Overactive Judicial
Center: The lateral frontal pole in the ventrolateral frontal cortex area
of the human brain is vital for pondering the ‘what ifs’ of life and judging
right from wrong. This section of the brain associated with the ability to spot
bad decisions and thinks over what we might have done instead, thus giving us
the capacity to avoid them in future is a uniquely human trait. The Lateral PFC
goes quiet during the Flow State...thereby reducing self-editing
(repression/inhibition/superego). The inspired spontaneity, awe-filled Grace
state of improv, rapping, poetry, falling in love, music jamming,
genius-creativity, writer’s high, invention, visions and peak spiritual
experience arise from a quieting of the judicial center of the brain. What does
this say about self-inhibition, self-judgment and self-limitation?
Social reticence, shyness, low self-esteem, social
withdrawal accompanying depression, sensitivity to sociopathy,
vulnerability to the Powerhoe could all arise from a case of the lateral
frontal cortex being over-active thereby increasing self-consciousness to the
point of pain. Ratings of shyness-eliciting events reveal that interactions
with strangers, especially those of the opposite sex or in positions of
authority, situations requiring assertive behavior, and explicitly evaluative
settings such as job interviews, provoke the strongest feelings of social
anxiety (Russell, Cutrona, & Jones, 1986; Watson & Cheek, 1986).
Vigilance, or the action or state of keeping careful watch
for possible danger or difficulties, from the Latin vigilantia/vigilare ‘ to keep
awake,’ can be set on such habitual high alert that life itself becomes painful
and unrewarding. Learning to tone down our reptilian brain and build a more
self-assured prefrontal overseer is essential to generating the energy reserves,
sense of well-being and confidence necessary to establish a sovereign life.
That is, we cannot fully develop or mature if our self-reflexive judicial observation
center causing us too much friction, second guessing, double-binds, hesitation,
paralysis, inhibition and neurosis. Leaving us to suffer a
crippling case of suspended animation—a life on hold. Afraid to venture, dream,
scheme, plan, strategize or put one foot in front of the other in life.
The lack of faith in life, world-weariness,
oversensitivity to conflict, and fear of constant predation and ridicule make
life untenable to the hyper-conscious and the hyper-conscientious. Dejection
and self-rejection go hand in hand. Conscientiousness is the personality trait
of being thorough, careful, or vigilant, and implies a desire to do a task
well. If our agentic capacity to propel ourselves forward in life is
insufficient to cope with our environment, plus our desire to conscientiously
perform is not realized…and yet we have a hyper-active judgmental center, our
existence is then plagued by a series of brink walls, pits of quicksand, false
starts and cul-de-sacs. Thus we fail to achieve a sense of reward in being
“us,” and our life is not a bowl of cherries, but a bowl of rancid, cold stew.
When we fail to achieve life-satisfaction,
intrinsic joy and pleasure no amount of good intentions can make up for our
sense of deep loss and dejection…and ultimately we fail to maintain the
tenacity, persistence, stamina, and grit to keep going, and we enter a crisis
of creativity and conscience. When we enter that crisis, rather than wallow in
that quagmire for the rest of our lives, we must choose to let go of our
hardened judge, stop beating ourselves up for under-achievement, and step out
into the new, the novel and the creative edge. In those with high creative
ability, conscientiousness is negatively related to creative accomplishments,
perhaps because an over-active Lateral PFC prevents the creative Flow State
through excessive self-editing, repression, inhibition and second-guessing.
The degree of entrepreneurial executive capacity
of our parents…that is their agentic will to achieve their just desires…will
largely determine where we stand in our own sense of hope and accomplishment
vs. futility and disappointment. Presovereign parents locked in a loveless
marriage, mindlessly carrying out their duties at the expense of their own
self-actualization and fulfillment, will in effect lead to the castration of
their children’s sovereign will as well. If parents are fragmented and
at war with themselves, then they're going to pass that on to the child; the
only quality of life for a child is their emotional relationships. With regards to expectation and performance we internalize our
parents’ superego, which in turn becomes our own superego by default. Thus if
we had a cold, anxious, critical mother and a ridiculing, unsupportive father
then our own judicial superego will be uncompassionate, self-hating and
subversive.
The false power/disempowerment dichotomy of
the sadomasochistic enemy within not only confounds our capacity for growth,
but undermines our enjoyment of success and rewards as well. This leaves us without
the courage for life, expressed as a general lack of encouragement and heart
needed for the perseverance and will-power to rise to the challenges and
changes that life presents. Thus we always feel overwhelmed and not quite up to
the task of life no matter what circumstance we find ourselves in as we are not
“at home” in our own being. While we are not really “at home” we are an easy
pushover to being hijacked by the wills and needs of others. For the socially
anxious individual self-consciousness is actually other-consciousness…as we
become uncentered or pulled out of ourselves by our oversensitivity to the
opinions of others. False power
and disempowerment is the anathema of the sovereign, who will not tolerate the toxic
social stress for more than the length of time it takes to realize it is
happening.
