We Are Divine Beings
If we’re, certainly, one with God in our divine Self, why don’t we all know it? How can such a stupendous and highly effective Actuality that’s our personal excessive potential stay so totally hidden from us?
There are various solutions to that query, however as I discover in my e book, Break By the Limits of the Mind, the neuroscientific reply is surprisingly easy: Most of us, by late childhood, have unintentionally rendered ourselves neurally blind to all the things besides what our senses reveal–our bodily physique and the bodily world round us. From earliest childhood onward we had been inspired to study to function solely throughout the bodily world and as we did so our mind wired an increasing number of neural circuits to help solely that goal. By the point most of us attain our teenagers, all of our mind’s neural circuitry has wired to focus our thoughts’s eye view, consideration, ideas, recollections, feelings, and actions on the bodily world round us and on our myriad reactions to what’s occurring in it.
We weren’t, nonetheless, born neurally blind to the delicate actuality through which we exist. Younger youngsters, the truth is, are identified to understand many issues that their mother and father not do. For instance, there are lots of tales of kids seeing angels:
My youngest daughter used to have conversations with angels each night time. One night time when she was simply two and a half, she requested me to inform them to not have so many in her room as a result of she was drained and wished to sleep some extra. I informed her to ask the angels to not keep that night time, and we did it collectively. The subsequent morning after I requested her how she slept, she informed me that solely “Michael” had stayed on the foot of her mattress to assist her sleep extra peacefully. I received chills…I’d by no means informed her angel names—I all the time let her inform me. —Wayne Dyer, Reminiscences of Heaven
The societal deck, nonetheless, is stacked in opposition to such delicate perceptions. We dwell in a time when many in our society think about the avowed notion of delicate realities, reminiscent of seeing angels, to be fraud, misguided creativeness, or psychological sickness. Given the societal local weather of disapproving disbelief, few mother and father encourage their youngsters to belief their notion of issues unseen.
We’re born psychic and kids are particularly open to seeing and listening to the delicate alerts and energetic patterns that emanate from different dimensions. Sadly, we’re conditioned, fearfully taught to disregard spirits and psychic messages, in order that as youngsters are more and more socialized, they quietly shut down their innate psychic senses. —Web site: The Psychic Effectively
We Want Neural Circuits to Function within the Bodily World
We’re deterred from the notion of delicate realities not solely by society’s bias but in addition by the need to adapt to the bodily world. As youngsters we have to develop the power to perform within the bodily world; in doing so our consideration strikes away from extra delicate realities.
From the day we’re born, we start quickly creating neural circuitry to assist us perform within the bodily world—and we accomplish that at a prodigious price. A one-year-old youngster, in as little as a single day, could cause tens of millions of recent neural circuits to type in her mind. These neural circuits join numerous neurons chargeable for contracting and enjoyable explicit muscular tissues and finally type into hundreds of what I consider as neural behavior circuits.
Many neural behavior circuits, once they activate — or fireplace as neuroscience would have it — make any a number of of hundreds of bodily actions nearly computerized. As soon as supporting neural circuits type to help any recurring bodily motion, a lot much less focus is required to carry out that motion.
Neural Circuits Join Us to Ideas, Reminiscences, and Feelings
Past forming neural circuits that automate motion, we additionally type neural circuits that work together with our interpenetrating nonlocal vitality physique, additionally known as the astral physique, to stimulate ideas, recollections, and feelings. Neural circuits that type to work together with our nonlocal vitality physique are like presets on a automotive radio—press a preset button in your radio and it routinely tunes your radio to a specific station. Music from that station doesn’t originate out of your radio. Your radio solely makes audible the radio waves being broadcast by that station. Neural circuits that type in our mind to work together with the vitality physique are like presets—stimulate such a preset neural circuit and also you routinely tune into a specific nonlocal practice of thought, affiliation of recollections, or movement of emotion. Such ideas, recollections, and feelings don’t originate within the mind. The mind merely stimulates them.
By maturity, we may have shaped from a whole lot of hundreds to tens of millions of neural circuits that, when firing, provoke computerized responses to just about all the things we expertise—from pondering to transferring, from physiological responses to feeling feelings. In his e book, Pondering, Quick and Gradual, Daniel Kahneman shares how our routinely firing neural behavior circuits—quick pondering, as he calls it—dominate our habits. Except we intentionally pause to contemplate our selections in a specific scenario—interact in sluggish pondering—we’re on neural autopilot.
Neural Behavior Circuits Can Turn out to be Complicated
Our neural circuits can turn out to be interconnectedly advanced. Such advanced neural circuits can concurrently stimulate many various sorts of expertise, together with the bodily—notion and motion—and the delicate—emotion, thought, and reminiscence. As a result of neurons that wire collectively, fireplace collectively, when any neuron in a posh neural behavior circuit fires, all the opposite neurons will fireplace as nicely, thus routinely inflicting bodily actions, physiological responses, and stimulating nonlocal feelings, ideas, and recollections.
For instance, let’s say you like ingesting espresso. On a carefree Sunday afternoon, as you stroll by a espresso store, the sensory stimulus of the odor of espresso coming from the store prompts your complete neural coffee-habit circuit—starting with a wave of delight.
Concurrently firing neurons in your well-developed coffee-drinking circuit ship alerts everywhere in the mind, alerts that activate different areas of the mind and central nervous system and that set many physiological processes in movement—salivation, elevated coronary heart price, elevated breath price, launch of additional glucose, launch of adrenaline, elevated muscle tone, and contraction and leisure of the facial muscular tissues to type a smile.
Further concurrently firing neurons in your espresso circuit stimulate numerous nonlocal trains of thought and recollections related to espresso—the style, the texture of the cup in your hand, goodies you’ve eaten whereas ingesting, pleasant caffeine-enhanced conversations, a query about how espresso is ready on this espresso store, a protracted historical past of how espresso is ready world wide, and your treasured opinion about the easiest way to arrange espresso. To all of these ideas and recollections, you’re more likely to react with elevated emotional pleasure.
Your elevated emotional pleasure can in flip trigger neurons in your neural coffee-habit circuit to launch dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and a hormone that, amongst different issues, can improve bodily pleasure. This suggestions cycle (pleasure, dopamine launch, extra pleasure, extra dopamine launch) could proceed—particularly should you’ve already gone into the espresso store and at the moment are ingesting a cup of espresso you totally get pleasure from—till all of the pleasure-enhancing dopamine receptors in your neural coffee-drinking circuit are saturated.
Amazingly, all the computerized habits and computerized physiological, psychological, and emotional responses activated and stimulated by such a well-established and sophisticated neural behavior circuit may be triggered by a single stimulus. The stimulus generally is a sensory expertise, a bodily motion, a reminiscence, a thought, or an emotion. Within the coffee-habit circuit instance above, the odor of espresso was like a single firecracker setting off all the opposite firecrackers in a woven chain of firecrackers.
Our Mind Gives a Steady Fireworks Present
Quite than only a single woven string of firecrackers going off, nonetheless, the chain-reaction firing of advanced neural circuits is extra like a steady fireworks show as a result of one advanced neural circuit will most frequently be interconnected with and due to this fact activate one other. The continual noise of a fireworks show may be in comparison with the continual sensory enter we expertise when awake. The massive explosions of sunshine and colour may be in comparison with out of the blue having a thought or reminiscence, or to experiencing an emotion. In our wakeful thoughts it’s almost all the time the Fourth of July—and, like youngsters at a fireworks present, we’re captivated.
The well-established bodily world-supporting neural wiring of most individuals is so totally and repeatedly engrossing that they turn out to be experientially satisfied that there merely may be no different actuality of which they may remember. This day by day reaffirmed conviction makes it very troublesome for them to truly consider the testimony of saints, sages, and near-death experiencers that different worlds, different realities, and different ranges of consciousness exist and are accessible to us—or that we’re something greater than our bodily physique.
