WILLPOWER AS IT RELATES TO CONSCIOUSNESS
My intentions for this article are to outline to you the neurology behind being self-aware, and how this knowledge can be used to aid us in our endeavor of exploring supra-physical realities and the extremities of consciousness.
In order to draw parallels between neural activity and conscious awareness and mental faculties, I first must relate the brains physical layers of functions to behavior into three intellectually accurate yet still metaphorical layers of function.
I have come across a particularly interesting neuroscientific study regarding the induction of self-awareness in dreams. In a book titled Behave: The Biology of Human Beings at our Worst and Best by neuro-endocrineologist Robert Sapolsky, he details the layers of the brain and how they relate to human behavior. The brain can be categorized into three metaphorical layers that highlight the order in which the brain has evolved and the manners in which decisions are made.
The first deals with causal based logical mechanisms. Primal instincts to mate, to eat, this layer deals with autonomous functions, if your skin cells detect a drop in temperature, they send a signal to your brain, which layer one depicts then sends the command for you to start shivering. This is a rudimentary understanding of layer 1.
Layer 2 has developed as an emotional and associatory center and is found primarily in mammals and primates, the main structures of layer two is the Hippocampus which deals with emotional responses of anger, anxiety and fear also declarative long term memories that indicate a factual nature, “fire is hot,” “I will hurt if I jump from this cliff”, “I can take a different route home to beat the traffic jam” etc. We will not talk anymore about this layer.
The third layer to develop was the Frontal Cortex. This is the outermost layer of your brain that deals with deep cognition, ethics and principalities, contemplation of philosophies and Reason, also notably it deals with long term decision making. When you see the cookie jar but you tell yourself, “No, Self, you’re on that sugar free diet remember?” Vital energy is discharged in the Frontal Cortex that allows this decision to take place. All areas of the brain require high amounts of electrical energy, but none more than the Frontal Cortex.
Here is a blueprint of the Triune Brain as presented by neuroscientist Paul D. Maclean
There are a handful of cases that have allowed neurologists to come to these conclusions, most notably one involving a man named Gage and an iron rod from a railroad track that blasted through his jaw and out the top front of his skull taking with it most of his Frontal Lobe and with that the balance between his intellectual faculties and animalistic propensities. He could not refrain from indulging in ludicrous profanity, was obstinate in his beliefs and was victim to unaccountable changes in mood and behavior and would be heavily indecisive on different opinions and future plans. He could no longer act “appropriately” in a social setting and was reduced to a circus exhibit. Amazingly though after a few years, he made remarkable recovery and was described as “broadly appropriate in his behavior” by the doctor who had been following him over the years. This becomes important later as I will touch on conscious intention as it applies to the genesis of new neural circuits especially within the Cortex.
Here is Gage with his spike(D)
As Sapolsky is reviewing these cases of Frontal Cortex damage, we also examine the process and affects of Dementia. Frontotemporal Dementia to be exact. Frontal damage, (which also occurs in Huntington’s disease) invokes serious behavioral disinhibition – stealing, aggressiveness, hypersexuality, bursts of compulsion. But when it is working properly we have a different story. When properly functioning, the Cortex plays key roles in mediating the availability of our Willpower, the energy it takes to make the decision to not curse out your child, to refrain from hitting your brother cause you know your mom will punish you, to not act on those crazy thoughts that occasionally pop in your head (like shouting “I object!” at a wedding, or telling somebody you don’t agree with to “fuck off,” regardless of implications) this synaptic energy is rare and depletable. The most repeatable and striking findings when investigating Willpower reveals that Will is a finite resource.
You see, it takes a lot of energy to be a life contemplating, over worrying, self-regulating person. (Scientifically based evidence on how to strengthen your capacity for Willpower later) When you run out you can begin to become physically tired and are prone to making more poor decisions, taking that extra shot of whiskey, eating the cookie, impulsively spending money on a good sale, and even uncontrollable gambling.
