Workshop & Concert! with Lenedra on Sunday June 22, 2008 click here for info
Lenedra Carroll's Blog Private Thoughts
If I Only Had a Brain May 22, 2008
In The Wayword Mind by Guy Claxton, Guy writes about the famous experiments of a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet who hooked people to EEG machines to do electroencephalograms and proved that our brains tell us what to do BEFORE we even consciously decide to do it. The EEG showed that before a person had conscious intention to do something, a strong surge of brain activity had already taken place that indicated the impulse. This shows that the intention comes first and then enters the conscious awareness.
Claxton writes that Libet 'discovered that the intention to move appeared about a fifth of a second before the movement began - but that a surge of activity in the brain reliably appeared about a third of a second before the intention."
William Irvine in his book, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want "Experiments such as these suggest that our choices are not formed in a conscious, rational manner. Instead, they bubble up from our unconscious mind, and when they finally reach the surface of consciousness we take ownership of them."
Benjamin Libet, who performed the original experiments, wrote in his book, Mind Time "The unconscious appearance of an intention to act could not be controlled consciously. Only its final consummation in a motor act could be consciously controlled."
So if the impulse to read this blog comes before the conscious decision to read this blog, you can't control the original impulse, but you can control the action. You can choose not to read, but you can't control the impulse to read. Though the unconscious mind can edit the impulse so we are not aware of it. A big question, where does the impulse come from if not the conscious mind? It would have to be either from pure inspiration, or from unconscious programs. What is the source of the inspiration? That comes through us from another, perhaps Divine, source. And how do we know if an impulse is inspired or from the unruly and mirk-filled unconscious? How do you tell the difference - is your thought, idea, reaction inspired or unconscious? I say most of us our run by our unconscious programing far more than by our connection to the core source of inspiration. The former connection leaves us in a very tenuous, fragile delima, insecure, and easy marks for manipulation from a variety of places such as media, political agendas, love interests and so on. A good link to inspiration, on the other hand, brings, balance, and peace. How to get there from here?
The work of Dr. Hew Len is built on the understanding that we cannot be certain whether our impulse is, in his words, Divine or from your own mind, inspired or unconscious. He postulates that we must constantly be clearing, or cleansing, our programs, impulses, actions, communications. Joe Vitale has done a great job of laying out all of these ideas, and methods to achieve that peace of mind, in a book with Hew Len, PhD, called Zero LImits. Its a pretty simple program, but very radical ideas. Half the time Dr Hew Len seems a tad touched, or crazy. But we might all agree that much of our current mind blather is totally insane, insecure, ego driven, run-amuck mental pain and babble, so next to that a sane and peaceful person might seem like the crazy one! That's what I'm thinking about this week, how about you?