With out the Fireworks We Have Transcendent Consciousness
We might, nonetheless, understand actuality fully in a different way if the billions of neurons we’ve got dedicated to functioning within the bodily world didn’t fireplace routinely in response to stimuli. Have been we to die, in order that our native bodily mind was not functioning, the saints, sages, and, particularly, near-death experiencers inform us that we might instantly and routinely start to concentrate on heavenly realms, heavenly emotions, and heavenly information as a result of we might be freed from the routinely firing neural circuits that compel us to concentrate on the bodily world.
I usually say that we’re acutely aware despite our mind, not due to it. It’s not elevated exercise in any mind area that results in such extraordinary phenomenal experiences. It’s really the mind turning off. —Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon, near-death experiencer, writer, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife
We don’t, nonetheless, have to die to flee the neural compulsions of the mind, as you may assume after studying the citation above. Quite the opposite, we are able to methodically rewire the mind to permit us to bypass the same old fireworks-storm-creating neural circuitry that retains us preoccupied with our sensory notion of the bodily world. We are able to rewire our brains to help subtler notion, intuitive pondering, and better feeling. We are able to rewire our brains to help the direct expertise of our divine Self in God.
Neuroplasticity
The notion of rewiring our mind is comparatively new. For many of the twentieth century, it was popularly believed that the mind was hardwired from delivery and progressively deteriorated over time as irreplaceable mind cells died. A bleak prospect! It was additionally believed that the features of the varied areas of the mind had been mounted and didn’t change or adapt to new situations. We all know now that the mind is astonishingly changeable and reveals a excessive diploma of what’s known as neuroplasticity.
Neurons usually are not inherently specialised. All of them carry out the identical primary perform—to go on an electrochemical sign to a different neuron. It isn’t the neuron itself however the neural circuit through which it’s wired that determines the perform that any particular neuron performs. A selected neuron could ship a sign to a different neuron to activate a sure muscular contraction. That very same neuron can rewire and find yourself sending a sign to a special neuron to stimulate a sure reminiscence.
This phenomenon is commonly seen in stroke victims who regain purposeful management over part of their physique. It’s now understood that the neurons in undamaged areas of stroke-victims brains have rewired to make new neural connections with a purpose to restore the features of the broken areas.
The inherent plasticity of the mind, nonetheless, isn’t restricted to the necessity to regain features misplaced to mind injury. The mind can and can change, to a exceptional diploma, in response to any new situation, habits, emotion, or thought. This alteration could take the type of fully new neural circuits or of recent features added to present neural circuits.
One of many causes that the mind is so plastic is that each neuron can develop multiple connection to different neurons, and in doing so deliver further performance to any neural circuit. These connections to different neurons are known as dendrites; a single neuron is able to rising as many as ten thousand dendrites to type ten thousand connections to different neurons. As soon as a brand new dendritic connection is produced from, say, neuron one to neuron two, if neuron one fires then neuron two routinely fires as nicely. Thus a single neuron that has myriad connections to different neurons has the potential to make as many as ten thousand different neurons routinely fireplace.
In our first three years of infancy, we undergo a interval of what’s referred to as transient exuberance throughout which our mind is making as many as 700 new dendritic connections per second between the varied neurons in our authentic complement of 100 billion neurons. The making of further connections by new dendrites doesn’t cease as we get older, however the price of rewiring tends to decelerate as soon as we’ve mastered the fundamentals of physique management and communication. At any age, nonetheless, our mind’s neurons could make new dendritic connections to different neurons to help no matter it’s we repeatedly do, assume, or really feel.
Removed from being mounted from delivery the mind is definitely essentially the most changeable organ within the physique. Repetition of a habits, whether or not psychological, emotional, or bodily, quickly causes new neural circuits to type within the mind. Even as few as half a dozen repetitions of a brand new habits could cause a brand new circuit to type within the mind to help that new habits.
Meditation
The best instrument for rewiring the mind for delicate notion is meditation. It allows us to sluggish, and, in the end, cease fully, the automated firing of our recurring sense-supporting mind circuitry, thus slowing down or stopping the continual neural fireworks present that leaves us dazzled and preoccupied with the bodily world, thereby successfully crowding out any risk of delicate notion.
