I Want To Be Obsessed With the Pearl of Great Price

One Comment

1. Hi, Jamie,
   You have two brains. They work together in an integrated manner with the left half mostly dominating the right half (until you fall asleep when the left half mostly lets go). The left is the control panel, the seat of grammatical language, logic, reason, the rationalized belief system and it pays attention to detail and holds the morality that you have been acquiring all your life. By default, the right half of the brain is holistic, maintains a generalized perspective, is the place where the primal drives form associations with the perceptions of the environment to form an emotional life and it is amoral. (“Amoral” is necessary because you need an objective point of view on the world to be able to adapt your belief system to changes in the environment.) It is a storage bank of memories that the left-brain draws on continuously. If your left-brain receives too little sound energy, it cannot dominate the right-brain, and that loss of dominance causes most of the range of mental illnesses, including obsessions. (I am not making a big deal about your metaphor, but you might want to ponder what “obsessed” usually means. That’s not the direction for finding more self-control!) The “microchip” that conveys power to the left-brain is the right middle ear, which gates sound getting into the inner ear and on to the brain stem and left-brain. The secondary “microchip” that conveys power to the right-brain is in the left middle ear. (Both ears feed both brains, but I have to keep this simple.) You attain a state of consciousness called “prayer” by slowing down the integration of the left-brain with the right-brain, which gives you a reduced amount of left-brain influence (logic and reason) over the right-brain (emotion and primal drives). This adjustment is done in the ear and is delicate. We adjust posture and environment (your blog piece about your sanctuary) to support those ear adjustments. The ear muscle should not relax so much that it puts you to sleep or sends you into schizophrenia — those are total ear muscle relaxation and conditions of sound-deprivation to the left brain that slows integration to zero. During prayer, wonderful things happen. But when you withdraw from that state, you are more vulnerable because your right ear and left-brain may not spring back into their high-powered level of control right away. It depends on the condition of your right ear whether it can make that rapid adjustment and it depends on how much sound is available to power your brain. (It might also depend on how well you slept the previous night and how good your nutrition is overall and other physical factors such as blood glucose that also affect ear muscle function and brain function.) That is why you were rude to your friend: inadequate restoration of self-control. If you had ended your prayer session with singing, or even listening to music, you would have helped your left-brain to transition back to high alertness and high self-control. Increasing your meditative bliss or trying to fix your “tendency to sin” with even more bliss is NOT a solution. Depending on what you are reading online, your surfing actually could increase your left-brain dominance as effectively as a session in the Word. Doing something with your husband despite other inclinations is an exercise of self-control. Increasing the strength of your right ear muscle with focused listening, as I described a while back, likely would increase self-control. Increasing your left-brain strength with a more rational belief system — which I hope I am contributing to with this comment 😉 — also will give you more control over your right-brain tendencies. It is fascinating to find how many of our traditions in worship foster (1) that slight loss of left-brain dominance that creates “spiritual” or “mystic” states of consciousness that disengage normal temporal awareness — because the temporal lobe becomes slightly sound-deprived — and gives us future-awareness (prophecy in the foretelling sense) and (2) the revving up of the ears afterwards with music and strong exhortations to action that prepare the worshiper to go “back into the world.” The church service is designed to build up the left-brain logic and reason about worldly issues through reading the scriptures and preaching. It is designed to “open” the ear and the brain with music, which can also cause physical and “emotional” healing (“emotional” healing actually is physical, too, because it is making the left-brain more dominant). It teaches ways of developing more self-control and provides a community to reinforce those values. I won’t get further into the neurology of “sin,” but you get the drift — people with weakness in their right ears need more of the cognitive left-brain activities and fewer of the emotional right-brain ones. Music used appropriately builds right-ear strength and stronger levels of control in the left-brain. At the same time, music supplies the right-brain with more energy to do its thing, which the left-brain has to stretch a bit further to learn to control. Singing unto the Lord is a win-win solution!
   Much love,
   Laurna

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