Brains and Realities

JAY ALFRED Brains and Realities B10 6x9 PB LAM: No 20lb Inserts: No, Brains and Realities © Copyright 2006. Jay Alfred. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author. Note for Librarians: a cataloguing record for this book that includes Dewey Decimal Classification and US Library of Congress numbers is available from the Library and Archives of Canada. The complete cataloguing record can be obtained from their online database at: www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html ISBN 1-4120-8877-1 Printed in Victoria, BC, Canada Illustrations by Diane Lucas. Printed on paper with minimum 30% recycled fibre. Trafford’s print shop runs on “green energy” from solar, wind and other environmentally-friendly power sources. Offices in Canada, USA, Ireland and UK This book was published on-demand in cooperation with Trafford Publishing. On-demand publishing is a unique process and service of making a book available for retail sale to the public taking advantage of on- demand manufacturing and Internet marketing. On-demand publishing includes promotions, retail sales, manufacturing, order fulfilment, accounting and collecting royalties on behalf of the author. Book sales for North America and international: Trafford Publishing, 6E–2333 Government St., Victoria, BC v8t 4p4 CANADA phone 250 383 6864 (toll-free 1 888 232 4444) fax 250 383 6804; email to [email protected] Book sales in Europe: Trafford Publishing (uk) Limited, 9 Park End Street, 2nd Floor Oxford, UK OX1 1HH United Kingdom phone 44 (0)1865 722 113 (local rate 0845 230 9601) facsimile 44 (0)1865 722 868; [email protected] Order online at: trafford.com/06-0633 12 11 10 Contents Prologue ..................................... v PART I 1 Right vs. Left Brain............................. 1 2 Intuitive versus Discriminating (Rational) Mind ..... 11 3 The Intelligent, Intuitive ‘Unconscious’............ 19 4 Complementary Thinking & Feeling .............. 28 5 Split Reality.................................. 37 PART II 6 The Brain & Mystical Experiences............... 46 7 Deactivating the Brain ......................... 53 8 Virtual Reality .............................. 64 9 Quantum-Holographic Theory of Perception ....... 74 10 The Insubstantial Universe .................... 84 PART III 11 The Really Astonishing Hypothesis ............... 91 12 Superposition in the Full-Void ................... 98 13 Cancellation in the Empty Void ................. 108 14 Meditation & the Brain ....................... 122 PART IV 15 Meta-Neurology ............................. 132 16 Universal Brain-Mind......................... 144 17 Full-Time Mystic, Part-Time Scientist ............ 167 Epilogue ................................... 174 References.................................. 176 Other Books By Jay Alfred Our Invisible Bodies Between the Moon and Earth Prologue This distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion Albert Einstein, Physicist Conventional neuroscience assumes that there is a real objective world ‘out there’ and that the brain constructs a world that is representative of this world. But how do we prove that? Do we use our three- dimensional instru- ments to probe and our three-dimensional consciousness to verify? What exactly is out there? Contrary to the conventional neuroscientific three-dimensional model, cutting-edge physics tells us that the world ‘out there’ is multi-dimensional and not solid but a cacophony of waveforms. The three-dimensional world constructed by the brain is a reduction and a limited interpretation of what is really out there. In Eastern religious philosophy and certain Western phi- losophies, there is a bold assertion that what is out there is a paradoxical ‘full-void’ — i.e. a nothingness which contains everything. Apparently, this void has been ‘experienced’ by mystics and advanced meditators — as recorded quite extensively in religious scriptures and the metaphysical literature. In this void, space and time are meaningless. The Surangama Sutra of the Buddhists emphatically point out that location in space is illusionary. Saint Augustine believed in an ever-present eternity which was not acces- sible to humans. Both space and time may be illusions. Ultimately, all moments are really one. Therefore now is eternity. David Bohm, Physicist v JAY ALFRED | BRAins AND REALitiES For a long time it was assumed that space and time were fundamental to the underlying reality; but Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity toppled this assumption. What we observe as space and what we observe as time are now regarded as two aspects of a more fundamental spacetime continuum. To what extent this continuum manifests as space and how much of it manifests as time varies according to the relative motion of the observer. In other words, they are both subject to our perception within specific frames of reference which provide three-dimensional frameworks to structure our mental image of the world. But we are perhaps deceiving ourselves when we assume that they are