Super Brain (24 page)

Fortunately, the power to go beyond suffering has always existed; it is your birthright. To have even a speck of consciousness is to be connected to the infinite consciousness that supports evolution, creativity, and intelligence. None of these things is accidental or a privilege handed out to the lucky few. When you ask to be connected to a higher reality, the connection is made.

GLIMPSES OF HIGHER REALITY

You feel watched over and protected.

You feel cared for.

You recognize blessings in your life that feel like acts of grace.

You feel gratitude for being alive.

Nature fills you with wonder and awe.

You have had some experience of seeing or sensing a subtle light.

A divine presence has touched you personally.

You’ve experienced moments of pure ecstasy.

Miracles seem possible.

You sense a higher purpose in your life. Nothing has been accidental.

How close is higher reality? To use a metaphor, imagine that you are caught in a net. All nets have holes, so find one, and jump through it. Higher reality will be there waiting for you.

One wife of a domineering husband found herself feeling stifled and powerless. She had never worked outside the home, devoting twenty years to raising a family. But she jumped out of the net when she discovered painting. It was far more than a pastime. Art was an escape route, and as she found buyers who appreciated her paintings, a shift occurred inside. Her reality picture went from
I am trapped and can do nothing
to
I must be worth more than I imagined, because look at this beautiful thing I created
.

Breaking out:
Escape routes exist everywhere in consciousness. All you need to do is be aware of the potentials hidden in your awareness
and latch on to them. What are the possibilities in life that you hungered to fulfill but never did? These are the choices you need to revisit. If you pursue something you deeply cherish, higher reality will reconnect with you. This new connection registers “in here” as joy and curiosity, a whetted appetite for tomorrow. It registers “out there” as ever-expanding possibilities that support you when you least expect it.

Everything we’ve discussed is a kind of escape route in the end. All escape routes lead back to the core self, the person who was born to be a reality maker. That person is unconcerned with individual power. What really counts extends far beyond the individual: it is the glory of creation, the beauty of nature, the heart qualities of love and compassion, the mental power to discover new things, and the unexpected epiphanies that bring the presence of God—these universal aspects are your true source of power. They are you, and you are all of them.

WHERE
HAPPINESS LIVES

I
f you can make reality, what would an ideal reality look like? To begin with, it would look personal. As your brain constantly remodels itself, it conforms to what you, as a unique individual, want from life. Happiness? You might suppose that this would top the list. But it turns out that the desire for happiness immediately exposes a serious weakness. Although we are designed to be reality makers, most people aren’t especially skilled at making their personal reality a happy one.

Only recently, with the rise of a new specialty known as positive psychology, has happiness been closely studied. The findings are mixed. When people are asked to predict what will make them happy, they list things that seem obvious: money, marriage, and children. But the particulars do not bear this out. Taking care of small children is actually a source of high stress for young mothers. Half of marriages end in divorce. Money buys happiness only up to the point where it makes the material things in life secure. Poverty is certainly a source of unhappiness, but so is money, since once people have enough of it to secure the basic necessities, adding extra money doesn’t make them happier—in fact, the added responsibility, along with fear of losing their money, often does the opposite.

The overall picture, surprisingly, is that even when people get what
they wanted, most of them aren’t as happy as they thought they would be. Climbing to the top of your profession, winning a sports title, or making a million dollars looks great as a future goal, but those who arrive at such goals report that the dream was better than the achievement. Competition can turn into a never-ending process, and its rewards decrease over time. (A study of top tennis champions found that they were motivated less by the joy of winning than by the fear and disappointment of losing.) What about people who fantasize about striking it rich and never having to work for the rest of their lives? A study of lottery winners, for whom this fantasy came true, found that the majority said winning actually made their lives worse. Some couldn’t handle the money and lost it; others found their relationships strained or descended into reckless behavior like gambling and making fly-by-night investments. All were plagued by strangers and relatives asking incessantly for handouts.

If people are such bad predictors of how to be happy, what can we do?

The current fashion in psychology holds that happiness can never be permanent. Polls have found that around 80 percent of Americans—and often more—report that they are happy. But when examined individually, researchers find that each person experiences only flashes of happiness, temporary states of well-being that are not permanent at all. Therefore many psychologists contend that we stumble on happiness without knowing how to achieve it.

But we diverge from this view. Our feeling is that the problem lies with reality making. If you have more skill at creating your own personal reality, then permanent happiness will follow.

MOVING TOWARD LASTING HAPPINESS

DO

Give of yourself. Take care of others, and care
for
them.

Work at something you love.

Set worthy long-range goals that will take years to achieve.

Be open-minded.

Have emotional resilience.

Learn from the past, and then put it behind you. Live for the present.

Plan for the future without anxiety, fear, or dread.

Develop close, warm social bonds.

DON’T

Hitch your happiness to external rewards.

Postpone being happy until sometime in the future.

Expect someone else to make you happy.

Equate happiness with momentary pleasure.

Pursue more and more stimulation.

Allow your emotions to become habitual and stuck.

Close yourself off from new experiences.

Ignore the signals of inner tension and conflict.

