object was another color, he said that color. But Aimee had even more astonishing stories for Sheldrake. When she was watching a Jackie Chan movie on television, during one scene with Chan perilously perched on a girder, N’kisi said, “Don’t fall down,” even though his cage was behind the television with no line of sight to the picture. When an automobile commercial came on next, N’kisi said, “That’s my car.” Another time Aimee was reading the lines, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” in a book when simultaneously from another room the bird said, “The color is black.”
Sheldrake wanted to confirm this for himself. On his first visit, Aimee gave him a taste of N’kisi’s telepathy: she looked at a picture of a girl in a magazine, and with remarkable clarity from the adjoining room the parrot said, “That’s a girl.” The next step was to conduct a formal experiment. If N’kisi could understand words and also had telepathic abilities, could the two be tested together? Sheldrake proposed that Aimee would look at pictures that corresponded to words her parrot already knew. She would sit in one room while N’kisi remained isolated in another. The bird would have two minutes to utter a “key word” that matched the picture. If he said the word within that time, it would count as a hit. If he didn’t say the word, or if he said it after the two minutes were up, it counted as a miss.
To ensure neutrality, someone besides Aimee chose both the pictures and the key words that matched each one. (This proved somewhat unfair to the bird, since the neutral chooser picked some words like “TV” that N’kisi had only said once or twice before; the bird didn’t utter these words at the right time during the experiment, nor did he say them at all.) After all the trials were over, the tapes of what N’kisi had said were played for three judges, who wrote down what they heard; unless N’kisi distinctly said the right word, as transcribed by all three judges, a hit wouldn’t count. The results were beyond ordinary comprehension. For example, when Aimee looked at a picture showing scantily clad bathers on a beach, N’kisi mumbled for a bit, then all three judges heard him say, “Look at my pretty, naked body.” He didn’t say other, irrelevant key words in between saying the right words, the bird only whistled and made tones. When Aimee looked at a picture of someone talking on the telephone, N’kisi said, “What’cha doin’ on the phone?” Perhaps his most intriguing response came when Aimee concentrated on a picture of flowers. Instead of simply uttering the key word “flower,” Ni’kisi said, “That’s a pic of flowers.”
How did he do overall? Out of 71 trials, N’kisi got 23 hits, as compared with 7.4 hits that would have been expected if the results had been random. Sheldrake points out that this is quite a significant outcome, all the more because N’kisi wasn’t aware that he was being tested and often said the right key word after the allotted time was up.
In a small Manhattan apartment this bit of proof was added to mounting evidence that the mind isn’t solely human property, and in fact might exist outside the brain. Communication between the animal kingdom and humans may seem odd, but pets can’t cheat and they have no ulterior motive for proving they have special abilities. The Vedic rishis long ago asserted that the entire universe is intelligent, because it is permeated by consciousness. Let’s see how precisely we can put this in modern terms.
Into the Mind Field
Mind has remained a metaphysical riddle for centuries because it inhabits the physical world like a ghost. But that’s a Western perspective based on our bias for solid, tangible things. We insist that the brain must be the source of mind because the brain is a visible object, which is like saying that a radio must be the source of music because it is a visible object from which music emerges. The Vedic rishis adopted the opposite perspective, insisting that visible objects couldn’t be the source of mind since the physical plane is the least conscious of worlds. It may seem significant that the brain is active during thought, but a radio is active during a broadcast, and there is no doubt that N’kisi (not to mention human telepaths) picked up a thought that was being broadcast.
Our Western prejudice against the invisible isn’t easy to overcome. Mind will only be proved to exist outside the brain if it leaves some kind of footprint, a visible sign that is as convincing as the MRIs that provide concrete evidence of neural activity. One such piece of evidence is information, which we’ve touched on before. If information permeates the entire quantum field, it can bridge mind and matter in terms more acceptable to a materialist. No scientist has a problem believing that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, and the cutting edge of physics is grappling with the notion that information cannot be created or destroyed, either. What we see in the universe is constant transformation. Helium atoms that fuel the sun send heat to Earth that gets transformed by photosynthesis into plants and all other life-forms. It can fairly be said that life consists of the sun’s atoms exchanging information with atoms on Earth. (Energy is information in the sense that all chemical or electrical charges can be expressed as plus or minus, positive or negative, zero or one.) It doesn’t matter, then, that your body bears no resemblance to a fiery star. Both are part of the same information field, which undergoes endless transformation within itself. Or as Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad-Gita, “Folding back in on myself, I create again and again.”
