From: https://bigthink.com/the-well/how-spirituality-protects-your-brain-from-despair/
Lisa Miller: The mental health field minus the spiritual core makes no sense — because every single one of us is born with a natural spiritual capacity. We have never had a time where we have had as many people suffer from an atrophied spiritual core. And with the sharp decline in personal spiritual life, there has never been as elevated rates of addiction, depression, and even suicide. We are addicted to goals; we don’t even see it. Or life is about setting goals and achieving them to the expense of being in relationship with the deepest force of life.
Every single one of us, by birth, has two forms of awareness:
- Achieving awareness - lets us strategize, its tactical thinking, is in a relentless addiction to the next goal.
- Awakened awareness - is the core of the being, the self observing self (like the parts of self laid out in Dr K’s Guide - Meditation)
So where we get in trouble is when achieving awareness sets our North Star. This leads us into depression. Awakened awareness is when we don’t ask, “What do I want and how am I going to get it?” But instead, ask, “What is life showing me now? Where am I finding guidance, direction?” This can come from synchronicity. This can come from a mystical experience, an intuition, someone showing up in our lives and pointing us in a direction that we’d never thought of before. The awakened brain allows us to perceive that we are on a journey — we are on a path. So it turns out that every single one of us are all born with the neuro-docking station for awakened awareness.
And this tendency to see life on spiritual bedrock was mirrored by a thickening of the cortex, offering some evidence that sustained spiritual life is neuroprotective against depression. And in addition, when we looked at the awakened brain, what we saw is that universally, we are drawn into an experience in which we are loved and held, guided, and never alone.
The awakened brain has three major networks:
- The frontotemporal, the bonding network comes on just as we were loved and held as children.
- The attention network shifts from “I’ve gotta have it,” top-down dorsal, to the ventral system where the lights go back on and many people say a new direction pops; we are guided.
- The parietal that puts in and out hard boundaries lets us know that we are never alone. We are a point and we are a wave. We are magnificently distinct and unique and diverse, and we are part of one field of life, one sacred consciousness.