3

Let Your Body Guide You

There’s a critical misconception that needs clearing up. It’s the idea that meditation is “all in your head.” People want practical results from meditating. This is understandable. Meditation can improve your life for the better by helping you to become less anxious and more focused. It offers the experience of quiet mind. Currently, the attentive state known as mindfulness is all the rage. But the mind isn’t separate from the body, which is always involved. For instance, to lose the lingering effects of old, unwanted memories, the brain must no longer retrieve them.

Every sensation you have comes through the central nervous system, including the sensations associated with love, peace, and even the presence of God. Extraordinary as any spiritual experiences might be, they are still physical reactions in the nervous system. To see meditation as just something mental is to misunderstand how total meditation really works.

The mind-body connection merges physical and mental activity. The mind responds to the body at the same instant the body responds to the mind. This fact, which seems obvious today, used to be adamantly resisted. Few Western doctors “believed in” the mind-body connection when it was first proposed. They insisted—as some still do—that only the physical side mattered. I remember my frustration when senior physicians in Boston would scoff at the notion that the body could be affected by meditating. I had one encounter with a Harvard Medical School professor who so thoroughly dismissed the mind-body connection that I blurted out, “For heaven’s sake, how do you think you move your toes?” He didn’t budge.

Such denials seems like ancient history, and yet they linger in the widespread notion that what we consider the self, the individual person, is simply a creation of brain activity. This is the new flashpoint of disagreement. The average person might rightfully look upon such controversy as irrelevant to their own life, but it isn’t. Beyond the mind-body connection, vital questions demand answers.

Does the brain create the mind? If so, are we just robots at the beck and call of the brain?

Is the pursuit of expanded or higher awareness a fantasy? If you have no self except for squiggles of brain activity, there’s zero likelihood you have a higher self, so why even bother meditating, praying, or being kind to your neighbor? You are simply fostering an illusion.

But can the mind really override the brain? The act of mind over matter meets with skepticism and even ridicule in the “brain only” camp, even though there is copious scientific evidence to suggest that you are in more control of your brain than you realize. If you pile up so many bills that you begin to worry about your finances, your brain chemistry changes. Your anxious emotion triggered these changes. It makes no sense to say that you are worrying because your brain made you anxious—your mind started the process when you saw your credit card statement.

Still, many of us are convinced that we live solely in a material world. On many fronts, including science, philosophy, and the mass media, the “brain only” position seems to have won. Few people fully support the possibility that consciousness could be independent of the brain. Even less do people accept what this book proposes, that consciousness creates the brain. How can a nonphysical entity go about building neurons in the first place? The mystery is solved once you realize that we are not separated into mind and body. We are one thing: the bodymind, which unites the two.

Total Meditation

Lesson 7: The Bodymind

Brain activity can be seen on a functional MRI or a CT scan, but thoughts cannot. Clearly the two activities are connected, but connected is too weak a term. Brain and mind are indivisible. It isn’t a matter of which came first. The bodymind is one thing, and because it operates as one, it has always existed as one.

If you want proof, here’s a simple demonstration of mind and body being inseparable:

  • Close your eyes and imagine a bright yellow lemon with a kitchen knife beside it.

  • See the knife cut the lemon in half, watching drops of lemon juice spritz into the air. At some point in this visualization, you will begin to salivate involuntarily (I did while writing the exercise down).

This is a classic example of the mind-body connection. But what is often missed is that the brain doesn’t know the difference between an imaginary lemon and a real one. The brain triggers your salivary glands in either case. Yet your mind does know the difference, because you are not your brain.

You are using your brain, and doing so with complete reliance on the fact that the brain and the mind react simultaneously and almost instantly to each other. It is impossible to locate where one ends and the other begins.

HEALING THE DISCONNECT

In hindsight, it seems peculiar that anyone had to discover a so-called mind-body connection, because it is impossible to be a person without it. It’s rather like “discovering” that Fuji apples are red and sweet. The experience of that particular type of apple includes those qualities. An apple wouldn’t be an apple without them.

Yet there was a practical reason for needing to discover the mind-body connection, having to do with the troubling state known in psychology as dissociation. Dissociation is broadly defined as “a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experiences.”

