Mind Work: Introduction Part 1: The Body

Preface

A few years ago I was struggling with the notion of what was my true nature. At the time I was a committed Christian. The information that that gave me was that I has a body, mind and soul. And then there were heaven and hell with God, angels and demons. None of this gave me much to work with.

Throughout this period I practised a lot of self-examination. The Christian religion really gave me nothing to grasp hold of. The deeper I tried to go, the more problematic the Christian paradigm became. So I moved away from it, first to Gnosticism and the gnostic material available.

I renewed my acquaintance with the work of Edgar Cayce and Eastern religions. The volume of material available on the internet and especially YouTube on esoteric philosophies and metaphysics is immense. After exploring this for a couple of years I slowly came to realize that any real learning for me – true gnostic knowledge – was going to have to come from within.

Recently I decided that I had explored enough and had to bring some order to what I had covered. In particular, it became important to develop practical forms of application. This text is the result. It will grow as I grow.

The Body

Ancient religions and modern metaphysics all hold a hierarchy of spiritual dimensions or planes with the material world at the lowest level. The physical body is the form that an entity holds when operating in this level. The question becomes “can we discover the relationship between the body, its elements and a higher spiritual nature.”

The Control System of the Body (and Mind?)

Most bodily functions are regulated and controlled by the body itself. Obvious examples are breathing and heart function. There is an important physiological component that is part of this control called the Reticular Activating System¹ (RAS).

The RAS isn’t a single anatomical blob you could point to on a brain scan. It’s a distributed network, stretching from the brainstem through the thalamus and up into the cerebral cortex. The RAS sits atop the brain stem and plays an important role in sensory perception as well as sleeping and the autonomic nervous system.

The RAS has several important functions¹:

1. “It turns consciousness on and keeps it running.”
2. It’s the RAS’s job to regulate your being awake or asleep.
3. It filters sensory information (for relevance affecting your interpretation of reality).
4. It is [partly] responsible for arousal which directly affects your ability to focus and maintain attention..
5. It shapes memory formation indirectly by controlling which stimuli reach conscious awareness and how alert you are while encoding an experience. It effectively gate-keeps what gets a shot at long-term storage in memory.

There are a few behaviours¹ that help maintain a healthy RAS but more generally would be beneficial for any Mind Work. These are:

1. Consistent sleep-wake times, Keeps circadian signals to the hypothalamus stable and predictable
2. Morning light exposure, Helps anchor the arousal system’s daily rhythm.
3. Limiting late caffeine, Prevents artificial override of natural wind-down signals.
4. Regular physical activity, Supports healthy neurotransmitter turnover linked to arousal regulation.

You cannot consciously rewire the RAS the way popular psychology sometimes claims. Daniel Moreno speaks extensively of the role the RAS plays in our perception of reality, acting as a filter for what our perceptual system feeds our consciousnesses.

Consciousness and the Body

In the following video (13:49 minutes), Julia McCoy explains how consciousnesses in the brain manifests through an identified physical structure involving quantum mechanical operations. As she says, “Consciousness isn’t generated by the brain, consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality…”

Systems of metaphysics derive reality from consciousness as a first principle. Science is working in the reverse direction in seeking a physical mechanism in the body that will derive consciousness. The he above video describes such a mechanism. Whether it is exactly true is not clear at this point but it is close enough to propose, if not confirm. such a link exists. However, the clear understanding from the video and the mechanism proposed is that consciousness exists outside the body and is not created by it.

For a deeper discussion of the Penrose-Hameroff theory of microtubule-based consciousness see reference 2 below.

A Caveat About Quantum Mechanics

There are dozens if not hundreds of individuals proposing a new metaphysics based in part on quantum mechanics (QM) to lend it importance. I would wager very few if any have studied quantum mechanics. Instead, they spout an important-sounding concept for their audience. This popular view is that a persons intentional thoughts create reality by collapsing the wave function of a proto-collapsed state.

The thinking among physicists, although not consensual, is that consciousness shapes reality at a deeper level. The following video (8:38 minutes) states that QM does not prove that “conscious is reality at a deeper level”. Rather, as Max Planck said, “consciousness is fundamental, matter is derivative”.

The video goes on to say that a persons reality is shape by the quality of their attention and engagement. These are psychological properties and not Physics or metaphysics.

A Short Experiment

Hold out your hand and look at it. Do you have the sense that the hand is your sense of “Me”? You recognize it as “your” hand but your sense of “Me” is the observer of the hand not the hand itself.

You can do this with any body part. You have such a body part but you are not that part in awareness. Some people lose hands, arms or other parts but their sense of self as an experience is not diminished. It raises the question of what happens when I lose my whole body as in death? Where does the “I” then exist?

Summary

We have a body but we are not the body. As we shall later see, we have a mind but are not the mind. Conscious awareness we do have. In simplest terms this is the “I Am that I am”. In fact this may be all that we really are.

The RAS is extremely important for its role in supporting consciousness in the body as well as our perception of reality. All this is an important input into other Mind Work. RAS is a neural network. It may be the singular site for the interaction of consciousness or it may be part of it

Science has long viewed the brain as the seat of consciousness. In a sense it is but it is not the creator of consciousness.

References

1. RAS in the Brain: Function, Location, and Importance of the Reticular Activating System.
2. The Penrose-Hameroff Approach.

Articles in This Series

Refer to the series index in Gnostic Wisdom.

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