The totality of the interactions of the trinity of mind, brain, and consciousness are mysterious and seldom considered. Each in themselves is an area of mystery. Adding to these the mysteries of our DNA and genetic makeup makes life a playground of seeking knowledge into our being of “who we are.” In other words, we need to know ourselves as the Greek Philosopher Chilon of Sparta’s maxim states: “Know Thyself.” This was one of the three primary maxims found inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at the ancient oracle site of Delphi, Greece. The other two are “Nothing in Excess” (meden agan) and “Keep the Measure.”
Knowing ourselves, self-knowledge, means exploring and understanding our consciousness, our mind and our brain and their effect on our DNA and genetic makeup. With the debilitating effects of our culture and environment on our minds and brains, the scourge of brain-linked ailments is rampant in our society. A scourge which may be reduced and repealed. But how? With this being said, let’s explore our trinity in seeking knowledge of ourselves and solutions to the mental/brain blight.
Consciousness[i]
Of the three, consciousness is the most mysterious and little thought is given to it. Ironically, one of the reasons is due to dualistic minds, beliefs and practices based on science being a dualistic paradigm, which separates itself from spirit. As science can’t quantify consciousness, can’t be measured, poked or prodded, means it takes a backseat to the mind and the brain.
When we consider sacred science or the blending of science and spirit, Consciousness becomes the most important and foundation of our trinity. Our thoughts and their patterns (mind) flow from our consciousness. This affects our minds, which then affects our brains. A “loop” is created where mind affects brain, brain affects mind, mind affects brain, and so forth. And one step further, our mind affects our body, our body (heart) affects our mind and so forth. But it all begins with our consciousness.
There are eight stages of consciousness, a ninth consciousness and our awakened state of heart-mind consciousness. But in simplified terms, foundationally there are two: a consciousness of dualism and a radical nondualistic consciousness. A consciousness of dualism is one of separation (either-or) while a radical nondualistic consciousness is one of unity or oneness (blending together of the binaries).
Of the eight stages, the first five are our senses: visual consciousness discerns form, hearing consciousness discerns sounds, taste conscious discerns taste, smell consciousness discerns smells, and touch consciousness discerns tactile sensations. Our sense consciousness is essential to the overall health of our bodies, minds, and spirits and the awakening of our divine starlight. You may see the Pandora effect of the unbridled technological advance based solely on capitalist gain without concern for the totality of people’s bodies, minds, and spirits. The bottom line: humanity’s sensory consciousness is deadening, affecting people’s sense of reality, common sense, and connection to the earth and nature.
The next stage after sense consciousness is the one where we will focus our attention: mind and thought consciousness—conscious mind. After mind and thought consciousness is Storehouse Consciousness (subconscious – 1st Attention then 2nd Attention), then we have supraconsciousness – soul consciousness.
Mind
Our conscious mind is based on either dualism or a radical nondualistic consciousness. For the majority of people, their worldview is dualism—separation of the binaries such as male and female, spirit and matter, the brain’s right hemisphere and the brain’s left hemisphere. Take a moment and ponder how this consciousness feeds the fires and flames of tribalism, sexism, and racism to name just a few resulting from a mindset of dualism. Unity of the binaries only comes from a consciousness of radical nonduality. To reach a consciousness of oneness or radical nonduality requires the transitional state of heart-mind consciousness.
Heart-Mind Consciousness
Our heart-mind consciousness is our awakening and awakened minds. It is still corruptible and deluded but awakening to the reality of interpenetrating radical nonduality. It is a shift from viewing life totally from the I position to one where the I and the we interpenetrate—the I in the we, and the we in the I.
Our consciousness flows from our hearts through our minds—the sun of our hearts gives light to the moon of our minds. We no longer recognize people by race and gender but as human beings with a divine spark within. Judgments and discernments are not made on a label of color or sex but based on the person’s actions to us and to others.
Brain, DNA[ii] and Genetics
There are five areas we will explore: Chronic Stress Prematurely Ages Our Brain, Meditation Rewires Our Brain, Our Brain Learns By Doing, Our Thoughts Affect Our Genes, and Growing Older May Make Us Smarter.
