S(p)irituality

If you ask me what started this introspective spiritual quest in me, I would say 3 major things triggered an awakening in me. But it still took years to see what I see today and yet not know what is ahead.

The first was this in the 1980’s when I was in India. I found this book in the corner of a room I was staying:

The framed book is “The Razors Edge” by Somerset Maugham I found in a corner of a room when visiting India in the 1980s. It had no front cover and the front pages were missing. I picked it up and read it all in one night without sleeping and the “seed” had been set for a spiritual quest. I held on to it all these years. Though it took me years to see it “all?” I did not realise it was just there in front of me behind the noise of thinking.

“Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute.”

https://www.amazon.com/Razors-Edge-W.../dp/1400034205

“Larry sets out on a quest that takes him to India, where he studies with a guru and gains mystical illumination. Larry’s spiritual approach to life is contrasted with the materialism of the other characters, such as Gray Maturin, who becomes a wealthy stockbroker, and Elliot Templeton, a worldly, superficial man who spends most of his time socializing at upper-class parties.”

https://www.bccls.org/BookClubBooks/RazorsEdge.pdf

The 2nd was this morning prayer from a Sikh prayer book. It is the first sentences in the prayer book. It showed me the expanse of the universe and I was in it.

“There is One Universal Creator, Sustainer & Destroyer; The Name is Truth; the Doer pervading in everything; Without Fear; Without Hate; Timeless Undying Image; Beyond Birth; Self-existing; Known through the True Guru’s Grace.”

There is One God (ੴl EkOnakar); Truth is its name (ਸਤਿਨਾਮ l Satnam).

It is that empty space in the universe that has everything in it with its emergent qualities:

Finding the silent brain-mind:

Then the 3rd trigger was a question that I was asked to answer on a social media platform: What is the Precuneus?

In neuroanatomy, the precuneus is the portion of the superior parietal lobule on the medial surface of each brain hemisphere.

This, it controlled the movement between the left and right brain using what is called the “Default Mode Network”, DMN.

It took us from the chaotic frontline thinking brain mind to the silent brain-mind.

Left to right brain

It allowed me to get past what was just about the brain to know there existed a silent brain-mind, when verbal thinking in the brain mind stopped.

Then the rest came to me in time where in the doing in creating art (I came to art after work, later in life, and studied at the Slade, University College London), the process of making art showed me the limitations of my brain-mind.

Capturing the shadow:

A model for the thinking brain-mind:

Conscious awareness sees the action of Truth but thought cannot see what conscious awareness sees.

The extended brain-mind:

There are 2 of me in me: