The spine the spine the spine the spine.
The SPINE!!!!
Guys, the spine. It is freakin' cool, okay? It is so cool, in fact, it holds the answers to everything you could ever conceive in this lifetime. For sure.
Why? Because the spine, YOUR spine, is the middle man of this very unique and highly complex relationship between your body and your brain. See, your brain and body are in direct communication and seem to be knitted together in a crazy cool suit of armor known as the body. Only this communication signal gets fuddled up and then we experience a disconnected between our outer environment and our inner environment. We find ourselves fighting a losing battle to reclaim purchase in a world that appears way bigger than our senses can perceive. It is a disaster!
See, your body represented the 'feeler' of your brain INTO the outer environment. Your body houses all of the senses you have, interprets the messages from the environment using these cool things like the eyes and the ears, and conveys the sensory input to the brain. The brain then makes a series of highly sophisticated computations, tries to make sense of the outer world's read-out, and spits out a command to respond accordingly for the best wishes of the entire community. It's like there's a little nerd in there sitting behind a bunch of computer screens, getting messages from people who are actually in the fray of the battle, and doing the best job he/she can to integrate all of those differing viewpoints into one holistic model of reality and then rapidly sending out commands to the varying posts in the field. Yes, this is what the brain is doing, on extremely rapid rate, every moment we are alive.
Let's step back for a moment and look at the way our body works as a whole. We have about 50 trillion cells that make up this body (which, as far as we know it, is the most advanced piece of technology in the Universe - thank you Universe!) Each cell has very specific function and is designed to work together in a colony of both similar and dissimilar cellmates. The entire prison containing all of the cellmates is the body. Excuse my analogy but also take it seriously - the body CAN be a prison, provided we don't understand nature's intentions for us. Over seeing all of this, there seems to be some governing force that is driving the little machinery in these cells to continue to produce their work. This governing force is pure consciousness, although when we start to get our grubby little fingers on it we call it 'me'. Here is why.
Before our personality get's in the way, we are perfectly capable of taking care of everything on our own. We are children of the Earth, in all ways - spiritually, metaphysically, physically, scientifically, enthogeographically, whatever. I think I just made that word up. But for real, the elements comprising your body, are all borrowed from the Earth. Yet somewhere along the way, you came around to being in your body and thinking that your body was separate from the environment. It probably happened somewhere around 2 years old, according to our research on neural and psychic development, etc. This was a necessary part of our development as both human beings and spiritual beings. This identification with self, and the separation between what is 'you' and 'not you'. Why was this important?
For the integrity of our physical being, we have to actually have a boundary between what is us and what isn't us. This travels all the way down to the cellular level. A cell needs to know how to distinguish between a chemical it needs inside of its cell walls, and to differentiate from harmful or waste chemicals that it must excrete or put up the 'keep out' sign. How on Earth did any of this get figured out? Nature is smart, way way WAY smarter than us, because it has begot us. Remember that, while at the same time start to consider exactly how you might tap into Her whispered secrets. Hint: they are captured in the folds of your body. We're all picking up on these gently told stories when we just pay attention to what is actually happening inside our bodies. Not what we think is happening, or what we want to be happening. What IS HAPPENING!!!
So, the ego is developed. It is the self-identifying mechanism of consciousness, and it is paradoxically what allows consciousness to see itself. Without distinction, how could anything be identified? Yet, we fall into the repetitive and painful trap of being more closely identified with our ego-consciousness, rather than our universal consciousness. It is when we make our decisions from this separate state that we experience stress, turmoil, lack of conviction in our beliefs, and an unstable ground to stand on. If our behaviors are being driven from a place that is inherently limited, then our world will be limited. This creates pressure on us, because inside of us is also that infinite being propelling us along.
Often in life, we find ourselves stuck between the two. We know what the higher road looks like, and it scares the hell out of us. We are afraid to move beyond our own limitations. Yet every time we do so, we taste what that eternal being means for all of us. We get to experience the true nature of our soul, as it connects to Spirit, and we feel expansive, yet connected to it All; we feel infinitely capable and powerful.
What is the key to this connection..? THE SPINE!!!
I bet you were wondering when I would come back around to this wonderful thing that is your anchor to physical reality.
The brain and its neural tissue sits on the top of skeleton inside your cranium, representing the upper terminal of the spine. The sacrum and its plethora of exiting nervous tissue sits on the lower part of your skeleton. Consider these two points Heaven (crown) and Earth (sacrum).
When we utilize our highest brain capacity, our capabilities are far reaching. We can see it in the world - we have brains coming up with ideas like Space X, Tesla, Google. We have the brains of Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton and we also have brilliant artists, authors and creative science explorers like Van Gogh, Bach, Leo Tolstoy, Shakespeare. Everything that is subjectively good, and yet universally agreed upon as a positive contribution to society such as language, tribal development, community, art, music.... This has all come from the higher brain faculties. I say higher brain because I do mean the most evolved parts of our brain, the ones that make us uniquely human. Especially the frontal lobe - this mass of neural tissue sitting on the very top of our brain that is the most recently evolutionary advantage provided to us again, by Nature. Geez, She is really looking out for us...