Quieting down the lateral PTL through
self-regulation, meditation and mindfulness to elicit the Flow and Awe state
will ultimately promote freedom from a subversive superego that is holding back
our life. Refusing to put off our true purpose anymore will force us to move
from stoic dependability and self-sacrifice to being able to tolerate the
disorderliness, conflict and risk necessary to become truly creative. The
insecure must let go of the safety line of codependency and become fiercely
independent in order to grow up and join the human race as creative,
interdependent sovereign. To not do so is to forgo the chance that our parents
did give us to realize our HUman potential.
We are both limited by or facilitated by the negative or
positive qualities of our inner-parents (superego). As we go through life we
adopt countless relationships with psuedo parents as we unconsciously key into
the superegos of others. We remain a child, psychically open to socioemotional
hypnotism as we play out "unfinished business" or developmental
challenges and stages. We grow in sovereignty as we succeed in attuning to our
own truth and doing what is best for ourselves - without either giving our
power away or succumbing to numbing in an effort to serve others at our own
expense.
Our higher HUman circuitry can only develop if and when we
resolve the conflict within our inner-parents through inner-couples counseling
if you will. Mindfulness as to our difficulties, problems, conflicts, deficits
and blocks and how they relate to our family of origin will determine what work
needs to be done to establish a more compassionate relationship to ourselves by
eliminating the default sadomasochistic (sub/dom) condition of our superego.
This opening up of the lid of our consciousness by healing the relationship
between the masculine and feminine within is the greatest source of energy for
enlightenment, creativity, bliss and sovereignty.
The whole jist of sovereign
evolution is to overcome the inner turmoil of domestic violence in our brain
via compassionate Fair Witnessing. Sadomasochism is rife in society even when
there is no overt abuse, violence or disharmony. Since we ARE IT, it is very
hard to see the lens through which we relate to ourselves and the world. We
have to become disillusioned by facing reality before we can grow beyond the
conditions that support our repression and captivity. Only the gnawing pain of
dissatisfaction and the mounting pressure of dysfunction alert us to the
entropic, wasteful nature of our condition. The sub/dom duality of the
Hindbrain Borg is holding most of us back in the dark ages, and threatening the
very existence of the earth.
The Borg is the Hindbrained human
remember...while the Sovereign is the Wholebrained, or presenced human. Unless
we discover some remarkable methods for brain regrowth (promyelinating
exosomes, rejuvenating frequencies, ecovillages, neurophillic electromagnetics,
neurogenesis supplements) we are stuck with starting at the 1% potential we are
left with. But with a small amount of self-training in observation we can keep
the Janus of perception alive to equally perceive the inner and outer worlds at
the same time. Humanizing or sovereignizing begins with the dual eye of awareness...the
simultaneous inner and outer eye. We may still act robotically, BUT we are
aware of the fact that we are doing so. The Hindbrain however, is embedded in
impulse/instinct/reaction, which is predetermined through the robotic
repetition of the unconscious and conscious memory of the past. This is why we
make a joke about humans never learning from history or the past...because when
we are operating from Hindbrain dominance we lack the aerial perspective of the
Fair Witness and its capacity for creative and autonomous choice. True learning
from history would require a stage development to Wholebrain dominance.
Wholebrain dominance is obviously
a matter of integrating the Triune or 8 circuit brain through autonomic nervous
system regulation and Heart meditation. The heart integrates the various
evolutionary structures in the brain, so that that which we're thinking,
feeling, and acting become a single integrated whole. Instead of being
fragmented and neurotic we become authentic and integrated (integrity) ie: more empowered and effective in our life
than we ever were before. As Joseph Chilton Pearce says, surrender to the great
intelligence of the heart and everything is radically changed, including our
intellect.
Wholebrain dominance and the Fair
Witness, or Presence, comes and goes with our energy levels, self-care and
environmental cues…this is why the visionary ecopods are essential for HUman
evolution, because the environment, the emotional-cognitive-intellectual
ambience and lifestyle is created expressly to
support higher HUman cognition. As it is now, we have to make a muscular effort
to stand against the tide of devolution, our own addiction to destruction and
desire for death. The good news is that we do have a “small” window of personal
liberty and resource availability to collectively make a push for Civilization
Next.
