Mystics of the past were very often seen as “touched.” Originally described as being touched by the gods or spirits, a term we now sometimes use to describe insanity, and we even say that there is a fine line between genius and insanity, or even none at all. The thing people desire most is also the thing they fear most, and the reason why it remains in their subconscious mind is that fear.

Two recent discoveries are relevant here. One is that people can actively forget selected information to the point that though reasonably it should show up on FMRI, even within the span of short term memory when it’s immediately checked after it was voluntarily forgotten, it registered almost not at all, and when checked soon after that, it failed to register at all.

It always surprises me when someone has selective memory. Selective memory is natural, universal, and almost completely controlled by enculturation. Our subconscious exists to partition off all the processes and information we have reacted to negatively, have judged as inconvenient or too confusing. This starts in our formative years. There is no neurological reason we should forget memories from before the age of four, but almost universally we do.

It’s viewed as a form of amnesia, and they still don’t know the cause as they don’t understand the cause of psychological amnesia. They don’t fully understand the reason for loss of memory in the case of brain injury. They have found no single centre of memory in the brain, no single system responsible for storing or recalling memory. The theory being that it’s distributed all throughout the brain and they don’t understand what governs that.

The second discovery ties into brain computer interface research. We can do things thought previously impossible, deliberately trigger synaptic processes. At least with external feedback, like some biofeedback system, we can relatively quickly and easily train our brain to respond in what would seem unnatural ways, like trigger a synapse in our visual cortex to fire because it causes a video image to resolve in front of us. Even learn to switch back and forth between two images.

Wow, that could be the new virtual reality or heads up display.

Spiritual strength can be found only in a part of our mind we have come to relegate to our subconscious, to the “unknown” but it doesn’t have to remain that way. With improved biometric sensing, they could derive commands from the eyes saccade pattern, to dilation, to heart rate and ideomotor response, and that’s without putting an electrode in your brain.

The supposedly unthinking and animalistic subconscious, the supposedly meaningless and noisy part of your brain that you have only the barest need of, or so they think, is proving very well organized, very capable of processes that they would like to confine to the frontal lobe. Theories they up until recently held about brain function as it relates to the animal brain are being overturned right and left. So their ideas of what intelligence is and where it resides in the brain are being shot full of holes. They would love to keep your attention focused in the traditional way, but instinctive consciousness, hypnagogic experience, offers you a great deal more up to and including mastery of your conscious cognitive functions, your waking every day habits.

In general, your dreams are governed by one thing (they are even using it in sleep labs now) desire/emotional response. If you don’t have feelings about it, you won’t have dreams about it, and they find both memory formation and retention, as well as behavioural reinforcement, are driven by what happens in your sleep, in your dreams. It’s possible your brain can’t even really make sense of your days experience until you have slept and eliminated the built up junk byproducts from your daily brain function.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~