also fundamental to the underlying reality. Space and time are like the two lenses in a pair of glasses. Without the glasses we could see nothing. The actual world, the world external to our minds, is not directly perceivable; we see only what is transmitted to us by our space-time spectacles. The real object, what Kant called the ‘Thing-in- Itself’, is transcendent, beyond our space-time, completely unknowable… Perceptions are in, in a sense, illusions. They are shaped and colored by our subjective sense of space and time. Martin Gardner, Mathematician Advances in Brain Science Recently, Science has made significant advances in studying the brain during meditative states. Using cutting-edge medical imaging methods, obser- vations have been made of specific areas in the brain which are activated or deactivated during meditation. It has also been widely observed that many meditative traditions emphasise the activation and development of the right hemisphere of the brain. In fact, certain studies have shown that various areas in the right hemisphere grow thicker with regular meditation. Is it possible to modify the operation of the brain to allow a meditator to experience a totally different reality? Can we bypass the brain’s con- structions to reach a more fundamental reality? It is becoming increasingly evident that we are blocked by our perceptual apparatus from experiencing a more primordial reality. Hence, it would make sense to look at how the human brain processes information to understand better the models that it uses to construct its interpretation of the underlying reality; while being limited by its own processing power and capabilities. vi | PROLOGUE …our senses cannot be fully trusted especially when it comes to such fundamental questions as the dimensionality of the world …there is nothing three-dimensional in the objective world…the three-dimensionalist view contradicts [Einstein’s] Special [Theory of] Relativity and more importantly the experiments which confirm its consequences. …spacetime is not merely a mathematical space but represents a four- dimensional external world which is not directly reflected in our perceptions. Vesselin Petkov, Physicist The Journey We will begin the journey by first discussing the different methods of processing sensory information in the right and left hemispheres of the human brain. We will then explore what happens to the brain during mystical experiences as revealed by recent medical studies. After this, we will take a look at what modern physics tells us of the nature of the universe or multi- verse, comparing it with what mystics have said about it. We will then propose the astonishing hypothesis that the experiences of mystics are reconcilable to modern physics; and that the brain can be made to experience a more fundamental reality where space and time do not operate. Descriptions of this reality recorded in religious and metaphysical literature will be reviewed, alongside descriptions from modern physics. Then we will proceed to see how the human brain connects to parallel universes and review its non-local nature. Readers will however note an un- dercurrent of questions regarding the nature and future of Science and how it can be reconciled to the totality of human experience. Science parted ways with Religion more than 500 years ago, shaking-off the dust of centuries of non-verified claims and superstitions. Will it be reunited with Religion’s in- ner essence and wisdom in the next 500 years? vii I still believe the universe has a beginning in real time, at the big bang. But there’s another kind of time, imaginary time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end. Stephen Hawking C H A pt E R 1 Right vs. Left Brain Our brain, like many other parts of our anatomy, is made up of two halves, a left brain and a right brain. They are connected to each other by a thick cable of nerves at the base of each brain, called the corpus callosum. It is analogous to a cable or network connection between two incredibly fast and immensely powerful computers, each running a different program to process basically the same input. When Roger Sperry severed the corpus callosum in the sixties, which connected the left and right brains, he was stunned by the fact that his ‘split-brain’ patients behaved as if they had two minds and two persons in one body! He found that the patient could name an object but could not explain what it was used for when the object was shown only to the right eye (the left ‘verbal’ brain processes data from the right visual field). When shown to the left eye (the right ‘non-verbal’ brain processes data from the left visual field), the patient could explain and demonstrate its use, but could not name it. Roger Sperry received the 1981 Nobel Prize for his work in this area. It appears that when a normal person names an object and explains its purpose, both halves or hemispheres of the brain, which are connected by the corpus callosum, participate in this final conclusion.

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