Doctors and therapists treat dissociation at the extreme end of the dissociation spectrum, where mind and body are severely disconnected. Anorexia, for example, involves a disastrous disconnect between a mental obsession over losing weight and the physical evidence of an emaciated body that desperately needs food. A young woman might look at herself in the mirror and see someone grossly obese when, in fact, she weighs eighty pounds and is slowly dying of malnutrition.

Dissociation is also evident when a person goes into shock and bodily sensation goes numb. Someone who has just been in a serious car crash on a cold winter’s night might be shivering in shock without the slightest mental recognition of being cold. It takes an outsider to wrap a blanket around them; they are in too much shock to do it for themselves.

Dissociation poses a mystery far deeper than its medical implications. Pain can be numbed by detaching yourself consciously, the very opposite of going into shock. This occurs in the spiritual state of detachment. Why are anorexia and bulimia maladies, shock a state of acute numbness, and detachment a spiritual goal? We have to look deeper into the bodymind to understand these differences.

Let’s begin with the extraordinary experience of the South African writer and teacher Michael Brown. Brown was a music journalist who suddenly developed a very uncommon neurological disorder known as Horton’s syndrome, which is rarely diagnosed in people under fifty. “This condition,” Brown writes, “which started in 1987, manifested as multiple daily occurrences of excruciating agony.” Severe inflammation of arteries in the brain results in so-called cluster headaches. Brown’s case was an extreme example, and for almost ten years he found no relief. He tried prescription medications, went to native African medicine men, and consulted all manner of healers. His desperate plight caused one of the country’s leading neurosurgeons to declare that Brown was a candidate for either a lifelong addiction to painkillers or ending his pain through suicide.

“In 1994,” Brown writes, “after years of pursuing endless modalities that led nowhere, I was confronted with the possibility that nothing and nobody ‘out there’ could alleviate my suffering. My options at this point were either to check out—or check in.”

Choosing the second option proved to be decisive. Brown experimented with different self-induced mental states. He discovered that his pain lessened if he could bring himself into what he terms “a high personal energy frequency.” He had made a mind-body connection on his own. “This was the first whisper of what I now call present moment awareness.”

A dramatic breakthrough followed in the Arizona desert in 1996. Brown attended a sweat lodge ceremony led by a Native American guide. Such ceremonies involve intense heat, sweating, chanting, and drumming. Ordinary states of awareness are put under extreme pressure for a few hours. When Brown emerged, crawling out of the sweat lodge on his hands and knees, he suddenly experienced a dramatic shift inside.

“As I stood there in the cool night air, everything in and around me vibrated with life, as if I had just been born.…I stood by the fire in reverent silence, remaining long into the night, feeling warm blood flowing through my veins, crisp breath massaging my lungs, and the comforting rhythm of my heartbeat.” He terms this his first experience of Presence, or beingness. He “showed up” in his own life, which Brown describes as follows: “I felt physically present, mentally clear, emotionally balanced, and vibrationally ‘in tune.’ ”

As told in his book, The Presence Process, this breakthrough led to Brown’s gaining control over his neurological condition, and his experience in the Arizona desert underscores that “showing up” in your own life—in other words, becoming much more aware—requires the body to show up as well. What is this mysterious Presence that Brown encountered? He takes almost a religious attitude toward it, but I think the answer is simple: when you are present, there is an encounter with Presence.

Not every person who enters a sweat lodge, or tries another intense spiritual practice, comes out with an experience of being totally present. We drift in and out of awareness, and as we do, this creates the unpredictability of Presence. In other words, we are typically in a state of dissociation, or disconnect. Sometimes it takes a severe jolt to make this apparent. There is a tradition both East and West of placing the body under intense stress, which can cause a sudden snap into full awareness. Soldiers have experienced this on the battlefield, when a state of fear and apprehension is transformed into sensations of total awareness. These sensations include

A feeling of physical lightness or even weightlessness

Heightened colors and sounds

Intense awareness of breathing and heartbeat

A tingling energy in the body

Total relaxation

Euphoria

What is seen in soldiers, extreme athletes, or victims of trauma is that awareness can dramatically click into a higher state of consciousness. This, however, doesn’t lead to the conclusion that we should punish our bodies with stress, go to war, or seek extreme physical conditions. People who make a habit of high-stress living might hack into a temporary state of altered consciousness, but it is much more likely that they are becoming adrenaline junkies, not yogis. Heightened awareness isn’t tense, excited, and physically exhausting in the aftermath—these are all hallmarks of an adrenaline rush. The aftereffects of an episode of higher consciousness are, in contrast, relaxed and blissful.