Stillness and inward absorption are the keys to deep meditation. From the attitude of neuroscience, bodily stillness reduces the variety of sensory nerve alerts coming from physique to mind, and, in consequence, calms the fireworks storm in our sense-supporting neural circuits. Meditation additionally calms the fireworks storm by methodically drawing our consideration inward and away from our sense-stimulated and ongoing chain-reaction of ideas, recollections, and feelings.
Meditation, nonetheless, goes past merely not stimulating our recurring mind circuitry. Relaxed focus on the level between the eyebrows—a typical function of many meditation strategies—prompts the prefrontal cortex of the mind. The activation of the prefrontal cortex naturally deactivates the remainder of the mind. Because the circuits in the remainder of the mind deactivate, the fireworks show of steady ideas, recollections, and feelings slows dramatically.
As our consciousness of our bodily physique fades, and our stream of ideas, recollections, and feelings slows, we naturally and effortlessly understand the extra delicate realities that lie past sensory consciousness. We could really feel the joys of our life power transferring within the core of our being. We could really feel our coronary heart opening, like a clenched muscle enjoyable, and we could expertise transferring emotions of peace, love, concord, and pleasure. We might even see mild or have inspiring intuitive insights. And that’s solely the start.
Meditation Rewires Our Mind for Stillness and Inward Absorption
Common follow of meditation, like every repetitive habits, types supportive new neural circuitry. As soon as neural circuits type to help meditation, each time we sit to meditate neural meditation-habit circuits will fireplace to loosen up or contract numerous muscular tissues to help sitting with stillness, in addition to to sluggish breath and coronary heart price. Neural circuits will fireplace to extend blood movement, and thus vitality, to our pre-frontal cortex making focus simpler. Different neural circuits will fireplace that inhibit sensory info from reaching our consciousness—simply as sensory info is inhibited from reaching our consciousness after we are asleep. Different neural circuits will fireplace that inhibit bodily motion—simply as bodily motion is inhibited after we are asleep.
In the identical means that we are able to rather more simply play a musical instrument as soon as we’ve practiced lengthy sufficient for supporting neural circuits to type, stillness and inward absorption, too, turn out to be a lot simpler to attain with the formation of supporting neural circuits. Higher but, simply because the continued devoted follow of a musical instrument will type ever extra advanced neural circuits to help enjoying our instrument with larger and larger proficiency, so continued devoted follow of meditation will type ever extra advanced neural circuits to help an increasing number of profound transcendent experiences.
Most inexperienced persons discover meditation a problem. It’s troublesome to remain nonetheless. The thoughts is as stressed because the proverbial monkey. However should you keep together with your meditation follow, your newly forming neural circuits will come to your rescue. In time meditation will really feel as pure as pondering. In time additionally, you will discover that your neural meditation circuits will fireplace even within the midst of exercise and routinely stimulate meditative calm, readability of thoughts, and consciousness of delicate feeling.
The distinction between most of us and a saint or sage is that via their deep and common follow of meditation—and the ensuing deep and repeated immersion in delicate realities—they’ve shaped sturdy and sophisticated neural behavior circuits that make delicate consciousness as regular as bodily consciousness. The saints and sages, nonetheless, additionally stay in a position to perform within the bodily world. Actually, they turn out to be extra productive, artistic, and energetic. Even when absolutely engaged with individuals and tasks, nonetheless, they continue to be immersed in transcendent peace, love, and pleasure, within the fixed realization of the Self in God. They’ve the perfect of each worlds.
Meditation Rewires All the Mind
The second means that meditation rewires our mind is to allow optimistic psychological, emotional, and bodily well being. Simply as a rising tide raises all boats, so too the expertise of deep states of leisure, transcendent pleasure, or sacred growth into our larger actuality, successfully, effectively, and beneficially rewires not simply the prefrontal cortex however all of our mind.
