French philosopher René Descartes famously concluded that the mind and the brain existed as entirely separate entities (a position now known as Cartesian dualism) and believed that pineal gland was the point at which the two interacted.
This was due to the fact that that, unlike most other structures in the brain, there is only one pineal gland and it is located exactly along the midline.
Archive for the ‘Neurology’ Category
Brain sand
Saturday, June 19th, 2010Aristotle’s Error
Monday, March 15th, 2010From Aristotle’s Error:
[C]ells in early-processing brain areas are each sensitive mainly to changes in just one visual parameter, not to others. For instance, in the primary visual cortex (V1, also called area 17), the main feature extracted is the orientation of edges. In the area known as V4 in the temporal lobes, cells react to color (or, strictly speaking, to wavelengths of light, with different cells responding to different wavelengths). Cells in the area called MT are mainly interested in direction of movement.
That’s relevant because a few years ago I came across (in here, I think) the easily-offended aboriginal anthropologist Alice Beck Kehoe trying to refute the idea that primitive cave-paintings of form constants had anything to do with the perceptions in altered states of consciousness, by bringing up an artist-friend of hers who had drawn similar images, but explicitly with no spiritual origins—rather, he was just exploring the edges of objects in his paintings.
Why did the suggestion that cave paintings are accurate transcriptions of forms seen in altered states of consciousness bug Kehoe so much? Simply because she thought it meant that (esp. white) anthropologists were saying that such primitive people couldn’t distinguish between reality and their drug/dancing-induced (primary visual cortex) hallucinations. She’s utterly wrong about that, of course: It’s precisely because people such as the Jivaro can distinguish between hallucinated form constants and their daily lives that they take the former as being the archetypal basis of the latter.
The Happiness Hypothesis
Monday, February 15th, 2010Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (p. 5-6):
Our intestines are lined by a vast network of more than 100 million neurons; these handle all the computations needed to run the chemical refinery that processes and extracts nutrients from food. The gut brain is like a regional administrative center that handles stuff the head brain does not need to bother with. You might expect, then, that this gut brain takes its orders from the head brain and does as it is told. But the gut brain possesses a high degree of autonomy, and it continues to function well even if the vagus nerve, which connects the two brains together, is severed….
The gut brain makes its independence known in many ways: It causes irritable bowel syndrome when it “decides” to flush out the intestines. It triggers anxiety in the head brain when it detects infections in the gut, leading you to act in more cautious ways that are appropriate when you are sick. And it reacts in unexpected ways to anything that affects its main neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine and serotonin. Hence, many of the initial side effects of Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors involve nausea and changes in bowel function. Trying to improve the workings of the head brain can directly interfere with those of the gut brain. The independence of the gut brain, combined with the autonomic nature of changes to the genitals, probably contributed to ancient Indian theories in which the abdomen contains the lower three chakras—energy centers corresponding to the colon/anus, sexual organs, and gut. The gut chakra is even said to be the source of gut feelings and intuitions, that is, ideas that appear to come from somewhere outside one’s own mind.
At an intuitive level, we all believe in karma, the Hindu notion that people reap what they sow. The psychologist Mel Lerner has demonstrated that we are so motivated to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get that we often blame the victim of a tragedy, particularly when we can’t achieve justice by punishing a perpetrator or compensating the victim….
[B]elief in postmortem justice shows two signs of primitive moral thinking. In the 1920s [Jean Piaget] found that, as children develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of right and wrong, they go through a phase in which many rules take on a kind of sacredness and unchangeability. During this phase, children believe in “immanent justice”—justice that is inherent in an act itself. In this stage, they think that if they break rules, even accidentally, something bad will happen to them.
Cf. taboos in hunter-gatherer societies, of course.
Immanent justice shows up in adults, too, particularly when it comes to explaining illness and grave misfortune…. [W]hen illness strikes and Westerners ask, “Why me?” one of the places they often look for answers is to their past trangressions. The belief that God or fate will dole out rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior seems on its face to be a cosmic extension of our childhood belief in immanent justice, which is itself a part of our obsession with [evolutionary psychology-based] reciprocity.
Biblio: Haidt, Jonathan (2006), The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books).