Having experienced a dramatic shift in consciousness, Michael Brown tried to bring his altered state under control so that it could be repeated at will. One of his key practices in “the Presence process,” as he calls his program, is an extended practice of controlled breathing involving various detailed steps and a great deal of discipline. Yogis have practiced similar controlled breathing for many centuries. I doubt, however, that such sustained discipline is suitable in everyday life.

But Brown also came to the same conclusion I’ve been stressing in these pages. Namely, when Presence appears, it happens naturally and without effort. You can’t force it. You can prepare the way, however, which is what we do in total meditation. It will always be true, I believe, that so-called peak experiences arrive on their own schedule. You can try to find them, but it is far more likely that they will find you. This isn’t a frustrating trick of Nature.

Consciousness knows us better than we know ourselves. Presence, or a peak experience, transforms a person when it is time for transformation. The good news is that the most valuable experiences, including euphoria and bliss, occur because there is a time for them in everyone’s life.

In total meditation, the goal is to move the needle ahead on the spectrum, making steady progress every day. This might not be as spectacular as a sudden burst of awakening or as exciting as parachuting out of an airplane. But it lasts, because your entire being—body, mind, emotions, thoughts, desires, and relationships—becomes part of a natural development. States of disconnect we accepted as normal are knitted back into the harmony of the bodymind as it was meant to be.

Total Meditation

Lesson 8: Feeling Your Way

There are two basic paths we take through life: thinking and feeling. Rational thought is highly prized in an age of science and technology, but in everyday life, all kinds of feelings intervene. People assume they are dealing with their life rationally, but for everyone there’s a mixture of thinking and feeling. This mixture is confusing and needs to be straightened out if you want to make your way through life consciously, in full awareness.

To think your way through life appeals to rationalists, but they are fooling themselves. Feeling is always a part of every experience, every decision, every life choice. Here are some examples of how this works:

The point of these observations is that we all feel our way through life far more than we realize. We assume that we are thinking logically from one decision to another. In reality, how we feel is much more dominant. The ancients used to believe that the heart was the seat of intelligence, and in that they really weren’t wrong. Feeling has its own deep intelligence.

It is limiting and often damaging to overlook that fact. Someone will say that they feel too much. They always lead with the heart, for example, and because of this they get their heart broken a lot. Yet as often as not, love is lost by overthinking and not paying enough attention to feelings with an attitude of trust. I think heartfulness is just as present as mindfulness.

In the end, learning how to feel your way through life offers the best hope of happiness and success. Feeling occurs in the whole bodymind, which gives us a practical reason to unite body and mind rather than trying to keep them separate.

THE WISDOM OF THE BODY

In many ways the body and not the mind should be the measure of what meditation can achieve. By body, I’m not referring to the brain specifically, although its functions extend to every cell in the body, which implies that everything we attribute to the brain should be present everywhere, and so it is. Your immune system, for example, functions with a complete memory of every disease you and your ancestors have ever had. This memory goes into action whenever invading bacteria, viruses, and fungi appear in the bloodstream. Just as you recognize whether a face is familiar or unfamiliar, so do immune cells. They attack familiar pathogens as soon as they appear. If the invader has taken a new genetic identity, which happens with fast-mutating cold viruses (this winter’s strain of colds and flu are new faces on the block, as is the far more catastrophic newcomer COVID-19), your immune system quickly learns all about this new identity and develops new antibodies to fight it.

