How To Know God Part 13

This turns out to be immensely important when it comes to memory. No one doubts that the brain uses energy. It burns food as calories, subsisting on glucose, a simple sugar that gets broken down to accommodate the brain's complex activities. But as atoms of food are mined for their energy and this energy gets converted into thought, none of it is channeled into memory. It doesn't take food to store the image of where you were ten years ago on your birthday or what you did yesterday after work.

Nor does it seem to take energy to remember these things. Going back to my example, I didn't consciously try to retrieve anything from my memories. I was meditating, and after an hour a name and a telephone number came to me. Was my brain working on the problem all that time? Currently no one has an answer. Our popular belief is that the brain functions like a Macintosh built from organic matter (one researcher has called it "a computer made of meat," a disturbing but unforgettable phrase). It is my belief that the brain is the last stop downriver, the end point of impulses that begin on the virtual level, flow through the quantum level, and wind up as flashes of electricity along the trunks and branches of our neurons.

When you remember anything, you move from world to world, maintaining the illusion that you are still here among familiar sights and sounds.

Sometimes the connections are faulty-I might have come up with the wrong name or telephone number. Without understanding this journey, however, there is not much hope of undertaking the spiritual journey back to G.o.d, because both routes are the same.

The advent of CT scans and MRIs has afforded us a glimpse into the brain as a place where energy is constantly being generated. But the brain and the mind are different. Sometimes brain surgery has to be performed with the patient awake, conscious, and able to answer questions. If you are talking to such a patient and ask him to lift his arm, he obeys like anyone else, even though a section of his skull has been removed, exposing the cerebral cortex to open air. Now take an electrode and stimulate part of the motor cortex so that the same arm suddenly moves. The action is exactly the same as when you asked the patient to perform this action.

However, there is one huge difference. In the first instance if you ask what has happened, the patient will respond, "I moved my arm." In the second instance if you ask what happened, the patient will respond, "My arm moved."

Despite the external similarity (the arm moved), the first act involved will and desire; a mysterious ent.i.ty called "I" did the work, not simply the brain. Such an experiment was actually performed by the pioneering Canadian brain surgeon Wilder Penfield, which led him to conclude that our minds and our brains are not at all the same. (3) Today we can expand on the ways in which the two seem to diverge: You ask me my name, and I give it to you with a flash of activity in my cerebral cortex. But it takes no brain activity for me to know my name.

At the store I choose whether to buy vanilla or chocolate ice cream. As I think about the choice, my brain is working, but the chooser-the person who decides between A or B-is nowhere to be found in the brain.

You and I are looking at a Pica.s.so painting. I say I like it, you say you don't. It takes brain activity for us to express our opinions, but the difference in taste isn't an activity.

I am sitting on an airplane worrying about what to say in my lecture when we land. I fall asleep and begin to doze. When I wake up, I know exactly what I want to talk about. This shift from worry to certainty was not a measurable brain event, since in sleep I did no conscious thinking.

You are sitting on the sofa reading when all at once the name of an old friend pops into your mind. The next instant, you hear the phone ring and it is your friend calling. It took brain activity to recall the name, but no brain mechanism could time the coincidence.

You meet a stranger at a party and in a moment of instant attraction you know that this is the person you will marry. In time you do, and it is revealed that he had exactly the same feeling for you. The brain may account for all the hormonal attractions, even the mental and emotional impulses that make each of you "right" for the other.

It cannot possibly account for your simultaneous certainty, however.

When Penfield began his work in the 1930s, science had not yet firmly decided that the mind was just a ghost created by neurons. By the 1970s it was obvious to him that many experts "would, no doubt, silence me before I began to discuss the mind and the brain, if they could. They declare that since the mind, by its very nature, cannot have a position in s.p.a.ce, there is only one phenomenon to be considered, namely, the brain." Nonetheless, Penfield (along with Sir John Eccles, an equally audacious brain researcher in Britain) asked an obvious question. Where in the brain can you find any mechanism that possesses intuition, creativity, insight, imagination, understanding, intent, knowing, will, decision, or spirit?

Indeed all the higher functions of the brain still cannot create the qualities that make us most human. Are we supposed to dismiss them as illusion or postpone discussion until someone discovers genes for the soul?

Among his many observations, Penfield noted that the brain retains memory even while dormant. Patients recover from severe states of coma still knowing such things as language, as well as their own life history. Under deep anesthesia, about 1 percent of surgical patients report that they could hear what the surgeons were saying around them and can even recall details of what transpired during the procedure. Therefore, even though he didn't know how it worked, Penfield speculated that the mind must have its own energy source. Somehow it also gets energy from the brain-when the brain dies or loses function, as in a stroke, certain or all mental operations are cut off. But energy inside the brain isn't enough to explain how the mind survives traumas.

