“You” are an Electrochemical Synaptic Feedback Loop

I know you want your thoughts to be more than just synaptical impulses in an electrochemical goulash. You want your big, bright ideas to be more than interlocking neuro-circuits lighting up specific lobes of fatty tissue based on genetic and socio-cultural conditioning.

You want it all to mean something and will struggle to keep the dendrites from redirecting into sputtering sparks of randomness. You want your spiritual beliefs to be more than neural firings along axon networks and you want all your years of seeking to "awaken" to be more than just electrochemical jolts of meaninglessness.

But the synaptical messages you've been repetitively sending are losing juice.

The circuits are shorting and dendrite branches are in retrograde. Without current, how can the circuits fire? Without the right neurons, how will you ever “awaken”? How can "awakening" happen if your not imprinting the correct circuits upon the neo-cortex, if you're not adequately mapping your journey to "awakening" within the neural network?

The joyful experiences of your big beliefs are into diminishing returns. You’re starting to recognize a lack of purpose to all your seeking (which can only mean another damn circuit!)

Because reality owns you and neuro-circuitry gives reality to you in living color.

Everything you do, every action you initiate and every behavior you engage in, is fired up by the Mother Board. You can’t even shove your pinky up your hairy nostril unless the brain sends that precise signal (and you never can tell when that urge will fire up, can you?).

All your goals and dreams are nothing but neuro-circuits that have as much meaning as does the urge to pick your nose. The electro-chemical impulse to seek "awakening" is made of the same neural material as the impulse to pick your nose and neither one is under your control (Funny, though, how we want to "awaken" publicly, but only pick our nose in private).

“You” are an aggregate composite of electrochemical impulses all going off randomly based on other impulses resulting in further impulses stimulating ever more. You think you’re in control. But the chaos of the cortex is outside the realm of control and always has been.

You want to be more than a tangled mass of brain circuitry in 3 lbs of fat and, through your spiritual practices and study of the ideologies (especially your intense readings of Jed Mckenna), you’ve managed to actualize numerous neuro-circuits igniting an electro-chemical experience of having wonderful ‘ideas’ and ‘concepts.’

These experiences link up with the limbic system and, for a couple of days or so, you feel really good and uplifted about what’s going on in your brain. For a couple of days life takes on new meaning and your perspective seems "happier," more positive.  You believe you're finally getting close to the  “awakening” you’ve been seeking all these years. It seems you’re finally ready to achieve the “enlightenment” you’ve always wanted.

But then, eventually, as is always the case, the circuit fades and fizzles. The juice peters out and the limbic system disengages, while the amygdala of fear comes rushing in, never letting you forget the actual predicament your in.

This is because Reality Circuits require constant stimulation (cause your boss is a jerk, your kid’s on dope, your two months behind in the mortgage and your cholesterol is way too high). All the electrochemical synaptical impulses, that allowed you to experience your bright ideas and beliefs and facilitated your processing all this “spiritual awakening” data (that you’ve been diligently studying for decades), must fade against the immediate and undeniable power of reality.

The reality of your brain.

But you were oh so close to ‘awakening’ weren't you? You could feel it, right up in that emotional limbic system. But nope, no “awakening” yet, and with that thought, guess which circuits light up the grey matter?

The not-yet-awakened Seeker Circuits extend axon/dendrite branches further into the grey matter, linking up with other circuits and constructing additional synaptic relay stations to maintain the current and engage the actions and behaviors of your incessant need to ‘seek.’

This pathway builds up its own electro-chemical momentum and everyday that you fire up a neuron with, “I guess I’m not awakened yet,”or "geewhiz, maybe Jed McKenna's the way to go?", the circuit strengthens (no doubt reading about all these “awakened” dudes also helps jack up the electrochemical juice even more, cause you soooo want to be one of those dudes, eh?)

Everyday, Reality Circuits reinforce Seeker Circuits and vice versa. Back and forth and back and forth, the dualistic current flows, each impulse one way jets another in reverse, with a feedback loop reinforced by the momentum of the two poles, of what's real and what you want to be 'real,' (so that you can finally escape the bullsheit of whats real)

Each thought-circuit pumps up the volume just a little bit more. Each day reinforces the neuro-circuits that will determine the next day and the next and the next…

This feedback loop is “you” and whether you’re seeking to “awaken,” or get laid tonight, it is the constant neuro-electrochemical actualization of an “I-Me” that seeks to have something it wants against a reality that informs it that it is lacking. However, you may certainly get laid tonight and relieve the electrochemical juice of that current for a time. But you will never "awaken" to any experience but what the brain provides and it will NEVER provide an experience outside what it is wired to provide. You can seek to alter the circuitry through neuro-plasticity, but you will never be completely free from the wiring that allows experience in the first place.

Many of the circuits that provide the "I-Me" experience are genetically hard-wired, auto-reinforced and give you the experience of an “I-me” that owns its brain...

....but is actually owned by its brain.

Artwork by Shadowtuga - "mind control"