brain and Enlightenment - Buddha's Enlightenment.

[Guest guest]

Imagine a person were to do long

periods of MEDITATION in which they

spend many hours a day suppressing all

negative ideation and emotion.

 

With time, their right (fearful)

AMYGDALA

would become INCREASINGLY QUIET

 

 

One day, they stop their practice, as

the Buddha did after seeing that his

had gone too far.

 

Their right amygdala, and the whole

set of things it's wired

to, would soon begin to activate

themselves. After the long history of

inactivity, all the negative emotions

that belong to the right amygdala would

emerge into the person's awareness. A

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, so to speak.

Especially if an outer stress were to

activate it naturally. And the Buddha

had one. His disenchantment with the

ascetic path caused him to lose all his

friends. All at once.

 

 

A spiritual discipline that 'tasks'

the LEFT AMYGDALA, SUCH AS REMAINING

AWARE OF AN EMOTION WITHOUT ACTING IT

OUT IN ANY WAY, or responding to all

negative emotions with a verbal prayer

(ex: Jesus, have mercy on me) WILL BE

RAISING THE LEVEL OF THE LEFT

AMYGDALA'S ACTIVITY, AS RIGHT

AMYGDALA'S FUNCTIONS ARE INCREASINGLY

SUPPRESSED.

 

As one amygdala's activity

increases, the opposite one decreases,

according to the theory of VECTORIAL

HEMISPHERICITY.

 

.....

 

 

 

And the right amygdala is connected to

many other brain parts. When they're

held off by ongoing SPIRITUAL PRACTICE,

they're QUIET, but as soon as any of

them are initiated, the whole matrix of

right amygdaloid activity can burst

into activity, in an attempt to re-

establish themselves.

 

METABOLIC SNAPBACK is the name for this process

when it happens in response to magnetic

signal stimulation, and when it happens

(in theory) to keep rarely used

matrices of neurons active, it's called

DYNAMIC STABILIZATION. Remember, the

amygdala itself is much more labile

than the structures it's connected to.

It's more prone to localized seizures

than any other part of the brain.

 

 

If the suppressed matrix of right

amygdaloid connections were large

enough, their re-emergence might elicit

enough activity to overwhelm it.

 

First, the activity would spread to

the RIGHT HIPPOCAMPUS, a brain part

that's involved with INNER IMAGING,

most importantly, the VISUAL COMPONENTS

OF MEMORY. (It also consolidates short-

term memory into long-term ones.)

 

.....

[Guest guest]

OK. Now we're up to the night of the

Buddha's enlightenment.

 

If you know the story, you know that

Mara is said to have disappeared after

the Buddha touched the earth, calling

on her to witness his vow to attain

enlightenment. If our definition of

enlightenment is valid, then this would

have included continuing to condition

the suppression of fear, sadness, etc.

 

The activity in his right hippocampus,

we might guess, now had nowhere to go

but back into the right amygdala.

 

But it was already loaded to the max.

So it took the next available route.

Across the brain to the left amygdala.

With so much force that large numbers

of synapses that had previously

functioned to inhibit traffic from the

right amygdala to the left were

overloaded and dropped out. The Buddha

became enlightened at dawn one day,

gazing at the morning star.

 

 

As the left amygdala bursts into

activity, the pressure is taken off of

the one on the right, and the right

hippocampus no longer needs to vent its

activity. It remains busy. That

enhances non-verbal cognitive processes

at the expense of verbal cognitive ones.

 

The mind is 'silent'. " Suffering " is

'ended' as the left amygdala's positive

emotions now predominate. Bliss,

ecstasy, unconditional love, etc.

 

 

The story tells that he sat and looked

at the morning star, venus. This

suggests how he might have gotten hold

of himself. By engaging a cognitive

task. Putting all his attention into

looking at a point of light, a common

introspective task for meditators who

experience inner points of light.

 

However, Venus is not as bright as the

sun. When the sun lights up the morning

sky, venus will disappear.

 

I would suggest that his limbic system

was very labile just then, and given

it's contribution to the sense of self,

it might have facilitated an

interhemispheric intrusion; one that

followed the cognitive context created

shortly before, when he ended his

episode with Mara.

 

In the new context, a new sense of

self emerged. One that wasn't based on

language any longer. His non-

linguistic sense of self became

dominant. His choice to look off into

space after touching the earth

activated his right hippocampus again

(due to it's involvement with spatial

perception). This time, it's phenomena

combined with the left amygdala's

(affective) contribution to the sense

of self. So that the dominant sense of

self acquired a non-linguistic

cognitive basis.

 

 

In other words, when The morning star

vanished, so did he.