Power Up Your Brain (4 page)

Using this program, you can develop the gifts once ascribed only to a privileged few. And in the process, you’ll have the chance to gain other health benefits, including a reduced risk of devastating brain diseases, cancer, heart disease, and Parkinson’s; elimination of debilitating mood swings; the breaking of unhealthy emotional and behavior patterns; the overcoming of painful memories and past traumas; a powerful clarity of thought; and the potential for maximum human life span; all without the use of drugs.

When we repair our brains and heal our toxic emotions, we move toward a state of personal health and well-being. Then, we can bring forth the qualities attributed to enlightened beings: inner peace, wisdom, compassion, joy, creativity, and a new vision of the future.

CHAPTER 1

THE NEUROSCIENCE
OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Can neuroscience deliver on the promises presented by religion: freedom from suffering, violence, scarcity, and disease? Can neuroscience deliver us into a life where health, peace, and abundance reign?

The pledges of the world’s religions are so universal that it’s likely the longing for joy, inner peace, and well-being are hardwired into the human brain and have become a social instinct as powerful as the drive to procreate. The Bible, the Koran, and Buddhist and Hindu scriptures all teach that we can be delivered into a paradisiacal state, whether after death, at the end of time, following many reincarnations, or as a result of personal effort and merit. This state of liberation is called grace or Heaven by Christian religions, Paradise by Muslims, while Eastern traditions refer to it as awakening or enlightenment, using various terms such as
samadhi
,
mukti
,
bodhi, satori,
and
nirvana
.

But what if grace, samadhi, and enlightenment are really based in biological science? What if they are states of higher order and complexity created by programmable circuits in the brain? What if these circuits could make it possible to attain lifelong joy, inner peace, health, and well-being now, in this physical world, and not in some distant future or afterlife?

THE ENERGY MATRIX

In the 1930s, Dogon shamans of western Africa informed two French anthropologists of the existence of a companion sun to Sirius, the Dog Star. This celestial body could not be seen with the naked eye, and the shamans had no access to sophisticated telescopes. Yet they described it as extremely heavy, orbiting around Sirius in an elliptical pattern that required half a century for each complete cycle. Forty years later, astronomers with powerful telescopes identified the star and named it Sirius B.
¹

There are many more examples of the discovery of seemingly impossible knowledge. For example, Amazon sages claimed that, after fasting and praying during vision quests, they were taught by the plants themselves how to prepare curare, a neurotoxin employed for hunting and also used for modern anesthesia.

Curare contains deadly poisons from the bark of
Strychnos
toxifera
and from moonseed flowers, in particular from
Chondrodendron
tomentosum
. The most common method of preparation is to slowly cook the bark scrapings of
Strychnos
and moonseed for exactly 75 hours, after which the mixture becomes a dark, syrupy paste. During cooking, if its sweet-scented vapors were to be inhaled, the muscles involved in respiration would relax and cease to respond, resulting in instant death from asphyxiation. The men who prepare it watch it cook from a safe distance so as to avoid inhaling its fumes. A victim of curare poisoning is horribly aware of not breathing and lucidly witnesses the body going into convulsions while being unable to move or call for help. Amazingly, however,
after
curare is cooked, it can be safely touched and rolled into a paste that is harmless even if swallowed. But if curare comes into direct contact with the bloodstream, it is deadly—as when the poison is applied to arrow tips that pierce the skin of victims. How could the shamans have known about this effect? It is statistically impossible to discover the formula for curare through trial and error, which underlines the shamans’ claim that they accessed information from the natural world—from the biosphere itself— by tapping into the invisible wisdom of a field that permeates all of life. This web of life, which they refer to as the Divine Mother, is a living energy system that supports and informs all creatures. It is, in essence, a matrix of energy that connects all living entities. This concept is making its way back into the minds of the science community. Scientists are also beginning to reconsider the notion of space as one huge void. Instead, a growing number of physicists postulate that space is not empty but full of energy: cosmic radiation from the Big Bang, pulsating electromagnetic fields, and gravity. Could this energy be a vast storehouse of information as well?

THE FEMININE THROUGH HISTORY

Ancient peoples recognized and revered the power of the divine feminine in her many forms, such as the Divine Mother of the shamans. For millennia, before the advent of the alphabet, cultures around the world, from the Indus Valley to Central Europe, celebrated the Goddess. In India, Kali has long been worshipped as the Great Mother and the ultimate reality. In Greece, Hera represented a much older mother deity, perhaps related to the Sumerian goddess Inanna, while the goddess Demeter, revered in the Eleusinian Mysteries, was the Great Mother of planting and harvesting crops.

Throughout Central Europe, the earliest of representations of the Great Mother are stone and bone pieces collectively referred to as Venus figurines. The best known of these is the Venus of Willendorf, a symbol of fertility with large breasts and hips, named after the village in central Austria near which it was found. This statuette was carved close to 25,000 years ago from limestone and tinted with red ocher that is not native to the area, suggesting that it had perhaps been a treasured possession brought from elsewhere by a pilgrim. Similar figurines have been found throughout the area and in such great numbers that some anthropologists are convinced they point to a time when the feminine form was the singular representation of the Divine.