Dwell on the past or live in fear of the future.

In a consumer-driven society, it’s all too easy to fall into doing all the don’ts on this list, because they share the same element: linking happiness with temporary pleasure and external rewards. But here’s the story of a man named Brendon Grimshaw, who must have a very finely honed instinct for happiness, since he created his own personal paradise.

Paradise Is Personal

Grimshaw, born in Devonshire, England, was working as a journalist in South Africa when he walked away from his job in 1973. He had taken the extraordinary step of buying his own tropical island—Moyenne Island, in the Seychelles chain located between India and Africa—for 8,000 pounds, or around $12,000. He owned
Moyenne for nine years, then made the decisive leap to live there, all alone with a native Seychelles helper. What faced this modern Robinson Crusoe was daunting. He did the opposite of lounging on the beach. The undergrowth was so dense on the island when he arrived that falling coconuts didn’t hit the ground.

Grimshaw set about clearing the underbrush, and as he did, he let the island speak to him—that’s his description of how he approached new plantings. He found that mahogany trees thrived on Moyenne, so he imported a few at first, and he now has seven hundred, reaching sixty to seventy feet high. But they are a fraction of the sixteen thousand trees he has planted by hand. He gave refuge to the rare giant tortoise of the Seychelles and has 120 of them. Birds flock to this protected sanctuary, and two thousand of them are new to the island.

In 2007 Grimshaw’s helper died, so at eighty-six he is the sole caretaker of his island, for which he has reputedly been offered $50 million, which he turned down. He shakes his head when visitors see the mahogany trees solely as a source of wood for furniture and the pristine beaches as a haven for rich vacationers, who have been visiting the Seychelles more and more. Moyenne will remain a preserve after his death. In person, Grimshaw looks sunburned and weathered as he tramps around in his bush hat and shorts, but he is remarkably alive, too. His state of contentment can be traced back, almost item for item, to the things on our list. He gave of himself while working at something he loved. He set a goal that took years to achieve. He was dependent on nothing and no one outside himself to give him constant approval.

About the only aspect of lasting happiness that is absent from this story is social bonding. But for some people, solitude is richer company than society, as it is for Grimshaw. His life also conforms to the concept of a fully integrated brain, one that merges every need that the brain is designed to serve. These include:

Connecting with the natural world

Being useful

Exercising your body

Finding work that satisfies

Fulfilling your life purpose

Aiming beyond your limited ego-self

No separate region of the brain oversees the merging of these needs to make a fully developed person. It takes the entire brain, acting as an integrated whole. Happiness is then rooted in the feeling that you are complete. The most credible version of the fully integrated brain is the one laid out by a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, now at UCLA, who has made a career of examining the neurobiology of human moods and mental states. Siegel has pioneered the fascinating study of how our subjective states correlate with the brain. What sets him apart from researchers who perform thousands of brain scans to discover how the brain lights up during certain states is that Siegel’s aim is therapeutic. He wants his patients to get better. The route to healing, he maintains, is to trace symptoms like depression, obsession, anxiety, and so on back to the exact brain region that is causing a block.

Since every thought and feeling must register in the brain, it makes sense that psychological symptoms like depression and anxiety are indications of faulty wiring—that is, a neural pathway has been laid down that continues to repeat the undesirable symptoms or behavior. It functions like a microchip that has no choice but to reiterate the same signal. But neural “wiring” can be changed, such as through therapy—Siegel uses talk therapy in conjunction with his brain-centered theory.

Siegel’s goal is a healthy brain that sustains a person’s well-being. As he sees it, the brain needs healthy nutrition every day. His approach is in accord with ours, since he prescribes a “healthy mind
platter” of daily nourishment, with the idea that a healthy mind leads to a healthy brain. On his mind platter, Siegel and colleague David Rock place seven “dishes.”

Sleep time

Physical time

Focus time

Time in

Down time

Play time

Connecting time

Years of brain research lie behind these simple prescriptions, but as science learns more and more that all aspects of life lead back to the brain, the nutrition offered on Siegel’s mind platter could be far more important to the body than any conventional advice. Your brain has an enormous talent for integration, but more than that, if it is used holistically, the brain thrives on putting everything together.

Doing the Work

Let’s consider the benefits of these seven nutrients, which we will divide into
inner work
and
outer work
.

Inner work:
Sleep time, focus time, time in, down time

Inner work is the area of subjective experience. A healthy day, as viewed by the brain, follows a natural cycle. You have had enough sleep to be adequately rested. You focus intensely, with enough down time to let the brain rebalance and find an easy resting place. You have down time for doing no mental work—letting the mind and brain simply be. And you set aside a period for what many Westerners neglect: going inward through meditation or self-reflection. This
is the most precious time, actually, since it opens the way for evolution and growth.

What goes on in your inner world? Most people, if they are being honest, devote eight hours at work to focused activity. Then they go home, find a way to relax, and distract themselves until it is bedtime. If work is unsatisfying, they focus only as much as they have to, and their real pleasure “in here” comes from pure distraction, diverting their frustrations with television, video games, tobacco, and alcohol.