Brain function: Brain does not secrete mind. Cosmic or Christic Consciousness. The physics of envisioning: Everything begins in vision. Reality is as we construct it! Devolution and decentralization. “Union differentiates.”
Barbara: Jean, I would like to ask you a question about the evolution of the human brain. Is it possible that there is something happening to the brain in terms of evolutionary change?
Jean: Well, fourteen quadrillion things are happening in the brain at any given instant.
Barbara: Yes, but I’m wondering about the evolution of consciousness. Could there be some kind of evolutionary chance that might be leading towards something like cosmic consciousness? I don’t know, really, whether I’m talking about an actual physiological change in the brain, or whether it’s something far more simple—a response to new stimuli perhaps.
Jean: That’s a difficult question to answer directly, but let’s talk for a moment about what we know about the brain. First of all, have you ever watched closely the movements of a very small child? A normal three-year-old, for instance, is almost constantly engaged in some form of body movement—dancing around, swinging an arm or a leg . . . Now, if you take a Harvard fullback, and ask him to follow and imitate all the movements of a three-year-old, he will literally collapse after two hours and have to go to bed for a week.
This is why a child is able to learn so much so quickly. There is so much stimulation, and so many connections being made in the brain, that a child is a regular osmosis machine for processing information. With the stopping of movement comes the stopping of brain function.
Now, it has been theorized that the brain is unfinished. There are three sections of the human brain, and parts of these sections are really not very well connected. The oldest part of the brain is not very well connected to the newest part. If you are really interested in the evolution of your own brain, you can, through certain exercises, actually being to put down pathways and being to establish these connections.
With regard to the idea of cosmic consciousness, some recent research suggests that when you are meditating, and you begin to get into the one-seven-one cycle—which is the cycle of the Earth as well—then quantum tunneling occurs between all of the cells. If you are meditating, let’s say, in certain cellular areas, then a generalization occurs—these cells trigger millions of other cells, which in turn trigger millions of other cells, so that you have whole area of the brain in this pulse. And this pulse is a great quieting. It is thought that this great pulsing of the whole brain relates to an innate matrix of stillness, and that this stillness may then relate, ecologically, probably through field phenomena, to other areas of being, or to the larger ecology of things—what you might call cosmic consciousness. So, you see, the doorways are already physiologically structured in the brain.
Now, at the same time, two leading brain physiologists—Wilder Penfield and Sir John Eccles—conclude, after lifetimes of study, that mind is ultimately separate from brain. Mind uses brain as a kind of bio-computer; it is prior to brain, and gives brain its designs. Brain does not secrete mind!
Barbara: Mind would then be a disembodied energy?
Jean: We don’t know, but it uses brain as matrix.
Barbara: Could the mind be synonymous with what has usually been called soul?
Jean: Well, we don’t know. Probably there are layers and layers to the self. You find this notion in many ancient traditions; in ancient Egyptian tradition, for example, there are five or six levels of the self.
Barbara: You find this idea also in Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness. It’s Teilhardian, too, of course. Bucke talks about the idea that the founders of many of the great religious traditions—Christ, Buddha, and so—represented a new form of consciousness for the species that would eventually become common, just as at some point self-consciousness became a common reality. Christic consciousness, according to Bucke, is a highly evolved form that eventually all living humans will have. We’re moving toward that form of consciousness.
Jean: A growing number of individuals in our time are moving towards that.
Barbara: Yes, and I’m wondering what that phenomenon is, because that really may be the salvation of the Earth. The number of individuals that can move towards that form of consciousness could make the difference in a critical period such as the one we’re in.
Jean: Out of ecological necessity! It may be necessity entering into time. It’s a kind of cooperative consciousness, the first levels of which may not appear in mystical or even in psychological terms. The first level may be manifesting itself in terms of fifty million Americans participating in co-ops. They may be the first manifest, objective form of what is happening as a subjective event—what you would call Christic consciousness.
Hazel: It’s probably some kind of body wisdom.
Jean: And I think that you can engender it. It doesn’t have to be engendered as meditation; it can probably happen in a simple co-op store. That already creates a level of communion and community that in turn will begin to encourage deeper levels. And you can approach it from any place—interior or objective. We are Unus Mundus: we are one world within and without, and so it doesn’t matter where you start. I start from within because that’s the nature of my job. You start from without—that’s your mode.