So here is what our frontal cortex is good for in terms of conscious application and intention. While were not sure which part of the Cortex imagined images originate in, we know that their processing begins somewhere in the Cortex and ends in the Occipital Lobes (part of cortex towards the back of your skull.) The Cortex allows for all of that specialized human pontification and mindful conjecture about the nature of man and handles the projection of theoretical mathematical formulas that help in creating blueprints and schematics and all manner of intellectual functioning are hosted in the cortex. This is of course while it is optimally operating. How do you keep it operating optimally? (A) The two most important factors are a proper diet and a healthy sleep schedule. Sleep experts suggest 6.5 to 7.5 hours of sleep (B). When your cortical energy runs low, you make decisions that you normally wouldn’t were you fully online. How can we gauge this energy to see where along the scale you fall?
Ask yourself, where else do you make decisions that you normally wouldn’t were you your totally clear functioning self? In the Dream Consciousness of course. Just the other day I was having a particularly violent dream involving gun fights and quick decisions. Of course I don’t like hurting people physically or emotionally, yet in the dream I am making heartless decisions to kill other dream characters. Does this say something about my deep rooted feelings towards the archetypes I was battling? Perhaps, but realistically that is just energy wasting conjecture on the frontal cortex’s part (poor attempt at humor). What it says undoubtedly, is that the cortex during REM sleep is hypofuntional. Meaning inactive, in a state of diminished function. Consider your dreams and your dream journal if you have one, go back to it and look at the questionable moral decisions and strange actions you have made in your mysterious unconscious state, a friend of mine once told me of a dream he had involving an intimate scenario with his sister! Of course, this is not uncommon, but it shows an intermittent or lack there of in neural communication between the cortex and the “dream scriptwriters” which are operating from layers one and two. Can you gauge how functional your Cortex is while you are experiencing dreams by noting the degree of self-awareness you make in dream time as it relates to the quality of the decisions made? It would be wise to start taking notation, the point of this article is to provide means of raising that quality. Those who are students of the unconscious have likely experienced the weighing of decisions in dreams, deciding to make a clear decision, to hit somebody, but not experience the action itself sensorially, as if our decision making awareness is below the conscious surface of the dream character, who perhaps is a projection of yourself with your awareness existing as a “decision maker” within the subconscious that drives the avatar to make decisions. Sure you can make decisions, but how do you experience the full affects with any degree of clarity? We see this not only in the dream realms where we bear witness to scenarios created and influenced by our consciousness and its many layers, but on the flip side of the mirror, in real life when we are playing baseball and a pop fly comes your way out in left field. Immediately your brain starts sending the signals to your legs to tense your muscles, lift your leg, lean forward and propel yourself, release tension in leg one, send signals to hip to bring leg forward simultaneously plant the opposite leg, swing your arms in momentum, all the while not looking at your legs or arms only having an eye for the white ball flying through the blue sky. You do not have to think about all of the micro movements, sub processes, and intricate coordination’s that are rapidly being fired off by your subconscious, and so the ego does not have to determine the majority of functions being carried out. Just like in the dream, you simply make the decision to catch the ball, and you do it without much hassle. It seems that the decision-maker leads and the body/dream follows. What separates the two scenarios is where along the ladder reaching from conscious experience to the archetypical sub conscious Primes, does the decision maker gain a sense of self-awareness? And what brings about that sense? The audible ping of the baseball off the bat and the visual of a ball coming to you for the former, imagine a left fielder absent mindedly chewing on a piece of grass watching the clouds when the batter hits the ball and the crowd starts cheering, that’ll bring our left fielder out of la-la land. The latter is a bit more of a complex answer. It depends on the amount of data flow from different regions of the brain.
We are now entering the realm of the unknown where causal based science looses its grips and subjective experience becomes the main processor of phenomenology. We can say that when dreaming occurs, the frontal cortex goes offline and you have dreams that can be categorized as abnormal, not on par with your normal behavior and moral compass, as reported in non lucid participants in a lab study, but studies have shown that when the third layer of the brain, the Cortex is stimulated (using short gamma bursts) in the midst of a dream, the sense of self-awareness is repeatedly heightened. Participants realized they were dreaming while still in the dream. (C)
This can explain why being aware in dreams is a rare phenomena and actively trying to rewire your neurons to be functional when biologically they are not so inclined is such a difficult task for consciousness explorers.
