The Mind of the New
Age
This is a cerebral chapter. It's about the brain, the mind, intuition, and consciousness.
In many ways, the human mind is the heart of the New Age. Within the movement there is a near fixation with exercising the underdeveloped right hemisphere of the brain to generate new ideas and attain spiritual power.
"Step by step, we have been ferreting out a transcendent panacea, to get some right-brain or intuitive control over this left-brained mess of things," rhapsodized New Age advocate-author Kathleen Vande Kieft.1
But what is the mind" Is it the same as the brain? Is it more? The most mysterious and least-known human frontier is not in some outer galaxy; it is between the ears. It is a three-and-a-half pound object about the size of a grapefruit, pinkish-gray in color, with the appearance of a giant fissured walnut and the consistency of Jell-O.
Your brain is you, the master control behind all you do and say, the central panel for thought and consciousness. And the agent for transcendence.
In recent years, neuroscientists have made Promethean strides toward unlocking many of the brain's secrets. Thus far, however, the brain has stubbornly refused to yield up its deepest mysteries; its powers and limits remain beyond our powers and limits. Scientists seek to understand exactly how the brain records memories, how it learns, and how it is aware
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of itself. As biology writer Lyall Watson said of the catch-22 of brain research: "If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't" understand it.2
What does human intelligence know about human intelligence?
For starters, there are as many as 100 billion nerve cells in your brain. Each one connects to between 5000 and 50,000 others. For math buffs, that's at least 100 trillion connections under your dome. And for trivia pursuers, a computer with the same number of bytes would be 100 stories tall and cover the state of Texas!3 These nerve cells — called neurons (the "gray matter") — "talk" to each other by means of pulsating electricity and chemicals — called neurotransmitters — that flow between neurons.
But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the human brain is its process of perceiving, processing, storing, and recalling information.
Researchers have mapped out different functions for discrete areas of the brain, but not in the old way the phrenologists did — by studying the bumps on your skull. Actually, anatomist Franz Joseph Gall, founder of the pseudoscience of phrenology (in 1810), wasn't far off in his belief that the brain housed particular mental faculties in specialized "zones."
Ever since the 1860s and 1870s, when neurologists Pierre Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke reported that damage to the left cerebral hemisphere produced severe speech disorders but that comparable damage to the right hemisphere did not, "split-brain" researchers have known that the two hemispheres tend to have unique functions.
Each hemisphere influences the other. They are joined through the corpus callosum, a kind of telephone trunk line connecting the two halves.
In general, the left hemisphere does the thinking; the right side does the feeling. (These functions are reversed for left-handed individuals.) So there's some truth to the saying, "I'm of two minds about that." Fortunately, the left side prevents (usually) the right side from bursting out with inappropriate emotions.
For a right-handed person, the left hemisphere acts as a sort of "super press agent," says Harvard Medical School
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Professor Herbert Benson, who believes meditation techniques can produce dramatic changes in the mind's capabilities. "It tries to make sense out of the huge quantities of new and stored information; it sifts and categorizes data. It makes inferences and predictions based on that information. To facilitate this inference-making function, the left hemisphere relies on vast reservoirs of analytical, logical and verbal skills. The fact that we can put thoughts in language and give precise reasons for why we do things is largely a direct result of this function of the left side of the brain."4
Benson, as well as many behavioral scientists, maintains that the right hemisphere has the ability to change ingrained habits and thought patterns. This right side — is the center for many of our intuitive, creative functions. Flashes of insight and images of ideas, seemingly coming out of nowhere, enter our consciousness through neurotransmitter activity originating in the right hemisphere.
Neurological psychologist Michael S. Gazzaniga, author of The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind, believes the human brain has a modular organization; it is made up of units that function in relatively independent, parallel ways. Based on extensive post-surgical studies of "split-brain" patients, Gazzaniga concluded that each brain module is "capable of action, of carrying out activities that test and retest the beliefs that are maintained by our dominant left brain . . . . If the brain were a monolithic system with all modules in complete internal communication, then our beliefs would never change."5
A linear system can't generate new information, agrees Arnold Mandell, an unorthodox brain chemist at the University of California, San Diego. "The brain has this spontaneous, self-organizing activity, like clouds, air, and water. It makes eddies and whorls. As you go from the level of neurons, to electromagnetic fields, to a person, to a family, to a society, you get emergent properties."6
But the current mod metaphor of "left brain" versus "right brain" leans on gimmickry borrowed from a quasi-scientific foundation, cautions William H. Calvin, a professor of neurophysiology at the University of Washington. Metaphor has been confused with reality in New Age circles, he says,
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spreading a number of myths. Chief among them is an exaggerated notion of the dichotomy between the two hemispheres and their characteristics and abilities.
Calvin noted that a percentage (about 7%) of people have right brains that are language dominant. Often when one hemisphere is damaged — especially in very young children — tasks processed by that hemisphere can be "taken over," though usually not as well, by the other side.7
The excuse that "it's tough being a right-brained person in a left-brained world" may be funny, but it's half-brained and fallacious, concurs Jerre Levy, a biopsychologist at the University of Chicago. That the left hemisphere controls logic and language, and the right controls creativity and intuition is a half-truth, she says. "To the extent that regions are differentiated in the brain, they must integrate their activities . . . There is no activity in which only one hemisphere is involved or to which only one hemisphere makes a contribution."8
Many New Agers do not look at it quite this way. To them, there is a "higher wisdom" in the right hemisphere, a kind of "body-knowing" that attunes one to God. This is the pure consciousness the New Age seeks, the cosmic awareness Eastern mystics and sages have long exalted.