Hazel: Yes, that’s so true. It doesn’t really matter where you start, or where you feel that you’re best suited to making a contribution.
Jean: Suppose you enter into some very powerful, cooperative, communal event where you feel this sense of community, of love . . . Now what is happening to you psychologically in terms of the new brain theory? You begin, in terms of your brain, to resonate in a different kind of frequency. You don’t have to be directing the action anymore—something takes over. It’s a form of meditation—daily life as spiritual exercise.
Any moment can be a loaded moment in which this frequency can begin to occur. It is a latent frequency that relates to the frequency of the Earth, and that ties you to the larger community, and to the community of the Earth itself. You become what in your terms would be cosmic or Christic being.
Barbara: This happened at SYNCONs when the walls began to come down and people started moving together—moving around together, dancing together, singing together. If there had been a psychic measure the “temperature” would have gone up. It was like being drawn together by some greater force. Unfortunately it was always lost when it was all over and we had to separate, but this memory is never lost.
Hazel: Let’s talk for a moment about vision, which I think relates very closely to this movement towards cosmic consciousness we’ve been discussing. One of the things which I have learned in my own life, is that certain things are essential if one is to become part of the new being. One must have, first of all, the intuition, and the faith, that is a vision—even if you haven’t yet any clearly defined sense of that vision. Faith is very important; you can’t give up on that vision, even if it is vague. . . . I have always had that faith. And even if everyone around doubted it, it was real, it emerged. I have always had trust in the very deep levels of the vision.
Jean: And even if unseen, these things are real. They are there in their loaded, coded potencies.
Hazel: And we know how these unseen visions manifest themselves in very concrete ways.
Jean: Everything beings in vision. Would you like to know something about the physics of envisioning? It’s quite interesting.
Hazel: Yes! That would be interesting.
Jean: Well, suppose you have something held very vividly as an image, or as a feeling—it can be touched, smelled, tasted . . . Somehow this switches on to the autonomic system, which is a very deep system relating to older areas of the brain. We have reason to believe that the autonomic system, when it is activated by images, is related to the bioplasmic fields that surround the body.
Hazel: Biosplasmic fields?
Jean: The electromagnetic fields surrounding the body. The image thus held sets up a wave frequency into the fields surrounding the body. This then, since we are ecosystems within ecosystems, envelopes within envelopes, sets up a wave system in other ecologies that are around us. In point of fact you do, quite concretely and quite physically, send images out into the atmosphere.
So, be careful of what you really want, because you’re likely to get it. In other words, there is an ecology of happening—of how things happen. Your system sets up an imaginal wave that changes the electron balance, which changes other electron balances, and it begins on microcosmic levels to be encoded into the environment—so that what you really wish beings to occur.
Now, there are people who are able to sustain this, and they are the great optimists of the world—like Margaret Mead, for instance. Margaret gets almost everything she wants—because she is sure that reality would not dare to do otherwise! [laughter] Her reality is one of intense imagery: any event she sees, touches, hears, feels, smells. She feels it absolutely; she sends it out; she talks about it; and it begins to cohere. A deeply held thought, feeling, or image is literally a seed planted in the fields that surround us.
Barbara: So there is then a physiological basis for the envisioning process.
Jean: Yes. There are a lot of steps that we don’t know, but the oscillation wave function of the autonomic system with respect to deeply held image is certainly part of it.
Hazel: Is there some kind of a theory that might be analogous to critical mass? Step theory? In other words, if enough people are imaging the same thing powerfully enough, and resonating, you do create the manifestation of that image.
Jean: Oh sure. There are many instances of this. Have you ever heard, for example, the story of rather queer group of thinkers in Britain who collectively projected the image of Rudolf Hess coming over to England? They did this for months: “Rudolf Hess, come over! Rudolf Hess, come over!” And for no particular reason Rudolf Hess got on a plane one day and flew over!
Hazel: No, I’d never heard that. Is it true?
Jean: Oh yes! Yes! They did it for months! And they actually brought him over. So, if you have a group of people that begins to work together—I mean a prayer circle is that kind of thing. Very frequently people are cured after prayer circles. Not the usual Christian prayer circle—“Oh, dear Lord, please!”—because then you’re missing your step function. It’s a level of affirmation, and the perception of a different reality.