Now for the ultimate question for conscious exploration, how can we maintain a greater degree of lucidity? How can we exercise our intention and Willpower over a dream scenario to become completely in control? How can we use this objective data and apply it to our conscious sleep practice? What we have is a clear casual relation between neurotic higher-level cognition and self-awareness in an unconscious state. At the other end of the spectrum of consciousness analysis, in the book Tibetean Yoga and Secret Doctrines by Evan Wentz, the goal of the yogi is to become completely aware of their own consciousness as it shifts through various levels of awareness, from waking, right into sleeping to the reality frame where dreams are generated, given the monicker “The Clear Light” by Tibeteans, think of it as “Dream Building Space” for contextual purposes. This is achieved through a series of mental techniques and practices to achieve mindfulness that all orbit around the ritual of sleep. An overview of these techniques will show that the main component is to maintain an active intent to have a clear thoughtless mind, whilst simultaneously contemplating but not analyzing the nature of the spatial in which you wish to transition your consciousness. Again, the act of contemplating abstract ideas, for random example “I am the same I that I was yesterday,” or imagining a place in which you can exist and act without a body, undoubtedly is a process of higher level cognition that when focused on stimulates activity in the Cortical regions. This ancient Tibetean practice employs knowledge of neurotic function only recently garnered by science as a tool to leap into altered states of awareness, those of which science is still yet to accept and explore.
Again, with this knowledge of the neurology regarding the ability for self referential thought and action, how are we to apply it to be beneficial in waking life and simultaneously carrying that Willpower into the Non-Physical Reality so you can more effectively explore the multiverse?
Luckily the answer is simple and like always, you already have it.
Practice. Repetition is the mother of skill. I said we would come back to our friend Gage and his railroad spike. Gage, who was missing the majority of his frontal lobe, who’s cognitive experience deteriorated into a state of social anarchy and emotional imbalance, was able to recover after a few short years of applying himself to his tasks. He regrew his higher-level cognitive circuits, as his environment demanded it of him. If he had not been in that environment would he have recovered as fully? Possibly, the message I gained is that, he put himself to it. He applied himself. In his case, his task was to be a stagecoach driver, in our case, its applying our self to a practice of attentiveness. If Gage can regrow brain matter that was violently removed from his brain, by simply applying himself, logic would dictate you have the potential to gain a mastery over our own current fully operational circuits by having a similar conscious intent.
Gages delirious state is analogous to the ‘unconscious,’ weak-willed, non-lucid states of conscious explorers. His journey to recovery is a real life example of our potential for growth insofar as quality of consciousness and ability to become more self-aware. To know thyself is life’s purpose. To see the power we have over our own chemistry is almost magical. What are you going to do with your brain???
To keep your Cortex fully functional and optimally operating with as little inhibition as possible, we want to increase our sensitivity to Cortical processing. This I have simply labeled Cortical Health. Cortical Health like previously stated relies on two fundamental pillars, sleep and diet. Sleep is the most crucial element to proper functioning. At this point in our exploration and conscious evolution, we should have a regimented sleep cycle, not just for purposes of neural health, but to maintain the natural sleeping rhythms that nature has crafted for us (the Circadium Rhythm.) Staying in those cycles can be the greatest aid while derailing just a little can have significant impacts on dreaming faculties and that grouchy behavior in the morning, which often extends its affects the entire day. Cortical Health is one that may scare off some, but that’s cause the truth hurts and the science doesn’t lie! Below is a list of inhibitors to the Cortex functioning. (G)
• Pharmaceutical Medications
• High Blood Pressure
• Asthma
• Marijuana, Heroin, Cocaine
• Alcohol
• Caffeine
• Nicotine
• Sugar
• Addictive agents/refined sugars
• Cheese (Tyramine Affect)
• Meat
These last two are hard hitters, but the acids and compounds found exclusively in meat and cheese are known interferers to neurotransmitters required for proper frontal lobe function.
