If you have read The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas, or have seen various movie versions of the adventures of D’Artagnan ( a boyhood hero of mine) you will know this comradely vow, usually made as the rapier blades clashed together above the heads in a close-up.
If you are a Tarot person and have checked out that amazing book The Book of Tokens, received, as we say, by Paul Foster Case you will have picked up a phrase that sounds very similar…All and in all…when talking about the special solar fire that exists in everything and extends throughout space. A Tarot version of zero-point energy.
If you meditate according to any of the routes expressed by the Hindu sages you will be familiar with the idea that the very feeling of “I am” is the only unchanging reality in this universe, which is all a mental construct. Only the Self is real, which means unchanging.
The Self is the All and is also in all. The immortal, invulnerable witness who watches the show, unmoved, as the life is lived with all its input. One who identifies with the eternal witness instead of with the temporary ego is said to be self realized, in the world but not of it.
The mystery is alluded to in the Siva sutras where the devotee says ‘You are pleased O Lord, with devotion, and devotion arises at your will. You alone understand how these are connected.
Not only meditators, but great poets, musicians and visionaries have had the experience of being totally one with the universe, yet in some way also individual. Being the totally undisturbed and unconcerned witness of the universe is another way the experience has occurred in myriads of cases. Not many of these were left brain dominants.
One famous exception, among several great physicists was Erwin Schrödinger who was a great name in quantum physics, the physics of the ultimate inner atomic reality that made it clear that the world is certainly one thing at the atomic level and another at the mundane level, though the two ways of looking are intricately connected. The rationality of the macro mundane experience breaks down completely at the sub atomic level.
Schrödinger’s quantum physics somehow enabled him to be convinced of the proposition that the feeling of self, the “I am” is a primary component of the universe. The energy from which the mundane world emanates to stimulate our senses, is in some sense a conscious energy and behind all phenomena, at all levels.
If you have ever done any serious contemplation you will already know that the only thing you can be sure about is your own existence, and this is more than just the existence of the ever changing body that you are currently controlling, which is a whirlpool of flesh.
What prompted this sudden dot connecting with Schrödinger was the possibility that this amazingly gifted left brainer had suddenly been hit with a right brain shift at a crucial date in his life.
My own experiences this year produced the ability to connect the dots of this possibility. I have been quite well known to my friends and colleagues for many years as a person who not only exhibits few emotions, but doesn’t appear to have any in many circumstances where they are truly appropriate. In times of great danger this apparent imperturbability has served my survival well, but in many social circumstances it has not served me well.
And then there’s “My Fair Lady” which I saw for the very first time last night on DVD. And all of these hints and diverse threads will be connected clearly in the work of the Japanese neuro scientist Tananobu Tsunoda. I pause in case you need, as I did, a moment to figure out how to say the name.
He spent well over a decade investigating the functions of the right and left brain. Sometimes we have to do calculations, involving the left brain and then a short time later we are listening to music. He discovered that there is a switch in the brain stem that switches from left to right brain dominance or vice versa, depending on the circumstances. This is a temporary matter for minutes or hours depending on the circumstances. It is not the natural left or right brain dominance that is the basis of the life interests and abilities.
Now, Tsunoda’s research rang a bell. He had found a way of checking the right brain to left brain switching by using a delayed feedback of sounds, similar to that used by everyone who listens to his own voice when he speaks.
He made the astonishing discovery that people’s right/left brain dominance switched when they were played a sound whose frequency was a multiple of their age. So people of sixty would experience the switch if they were played 60, 120, 180,240 Hz tones, and so on up the sound spectrum. Maybe the key of D, in which so much Celtic music is composed contains some of my triggers. I will see. At least the mathematics of it is available to me.
Not only that, but in a whole group of his subjects the switch occurred spontaneously on their birthday, and lasted for extended periods of time in some cases. Left brainers became right brainers and lived in that different world for a while. And in some subjects it occurred three years in a row.
Well, I have just had my 78th birthday a dozen days ago. Since that time I have experienced more emotional states than I can remember in my whole life before. I watched the first DVD of Celtic Woman, and the voices, faces and words of those immensely talented singers brought me not just to tears, which sometimes happens with poetry, but to extended sobbing. I felt much better afterwards and slept very well that night. It connected with my only happy year of the first 48, which I spent among the Celts of Wales.
Then came My Fair Lady, courtesy of NetFlix, whose amazing efficiency should be copied by many bureaucratic agencies to the benefit of us all.
