By Brian Luke Seaward

A few years ago, I was invited to participate in a study of the effects of Cranio-Sacral Therapy on stress and relaxation. My first day in the lab I was fitted with a skull cap with countless electrodes ready to record my brain’s electrical activity. Once fitted, I lay down and within seconds one of the researchers said, “Oh, you’re a meditator. We can always tell who meditates the moment these electrodes are attached.” Sadly, I did not find out if CST promotes relaxation since I was in the researchers’ control group, but the skull cap with electrodes fascinated me. What was going on in my head?

I have been intrigued with matters of the mind and brain since I was a child. Learning about intuition, telekinesis, psychic activity, and remote viewing intrigued me when I was in high school. In college, I became particularly interested in the role our thoughts play in the stress response and perhaps more importantly, in healing chronic illness related to stress. Later, I became curious about consciousness after I discovered the work of Carl Jung. My educational training taught me that the mind is produced in the grey matter of the brain as the result of very complex (yet unexplained) brain chemistry. However, all my personal psychic experiences (combined with those reported by credible sources) showed me that the brain/mind puzzle was anything but solved, and in the west many mental phenomena were not even addressed.

Every now and then I would get excited about new findings in medicine that might provide answers, only to be disappointed. The March 2005 cover story of the National Geographic magazine read, What’s in Your Mind? and displayed a photograph of a Tibetan monk with scores of electrodes covering his forehead, scalp, and face. Sadly, for anyone curious about what secrets the mind really holds, the article never did say. Instead, once again, the complete focus was on brain physiology while secrets of the mind remained unexplored.

The common assumption in Western science has been that the mind and brain are the same thing. The brain – with its hemispheres and lobes, hypothalamus, pineal gland, hippocampus and amygdala – has been dissected, weighed and, most recently, scanned repeatedly.  Researchers did make the remarkable discovery that the number of brain cells is not fixed at birth. Instead, we have the ability to create new brain cells and, perhaps more importantly, to alter the existing neural wiring – a phenomenon called “neuroplasticity.” And while brain and mind, like overlapping circles depicted in a Venn diagram, seem to share a sliver of common space, experts who study both confide that they indeed, are not the same thing. At best, many western-based researchers regard the mind as an “epiphenomenon” of the brain. But those who study the mind will tell you that the mind is not a by-product of brain activity although mind uses the brain as its physical basis for organization and expression.

At the beginning of the 20^th century Sigmund Freud, a Western-trained physician, placed the study of unconscious thought on the medical map. Before Freud there had been little consideration of the subjective and hidden operations of the brain. Freud’s student, Carl Jung, furthered our understanding of the mind with the concept of collective consciousness. There’s a fascinating story that at a private luncheon where the conversation was about quantum physics, Albert Einstein explained to Jung that everything is energy and this led Jung to conceptualize the collective unconscious. Later after decades of research, Wilder Penfield stated as well that although the brain was the primary organ for the mind, consciousness existed outside of the brain. Researcher Candace Pert came to the same conclusion stating:
“I think it is now possible to conceive of mind and consciousness as an emanation of emotional processing and as such, mind and consciousness would appear to be independent of brain and body.”

 Over the course of my career as a health psychologist, I have had the great pleasure to meet many innovative thinkers including Elmer Green, Larry Dossey, Richard Gerber, Candace Pert as well as others who were also trying to gain a better understanding of what the mind really is and how it really works.

Elmer Green, Ph.D. is considered the founder of clinical biofeedback. Working at the Menninger Foundation with his wife Alyce, he taught people how to self-regulate physical processes such as blood pressure or heart rate. Although biofeedback is a body-based system, the Green’s goal was to teach people how to master emotional responses so they could calm and clear their minds and go on to achieve higher states of consciousness. (To learn more, read their book, BEYOND BIOFEEDBACK, first published in 1977.)

At about the same time that researchers were placing electrodes on Tibetan monks’ heads or running Functional MRI tests to gain a better understanding of brain physiology and, they thought, its link to the mind, a group of maverick research pioneers continued to work to better understand the relationship between the material brain and the non-material mind. What had begun in the 1970s as mind-body medicine later became mind-body-spirit approaches to human health and well-being. Here are some of the pioneering researchers, doctors, physicists, and parapsychologists whose work and writing taught me much that I have wanted to know about consciousness, parapsychology, subtle energies, healing, and enlightened states of mind.

• Larry Dossey, M.D., physician and author of books containing empirical studies of prayer, non-local healing, and the powers of conscious thought and intention. (Like Elmer, Larry’s credibility opened the way for me to explore these phenomena.)
• Charles Tart, Ph.D., one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology devoted his career to the legitimacy of parapsychology and non-local consciousness.
• Stan Groff, Ph.D., pioneering researcher of the effects of psychotropic drugs on our ability to gain an expanded awareness of the nature of reality.
• Raymond Moody, M.D., was the first to collect and document the experiences of people who had Near Death Experiences (NDEs).
• Russell Targ, Ph.D., with Hal Puthoff, was an early developer of the remote viewing program supported by the Department of Defense.
• Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., researcher who developed the field of frontier science and studied the subtle energies of living systems and spiritual healing.
• Dean Radin, Ph.D., director of far-reaching research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and an early proponent of entanglement theory which studied the effect of conscious thought on all aspects of research.
• Lynn McTaggart, health reporter and author of The Field in which she outlined countless empirical, evidence-based studies that showed the effects of conscious intention on a wide range of health outcomes.
• Itzak Bentov, Ph.D., a physicist who determined that conscious thought is indeed energy and the human being is comprised of layers of energy, several of which exist outside the body.
• Richard Gerber, M.D., a radiologist intrigued by the concept of Kirlian photography who wrote Vibrational Medicine, a classic textbook of subtle energies and energy healing.
• Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., a cell biologist and one of the early advocates of epigenetics that can link consciousness (and unconscious thoughts) to the health or detriment of all cells in the human body.
• Joe Dispenza, DC, an explorer of mind-body-spirit phenomena and the positive effects of conscious intention on healing systems.

Currently, the investigations into the mind and its connection to brain physiology continue. Two things are needed for standard science to advance its understanding: a greater acceptance of the solid, empirical data that has already been collected, and most importantly, a vanquishing of the fixed Western belief that the brain alone produces the mind.

My experience with the skull cap and electrodes revealed that my meditator’s mind showed up as alpha brainwaves, the hallmark of a relaxed brain which I was told had become quite uncommon in this crazy, stressed-out world. That experience only validated my meditation practice and my thirst for further explorations.

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If you would like to read more about the mind and consciousness, there are many good books – these are just four authors I have especially appreciated:
Larry Dossey, ONE MIND, Hay House, Carlsbad, CA, 2014.
Wilder Penfield, MYSTERY OF THE MIND: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, 2015.
Candace Pert, MOLECULES OF EMOTION, Scribner, New York 1997.
Raymond Moody, and Paul Perry, PROOF OF LIFE AFTER DEATH, Atria Books, 2023. Dr Moody has written many books about the Near Death Experience and this is the first one in which he has been willing to use the word “proof.”

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Brian Luke Seaward, Ph.D. is the executive director of the Paramount Wellness Institute located in Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of Stand Like Mountain, Flow Like Water and Stressed Is Desserts Spelled Backward. He can be reached via his website: www.brianlukeseaward.net 
The image that leads this post is from Pixabay – thepowerofoneness.com

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