BRAIN, TIME AND REALITY

Nov.11th, 2013 - It is clear from many writings that modern men have forgotten something crucial. Ceasing to be a mere animal, man has ceased to be passive. Through rituals, he felt the sense of control over the universe. When he began to study the movements of the moon, sun and stars, he foresaw he could do something to control the world which surrounds him.

The ancient "learning" made part of a system of rich and complex knowledge, a "lunar" system radically different from our modern one. "Knowledge" of the ancients has not to be taken in the modern sense of today : that-is-to say a knowledge that can be archived in an encyclopedia. It can not be reduced to the concrete. For people at the time, it was the growing participation to an intuitive sense of the universe. Thus, the Dresden Codex was one of the astronomical texts that the Mayans used to calculate eclipses and the cycles of the Venus planet which have a great importance for them.

At some point of his history, man began to develop a form of "solar" knowledge, the kind of knowledge which leaves trapped in encyclopedias, dictionaries and tables of logarithms. Solar knowledge, is extremely useful but cannot be substituted to this intimate perception of the universe and the bond that links us to it that our ancestors have developed contemplating the stars. At this time, various knowledges formed an universal one, there was no awareness of the right brain or left brain. Our ancestors for the most talented were as Pythagoras or Leonardo da Vinci, both mathematicians, artists and mystics with plenty others talents too. The rational and irrational were intimately intertwined. This resulted in a non-fragmented human brain but also a close link with the belonging and dissemination of a collective knowledge.

By the consciousness of his left brain, human being has worked out gradually the world in which we live made of a reality interpreted. He learned to develop his imagination and also an individual consciousness and knowledge. For the scientist Einstein, imagination is at the base of all scientic development and discovery.

We tend to live increasingly in a world where consciousness is controlled by the left brain. Such a world is reassuring as it codifies and interprets reality.

But the daily and repeatedly increasing sum of information broadcasting by the media make now that human beings imagine themselves living in the present while their mental state could fundamentally be described as an "absence" because they live in an interpreted world. Today, we are unable to "see" without preconceived ideas what we have in front of us. Man is like a schoolboy looking out the window instead of being attentive to the lesson. Henceforth, our basic mental structure has become that one of a spectator: we look at the world like we watch movies.

And most inconceivable is that each other we want to impose our interpretations to each other that give rise to perpetual conflicts.

In Phaedra written by Plato (424-347 BC), King Thamos is skeptical when the god Thoth tells him that his invention of writing is a great step forward for humanity. The king replies that it will only make lazy man and reduce his mental powers. Closer to us, Schawller and Gurdjieff looked modern humanity as the result of a degeneration
compared to its previous level.

If it does not bring peace, consciousness induced by left brain also causes frustration which at its turn produces criminals who take revenge on the rest of society.

What it is hard to admit is that our right brain can make us aware of another reality. When man wakes up to this reality, the world and his world change: everything becomes reality and even the vision of himself: he becomes aware of his being as a dynamic force, rather than looking himself as a passive entity.

"Yes, you earn your living, you support your family, you love and hate, but ... what do you made?" HG Wells in one of his works makes a comparison between mankind and the first amphibians. For him, man is not still really a creature of the mind: he has fins instead of legs. When he tries a brief foray into the mind world he is exhausted. In a sense, men are not yet "human".

Thus the notion of time is different according people and the development of civilizations. The former collective knowledge was based primarily on a different conception of time, a time far away from the rhythm of the westernized clocks. Nowaday, time is becoming a timer which speeds and exhausts.

Activation of the right brain allows a better perception of time. Access to another level of perception. Anthropoloqist Edward T.Hall treats time with the particular study of the Indians’ time system so different from that of the Americo-Europeans.

We may access mainly thanks to a state of relaxation. Some choose alcohol, drugs ... other meditation and learning calm. One notes that this way of perceiving time is natural for the Japanese culture that we found in the Zen tradition.

The result is the brain access to a global awareness of what surrounds it. The perception of time can become divination: the body naturally begins to receive, analyze and send messages.

Saint Augustine told us: "What is time ? when I do not think about the question, I know the answer".