Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctors wig show, where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues, aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey people, what's up. How's your day or night going? I'm sitting here sipping a cup of cold ginger tea and ready to get into some really cool stuff today. I hope you're doing well, but no matter what's going on, remember to use your meta awareness, the part of you that can step back and observe yourself. Even if you're in an awful state of mind, a crappy mood, a painful conflict, or even dealing with a devastating failure or a situation. Self awareness is the key to everything. Treasure it, honor it, train it, use it today. I want to tell you all about the power of awareness. So grab a drink and whatever else you need.
Speaker 0 00:01:16 And let's jump in. In episode five, I showed you how to consciously direct your awareness to pick up on specific kinds of inner experiences. We have this unbelievable capacity to intentionally focus our awareness. It's more difficult if you're in extreme physical, mental, or emotional pain, but even then you can almost always place your awareness where you choose where awareness goes. Experience flows. Unfortunately, we barely utilize this gift. We go through our days on automatic, letting our awareness direct us instead of the other way around. And when we feel lousy, we assume it just is what it is and think we can't use our awareness to change it, except perhaps through distraction, uh, or maybe working out in my doctoral work. I studied a lot of neuroscience. I lived in Switzerland for 10 years. And for part of the time I worked in a neuroscience lab.
Speaker 0 00:02:32 It's a really interesting field that makes new discoveries every year. We've gained a lot of valuable knowledge about strokes, brain tumors and other brain lesions, as well as fascinating observations of how the various areas of the brain process, different kinds of sensory information, visual, auditory propioceptive and complex things like language and music. But one thing that really struck me was how utterly clueless the field is about the mind itself by mind. I don't just mean thinking. I mean the entire psyche, everything we experience awareness, perception, cognition, imagination, intuition, thinking, feeling judgment, language memory, the whole kitchen caboodle. That was the name of the store I lived above in Portland, Oregon, not important. The whole kit and caboodle awareness of the contents of the mind is a domain that brain science knows nothing about. We have awareness, but we have no idea where it comes from or what controls it. None of the mind's awareness can be found in the brain. And you also can't locate functions like creativity, intuition, insight, understanding, and the most important one agency or control meaning the ability to direct your awareness from this mysterious source called I, we have this amazing gift of being able to direct our awareness at will and use it to make things happen. But neuroscience is in complete darkness as to how this occurs. For example, if I say wiggle your toes, you can just tell your toes to wiggle. And they do it
Speaker 1 00:04:43 Freaking magic. How the hell does that happen?
Speaker 0 00:04:47 We can map the neural signals in this, but we know nothing about how your awareness tells your toes what to do. Now. Let's say we attach electrodes to the part of your brain that controls toe wiggling. I could stimulate the electrodes and Presto. Your toes would be twitching. The discontents they'd be wiggling and wiggling, but here's where it gets interesting. If I stimulate the electrodes and your toes, wiggle, you say my toes wiggled. But if I say wiggle your toes and you do it intentionally, you say, I wiggled my toes. Whoa, major difference in the former electrode stimulation of the nerves was the agent of the action in the ladder. This mysterious force called I was the agent of the action, but you can't find this eye anywhere in the brain. Who, and what is this eye thing? It's the mystery of all mysteries in the 1950s, Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder, Penfield love that name, Wilder a specialist in epilepsy and the father of modern brain surgery demonstrated this.
Speaker 0 00:06:10 Sometimes brain surgery is done while patients are awake. So doctors can communicate with them during the procedure. Penfield discovered that when he stimulated various parts of the patient's brains, he could induce a variety of intense experiences, stimulate one part of the brain and they'd cry another part. And they'd hallucinate visions. Another part they'd hear sounds or experience a long lost memories. The patients describe these experiences as vivid and detailed, but said, they were also acutely aware of being in the operating room, having their brains stimulated by electrodes. They experienced two simultaneous situations at once. For example, feeling sad while also feeling normal and observing the whole process as it happened, they were totally conscious of the incongruity of the two experiences. And after the operations, they remembered this double consciousness. What does this tell us? Penfield could stimulate various types of responses, sensations, movements of limbs, memories, emotions, and so on, but he couldn't stimulate agency.
Speaker 0 00:07:31 Patients still knew whether a movement was done by them or to them. A sense of will. Freewill was beyond evocation by brain stimulation. Pennfield began his career as a materialist, meaning that he thought the mind emerged from the brain, but this completely changed his viewpoint. He became a passionate dualist meaning. He concluded that the mind and the brain are two related, but totally different things. Unfortunately, most modern neuroscience ignores Pennfield's discovery. Sometimes scientists want something to be true or untrue and consciously or unconsciously steer their research to reflect this. One of the worst pieces of science ever produced is the reductionist idea that the mind is caused by the brain. I'm going to do a whole episode that goes into detail about this and how it demonstrates without a doubt that psychiatric medication is a completely misguided and actually harmful approach to dealing with bad States of mind.
