“And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now”. – Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
The above represents what I believe to be the most beautiful moment ever captured in the written word. Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding; blood in his mouth, cool grass beneath his exhausted body, discovering he’s alive in the summer of 1928 in fictitious Green Town Illinois.
Bradbury’s prose describes the boy’s realization with a level of artistry that few ever touch. A moment of epiphany that divides the entire arc of life into simply “before” or “after”.
“I’m really alive! He thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember”.
Like Douglas, we all receive gifts of newfound understanding over the course of our lives. Some small and forgotten unless sought for in memory, others so profound that they live and breathe in our consciousness for the rest of our days.
It is my belief that the single most important of these potential realizations lies in the recognition of the soul and the brain as two wildly separate entities.
“You” are not your brain.
Your brain is a machine; a beautiful, sophisticated piece of hardware designed to assist You in navigating the world.
“You” are your soul; the invisible life force gifted to you for stewardship and expression by God’s perfect design.
That’s You.
Your soul was alive and free in the days of your early youth. Less separated by time from your creator, you were You without doubt or apology. Then came the instructions from the world. How to think, act, talk, dress, live, love, fit in, or rebel for the sake of rebellion.
Your soul was ushered to the back of the room while your brain took the wheel and said “I’m the captain now” in its best Somalian accent.
Your brain cared deeply about your survival. It was wired to keep you alive. It wrote programs for self-preservation by recognizing patterns in your environment, the people around you, and your own behaviors and outcomes. It did what it was engineered to do.
Slowly your soul was relegated to the occasional cameo in your consciousness, while your brain with its manufactured thoughts and emotions, learned behaviors, beliefs, and habits took full control of your identity.
Your human existence; shifted from the expression of a divine miracle to the output of a glitchy, emotional computer riddled with malware.
You see, “garbage in, garbage out”, the golden rule of computing, is true in matters of the brain as well. And if you are indeed human, my guess is that you picked up some dogshit inputs along the way.
But the brain was never meant to enslave You. Like your heart was designed to circulate blood, and your lungs to breathe air, your brain was perfectly created to perform complex operations in support of your soul’s expression on earth.
Do you truly believe that a life subordinate to a piece of equipment made King through your soul’s dereliction of duty was God’s desire for You when he started your heart?
Of course you don’t. Yet while many today fear the threat of an AI uprising, they don’t realize that the real war against the machines was already lost inside of them.
They spend disproportionate amounts of time in moods and patterns of thought that the innocent soul of their youth would never consciously choose. They react to what is fed to them through social media, biased news headlines, political rhetoric, the words and behaviors of others, the circumstances of their employment, their relationships, their bank balance, and the shape of their own image in the mirror.
Leaves in the wind; emotions changing course in response to each errant gust of thought that blows through the valleys of their mind.
Devoid of conscious direction from the soul, their brains incessantly filter information to validate their learned and accepted beliefs, unconsciously assigning meaning to everything while keeping conflicting ideas and perspectives far, far away. The brain maintains the status quo of basic survival as the soul languishes in the open cage it resides in of its own volition.
Over and over they use their bodies and language to assist in manufacturing emotions that feel familiar and comfortable, even though they’re often anything but.
And the real kicker? The “smarter” they are, the more horsepower their brain came with from the factory, the harder it works to keep them “safe” in their default, accepted feelings of misery, despair, and not being good enough.
Liberation and return to soul-led living is only possible through acceptance of the soul/brain hierarchical reality and reassertion of control.
But this awakening is often met with resistance.
Many suffer from what I call “Stockholm syndrome of the soul”. They will insist that they are different. That their circumstances, background, sex, blood type, or shoe size exempt them from this absolute reality. They’ll claim that to suggest that the brain is to be presided over as God intended is somehow more impossible of a proposition than the miracle of their life itself.
They will distort this information into the erroneous suggestion that they somehow become robotic or devoid of feeling, not realizing how consistently they surrender control of their life and their happiness to the literal machine that resides in their skull.
They will cling to the belief that to steward the gift of life is not to feel, distorting a fundamental truth about feeling itself.
Feeling is perhaps the most wonderful component of the gift we receive. Life is meant to be experienced with depth and a full range of emotions. But one hundred percent of the feelings we experience are manufactured at our direction whether we choose to accept that or not.
Now I can feel the objections to this statement from here, and I promise to expand on what I mean by this in later installments. For now, I’ll distill it into one true statement that even the most resistant may choose to agree with.
Focus equals feeling.
Without awareness and conscious leadership from the soul, the brain allocates focus and assigns meaning to validate absolutely whatever it’s been programmed to believe, whether that belief leads to desirable outcomes or not.
Behaviors and outcomes are then forced into alignment with what the brain has accepted as truth.
On and on, this oppressive cycle continues for the leaf in the wind. Positive emotions like joy, gratitude, love of life…. all chronically short-lived.
They’re gone when the wind carries one whiff of that which can be distorted into something the brain has learned to identify as a threat to the perverted homeostasis their soul had so little say in defining. This is true even when the scent originates from a random thought of their brain’s own creation!
If this sounds tragic it’s because it is. The gift of life, surrendered to a mass of tissue that ceases all function at the time of one’s death. The moment at which the soul departs the vessel. A mass then returned to nothingness through decay or cremation. The well-intentioned slave master granted retirement from a job well?… Done.
But one need not remain bound in a life of unwitting or unwilling slavery.
The return to a life of freedom is as simple as accepting the biblical truth that You are something far greater than flesh.
You are your soul.
Your brain works for You.
You are not a leaf in the wind.
You owe God and those you love a presence worthy of the gift you’ve received.
This life belongs to You.
Future entries will dig into the “how to” components of governing your life as God intended. Your brain is beautiful. It can and will enrich your experience beyond what you can imagine. But if nothing changes nothing changes. Your life awaits your lead.
If you would like to see how I use these same teachings to radically change the way people approach the subject of fat loss or body transformation, check out my book “STRIP: Lose Fat Find Yourself- The Stupid Simple Road Home”.
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