On Mar 19, 2009, at 7:14 PM, BillyG. wrote:
For all those TM'ers who only use MMY as the source for their spiritual & personal growth, unless you expand your horizons and explore the overall subject of Yoga you'll be 'locked in to stupid' till the day you die!
There's actually a term for this: "Brain Lock". It's pathological version is OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Since “neurons that fire together, wire together”, it's all too easy to get hardwired into problems, if we aren't awakening the brain circuity associated with the third eye, the middle prefrontal cortex. The problem is, once you become stuck in "rigidity", you tend to loose the factors which encourage neuroplastic change in the brain: the desire to aerobically exercise, allowing novelty in our lives, emotional engagement--tend to be lost and we turn off the mid-prefrontal circuitry, our resonant circuitry which allows us to experience the world as an interdependently arising relationship, rather than "the other".
It's interesting, you can tell by how people respond: embracing or creating an enemy. Present a stimulus that's different from the pattern they're expressing and then to watch if they embrace the differentness or attack it, like an enemy. People who instinctively "create the enemy", also instinctively shut down this circuitry. People who embrace diversity instinctively, have it turned on.
But introduce exercise (which encourages new neural growth, depression does the opposite) and awaken the mindful and mirror neuron circuitry of the third eye/mid-prefrontal cortex-- the brain will change, breaking the "lock" of the cortex on these illusory patterns of separateness. Research shows, once these circuits are turned on, symptoms like depression or OCD simply do not return.
It may be that we need to turn away from such abstractions as a "third eye" for the general public and work on sharing scientific findings anyone can appreciate.