Amit Goswami, a prominent physicist who writes extensively on the self-aware universe, says that creativity is just another face of transformation. “The universe is always putting new wine into old bottles, or new wine into new bottles.” The same energy packets, containing the same information, are being endlessly shuffled in the Zero Point Field. Goswami approaches reincarnation in the same context. Identities are passing through the information field, exchanging data with new identities that feel like a new “me” but are actually transmutations of indestructible zeros and ones strung into long chains of ideas and experiences.
Right now you are a bundle of information in mind and body. You have unique memories; your cells have undergone chemical changes shared by no one else in the world. When you die, none of this information will vanish, because it can’t. There is nowhere for plus and minus, positive and negative to go since the field contains nothing but information. Therefore their only alternative is to recombine. How do they do that?
The answer lies in the root word of information, which is “form.” We inhabit an “in-formed universe” according to Ervin Laszlo, which strings atoms along the double helix of DNA, bits of information in physical form, just as it strings together information in nonphysical form as ideas. This brings us one step closer to the breathtaking notion that the whole universe is God’s mind; that is, a dynamic field of infinite information undergoing infinite transformations. But we can’t take that step unless we know how small ideas survive, much less cosmic ones.
The rishis taught that ideas survive in the Akashic field as memories. You and I constantly access Akashic memory when we assume that we are accessing our brains. In esoteric circles Akashic memory functions to give us information from departed spirits and past lifetimes. In Jungian psychology the same memory accounts for cultures sharing the same myths and archetypes. Venus and Mars are invisible beings, yet present and alive. The Akasha remembers every god created by humans and every epic battle, romance, and quest. We tap into them all the time as the human story continues from age to age.
The brain has a locatable memory center, but mind isn’t confined to the brain. Consider a deeply meaningful experience in your life—a first kiss, or the last time you saw a beloved grandparent. That memory is the remaining trace of an event in time and space. The experience can still be activated in your brain, which means that millions of molecules that could be flying randomly through your neurons know that they have to stay together in order for your memory to continue, year after year, without fading. How could they know this, since molecules aren’t intelligent? The physical basis for memory remains totally unknown to neurologists, so we can only speculate.
Somehow your first kiss has an afterlife. The afterlife isn’t physical, because there’s absolutely no difference between the hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon in a neuron and those same elements in a tree, a dead leaf, or decomposed soil. Neurons aren’t immortal. They die, just as the rest of the body does, and atoms fly in and out of them every second. How, then, does a memory get transferred to a new atom, or to a new neuron when the time comes for the old one to perish? No physical process for this has been identified, so perhaps memory actually persists on a nonphysical level. Neurologists would defend to the hilt the opposite idea, that mind arises only in the brain, using CAT scans and MRI imaging to prove the point. But those images are only maps. They show the terrain of the brain as an idea or emotion crosses it; they don’t prove that the brain is the mind, any more than a footprint in the sand is the same as a foot. Imagine that you could map every vibration in the tiny nerve endings that line the inner ear. When graphed on a chart, there would be an extremely complicated pattern for every word and sentence the ear receives, but that pattern is only a map of a word, not the territory itself. A powerful sentence like “I love you” is more than the map of its vibrations, since even the most perfect map cannot contain love’s power, meaning, significance, and overall intent.
Memory seems to be a field effect. For you to think the word “rhinoceros” and see a mental image of that animal, millions of brain cells have to act simultaneously. (We will leave aside the more difficult question of why you picked “rhinoceros” out of all the words you could have chosen, since any word choice can be based on reason, emotion, nonsense, or private associations in memory. A computer can be taught to select any given word, but it has no special reason to do so—you do.) The neurons involved in choosing the word “rhinoceros” don’t run through the alphabet until they get to “R”; they don’t sound out one syllable at a time, nor do they leaf through a zoological photo archive to match the right word to the right image. Instead, the correct brain activity arises simultaneously. The brain is acting like a field, coordinating different events at the same time, except that we know the brain isn’t literally a field. It’s an object made of seemingly lifeless chemicals.