A brain totally deprived of oxygen for up to four minutes (longer if the body is very cold) can still recover complete mental functioning. During that interval of deprivation, the machinery of the brain shuts down. Under deep anesthesia, there are practically no higher brain waves at all, making it impossible for the cerebral cortex to accomplish anything so complex as remembering what a surgeon is saying. The fact that the mind can survive brain trauma and function under anesthesia points very strongly to the separate existence of the mind. In simplest terms, Penfield came to the conclusion that "it is the mind which experiences and it is the brain which records the experience." He concluded that the mind must be a kind of invisible energy field that includes the brain, perhaps even controls it. In place of energy field, I believe we should say "information field," because the brain clearly processes information that is flowing and related to all that exists.

As soon as one uses the term field, a step has been taken into the realm of quantum reality. The brain is a thing with material structures like a cortex and a limbic system. A field is not a thing. The magnetic field of the earth exerts a pull over every iron particle, causing it to move this way or that, yet nothing visible or tangible is doing the moving. In the same way the mind causes the brain to move this way or that. Think of the word aardvark. Then think of the word Rangoon. The first word contains its own sound and meaning, paralleled in the brain by a specific pattern of waves. The second word is also defined by its unique patterns. Therefore, to go from one word to the other requires a radical shift involving millions of neurons. Who makes this shift? The first pattern has to be totally dissolved in order to bring up the second; there is no transition between them that serves as a link. Aardvark is wiped out (including your mental picture of a giant anteatera so that Rangoon can take its place (including your image of its place on the map and whatever you know of Burmese history). In between is only an empty gap, like the black s.p.a.ce between two images in a movie.

Yet somehow this gap, which has no brain activity at all, manages to organize millions of neurons. It knows the difference between an aardvark and Rangoon without your having to think about the difference-in fact, you don't have to will yourself to organize even one brain cell into the incredibly intricate pattern necessary to produce a word. It all happens automatically, without expenditure of energy-brain energy, that is.

Another kind of energy may exist in the gap. Eccles made the famous statement that "G.o.d is in the gap." What he meant was that the empty s.p.a.ces of the brain, the tiny synapses between two nerve endings, must be the home of higher mind because it could not be found in the material stuff of the brain.

Our minds are a vital tool in the search for G.o.d. We trust the mind and listen to it; we follow its impulses; we rely on its accuracy. Far more than this, however, the mind interprets the world for us, gives it meaning. To a depressed person the sight of a glowing Tahitian sunset mirrors his sadness, while to someone else the same signals to the retina may invoke wonder and joy. As Penfield would say, the brain is recording the sunset, but only the mind can experience it. As we search for G.o.d, we want our interpretations to rise even higher than our minds can take us, so that we might understand birth and death, good and evil, heaven and h.e.l.l. When this understanding extends to spirit, two invisible fields, mind and soul, need to be connected if we are to have any confidence in them.

G.o.d requires the most delicate response of the mind. If the mind is troubled or unrefined, the journey back to G.o.d cannot be successfully made. Many factors come into play here, but in terms of the mind/brain connection, Valerie Hunt, a researcher with degrees in both psychology and physiology, has made some important connections, recounted in her 1989 book, Infinite Mind. (4) After hooking subjects up to EEGs, she determined that certain brain wave patterns can be a.s.sociated with higher spiritual experiences. This finding extends earlier research, now three decades old, which established that going into deep meditation alters the patterns of alpha waves in the brain, along with heartbeat, respiration, and blood pressure.

But Dr. Hunt was further interested in why people do not have spiritual experiences. In doing so, she took the step of supposing that we should all be naturally connected to the totality of the mind's field of energy and information, just as we are all connected to the parts that involve thinking. It is a simple but profound a.s.sumption. Why do we block spirit out?

"The problem is always fear of the intense emotions that occur at the mystical level," Hunt a.s.serts, "experiences so real and profound that we cannot easily comprehend or accept them.... Another way to describe our blocks is to say that we don't want to change our priorities, nor our beliefs about ourselves and G.o.d." The mind field, it seems, is a mine field. (5) This spiritual "stuckness" is not just a limitation of the brain.

