The Enemy Within

At the end of every activity, even these introductory ones, there will be an exercise for you. We’ll call it homework and Jess’ logo to the side is the homework bookmark.

If you are like me then the thought of ‘homework’ makes your stomach churn, but I promise the homework is fun and easy and you’ll look forward to these activities.

When we consider the brain as a single organ most people would agree that it is a super-biological-computer organizing and controlling their world through two distinct hemispheres. The experts often tell us that the left is a detail obsessed control freak and the right brain is a pot-smoking psychic.

I have some psychic tendencies, and I have also been called a good analyst. This makes me not seem to fit the experts’ thesis.

Thought of this way, the right hemisphere of the human brain has been associated for years with many creative things like psychic awareness. High-profile figures such as Oprah Winfrey have championed the right brain. Said the talk show host once, “Your left brain is logical, linear, by-the-numbers; the right side is creative, artistic, empathetic …. I’ve always been a right-brain kind of person, more of an inventive and empathetic storyteller than a linear, logical number cruncher.”

In the same way as Oprah, most people choose to associate with one side or the other. We are brought up to feel we have to choose between practical or woo-woo. We are asked if we want a creative career or a pragmatic one? Parents ask if we want to be a starving artist or an employable accountant? Most people, therefore, separate the scientific and the spiritual.

Unfortunately for Oprah et al, no research backs up such sweeping claims of the right brain being the center of creativity. To associate as left or right brain skewed does you a disservice. When we learn to view the brain as a whole, and attach it to our torso-wand, we bring together creativity, intuition, psychic awareness, analysis, and pragmatism into the same creative process.

Divided the brain stumbles. United it triumphs. It is important to strike the right balance.

Even though the brain does have two cerebral hemispheres, researchers realize both sides contribute to logic and analysis. And both sides contribute to intuition and creativity. A small band of adventurous neuro-scientists are discovering links between spiritual and artistic states of mind and specific nodes of the brain on both sides.

Researchers such as Beauregard are discovering that spiritual and artistic states are linked with all parts of the brain, including white matter and grey matter. Spiritual and artistic moments light up all over the map of our brain right next to pragmatic ones.

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The Enemy Within: Reticular Activation System (RAS)

The RAS is so vital to our journey here that it gets it own headline… and in bold.

From Three Simple Steps: The moment we are born is the purest in our entire lives. We have seen, felt, and heard nothing. Therefore, we have nothing to contemplate or to react to. We are born an individual, and with unlimited potential. One second later, a well-meaning giant with a hand the size of a spade smacks us on the bottom. It is commonly taught that we don’t feel pain in the first two weeks of life, (unproven) but regardless it startles us. Because of the rude awakening, and the fact we realize in the same moment that we are away from the warmth and security of the womb, we react. To our parents, our cry is the greatest sound in the universe (until that first sleepless night at home!)

Our newborn state of mentality is unguarded. Like a paper towel dropped into a puddle we absorb everything we sense in our environment. On the one hand, we learn quickly. On the other, we cannot filter anything. We take in all the feelings and moods, the opinions and reactions of those around us… our family, school, culture, country, media. Our state of mind fills up quickly, and most psychologists agree that our mentalities change very little after the age of five. We quickly cease to be individual as we conform to the worldview we are fed.

This is only true for those who choose to sleepwalk through life. It certainly does not apply to you.

New knowledge and new tools rewire the brain and when the brain rewires our personalities automatically change. As you go through this journey and for the rest of your life as you allow the knowledge to interact with your energy and that of the world around you your personality continues to change. It goes through many iterations. You’ll be aware of that and so will the people and authority figures around you. In some ways you awaken the infant who fell asleep around age five.

While it may appear that infants are helpless creatures that only blink, eat, cry and sleep, one University of Missouri researcher says that studies indicate infant brains come equipped with knowledge of ‘intuitive physics.’

This is what you are awakening… intuitive knowledge.

“In the MU Developmental Cognition Lab, we study infant knowledge of the world by measuring a child’s gaze when presented with different scenarios. We believe that infants are born with expectations about the objects around them, even though that knowledge is a skill that’s never been taught. As the child develops, this knowledge is refined and eventually leads to the abilities we use as adults.”