Speaker 0 00:08:38 But I want to mention a few tidbits that are floating through my awareness right now, if ideas were stored in your neurons, how could you ever have a new idea? You just have to keep recombining old ones, or do you think your brain decides what it likes or what breakfast cereal you want to buy? Do you think your brain thinks your brain does none of these things, you do them, your mind uses your brain to accomplish these things. Of course, there are experiments that have been interpreted to mean that artificial brain stimulation can induce agency, but yeah, they're interpretations and super dumb ones at that. I mean, some of the theories don't even make logical sense. Like for example, the notion that all that really exists is the brain and the mind is just a byproduct of it. This is a classic self refuting proposition.
Speaker 0 00:09:36 It says the mind doesn't really exist. Meaning thoughts aren't real because they're just byproducts of brain activity. But this means that this very proposition is mindless because the mind doesn't exist and therefore propositions don't exist. And therefore the ideas of meaningless, it's just junk science. There's also a theory that says the brain and the mind are the same thing, but this is also logical nonsense. Every attribute of the mind, perception, reason, emotion, and everything else we experience can only be described by using experiential language. There's nothing concrete you can touch or see or measure in the outer world. This is the complete opposite of the physical brain, which is described in terms of matter extension in space, physical mass, and so on mental and physical States interact, but they don't share any of the same properties. You'll never find your experience of a breathtaking sunset, or an insight into the spiritual meaning of your life.
Speaker 0 00:10:47 By examining a slice of brain tissue, they have nothing to do with each other. Bottom line is neuroscience can mess around with brain stimulation, chemistry and medication, all of which can alter your state of mind. But this has nothing to do with the mind awareness and agency themselves. Now, why is all this important? And how does it relate to the exercise on directing your awareness? Personal growth change and healing are predicated on your ability to direct your awareness. You aren't a victim of molecules and chemicals in your brain. You aren't just a byproduct of brain activity. Your mind has the amazing capacity to co-create choose transform and know itself. You're not stuck in automatic behaviors, like many of our animal brethren who live mostly at the level of the physical brain. You can direct your mind. You can train it. And most importantly, you can uncover and follow its deeper processes.
Speaker 0 00:11:57 The exercise teaches you how to do this by strengthening your ability to direct your awareness. If you don't train your awareness, but instead refer illogically to your brain as the source of your life issues. You miss out on your real growth as a human being now directing your awareness. Isn't only the core tool for working on yourself. It's also an essential part of creativity. I know this really well from playing music, putting your awareness onto your various inner experiences as they unfold in real time. Well, that's what I do. When I write a song, I never sit down with an idea for a song for me, songs just happen. And if I'm awake enough to catch the incoming signals, I jump on them. Usually what happens is I start feeling a certain way. Like I get in an odd mood or have a weird thought or vision.
Speaker 0 00:12:59 And I sit down at the piano or with my guitar, or maybe just with a pen and paper and I close my eyes and sense what's there. It could be something so subtle. I might not even notice it. I've written songs in crowded places where I barely notice my inner experiences, but I directed my awareness to them just long enough to download the vision. Sometimes it happened super fast like that. Then I go home and there's a song already written who wrote that? Not me. I just used my awareness, like an antenna, picking up a radio signal. If my perception of a potential song is more explicit. I follow it. If it's a feeling, I direct my focus there. If it's a vision, I look at it. If it sounds like a melody or a rhythm, I listen to them. If it's a thought dream, like word sequences, passing through my mind, I listened to the words.
Speaker 0 00:13:57 Then I dive into and follow my experience. But of course there are times when I feel like something gets stuck. Like I sent a melody or a line of words. I can feel it, taste it, but it doesn't materialize. So I focus more intensely on it. I amplify it. This brings it out of the shadows and makes it clear in my awareness. Boom, a song appears just like the solutions to your problems appear if you process them deeply. Speaking of awareness, as the key to creativity, I recently wrote a song and made a video about the process of directing your awareness and how the better you get at doing this. The more liberated you feel from your problems, problems can feel so oppressive and deadly, but there's always a light shining within your darkness. And you can tap into it. If you train your awareness in the right way, the first lines of the song are in the foggy runes of his mind was a yellow moon.
Speaker 0 00:15:09 That always shined. When I was writing it, I kept hearing the word castaways and it gave me the feeling that when you first start to free yourself from a bad problem, it's like being a Castaway. Like nothing makes sense, but your little Island of hope, faith and the vision of transformation. So I called the song castaways and I drew a picture of the process. The release date is this Friday, October 2nd. You can watch the video on my YouTube channel and you can stream the song on Spotify or wherever you listen to music. Here's a sneak preview.
Speaker 2 00:16:11 <inaudible> see you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at doctors' wig, and you can sign up on the mailing list at <inaudible> dot com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting 20, 21 weekly personal growth tips, and lots more be well.