Meditation has been confirmed to make lasting structural adjustments within the mind in help of quite a lot of actions:
- growing theta waves to deepen our consideration
- enabling optimistic emotion and empathy by effecting adjustments within the amygdala
- decreasing or inhibiting worry, nervousness, and different adverse feelings
- bettering studying and reminiscence
- serving to to beat childhood trauma
- positively altering habits and temper
The adjustments that happen in your mind while you’re meditating construct up over time to provide exceptional shifts in cognition and mind construction. The meditating mind is a really cool factor. —Richard Davidson, Founder, College of Wisconsin’s Madison Middle for Wholesome Minds
By decreasing stress, meditation additionally stimulates wholesome physiological processes reminiscent of detoxing, elimination, digestion, promotes therapeutic, and even prompts genes that have an effect on our bodily, psychological, and emotional well being. Meditation turns into, in time, essentially the most important optimistic affect on our well being and wellbeing.
It’s fascinating to see the mind’s plasticity and that, by working towards meditation, we are able to play an lively position in altering the mind and may improve our well-being and high quality of life. —Dr. Britta Hölzel, first writer of the groundbreaking Harvard College research on meditation and bodily change within the mind
The Deeper Our Meditation, the Extra Quickly We Rewire the Mind
The extra deeply we meditate, the extra our consideration shifts from the bodily world to extra delicate realities; the extra deeply our consideration shifts from the bodily world to extra delicate realities, the extra quickly our mind is rewired.
Individuals who have had near-death experiences, who’ve skilled profound emotional launch and surpassing heart-opening emotions, usually share, even years after their expertise, that their lives had been profoundly modified. Lengthy afterward they proceed to really feel totally different. Not solely had been they mentally, emotionally, and spiritually remodeled through the expertise itself however, on returning to consciousness of this world, they even discovered a major diploma of that transformation remained completely. The neural behavior circuits that help even deeply rooted, recurring adverse feelings, reminiscent of fearfulness, buried anger, emotional wounds, or lifetime anxieties, in uncommon situations have been, as the results of deep and highly effective transcendent expertise, immediately rewired into new and optimistic neural behavior circuits.
An Enlightenment expertise radically rearranges many neuronal connections in a comparatively quick time. The result’s an incredible profit to our mind and physique as we uncover new optimistic methods of pondering, feeling, and experiencing the world round us. [I]ntense religious practices…can break down the neurological circuits that hold previous beliefs firmly rooted in place and remodel the methods we predict and behave. —Dr. Andrew Newberg, How Enlightenment Adjustments Your Mind
In deep meditation…the relaxed vitality of the thoughts, concentrated within the mind, [goes] deep into the mind grooves the place habits are secreted, and cauterizes [negative] habits. —Paramhansa Yogananda, Kriya Yoga Grasp
Deep transcendent expertise additionally adjustments the psychological and emotional convictions held in our vitality physique. When these psychological and emotional convictions undergo fast change, the neural circuitry of our mind is equally quickly and completely rewired to help our new psychological and emotional convictions.
Individuals over the millennia have reported having deeply transferring non secular experiences and a portion of these experiences have been encounters with what the particular person regards as “God” or “final actuality.” In a survey of hundreds of people that reported having skilled private encounters with God, Johns Hopkins researchers report that…a majority of respondents attributed lasting optimistic adjustments of their psychological well being—e.g., life satisfaction, goal and that means—even many years after their preliminary expertise. —John Hopkins Drugs on-line bulletin
I used to be mendacity in a subject underneath a tree pondering relatively deeply of affection and the enjoyment it brings. Out of the blue…all materialism disappeared fully, and I felt like a torch burning within the darkness. I gave the impression to be stuffed with the rays of the solar. This expertise lasted for about three minutes. It’s fascinating to notice that my habits sample has modified since this expertise. —Nameless contributor to the e book Seeing the Invisible
Though awakening experiences usually solely final from a couple of moments to a couple hours, they ceaselessly have a life-changing impact. Many individuals described an awakening expertise as essentially the most important second of their lives, reporting a serious change of their perspective on life, and of their values. —Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Religious Awakening
We could not ourselves have such a dramatic or sudden life-changing expertise as these described above, however any meditation throughout which we immediately and movingly expertise delicate actuality will change our psychological and emotional convictions; the deeper the expertise, the extra quickly our mind is rewired. Meditation faucets into an influence that adjustments us, faucets into an “unseen supply” that uplifts us, faucets right into a Pleasure that strikes us as nothing else can.