It goes without saying that in a
sub/dom false power society that consciousness is set to unuse, misuse and
abuse as a matter of default. Thus conflict and confusion is implicit in the
underlying fabric or substrate of Borg reality...that we make such a good go of
it despite the chessboard being rigged against sovereign freedom and autonomous
choice is truly remarkable. Thus our very difficulty with this end-stage Borg
world shows great promise of what is to come...and I feel we are on the verge
of a mega-breakthrough…perhaps through our understanding of the brain.
It is said that the Flow state is
achieved via the slowing down of activity in the prefrontal cortex, but this
calming of activity does not represent an absence of consciousness in the
forebrain, but an increase in the Presence of consciousness. In the Flow state
the self-critic and self-consciousness disappears not because the prefrontals
go offline, but because the Hindbrain stops hijacking the forebrain and ceases
to generate the cacophony of alert mental activity associated with beta
brain waves. Thus the natural evolutionary hierarchy
of the brain stands on its base, rather than being ass up. Integration means
less “noise” such that consciousness can ultimately be elevated to cosmic
connectivity or sovereignty…as evidenced in states of Presence, Flow and Awe.
Presence, Flow and Awe is moving
from the Hindbrain hack to the Gamma range in which fragmentation and “noise” are
reduced and Wholebrain synchronization occurs. Further research may discover
that awe, Flow and eureka chemistry is similar to that of near death or lucid
dreaming in which wholebrain synchronization causes a temporary rise in super
vivid lucid reality—a supra-reality if you will. In gamma brain wave
activity virtually all of the brain's higher cortical regions begin to operate
on a common frequency, somewhere in the 30- to 40-hertz bandwidth, generating
"flow," with being "in the zone.”
The gamma brain wave state is
as pleasurable as it is powerful via the production of neurochemical dopamine,
the fuel of the brain's reward circuitry. The highest state of cognitive
processing occurs when gamma waves prevail. Laughter is the best medicine! Humor, laughter or mirth associated with genuine
joy creates gamma brain waves similar to meditative
bliss that enables the brain to enter the highest state of cognitive
processing where learning is facilitated. Flow and Awe promotes unconditional
love and altruism, gratitude and compassion, and trains the brain for
creativity.
Researchers
have created a drug that makes people more sensitive to inequality, more likely
to share resources and generally more compassionate - in other words, it makes
them kinder and more altruistic. The drug, called tolcapone, prolongs the
effect of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Tolcapone is already used
for the treatment of Parkinson's disease as it changes the neurochemistry of
the brain by prolonging the effect of dopamine, the hormone associated with
reward and motivation in the prefrontal cortex. Previous research has
shown that fairness or economic inequality is regulated by our prefrontal
cortex.
Tolcapone-takers tended to give more money to strangers under the drug's
influence showing that under the drug's influence, players were more sensitive
to and less tolerant of social inequality. The effect of dopamine’s association
with reward and motivation in the prefrontal cortex points to a mechanism for
why mercenaries are without mercy. Dopamine
in the prefrontal lobes are the circuits governing free-will, proactivity,
assertiveness, and compassionate caretaking (socialwork). The more these are
exercised the more we become sovereign in our own life...wherein higher use of
the brain for social uplift becomes the drug of choice.
Gamma
wave is a heightened state of conscious awareness similar to the
"highly lucid and realer-than-real mental experiences reported in
near-death experiences. If reality itself is always incomplete, each
moment becomes complete in itself. Going after higher performance rewards and
Flow states increases our sense of altruism and abundance. The active seeking
of positive reward chemistry not only prevents us from stooping to the negative
reward chemistry of the Powerhoe, or pathological narcissist, but it also
habituates our brain to happiness, which directly and subliminally protects us
from attracting power-abuse from others. In this way we become immune to
learned helplessness, victimhood, identity crises and depression.
The visionary mind probes the imagination through adjacent
possible realities into the highest, most wonderous, joyous potential futures. Gnosis or connecting the dots through writing,
scientific eureka, creative design or any creative act encompassing the Flow
state provides us with positive reward chemistry…that does not necessarily have
a downside except for a short period of rest and recovery after the peak
experience.
Volitional Daydreaming—One such method of achieving positive
reward chemistry is daydreaming. Positive daydreaming is known to reinforce and
enhance social skills, offer relief from boredom, provide opportunities for
rehearsal and constructive planning, and provide a ongoing source of pleasure.
