Super Brain (8 page)

YOU ARE BECOMING MORE ADAPTABLE WHEN

You can laugh at yourself.

You see that there’s more to the situation than you realize.

Other people no longer look like antagonists simply because they disagree with you.

Negotiating starts to work, and you genuinely participate in it.

Compromise becomes a positive word.

You can hang loose in a state of relaxed alertness.

You see things in a way you didn’t before, and this delights you.

HERO #2
A NEWBORN BABY
FOR INTEGRATION

Our next hero isn’t famous or a genius or even gifted. It’s every newborn baby. Babies are paragons of health and well-being. Every cell in their bodies is vibrantly alive. They see the world as a place of endless discovery. Each day, if not each minute, is like a new world. What makes for their state of robust well-being isn’t that they are born in a good mood. Rather, their brains are constantly on the move, reshaping themselves as the world expands. Today is a new world, whether you are a baby or not, if it expands on what you experienced yesterday.

Babies have not shut themselves down or become stuck in old, outworn conditioning. Whatever their brains absorbed yesterday remains in place while new horizons keep opening up: walking, talking, learning how to relate and feel. When we grow up, we become nostalgic about the innocence of childhood. We sense a loss. What have we lost that babies have in abundance?

The key is
integration
.

Among all living things, human beings absorb every possible input and integrate it—that is, we make a whole picture. At this very minute, just like a newborn baby, you are sifting through billions of bits of raw data to form a coherent world. Here,
sift
is a technical term proposed by psychiatrist Daniel Siegel. It stands for

S—Sensation

I—Image

F—Feeling

T—Thought

Nothing is real except through these channels: either you sense it as a sensation (like pain or pleasure), imagine it visually, feel it emotionally,
or think about it. Sifting goes on constantly, and yet is utterly mysterious. Imagine a beautiful sunset in your mind’s eye. No photons of light hit your retina, as they would if you were gazing at an actual sunset. No illumination lights up your visual cortex, which is submerged in the same blackness as the rest of the brain. Yet microvolts of electricity pumping ions back and forth along your neurons magically produce a picture full of light, not to mention beauty and a cascade of associations with every other sunset you’ve ever seen. (How the brain correlates this image through physical means with your imagination is a central mystery in the mind-brain connection.)

Integrating bits of raw data into pictures of reality is a process that reaches right down to the cellular level, because anything the brain does is communicated to the rest of the body. Quite literally, when you feel depressed or have a bright idea or think you are in danger, your cells join in. Technically, what’s at work is a feedback loop that integrates mind, body, and the outside world in one process. Incoming data stimulates the nervous system. A response arises. The report of this response is sent out to each cell, and in return the cells say what they think about it.

Babies are perfect feedback machines. You can learn from them what it means to integrate your own personal reality with greater success. Just consciously do what nature designed into the infant brain.

HOW TO INTEGRATE FEEDBACK

Remain open to as much input as possible.

Don’t shut down the feedback loop with judgment, rigid beliefs, and prejudices.

Don’t censor incoming data through denial.

Examine other points of view as if they were your own.

Take possession of everything in your life. Be self-sufficient.

Work on psychological blocks like shame and guilt—they falsely color your reality.

Free yourself emotionally—being emotionally resilient is the best defense against growing rigid.

Harbor no secrets—they create dark places in the psyche.

Be willing to redefine yourself every day.

Don’t regret the past or fear the future. Both bring misery through self-doubt.

One way or another, you will inevitably create a reality around your own viewpoint. No one is perfect at integrating the world without bias. But babies teach us how to make our reality more complete. From birth, nature has designed us to approach the world as a whole, and when we slice experience up into bits and pieces, wholeness breaks down. Then, instead of living in reality, you are being fooled by a reality illusion.

Think of a dictator who has become used to unquestioned power. He stays in place through terror and a secret police. He bribes his enemies or makes them disappear in the middle of the night. Typically, such dictators are astounded when opposition rises up, and up to the moment when they are deposed or murdered by a mob, they believe that they are justified. They even fantasize that the people who suffer oppression in a police state love their oppressor. This is reality illusion carried to an extreme.

The fall of dictators fascinates us at another level because we sense, somewhere deep down, that unlimited power could do the same to us. A dark magic seems to draw a veil over the eyes of the deluded. But
when it comes to the reality illusion that everyone lives in, there is no dark magic. There is only a failure to integrate. We are born with the ability to create wholeness, yet we choose denial, repression, forgetting, inattention, selective memory, personal bias, and old habits instead. These influences are hard to overcome. Inertia is on their side, for one thing. But you can’t feel balanced, safe, happy, and in tune until you regain the wholeness that comes naturally to every newborn. This is the key to well-being as well as physical health.

Being a fully integrated person means having three strengths that reflect a baby’s approach to the world and avoiding three obstacles that plague us as adults.

