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| Grain Moon Mission Launch September 10, 2011 |
In a recent lecture, Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson talked about how our brain sometimes blocks our senses. Senses can mean so much these days from the five main ones (touch, sight, smell, taste, hearing) to things that many new age people experience. However, what we actually pick up is filtered by our brain.
Take for example the account of someone committing a crime or even a vehicle accident. You can have five eye witnesses and more than likely you would have five different versions of what took place. Each one used their sense of sight and hearing to observe what was going on and I'm sure each person would claim that their version was 100% accurate. Yet, if you laid all of the versions out, it would create an endless scenario of variation.
So why is it that everyone would have a different version? After all, each person saw the same exact thing or heard the same sounds. There is the possibility that some of the observers may be lying or telling things that they think you want to hear, but I doubt that is all that is going on.
You see, no matter what we sense, the brain filters it. The brain filters the experience through our past experiences and the information that we already know. Even though we may be viewing the same thing, our brain chooses how we interpret the information and how we relay it back.
Take for example some native of the Amazon Rain Forest who had never seen a spaceship before. If you tried to describe a spaceship to them, they would be completely confused by what you were talking about. If you showed them a picture, they would have no idea what it was.
We all do this every day in our life. We see things in the way that our life experiences or our belief system have taught us to see them. Most of us walk around mindlessly and so we do not evaluate what it is that we see or pick up. We claim we do but we are just fooling our self and those around us. Even if we are mindful, we still filter and evaluate what we see through our experiences and belief system.
If you don't step back out of yourself and objectively evaluate what it is that you see, than your senses are being blocked by your brain. In our day and age, we make up words, systems and philosophies that attempt to explain these things but we never fully go in and evaluate them objectively.
One of the areas in bodywork where I see this so predominantly is the use of the word "energy". That word and concept has been so overrated and so overused that if you are in the healing world, there is barely a true understanding of it. Yet, everyone uses it as freely as they drink water.
I'm always amazed that people talk about energy as if it is something special they have and they are ones that can sense it, transmit it and pass it on. The thing is, if you asked them to quantify what it is that they sensed, they would be hard-pressed to do that. You would be told that you have to take this on faith and once you were "given" this energy that you would know it.
While I do think that science can explain so much and it can provide measurements to help in our evaluation, there is a thing called connecting through faith with a higher power (whatever that higher power means to you). On the other hand, we as humans accept these concepts, such as energy, with more faith than we should. Science is important but so is the belief in the unknown as long as it leads us to greater awareness and does not only become our belief system.
Honestly, I think that the majority of people who say they feel energy or sense and transmit it, really don't have a clue as to what they are talking about. These people may not like to hear that but I have seen it many times. They get it mixed up with a feeling of connectedness and a moment of deep relaxation. The "energy" that they feel may be nothing more than a gravitational attraction between you and another person. The only thing is that many people are not secure and aware of themselves enough to sense this even though they claim they are at this level.
We are a complex being that have only begun to scratch the surface of all that we are and all that we possess. While we claim to be enlightened or advanced, all too often, we have stopped where we are at instead of continuing down the journey of life. It is far easier to feel secure in some euphoric experience than to travel into the depths of our soul, learning and quesitoning all that there is to our existence. The more we question about ourself and our existence, the more we will come to understand. Hiding from those deep recesses within adds to the filter that we apply with our brain to all that we sense and experience in life.
Related Blog Posts
1) Fallacies Of New Age Practices (Blog Post August 7, 2011)
2) Pre-Frontal Cortex Funtions (Blog Post December 24, 2010)
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