Chronic Stress Prematurely Ages Our Brain: Stress is a fact of life; what’s damaging is the distress we feel internally in response to it. According to Howard Fillit, MD, clinical professor of geriatrics and medicine at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, “points to the body-wide reaction our bodies experience when we routinely respond to stress by going into fight-or-flight mode. In our brains, the stress response can cause memory and other aspects of cognition to become impaired, which is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and accelerated memory loss with aging. One thing that can happen is you can start feeling a lot older, mentally, than you are.”
Studies at the University of California–San Francisco have shown that repeated instances of the stress response (and their accompanying floods of cortisol) can cause shrinkage of the hippocampus — a key part of the brain’s limbic system vital to both stress regulation and long-term memory.
To protect the brain from cortisol-related premature aging, build stress disruptors into your regular routine: such as a short walk or sitting in nature doing nothing, eat breakfast every day, and practice deep slow breathing while doing nothing.
Meditation Rewires Our Brain: This is a natural follow-up to the above. According to Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, PhD, “Of all the mental trainings — affirmations, psychotherapy, positive thinking, yoga — the one that has been far and away the most studied, in terms of effects on the brain, is meditation.”
“Stimulating areas of the brain that handle positive emotions strengthens those neural networks, just as working muscles strengthens them,” Hanson says. The inverse is also true, he explains: “If you routinely think about things that make you feel mad or wounded, you are sensitizing and strengthening the amygdala, which is primed to respond to negative experiences. So, it will become more reactive, and you will get more upset more easily in the future.”
By contrast, meditative practices stimulate the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain’s outermost layer that controls attention (this is how meditation can lead to greater mindfulness {no mind chatter}, Hanson explains), as well as the insula, which controls interoception — the internal awareness of one’s own body. “Being in tune with your body via interoception keeps you from damaging it when you exercise,” Hanson says, “as well as building that pleasant, simple sense of being ‘in your body.’” Another plus of a strong insula is an increased sensitivity to “gut feelings” and intuitions and greater empathy with others.
“Deciding to be mindful (in present moment with no mind chatter or talk) can alter your brain so that being mindful is easier and more natural,” he explains. “In other words, you can use your mind to change your brain to affect your mind.”
Our Brain Learns By Doing: The mirror neuron system is the name for those regions of the brain with synapses that fire whether you’re actually doing or merely watching an action — as long as you’ve done it previously. Doing an action lays down neural connections that fire again when you watch the same action. The existence of the mirror system helps explain why learning a new skill is easier if you try doing it early in life.
In the human brain, entire regions light up in response to a familiar action; this endows us with a full-fledged mirror system. Additionally, the mirror system is also what endows us with the empathic ability to feel the pain or joy of others, based on what we register on their faces. “When we see someone else suffering or in pain, mirror neurons help us to read her or his facial expression and actually make us feel the suffering or the pain of the other person. These moments are the foundation of empathy,” according to UCLA neurologist Marco Iacoboni, MD, PhD.
Far Traveling, wandering to distant lands into the unknown and interacting with peoples different from our own, builds our empathic mirror system. Far Traveling is not vacation. A Far Traveler goes on holiday (Holy Day) and is not a tourist but an adventurer, a pilgrim of spirit on a journey of self-knowledge. The word itself means going out and finding something. And that something equates to many things: finding our true self, compassion, love of self and nature, and accepting and understanding our self and others not like us, the roots of empathy.
Our Thoughts Affect Our Genes: We tend to think of our genetic heritage as a “done deal.” But, in fact, our genes are open to being influenced throughout our lifetime, both by what we do and by what we think, feel and believe. The new and growing field of “epigenetics” studies extra-cellular factors that influence genetic expression. While you may have heard that genes can be influenced by diet and exercise, many researchers are now exploring the ways that thoughts, feelings and beliefs can exert the same epigenetic effect. It turns out that the chemicals catalyzed by our mental activity can interact with our genes in a powerful way. Much like the impacts of diet, exercise and environmental toxins, various thought patterns have been shown to turn certain genes “on” or “off.”
