Jill Bolte Taylor
BREAKING up is hard to do especially when it comes to ingrained scientific worldviews.
Even after they have betrayed us, dogmatic beliefs still cling like burrs to our psyche and 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 this cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, science now confirms that in fact adult brain cells keep growing after all! H. P. Blavatsky made short work of the errors of science in explaining the occult teachings:
“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.”
Neurofeedback
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.”
- The “Secret Doctrine” and its Study (P.G. Bowen) – Being extracts from the notes of personal teachings given by H.P. Blavatsky to private pupils.
“Memory has no seat, no special organ of its own in the human brain,” Blavatsky wrote in — it has seats in every organ of the body. The seat of memory, then, is assuredly neither here nor there, but “everywhere throughout the human body.”
- H. P. Blavatsky, Psychic & Noetic Action
Neuroplasticity
Modern studies in people recovering from stroke also provided support for neuroplasticity, as regions of the brain remained healthy could sometimes take over, at least in part, functions that had been destroyed.”
The ideas she presented were no less than a startling preview of our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of neuroplasticity.
Especially the “brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.” This fact in occult science began to be recognized by modern science thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.” These “now commonly accepted concepts, [were] novel ideas when [he] first conceived of them [70 years after Blavatsky] in the 1960’s.”
“In the 1960s, Paul Bach-y-Rita invented a device that was tested on a small number of people, and involved a person sitting in a chair, in which were embedded nubs that were made to vibrate in ways that translated images received in a camera, allowing a form of vision via sensory substitution.
Tree Bark
A musician needs his instrument, a painter her canvas. This requirement of a physical material vehicle is explained in The Secret Doctrine‘s first Fundamental Proposition: “…it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as ‘I am I,’
a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.
A central nervous system connected to a physical brain and body are indispensable to complete our human evolutionary experience. Just as the invisible “zeros and ones” of a digital software program, for example, must be connected to a physical computer or they cannot be read or used.
The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer, each layer being different from all the others, and each having its own special work, function, and properties.
– H. P. Blavatsky
(Transactions, Appendix on Dreams)
Neurons
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.
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 (The Secret Doctrine 1:14), that “consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change,” and, “motion best symbolises change, its essential characteristic.”
BREAKING up is hard to do, even when false truths have betrayed us, they still cling like cotton candy, resurrecting like the mythical Hydra. For each head cut off, it grew two more.
Theosophy Watch 