Brain surgery boosts spirituality
Thursday, February 11th, 2010Brain surgery boosts spirituality:
Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas.
To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not the case for patients with tumours removed from the frontal regions of the brain….
The authors pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external world. The authors of the study in the journal Neuron1, say that their findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling detached from the body.
Out of LSD?
Saturday, October 24th, 2009From Out of LSD? Just 15 Minutes of Sensory Deprivation Triggers Hallucinations:
You don’t need psychedelic drugs to start seeing colors and objects that aren’t really there. Just 15 minutes of near-total sensory deprivation can bring on hallucinations in many otherwise sane individuals.
Psychologists stuck 19 healthy volunteers into a sensory-deprivation room, completely devoid of light and sound, for 15 minutes. Without the normal barrage of sensory information flooding their brains, many people reported experiencing visual hallucinations, paranoia and a depressed mood.
“This is a pretty robust finding,” wrote psychiatrist Paul Fletcher of the University of Cambridge, who studies psychosis but was not involved in the study. “It appears that, when confronted by lack of sensory patterns in our environment, we have a natural tendency to superimpose our own patterns”….
Among the nine participants who scored high on the first survey, five reported having hallucinations of faces during the sensory deprivation, and six reported seeing other objects or shapes that weren’t there. Four also noted an unusually heightened sense of smell, and two sensed an “evil presence” in the room. Almost all reported that they had “experienced something very special or important” during the experiment.
Obviously, exactly the same principles would apply to “15 minutes of deep meditation.”
Religious Experience Linked to Brain’s Social Regions
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009From Religious Experience Linked to Brain’s Social Regions:
Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence.
In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution.
“The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other forms of social cognition and behavior,” said Jordan Grafman, a National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist….
People who reported an intimate experience of God, engaged in religious behavior or feared God, tended to have larger-than-average brain regions devoted to empathy, symbolic communication and emotional regulation. The research wasn’t trying to measure some kind of small “God-spot,” but looked instead at broader patterns within the brains of self-reported religious people….
Grafman suspects that the origins of divine belief reside in mechanisms that evolved in order to help primates understand family members and other animals. “We tried to use the same social mechanisms to explain unusual phenomena in the natural world,” he said.
Well yeah, that’s part of it. Like maybe 5%….
Fire in the Brain
Monday, August 3rd, 2009Three weeks ago, I read that “fire in the brain by ronald siegel has one of the best opening chapters EVER concerning mysticism.”
I just picked up my (used) copy from the post office today. Looking at the cover, I’m 90% sure I already had a copy in a box somewhere, but this one was cheap enough that I’m glad I ordered it (again).
It’s a fascinating book.
Inside [John C. Lilly's sensory-deprivation] tank, small, odd-shaped objects with luminous borders started to fly in front of my eyes. Geometric forms, like skyscrapers sculpted from lights, filled my visual space with a futuristic architecture. A tunnel emitting a pulsating blue light appeared straight ahead. The camera of my mind’s eye zoomed in and emerged on the next stage, a mental landscape where my thoughts and memories were displayed like a slide show. (p. 5)
In the SRF Lessons, Yogananda gives a technique of meditation for passing through the spiritual eye (into the astral regions), which involves visualizing oneself first as passing through a golden ring, then a blue tunnel, and then the white, five-pointed star of cosmic consciousness. That’s probably no coincidence at all; and it’s not ontologically real; but it is neurologically real.
I developed methods of training laboratory pigeons and monkeys, who have visual systems similar to our own, to “tell” us what they saw while hallucinating under the influence of various drugs…. When I started collecting accounts from friends who took the same drugs, I knew there was much more to hallucinations than the colored geometric forms the animals were able to report. (p. 8 )
Since form constants can be produced by just about any neural network, even the simplest ones, of course animals would experience similar geometric forms to the ones we do. Oliver Sacks and his colleagues were actually doing simple modeling of neural networks to produce form constants two decades ago, in mere 20 x 20 arrays of virtual neurons. (There’s a slow wave that sweeps across the brain’s neural network during the migraine “aura,” which has actually been measured to exist, and was part of that computer modeling.) Since then, even detailed funnels, spirals, cobwebs and honeycomb (i.e., tiled hexagonal) shapes have been mathematically derived (see p. 35 of 53), starting from the basic neural structure of the human brain (e.g., retina and visual cortex). What that means is that the measurable electromagnetic activities of the brain’s neural network are not just a correlated activity, in a psycho-physical parallelism, with visual stuff that’s going on in some higher/astral/mental reality. Rather, the physical neural activity is all you need in order to account for at least the simplest of the specific forms seen in one’s “inner sight.”