Thus positive constructive daydreaming has an adaptive role in our lives and is
associated with openness to new experience, reflection, curiosity, sensitivity,
and exploration of ideas, feelings, and sensations. Four basic adaptive
functions include: Forward thinking/future
planning; creativity/creative
problem solving; attentional cycling/meaning
making; dishabituation/breaking
perspective. Daydreaming also offers “constructive internal reflection”
for socioemotional skills including compassion, taking anothers’ perspective,
moral reasoning, understanding the implications of emotional responses, and
deriving meaning from events and past experiences.
Lucid Dreaming—In Lucid Dreaming the dreamer knows that what
she’s seeing and feeling is a dream, not reality—and with that awareness comes
the ability to make decisions about changing the dream’s course of events. New
evidence suggests that lucid dreaming constitutes a new state of consciousness with
distinct differences from waking and from REM sleep. Lucid dreams occur not just
in the REM frequencies (delta and theta range), but also higher frequency gamma
band, peaking at around 40 Hz. This effect is strongest in the frontal and
frontolateral areas of the brain, which are considered to be the seat of
linguistic thought and higher awareness. The altered states of meditation have
been scientifically linked with gamma brainwave frequencies and the ability to
lucid dream. Also zapping the prefrontal lobes of sleeping volunteers with the 40
Hertz gamma wave band, produces brain waves of the same frequency, which
triggers lucidity 77% of the time, leading participants’ to feel insight
(knowing that they were dreaming).
The child is born with an
infinite capacity for love and intelligence but by the age of 14 Borg society
has stripped us of our genius and molded us into a conformist slave. We may
only have 1% of our autonomous conscious faculty left to us to use, but if we
use it well, we can start to regrow some of our mental and spiritual potential
that we lost through unuse, misuse and abuse. Nutrition, the Inner Arts,
exercise and an enriched environment will encourage the regeneration of our
central nervous system. However, the most important factor in the development
of the sovereign brain and the recovery of the soul is being surrounded by a
post-sadomascochistic society. Because we are fundamentally wired as a social
creature a trans-Borg community is absolutely essential to both achieve and
maintain personal sovereignty. Once the sovereign brain is established we are
plugged directly into the heartbeat of the universe and the triggers, impulses
and insults from the outer world are filtered through the Fair Witness...that
doesn't "take things personally."
Creativity is
associated with disobedience, disorderliness, breaking rules and a tolerance
for ambiguity and risk. Self reliance, confidence in our own ideas and less
dependency on others, eventually lead to higher levels of novelty and
creativity. Creative people manage to silence the inner critic, lack concern
about what others think, and lack of a desire to do everything just right.
Transcending the social inhibitory effect of the superego may be exactly what
is needed to persevere in the long-term, despite setbacks and despite
criticism. Failure and mistakes are a crucial part of learning and creativity,
while too much people pleasing, conscientiousness, dependability and
orderliness may prevent the amount of failure necessary for creative genius.
Creative individuals tend to be more self-contained, independent, and intrinsically
motivated (lower dependability/orderliness) while also being more driven,
persistent, and gritty (higher industriousness/achievement).
The ability to question reality is a self-authoring executive function
that normally arises in adolescence. The creativity inherent in
the self-authoring brain provides the “space” and expansiveness necessary to
metabolize power stress in a positive productive manner. Whereas the socially
compliant Hindbrain must conform and react to the given social conditions. In
this way amplifying executive self-determinism allows us to establish our own
homeo-regulating method of preserving our brain matter from the caustic rampage
of the Powerhoe. Note however that we do have to continually up our game as our
observation of the machinations of power abuse become ever more acute as we
develop the Fair Witness sensitivity of the sovereign. We notice the Powerhoe
more, but it affects us less.
Paul
McLean of the Triune Brain theory found that the majority of our ego awareness
-- our personality, our awareness of selves in the world – is processed through
the two animal brains, and only the tiniest fragment of it through the
intellectual brain. Our subconscious is said to travel at 2500 mph while the
speed at which our conscious intellectual brain moves is only 120 mph. This is
why instinct, intuition and emotion often supercedes rational thought,
especially in the spur of the moment.
According
to Joseph Chilton Pearce by age six, a child has an infinite capacity
of adapting to any kind of pattern given; a
six-year-old is able to adapt to, modify to, modulate to, imprint to anything. At age twelve, a chemical is released by the brain and
starts dissolving that neural mass that has not been activated by being given
the proper stimulus of models, people, exemplars out there, who represent these
capacities for the child. By age fourteen eighty percent of that neural brain mass
is dissolved and absorbed into the cerebrospinal
fluid from
disuse. That neural tissue unprotected by
fatty myelin sheathing which is laid down during patterning is discarded.
