Notes from the Mindscape
This weekend, while on retreat at Kripalu Center, I had the great fortune to attend a 3-day workshop with psychiatrist and brain researcher, Dr. Dan Siegel, founder of the Mindsight Institute and professor of clinical psychiatry at UCLA.
I didn’t know what a “brain crush” was until I heard this humble scientist explain, with extremely simple profundity, why it is that we suffer so much and how we may overcome it.
Here are 10 essential points that struck my core:
1. The awareness of change creates the mental construct of time.
2. To change (our mind + brain), consciousness is required.
3. The state of flow is different from mindfulness (mindfulness due to its observing properties entails ethics, flow does not).
4. The self is not a singular noun. It is a plural verb.
5. The self is a system dependent on a larger system (it is relational + emergent / believing we are separate is a kind of "optical delusion of consciousness" - Einstein).
6. The basic unit of experience is energy flow.
7. The mind is not inside the brain (it is embodied and relational - able to monitor + modify energy and information flow)
8. An integrated mind arises out of and returns back into The Plane of Possibility (the point near 0 on the Probability Distribution Curve).
9. The above implies that the true nature of mind dwells on the quantum level of phenomena, the domain of infinite possibility, and that the subjective experience of a “self” is constructed due to the processing of sensory data, represented by fluctuations of energy on the Probability Distribution Curve.
10. But most profound of all to me was the following quote:
“Kindness is integration made visible."
Kindness and compassion are signs of an integrated mind + brain.
Perfect.