In a few sentences. I’ve outlined four aspects of consciousness that belong not only to the brain but to every cell: memory, recognition, learning, and creativity. If we weren’t misled by meditation being “all in your head,” it would be obvious that consciousness is a global property inherent in life itself. But the story has another, deeper plotline. By themselves, the qualities of consciousness are very general. Memory in a white cell shares memory with heart, liver, and brain cells. This is a fixed trait, or quality of consciousness. Life is always moving and changing, however, so memory must run alongside, constantly adapting to the next invading pathogen, but also to the next place a wound needs healing, the next renegade cell that might be precancerous, the next person’s name you need to remember, and so on. The tasks of memory are endless, indeed infinite.

That’s how totality works. By adapting to life’s infinite experiences, consciousness must be infinite just to catch up, as it were. In reality, consciousness leads the way, and the prime leadership role is given to the body. You can be in deep sleep or in a coma, and your cells will still be fully conscious and aware. This awareness has its own wisdom. Certain principles of the body have been tested for millions of years, ever since the first multicelled organisms appeared on Earth, and these principles now govern our existence as a bodymind.

Wisdom in Action

Your body is filled with its own wisdom, putting in action the most fundamental principles of consciousness. We get visible proof of this beginning at the level of cells:

Cells cooperate with one another for the greater good.

Vastly different organs understand and accept how other organs work.

Healing is a response that calls upon the whole community of cells.

Conflict has been banished in favor of peaceful coexistence.

The outer world is constantly sensed and adapted to.

New experiences are met with creative responses.

The fact that these principles apply automatically doesn’t mean they do not announce themselves to you. You feel your way through life, in fact, by receiving messages about your own behavior as sensed by your body. These are nonverbal messages delivered in chemical form. They can be roughly divided into two categories: warnings of trouble and signs of well-being.

WARNINGS OF TROUBLE: pain, physical discomfort, tightness and tension in muscles, headache, lower back pain and stiffness, nausea, insomnia, lethargy, fatigue.

Although patients show up at the doctor’s to have these warnings treated as medical conditions, it is just as important to listen to them as actual communications to be heeded. For example, each warning has psychological implications. Nausea can come from eating the wrong food but can also come from nervousness, ranging from mild butterflies in the stomach to paralyzing stage fright. Lethargy and fatigue are signs of stress. The stress can be physical, like heavy physical labor, or mental, like the pressure of a deadline at work. Reading what your body is trying to tell you allows you to feel your way to healing earlier rather than later.

SIGNS OF WELL-BEING: lightness, energy, physical flexibility, good muscle tone, sound sleep, good digestion, absence of colds and flu, bright eyes, dynamism.

These signs are the opposite of warnings of trouble. In a consumer society, products are peddled that supposedly give more energy and vitality, but, in reality, well-being is the normal resting state of your body. The signals you receive are like the quiet humming of a perfectly tuned car, except that this analogy leaves out the living nature of well-being. Again there is a psychological component. Well-being brings a sense of optimism, contentment, safety, stability, and openness to new experiences.

Once you absorb how full and complete the wisdom of the body is, it’s hard not to blush at our failure, both personal and social, to match it. The peaceful coexistence that is only a tiny portion of the body’s wisdom has been achieved only by fits and starts in human history. Unfortunately, the mutual understanding that different organs have with one another is, at the level of society, beset with prejudice, suspicion, and hatred.

What went wrong? If the bodymind is a seamless whole, and if the body is so wise, why do many of us experience insomnia, anxiety, digestive problems, and stress-related disorders? There must be a disconnect somewhere. Stress is one of the chief causes of disconnect in the first place. A 2019 Yale psychological study uncovered that student stress had doubled in the preceding decade. Searching for the cause of this dramatic rise, one can point to the increasing lack of quiet mental time free of distraction.

Although far short of a full-blown stress response, perpetually looking at your smartphone for texts and e-mail puts the bodymind on constant alert, which is no different, as far as your involuntary nervous system is concerned, from being in a state of wariness for danger. There are larger issues for students, such as the crushing burden of college debt, estimated at a staggering $1.47 trillion at the end of 2018. Such debt cascades into pressure to get good grades, hold a part-time job, and at the same time discover a financially secure occupation as quickly as possible. These macro-stresses, as they are termed by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, a physician who specializes in stress, are actually not as important in the total picture as micro-stresses.

