Truth and the Mind

Just finished reading an article about a severely burned Iraq veteran who found pain relief from a virtual reality game called "Snow World" in which he shot penguins and snowmen and mammoths with snowballs. Brain scans of the area called the pain matrix showed much less activity while he was playing. He rated his own pain a 6 out of 10 while on other days it had been 9's an 10's constantly. The hell that the pain caused him was alleviated by giving the mind something else to focus on.

Our brains are equipped with chemicals which regulate our physical feelings as well as emotional states. I'm no brain expert, but am moderately aware of things called endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Certain drugs, like opioids, affect the production of these chemicals and alleviate pain and promote feelings of well-being. I've heard that endorphins are three times as powerful as morphine. So our brains are equipped to manage pain, but unfortunately, most of us do not know how to manage our brains. If we did, pain would be a trivial message that something was wrong with our body that needs attention, and that's all.

Last year I had a weird, severe back injury while tying a shoe! Fear was my first emotion, because I had gone through years of back pain when I was younger that I now feel was tied in to my depressive/manic states. This time around, my bipolar disorder had been under control for about ten years with meds and therapy. The pain reached down through my nerves to the entire right side of my leg, feeling like a knitting needle were being jabbed into my joints. The trigger for the injury may have been a bulged disc pressing on the nerve that ran down that leg, but the pain, though severe, now did not affect my sense of well-being.

Like in the virtual reality game, I found a way to minimalize the pain using the power of distraction. Instead of focusing on the leg that hurt, I tried intensely concentrating on how good my other leg felt. Amazingly, the more I focused on the good leg, the less pain I felt. This told me that I was controlling the way my brain was processing its chemicals. I was able to produce endorphins enough to fill my body with a sense of well-being.

Lately, I think I've gotten better at producing these sensations at will. I have a sense of being high and my body feels wonderful. I feel lighter and a little less connected to what Eckhardt Tolle calls "the pain body." I also feel anchored to the present, and any baggage of all that I have been through in my life disappears. It is an amazing feeling. It doesn't last forever - life somehow always intrudes eventually, but it's a great skill to learn.

Meditation quiets the mind. When the mind is quiet, everything is perfect. In the present moment, everything is perfect. It is only the fear and anxiety of our expectations which are based on our past experience that take us out of the present moment. Some people say, you can't just meditate all your life, but they don't realize that you can quiet your mind during any activity. You don't have to be in a lotus posture, you don't have to close your eyes, you don't have to focus on your breathing. These are all things that might help you get there - they let you take control of your brain chemicals - but they are not the only way. If you are fully in the present, no matter what you are doing, you become the experience. You are no longer a person doing something, you are the entire world as your mind understands it. You exist in harmony with all of creation. Sounds nice, right?

You can be there right now. When we look for it, like the Tao, we will never find it. As soon as you stop trying to attain, you attain. You are the Buddha right now - you just have to stop trying to be the Buddha. But this is like the old story of the master saying that to attain enlightenment, you must not think of an elephant. The student then, of course, can only think of what he is trying not to think of. Stop seeking, and be the Buddha.

So the truth of reality is not what the mind tells us. Like in Plato's allegory of the caves, we only see shadows of reality and make our best guesses as to what it is. We are limited by our five senses. Reality is what we see, touch, hear, smell and taste. Could it be that there are other qualities of reality that we don't have the sense organs to perceive? Bats understand spatial reality by echolocation. Insects, birds and tropical fish see ultraviolet patterns that we can't see. Suppose we could sense magnetism, or density, or see gamma rays or electrical fields. There must be so many other aspects of reality that we cannot even measure.

So what is the truth? When your mind stops perceiving with its senses, it feels like truth. Truth is acceptance of all that is. Not judging, not comparing, not reacting, just accepting. Our brains are amazing machines that are built for judging, comparing and reacting, so that the organism of the body can successfully continue and help life on Earth continue. But we can control our brains, instead of our brains controlling us. We have the power to quiet our brains any time we want. And in doing so, we can experience the truth.