This is a fantastic series of lectures by the psychiatrist Daniel Siegel MD given at the Upaya Zen Center. He is explaining brain function. This in-depth look is interspersed with meditation sessions and contemplation exercises that compliment all the information.
I am utterly fascinated learning about the brain. The healthy functioning of this organ determines our experience of life and our experience of life has an effect on the functioning of the brain. But the most mind-blowing, mysterious and mystical question is where is the self that ultimately receives the information the brain interprets from the outside world. I ask myself this question in meditation: If I follow the data received by my senses, the sounds that I hear, the feel of the clothes on my skin, the air surrounding my body, the light hitting my eyes, if I follow this sensory information to its source of interpretation in the brain, where does the information go to? In other words, who or what is the consciousness that is ultimately aware of the living picture my brain makes of the world?
I don’t want to answer that question intellectually. I have heard the answer the traditions have given. And science cannot explain how inert matter creates consciousness. The question for me is an honest investigation. Who or what am I? What happens for me is not an answer, per se, but the dissolution of the question. When my mind, the mind that usually asks and answers ordinary questions, investigates this thread, at a certain point it must slip away, relinquish control and accept that the answer is in the realm of the unknowable, only in the realm of the be-able. It is unknowable and yet it would not be true to say that there isn’t something there. Clearly there is something. There is something that is aware of the typing of this sentence. There is something that is aware of the words on the screen. This something is… IS. Staggering, mind-blowing, knee-buckling, jaw-dropping! Look for yourself! What do you find?
Ryan
Spencer
Clare
jennybe
LeAnn
lovingtruth
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Jamie
Hi! It looks like we have some shared interests! Check out these posts and let me know what you think.
http://deistneurobiology.wordpress.com/
I too am interested in knowing about the brain and how it creates what we see, in particular the god experience.
No, this was not the idea. I meant God has put this ‘somenthing’, Ryan was after, into us and it remains in us. It may be part of God or a mystery, like ‘God’ itself is, depending on your belief.
Aren’t you moved to tears realizing this? If I am present to it I’d be crying/emoting all the time!
So… here’s as close as I can come to articulating the indescribable… when I look for a “self,” a “me,” I can’t find one. There are thoughts that fire in coherent patterns. The brain strings these thoughts together into a story. Just like watching a movie which is actually individual pictures played at 20 frames per second that create the illusion of a coherent story in time, the brain is doing the same thing. Putting together bits of information that create the story of me, the experience I am having in this moment, thinking what I’m going to write, the feeling of my fingers touching the keypad… the experience of “me” in this moment. This appearence is essentially empty. Have you heard of Indra’s net of jewels? Every jewel is shining like the stars in the sky but each one is a reflecting the light of every other. A paradox. A beautiful mystery. There is an experience of mind, of me, which is seen by… what? Who is looking? Who is observing the dance of the universe?
You say what is looking was left by God. Can you explain? How do you know? For me, If I’m really honest with myself, I can’t tell any stories about the origin of the universe. All I know is this mysterious, amazing, miraculous inconceivable moment arising in consciousness.
What do you mean “left”? Then we are still separate from God?
Response to the response of Linda/Mom: I feel it is what God left in us.
Shall we call it God? Is God the presence?Am I God?