So what does it mean to have a whole mind? A peaceful mind?
Integration. What Jung called “Individuation.” Basically, acceptance of all parts of ourselves.
We speak of digesting thoughts and ideas. Information. Which is a form of disintegration. Scientific method is itself ritualized disintegration. Why is it that we recognize disintegration as understanding but have no other model of understanding?
We may understand but don’t have the words to describe it.
Eastern thought does? Like zen practice? Ah indeed, they do have something like integrative thought even if it is not quite a living discipline. Most things like traditional Chinese landscape painting are pretty formalized. They aren’t really adaptive.
“Formal” = “coherent pattern”?
Yes, and perhaps it’s the English language that doesn’t accommodate it, unlike ancient languages like Mayan? Indeed, speaking what was, and still is, really only a language of trade / politics is a serious disadvantage.
So the point of all this… there is something that drives your search for understanding, and it’s not your knowledge. There is a process that goes on in biology known as signal transduction. It’s the process that converts things like light hitting your retina to neural spikes and chemical signals, and also is responsible for things like your brain stem knowing what your kidneys are doing as well as your sensory motor cortex being able to keep track of where exactly your feet are located under you without you having to look at them.
This process goes on outside of the cells themselves. The majority of information processing never occurs in the cell that perhaps finally receives it. They have even tracked this under functional magnetic resonance imaging. Your retina and optic nerve sort things you see, have the equivalent of a motor memory if you will, and process a visual signal before it even reaches the occipital lobe, the visual center of your brain, and you still don’t even know what you saw until that same signal moves from the occipital lobe to your frontal lobe.
Sometimes I forget my legs are there and I scare myself. I feel like I’m going to fall.
When my wife was in the hospital she literally lost her left limbs. She couldn’t keep track of them. Is this not so?
It’s true. I’d have to find them. It became a mental habit.
I sort of identify with that problem. Since I have very little sense of balance from the inner ear, I must compensate through other senses for that. I had to learn how to listen to music after the age of 70.
They have discovered that you actually have to find your memories as well. It’s this same process that leads your brain to display what they call neuroplasticity, and allows them to do things like delete memories. They call it the reconsolidation window. You reconstruct, rebuild the original signal, which gets contaminated by whatever signal triggered you to try and recall the old memory in the first place.
So yes, my point is, your memories and perceptions are not in your cells. They are not hard wired anywhere. All the tissues and organs serve a support purpose, they produce the proteins and molecules that actually contain the information. Though it gets stranger than that, shall I go into it?
Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~