Researchers before Hunt have doc.u.mented that if the right temporal lobe is deprived of oxygen for a few moments, its activity begins to heighten, thus creating the illusion of "going into the light." The same floating feeling, the sensation of being outside the body, feelings of ecstasy and otherworldliness, even visions of departed souls and angels beckoning one into the light-all these phenomena can be imitated through oxygen deprivation, or by whirling subjects in a large centrifuge of the kind used to train astronauts for the experience of intense gravitational forces. Yet inducing the experience isn't the same as having it; there is no spiritual meaning to centrifugal force or oxygen loss, while people who have experienced near-death episodes (not to mention yogis and saints who have grown used to living in the light) report profound spiritual changes.

If the brain normally filters out an entire range of experience, as we know it does, perhaps our crudest access to higher dimensions is unfortunately through damage or deprivation. The brain has to adjust itself to any higher experience. It takes brain waves to turn the whirling, chaotic energy of the quantum soup into recognizable images and thoughts. Hunt makes the point that if you measure the brain activity of someone who is willing to have a spiritual experience, who isn't stuck or blocked, the patterns are very different from someone who is blocked.

Going beyond her EEG measurements, Hunt has correlated five states of psychological stuckness that shut out spirituality. All are rooted in some initial experience-a brush with G.o.d-that the person cannot integrate into the sense of self that already existed. The five blocked experiences are as follows: 1. The experience of a G.o.d-like energy or presence.

2. Suddenly comprehending past, present, and future as one.

3. Gaining the power to heal.

4. Unanswered prayers in the midst of a "good" life-the experience of being forsaken by G.o.d.

5. Sensory overload to the nervous system when "the light" enters.

Although related, these are distinct experiences, and when any befall a person, there is often a sense of shock and dismay, despite the fact that something positive may be happening.

One could reasonably claim that Christianity itself might not have survived if Saul had not been blinded by the light on the road to Damascus, when Jesus uttered the words "Why do you persecute me?" But this overwhelming experience included some of the obstacles listed above.

Saul's entire belief structure was challenged. His sudden exposure to G.o.d as a full-blown reality had to be integrated, and this provoked tremendous struggle within. The sensory overload of the experience caused physical blindness for a number of days. The Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree, determined to break free of the binding influence of the mind, was volunteering for the same inner struggle. What is common to any spiritual breakthrough is that strong opposition is never far away. For example, Neurotic defenses such as "I am unworthy" or "I have low self-esteem" are triggered.

Anxiety that an evil or satanic force is at work arises; these may he expressed as fear of insanity or the belief that delusions are being caused from the outside.

The self vainly tries to hold together along its old patterns, fearing change as a form of death.

The absence of a sign from G.o.d, such as a voice or vision, makes the experience seem unreal, detached from this world.

The habit of being in duality, of seeing past, present, and future as separate states, does not want to be broken down.

All in all, the mind's journey back to G.o.d can have serious repercussions just in terms of the brain adapting to a new mode of perception. This was made clear to me by an accident that recently befell a close friend.

Unaccustomed to working out at the gym, he strained on one machine and injured his right foot. Over the next few days he began to feel increasing pain whenever he put any weight on that foot, until after a few weeks he could hardly walk a block without having to sit down. On medical examination it was found that he had a common ailment known as planar fascitis, in which the connecting tissue between the heel and the front of the foot have been stretched or torn. The condition can sometimes be improved through specific exercises; severe cases can require surgery, which isn't always successful.

My friend, a stoic type, decided to tough out the pain and made only sporadic attempts to do the required exercises. In time he found it so difficult to walk, however, that in desperation he sought out a Chinese healer. "I went to his office, which was just a small room in the back of a kung fu studio. He was a short man in his fifties who gave no evidence of being mystical or spiritual, or in any way gifted in healing. But his treatment was remarkable," my friend recalls.

"After gently feeling my foot, he stood up and made a few signs in the air behind my spine. He never actually touched me, and when I asked what he was doing, he said simply that he was turning some switches in my energy field. He did this for a minute or so and then asked me to stand up. I did, and there was no sensation of pain, not the slightest. You have to remember that I had limped in, barely able to walk.

"In complete amazement I asked him what he had done. He told me that the body was an image projected by the mind, and in a state of health the mind keeps this image intact and balanced. However, injury and pain can cause us to withdraw our attention from the affected spot. In that case, the body image starts to deteriorate; its energy patterns become impaired, unhealthy. So the healer restores the correct pattern-this is done instantly, on the spot-after which the patient's own mind takes responsibility for maintaining it that way.