College debt and the pressure to perform didn’t double in the last decade. But perpetual distraction, through video games as well as texting and e-mails, has become a way of life. The bodymind’s natural state is to cope with stress and then return to balance as quickly as possible. Keep up a steady stream of such micro-stresses, which might hardly be noticeable to a smartphone addict, and in short order, Dr. Chatterjee says, you will have unwittingly approached your personal stress threshold.

All it takes, he points out, is to wake up and immediately consult your messages—which might contain three work-related issues—before you have even had a cup of coffee. Your bodymind goes on alert, and if you encounter micro-stresses around the breakfast table, such as forgetting that you promised to take your daughter to band practice, followed by a few added micro-stresses on your commute to work, you will be close to your stress threshold the minute you arrive at the office. The result is impatience, irritability, distraction, and the likelihood that the next text leads to a blowup over something totally trivial.

The disconnect I’ve just described is what meditation seeks to repair. The direction of the repair work isn’t a mystery—the body naturally guides us through early warnings of trouble on one hand and signs of well-being on the other. Heeding these signals is central to leading a conscious life. When you go into meditation mode, your mind is returning to a state of balance that mirrors the body’s state of balance.

However, meditation in itself isn’t sufficient to heal the state of disconnect, because of the divided self. The existence of bad habits, old conditioning, negative emotions, fixed beliefs, and all the rest of the apparatus we carry around in our psyche indicates a much deeper alienation. We war against one another and against ourself. We don’t know what is good for us, and when we do, there’s no guarantee we will act accordingly. The state of denial may be effective in some cases, but eventually fatigue, frustration, depression, anxiety, self-defeat, and self-judgment break through one way or another.

We need to realize that only consciousness can fully repair the disconnect, and it must be total consciousness, because mind and body have suffered together and need to heal together. Well-being is a state of wholeness, and your life cannot be whole until the bodymind is whole. Achieving total consciousness may, at this point in the book, sound impossible, but stay with me and you’ll see that total consciousness is not only possible, it is a natural state.

If your body meditates along with your mind, that’s a good working definition of totality. One of the first findings about meditation back in the 1970s showed that alpha wave activity increases in the brain during meditation. Alpha waves are a frequency range of brain activity that organize in sync. They can be detected by hooking a subject up for an EEG (electroencephalogram) and, in fact, were discovered by the inventor of the EEG, the German neurologist Hans Berger.

Ocean waves out at sea are disorganized, rising and falling at random, but the brain doesn’t scramble its electrical activity into chaotic noise or static. Once brainwave activity was discovered—other EEG measurements revealed beta, gamma, theta, and delta waves, each sending a signal on its own frequency, like separate radio stations—a fund of information was gained. To a brain researcher, alpha waves are “neural oscillations in the frequency range of 8–12 Hz arising from the synchronous and coherent electrical activity of thalamic pacemaker cells in humans.”

This information, however, tells us nothing about the mystery of alpha waves. Why did our brains evolve to produce them? They must serve a purpose; otherwise, they would belong to the category of evolutionary changes that vanished in prehistory because, from a Darwinian point of view, they were useless. Alpha waves are physically useful in regard to what they indicate the bodymind is doing: relaxing.

Alpha waves appear when you close your eyes and rest but are not tired or asleep (a second type of alpha wave occurs during REM, or dream, sleep). In itself, this phenomenon doesn’t seem like anything special; all creatures need to rest and sleep. In fact, there are states of human awareness beyond relaxation that (so far as we know) only we possess and in which alpha waves dominate. These states include:

Smoothly flowing thoughts

Being alert in the moment

Meditation

Creative activity

Stable mood, decreased depression

Why are alpha waves increasing during these very human activities? It’s uncertain. Your visual cortex takes a rest when you close your eyes. Is that a prelude to starting a creative activity? That’s only a guess, because wiggly lines on an EEG are too crude to suggest, even remotely, what a person is getting ready to do. But anyone who has taken up amateur painting as a creative hobby can testify that it is relaxing.

Unlike drowsiness, the relaxed state indicated by alpha waves is quite alert. Some researchers have deemed alpha waves “the motor that drives the power of now.” It isn’t contradictory to be relaxed and alert at the same time—meditation brings on this state, in fact. Only human beings are aware that the power of now exists, and we have spent centuries pondering how to use it.