A compass needle moves because it’s responding to the Earth’s magnetic field. What if the same thing is true for brain activity? What if the mind field is sending signals, and billions of brain cells arrange patterns in response to what the field is saying? A team of innovative scientists has proposed exactly that. Henry Stapp, a theoretical physicist from Berkeley; Jeffrey Schwartz, a neuropsychiatrist at UCLA; and Mario Beauregard, a psychologist from the University of Montreal, have crossed disciplines to formulate a workable theory of “quantum mind” that may revolutionize how mind and brain relate to each other. Central to their theory is “neuroplasticity,” the notion that brain cells are open to change, flexibly responding to will and intention.
They acknowledge, to begin with, the usual scientific explanation that “the mind is what the brain does,” but there are many flaws in such an explanation, as we have seen. They propose, therefore, that exactly the opposite is true. Mind is the controller of the brain. In their view, the mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom. Until an observer appears, electrons have no physical identity in the world; there is only the amorphous cloud. In the same way, imagine that there is a cloud of possibilities open to the brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images it could choose from). When the mind gives a signal, one of these possibilities coalesces from the cloud and becomes a thought in the brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron. Like the quantum field generating real particles from virtual ones, the mind generates real brain activity from virtual activity.
What makes this reversal important is that it fits the facts. Neurologists have verified that a mere intention or purposeful act of will alters the brain. Stroke victims, for example, can force themselves, with the aid of a therapist, to use only their right hand if paralysis has occurred on that side of the body. Willing themselves day after day to favor the affected part, they can gradually cause the damaged sites in the brain to heal. Similar results have been found with aging. Older people who have begun to show signs of senile dementia such as memory loss can slow down and even reverse their symptoms by exercising their brains (one software manufacturer has even brought out a “brain gym,” a program that looks like a video game but in fact consists of exercises that strengthen specific areas of the brain). Children born with cerebral palsy have recently regained use of their paralyzed limbs through similar therapies in which the unaffected arm, for example, was kept in a sling, forcing the child to use the paralyzed arm; in time, the brain healed itself. It showed neuroplasticity.
Putting mind before brain may have many far-reaching consequences in medical therapies. For example, patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are routinely treated with psychotropic drugs like Prozac. Symptoms improve, and physical evidence for that can be found through brain scans; the parts of the brain that malfunction in OCD start to become more normal on the drug. But obsessive-compulsive patients sometimes seek relief through talk therapy instead. These patients frequently improve, yet only recently did anyone examine their brains with MRIs and PET scans, and what they discovered is startling: the same impaired regions that become more normal with Prozac also become more normal with talk therapy. ( Jeffrey Schwartz is an expert in OCD and based the new theory in part on such brain scans.)
In other words, the process of reflection and insight through therapy changed the patients’ brain cells. This is exactly what was predicted by the new theory of quantum mind. But the answer was there all along. The mind has always been able to change the brain. If a person suddenly loses a loved one or is fired from his job, sudden severe depression often follows. Depression is rooted in abnormal uptake of the brain chemical serotonin. This physcial imbalance is what antidepressants are typically designed to correct. Yet when someone loses a loved one or gets fired, isn’t it obvious that the chemical imbalance came about after the bad news? Reacting to bad news is a mental event. Indeed, the entire world we inhabit of words and thoughts creates infinite brain changes in all of us every moment.
If mind comes before brain, then what if mind belongs to all of us? I can say “my brain,” but I can’t say “my quantum field.” There is growing evidence that in fact we do share the same mind field. This would go far to support the existence of heavens and hells, Bardo and Akashic memory, extending far beyond the brain. To begin with, we need to examine the kinds of ideas that people share as a group. The brain belongs to “me,” but if ideas belong to “us,” then we are participating together in a field, sometimes quite mysteriously.
