Making an interesting observation, Andrew Sullivan links to the final two paragraphs in Michael Miller’s Newsweek article,  Sad Brain, Happy Brain.

Earlier this year the Annals of Neurology published an article by Sam Harris and colleagues exploring what happens in the brain when people are in the act of either believing or disbelieving. In an accompanying editorial, Oliver Sachs and Joy Hirsch underscored the significance of what the researchers found. Belief and disbelief activated different regions of the brain. But in the brain, all belief reactions looked the same, whether the stimulus was relatively neutral: an equation like 2 6 8=16, or emotionally charged: “A Personal God exists, just as the Bible describes.”

By putting a big religious idea next to a small math equation, some readers might think the researchers intend to glibly dismiss it. But a discovery about brain function does not imply a value judgment. And understanding the reality of the natural world—how the brain works—shouldn’t muddle the big questions about human experience.

Miller’s points are great except that he begins his piece with a misplaced Cartesian axiom, suggesting that the brain and the mind are in fact one in the same. Are they?

Perhaps we should be asking researchers different questions. What is mind? Where is mind? What is aware of mind?

It’s good to be back after weeks of being still.

In a recent blog post by Andrew Cohen, he rightly asserts a point so often misappropriated in alternative spiritual circles:

Consciousness doesn’t exist or work in mysterious ways outside of or away from the innermost depths of our individual and collective selves.

In other words, while consciousness is mysterious in the way it unfolds past the mind, it shouldn’t be conflated with pre-rational fairy tales. It’s all right here in front of us.

At the same time, all of us, especially teachers, can unwittingly set up structures that allow the mind to cling, thus blocking the natural expression of enlightenment. This is especially true when an adherence to sins of the past, or salvation in the future, colors spiritual teaching since it puts the ego into the driver’s seat of the process of awakening. Consider his final line:

The more we not only awaken to that fact but take responsibility for it, the more quickly this world will become the paradise that we all long for in our most inspired moments.

Here, here. But let us all co-create the future by loosening the grip we keep on the fairy tails of the past as well as those fairy tails of times yet to come. When teaching people to “become” without first teaching them to just “be” a massive impediment is created thus blocking an authentic approach to what the mind can only refer to as “paradise”.