Researcher Dawson Church, PhD, explores the relationship between thought and belief patterns and the expression of healing- or disease-related genes. “Your body reads your mind,” Church says. “Science is discovering that while we may have a fixed set of genes in our chromosomes, which of those genes is active has a great deal to do with our subjective experiences, and how we process them.”
As we think, we become; our body influences our mind and our mind influences our body. And our worldview and our thought processes are ruled by our foundational consciousness.
Our soul’s DNA may affect our thoughts and patterns at various times during our life. Awakening will assist in activating our soul’s DNA.
Growing Older May Make Us Smarter: Brain scientists used to be convinced that the main “driver” of brain aging was loss of neurons — brain-cell death. But new scanning technology has shown that most brains maintain most of their neurons over time. And, while some aspects of the aging process do involve losses — to memory, to reaction time — there are also some net gains.
What researches call a “neat trick” for net gain is named: “bilateralization.” This involves using both the brain’s right and left hemispheres at once. What the researchers don’t realize, this is the awakened consciousness of radical nonduality, the interpenetration of both hemispheres. I refer to this state as a “strong mind.”
When the two hemispheres of our brains are united in an interpenetration of the logical and the intuitive, we experience reality not as separate from us but as a part of us and us as a part of it. This breaks down the barrier between our ordinary minds and our enlightened minds. The mirror of our minds will then reflect things in their true, original state.
There still may be dust on our mirrors, but we will see clearer than the ones that remain stuck in a dualistic reality. When we realize that reality is not based on an either-or paradigm of dualism, we will finally discover a great peace within ourselves. There is great solace in knowing that we may be both enlightened as well as deluded. We do not have to be one or the other. We do not have to win or lose. This shift alone will transform us from self-centered beings into divine human beings that are participating in a journey of life and experience along with all other humans and all other creatures of the earth.
Our minds become purer and calmer when we view and sense reality as united, not as a separate thing that may threaten our egotistic sense of safety and security. When we can see ourselves in all other things, not only another human being, but animals, moths, trees, and so forth, we achieve a state of being that is peaceful, benevolent, compassionate, and empathic. This is something not just achievable in meditation, but more importantly, in every waking second of our lives.
One final point as we age, our minds/brains need to be challenged to seek knowledge not known by us. We need to discover, explore the far reaches; not only do we need to far travel into the unknown but, as well, our minds need to seek what is not known. As it has been said: we need to “Boldly Go Where No Man/Woman Has Gone Before…”
Ninth Consciousness
If there were not a ninth conscious, each of us would be separate from, and not a part of, the web of life—islands isolated unto ourselves. Just as the sixth great element, divine consciousness, interpenetrates the other five elements of space, air, fire, water, and earth (physically and metaphysically), it also interpenetrates our individual eight states of consciousness. Our ninth means that the observer and the observed, self and other, are not separate but are connected in a oneness of being. We are not our brothers’ or sisters’ keepers, but we are our brothers or sisters.[iii] We are truly one with the divine.
[i] Consciousness is fully explained in my book Do You Like Jesus—Not the Church?, 216 – 219.
[ii] There are two bloodlines. Every human being has not only an ancestral line of the earth but also an angelic lineage of the heavens. Our earthly bloodline flows from our parents’ ancestral lines, while our heavenly evolution stems from our previous incarnations.
Each of us has two lineages. This is one of the reasons why there is emotional confusion surrounding the fetus and life. Of course, there is an emotional attachment to the feelings of having life growing within you. Yes, it is alive, just as the heart of the mother is alive. Yet, it is not a soulful human being at this point in time. It is developing its earthly DNA lineage. It is a potential human being, as it has not as yet interpenetrated with its soulful heavenly lineage. This occurs at birth with the first breath of life, God’s breath, and the descent of the heavenly DNA—the golden dew.
All of the mysteries of life are amazing as witnessed by the descent and entrance of the heavenly DNA—the golden dew—at birth, which results in our initial sound of power. Our birth cry is not the first sound that we make on earth. Our first sound is the sound of God’s breath (our soul) entering our mortal body—silent as it may be. Then our soul’s cry—I exist. (Do You Like Jesus—Not the Church?, 152 – 153.)
[iii] Just as humanity in Divine Humanity represents not only the human race but all things of creation, brother or sister means all things of creation.