Super Brain (31 page)

We will have much more to say about how to reach your true or core self. It’s a vital issue since the world’s wisdom traditions declare that death cannot touch the true self—and that truth is what Saint Paul means by “dying unto death.” Here we want to emphasize that dying is a natural part of life, as every cell in our body already experiences. The path to making peace with death might look something like the following:

I don’t think about death. It’s pointless
.

The main thing is to live your life right this minute
.

Anyway, I secretly don’t believe I will grow old and die
.

To be honest, I don’t think about dying because it’s too scary
.

I’ve seen death, of a friend, family member, or pet. I know I have to face it someday
.

I am beginning to feel calmer about the whole issue. I can look at death without running away
.

Dying happens to everyone. It’s better to approach it calmly, with eyes open
.

I’ve felt the first serious twinges of mortality. It’s time to face it
.

I find I am actually interested in what death is all about
.

It’s possible to embrace dying as a natural stage of life—and I have
.

Achieving wisdom is a lifetime project. We are encouraged by the “new old age” and by studies that indicate the positive side of aging, which can be grouped under the rubric of maturity. Older people tend to underperform on tests of memory and IQ compared with younger people, but in areas of lifetime experience, they outperform them. This is especially so in tests that ask you to make a decision about a challenging situation like firing an employee, telling a friend that his spouse is cheating, or facing the diagnosis of a serious illness in the family. What is needed in such situations is maturity, and although emotional intelligence comes into play, no single aspect of IQ equates with maturity. You must live a life to acquire it. Why not live that life in accord with evolution, as embodied in your cells?

THE
ENLIGHTENED BRAIN

W
hat would it be like to be enlightened? Is the soul within reach? Can God be experienced personally? For many, answering these questions is like capturing a unicorn, a beautiful dream that never turns into reality. The unicorn represented perfect grace in the Middle Ages. The pure white horse with a braided horn coming out of its forehead was a symbol of Christ, and capturing it was an inner journey to find God. Myth can become reality if you find the right path.

Enlightenment also involves taking an inner journey, with God as the destination, and it can be accomplished. There are other destinations than God, however. The original term for enlightenment,
moksha
, is Sanskrit, translated as “liberation.” Liberation from what? From suffering, mortality, pain, the cycle of rebirth, illusion, karma—Eastern spirituality offered many cherished goals as it unfolded over the centuries. Even though
moksha
is considered to be a realistic goal, something that every person should aim for, the frustrating truth is that examples of those who have achieved enlightenment are very scarce. Parallels with the unicorn are uncomfortable.

We’d like to approach the pursuit of enlightenment as the natural path for the brain. For centuries before anyone made the mind-body
connection, people didn’t know—as we know now—that any experience must involve the brain. You cannot see a toaster or a terrapin without activating the visual cortex. The same holds true if you saw an angel, even in your mind’s eye. As far as the neurons in the visual cortex are concerned, an image can be waking or dreaming; it can exist either “in here” or “out there.” Nothing visual is possible without stimulating this area of the brain. Nor is it just angels. For God, Satan, the soul, ancestral spirits, or any spiritual experience to exist, your brain must be able to register it, hold on to it, and make sense of it. We aren’t speaking of the visual cortex alone. The entire brain is virgin territory for spirituality.

The Brain Wakes Up

One clue that enlightenment is real—and accessible—is staring at us already. We use common phrases all the time that edge right up to it:
Wake up, See the light, Face reality
. These are all pointers to a higher state of awareness. An enlightened person has just gone further. In enlightenment you wake up completely, you see with total clarity, and you face ultimate reality. Your brain therefore is no longer dull and sleepy; instead, it matches your enlightened state, which is alert, vibrant, and creative.

A dramatic shift has occurred, and it’s no wonder that in an age of faith, we would put
waking up
in religious terms. In the New Testament,
to see the light
meant “to see the light of God.” When Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12), he meant that people would see divinity if they looked at him not as a packet of flesh and blood but as part of God’s being. God is the supreme light, and it takes new eyes, the eyes of the soul, to perceive him. Yet any kind of perception, however holy or poetic the terminology, must involve a change in how the brain functions.

When such a shift occurred, you would see everything in a new light, including yourself. Jesus told his disciples not to hide their light under a bushel basket, because they too were part of God. They
needed to see themselves with the eyes of the soul and then let the world see how transformed they were. Religions try to patent personal transformation and make it exclusive, but this is a universal process rooted in the mind-body connection. When we say
Face reality
, we mean look at things as they really are, not as illusion. An enlightened person has freed her mind from all illusions and sees reality with perfect clarity. What looks ordinary suddenly becomes divine.

Once the mind wakes up, sees the light, and faces reality, the brain undergoes its own physical changes. Neuroscience cannot fully map these changes, because subjects to test and scan are so few. The whole issue of higher consciousness is being chipped away at, and progress may be very slow. It’s nearly impossible to decide if people really see angels, when neuroscientists can’t explain how the brain sees anything. As we have pointed out, when you look at the most common object—a table, chair, or book—there is no picture of that object in your brain. So theories of sight, along with the other four senses, remain rudimentary and largely a guessing game.