"I stood up on the foot and walked around, just to be sure that I wasn't fooling myself. As I was doing this, the healer told me casually that I could be trained to do the same sort of work. 'Really?' I said. What would it take to be able to accomplish something like this? He answered, 'You only have to discard the belief that it is impossible.'"

To this day my friend has had no recurrence of pain, which is remarkable enough. But here is the spiritual moral of the story: This healing did not change my friend's life. His a.s.sumptions about his body remained intact-he didn't begin to see it as a ghostly image or a mask for hidden energies.

Belief is incredibly powerful; it can imprint the brain so deeply that even the most remarkable experience doesn't bring any breakthrough into a new reality. My friend's old beliefs were nudged aside slightly, but that is all. One impossible event was not enough to overcome spiritual stuckness. (Christ's reluctance to perform miracles seemed to be based on a similar realization.) As a child I felt left out spiritually because I would never meet Buddha or Krishna, and my eyes would never see someone raised from the dead or water turned to wine. Now I realize that it isn't the miracle that creates the believer. Instead, we are all believers. We believe that the illusion of the material world is completely real. That belief is our only prison.

It prevents us from making the journey into the unknown. To date, after many centuries of saints, sages, and seers, only a few individuals can open to radical change in their belief system, while most cannot. Even so, our beliefs must eventually shift to conform to reality, since in the quantum world, belief creates reality. As we will see, our true home is the light, and our true role is to create endlessly from the infinite storehouse of possibilities located at the virtual level.

Five.

STRANGE POWERS.

... for all things are possible with G.o.d.

-MARK 10:27 "I'm the kind of person the church would call lost. Growing up, I didn't have much faith in myself or anything else. If anybody had asked whether I believed in G.o.d, I would have said, 'Why should I? He doesn't believe in me.'"

A twenty-four-year-old medical technician was talking about his working-cla.s.s childhood. In his family, the mother was a devout Catholic, the father a casual believer who stayed home on Sunday while the children were dragged off to Ma.s.s.

"Once when I was thirteen, my father and I were walking through downtown Boston, and we pa.s.sed a street beggar. The guy held out his hand without saying anything. I noticed my father give him a dirty look. We kept walking. In a faint voice behind us the beggar mumbled, 'G.o.d bless you.'

My father got very angry. 'There's faith for you,' he said sarcastically.

'I work for thirty years and that guy doesn't lift a finger to help himself. Every night he leaves it to Providence whether he gets to eat or have a place to sleep. Faith doesn't get much greater than that.'"

The story ill.u.s.trates how religious faith clashes head-on with the necessities of life. If there are two realities competing for our allegiance, the material and the spiritual, why should we abandon the material? A cynical Arabic saying advises, "Trust in G.o.d but tie up your camels." And since G.o.d doesn't interfere to bring even the bare necessities to millions of poor people, disbelief makes sense.

Yet disbelief doesn't seem to work, either. There are mysterious phenomena that can be explained only in terms of an invisible domain that is our source in the sacred. It is the home of our intelligence and our sense of order in the universe. To prove that such a place exists, we look to a vast range of anomalies on the fringes of ordinary events. These include religious awakening and "going into the light," which we have already covered, but also the following: Inspiration and insight Geniuses, child prodigies, and savants Memory of former lifetimes Telepathy and ESP Alter egos (multiple personality syndrome) Synchronicity Clairvoyance and prophecy Diverse as they are, these fringe phenomena all take us beyond our present knowledge of the brain into the regions of the "mind field" that are closest to G.o.d. The brain is a receiver of mind, like a radio receiving signals from a faraway source. If a battery-operated radio were dropped from the sky into the midst of a primitive society, its members might wind up worshiping it, because there would be no one who would understand about how music and voices could be emitted from this mystical box.

Right now the brain also resembles a mystical box. We utilize it in very chaotic ways, however, which is why the ultimate signals-the ones sent by G.o.d-often pa.s.s unnoticed. After sixty years of exploring the paranormal, and many years of experiencing music, genius, insight, and inspiration, there are still many spiritual connections yet to be made. We will be working on those connections in the following sections, and as we do it will become clearer that quantum reality-the zone of miracles-is a place very nearby.

INSPIRATION AND INSIGHT.

If the brain produces thoughts, and these are the result of stored information inside our neurons, how does anyone ever have a new idea? Why aren't we constantly combining and recombining old information? New thoughts come to us from the mind, not the brain. The most original new thoughts are called inspired; on the personal level seeing something new about yourself is called an insight. When you feel inspired, more than ordinary thinking is involved. There is a sense of being uplifted, of suddenly breaking through. Old boundaries fall away, and one feels, if only for a moment, a rush of liberation. If the inspiration is powerful enough, one's whole life can be changed. There are insights so potent that years of patterned behavior can change in an instant.

