This is Your Brain, Infinitely Elastic

Jill Bolte Taylor

BREAKING up is hard to do especially when it comes to ingrained scientific worldviews.

Even after they have betrayed us, dogmatic style beliefs still cling like burrs to our psyche, and our brains, despite all logic.

Recall the insistent flat earth and geocentric crowd, and creationist belief that the Earth is only ten thousand years old.

The list is very long. Science is littered with the remains of once sacred cows.

Until only a few years ago, for example, it was asserted that the brain cannot grow new cells —

when they are gone they
are gone for good?

Challenging the cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, neuroscience now confirms that, in fact, adult brain cells can regrow after all — they can and do replace and even increase themselves as necessary!

H. P. Blavatsky explained: “The brain is the instrument of waking consciousness and every conscious mental picture formed means change and destruction of the atoms [neurons?] of the brain.” Yet, “in ordinary intellectual activity, moves on well beaten paths in the brain, and does not compel sudden adjustments and destructions in its substance.”

She then noted that a “new kind of mental effort calls for something very different — the carving out of ‘new brain paths’, the ranking in different order of the little brain lives.”

Her idea was, unmistakably, a preemptive nod to our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of “neuroplasticity” —

“… the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.”(Wikipedia) This fact of occult science began to be recognized thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.”

Paul Bach-y-Rita and Neuroplasticity

A short 10 minute story by Wired Science called ‘Mixed Feelings’ showcasing the work of the late, great Paul Bach-y-Rita and his revolutionary work in neurosplasticity. He sought to rewire the brain so that one sense could potentially compensate for another that was damaged or absent; working to help the blind to acquire a certain form of ‘sight’ using the sense of touch, and also helping ‘wobblers’, people with damaged vestibular function, so their brains might create a new mode for having balance.

Neuroscientists Are Baffled

These “now commonly accepted concepts, [were]  novel ideas when [he] first conceived of them [70 years after Blavatsky] in the 1960’s.”

The world of brain science was forever changed. Yet, “the scale of change [in the brain] is much smaller than what goes on during the critical period of development,” said a study co-author Elly Nedivi, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) —

“but the fact that it goes on at all,
is earth-shattering.”

The truth is that neuroscientists today are completely baffled by how the brain is able to organize itself so perfectly.

Neurons

Yet, the word “science” comes from the Latin word “scire” which means to know. “Science” is supposed to be a systematic, organized way of investigating the world. The catch is when specialized learning turns into a dogmatic worldview, it then becomes an end-in-itself — distorting what might have resulted in a more holistic truth.

With persistent reference to occult science Blavatsky insisted (SD 1:14), that “consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change,”  and, “motion best symbolises change, its essential characteristic.”

The Miracle of
Brain Organization

West Meets East

In the emerging science of neuroplasticity and growing brain cells, we’ve come full circle again — in this case back to Buddha, who maintained it is “thoughts” that reign supreme over the physical brain and body.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought,” says the opening verse in the Dhammapada:-

“… all that we are is founded on our thoughts and formed of our thoughts.”

And if our thoughts can and should grow, it follows logically that the medium through which they are expressed, the neurons (brain cells), should also grow.

But what is it that initiates and orchestrates these changes? Must it not be that actual “thought producer” — the soul-perceiver within everyone? Theosophy maintains there must be, in fact, a higher directing power

above the intellect and functional brain mind, that often accomplishes what might seem like miracles.

Scientists Study
Tibetan Monks

A clip taken from the History Channel documentary about a Buddhist monk of Tibet who some how mummified himself through meditation, and whose body has somehow been miraculously preserved.

Scientist set out to discover what happened and study the monks preforming meditation under scientific test conditions, with amazing results.

Brain Plasticity

Is there is a Master Planner working behind the scenes in our brain? One of the most convincing proofs of this is in the brains almost limitless resilience and capacity to adapt to changing conditions, to heal itself and restore order in the body — from the inside out.

“We are beginning to harness the brains incredible ability to invent itself, and then reinvent itself throughout life,” says the commentator in this video clip.

This is the true story of young girl, Jody Miller, who “leads an idyllic life for a nine-year-old girl.” Yet she underwent, when all other measures failed to cure her life-threatening illness, some of the most drastic surgery imaginable — half her brain was removed.

The Jody Miller Story

The Plastic Atom

Brain cells, like all substance, is built on the notion of “atoms” which were once thought to be “indivisible,” over the objections of H. P. Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine.

That reductionist view of atoms changed completely in the first few years of the 20th Century. The idea of rigidly unchangeable brains may well have been a stubborn carry-over from the earlier view about atoms, and had simply not been challenged until recently. It’s ironic how similar the words “neutron” and “neuron” are.

Laboratory scientist Dean Radin describes the relationship between mind and body as seen through both Eastern and Western sciences:

“If West meets East, could science verify our deep union with the universe that mystics have been talking about for thousands of years?”

Eastern Science

“Gain Siddhis for thy future birth.”

(Voice of the Silence}

The Fickle Atom

The illusion of solid matter “was shattered in 1897,” writes David Pratt, in his article The Infinite Divisibility of Matter,”with the discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle”…

…the “uncuttable” had been cut. This was followed by the discovery of the proton in 1911 and the neutron in 1932, the two particles that make up the atomic nucleus.

In the decades that followed, subatomic particles began to proliferate like bacteria, and today over 200 are known.

Neutrons & Protons

“This is sufficient to show how absurd are the simultaneous admissions of the non-divisibility and elasticity of the atom. The atom is elastic, ergo, the atom is divisible, and must consist of particles, or of sub-atoms.  And these sub-atoms?”

– (H. P. Blavatsky)

Atoms

“They are either non-elastic, and in such case they represent no dynamic importance,” Blavatsky went on to say, “or, they are elastic also — and in that case, they, too, are subject to divisibility. And thus ad infinitum.”

“But infinite divisibility of atoms resolves matter into simple centres of force, i.e., precludes the possibility of conceiving matter as an objective substance,” Blavatsky wrote:

“This vicious circle is
fatal to materialism.”

– H. P. Blavatsky

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