Three strengths:
Communicating, staying balanced, seeing the big picture

Three obstacles:
Isolation, conflict, repression

When you are in an integrated state, either in body or mind, you communicate openly. You know what you feel; you express it; you absorb signals from everyone around you. But countless adults experience a breakdown in communication. They feel isolated from all kinds of things: their feelings, other people, the jobs they go to every morning. They become entangled in conflicts, and as a result, they learn to repress what they really feel and all their real desires. These feelings are not just psychological factors. They affect the brain and, in turn, every cell in the body.

Bottom line: If you want to return to the natural state of health and well-being, be like a newborn baby. Integrate your experiences into wholeness instead of living with separation and conflict.

YOU ARE BECOMING MORE INTEGRATED WHEN

You create a safe place where you can be yourself.

You invite others into the same safe space so that they can be themselves.

You desire to know yourself.

You look at areas of denial, accept hard truths, and face reality.

You make peace with your dark side, using it as neither a secret ally nor a feared enemy.

You honestly assess and heal guilt and shame.

A sense of higher purpose dawns.

You feel inspired.

You offer yourself in service to others.

Higher reality seems real and attainable.

HERO #3
THE BUDDHA
FOR EXPANSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

We use our brains first and foremost to be conscious, and some people take their consciousness much farther than others. Our heroes, our paragons for inner growth, are the spiritual guides of humanity wherever they arise. One particular hero, the Buddha, and the type he represents—saints, sages, and visionaries—display to perfection a unique trait of human beings: to live for meaning, which leads to a craving for the highest meaning. Meaning comes from within. It goes beyond the brute facts of life. The raw data that streams into the five senses is meaningless by itself. Looking at the brief, brutal lives of Paleolithic cave men or early hunters and gatherers, you would never suspect that their brains were capable of mathematics, philosophy, art, and higher reason. Those capacities were hidden, and a figure like the Buddha, who lived amid the poverty and struggle of life in India more than two thousand years ago, indicates that much more remains hidden inside us, if only we could tap into our yearning for meaning.

The key is
expansion of consciousness
.

No matter what kind of experience you are having, having it presupposes
that you are aware. To be human is to be conscious—the only issue is how conscious. If you strip away all overtones of religion and mysticism, the state of higher consciousness that Buddha exemplifies is part of everyone’s inheritance. An old Indian adage compares consciousness to a lamp at the door, shining into the house and out into the world at the same time. It makes you aware of things “out there” and “in here” simultaneously. Being aware creates a relationship between the two.

Is that relationship good or bad? The heavens and hells conceived in the human mind are all products of thought. We think our way into them, and we think our way out. “You are only as safe as your thoughts,” says a wise aphorism. But where do thoughts come from—the dangerous, unsafe kind as well as the reassuring, trusting kind? They originate in the invisible realm of consciousness. For the mind, awareness is the womb of creation. To achieve a life filled with meaning, you must figure out how to be more conscious; only then do you become the author of your own destiny.

HOW TO EXPAND YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS

Put a higher value on being awake, aware, and alert.

Resist conformity. Don’t think and act like everyone else.

Value yourself. Don’t wait for the approval of others to validate you. Instead of desiring external validation, strive to help others.

Expose your mind to a higher vision through art, poetry, and music. Read widely in world scriptures and holy texts.

Question your own core beliefs.

Work on reducing the demands of the ego. Expand beyond the limits of “I, me, mine.”

Aim for the highest meaning that your life can have.

Keep faith that inner growth is an unending process.

Walk the spiritual path, however you define it, with sincerity and hope.

Consciousness is a curious thing; we all have it, but we never have enough. Yet the supply is infinite. Because he stands for this eternal unfoldment, the Buddha is more than Buddhism. The greatest spiritual guides exemplify three strengths and avoid three obstacles.

Three strengths:
Evolving, expanding, being inspired

Three obstacles:
Contraction, fixed boundaries, conformity

None of these terms are overtly religious. They are about facing existence with more awareness. According to legend, when the Buddha was a troubled seeker named Siddhartha, the king, his father, wanted his son, born a prince, to grow into a great ruler. To suppress Siddhartha’s spiritual yearnings, his father kept him imprisoned behind the palace walls, surrounded him with luxury, and refused to allow him any contact with the suffering of everyday life. That is a parable for what we do to our own awareness. We contract behind the walls of ego. We refuse to look beyond fixed mental boundaries. We pursue the pleasures and possessions that a consumer society holds out for us.

Higher consciousness isn’t necessarily a spiritual state—it is an expanded state. Spirituality arrives in due course, depending on how contracted you were when you started. A life filled with stress and
sorrow naturally causes awareness to contract; it is a survival response, like a herd of antelope drawing together at the approach of a lion. You need to realize that contraction may create a primitive kind of safety, but at the cost of tightness, fear, constant vigilance, and insecurity. Only by expanding your consciousness can you be a lamp at the door, seeing the world without fear and yourself without insecurity.

Bottom line: If you want to achieve inner growth, be more like the Buddha in your approach to consciousness. Expand your awareness and look beyond the walls set up in the mind.

YOU ARE BECOMING MORE CONSCIOUS WHEN

You can speak your own truth.

You no longer see good and evil as fixed opposites. Gray areas emerge, and you accept them.

You forgive more easily because you understand where other people are coming from.