The Brain Beyond Boundaries
The human brain processes only a fraction of the information available to it. By some estimates the brain receives 6 billion bits of data per second (such as sound vibrations, photons, X-ray and gamma radiation, electromagnetic static, and various chemical and electrical signals from the immediate environment), a floodtide that gets squeezed into the trickle of experience we actually notice and respond to. But what we notice isn’t the same as what we know. For example, some so-called idiot savants with very low IQs can instantaneously compute long strings of numbers, tell the day of the week that any date falls on in the future, remember every detail of their past, or learn difficult languages with incredible fluency. (One savant mastered Finnish, Arabic, and Mandarin at a young age, and only afterward did his caregivers realize he had been learning these languages on his own despite the fact that he’d held the books upside down.) Such savants often lack even the most basic capacity in other areas. One well-documented type of savant is able to perform music or paint pictures with extraordinary facility but cannot calculate change from a purchase, or tie their shoes without help.
When sudden artistic abilities began to appear in a small percentage of normal people who suffer from brain tumors and other neurological disorders, researchers looked at the brains of savants and discovered that they, too, displayed brain abnormalities, particularly in the right temporal lobe. To my knowledge, the current explanation for “savant syndrome” now centers on such physical abnormalities. Thus it seems that when the brain’s filtering system is impaired, reality expands in some areas while it contracts in others. All kinds of abilities may inexplicably exceed the norm. Joseph Chilton Pearce, a specialist in child development, writes about the savant syndrome in his book The Biology of Transcendence. He makes several striking points. The first is that most children with savant syndrome don’t perform on their own but respond when asked. The second is that they are not especially interested in the wider area of their extraordinary ability. If you sit down and ask a savant what day of the week March 12, 2163, falls on, it’s like talking to a machine. The child goes inward for a few seconds, then pops up with the answer, but might have little interest in simple math. A calendar savant might not be able to multiply 12 by 12.
The normal brain filters out information for good reason—it takes narrow experience to form a self, a separate person with limited beliefs, goals, memories, likes, and dislikes. We deliberately reject huge portions of information, but a damaged brain is exposed to everything through its inability to select and filter. Pearce is particularly intrigued by how an “automobile savant” could take one look at a parking lot and tell you the make, model, and year of every car in it without being able to read. How does he know this without reading magazines that feature the latest models, including European models that had received no publicity in the United States? It seems as if these savant children are accessing the mind field.
Genius is another way to access the field beyond normal abilities. Musical prodigies like Mozart can see whole symphony scores in their heads. One such prodigy now enrolled in the Juilliard program for composers has been able to switch between four channels of music in his head since early childhood; when asked to write a new sonata for violin, he simply turned to the appropriate channel and took dictation. A direct link to the field of information seems possible, then, and we move closer to the possibility that the brain is the receiver of mind, not its creator.
This is important to the afterlife because upon dying we have no brain but do desire to keep our minds. If the Vedic seers are right, the human brain connects us to infinite consciousness. The fact that we shut out so much of the mind field doesn’t mean we have to. Aboriginal peoples don’t access higher math, scientific reasoning, or advanced musical harmonies, but if a baby were taken from a New Guinea jungle tribe and placed in the right learning environment, its mind contains the potential for all these skills. Indeed, only in this decade are certain tribes moving out of the jungles of New Guinea into surrounding cities, and as they do, they make the transition from a culture that never discovered metal-working to one where they can drive a car.
Why don’t we access more of the mind field ourselves? In fact, we do. The brain adapts to the field at will. If you intend to learn Chinese ideograms, of which there are thousands, you can apply yourself, and gradually a system of meaningless ink strokes will be transformed into a meaningful area of knowledge. Once mastered, the Chinese language becomes part of you; it becomes second nature, and you can proceed to use it for creative purposes. In essence you have accessed the mind field and willed your own evolution. You have made a leap nearly as significant as when Paleolithic man discovered that meaningless vocal noises could be transformed into spoken language.
