By Ute
Powerful words: Imagine Peace – Yoko Ono wrote it on an entire page of the New York Times during the George W. Bush and John Kerry presidential debates, and now she is calling again for a world wide prayer for peace. If you ask yourself, what is your greatest desire right now – would you imagine peace – and in which way would you direct this desire for peace? Peace with your parent, your spouse, your child, your former friend, your present boss, maybe even with your body?
How would I use my imagination if I remembered that I have the capacity to create peace – if I remembered that this power to create is built into my relay-messenger system between nervous system and brain.
The sacred organic design we call Body, I believe is the expression of soul, manifested in human form. With each decision we make and with each image we envision, we create an intra-cellular communication throughout our brain, heart and body. Every cell in muscle, bone, organ, etc. is run by these messenger molecules. If the decisions we make in our lives are self-supportive, then our body organism responds harmoniously. We feel in balance with our surroundings, the world looks brighter and more manageable, and we feel at peace. In that moment, when the belief in our creative self is stimulated, we feel more confident and begin to dare to imagine! Our psychosomatic communication network is given the chance to head towards peak performance.
If I use my most far-out “imagination” right now, could I bring about an image in which I would sense, see, and hear a peaceful, constructive conversation between John McCain and Barack Obama in the middle of a presidential campaign? With that kind of role modeling by our leaders, maybe such an imaginary exchange could open the door to my own imprisoned self that still thinks that peace with an old foe is not possible!
If I use my most far-out imagination right now, could I sit down with a President in the war room of the White House and imagine peaceful, far-reaching discussions that include the well-being of every member in the room and their families, and all the people and countries these conversations and resulting decisions would affect?
Imagination is the least expensive and most expansive tool that we can use to make a personal difference. Imagination is not limited by time or place. We could start right now and anywhere.
Here is a translation of a German Folk tune I learned during my childhood in
Die Gedanken sind frei
wer kann sie erraten
sie fliegen vorbei
wie nächtliche Schatten
kein Mensch kann sie wissen
kein Jäger erschiessen
es bleibet dabei
die Gedanken sind frei
Translation:
Thoughts (imagination) are free
who would know them
they fly past like nightly shadows
no human can know them
no hunter can shoot them
it is so forever
thoughts (imaginations) are free.
And what about love? Could the heart be the true center of intelligence in the human body? The seat of human thinking and imagination has always been thought to be the brain. Body/brain scientists have discovered that we have several parts to our brain which develop sequentially. The earliest part of the brain to evolve, located at the bottom of the skull in the brainstem, is the ancient reptilian brain. It connects us to the animal species and conducts our fight-flight survival defensive responses. The next part of the brain to develop is located above the brainstem. It is the limbic brain and it directs our emotional, feeling, and relationship responses. The third area of the evolutionary brain development, the neo-cortex, lies toward the top of the skull. Its function is thought, reasoning, and language–we call it the intellect.
If our life experiences involved abandonment, neglect, physical, mental or emotional traumas during our developmental years, then the neo-cortex, the third brain area designed for rational thinking may be largely under-developed, and may re-route messages to the ancient reptilian brain. This fight-flight brain, programmed for survival, will then take charge, and to this day is likely to flood the emotional as well as the thinking brain, causing all the systems of the body to receive messages of anxiety and fear. Our decisions made from this response will make sense to everyone who feels and lives in fear.
The result is that we easily join the leader who takes charge at all costs. He makes us feel safe by connecting us to the archetypal image of male strength (used and misused for survival).
War is often the next step. Force is readily applied in the name of safety and national pride. “Power over” others becomes essential since we are still limited by our past survival history and have been brilliantly indoctrinated by it. The fight or flight response has embedded itself in our DNA. Avenues to peace remain unexplored and “power with” others is rejected.
As a result of this limiting programming we’re not able to reach and explore the potentials awaiting us in the fourth brain. This fourth, most advanced segment of the brain is located in the pre-frontal cortex, the forehead, and its function is to transcend the limitations and constraints of the previous three systems. This fourth brain can modulate and regulate the earlier and more primal brain responses, reorganizing them into the focused intentionality of a mature civilized mind, lifting us above our animal nature, the fight for survival response. Higher human values manifest. Our imagination is expressed by compassion, acceptance, scientific, philosophical, and artistic pursuits. Thoughts, feelings, and actions come under its jurisdiction and connect us to the continued evolutionary development.
Why not use this synthesizer to compassionately listen to and honor our own fears? We can learn how to transform our habitual physical and emotional responses that were programmed during challenging and difficult situations. Even though these old fight-flight survival responses (which seem to be called by many our “ego”) may no longer serve us well, we have to acknowledge them and become compassionate toward our often difficult journey, and all we have painfully and joyfully learned so far.
Self-acceptance, self-love, and self-understanding become possible. Finally, the door to the fifth brain, which includes all four earlier brain segments, opens. We call it the intelligence of the heart or the “heart brain”.
Neuro-cardiology, a developing new branch of medicine, tells us that our heart-brain is located directly under our physical heart, and that its potential is unlimited.
It seems to me that the evolution of our human experience is constructed magnificently, as the design of the five parts of our brain indicates. It gives me great hope to think that every human being carries the same potential. Individually and together, black or white, we are able to create opportunities to participate in a heart-centered, self-responsible society.
When we imbue this intention with our imagination, we will gravitate to leaders whose advanced personal evolution has become stabilized and resides in a heart-centered and integrated relationship with self, and his or her world. I believe that his or her heart-brain intelligence will be able to guide us into the kind of evolutionary thinking that can be part of our wildest imagination – Now!.
Maybe we can begin to set it in motion by choosing peace over fear – for the survival of nature, animal and human species.
Let’s take to heart the wisdom of these 2 sages:
11th century poet Rumi:
Far beyond all ideas
of right doing
and wrong doing
there is a field
I’ll meet you there
and the 14th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart:
“When the higher flows into the lower,
it transforms the nature of the lower into that of the higher”
