I have often been intrigued by claims of my friends and kin who had extra sensory perceptions and visions of divine interventions in their lives .Once they have had an encounter with a deity either in their wakeful state or dream, the experience becomes a testimony to believe in such supernatural powers on their special terms and conditions. I used to meet several people who had apparitions of Jesus, Krsna, Mother Mary, various groups of Angels and demons and so on. To them it was so real that I neither had any way of disproving it, nor authentically verifying their claims. I used to wonder why I could not see such imageries when they could see it right under my nose! Auditory and visual experiences with the dead ancestors or Gods were like day to day experience for some people and they would vividly describe those experiences in great details. When I discovered the beauty of happiness and peace without hankering for any such supernatural or extra sensory perceptions just by simply being as ordinary as you truly are, such visual and auditory paraphernalia faded as trivial phenomenon like any movie you see in a dream. However, I was curious as to why a certain section of people are highly charged with such “UFO” phenomenon! I did not want to understand this phenomenon from any spiritual guides or archives. Instead I chose to deal with neurology. Even psychiatry and psychology were relatively vague in spite of their proven examples of success in understanding the hallucinations in the brain. Our brains are continuously bombarded with sensory inputs that get processed modularly as well as holistically in different modules of brain. All of these inputs must be coherently brought into a perspective after running them through stored memory in the brain. The prolific nature of the data need to be sifted and fitted into a consistent story that aligns itself with the “belief system” you already have. Our left hemisphere of the brain applies logic and skillful maneuvers to any new input or information in order to fit it into the pre-existing beliefs and views. What would you do if a piece of information that gets into your left hemisphere does not fit into a pre-existing world view or the belief system you already have? If you are continuously bombarded with such inputs, your left brain will start spinning and you can go really mad within yourself! The left hemisphere produces a kind of coherence by combining all the inputs and benchmarking it against the memory. If a person is confronted by several anomalies that were not consistent with his original belief system, a new belief system will gradually evolve and get coalesced in the brain. When two belief systems insulated from each other try to co-exist in the brain, this person will start creating multiple personalities. In normal circumstances, the left hemisphere of the brain tries to ignore or distort the anomaly in order to squeeze it not the pre-existing models of your belief systems so that it can preserve the stability. This is the essential rationale behind denials, repressions and confabulations and other forms of self-delusion that govern our daily lives. As a result, you may be “lying” to yourself . Most of us accept that compromises are part of life and it is better to have a stable belief system consistently rather than drifting toward multiple personality disorder. The tendency of our left hemisphere of the brain is what I think Sigmund Freud terms as “ego”. Even as normal healthy persons, we resort to denials, repressions and confabulations to protect our belief systems. In some mental and neuro patients it is possible that such defense mechanisms are grossly exaggerated. A person physically paralyzed on the left side of his body is likely to keep lying to himself that his left arm is as healthy as or even healthier than the right arm! In contrast our right hemisphere of the brain plays an entirely different role with a complimentary strategy. When the anomalous information reaches a particular threshold, the right hemisphere of the brain decides that it has to play the role of a “devil’s advocate” and question the status quo and force a complete revision of the existing model and start from scratch. If the ego is strongly entrenched in you, it becomes a difficult job because we are more accustomed to using our left brain most of the time in our wakeful state. This is why the ego shells become hard to crack as the left hemisphere always tries to cling tenaciously to the way things are. For denial is something we do all our lives, whether we are temporarily ignoring the “to do list” in our daily worksheet or defiantly denying the finality and humiliation of death. When you understand both the phenomena unfolding in your brain, you can step back a little and watch yourself. Then, in reality, what are you? Are you the ego coalesced by your belief system or the devil’s advocate of your right brain? If you see both then you are not either of them . Are you the light that projects those pictures on to the screen of your life?..Or may be, are you the screen on to which these living experiences play like a movie?.. Or may be you are both the screen, the light and the projector and the memory film through which this light has to pass through . Who are you? What is our self? The greatness of the purpose of life is to unfold this mystery which is enfolded in you. This is not a destination to reach.. This is your true beingness.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 01:41:04 +0000
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