Trying to make the brain responsible for the infinite variety of human activity will always prove frustrating. When you do something new and creative, the entire bodymind obeys your intention. Creativity as a brain phenomenon would be like a radio producing a new Beethoven symphony. Neurons cannot be creators: creativity takes a mind that goes into a special state physically indicated by increased alpha waves. Let’s say that Leonardo da Vinci decides one morning to paint the portrait of an elusive and beautiful young woman who became known as Mona Lisa. Once he picks up his palette, he muses over color, design, form, and artistic technique.

If Leonardo were alive today, we could spot the alpha waves on an EEG as he entered a creative mood, and if neuroscience one day makes a complete map of the brain’s entire circuitry, we conceivably could know, nerve cell by nerve cell, what was happening as the Mona Lisa was born. It’s hard for people to realize, however, that such a map in no way would tell us anything about the Mona Lisa as a work of art, because a botched painting by a total duffer also comes from the same brain activity. Art isn’t in an alpha wave. It is in the consciousness that happens to induce alpha waves. The same setup occurs in countless other activities, whose value may be creative or merely relaxed.

Total Meditation

Lesson 9: “I Am”

The bodymind is a fine concept that remains a concept until you translate it into your own experience. This is a tricky business. We are used to taking different roads for mental and physical experiences. If your palms are cold and sweaty, that condition takes place down a different road from the thought “I am going on a first date.” Yet obviously the two belong together if a first date, or anything else, makes you feel extremely nervous.

How can we unite the two roads into one? Here’s a method that connects body and mind by a simple maneuver, which is not to take any road at all, physical or mental. You constantly experience the bodymind without the words body or mind coming into play. Instead there is simply “I am”: the experience of your sense of self. You don’t need to pinch yourself to know you are awake. Likewise, you don’t need to remind yourself in any way that your sense of self is always present.

Let’s see how this works in practice.

  • Look around the room and out the window to see whatever strikes your eye. Listen for sounds in your surroundings. Touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue to experience its texture and any flavors you might detect. Smell anything your nose happens to notice.

  • Now shut your eyes and repeat the same sequence by imagining sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells.

At any given moment, you are entangled in these sensations, and they are not separate. They mingle into one sensation, the total experience of being here and now. “I am” is whatever sensation you are identifying with at the moment, sometimes singling out a sight or a thought, sometimes just mingling with the whole sensorium (a good example would be the experience of lying on a beach under the sun with a breeze and the sound of the waves taking you in together).

As the sensorium moves this way and that, “I am” pays attention. You are ready for the next sensation or thought. If you look closely, however, you will recognize that “I am” isn’t really a chameleon. It takes on the color of a leaf, the fragrance of a rose, the texture of sandpaper, and so on. But all this occurs in an open space, the space of consciousness.

Consciousness is the space in which everything happens. Sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells pass through the space, but the space itself remains unchanged, the way an airport doesn’t change when thousands of people pass through it every day.

When you grasp that “I am” is whole, free from thinking “I am my body” or “I am my mind,” a great change occurs. You find that you can live in this unbounded space of “I am” quite easily. In fact, it is the natural place to be. A good example is body image. If you think “I am my body,” the image you see in the mirror will mostly likely not be ideal. You will experience judgment about the image you see, and from this starting point you might vow to go to the gym, eat less, look into anti-aging products, and so on.

But if you don’t focus on an image in the mirror, which runs up against images in your mind about how you should look and what is perfect and how short of perfection you are, reality then has nothing to do with images of any kind. Close your eyes, and you are sensing either warnings of trouble or signs of well-being. Nothing else really matters. Images come and go, as do all passing sensations. But in the open space of “I am,” these transient experiences are just passing scenery. The real you is a passenger watching the scenery go by. Your attention wanders all over the scenery without your awareness wandering. Your awareness stays where it has always been, in “I am,” without judgment. This absence of judgment is very liberating, which is why it is one of the major goals of total meditation.

WHO’S IN CHARGE?