Structurally, the
brain continues to increase in total volume until the age of approximately 14 years. Total white matter volume continues to
increase into the early 20s, frontal and parietal grey matter volume peaks at
approximately 14 years of age before declining, and the grey
matter in the occipital and temporal lobes continues to increase until 20 years of age. The decrease in grey
matter volume particularly from the frontal regions is probably due to the
streamlining of the developing brain on the basis of experience and pertinent
environmental needs—the “use it or lose it” theory.
It
is the thinking brain, our intellectual brain or neocortex, which occupies
eighty percent of the skull, that we lose eighty percent of in adolescence, but
the two animal brains we utilize one hundred percent of, and they never lose
anything. Emotional energy is the energy that holds all patterns into their
formal relationships and maintains all relationships. Our brain imprints, and
makes all its neural patterns, according to the suggestions given or implied
within the child's ambient environment. Ninety-five percent of all learning and
memory that the brain lays down in that neural patterning takes place beneath conscious
awareness. While only five percent of those neural patterns will result from
all of our training of our children, all of our disciplines of our children.
Providing set and setting or generating positive feedback
loops through environmental
enrichment of produces exosomes that mimick a promyelinating effect and promote
the proliferation of neural stem cells, supporting myelination of the gray
matter and preserving memory and cognitive function. In this way we can
precommit to a neurologically stimulating life by setting ourselves up for
Flow, Awe and neurogenesis. Since we are largely driven and created by our
unconscious, we must use the small conscious ratio of our awareness to support
the lower brains…the reptilian, limbic and old mammalian.
• Reimagination—The stresses of human reality do not seem to
go away over the course of our life, but are a reoccurring theme to which we
either succumb or find ways to meta-adapt to and rise above. There is childhood
PTSD, workplace PTSD, relationship PTSD, ecoshock and existential doom. The
desire to fall and not get up is a symptom of our burnout and exhaustion from
successive traumas and disappointments that we fail to completely recover from.
Unless we have a strong will or training in stress relief and meta-adaptation the
accumulated weight of stress eats away at our ability to get back up and keep
going. The unbearable gravity of systematic stress prevents the joy, Flow, awe
state through which a reimagination of our lives could come into being. The
learned helplessness from repetitive PTSD makes it hard to have new ideas and too
easy to give up. Depression thus represents the inability to construct a
future, and to believe that a desired future is possible. Thus unmetabolized
stress is the eater of dreams. Breaking this one way train to hell requires a
conscious muscular effort to slay the dragon of systemic stress as many times
as it takes to get on top of it and triumph over our triggers and our
circumstances. Proadaptation to stress can be as systematically constructive as
stress is deconstructive, and in this way we build a new life for ourselves out
of the dying bones of the old. Some of the steps necessary to proadaptation
are: Diagnosis, Assessment, Declaration, Preparation, Precommitment, Practice,
Execution, Reassessment and Regrouping.
• Walk the Path and the Way and
the Skills Appear—You create your reality by your perception of it...in this
sense there is no reality but the one you perceive. With Kundalini awakening
your reality becomes greatly expanded...there is no point talking to doctors
about this...for there is no medication that will save us from
reality...reality always gets us in the end, so we might as well surrender to
it. The universe is hyperbolic and new growth requires death of the old, that
is growth emerges out of former stages. During kundalini awakenings we go
through many cycles of influx-grace, dieoff, regrowth, and substantiation.
Contemporary medicine and psychiatric medicine work against these natural
rhythms—it seems we are doing everything in our power to avoid reality and
prevent our evolution.
Trying to fit your experience of
reality into any thought system, science or philosophy is pointless. Reality is
too big to be known or understood by the mind. You can play with concepts and
paint pretty word pictures...but it is just poetry to help you maintain your
foothold in infinity. Much better to relax into the flow of reality than to try
and grasp it as a "thing." The real safety and pleasure is achieved
by letting go of our need to know and melting into the bliss of nothingness.
Nature is your guru and your heart is your guru. In order to grow and
substantiate find some vocation that will help you heal with plants, children,
animals, arts etc...You will not feel stable in a vacuum, you have to do
something productive with your life. See what the world is asking of you to
do...this will help you grow and feel more solid.
The Way encompasses everything on
earth and in heaven...thus if we aim to run around trying to "fix" everything
to align it with Shambhala we would probably be locked up as a disruptive
influence on the status quo. Certain people have cottoned onto A Way that works
brilliantly for them, while at the same time serving the whole. Jason Silva
with his Shots of Awe is a case in point.
Prometheus Rising by Aton Wilson
is a good primer. The 8 Circuit brain in association with the Spiral Dynamics
scale of consciousness is a good map. http://deoxy.org/8brains.htm