The simple forms consist of tunnels, lattices, and other geometric shapes. These forms arise from unseen structures within the visual system that become illuminated by the action of the drugs. For example, dancing spots are created when red blood cells float through retinal capillaries, casting a shadow on the underlying rods and cones. Other forms are produced when the [psychedelic] drugs cause neurons to discharge in the retina and visual cortex. This creates a series of bright lights known as phosphenes. Phosphenes can take the shape of spots, concentric circles, spirals, tunnels, grids, even checkboard patterns. Still other forms are generated from the visual cortex of the brain where excitation of organized groups of cells produces repeating polygons, mosaics, and symmetrical arrays….
Like dreams, images of hallucinations are often elaborated and embellished into fantastic scenes. They can become highly creative and imaginative variations of retrieved memory images, so transformed as to appear unrecognizable.
All hallucinations encountered by the psychonauts were variations on these two basic themes [i.e., of simple and complex forms]. (p. 17)
Typically, mandalas are circular patterns that contain symmetrical squares, crosses, stars, or other geometric shapes. The view through a child’s kaleidoscope provides a classic example of a symmetrical mandala pattern. Mandalas may also contain symmetrical arrangements of complex figures such as deities, people, or animals. Some arrangements may take on a spiral shape. (p. 21)
[The peyote-consuming Huichol shaman] said that when he closed his eyes he saw many colors and patterns like those on the embroidery or yarn paintings. If he opened his eyes he could see these designs projected against the night sky and all that he looked at. The visions started off in black and white, then turned blue, then red as the experience peaked. This progression seemed to account for the two dominant colors used in Huichol embroidery. (p. 27)
The shaman … picked up the bowl of peyote gruel and took a long drink…. This continued throughout the night.
The night sky was clear. Every constellation was visible. Our campfire was small, but viewed through my dilated pupils it seemed bright enough to cloak the mountains around the mesa with fiery auras.
If you were going to be star-gazing in pre-telescopic times, night-time ceremonies in which drugs that dilated your pupils were consumed would be the way to go—that dilation could disclose stars which were otherwise not visible to the naked eye.
[H]allucinations can also make [sounds] seem softer, closer, farther away, or distorted in any number of ways. And sometimes people hear things that they normally ignore. For example, the psychonauts became aware of background noises from the lab ventilation system, the sound of air rushing through their nostrils, even the telltale thumping of their own hearts!
Noises that are normally undetectable can also be heard with the drugs. These noises—the auditory equivalent of phosphenes and other unseen structures in the visual system—arise from movements of the muscles governing middle-ear function. Vibrations of these muscles, or attached structures like the eustachian tubes, are heard as clicking or crackling noises. Fluttering and popping noises can be produced when the muscles that alter the tension of the tympanic membrance contract, thereby altering the timbre and volume of hearing. Minor contractions generate fading noises like blowing or rushing wind. Sudden reflex contractions produce loud noises like shots or knocks….
The most common perception [in tinnitus] is a ringing in the ears that can vary in pitch from a low roar to a high squeal or whine…. “[S]ubjective” tinnitus can only be heard by the patient, but there is still a real physical cause for the sound. In addition to drug intoxications, subjective tinnitus can be produced by allergies, high or low blood pressure, a tumor, diabetes, thyroid problems, or a a variety of other causes. (p. 32-3)
Most commonly, tinnitus is caused by overexposure to loud noises. Today, it’s frequently the product of listening to too much loud music for too many years … as the iPod generation is going to discover to their chagrin, as they age. In pre-industrial times, though, there was one profession which was exposed, day after day, to loud, percussive hammering noises: metalworking, i.e., the various forms of smith-ing. The same tinnitus-prone profession, able to hear “inner sounds” which others could not, was already independently a very “mystical” one, for their Creator-like forging and transformation of matter. Mircea Eliade:
To collaborate in the production of Nature, to help her produce at an ever-increasing tempo, to change the modalities of matter—here, in our view, lies one of the key sources of alchemical ideology. [...] [What] the smelter, smith and alchemist have in common is that all three lay claim to a particular magico-religious experience in their relations with matter; this experience is their monopoly and its secret is transmitted through the initiatory rites of their trades. All three work on a Matter which they hold to be at once alive and sacred, and in their labors they pursue the transformation of matter, its perfection and its transmutation.