Meditation Is the Key to Self-Realization
Meditation rewires our mind to expertise delicate actuality. The extra deeply we meditate, the extra fully our mind is rewired to permit clear consciousness of our indissoluble unity with the infinite Consciousness from which all creation springs.
That is the expertise of God, or, simply as meaningfully, the expertise of our Self or Soul. As a result of we’re godlike in our essence, inextricably one with God, the expertise isn’t reserved just for cloistered nuns or yogis in distant Himalayan caves. Anybody, anyplace, who achieves deep stillness and full interior absorption share the identical common expertise.
The upper our thoughts is raised to the contemplation of religious issues the extra it’s abstracted from wise issues. However the remaining time period to which contemplation can probably arrive is the divine substance. Due to this fact the thoughts that sees the divine substance have to be completely divorced from the bodily senses, both by loss of life or by some rapture.
—St. Thomas AquinasSoul and thoughts immediately misplaced their bodily bondage, and streamed out like a fluid piercing mild from my each pore. The flesh was as if lifeless, but in my intense consciousness I knew that by no means earlier than had I been absolutely alive. —Paramhansa Yogananda
The physique, the earth, the celebs, the galaxies melted into an enormous unity—and I used to be part of this unity. Limitless and timeless my consciousness hovered in a pulsating eternity. —Frédéric Lionel, French thinker
Oh, marvel of wonders, after I consider the union the soul has with God! He makes the enraptured soul to flee out of herself, for she isn’t any extra glad with something that may be named. The spring of Divine Love flows out of the soul and attracts her out of herself into the unnamed Being, into her first supply, which is God alone. —Meister Eckhart, German theologian, thinker, and mystic
This new expertise bestows new enlightenment which locations the experiencer on a brand new airplane of existence. There may be an indescribable feeling of elation and indescribable pleasure and Bliss. He experiences a way of universality, a Consciousness of Everlasting Life. It isn’t a mere conviction. He really feels it. —Swami Sivananda
One turns into wholly Thoughts, the One Thoughts of God, through which exists all-knowledge, all-power, and all-presence. —Walter Russell, sculptor, musician, writer, thinker, and mystic
That mild is the very essence, the center, and soul, the all-consuming consummation of ecstatic ecstasy. It’s a million suns of compressed love dissolving all the things unto itself, annihilating thought and cell, vaporizing humanness and historical past, into the one nice brilliance of all that’s and all that ever was and all that ever shall be. You realize it’s God. Nobody has to inform you. You realize. —P.M.H. Atwater, near-death experiencer
The potential for the conclusion—the entire expertise and consciousness—of our Self in God is confirmed many times, in all ages and in each tradition, by saints, sages, saviors, and near-death experiencers. Such expertise has impressed the paranormal teachings of all religions. Such experience is the essence—and the promise—of all religions.
Lest self-realization appears too excessive a mountain to climb, the excellent news, for many who, like me, have but to grasp excellent stillness and full interior absorption, is that meditation brings many advantages lengthy earlier than full self-realization is achieved. The advantages infuse one’s complete life: decreased bodily and emotional stress, a sense of well-being, enhanced readability of thoughts, elevated vitality, improved well being, and deepened compassion and love—to call however a couple of.
- Follow meditation usually and you’ll uncover an inexhaustible nicely of Pleasure that can imbue your life with happiness regardmuch less of outer circumstances.
- Follow meditation extra deeply but and you’ll uncover a loving and clever Presence responding to you and sending waves of affection and pleasure coursing via your being.
- Follow meditation to perfection, attaining excellent stillness and interior absorption, and you’ll notice your Self in God.
In deep meditation…the relaxed vitality of the thoughts, concentrated within the mind, [goes]deep into the mind grooves…and cauterizes habits. -Paramhansa Yogananda
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Selbie’s new e book, Break By the Limits of the Mind, Pink Wheel/Weiser, provides fascinating scientific help for Yogananda’s intuitive perception into neuroplasticity and explores in depth the neuroscience of meditation and Self-realization.