“We believe that infants are born with the ability to form expectations and they use these expectations basically to predict the future,”

As most infants age, however, they usually develop the same habits, and react the same way to outside stimuli, as those they are associated with, such as parents, school friends, and the sports and television idols their elders like or dislike. They mimic their behavior and take on the same values as the groups to which they belong. They are attracted and repulsed by similar things. The result is that they continually seek experiences that reinforce learned group behavior and beliefs.

This is done automatically because of a small part of our brain-stem called the Reticular Activation System. (RAS). The RAS is a group of neurons unique to humans and certain reptiles.

In short, the RAS holds us in a loop unless we deliberately reprogram it. The Transformation Experience helps do this for you, but you still have to do the bulk of the work.

The RAS Conundrum

The human mind has an ‘inhibitory system’ which routinely and automatically removes from perception, reason, and judgement over 99% of available fact.” – Jerome S. Bruner (1915-2016)

The RAS connects the brain stem, to the cerebral cortex, through various neural paths. The stem controls most of the involuntary functions, as well as reflexes of the body, while the cerebral cortex is believed to be the seat of consciousness and thinking abilities. The RAS forms a link between these two different regions, helping our consciousness put together an internal world, through assimilation of sensory information, gathered from all body parts and senses.

A large part of the system consists of brain parts that are responsible for our survival instincts. Hence, it has a deep connection with awareness functions of the brain.

In a state of wakefulness, all the sensory information that reaches the brain stem (including touch, smell, sound, sight, and taste) from the various afferent nerves are transmitted via this system to the cerebrum for processing but only after undergoing filtering. This last fact is what I call the enemy within.

The ability to filter out information from external sources and focus on one particular fact, detail, or thought is controlled by this brain region. If it weren’t for this circuitry, our consciousness would be overwhelmed and flooded with all sensory information, leading to an inability to make decisions. This system helps prioritize information and controls what appears in the mind’s eye, at any point of time.

From birth, we are bombarded by 2 million bits of data every second but we only have the capacity to process around 147 bits.

Let’s pause and digest that fact.

Our RAS filters out more than 99.927% of the real world, or almost all of it. We experience hardly any of what is out there.

Add that to the startling fact shared earlier that we can only perceive 0.0035% of the EM spectrum and it becomes easy to understand why so many people appear robotic in nature and the few who understand how to perceive more through reprogramming the RAS and stretching the senses can appear so weird.

I recently got a stark reminder of this. When Jess (the artist for Transformation) came into my life, she inadvertently started to rewire my brain. As a successful writer and illustrator, her RAS is programmed to notice art. Mine is not. I have programmed mine to seek out the science, the how and why of the world. In no time at all I was astonished at how ‘observant’ Jess is. She points out art I simply hadn’t noticed… on the sidewalk, in a tree, in a house window. I had walked the same paths a thousand times but seen none of it. Now my RAS is also waking up to notice these things. Previously this aspect of the world was filtered out,  I didn’t see the value in it and my RAS always gives me loops of what I think I value. Not only am I more observant of art, but as I let it all sink in I find I am beginning to understand and appreciate it in a whole new way. The stark reminder is that I had inadvertently programmed my RAS to devalue art and in so doing I saw so little of it and what I did see was always through someone else’s eyes.

The RAS acts as the filter that chooses that 147 bits  of our world for us and hides the rest from our awareness. In other words, as the Observer Effect shows us, what we pay attention to grows, and the RAS is aware of this.

It is a conundrum because all through our life in every moment we are blissfully unaware of almost all of the world around us. If the 147 bits we allow includes a bunch of reality TV shows, shoot ‘em up games, and pulpit sermons then we have a lot of work to do to change our perspective so we can access a bigger and more rounded “real” world experience.

Through life our learned beliefs train the RAS to filter out almost everything that counters them. This is both an exciting and scary concept to grasp. It offers us a clue to how to change mentality to our benefit, but also hints that although this sounds simple it will not be easy. Changing habits requires a high degree of discipline and real practice.

