“Mind” is not limited to our brain or our body

 What is the mind? Where does it reside? How does it interact with the physical world? These are some of the questions that have fascinated philosophers, scientists, and ordinary people for centuries.

The traditional view is that the mind is a product of the brain, and that mental experiences are confined to the skull and the body. However, this view is increasingly challenged by new evidence and perspectives that suggest that the mind is more than the brain, and that it can extend beyond the body and into the environment.

One of the proponents of this view is Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and the author of Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.

He defines the mind as “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.”...<<<Read More>>>...

 

Shattering The Grand Illusion: The Power Of Human Thought

[Collective Evolution]: Have you ever noticed the voice in your head that doesn’t stop talking? It’s busy judging people and things, forming opinions, and commenting on everything that happens. It keeps nattering about things that happened in the past or might happen in the future. In fact, we all have this inner voice in our heads, whether we are conscious of it or not.

When life is lived with little or no awareness of the “voice in the head” it becomes completely driven by this voice. Eventually you can believe that the voice in the head is who you are. You may believe you’re the one who’s talking and having a say about everything, but perhaps this is not so. What if the voice in your head is not actually generating your own thoughts?

The mind produces an entire life of its own by keeping stories alive over and over again. It plays out scenarios and keeps them thriving by adding emotion. In turn, what keeps the mind going is the concept of “I,” and this “I” has things to do. In fact, every event in the physical world is neutral until the mind attaches its own meaning to it. A man loses his job and this is either the most devastating thing that happens to him or the most fortunate, because it becomes his ticket to a new life. A relationship ends and it is considered crippling or it is understood as empowering. The voice in the head will concoct numerous stories about events, and usually they’re rooted in stories heard in childhood, from the media, or other sources. My mother and her mother and her mother before her believed something so now I believe it too. The news perpetuates something so it must be true. On and on the mind goes spinning its web...<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...

How Mindfulness Can Reshape Negative Thought Patterns

Copyright Matthew James 2019

[Waking Times]: “Our life is like a silent film on which we each write our own commentary.” ~Unknown Zen Buddhist Master

We spend most of our lives thinking or lost in thought. The average human has 17,000 thoughts daily. Around 90% of them are repeat-thoughts!

Unfortunately, we often believe the stories underlying these thoughts, although often, they have little basis in reality. Mindfulness can help us relate more skillfully and wisely to our own thought patterns.

A common issue is that we often get stuck in thinking patterns that reduce the quality of our lives. We can call these patterns mental tapes because they usually have roots in the past. (Now, most of us are streaming music instead of listening to tapes anyway!)

These tapes often originate from when we were younger, more vulnerable, less mature, and less competent....read more>>>...

Is Your Thinking Your Own – Or Someone Else’s?

Waking Times: We live in a world where everything is crooked – lies masquerade as truth and it’s hard to find a straight path…. There seems to be no limit to the madness going on around us – ethics, morals, common sense and compassion have been thrown under the bus of profit. In this 21st century, hate and division are rampant in every level of society. Millions of people have flipped their humanity switch to off, and unplugged from the heart – we are a divided and manic species.

Many people no longer watch tv or mainstream news – they are aware of the fabricated narrative put out by the media…the forty percent fear porn and programming, thirty percent sports and entertainment, twenty percent intrigue, nine percent half-truths and one percent a cuddly bunny feel good story.

The mass media is all about controlling our thinking, and has become the propaganda marketing project for the psychopaths that run the world. The kaleidoscope of fake news and disinformation projected into our minds is designed to affect us emotionally: to make us afraid of a made up bogeymen, a pandemic that’s just around the corner – or an invasion by the Russians or Chinese. This fear based propaganda keeps us in a state of insecurity and we eventually turn on each other – race, religion, class, any person or group/nation that runs a different programme presents a threat to an unbalanced mind.

Our minds are being manipulated by a whole host of ‘occult fixers’ that hide behind the puppet politicians. Their end-game is world domination and absolute control over the hive mind of the worker bees called humanity….and they have moved slowly and deliberately through the shadowed centuries towards their global goal.

Is it any wonder, that in today’s ‘whirled’ we become confused and unable to keep up with- or understand, the rapidly changing and contrary nature of the political climate we live in....read more>>>...

