Number six is the mystical. We are accidentally raised with the idea that our thinking brain is us, and that’s just simply not true. The thinking brain is a small part of our perception.
By the thinking brain, I’m talking about the language that goes through your head, the stories that go through your head, what a scientist or an artist would call the left brain. We call the noisy part of our mind Left brain thinking. This the analytical thinking brain.
But we actually have a huge area of perception that’s available to us without the thinking language part being necessary. This is the part of our brain we live in most of the time. We might not notice it, but it gives us our full breadth of perception.
It’s this perceptive part of our brain that activates when you’re driving a car. Imagine that you are going to pull into a parking space. You drive without thinking about it. You don’t think of logical steps like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to go one degree to the left, and then I have to adjust my wheel.’ You just drive into the parking lot and pull into to the parking space.
This is a perfect example of Nonduality because you are not your car. Your car is way bigger than you. You are inside of it and you are driving. You have this sense of where the wheels are, how long the car is, how wide it is.You have a sense of your speed, of how you can just turn the wheel exactly this much and pull into the parking space.
It’s not your left brain at all; it’s this thing that we call the right brain. This right brain is spatial, it observes things. You could almost say that it does things by feel. You, the human being, with your full capacity are able to do that.
Another exercise I like to do, to emphasize that our brain is more than the chattery-chattery logical brain, is to ask: where is your spatula? Probably you get an instant picture. It’s not left brain logical mind. You probably didn’t think, ‘Oh, it’s in the third drawer from the right underneath the sink,’ or something like that. You probably just pictured it, spatula.
Our mystical, spacial, brain is always working. Say you’re cooking, ‘Ah, I need my spatula,’ you simply go over and you get your spatula. You don’t even notice that you are picturing it. It’s such a natural part of yourself that it seems invisible. It’s just useful; you use it all day long without even noticing.
One of my best stories about these different sides of the brain is Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s the one who did the TED Talk on ‘My Stroke of Insight.’ What happened to Jill was that she was a brain scientist, and she had a stroke. Because she was a brain scientist she pictured things in terms of an actual brain and how a brain worked. She had a stroke that took out the part of her brain that creates language.
She was awake and aware while it happened. Not only that, she had this scientific knowledge, so she understood, ‘I’m having a stroke.’ She sat there and watched what happened as all language disappeared out of her head. She was left with pure, unfiltered, perception. She could see the interconnection of all molecules. She was completely incapacitated; it is not a healthy state.
It took her eight years to heal and come back. When she came back she was able to give this fascinating clear explanation of the difference between the talking, yaking brain and what we call the mystical brain.
We can learn from this. Reaching the nondual state can happen by learning to access this mystical brain consciously. You don’t even access it; it’s always going. It’s always going; all you have to do is remove your attention from the language brain and allow this mystical side of you to come forth.
Don’t worry that you are going to snap into the mystical and never come back. At all times, our thinking left brain is going to be naturally dominant because we’ve been that way since birth. This mystical part of your brain is simply there working. It brings in the world and then lets the logical part of your brain sort it out. You are a blend of experiencing and knowing. Mystical brain sees; logical brain interprets.
Start seeing yourself as this full living human being.
Now, one final step: you are neither of those things; those are both just tools of perception. You are the one perceiving both of these things. It becomes easier to acknowledge yourself if you’re living in a balanced left brain-right brain state. A state where you can consciously go to the right, consciously go to the left, consciously let them work together.
Eventually, the process is for you to see who is consciously driving this vehicle. Once you are integrated in this way full perceptions opens up.
Who is driving your vehicle? You’ve got a body, right? You can use that as a exercise is self-knowing.
If I think I want to raise my hand and don’t actually do it, nothing happens, right? Just think: Raise my hand, nothing happens.
But if ‘I’ raise my hand obviously it goes up. I’m driving that. Who’s actually raising the hand? It’s me. When you’re this totally integrated self then you are in charge. This is what we call “Master of myself.”
I decide to do it, and I make it happen. That’s you; you’re the one driving the vehicle of yourself.