Alchemy: There’s a whole constellation of ideas related to quartz (which forms in six-sided prismatic crystals [cf. hexagonal form constants], and produces “rainbows” when sunlight shines through those crystals), fool’s gold (iron pyrite) and real gold. Those three substances are often found together in the ground—”quartz-pebble conglomerate deposits supply 50% or more of the world’s annual gold production”—giving the appearance that fool’s gold was simply a metal which, if left to gestate long enough in the fertile ground, would eventually turn into real gold.
The same association of quartz (=rainbows) with gold probably gives rise to the “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” idea. (That is my own explanation—you won’t find it anywhere else.) And because the Milky Way has a shape similar to the arc of a rainbow, ultimately (via internalized techniques of meditation) the spine is seen as the “rainbow bridge” to the transcendent “still point of the turning world” in the North Star (and bindu in the center of the head, and also the fontanelle as the mystical, seventh-chakra escapeway from duality).
Because the Milky Way undulates, river- or serpent-like, you get the “rainbow serpent” symbol out of that connection via similarity in shapes. Plus, milky quartz looks a lot like solidified/congealed semen, so there are huge numbers of pre-scientific associations of quartz with fertility and life-force there, too. (The rainbow and semen associations have gotta be a big part of the reason why Australian shamans were so fixated on having quartz placed into their bodies, in their death-and-resurrection initiation ceremonies.)
That, however, will be the subject of a whole other set of postings here, sometime in the (distant) future. See, I already know (big pieces of) how it all fits together, it’s just going to take literally years to document and explain it all. So, stay tuned.
Siegel again:
These [inner, tinnitus] noises form a class of acoustic phenomena known as elementary or unformed hallucinations. Hallucinations do mch more than permit detection of these basic sounds. The drugs promote their mishearing and misinterpretation. The noises become templates upon which the mind builds more recognizable sounds. Clicking noises become “someone tapping on a tin can,” “a woman walking in spiked heels,” or “water dripping.” Fluttering turns into “people murmuring” or “a pneumatic drill.” The fading noises are the “whoooosh” and “ziiiiig” of passing trucks and cars. Finally, the startling loud shots can be heard as “a door slamming” or “an object falling on the floor.” (p. 33)
Beyond the first couple of chapters the text doesn’t relate to the origins of religion, but the stories and neurology/biochemistry are still worthy of Oliver Sacks, combined with paranormal debunking worthy of Joe Nickell.
Biblio: Siegel, Ronald K. (1992), Fire in the Brain: Clinical Tales of Hallucination (New York: Dutton).
Mudras ‘n’ Yips ‘n’ Yips ‘n’ Yips
Thursday, July 30th, 2009It’s certainly not easy to discern a physiological basis for claims about the spontaneous assumption of yoga postures (asanas, mudras), like this from Yogi Amrit Desai, in his “intuitive” discovery of Kripalu Yoga:
[D]uring my routine practice of hatha yoga postures I found my body moving spontaneously and effortlessly while at the same time I was being drawn into the deepest meditation I had ever experienced. The power and intelligence that guided me through this seemingly paradoxical experience of meditation and motion left me in awe and bliss. That morning my body moved of its own volition, without my direction, automatically performing an elaborate series of flowing motions. Many of these “postures” [i.e., asanas] I had never seen even in any yoga book before.
Not easy at all.
Or is it?
No, it’s not. But here’s where I’d start:
In describing the yips, golfers have used terms such as twitches, staggers, jitters and jerks….
The yips affects between one-quarter and one-half of all mature golfers. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that 33 percent to 48 percent of all serious golfers have experienced the yips. Golfers who have played for more than 25 years appear to be most prone to the condition….
