Consider Your Body’s Mind by Reggie Ray

Until quite recently it has been the assumption in Western cultures that mind and body are two distinct and separate realities. This belief is, of course, inseparable from the presumption that spirituality is based in the mind and involves separating and distancing oneself from the body and all things earthly. Largely through the discoveries of neuroscience and neuropsychology, a consensus has emerged that this dualistic way of looking at mind and body is invalid. We now know that the body itself is intelligent and aware, down to the cellular level. So there is no body that is in some sense not equally and at the same time “mind.” And the mind, rather than being a separate entity, is intimately connected with, if not reducible to, the collective awareness of the neurological network of the body; so there is no mind that is not, at the same time, the body.

The scientific conversation about “body” and “mind” has been evolving in some very interesting directions. For example, consider the terms “left brain” and “right brain.” Since the mid-nineteenth century anatomists have recognized that the two hemispheres of our brain operate quite differently and know things in two very distinct but complementary ways. These two hemispheres have been termed “the left brain” and “the right brain.”

Our left brain is typically described as housing “our conscious self» or our “ego mind”», it is often said to be characterized by “the three L’*, itis linear, logical, and linguistic. It is the seat of discursive thought. As such, it is a more or less disembodied, autonomous closed system, cycling and recycling already existing information that exists in its database in the form of memories, ideations, labeling, judgements, and conceptual abstractions of all sorts. It houses the function of language, both spoken and written. As the seat of our ego consciousness it carries out executive, managerial, and coping functions. Not surprisingly, the left brain is neurologically the most far removed from our body and its direct perceptual experience, a fact that can be seen both experientially and anatomically. The left brain is not an originator or a source; it is a processor: it cannot feel, sense, or experience anything directly; and it is connected to the right brain only by a few neurological pathways.

Our right brain, by contrast, is our “physical, emotional self” It is deeply grounded in our body and is all about direct, unmediated, nonconceptual experience. It beholds things within a field of infinite silence and space, without any judgment or evaluation, without any discursive processing whatsoever. It receives experience of this moment in its totality, without any boundaries or filtering. It is like a mirror that simply reflects. … Lacking conceptual reference points, the right brain has no sense of past, present, or future: this moment is experienced as timeless.

Neuroscientists are also using some other roughly equivalent but more nuanced terms to refer to the same thing. They are doing so because, while the two modalities of knowing described above are relatively clear, locating them exclusively in the right and left hemispheres is problematic. In fact, these two ways of knowing, while primarily associated with the two hemispheres, actually involve a much more geographically diverse spread throughout the entire brain and beyond that, for the “right brain,” the entire neurological network of our body- to the point that even talking about a right “brain” may be questionable.

Thus some neuroscientists are now talking about two “functions,” rather than two hemispheric locales, of the two ways of knowing. One is the function of the conceptualizing, abstracting, executive, conscious ego mind, which is primarily associated with the left hemisphere, and the other is the function of the holistic, nonconceptual awareness of the body, which is more closely associated with the right hemisphere but includes our entire subcortical neurological system.

Following this functional way of looking at the brain, neuroscientists are also speaking of “top down” versus “bottom up” knowing. “Bottom up” functioning refers to the way in which direct, unmediated experience arises out of the unconscious domain of the body (“right brain”). “Top down” refers to the conscious, ego mind’s function of conceptual processing of what arises from the body, whereby we select from our inventory of labels, abstractions, judgments, and preconceptions those most fitting to “knowing conceptually” and mapping a selection of the nonconceptual experience that is arriving at the boundary of consciousness (“left brain”).

Other neuroscientists are using terms (very interesting in the present context) that suggest the experience of these two levels or modes of knowing (rather than geography or function). I want to draw attention to that approach here, because this distinction in the experiential quality is especially important for understanding the somatic journey. In particular, the terms they use for these ways of knowing are “exogenous” and “endogenous.”

“Exogenous” means “arriving from the outside,” and it points to “right brain” or bottom-up knowing, an experience of uter-unfamiliaritv: we feel as if information is arriving from outside of the domain of our familiar, conscious, ego world, coming as new and as yet unprocessed, undomesticated (by our ego). Exogenous refers to phenomena that arise naturally and spontaneously from the darkness and the unknown (ie, subcortical and largely unconscious) regions of our body: feelings, sensations, intuitions «felt-senses,” visceral impressions, somatic memories-arriving in our awareness in a direct, fresh, immediate, and naked way. Neuroscientists speak of “exogenous stimulae.”

By contrast, “endogenous” means “coming from the inside” which refers to coming from within the already existing and known database of the “left brain,” the self-conscious, self-referential ego. Endogenous thus points to what we recognize as familiar-experience mediated by and filtered through ideas, concepts, assumptions, judgments, conclusions that already exist in our consciousness, based on the past, through which we process our present experience in order to “know,” manage, and control it.

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From The Awakening Body by Reggie Ray