When Liza Doolittle sang “All I want is a room somewhere…” I teared up again as it brought back the bombing and destruction during WWII, where a shelter and some peace and quiet were top priorities during the raids. And later in the movie, the now cultured and beautifully spoken Liza goes back to Covent Garden Market (more memories) and is not recognized by any of her previous friends. They cannot even conceive that they once knew this stunningly beautiful and fashionably dressed lady before. Her voice and accent was a chasm they could identify but could not cross, and didn’t want to.
That hit me too. I was in a similar situation, not stunningly beautiful like Audrey Hepburn, but between two worlds like her character, Liza. During the War I was evacuated and lived in many middle to upper class homes. The school to which I won a full scholarship was one of the best in the country. When eventually I got back, six years later to the beaten up, early 1910 row-house that was now home, I found that none of the class of people I had known as a youngster was now available as friend because I spoke the English of the BBC and the educated.
To the working class people of the area I was just putting on airs and showing off, because my speech patterns and vocabulary were now quite different.
Liza had no idea of what would become of her. Her own folk couldn’t relate to her any more, though they were all still singing the song she sang as a Cockney flower girl. But she was not by breeding or inheritance able to enter the other upper class world of the rich.
We were poor. There was no way I could enter the world of the upper class in spite of my education without being considered an imposter to be unmasked. I have never, ever considered learning to play golf for example. In my British world then golf was a game played only by rich and upper class people. Someone like me would be laughed off the course. Professor Higgins was right in my world. Class was indicated by accent. Poverty went naturally with one world and riches and abundance with the other. And these two worlds were now both unavailable because of my education. Very uncomfortable situation. And I felt for Liza more than I had ever felt for myself in those armoured against everyone decades.
For those readers who are always made happy by synchronicities I’ll just note that today is the anniversary of the death of the beautiful, talented and compassionate Audrey Hepburn. I didn’t remember that until way into the post.
Every meditator knows that it is our perspective on our world that ensures the character of the circumstances we experience. The lover waiting for a sunset tryst experiences quite a different sunset from the soldier expecting an enemy attack at sunset, or a civilian knowing that the air raids are about to begin. The sunset is the same. The perspective is different.
I began to wonder if the great Schrödinger had experienced one of these birthday shifts to make him express the same idea as those of the greatest of mystics. And I wondered too about Tsunoda’s conclusion that our brains must be tuned in to the phases of the revolution of the earth around the sun and the moon around the earth. We are all in one and one in all in our immersion in the laws that run the show. He suggested that there is a cosmic clock in the brain that ‘civilized’ people have learned to ignore.
Considering the DNA for a moment it is clear that in that tiny amount of energy filled matter there is the clock for wisdom teeth at a certain age, hair loss at a certain age and a complete time track timetable for decades. And don't forget the significant fact that the heart is made in the foetus before the brain, and begins beating without any brain connection. The heart has its own nervous system and acts like a separate brain in many ways. Emotions for example.
Triggers in the DNA, can also deal with the amazingly variable life of the cells in our bodies. A skin cell may need replacing after a couple of days. The cell of part of the brain may never be replaced in a lifetime. The whole time spectrum of a human life is there, waiting to be triggered from before birth. Trillions of chemical reactions occur in the body every SECOND, and the DNA runs the whole show, almost never making a mistake in the schedules.
Now, Tsunada’s discovery lends new credence to the possibility that there is something in the observations of astrology. And I am very interested in the Personal Year part of numerology that occasionally forecasts definite energy changes around the birthday. For many years I was a member of a Rosicrucian group and everyone there was taught about the change of cycle that occurs for thirty days before every birthday. The astrology, numerology and esoteric rules were all obtained by centuries of observing patterns and their cycles. Tsunada may have hit upon a fundamental characteristic of brain functioning that throws light on these matters.
We may be able to be witnesses of all the different time functions of the universe too. To some insects who can deal with dozens of visual impacts a second, the movie would just look like a bunch of stills put together. To some creatures like snails with a response time in the seconds, they would miss many of the pictures. And time and space are inextricably combined together in Einstein’s universe. Akashic record readers note the times around your birthdays to see if sensory extension into the time created in the past becomes more available.
I am interested to see how long these new insights into what it means to have ‘normal’ emotions lasts. Certainly life is going to be different from now on. A climber on a stormy mountain sees the path ahead in a vivid flash of lightning. The darkness falls again but now he knows the path is there. The circumstances have changed.