Reality is as we construct it! There is a wonderful science fiction story—a John Collier story—that brings this idea home. It seems that a commuter train was pulling out of Paddington Station, and it leaped the track. And suddenly—wham!—it seemed to be back on the track again. And you see all the gentlemen in the first-class section reading their London Times. But the train starts going down—for hours and hours. “I say!” says one of the gentlemen, “we seem to have had a bit of a drop.” And he goes on reading his London Times. But the train keeps hurtling downward. Eventually smoke begins to fill the compartment; fire is all around them. Finally, the train comes to a stop and they all get out. And here come all these curious little red men with long tails and pitchforks: “Get your burn cream here! Four shillings for burn cream!” “Get away from me, you filthy little man!” says one of the gentlemen. But he continues to make such a pest of himself that finally one rather dandy-looking young man says to him: “Do you know what? I don’t believe in you!” “What did you say, sir?” says this repugnant little creature. “You beastly little thing, I don’t believe in you!” “Oh, don’t say that, sir!” “You beastly little thing, I don’t believe in you!” And all of a sudden they find themselves back on the train, pulling into the station as usual. The next scene shows this same young man standing in front of the Bank of England shaking his fist and saying: “I don’t believe in you!” [laughter] But reality, in a curious way, is really like that! We are not innocent observers of the environment. One person can become a critical mass. It’s better if there are more, of course. But a powerful imagizer—like Margaret Mead, who has no doubt about the effectiveness of her thought on the environment—gets about ninety percent return. It’s a kind of metaphysical chutzpah that you have to have.
Hazel: But, you know, that image of standing in front of the Bank of England saying, “I don’t believe in you!” and seeing the building begin to crack apart. That’s the image of the imperial system right now.
Jean: Yes. That’s what’s happening. It’s the people in the lower hierarchical levels who are saying “I don’t believe!” and it is happening.
Hazel: Well, that’s what devolution is all about. You see this in Britain. The word devolution is a very popular term in Britain right now, and also in Canada—and after the Yukon Indians, and Quebecois decided that they wanted to secede. This whole paradigm of devolution is very much on the minds of people in both of these countries.
And it’s really interesting—I was talking recently to the British minister of technology. He sees citizen participation as devolution. In this country, if you mention devolution to an administrator or a corporate executive, they are absolutely terrified, and have this image of the whole thing sliding down; whereas in Britain and Canada devolution is seen in terms of the empowerment of citizen participation.
Barbara: So it’s a different concept.
Hazel: Totally different. But it’s the same effect! The reason you’re having devolution in Britain, the reason the Welsh and the Scots are doing this independence thing, is because London can’t do anything for them anymore. In other words, they’re saying, “We don’t believe in you.” And the Quebecois are saying to Ottawa, “You’re not mapping our reality anymore; we don’t believe in you!”
Barbara: You know, Teilhard uses an interesting phrase that I think may describe this phenomenon: “Union differentiates.” Now, if we are moving towards a planetary unity on one level, at the very same time a differentiation is occurring.
Hazel: And it must!
Jean: And you move into very interesting mixtures of human scale and human difference.
Barbara: Yes, and so the paradox is resolved if it is true that union differentiates. We can become more and more interconnected, while at the same time differentiating. Teilhard also goes on to say that as individuals, or cluster of individuals, enter freely into the whole, they become more and more uniquely themselves. I would use the word evolution rather than devolution for this phenomenon. Centralized systems have become overly complex and unmanageable. Out of their breakdown, a higher order is breaking through; a decentralization and differentiation of the parts into self-organizing units—with concurrent increase of interconnectedness and communications among the parts. We are evolving toward a more complex whole system—a synergistic whole—that will be greater than the sum of the parts.
Hazel: I love Dennis Livingston’s image of a planet of neighborhoods.
Jean: Yes, very good.
Hazel: You see, what I am trying to say is that the only level of human organization that is truly irrelevant today is the nation-state and capital city. That is really part of the problem—that we’re measuring the well-being of all these cultures in terms of the capital city and the nation-state.
Jean: Which are based on anachronistic modes of territorial imperatives!
Hazel: Yes! And we need so much above the nation-state level, and so much below it.
Jean: Well, it’s this idea that we need the creation of new communities, or the reorganization of old ones, so that they are larger than the family, and smaller than the city. And they are back to back; they are neighborhoods. Therein a person would find as much opportunity as one would find in a city, and you would have the human factor brought back in.