How can we unlearn the fear that effects us negatively?

S.O.T.T: Imagination is a wonderful thing. Emotions are often a result of the mind telling us stories without our direction over the outcome. When we imagine any fear repeatedly in a safe environment, soon our phobia, and our brain's response to it, begins to subside.

That's the takeaway of a new brain imaging study led by CU Boulder and Icahn School of Medicine researchers, suggesting that imagination can be a powerful tool in helping people with fear and anxiety-related disorders overcome them.

"This research confirms that imagination is a neurological reality that can impact our brains and bodies in ways that matter for our wellbeing," said Tor Wager, director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at CU Boulder and co-senior author of the paper, published in the journal Neuron.

Being afraid of the unknown is not a new concept. From birth to death we've been trained to fear everything for a very long time. The dangers of modern life have a stranglehold on people's imaginations. Sociologists call the phenomenon a risk society, describing cultures increasingly preoccupied with threats to safety, both real and perceived, but most definitely imagined.

Our ability to judge risk is sophisticated, and instinctual decisions often serve us well. But when something doesn't quite seem to sync up, gut to head, then it's time to pause and at least question what's causing the discrepancy...read more>>...

How To Identify Your Critical Inner Voice

Psychology Today: You don’t have to look far to find your critical inner voice. It’s there when you go to a job interview: “Why are you wasting your time? The other applicants are more qualified for this job.” It’s there when you express a point of view, “You idiot, why did you say that? Now everyone will think you are stupid.” It’s there when you make a mistake, “Can’t you do anything right? You are embarrassing yourself!”

The critical inner voice reveals itself in those little everyday thoughts that flit through our consciousness. They zing us and are gone before we are even fully aware of them. These thoughts are part of a menacing internal dialogue, a harsh and judgmental way that we talk to ourselves. Though sometimes hard to pinpoint, the inner voice is often experienced as a running commentary that attacks and criticizes our actions and interactions in everyday life. Unfortunately, this destructive thought process influences us to make decisions that are against our best interests and to take actions that negatively impact our lives. In order to challenge this internal enemy, you must be able to identify your critical inner voice. Once you have become aware of its negative guidance, you can make a conscious effort to not act on its destructive advice.

So how do you uncover this internal enemy, which is hidden among your more objective and realistic views and reactions?...read more>>>....

Where Does The 'Mind Voice' Originate From?

Here's something for you to think about. It's about how you think; and you're unlikely to have thought about it before. When you think, you're mind clearly has some kind of 'liquid voice' that relates your thought processes to you; it reasons with you when you are making a decision; it is the voice of temptation when you are thinking in that way.

The mind voice is a constant companion. It reads to you when your eyes gaze at pages in books. It sings to you when you are listening to a song. In fact virtually everything you do on the earth plane, the mind voice relates its opinions, insights and advice to you ...

What is that mind voice? "According to a new study, internal speech makes use of a system that is mostly employed for processing external speech, which is why we can "hear" our inner voice. The study comes from the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia, and is led by researcher Mark Scott, who analyzed a brain signal known as "corollary discharge" - a signal that separates sensory experiences we produce ourselves from experiences that are external. This signal helps explain why we are unable to tickle ourselves: it predicts our own movements and omits the sensation of feeling ticklish. According to the study, this prediction usually filters out self-made sounds so we don't hear them externally, but rather internally. The corollary discharge therefore prevents the sensory confusion that would otherwise arise. Until now, the phenomenon of internal speech has been mostly unexamined. But through two experiments, Scott saw evidence that corollary discharge is an important component of our internal speech experiences...read more>>>..."

But is that inner voice YOU or is it an independent source. By day it guides us through the human grind on the hamster wheel. But by night, it is possible to OBSERVE the voice and OTHER voices doing the same role. When they are observed you notice there appears to be an independent quality to those voices. Or, maybe, they are the voices of the apparent physical form, its interaction with the mind field ... and when you get into mindfulness you are actually pulling away from that state of awareness and thus observing the programmed brain chatter that the R-Complex/hive mind generates .... we will discuss this fascinating subject at a later date.