qualities are at work, too. You add emotion to sugar’s taste if it reminds you that you may be prediabetic; you add emotion to a stoplight if the sight evokes bad memories of a car accident in your past. The personal cannot be separated from the “facts” of daily life. Facts are personal, in fact. The radical part is that nothing escapes the process of reality making.
Every quality in the outside world exists because you create it. Your brain is not the creator but a translational tool. The real creator is mind.
It will take more to convince you that you are creating all of reality. We understand. Doubt arises from a widespread lack of knowledge about how the mind interacts with the world “out there.”
Everything depends on the nervous system that is having the experience. Since humans don’t have wings, we have no idea of a hummingbird’s experience. Looking out an airplane window isn’t the same thing as flying. A bird swoops and dives, balances in midair, keeps an eye out in all directions, and so on. A hummingbird’s brain coordinates a wing speed of up to eighty beats per second and a heart rate of more than a thousand beats per minute. Humans cannot penetrate such an experience—in essence, a hummingbird is a vibrating gyroscope balanced in the middle of a whirling tornado of wings. You only have to consult a table of bird world records to be astonished. The smallest bird, the bee hummingbird of Cuba, weighs 1.8 grams, just over half the weight of a penny. Yet it has the same basic physiology as the world’s largest bird, the African ostrich, which weighs around 350 pounds.
In order to explore reality, the nervous system must keep up with the new experience, monitor it, and control the rest of the body. The nervous systems of birds explore experience on the far horizonof flying. Water birds, for example, are designed to dive. Emperor penguins have been measured to dive to a depth of 1,584 feet. The fastest dive ever measured belongs to peregrine falcons studied in Germany—depending on the angle they took, the falcons reached a speed between 160 and 215 miles per hour. Birds’ physical structure has adapted to push these boundaries. Their nervous systems are the key, not their wings or hearts. Thus a bird’s brain has created the reality of flight.
This argument can be taken much further with the human brain, because our minds have free will, while a bird’s awareness (so far as we can enter it) operates purely by instinct. For humans, a huge leap in reality making is possible.
But first, a note about something that Deepak is especially passionate about. It isn’t correct to say that the brain “creates” a thought, an experience, or a perception, just as it isn’t correct to say that a radio creates Mozart. The brain’s role, like the transistors in a radio, is to provide a physical structure for delivering thought, as a radio allows you to hear music. When you see a rose, smell its luxurious scent, and stroke its velvety petals, all kinds of correlations happen in your brain. They are visible on an fMRI as they occur. But your brain isn’t seeing, smelling, or touching the rose. Those are experiences, and only you can have an experience. This fact is essential; it makes you more than your brain.
To show the difference: in the 1930s, a pioneering brain surgeon named Wilder Penfield stimulated the area of the brain known as the motor cortex. He found that applying a tiny electrical charge to the motor cortex caused muscles to move. (Later research expanded on this finding extensively. Charges applied to memory centers can make people see vivid memories; doing the same to emotional centers can trigger spontaneous outbursts of feeling.) Penfield realized, however, that the distinction between mind and brain was crucial. Because brain tissue cannot feel physical pain, open-brain surgery can be performed with the patient awake.
Penfield would stimulate a local area of the motor cortex, causing
Every quality in the outside world exists because you create it. Your brain is not the creator but a translational tool. The real creator is mind.
It will take more to convince you that you are creating all of reality. We understand. Doubt arises from a widespread lack of knowledge about how the mind interacts with the world “out there.”
Everything depends on the nervous system that is having the experience. Since humans don’t have wings, we have no idea of a hummingbird’s experience. Looking out an airplane window isn’t the same thing as flying. A bird swoops and dives, balances in midair, keeps an eye out in all directions, and so on. A hummingbird’s brain coordinates a wing speed of up to eighty beats per second and a heart rate of more than a thousand beats per minute. Humans cannot penetrate such an experience—in essence, a hummingbird is a vibrating gyroscope balanced in the middle of a whirling tornado of wings. You only have to consult a table of bird world records to be astonished. The smallest bird, the bee hummingbird of Cuba, weighs 1.8 grams, just over half the weight of a penny. Yet it has the same basic physiology as the world’s largest bird, the African ostrich, which weighs around 350 pounds.
In order to explore reality, the nervous system must keep up with the new experience, monitor it, and control the rest of the body. The nervous systems of birds explore experience on the far horizonof flying. Water birds, for example, are designed to dive. Emperor penguins have been measured to dive to a depth of 1,584 feet. The fastest dive ever measured belongs to peregrine falcons studied in Germany—depending on the angle they took, the falcons reached a speed between 160 and 215 miles per hour. Birds’ physical structure has adapted to push these boundaries. Their nervous systems are the key, not their wings or hearts. Thus a bird’s brain has created the reality of flight.
This argument can be taken much further with the human brain, because our minds have free will, while a bird’s awareness (so far as we can enter it) operates purely by instinct. For humans, a huge leap in reality making is possible.
But first, a note about something that Deepak is especially passionate about. It isn’t correct to say that the brain “creates” a thought, an experience, or a perception, just as it isn’t correct to say that a radio creates Mozart. The brain’s role, like the transistors in a radio, is to provide a physical structure for delivering thought, as a radio allows you to hear music. When you see a rose, smell its luxurious scent, and stroke its velvety petals, all kinds of correlations happen in your brain. They are visible on an fMRI as they occur. But your brain isn’t seeing, smelling, or touching the rose. Those are experiences, and only you can have an experience. This fact is essential; it makes you more than your brain.
To show the difference: in the 1930s, a pioneering brain surgeon named Wilder Penfield stimulated the area of the brain known as the motor cortex. He found that applying a tiny electrical charge to the motor cortex caused muscles to move. (Later research expanded on this finding extensively. Charges applied to memory centers can make people see vivid memories; doing the same to emotional centers can trigger spontaneous outbursts of feeling.) Penfield realized, however, that the distinction between mind and brain was crucial. Because brain tissue cannot feel physical pain, open-brain surgery can be performed with the patient awake.
Penfield would stimulate a local area of the motor cortex, causing
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