Focal dystonia is mentioned as [a] possibility for the real cause of yips.
More Wikipedia:
Focal dystonia is a neurological condition affecting a muscle or group of muscles in a part of the body causing an undesirable muscular contraction or twisting. For example, in focal hand dystonia, the fingers either curl into the palm or extend outward without control….
Hmm, that’s sort of like an extreme “involuntarily assumed mudra” or asana, isn’t it?
The misfiring of neurons in the sensorimotor cortex, a thin layer of neural tissue covering the brain is thought to cause contractions. The sensorimotor cortex contains “maps” of the human body. Under normal conditions, discrete body parts (such as the individual fingers) occupy their own distinct areas on these sensorimotor cortex maps. However in dystonia these maps cease to be so distinct.
Research showing this initially involved non-human primates that were over-trained on particular finger movements with the result that they developed focal hand dystonia. Examination of their primary somatosensory cortex showed that the representations of the fingers were grossly distorted with finger representations that were segregated in normal animals having become co-represented in the cortex of dystonic animals. Imaging studies on humans have confirmed this finding with individuals with focal hand dystonia having finger representations in their brains that are abnormal in showing fusion compared to those in normals.
The lack of cross-connectivity between areas that are normally segregated in sensory cortex may prevent normal sensorimotor feedback and so contribute to co-contractions of antagonist muscle groups, and inappropriately timed and sequenced movements that underlie the symptoms of focal dystonia of the hand.
Back in the ’70s, Itzhak Bentov developed a very detailed model of “physio-kundalini syndrome.” The short version is in an appendix for his Stalking the Wild Pendulum; IIRC, the long version is in Lee Sannella’s The Kundalini Experience: Psychosis or Transcendence? (Bentov practiced TM; Dr. Sannella was a follower of Da Free John.)
I don’t have either of those books currently at hand, but I’m certain that the whole issue of involuntary body movements in spiritual “enlightenment” comes up in them, and that Bentov related that to the circulation of electric currents around the sensory homunculus.
There’s a brief but inadequate summary here: Physio Kundalini Syndrome – Bentov’s Model by Swami Satyananda Saraswati.
Every physical movement begins as electricity in our brains, i.e., neurons firing in the sensorymotor cortex. There is no reason, in principle, why meditation could not “rewire” our brains to spontaneously produce movements or postures which we ordinarily produce voluntarily.
Indeed, visualization has neurologically real effects, e.g., studies have been done where people who merely visualized shooting a basketball into a hoop improved (nearly?) as much as others who did the actual practice. Could spending a lot of time visualizing things that were less connected to reality then potentially mess up one’s brain, at least to the point of creating spontaneous mudra-like muscle contractions, or putting us into asanas (via a series of such contractions)? Or could a comparable thing happen biochemically, or purely electrically? And then, could different combinations of those contractions (and hence postures) be cycled through as one’s state of consciousness (i.e., brainwaves) changed, e.g., in being “drawn into the deepest meditation”?
I dunno. But it’s a lot more likely than the idea that there’s anything paranormal or divinely inspired in Desai’s experiences, even if those happened exactly as he reported them, with no suggestibility or expectation effects (in prior knowledge of the postures) at all.
Also, if Desai spontaneously assumed a number of postures which really aren’t documented in any yoga books, anywhere (except, by now, in his own books), that argues at least as much for those being a product just of quirks in his own nervous system, as it does for there being any beyond-physiological reality to his experiences.
If you want to move a robot through a series of postures, there’s nothing magical or mysterious about it (unless you don’t understand the mechanisms involved): It’s just a series of “muscle/gear contractions” and relaxations. And wouldn’t it be just like our magical-thinking species to elevate the arbitrary configurations which those turning gears create to the status of something spiritual and mystical, just for not understanding where the (neurological) “vital force” that moves the motors comes from?
Pearly Blues
Thursday, July 30th, 2009Why is it that certain people have spiritual experiences with meditation or in initiations, while other people, like myself, don’t?