Intelligence and meaning aren’t only “in here” as a subjective creation of the brain or “out there” as a freestanding object. The give-and-take by which the brain creates meaning is also how it creates the world and creates itself. All these processes actually belong to one process, the self “curving back onto itself to create again and again,” as Lord Krishna says. The field is innately creative. It formed the human brain, which is so receptive that it took the next leap and learned to create new thoughts, abilities, and memories on its own. Our brains are still acting out the total activity of the cosmos, but we happen to claim that “I am thinking” when it’s just as true to say “the mind field is thinking through me.”
Memes and the Behavior of Beliefs
There’s another kind of filtering that limits how much of the mind field we can perceive. This has to do with creating beliefs and then accepting them as real. A belief is an idea we hold on to. For example, if you believe that God is good, that women are mysterious, or that life is unfair, you have taken generations of shared experience and reduced it to one conclusion. The conclusion may be right or wrong; that’s not important for the moment. Beliefs hold us together as a society. Such shared beliefs give us a clue about how mind might exist outside the body.
We all carry in our minds a large database of information that we consider fundamental. This database holds everything important that we believe about the world. It is our worldview. We depend upon it to survive for even a short time. Beliefs evolve over the centuries, and therefore some researchers look upon beliefs as being like “virtual genes,” that become fixed characteristics of the brain. These mental genes were named “memes” by the British evolutionist Richard Dawkins, who founded a new field overnight that has proliferated considerably since then.
A meme is often compared to a virus that spreads from person to person until an entire society gets infected. It wouldn’t be beneficial to our species to become infected by everything. If we were actually open to all new ideas, we would not be able to maintain a coherent view of the world. Imagine changing your view of the opposite sex, for example, every time you met a new person. In order to evolve, human beings had to make sure that they accepted only “good” memes—ideas that promoted a coherent, reliable worldview—and rejected “bad” memes, ideas that moved the mind in the opposite direction.
The basic fact that we can track the spread of beliefs the way we track the spread of avian flu provides us with another clue to the nature of the mind field: it is dynamic, shared, evolving, and powerful. It is capable of “infecting” us with good or bad beliefs without the individual actually going through any experience at all. Thus societies fight and die defending a God few have personally experienced. Nietzsche was foreshadowing memes when he said that a mistaken idea “grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be a part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence, and is effective as such.”
Creating a Worldview
The Vedic rishis said that anything we experience in the Akashic field was created by our own consciousness. Memes offer evidence of this, as a means to create the worldview that we then believe in. There may not be much incentive to adapt to new ideas on our own, but when two worldviews clash, as Western culture is clashing with radical Islam, the pressure to cling to one worldview or the other against outside threat is inescapable. Our very survival is said to depend upon it. (I am reminded of a CNN interview with a right-wing Christian operative from Indiana who said, “As long as liberals and atheists despise us, we will never go away.”)
Two people with different worldviews can see the same fact and give totally divergent interpretations of it, because no fact or event is perceived by itself. Walking down the street, I may pass a woman with bright red lipstick, a faint whiff of wine on her breath from a lunch at a restaurant, and no hat on her head. In my worldview, none of these facts triggers any particular emotion or judgment, so this is a neutral encounter that barely registers on me. Therefore you might assume that nothing happened in my brain. Yet, as meme theory points out, a great deal happened tacitly. The sight of this woman entered my brain as raw data along the optic nerve, but I couldn’t actually “see” her until that data passed through my worldview. Imagine a series of filters marked “memory,” “beliefs, “associations,” and “judgments.” Each filter alters the raw data in some way, invisibly and instantaneously.
Should a person with a different worldview encounter the same woman, he would “see” her through his filters. If he happened to be a traditional Muslim or a Victorian or a medieval monk, all the innocuous features that entered my brain—the lipstick, the smell of alcohol, the absence of a hat—might cause a violent reaction in his brain, and generate considerable stress.
A worldview provides fixed grooves for behavior, which is dangerous, unfortunately, much of the time. Traits like racism and warmaking persist as automatic reflexes. Anatomically the human nervous system is divided into two parts: the somatic and autonomic nervous systems. All information in the body that you are conscious of comes from the somatic nervous system; all information that you are unconscious of comes from the autonomic nervous system. Memes occupy a fascinating middle ground, a shadowland. When you can’t get a catchy song out of your head—one classic example of meme behavior—you are totally conscious of the tune but unconscious of why you can’t get rid of it.