Let's look more closely at how insight works, because it is very revealing about the mind. A woman who was in therapy showed up at her psychiatrist's office in a state of outrage. She declared that her best friend, Maxine, had committed a terrible personal betrayal. When asked how, she told this story: the two of them were in the last year of law school and had belonged to the same study group. A serious and compet.i.tive person, the woman had done everything to help Maxine, providing extensive notes, catching lectures that her friend couldn't attend, and even going so far as to bring food to the group if study hours ran late into the night.

In other words, she considered herself a model of support. The time for finals came, and the two friends spent many hours outside the group preparing for all the possible areas to be covered. During the exam the woman was distressed to find that she was unprepared in one key area. She had forgotten to study an important Supreme Court case, and she missed all the questions devoted to it. She consoled herself with the feeling that at least she could share her misery with her best friend. But when grades were posted, Maxine had done much better than she had, and when asked how this happened, the friend casually dropped that she had studied that particular case on her own.

"All right," the therapist said, "I see all that, but why are you so outraged?"

"You have to ask?" the woman protested. "She betrayed me. She was supposed to be my best friend. I've done everything for her, bent over backward to get her through law school. Now look what she has done."

"Did she do it intentionally?" the therapist asked. "Or was she just looking out for herself? Maybe she meant to tell you, but then she forgot."

The woman set her jaw. "That's not the way you treat a best friend," she maintained. "Maxine obviously doesn't care what happens to me."

If you look beneath the surface, you'll find two deeper layers to this incident. The first layer is psychological and was addressed by the therapist. He didn't see a simple falling-out between friends. His patient was exhibiting all the signs of a severe control defense. Being a perfectionist, taking care of other people's needs even when not asked, taking charge of situations on the a.s.sumption that others cannot look out for themselves, and implicitly wanting to be thanked for one's trouble-all these are glaring signs. But how could this insight be transferred from therapist to patient?

"You think Maxine betrayed you," the psychiatrist said. "But actually she is the normal one here. It is perfectly normal to look out for oneself.

She had no obligation to share every detail of her study habits with you."

The woman was astonished to hear this and very resistant to it. "You are taking her side?" she asked in bewilderment. "But what about me?"

"It is you I am concerned with. What you haven't been able to see is that there is a piece of reality you can't face. All this help and concern you showed toward Maxine is fine, but it serves to keep you defended from what you can't accept."

"And what is that?"

"Listen carefully," the therapist replied. "Other people have a right to reject you, and there is nothing you can do about it."

The woman sat back, perplexed and upset. The words had been heard, but they hadn't really sunk in. She hesitated on the brink of insight. From her perspective, her actions were those of a betrayed saint. The alternative would be to see herself in a new light, as someone who for years had been "taking care" of others in an attempt to make sure that no one, absolutely no one, ever rejected her.

As it happened, she took the leap: the insight was accepted. Ahead lay several months of anguish as pent-up fear and grief poured out. The defense of her old behavior was gone, and now the hidden energies trapped so long inside could find release.

Earlier I mentioned that there was a second layer to this story, which is spiritual. Insight is one thing, but the impulse to find it is another.

Must we accept that this was a random event in this woman's life? Or did a deeper layer of her self provide a situation that opened a door? I believe that life events do not unfold randomly; our materialistic worldview may insist that they do, but all of us have reflected on turning points in our lives and seen, sometimes with bafflement or wonder, that lessons came our way at exactly the time we needed them.

In a word, some hidden intelligence seems to know when and how to transform us, often when we least expect it. By its nature, inspiration is transforming-it brings in spirit-and no model of the brain has come close to explaining how a cl.u.s.ter of neurons could transform itself. One school of neurology is predicated on the notion that the human brain is a computer of enormous ability, but computers don't wake up one morning and decide to have a new att.i.tude toward life. Nor do they have moments of spiritual awakening, whereas human beings experience them all the time.

Computers don't find any idea suddenly meaningful. For them every download of data is the same, a collection of zeros and ones arranged in a coded language. Yesterday's E-mail is no less significant than the New Testament, and no more.

Inspiration is the perfect example of how the invisible level of reality works. Whatever is needed is provided. A person may not be prepared to accept the insight, and therefore a chance for transformation will be missed. But that isn't the essential point. The mind is greater than any individual. Your mind isn't a computer; it is a living intelligence, and it evolves, which is why fresh insight is needed.