New Age reasoning goes along this line: If we can still the wordy chatter of our left hemisphere, and become aware of the messages from the silent, mystical half, we could be more in touch with the deepest reality."
Explains Shirley MacLaine:
A person who thinks laterally, or with the right hemisphere, is capable of seeing a broader connectedness to events that would be little more than a contradictory puzzle to a left-brained Westerner . . . Eastern thinkers are more open to intuitive thinking . . . [which] addresses higher dimensions and more realities, which enable us to feel connected to the source of what I call God Energy. It speaks to the language of the soul, the universality of the spirit . . . [W]hen we "go within" ourselves there will be something there.9
God in the synapse. God in the neuron. "Place the thinking mind on hold so these subtle energies can be perceived,"
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says Kathleen Vande Kieft.10 Short-circuit the rational mind and tune in Mind-at-Large.
"Tacit knowing . . . the silent partner to all our progress," mused Marilyn Ferguson.11 " 'Overstanding' the mind," she explained later. "But only when you get yourself out of the way. You have to be willing to have experiences and not have words for them."12
"All the brain is contained in the mind, but not all the mind is contained in the brain," concludes Ferguson, quoting a Hindu swami. "A tricky thing to talk about . . . . But there is something that acts upon the brain."
Wrote the late Wilder Penfield, the renowned Canadian brain surgeon: "There is no good evidence that the brain alone can carry out the work the mind does."13
The mystery of the mind/brain remains. From whence do our brightest ideas, deepest emotions, and grandest dreams arise?
"The workings of an organ capable of creating Hamlet, the Bill of Rights, and Hiroshima remain deeply mysterious," wrote neurologist Richard M. Restak in his odyssey The Brain. "How is it constructed? How did it develop? If we learn more about the brain, can we learn more about ourselves? Indeed, are we anything other than our brain? Some of these questions remain unanswered; others ('Is the brain the mind?') may remain forever unanswerable."14
Where is the mind of a person in a coma? Is something you previously thought but no longer believe still a part of your mind?
An essential fact of the human condition, notes science writer Douglas Hofstadter, is that people — no matter how aware they are of their minds — cannot fully take their own complexity into account in attempting to understand themselves.15
"Can a three-pound organ the texture of warm porridge account for consciousness?" ask Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi near the conclusion of their epic Three-Pound Universe.16
Can godhood be unleashed by restructuring the way we think? If so, observes Brooks Alexander, an analyst and critic of the New Age, "this always involves shutting down our rational, critical mind . . . New Age 'empowerment' comes
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only to those whose rational, critical filter has been removed or disabled."17
Astronomer Carl Sagan, science popularizer and naturalist, also puts it bluntly: "There is no way to tell whether the patterns extracted by the right hemisphere are real or imagined without subjecting them to left hemisphere scrutiny."18
The greatest endowment of the human mind is its ability to discriminate between what is true and what is false, and to verify what is real and what is illusion or delusion. But New Age superconsciousness is programmed to ignore those distinctions.
Humans are rational beings, and our correspondence with God is in that rationality. If God, as a transcendent Superior Being, created the finite human mind and placed the capacity for rationality within the human brain, then it's logical to assume we can understand his revelation to us.
As seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler exclaimed when he studied the universe and Scripture: "O God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee."19
Chapter 5 || Table of Contents
1. Kathleen Vande Kieft, Innersource (New York: Ballentine, 1988), 28.
2. Quoted in Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 156.
3. "A User's manual to the Brain, Mind and Spirit," OMNI Whole-Mind Newsletter (October 1987): 130.
4. Herbert Benson and William Proctor, "Your Maximum Mind," New Age Journal (November–December 1987): 20.
5. Michael S. Gazzaniga, "The Social Brain," Psychology Today (November 1985): 38.
6. Quoted in Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi, Three-Pound Universe: Revolutionary Discoveries about the Brain from the Chemistry of the Mind to the New Frontiers of the Soul (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 378.
7. William H. Calvin, Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain (New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 1983), 105.
8. Jerre Levy, "Right Brain, Left Brain: Fact and Fiction," Psychology Today (May 1985): 43-44.
9. Shirley MacLaine, "MacLaine's Guide to the 'New Age,' " Los Angeles Times, 19 August 1987, pt. 5, 1.
10. Kieft, Innersource, 156.
11. Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 297.
12. Marilyn Ferguson, interview with author, Los Angeles, Calif., 12 January 1988.
13. Quoted in Michael Brown, "Getting Serious about the Occult," Atlantic Monthly 242 (October 1978): 103.
14. Richard M. Restak, The Brain (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 1.
15. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books 1985), 487.
16. Hooper and Teresi, Three-Pound Universe, 383.
17. Brooks Alexander, "The New Age Movement Is Nothing New," Eternity Magazine (February 1988): 34.
18. Quoted in Maxine Negri, "Age-Old Problems of the New Age Movement," Humanist (March–April 1988): 26.
19. Frank S. Mead, ed. and comp., Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1965), 176.