This is precisely what the Bhagavad-Gita means by the binding effect of karma. You may be completely aware that you have a certain trait, such as being stingy, irritable, easily flattered, or self-important, but you cannot say why that trait sticks to you, however much you dislike it.
Worldviews are built of symbols that fulfill a need. Take any charming thing in the environment—say, the late Princess Diana. For her to stay in your mind and persist there longer than a few moments, she must be significant to you. That is, she is a sign for something you recognize, and I would add something you value and desire. On a global scale Princess Diana symbolized beauty, innocence, vulnerability, motherhood, prestige, sexuality, and more. Like all the best memes, her negative side was also powerfully symbolic. At various stages she represented disability, illness, social liability, addiction, naïveté, wantonness, infidelity, and masochism.
By whatever name we give them, memes are the way we give meaning to experience. They package meaning into the building block of reality. Insofar as we are creators of reality, we use these symbolic building blocks as our raw material. I find this whole field of meme theory exciting because among those scientists who cannot stomach the notion of inherent consciousness, the parallel notion of memes is gaining considerable credibility. A gap is closing.
The Vedic rishis had their own model for what happens in the mind field. Thought forms that grip us are samskaras, impressions made on the nervous system by past experience. A young child frightened when his mother forgetfully left him in a department store might carry that impression, or samskara, for life. Such impressions do not have to be negative—a first kiss can, and usually does, form a lasting samskara. The concept of samskara goes beyond memes because it applies to all mental experience. Whether they are sensations, desires, or ideas, impressions can go as deep into the field as the soul. They constitute the qualities of the self that give each of us an identity we recognize as “me.”
Samskaras can be dismantled or changed only by affecting the right level of the mind. A change at the subtlest level is the most powerful. J. Krishnamurti put it beautifully when he said that “the highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment.” That is, if you can stand aside from how your beliefs are behaving, how various impulses of desire and repulsion are pulling at you, how the “stored consciousness” of memory makes you see the world, you can witness the field itself. This is true enlightenment. In many spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism, the key seems to be stillness, detaching oneself from the internal dialogue whose stream of ideas and impulses comes from the past. Witnessing allows us to see and understand with an intelligence that is holistic, without a win-or-lose orientation. This gives us a chance to experience the mind field, or what we popularly call “having an open mind.”
Can We Open the Mind?
Ultimately, dying will carry each of us into the mind field, which we will experience directly. Yet our beliefs, being stored consciousness, will follow us. The issue of an open mind bears directly upon how much baggage we’ll have to carry. I’m reminded of a question posed by Krishnamurti. When someone commented that it was good to have an open mind, he asked, “Is there such a thing as an open mind?” This was a typically ambiguous reply, but if the mind is trapped by either memes or samskaras, it cannot be open, because of secondhand beliefs, opinions, judgments, and other mental “viruses.” Or is there some kind of new experience entirely beyond the realm of ingrained beliefs and karmic impressions?
The most profound of contradictions is that to reach enlightenment, which is free from past impressions, you have no choice but to use your brain, and the brain is mired in its habit of filtering, choosing, preferring, rejecting, etc. Krishnamurti stated this elegantly when he asked, “Can a fragmented mind ever experience wholeness?” The answer is that it cannot, but all any of us are equipped with is a fragmented mind. A mind made up of memes and samskaras. Asserting that you have an open mind while someone else’s mind is closed, or claiming that you experience reality instead of illusion, seems like a reasonable statement, but in Krishnamurti’s terms—which are pure Vedanta—it is impossible to do things like “trying to be more open” or “trying to get more real.” You are simply fighting with your own divided self.
So what is the way out of this paradox? There is a way to approach the tricky business of opening your mind.
1. Know that you are going to identify with your worldview at every stage of personal growth.
2. Accept that these identifications are temporary. You will never be truly yourself until you reach unity.
3. Be willing to change your identity every day. Take a flexible attitude. Don’t defend an “I” that you know is just temporary.