But the existing evidence for enlightenment, although it has arrived in bits and pieces, is positive. For decades adept Indian yogis have performed remarkable physical feats under the gaze of science. A class of holy men, known as
sadhus
, subject their bodies to extreme conditions as a devotional practice, as well as to gain self-control. Some have been buried underground in a sealed box and survived for days, because they could lower their heart and respiration rates almost to nil. Others survive on meager calories per day or perform exceptional feats of strength. Through specific spiritual practices, yogis and
sadhus
have gained control over their autonomic nervous system; that is, they can consciously alter bodily functions that are generally involuntary.

It would be amazing to witness such extreme control, but it’s a limited amazement compared with enlightenment. There the brain adopts a totally new picture of the world, and once the brain changes,
the person is filled with wonder and bliss. You undergo a series of
aha!
experiences, and as your brain processes these milestones, you enter a new way of looking at the world. With each
aha!
, an old perception is overturned.

The
Aha!
of Enlightenment

A TRAIN OF INSIGHTS

I am part of everything.

Overturns the belief that you are alone and isolated.

I am cared for.

Overturns the belief that the universe is empty and impersonal.

I am fulfilled.

Overturns the belief that life is a struggle.

My life is meaningful to God.

Overturns the belief that God is indifferent (or doesn’t exist).

I am unbounded, a child of the universe.

Overturns the belief that human beings are an insignificant speck in the vastness of creation.

These
aha!s
do not appear all at once. They are part of a process. Because the process is natural and effortless, everyone has moments of awakening. Perception isn’t hard to shift. In the movies (and sometimes in real life), a woman exclaims to a man, “Wait a minute. We’re not just friends. You’re in love with me! How could I
have missed it?” This moment of awakening, whether in a movie or in real life, can upend someone’s life. But even if it doesn’t, the person experiences an internal shift. The mind—accompanied by the brain—stops computing a world based on
we’re just friends
in favor of a world in which
you love me
has suddenly entered. Enlightenment follows the same course. Reality A (the secular world) is altered by a moment of insight, shifting your life to different rules, the ones that apply to reality B (in which God is real).

In their yearning for more meaning and fulfillment, people crave reality B. If anyone had a 100 percent guarantee of God’s existence, giving up reality A would be a joy and a relief. They would have no more suffering, doubt, or fear of death, no more worry about sin, Hell, and damnation. Religions thrive by feeding our desire to escape the pitfalls of the secular world, however comfortable reality A might be.

The only guarantee that God exists comes from direct experience. You have to feel a divine presence or sense God at work, whatever those phrases mean to you. God plays a relatively small part in the enlightenment process, surprisingly. The greater part is about a shift in perception: waking up, seeing the light, and facing reality. It’s a mistake to believe that an enlightened person is a kind of escape artist, a spiritual Houdini who mysteriously frees himself from the illusion of earthly life. The actual purpose of enlightenment is to make the world more real. Unreality comes from thinking that you are isolated and alone. When you see that you are connected to everything in the matrix of life, what could be more real?

There are degrees of enlightenment, and you never know what the next burst of insight will be. There’s a potential
aha!
in every situation, if you learn a new way to perceive it. Here’s an example from our own lives. At a conference, Deepak met a noted neuroscientist who mentioned that she was more comfortable in the world of birds than in the world of people. What could such a statement mean? It
didn’t appear to be delusional. This woman knew her neuroscience very well; she was intelligent and articulate.

What her experience came down to was something like that of the horse whisperer: tuning in to the nervous systems of other creatures. A decade ago the claim would have seemed flaky. How can someone think like a dog, the way Cesar Millan does, or like a horse, the way Monty Roberts, the original horse whisperer, does? The answer is sensitivity and empathy. Being self-aware, we can already extend our awareness to how other people feel. There’s no mystery to feeling someone else’s joy or pain.

It seems that we can do the same with animals, and the proof is that you can train horses and dogs almost effortlessly if you whisper in their language, without using whips, muzzles, or mistreatment. When you know how an animal’s nervous system sees the world, you don’t have to “break” the animal. You can change animal behavior most easily by following the natural course of an animal’s brain.

In the case of the bird lady, the proof of her attunement is that several types of wild birds are comfortable sitting on her shoulder and eating out of her hand. Does that make her the heir to Saint Francis of Assisi, who is depicted in just this way? Yes, in a sense. A saint’s ability to see the whole of creation as part of God brings a sense of empathy with all living things. A shift occurs in the saint’s nervous system that expresses what the mind now accepts:
I am at peace with the world and all living things. I am not here to harm them
.

Is it so amazing that other creatures know when we come in peace? Our pets sense who to growl at and who to approach for a pat on the head. The human nervous system has commonality with that of other creatures. It sounds very dry to put this in such an analytical way, but the truth is quite beautiful when you see a bird alight in the palm of your hand.

Deepak recounted his meeting with the bird lady, but it wasn’t yet an
aha!
experience. Rudy triggered the
aha!
when Deepak asked a far-out question: Since human DNA is 65 percent the same as a banana’s,
can we empathize with bananas, or communicate with them? (He had in mind some famous experiments by Cleve Backster, who connected houseplants to sensitive electrical sensors and found that plants displayed changes in their electrical field, as measured with a kind of polygraph or lie detector, when their owners argued or exhibited high stress. In the most startling finding, plants displayed the greatest electrical excitation when their owners thought about chopping them down.)