The Cortical Health advice will not take you where you want to go. It will only make the path to get there a little less overgrown with prickly brush. However, some important activities you can undertake aside from your nutritional intake that will boost the processing power of your Cortex and renew the vital consciousness energies that define Willpower are as follows:
- You must learn how to manage stress. You cannot be overwhelmed with social duties and responsibilities. You must develop a system that relieves yourself of stress during your day. The most effective methods are centered on breathing techniques. Your Blood Pressure is a result of your heart rate which is a pattern rested in your breath. Draw your attention to your breath, slowly inhale through the nose, let it go. Do it again. Become aware of nothing but the breath. It takes less than three minutes and is extremely powerful. More articles on the Philosophy of Breath to come.
- Verbally encourage yourself. The amount of research regarding how we view ourselves, how we talk to ourselves, how we think about ourselves (See Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton) and how that shapes our bodies chemistry from genetic alterations to neurology is overwhelming. How you think of yourself and especially how you verbalize your thoughts about yourself have measurable affects on your neural construction. Self Driven-Intent affects your neurology (E). Simply telling yourself “I can,” “I am,” or “I will,” can reinforce a positive feedback loop, where as “I cant,” “I don’t know how,” or “I wish I could,” reinforce a negative feedback loop. For people with depression and suicidal tendencies, this could save a life. Don’t cut yourself down. However you view yourself, your biology tends to lean in that way as well. “I am discipline, I am willpower, I am The Force.”
- Again, as imperative as ever, go to sleep no later than 10:30pm, the body should naturally wake up around 5 am. Sleeping time is vitally important as this is the time for your body to regenerate and recuperate.
- Meditation. Mindfulness. Study after study have been done that relate meditative states to improved neural interconnectivity. Changes generally start around 8 weeks, meaning you don’t have to devote your life to become a recluse shaolin monk, you should just spend some time with yourself every morning accessing your state of mind before you begin your day. The highest ratio for neural structural efficacy to data processing happens when you meditate, self reflect, and use your imagination (F “They found the highest agreement between structure and information flow in the “default mode network,” which is responsible for inward-focused thinking such as daydreaming.”)
- Lastly we have exercise and diet again. We are not quite sure why exercise works, but it is known to reduce and manage stress levels. Diet is paramount as a plant based intake and less processed foods can make more energy available for the brain.
I write this in hopes that it can give you the realization you need to see that your discipline is generated by intention, that you can strengthen your Willpower be conscious application, and the advantages of strengthening your discipline can carry over across multiple frames of reality which you are always an active participant in whether you are conscious of it or not. The theory goes that maintaining an effective and fluid stream of imaginative consciousness (intentionally keeping the Frontal Cortex active) can act as a capacitor keeping you fully self aware as you move from beta, to theta, to gamma, from waking, to sleeping, to self induced lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences that so many traditions and spiritual masters and shamans have tried to inform us of. The same circuits that are most active when in those altered states are the same ones that are active when we are striving to meet our goals, aspirations, and social desires.
This is a simple perspective analyzing data from multiple sources including self-experience and is no way meant to be instructional or scientific. Simply my opinions regarding the information I have received. This article is apart of an ongoing series that will attempt to pull together altered states, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, mystical phenomena, and a scientific analysis, as I attempt to learn more for myself, and explore the worlds of consciousness.
To end I give us an excerpt from the Upanishads, regarding being fully aware within the dream.
“Hear, O children of immortal bliss!
You are born to be united with the Lord.
Follow the path of the illumined ones,
And be united with the Lord of Life.
As a great fish swims between the banks of a river as it likes, so does the shining Self move between the states of dreaming and waking.
As an eagle, weary after soaring in the sky, folds its wings and flies down to rest in its nest, so does the shining Self enter the state of dreamless sleep, where one is free from all desires. The Self is free from desire, free from evil, free from fear…"
(A)
http://www.breachbuilders.org/article.php?story=20100111015631512
(B)
https://www.fastcompany.com/3032513/6-scientifically-proven-ways-to-boost-your-self-control
(D)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
(E) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569494/pdf/rstb20041598.pdf
(F)
https://www.mpg.de/7738341/brain-architecture-daydreaming
(G)
http://www.thelifemanagementalliance.com/Psychological/ThinkingBrain/BrainFrontalLobeCare.html
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