Marija Gimbutas, an archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic cultures of Europe, offers compelling evidence that the European heartland was once invaded by Indo-European peoples from what is today the Ukraine and southern Russia. Being fierce warriors, these invaders rode newly domesticated horses and easily defeated the Goddess-worshipping Neolithic farmers. These invaders were known as members of the Battle Ax culture because they characteristically placed a stone battle ax, which by that time was useless as a weapon but held only symbolic value, in the graves of males.

When the Battle Ax people arrived in Europe around 3000 B.C.E., they replaced the mythologies of the Great Mother with those of a male deity, and the representation of the Divine became the phallus or the tree of life. The chief deity in the Indo-European pantheon is Dyeus, God of the Sky, who was addressed as Father Sky or Shining Father. The name Dyeus is the root of the Latin word for deity,
deus
. In Greece, Dyeus would become Zeus and, in Rome, Jupiter.

THE LOSS OF THE FEMININE

With the first Sumerian cuneiform tablets, Indus script, and Egyptian hieroglyphs around 3000–2500 B.C.E., at the start of the Bronze Age, scribes of that period began to record the stories of military leaders and the songs of poets. Accounts of historical events became regarded as undisputed fact and began to replace legends, which were a mixture of fact and myth conveyed from one generation to the next through a rich oral tradition. Male gods of the sky and heavens, such as Zeus, Yahweh, Thor, and Shiva, took dominance over goddess traditions and the earth goddesses.

People no longer saw nature as the manifestation of divinity but as a resource: forests were for building houses and ships, soil was to be tilled for crops, and animals were to be bred for food. A mechanistic view of nature began to prevail as alchemists gave way to chemists and astrologers to astronomers. With the arrival of Newtonian physics in the late 1600s, any force that couldn’t be explained by science was dismissed as superstition.

Western medicine was born of this worldview. Instead of relying on natural remedies to cure the ailments of the body, physicians turned to synthetic drugs and surgery. The scientific worldview replaced the mysterious world of the ancients. The invention of microscopes enabled scientists to investigate what were once deemed invisible “spirits” that cause disease and to catalogue them as microbes.

Later, investigators discovered the genetic code and began to entertain the notion that mortal humans could control health in the same way they controlled nature. Geneticists and chemists found ways to manipulate genes and conquer disease with prescription drugs.

These days, Western physicians seem overly focused on reflexively responding to physical problems that they believe underlie their patients’ maladies. Whether the cause is a smoldering infectious agent or a chemical imbalance, all too often both physician and patient regard the prescription pad as the sole means to treat a disease, thus ignoring the more fundamental issue of patient uniqueness.

A RETURN TO THE FEMININE

And yet, the pendulum has begun to swing back to the belief in an interconnected universe and the importance of the divine feminine. Contemporary scientists, including the Noble Prize–winner Erwin Schrödinger, the neuroscientist Humberto Maturana, and the physicist Francisco Varela, have suggested the interrelatedness of all particles in the universe.

We can find evidence of this interconnectedness in physics in a property known as entanglement. Evidence indicates that when two particles are created together, such as through the radioactive decay of other particles, they remain linked together, or entangled, no matter how far apart they might be from each other. Variables in the condition of each particle remain undetermined until they are observed and measured. For example, when one entangled particle has a positive charge, its mate will have a negative charge. Reversing the charge of one causes an instantaneous reversal in the other. This defies the laws of General Relativity because it would involve a signal traveling faster than the speed of light. Yet the concept of entanglement is consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics, which describe a universe in which distant interactions are not only permitted but commonplace. Quantum mechanics is thought to apply only to subatomic particles because quantum effects are not observable on a larger scale. But Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona, and Jack A. Tuszynski, a physicist at the University of Alberta, both suggest that quantum processing—on a level larger than subatomic—may actually be occurring inside the brain.
²

A commonly accepted scientific model states that consciousness arises as the result of the computational power—the information processing capabilities—of the human brain. Hameroff is studying microtubules, which are structural components of the cell that transport nutrients from the cell body to the axon terminal. In Hameroff’s research, he noted that anesthesia works through an effect on neural microtubules. The correlation between consciousness and computational power led Hameroff to reason that these microtubules could, in fact, act as information-processing modules, which would increase the current estimates of human computational capabilities more than a millionfold. And if this were the case, simple computing power could offer humans the mental “bandwidth” necessary to commune consciously with the biosphere—in essence tapping into the information of our interconnected universe. With research such as this, scientists are finding models to elucidate what shamans and seers have so elegantly and simply explained in the past as our ability to have an active dialogue with all of nature.

YOUR COMPUTATIONAL MIND

The number of neurons in the brain is 10 to the 11th power— that’s a 1 followed by 11 zeroes, or 100 billion! With close to 10,000 synapses in every large neuron and with switch rates close to 1,000 times per second, this means that the number of operations the brain can process per second is 10 to the 18th power.
³
While this is an incredibly large number, it becomes minute if neuronal microtubules are involved as computational subunits. With more than 100 million microtubules in each neuron, the increased computational capability of the brain becomes staggeringly immense.

But whether the number of computations the human brain can perform is a 10 followed by 18 zeroes or a 10 followed by 27 zeroes is not as consequential as how well we are using the brain we have now. If we were to ask you to remember the song “Hey Jude” for a moment and then ask you to forget it, you, in common with most people, would have a hard time putting it out of your mind. Regardless of the possible number of computations our brain is capable of, the truth of the matter is that most people use most of their computational ability to dwell on everyday problems. This waste of a good brain leaves hardly any computational power for innovation, creative problem solving, and enlightenment.