Consciousness Unbound

 

Brain Malfunction and Miracles

The most obvious thing in the world is my consciousness.  It is also a scientific  mystery. Thanks to my consciousness, I know that I have a body and a brain. And thanks to my brain I am conscious of my relationship to my brain.  But what sort of relationship is that? If you are a devoted materialist, you would say that your brain somehow produces your mind and consciousness.  The problem is that nobody has a clue as to how brain chemistry could produce out of itself a mental universe: feelings, joy, sorrow, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, regret, perceptions, intentions, memories, fantasies, reasonings, inferences, etc.  Instead of production, I would suggest transmission.  The brain transmits consciousness, like a radio transmits the music and talk that you listen to.

Thanks to our brains, we are conscious of our life and our existence on earth. But there is something paradoxical about the brain-consciousness connection.  There’s quite a bit of data showing that physical trauma to the brain can awaken various mental powers that rise to genius and miracle status. Why should traumatizing the brain open one to higher forms of consciousness?  I’ll mention a few examples.

The first that comes to mind may surprise you. In a near-death experience (NDE) the brain is severely traumatized—to the point of clinical death. When the heart stops the brain is deprived of blood which blanks out consciousness.  The brain is no longer functional. But—and here is our miracle—folks often have the most amazing experiences of their lives. The brain normally enables our experience of waking life; but when it ceases to function, it enables us to experience phenomena of the afterlife. That’s the extreme example of what may happen when the brain malfunctions.

There are other indications of brain malfunction that appear to unleash latent powers within us.  In the savant syndrome medical professionals deal with cases of autistic children with severe disabilities but who also display remarkable abilities, original to the point of genius. The syndrome includes several categories of phenomena: calculation prodigies and calendar reckonings, music and the plastic arts, painting, sculpture, and fantastic feats of memory. These savants had IQs less than 50, couldn’t feed or dress themselves.  And yet they had talents that were astonishing and that they themselves scarcely understood. Their malfunctioning brains somehow put them in touch with dimensions of creativity from another zone of being.  In Islands of Genius, Dr. Treffert describes adults struck by lightning or had their heads violently bashed that suddenly acquired extraordinary talents that changed their lives.  It’s hard to learn of these outcomes without marveling at the irony of nature. There are cases of people suffering from the dreaded brain diseases of aging who suddenly wake up to the living artist or musician inside them, desperate to come out.  We should take the time to muse on the unknown gifts we may be harboring within. We might learn how to tease them into active life.

 And so, being cut off, arrested, impaired, may serve to open one to creative, transformative forces.  Disruptive events may open channels of creativity that are normally inaccessible to us, sunk in the rhythms of normal life. We may have to be damaged or thrown violently off course to land on the cusp of transcendence. The game is played in such a way that we never know for sure where we are in the field of play. We need always to keep our third eye open to the half-hidden, the possible miracle.