Pseudo-Science Theory #1

As I've mentioned before, I'm reading this amazing book called PSIience: How New Discoveries in Quantum Physics and New Science May Explain the Existence of Paranormal Phenomena by Marie D. Jones.

And I've come up with a theory:

Thoughts are not produced by the brain -- as we were taught in school -- but actually originate from the mind, which may itself be a part of or product of what we often call the soul.

Now, if you're not a student of, or interested in, paranormal matters, this will probably sound like bunk to you (which is why I use the term "pseudo-science" in the title). And I'm not an academic, this is not a science blog, so I won't bother to site my sources. (If the theory intrigues you and this is the first time you've encountered such an idea, there are a lot smarter people out there who can guide you far better than I can. I'm just throwing out a concept for anyone who's interested.)

I arrived at this theory (I don't know if it's a proper theory, but I'm calling it that, anyway) due to a number of different observations an studies...

First, a few years back a podcast called Mysterious Universe (now defunct, but I think I've got several of the podcasts backed-up on disc somewhere) did a story about a study of reports of transplant organ recipients taking on the personalities of the deceased organ donors. The article (is that what you would call a spoken essay?) mentions how Eastern belief systems beleive that we have a life force which runs throughout us, called chi, and ponders whether or not chi might contain personality traits as much as the brain would. The precident is the scientific discovery that every single cell in our body contains in its DNA all the genetic information necessary to create any living being. Every piece of DNA contains all that information!

Then I remember wondering, while reading about the nature of auras, whether or not auras could be our soul. Maybe this energy that surrounds our body, which some people claim to be able to see, is actually us -- the eternal us, the us that leaves the body when it dies.

(Oh, yeah, for my theory to be correct, we have to assume that we have a soul and don't just decay into compost when our bodies pass away. If you can't get behind that idea, there's no use reading any further, lol. This entry isn't for you.)

I may have even read someone who said that our auras are our souls. I don't recall.

But the aura being the soul, that seems possible to me, based on experiential evidence: Have you ever met someone who just seems to "fill up" the room? Or "made a connection" with someone attractive at the oposite side of the room at a party or something? Or, conversely, have you ever met someone who seems buried deep inside themself? Or have you ever felt somehow "bigger" or "smaller" at times?

I'm explaining this poorly, but I'll bet you can understand the phenomena I'm talking about: It's a sense of you being at times as huge as a house or as small as an aching tooth. Your awarness of the world around you can span the unseen universe, or can collapse into an unscratchable itch on a centimeter of your skin.

If you practice martial arts, you know how to focus and expand your chi to attack or block an oponent, or to contract your chi to avoid an attack.

So what if the thing we're "expanding" or "contracting" -- or which is expanding or contracting involuntarily according to our emotional and/or mental state -- is us? Me? You? The "I" that you mean when you say or think "I am..."?

Moreover, mainstream science assumes that all the electrochemical stuff going on inside our brains is a product of that brain.

But what if it's not?

We often hear how we only use, like, 12% of our brains, or something like that. And New Age thinkers have speculated that if we were capable of using a larger percentage of our brain we could probably accomplish the types of feats that Eastern Yogis, or Jesus of Nazareth accomplished.

But what if that's not necessary? What if the paradigm itself is wrong?

I propose that we -- what Eckhart Tolle calles the "I Am," the little voice that asks the question when we think "What am I?" -- are not our bodies, and our thoughts aren't the products of our brains.

I think that when we use our brains, we are using our brain! The same was we use our liver or our hands. I don't think our brain thinks thoughts; I believe our soul or spirit or whatever -- that energetic form that lives on beyon its use for the body -- thinks the thoughts, and it merely uses the brain! :D

It seems to clear! I had this revelation toward the end of my shift at work. I was reading some of Jones' book -- she's still in a sort of introductory stage, where she's outlining the different types of paranormal phenomena that is reported and studied for people who aren't as nerdy as I am about the paranormal and haven't grown up reading books about these True Accounts Of The Unexplained An Mysterious! (these books often had exclamation points in the titles) -- and she mentions studies in human consciousness that she'll be describing later in the book, and then all these different concepts -- chi, auras, the energetic entity that lives on after physical death, the soul -- all coalesced into a single concept: Thought doesn't originate in the brain!

I think a possibly more accurate paradigm might be that thoughts pass through our brains, rather than originating there.

Which totally shifts the way we think about soul and the spirit!!! :D

Scientists and skeptics don't believe we can live on after death because our thoughts are created by our brain. When the brain dies, thought ceases.

Which trips them up when they study (scientists, not the skeptics, lol) Near Death Experiences, because how can a brain that has stopped functioning -- e.i. ceased producing electrical impulses that, mainstream science currently believes, is thought?

In fact, all psychic phenomena is a mystery when viewed from this perspective! How can a brain send it's electrical impulses outside the body to move a physical object, or read someone else's electrical impulses, or go halfway around the world a "remote view" an enemy's military movements?!

The answer, as mainstream science has come already come up with, is that it can't.

BUT...

If we -- the I Ams -- aren't a biproduct of our brain and, instead, are mealy utilizing that particular organ, then we might be able to do these things! :D

Think about the failed explorations in the past of the brain... Scientists in the early 1900s were sure they would be able to open up someone's head and poke around and figure out what makes what do what. But those experiements resulted in a sort of vague, general undertsanding that this sort of section over here seams to sort of control these types of functions, and then this section over here kind of seems to control these basic types of functions, and so on.

I think that's why chemical "fixes" for mental disorders never 100% work. they kind of help... but...

Because (in my theory) emotional disorders, thought-based disorders, personality problems in general, are all me disorders. They're not the byproduct of a brain whose electrochemical activities are malfunctioning, but of a spirit -- an amorphous blob of energy that is experiencing physical life through a physical vehicle -- that is somehow not "getting it" (whatever the hell "it" is, lol).

Not to be pro or con on medications that affect the brain. I don't know dick about biochemistry or pharmaceutical chemestry. I'm a decent armchair psychologists, but I am by no means a psychiatrist.

My point is just this: How many long-standing questions might we finally answer if we looked at the mind (our thoughts and/or the entity thinking those thoughts) as a completely seperate being from the brain (an organ that sits in our head and lights up on an EEG when you show us pictures of different things)?

Now, I jokingly refer to this theory as pseudo-science because it relies heavily upon basic concepts that Science won't tough with a 10-foot pole. First we have to convince them that we have souls, then we have to convince them that all the organ recipeints who have unknowingly taken on the character traits of the organ donors aren't suffering from "mass hysteria" or "delisuion", then we have to convince them that auras might exist... Yikes! I'm exhausted just thinking about it!

But if, say, some folks were already open to the possibilities of these phenomena, this theory of mine might answer some personal questions for them... ;)

OR...

I've just (hopefully amusingly) helped you kill a half-hour with some ramblings that might have got your own gray cells firing.

...if, indeed, that's how it all works.

;)