Trancendance from a scientific perspective?
Now that I have achieved many of the goals I set out for myself over the last six months or so, I thought about what was next. The answer came to me when I was casually surfing the Internet one evening. I came accross a course to train to be a practicing hypnotherapist, nlp practitioner and also gain a certificate in stress management.
This last weekend was my first weekend on the course.
On day1, the trainer did a class induction which I found to be very interesting, as I saw a great similarity in the way he did the relaxation technique to the tai chi micro-cosmic orbit. They were basically the same thing!?
I continuously see similarities in all forms of therapies, all spiritual books, all the concepts of personal growth be it being a lowly pickup artist, top entrepreneur in training, all the way through to becoming a spiritualist, or tai chi master. The similarities I see are to do mostly with a learned model of acceptance. This model can be applied either mentally, physically or both. In the case of spirituality, desired states are brought about by total body/spirit/mind acceptance. It is not surprising that all therapies involve a system of release, but I find myself asking the question - Why does the brain not have the ability to self regulate in this area?
To effectively answer this question is well beyond my current scope of knowledge, but we have to start somewhere…
When studying articles of brain waves, I came across this article, where:
“the Dalai Lama said. Could it work the other way around? That is, in addition to the brain giving rise to thoughts and hopes and beliefs and emotions that add up to this thing we call the mind, maybe the mind also acts back on the brain to cause physical changes in the very matter that created it. If so, then pure thought would change the brain’s activity, its circuits or even its structure.”
http://www.dalailama.com/news.112.htm
I am certainly with him in that the brain can essentially rewire itself, but to what extent?
And if the wiring of the brain denotes a change in perspective, where are the limits to the perspectives that we can experience?
It has long been a desire of mine to begin to study EEG and the field of neurofeedback. I see this as the next possible step when my course is over. A recent product that I have been watching eagerly is the OCZ Neural Impulse Activator. I’m am not interested in its use as a games device, but as a desktop replacement and research device.
Which led me back here:
Here it is stated that “One person also reports that frequencies at the other end of the spectrum, i.e. high frequencies above beta frequencies, can be associated with lightening-fast reactions and ’slowing down time’.”
Now, for some reason I find this somewhat confusing. The talk is of speeding up brainwaves results in a slow down of time, but anybody who has read any Eckhart Tolle, or practiced meditation knows that time slows when the number of thoughts are reduced. This is what the spiritual experience is all about.
How I understand this is as follows:
When the frequency of brain waves moves high into the gamma range, increased brain activity is possible. To the untrained mind this results in increased noise, and thus increased thoughts. To the trained mind, somehow the ability to filter traffic is in place. This means that the higher speed of thought combined with the ability to filter out thoughts creates higher brain function.
Having studied Krishnamurti, who states that time is the product of thought, it could be deduced that this trained filtering ability is the cause of the experience of transcendence.
Perhaps the experience of transcendence, is actually the mind utilising the higher brain function so as to rapidly flip from one thought to another, and so experience seeing all things at once?
This would be where Einsteins relativity would come in to play. I feel that all of these ideas are intrinsically linked. I just don’t know how.