4. Allow your ability to quietly observe without judgment to replace the ingrained ideas you reach for automatically.
5. When you have the impulse to struggle, use that as an immediate signal to let go. Open a space for a new answer to unfold on its own.
6. When you can’t let go, forgive yourself and move on.
7. Use every opportunity to tell yourself that all viewpoints are valid, every experience valuable, every insight a moment of freedom.
These steps cultivate an open mind by exposing you to the mind field itself, witnessing without judgment. They will orient you to the possibility that you can be redefined continuously. In other words, give your allegiance to transformation rather than defending the status quo. Now you are ready to disassemble your worldview. You are ready to stop having a stake in the world limited to the narrow confines of I, me, and mine. The ego-defended worldview you want to dismantle is organized in three layers:
These three layers apply both to the whole and to its parts. They are inescapably intertwined because the field itself contains all three. This means that a tree or a cloud is nothing but energy, information, and structure. Your personality is composed of the same three elements, and so is every experience in your worldview.
Energy: When an experience gets stuck in your head, you are holding on to its energy. Every experience has its own energy pattern, which is reflected in the brain as memory, emotion, sensation, etc. When you decide to recall something from your childhood, what comes to mind? Visual images, names and faces, all kinds of emotions, physical details, associations, various sensations. All of these exist at the level of energy. Without the electromagnetic field vibrating in a certain way, specific experiences couldn’t exist.
This stuck energy is cleared in many ways: through dreams, insight, imagination, emotional release, deep recollection, confession, prayer, atonement, meditation, love, etc.
Beliefs: Beliefs take us to a subtler level of the mind. Beliefs allow one experience but forbid another to enter. They are like judges deciding whether an experience is positive or negative, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable. The universe is doing a continuous dance with your beliefs. What you believe is reinforced by what you experience, but what you experience also alters what you believe. Anyone who has wrestled with the question “Does he (or she) love me?” knows what it feels like to have tiny things like a glance or a casual word or an unreturned phone call confirm or destroy your belief in being loved.
Beliefs are cleared by being aware of the sticky quality they possess. Beliefs aren’t static; they result in behavior. So when you watch your own behavior, you are seeing your beliefs at play. If a poor black homeless person asks you for a handout at night and your response is to say nothing and walk away, consider all the beliefs that could be at work: “Black is dangerous, the night is fearful, strangers can’t be trusted, any response will get me entangled, poor people are lazy or crazy or weak, to associate with them means I will be one of them one day.” When you stop defending the behavior of your beliefs, they become less sticky. You regain freedom to think and believe in a new way.
Structure: Structure is the foundation of the personality. It includes your vision of life, your purpose for being here, your deepest goals, your view of physical existence, and your attitude toward pleasure and pain. These profound things are overlooked because people are too overwhelmed—and too convinced—by their beliefs and energies. Only after you start clearing energy and beliefs can you look at the “Why?” that is at the bottom of your participation in Maya, or external appearance. Why are you alive? What is your overall purpose? To what higher values have you offered your allegiance? These are structural questions, and when you can see them clearly, they bring their own answers.
Structure isn’t cleared the way stuck energy is, and it can’t be challenged the way beliefs can be. Structure is your vehicle for this lifetime. It’s the boat you use to sail across the ocean of space and time. Without it you would have no identity at all; you would be a cloud of energy without a center. All you can do with your structure is to “witness” it. In that moment of witnessing, you reduce the “I” to its first principles. In other words, you stand at the threshold where the person meets the soul. This is an enormously liberating moment of recognition.
When you build any new structure in your mind—for example, deciding to see your life in spiritual terms or learning parenting skills after a baby is born or replacing the perspective of a victim with the perspective of someone who’s in control—you are choosing to evolve. You are taking advantage of certain subtle qualities that pertain to mental structures as revealed by the rishis:
To the extent that you are working on the three levels of energy, beliefs, and structure, you are connecting yourself to the field directly and consciously, which is how an open mind is achieved. How can you tell that your work has paid off and you have gained an open mind? You know yourself as wholeness once and for all.