Your brain has no bias for or against any state of mind. It obediently transforms itself according to what is demanded. The disconnect between mind and body, however, has a strong and lasting effect inside the brain. Worrying about money might make you feel a tightening in your chest and make you lose your appetite. Once the worries are over, those parts of the bodymind go back to their normal state. If you are a habitual worrier, however, you have altered pathways in your brain over time. Unless these pathways born of habit are changed, your brain becomes a coconspirator in your worry—the same would go for any mental state that persists long enough to have a strong effect on brain functioning, such as depression.

Fortunately, the brain is self-transforming. Sadness normally dissipates on its own without you making a move to improve your mood. Your brain is literally transformed when your mood changes from dark to light (or vice versa). How does it do this? There are some mysteries here that only consciousness can solve.

The brain isn’t like a car, which runs only if you turn the ignition on. The brain runs on dual control, which means that it obeys both conscious and unconscious impulses. No one has credibly explained how this happens. Unconscious processes keep going without your instructions. You have no awareness of blood pressure, heart rate, digestion, the activity of your immune system, the balance of endocrine hormones, and so on. In sleep you lose awareness that you have a body altogether. When awake, you have thoughts without knowing how neurons operate. Indeed, in the absence of medical knowledge, there is no evidence you even have a brain.

It is normal for the brain to operate either under your instructions or on its own. The mystery behind this dual control deepens when we ask how the nervous system can tell the difference between conscious and unconscious activity. The nerves associated with breathing, for example, do their job automatically, with sensitivity to the situation you find yourself in. Breathing is a telltale barometer of fight, stress, tension, sexual desire, and fatigue—as well as external factors like the altitude, the amount of oxygen, pollutants, and allergens in the air, and so on. At the same time, you can personally intervene with an intention, such as deciding to take a deep breath. You can make yourself sigh or yawn, which ordinarily are involuntary. If you are about to sneeze and try to stop it, the two halves of the breathing mechanism, voluntary and involuntary, fight each other, and sometimes the sneeze wins no matter how hard you try to stop it.

I don’t think it is credible to say that the brain is the one that decides whether or not to operate automatically. Such an explanation would make your brain more conscious than you are. It’s as if a self-driving car not only obeyed its software but also controlled the driver. Putting a car in total command prevents the driver from making decisions. Or imagine you want to wave to a friend as she leaves on a train, but your brain on its own decides, “No, I want no part of goodbyes,” and prevents you from raising your arm. That doesn’t happen.

The reason this point isn’t obvious to everyone is that the bodymind is so seamless that you yourself cannot always tell who is in control. All kinds of things—sudden anger, alarm, sexual desire, panic attacks, phobias, bad habits, addictions, compulsive behavior, obsessive thoughts, depression, anxiety—overtake a person as if they had a mind of their own. If you look at one of Shakespeare’s most psychological sonnets, the issue of who is in charge plays a leading role.

Sonnet 129 is about sexual desire taking over and then letting go as soon as orgasm is reached. It begins

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad.

In eight intense lines of poetry we grasp the extremity of the brain’s dual control. A carnal impulse “beyond reason” takes charge. Lust is so powerful that Shakespeare describes it the way a savage dictator would be described in a totalitarian state (perjured, murd’rous, bloody, etc.). When lust has run its mindless course, there is the aftermath. Rationality returns, feeling ashamed and remorseful, and now lust looks in retrospect like bait laid in a trap to ensnare the person.

Why was Shakespeare so bent on tying sexual desire to shame? Perhaps it was a personal confession by a married man whose wife stayed behind in Stratford while Shakespeare was away in London for months at a time. Is a cheater confessing his dalliances publicly in a poem or just saying he was tempted? Shame could also reflect religious beliefs about sex as a sin, although the Elizabethans were a rowdy, loose-living bunch, especially in theater circles. Firebrand Puritan preachers tended to compare actors to cutpurses and whores. Seen in the light of voluntary and involuntary action, Sonnet 129 is more about the human condition than merely about sex taking over as if it had a mind of its own.

The mystery of who’s in charge is underscored by an intriguing experiment with “Aha!” moments—moments of creative breakthrough in which a sudden insight occurs, seemingly out of the blue and often unexpectedly. Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya and his colleagues at the University of London asked a group of volunteers to solve a verbal puzzle in 60 to 90 seconds. If they didn’t reach the solution by 90 seconds, they were given a hint. Only some subjects solved the puzzle, and their brainwaves, as measured by an EEG, predicted who would fall into each group.