Particularly in an initiatory setting, David Lane’s exposition of the “Kirpal Statistic” covers a lot of explanatory ground:
Of the some 80,000 people Kirpal Singh initiated from 1948 to 1974, a majority of them claimed to have had some type of inner experience, ranging from simple visions of blue, green, and red lights to hearing subtle sounds like a bell, conch or a flute to sophisticated encounters with radiant yogis, sages, and mystics….
In the early 1980s when I was teaching religious studies at a Catholic high school, I tried several meditation experiments with my students which convinced me that Kirpal Singh and other gurus like him were taking undue credit for their disciples’ inner experiences. In my trial meditation sessions, I informed my students beforehand about the possibility of seeing inner lights and hearing inner sounds. Naturally, given the boring routine of secondary education, my students were intrigued. I informed them that I knew of an ancient yoga technique that would facilitate their inner voyages. I turned the lights off, instructed them briefly about closing their eyes gently and looking for sparks of light at the proverbial third eye. I told them that I would touch some students on the forehead lightly with my fingers. They meditated for some five minutes. I then proceeded to ask them about their experiences. (Kirpal Singh invariably did such a process directly after his initiation ceremonies; he also kept a running tally of how many saw stars and so on—something which I have called the “Kirpal Statistic.”) To my amazement, since I felt that Kirpal Singh and others were actually transmitting spiritual power, the majority of my students reported seeing light. A few students even claimed to have visions of personages in the middle of the light. Others reported hearing subtle sounds and the like. I repeated the experiment on four other classes that day. I have also in the past ten years conducted the same experiment on my college students (both undergraduate and graduate). The result, though differing in terms of absolute numbers, is remarkably the same. The majority see and hear something.
I’m the type of person who would not have seen or heard anything in that context. 
And much as I’m always on the lookout for neurological/physiological bases for the experience of subtle lights and sounds, when people have been primed to expect to hear or see certain internal phenomena in the practice of particular techniques, I think that human imagination and self-hypnosis are fully enough to deliver on that expectation. The cult exit-counselor Steve Hassan gives this revealing example:
[T]he core issue for Jim was his belief that he had “spiritual” experiences, such as seeing a golden light emanating from [Frederick] Lenz and filling the room. I explained that hallucinations like these are often the result of easily reproducible hypnotic processes that have very little to do with being spiritual. Jim said, “‘Prove it.” So I was forced to demonstrate this hypnotic effect for him. I asked him to close his eyes and meditate, as he had been doing for months as a student of Lenz. Once I saw his facial muscles relax, I added, “You’re going to meditate even deeper than you have ever done before, and I don’t want you to open your eyes until you’re ready to see an even brighter light emanating from me.” We waited less than a minute, and when he opened his eyes, he looked at me and said, “Whoa! That’s brighter than the light I saw coming from Lenz!’”
But, full disclosure: I frequently see a tunnel-like, transparent swirling at my “third eye” when I exercise on an empty stomach. Simply neurological? Yes. But what about the blue-black circle surrounded by a lighter ring-like region which I can often see there at other times (cf. Muktananda’s “blue pearl”), generally independent of any “suggestible” state of mind? You can’t tell me that isn’t a real, mystical experience.
Or can you?
Yes, you can. This is from Clay Stinson’s “Open Letter to Ken Wilber”:
[T]he greater the number of neurons firing, the greater is the intensity of the white light. Quantitatively put, with few neuronsrandomly firing, all one sees during meditation is a small circle of white, to bluish-white, light. With a moderate number of neurons randomly firing, one sees, during meditation, a moderately large circle of light. With all or most of the neurons randomly firing, one sees a circle of light so large, brilliant, and luminous that it literally engulfs the field of vision during the meditation session. The mistake, here, of mystics, meditators, spiritual “masters,” and Near Death Experiencers is to identify the “neural noise”‘ or “white light experience” for God, Self, Mind, “mystical realization,” satori, etc.
A “bluish-white circle” is more than close enough to Muktananda’s “blue pearl” or Yogananda’s descriptions of the spiritual eye (as a blue sphere surrounded by a golden ring, and centered with a white pentagonal star) for one to take any real perceptions of such things as having a merely neurological, not mystical, basis (perhaps overlaid with imagination and suggestibility). And that is all that I have taken it as, for years already now.
How the human brain works
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009Interactive map of How the human brain works.