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The RAS is the reason you learn a new word and then start hearing it everywhere. It’s why you can tune out a crowd full of talking people, yet immediately snap to attention when someone says your name. It is what happens when you see a new car commercial that causes an emotional response. Thereafter you see that new car everywhere you go as if they were all just dropped in by parachute.

All of this happens without you noticing. In the same way, the RAS filters out information that contradicts your philosophical, religious, and political beliefs. It filters the world through the parameters you give it, and your beliefs further shape those parameters. It helps to explain why we repeat behaviors and experiences even if they hurt us.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire as we like to say when observing others make repeated mistakes in their choices of partner or job. We also use the phrase ‘A person convinced against her will is of the same opinion still.’ Now we understand why. The person has to seek an alternative view or nothing will change.

The RAS creates a repetitive process of thoughts, behaviors and experiences. If you feel empowered, the RAS will help you continue to feel that way. If, on the other hand, you feel oppressed the RAS works to reinforce that sensation.

To choose a better life and world experience all we have to do is change what we focus on and how we react emotionally to that, then we can gradually change the world we experience. Bit by bit we can reprogram our RAS and swap out our limited experience for a different one… the one we want.

I have a friend who spent her whole career in a difficult and demanding job in which she got to see the darkest sides of human behavior… rape, abuse, violence. She has always seen the world as a dangerous place. She locks every door and window and reprimands me when I don’t. She mistrusts tradesmen. She judges everyone negatively until they prove their motivations to be honorable and even then there is constant suspicion of motive for any good deed. Those who pass that severe test become her closest friends and they love her. Her life, however, reflects her belief system. Every house repair or remodel goes wrong. Every delivery has an issue. Neighbors don’t respect her property as they do elsewhere. Her travel and entertainment experiences always go wrong. I joke with her that she walks around with her own dark cloud overhead and it constantly rains on her parade.

I have tried explaining the RAS but of course I just sound weird to her. In her words, “everything you touch turns to gold. You don’t know what the ‘real world’ is like, everything I touch goes pear-shaped.” The truth is we both have a version of our real words and our RAS doesn’t give a hoot what that is. It just creates the loop.

I know, however, which one I prefer to experience.

Recent research has revealed that this region of the brain is also responsible for bringing your mind into periods of heightened attention, alertness, or higher focus. This function is primarily mediated by the reticular formation which experiences an increased blood flow during these times.

Knowing this, we can build and practice with tools and techniques to create more frequent heightened awareness, the benefit being that we can expand our RAS to experience more than a mere 147 bits of information.

Not only does RAS filter information, but it also learns to identify patterns in the sensory signals transmitted through it. The reticular formation gets habituated to exclude what it observes as meaningless and repetitive signals that are deemed to be consistently unimportant. That explains why people can sleep through any kind of noise, once they have become habituated to it, while waking up in a startled state to an auditory signal like a gunshot. It also explains why we react to bad news stories but ignore the rest or find ourselves drawn to complainers at work and away from the more balanced ones.

Because of RAS, you can tend to lose a sense of individualism very quickly in childhood and thereafter, especially in modern times when so much has been automated for us. One can become robotic without knowing it. I am sure you have visited a restaurant and watched a family paying more attention to their phones than each other. One can go to a park on a sunny day and watch people playing some electronic game on their devices while totally ignoring the park experience. They look like extras in a Zombie film. They are not at fault and should never be judged. They are humans letting their RAS make the decisions for them, and because no one ever explained this to them. I can’t imagine a single person refusing to change if they learned this.  It is time for you to tell your RAS to change.

How do you do that? Awareness of the loop is 80% of the job done. For the next 20% you can deliberately reprogram your RAS. Start to expose your RAS to what you want. Take out subscriptions to luxury lifestyle magazines, visit high end art exhibitions, join entrepreneur groups (hint try VLSE), search the Internet for private jet experiences rather than gossip, go take a test drive in your dream car instead of lying on the couch watching TV.

Don’t delay.

Your life is at stake.

Start now.

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