In the primitive stages of evolution, life became more complex physically-green algae made the leap to becoming plants, for example, by developing a more complex ability to use sunlight. Higher evolution takes place in the mind, as when an Einstein is produced, for example. But the leap from algae to plants was a leap of intelligence, a moment of inspiration, just as much as the discovery of relativity. Unlike the brain, the mind can take leaps; it breaks through old limitations and glories in feeling free.

At every level, to be inspired is a step toward greater liberation, and liberation is a choice. Cells that evolved into plants, flowers, and trees moved ahead of blue-green algae, but at the same time, the lower level of evolution continued to exist as long as it served the environment.

At the moment of insight, there is an "aha!" that opens up new possibilities. At the moment the Buddha was enlightened, there was no further reason for any form of violence or suffering among humankind.

Buddha saw that suffering and evil are rooted in a mistake about how life works. He saw that the endless struggle to achieve pleasure and avoid pain would never end as long as we were attached to our ego needs. The ego's selfishness and insecurity would never heal by themselves; there would always be another battle to fight.

This insight came to Gautama under the Bodhi tree, just as it came to Jesus in the desert when he struggled with Satan (one could say the same of any great master or teacher). The fact that the ma.s.s of humanity still dwells in ignorance, giving rise to all kinds of suffering, goes back to levels of awareness. In the domain of the mind there is both freedom and attachment; we make the choice which to attune to. Each person sets his own boundaries and breaks through them when the evolutionary impulse is felt.

We've all met people whose problems are completely unnecessary, yet they lack the insight to find the solution. Try to give them this insight, hand it to them on a platter, and still they won't take it. Insight and inspiration must be sought and then allowed to dawn. As our spiritual masters indicate, this is the kind of knowledge you must tune into.

Inspiration teaches us that transformation must begin with trust that a higher intelligence exists and knows how to contact us.

GENIUSES, CHILD PRODIGIES, AND SAVANTS.

Brain research has little to say about genius that is very convincing.

Statistically we know that geniuses are rare and unpredictable; they are predominantly born in ordinary families, and their own offspring are rarely of exceptional intelligence. This leads us to believe that genius derives from a unique combination of genes-it is somehow encoded from birth in a very few children.

Under autopsy the cerebral cortex of geniuses is only rarely found to be exceptional. (In June 1999, headlines were created by the news that Einstein's brain, preserved for almost half a century after his death, was indeed abnormal. A center that is connected to mathematical ability and spatial perception known as the inferior parietal lobe was found to be 15 percent wider than normal in Einstein's case. Is this proof of genius?

Hardly, but there is an almost universal craving to think that geniuses are "different." I would argue that our brains are wired by our minds to begin with, and it is the genius of Einstein's mind, not the radio apparatus under the skull that received its signals, that is fascinating.) If DNA does not endow geniuses with special structures in their gray matter, then how do genes play a part? After all, unless a gene gives rise to a physical expression, it has no way to influence us. You cannot turn an ordinary brain into a genius's brain, either, and in fact the electrical patterns exhibited when a genius is thinking are not dramatically different from my brain waves when I add up my checkbook.

In our new model genius would be defined as something nonphysical: the ability to activate unmanifest levels of the mind much more efficiently than usual. Contrary to the popular a.s.sumption that geniuses think all the time, their minds are in fact quieter and clearer than normal. This clarity may be narrow, however. Geniuses can be plagued by the same mental obstacles as the rest of us, only they have achieved one or more open channels back to the mind field.

Mozart, for example, had difficulty managing the simplest financial affairs; his emotional life was torn between two women; feelings about his father filled his unconscious with suppressed anger and resentment. But the channel of music was so open that Mozart could compose freely from the age of four onward, and in his prime had little difficulty seeing whole pages of a score in his head at once.

Genius is beyond ordinary thought and learning-we could call it continuous inspiration. The same process is involved in a burst of inspiration, but a genius has these bursts longer and with more ease than the rest of us.

This brings up an important point: you can only access the mind field at your own comfort level. Your brain and nervous system become fine-tuned to who you are. If you are a civil engineer, your brain becomes accustomed to schematic diagrams, tensile stresses, and so forth. Should you suddenly begin to receive musical inspiration on the order of Mozart, your personal world would be thrown into chaos.

In California a stockbroker who had no interest in art began to paint canvases of bright-colored ellipses, often in yellow or purple. He startled his friends by beginning to wear clothes in the same bright hues.