Learning who we are to gain the power to change ($)

Humans think because software evolves faster than hardware.

Life took billions of years to evolve; language took thousands (Marins & Boeckx, 2019).

What is our species, anyway?

Evolution is a crude process that sometimes takes things backwards. If there are two choices, evolution opts for the one with the bigger reward, but many big payouts are dead ends. Like Gollum, in the Lord of the Rings, what we’ve set our minds on may not be the best thing for us.

Things that are in balance stay in balance, but growth is not a balanced process. Processes that proceed out of balance often head in the wrong direction. Our minds are such a process, and that’s one reason that we often find ourselves in trouble.

The biggest development in human history was our brain. This development gave us creative thought and took us from instinctive to intentional behavior. Intentional behavior, rational understanding, and an identity separate from our immediate environment is our ring of power, and it has overwhelmed us.

This race toward power has created civilization at the sacrifice of our body’s instinctive self-awareness. It has also sacrificed our holistic sense of connection that is embedded in emotional, somatic, and spiritual understanding.

We call ourselves Homo sapiens, but that reflects our arrogance. To be sapient is possessing great sagacity, and we think ourselves so wise, but wisdom is just what we lack. At the same time, we are not Homo sentiens, as sentience refers to the immersion in the senses. What we are, as a species, is Homo intelligens, a species dominated by our intellect. We are governed by intellect.

Someday we may unite our intelligence with our sentience and our emotions. When that happens, we will be on our way to becoming Homo sapiens, but we seem to be a long way from that now.

Intellect is sense without sensation

Modern medicine may be miraculous, but it’s nothing compared to the body. When you’re cut or damaged, how does your body know how to heal itself? Medicine can’t do it; nothing we know of or have ever invented can do it. Yet our bodies, somehow, do it everywhere and all the time.

No amount of intelligence makes healing happen. Intelligence can discern causes, injuries, and obstacles, and it can rearrange, relieve, and remove these problems, but the healing is a magic of another order.

I find it amazing that we overlook this. How are we so blind? We call doctors healers because they take credit for a process they have no role in. It is our intelligent mind that wants to give itself credit when, most of the time, intelligence has started the process that’s led to injury. We give ourselves credit by celebrating medicine, which is really a way of celebrating ourselves. This may move medicine forward, but it also further disables us in healing ourselves.

Healing happens because we turn our attention to it. It is not a rational or intellectual process, and it does not need outside knowledge or certification. Healing is what our bodes already know how to do, and they do not use our intelligent faculties to do it.

There are older parts of our brains involved with our bodies. These parts of our brains don’t micromanage bodily function, but they respond to and provide support for our health. The non-intellectual parts of our brains, which we take for granted and often disparage, do almost everything that keeps us alive.

The intelligent parts of our brains hunt for opportunity, trying to distinguish what glitters from what’s gold. Our identity is almost entirely managed by the intelligent parts of our brains. With the exceptions of lust, pain, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, we guide ourselves with reasoned intention. Even when these baser needs overwhelm us, we may still deceive ourselves with excuses and explanations. Our intellect never lets go. It is incorrigible!

Sentience confers the power to change

It is amazing, and it is true, that by building a deeper mental connection with your body, you enhance your body’s power to change and heal. It seems that our brains must disconnect from our intellects in order to reestablish an intuitive connection with our bodies.

One way to disconnect from our intellect is to go into trance. The kind of trance state we want is a state in which we feel a connection to our body. To achieve that, we envelop ourselves in sensations, images, and associations. We cease reasoning and censoring our thoughts, and, instead, let thoughts carry the messages of our body. We use our imagination.

It’s unclear if imagination is essential, or if it indicates the depth of our connection. There is no way to be sure that everyone who uses their imagination uses it in the same way. Because we are not using our intellect, our ability to use language is dulled. It’s clear that language is not the agent of healing, but it’s unclear if language presents an obstacle. It seems that language with intellect does obstruct the mind-body connection, but language that’s disconnected from intellect does not get in the way.

Language that’s disconnected from intellect is unreasonable language. It is descriptive rather than reasoned. We don’t have a framework to describe this aside from saying that it’s poetic or abstract, yet neither of those descriptions reflects the kind of metaphorical or allegorical sense that can be made when we put into language what we feel in our bodies.

Bringing into mind what the body evokes, and directing our minds to focus on sensations, amplifies the power of our cells. Whether it’s because we’re able to direct more nutrients to that body part we focus on, or if it’s some other form of energy or control, we don’t know. The healing process is a mystery, and our ability to contribute to it is also a mystery.

If we disconnect from intellect, we can connect to soul