Those who had a sudden insight about how to solve the puzzle showed a peak in high-frequency gamma waves. The brain location for these spikes was the right temporal lobe, which is responsible, among other things, for shifting mental gears. The spike in gamma waves occurred up to 8 seconds before the volunteer hit upon the answer. The researchers commented that this spike in gamma waves is the same activity that occurs in transformational thinking—the departure from everyday thinking into the experience of “Aha!” moments.

Speculating about where good ideas come from, one commentator on this experiment bravely located the source in a “network of cells exploring the adjacent possible connections that they can make in your mind.” This conclusion only seems to be on the right track if you believe brain cells are capable of looking around, finding the right connections, and saying “Aha!” on their own before delivering an “Aha!” to your mind.

As a cyber engineer would explain how computer circuitry works, a gap is created between the machine’s inner workings and what you experience on the monitor, where the screen shows words, photos, videos, and so on. When you watch a skydiver on YouTube, is the video happening in the circuitry of your computer or smartphone? Absolutely not. Only digital processing is happening in the circuitry of a computer. The video is happening in your awareness.

Likewise, the skydiver in the video isn’t experiencing the exhilaration of free fall in his brain. The brain is organic circuitry processing various chemical ions and electrical signals. Skydiving happens in awareness. The brain’s circuitry cannot have the experience any more than a computer parachuting out of an airplane can have the experience. Without a self, there is no experiencer. I’m not denigrating neuroscience—at the very least, an understanding of brain activity is needed to help find cures for brain-related diseases like epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s.

I only want to point out that human beings are not prisoners of circuitry and haven’t been for thousands of years. Somewhere in our ancestry, an evolutionary leap occurred when Homo sapiens crossed over the gap from circuitry to awareness. The most sophisticated high-speed computer cannot make such a leap, for the simple reason that, like the brain, a computer has no experiences.

So who’s in charge? The only viable answer is that no one is in charge. The bodymind is simply operating in one mode or the other, sometimes voluntary, sometimes automatic. There doesn’t have to be anyone in charge, not even you. You are also part of the wholeness. If there has to be an answer, then we can say that consciousness is in charge of itself. There is nothing beyond consciousness that could be in charge. (I am stepping on religious toes, I know, but putting God in charge simply adds another level of consciousness. It doesn’t go beyond consciousness, because you can’t.)

A visualization might help. Think of the ocean. It can be stormy or calm. Warm and cold currents run through it. Beneath the surface lives the uncountable multiplicity of marine life. Each goes through its life cycle. Some are predators, some are prey. Who’s in charge of the ocean? It can only be the ocean itself. It is a self-sustaining ecosystem. Similarly, consciousness is an ecosystem, responsible for everything that occurs in the bodymind.

Total Meditation

Lesson 10: Unbounded

To a fish swimming in a coral reef there is no boundary to the ocean. As an ecosystem, the ocean created and sustained everything living inside it. Consciousness is the ultimate ecosystem. It truly has no boundaries, because, unlike a flying fish, which can leap out of the ocean to perceive (if it had a human brain) that there is a nonwatery ecosystem, no one can leap outside consciousness. Such a move is inconceivable.

We are connected to this unboundedness. Everything about consciousness in its totality is true about us, too. Meditation takes us closer and closer to the unbounded mind, which is the whole mind. When whole mind is experienced, limitations fall away. One realizes how unnecessary it is for the mind to impose so many boundaries on itself. Waking up makes you realize how pointless boundaries are, especially if you imagine they must exist.

On the journey to unbounded mind, the goal isn’t reached at once—it is a process. But it helps to have a vision of the goal. Here are a few simple ways to connect with the unbounded for a moment or two.

If consciousness is in charge of itself, it can do anything and everything. But our personal experience is vastly different. We cannot do anything and everything. Often we feel that what we do is so feeble it hardly matters. This must change. Otherwise we are left with fantasies of power and possibility that do not turn into reality. Where is the total power of consciousness where it really counts, here and now? That’s the question we will explore next.