If you are interested, do some of your own research on this frontal lobe and it's significance. It is pretty cool. If you're not, just take my word for it - it's what allows us to imagine new ideas, a better future for ourselves, to weigh between 'good' and 'bad', to speculate.... Basically, all of the things that separate us from animals.
So this front and high part of the brain is awesome. It is the birthplace of humanity. When we fall out of this brain, such as when an idea challenges our current model of reality, the blood flow to these critical thinking areas shuts down, and we literally fall back to our primitive structures. We can no longer think for ourselves in this state, but we think for what nature intends for us to think, from a survival standpoint. Now, it is us versus them. Now, we are separate from our environment, and embedded in our old way of thinking without any escape. It is a scary place to be, because it looks the inner luminosity that we are truly capable of . It is a place of darkness - literally.
This is the symbolic fall from Heaven that the Bible speaks of. It is the literal fall from Heaven (the skull) from the Earth (sacrum) that we will discuss in this article. Because what happens when we are not fully connected to all of our brain? We are also not fully connected to all of our body. The brain is meant to take in data from all of our senses and be in communication with the whole body. When it is not, it is sending out messages according to the last input. Think of the nerd sitting between frozen computer screens. The body is now acting out its script, and the brain is confused why nothing is changing. We've got to reconnect. We've got to reclaim our access to our divinity.
Where is the door?
The door is the spine. And the visitor to walk through the door... that's the breath.
The breath is our anchor between our physical reality, and the reality that is beyond our own. It is the only thing that transcends our level of awareness, because our awareness extends to the limit our senses can perceive. We simply cannot comprehend anything outside the data coming in from sense perception. The computers are calibrated to pick up only certain vibrations, and anything beyond that is unreadable. For the nerd in the command center, they might as well not even exist. Yet the breath is something that is beyond. How? Why?
The breath that I take, the first one ever received in my body in fact, was given to me from the environment. From Nature. The air outside of my little infantile body when I was first born was heavier than the air inside my thoracic cavity, and the pressure difference created enough of a vacuum to literally push itself into my body and effectively "breathed into my nostrils the breath of life." That's a Bible quote, and if you are smart you might connect the dots to the Universal implications of this. It pretty much has everything to do with what we've talked about so far, including the borrowing of our materials from the Earth, the 'dust of the ground':
“And the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” (Gen 2.7)
And I became born! Born as me, that is, as Grant, a so-called "living soul". Boom, there I am, a baby, given my first breath from the Universe itself, didn't need to do anything at all and I am just propelled into life by life itself. I inspired. I breathed in. Or maybe 'I' didn't breathe at all, but rather I was breathed. My first inspiration was my first experience of being in-spirit. Is there such thing as 'out of spirit'...? Hmmm..
I think it is time to close these loops before I get anymore long winded. Hopefully you've followed me so far. We talked about the spine, how it is the connector between Heaven and Earth, or your brain and your body. We've talked about how your brain, at its best and highest capacity, is capable of visualizing amazing things (Heaven...?) And, although we didn't talk about it directly, we acknowledge that it is the body that is able to actually experience and in-joy the fruits of Heaven on Earth! The body is what allows us to sense pleasurable (and painful) experiences. The brain is just the interpreter of the messages. We need both, equally, and we need a direct and unencumbered dialogue between the two. Which, we've established, is done through the spine.
.....aaaand how the breath is important. I haven't really expounded enough on the breath just yet, but I'll leave that for another time. But I'll leave you with this - the breath is moved by the diaphragm, and the diaphragm is the primary anchor point between your entire musculoskeletal structure (aka, your body) and your spine. When I refer to the diaphragm I do mean the entire functional anatomy of that structure, as it connects to additional substructures such as the pelvic diaphragm and other very important tissues. Correct functioning of our diaphragm will directly influence and regulate the capacity of the brain to send signals to the body, as well as receive signals from the body. There are a whole list of reasons why which I am excited to share with you on another post, but for now, I am going to leave the room on this conversation.
I hope you've enjoyed this dialogue. I am considering it a dialogue because I am imagining you sitting here in the coffee shop with me, conversing on these subjects, and imagining your potential questions and validating your concerns. I am seeing in my mind's eye nodding in agreement, shaking your head in confusion, scrunching your face in reflection, or opening your eyes wide as recognition dawns. I am using this cool brain I've been gifted to access Heaven inside to 'see' a reality that appears like one that would help me and the people around me, and hopefully I am wielding this for a good purpose. Then I am embodying these messages from my inner high place, sending them down into my body, into my fingertips, and voicing them into the world. I hold true to this purest and highest intention, so that they might remain as an anchor, whilst the messages through me are sent out to be torn down, destroyed, and re-constructed in all the ways that Nature and Her inhabitants mean for it. Which is the way it is all intended. We express our truth, Nature pushes back, we refine, we grow. Eventually, we get to a place where we all agree, then we move on to bigger and better things.... Right now, I'm just trying to do the best I can with what's in front of me :)