Your Amazing Brain: To Both Construct And Participate In Reality
Greetings readers,
Today I've decided to write a post about your brain, and my brain, and all of the brains. This is because they are endlessly fascinating and beautifully misunderstood. Let us examine our brains together today. I must confess that this examination will be inadequate as our understanding of our brains is very limited. Your brain is a collection of trillions of cells called neurons. And these neurons do many things from regulating your heartbeat, to experiencing love, to causing you to breathe without having to think about it. So instead of focusing on the various functions of the brain today I thought I'd propose a few key points that might get you thinking and feeling more positively about how incredible your brain actually is.
Your Brain Constructs a Reality
Now this is really a big one so I thought I'd start with it. You are right now observing this web page, and reading, and thinking about what you are reading. Your eyes are perceiving light and your ears are perceiving vibrations around you. Your skin is transmitting friction into senses of heat and touch, and your nose could even translate olfactory chemicals in the air into smell if you focused on it. This is your brain constructing a reality. This reality is uniquely yours and belongs to no one else. What is most amazing is that you do not see with your eyes, smell with your nose, taste with your tongue, feel with your skin, or hear with your ears. These are extensions, portions of the body that deliver sense to your brain. It is your brain that does these things. It takes in an infinite amount of information from the universe, participates in that information, and then creates its own experience.
Your Brain Also Participates in a Reality
There is also an objective universe around you. It exists as there is objectively something and not nothing. So when you think about it, your brain is simultaneously participating in and creating its own reality. This squishy, gray, lumpy thing breaches a rift between the real and the created and then combines them all at once. Let that sink in for a second. You have created these words, and yet they existed before you created them.
Mindfulness Meditation Puts You In Touch With This
When you engage in mindfulness meditation something amazing happens. When we sit and simply close our eyes and pay attention to the world around us, the sounds, the smells, the feeling of it, something marvelous begins to happen. We begin to realize that the separation between our brains, us, and the universe around us begins to fade away and become arbitrary. Mindful meditation can smooth over the perceived difference between our brains and everything else and places us in a state of relaxation and confidence that cannot be adequately described with words.
A Link To Begin Meditation
The following link helped me really begin my journey into meditation and it has helped me with anxiety, fear, and sadness. Please try it out - wear headphones - and listen to the guided meditation provided by Mr. Alan Watts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPpUNAFHgxM&t=1s Enjoy
-Dr. Matt
