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Get lucky. That’s the first requirement. I believe the primary reason that the major religions have mostly failed to bring forth people of equivalent development as their founders – more Christs from Christianity or more Buddhists from Buddhism, for example – is because the brain is the most complex, kluged-together creation in the universe. The human brain appears to have emerged as one evolving structure was added on top of another (The Triune Brain). Consider this for complexity: piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of Nutrasweet contains roughly 100,000 neurons making connections with over a billion permutations. Putting all that wiring together in a way that produces a saint probably generates odds approaching infinity. Might we be able improve those odds by doing things to optimize connectivity?
Self as Saint
Be close to sainthood yourself. UCLA neuropsychiatrist, Dan Siegel, writing in The Mindful Brain, asserts that it takes a more organized brain to help organize a less organized brain. For the first years of our children’s lives, we as parents, act as their external brains, or more frequently as their prefrontal cortex, serving as external gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) dispensers. GABA works to soothe and calm painful or frightening experiences. If our own brain is organized and operating close to the ways in which a saint’s brain might, it stands to reason that we will generally have an easier time producing children who surpass us on the Saintliness Scale.
The Power of Intention
Intend to raise a saint. Intention is often the difference that makes a difference. Recent research on mindfulness and mirror neurons is beginning to bring the power of intention under greater scientific scrutiny. Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, in his book, Mirroring People, presents compelling empirical evidence over and over that … intention matters to neurons. The brain pays more attention and brings greater resources to bear on things connected to human intention. By deliberately intending to raise a saint, might we then begin paying ever-increasing attention to people, places and information that might move us and our children in that direction? Intention might work similar to the way the reticular activating system in the brain suddenly begins to notice all the children with large foreheads as our child begins to develop a large forehead herself.
The Smart Heart
Wire up the smart heart. As current appearances around the world readily confirm, human evolution still has a ways to go. As a species, we haven’t reached humanity’s highest pinnacles quite yet. If we’re taking up space in a human body, it’s very likely that we still have integrative work to do. The present-day wars and current world financial challenges are but a few obvious indicators. Joseph Chilton Pearce, writing in two books: The Biology of Transcendence and The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit, argues persuasively about the route that evolutionary development will take going forward. First, human beings are going to build out the central integrating networks connected to the orbital prefrontal cortex. He offers photos similar to this of children already evidencing this prefrontal build out. Massive prefrontal connectivity accomplishes lots of things, primary among them is the relatively easy regulation of fear. Walking fearlessly through the world seems to be one thing that saints have a reputation for being easily able to do.
After the prefrontals get built out, perhaps the next requirement is wiring up the human heart – running neuro-cable directly from the brain to the heart. Think of it as a neuro-cardio broadband infrastructure build-out. It’s just the opposite of the Killer Angry Heart. At the same time our nation is going back to work on long-neglected national infrastructure construction projects, we can simultaneously begin bringing our own personal “strength of heart” online. Here’s but one inspiring example: Leonard Abess. Here’s another: Bob Walker.
One way we might accomplish this build-out is to repeatedly do things that work to activate and strengthen the existing connections all of us came with. I suspect that similar to the way neural pruning (apoptosis) works to retain neurons in the brain that are activated and used the most, activating and using the ones connected to the heart’s magnetic field (which is 5000 times stronger than any other organ), might be just what spirit ordered in the realm of saint-raising.
The hard, healing, integrative work we do on ourselves, first as people, then as parents, it turns out will pay big dividends. Some of the benefits few of us can’t even begin to imagine. I tend to think of this work as a kind of “anti-stimulus package.” Our children’s children, and perhaps even their children are slated to be saddled with a crushing burden of debt and diminished services as a result of the current global economic crisis. As a cohort, it looks like they’re going to be poor. And we know from a number of research studies that poverty is not good for brains and other growing things. But by learning how the early, overwhelming experiences in our own personal past impact our actions today, and then taking steps to learn to heal and integrate them, we can begin a process that will beneficially affect generations and generations to come. It’s not quite as George Santayana observed, that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The history repeaters are those who have not addressed and healed their own personal histories. Doing so creates good mental and physical health that will not only benefit us, but will expand out geometrically like an exploding supernova of well-being across time, space and future generations.
Landmarks for Lamarck
Think I’m being a little narcissistically grandiose or delusional? Here’s some interesting research that suggests otherwise: Lamarckian Evolution. Work that has taken this controversial epigenetic theory out of mothballs implies that the effects we parents, coaches, teachers and clergy have on our children’s brain plasticity, connectivity and integration positively or negatively influences generations all the way down the line. In this study, long term potentiation (LTP) which is connected to how we learn and remember things, managed to be transferred epigenetically (environmentally- driven) through several generations of experimental animals without them having any prior exposure or direct knowledge to the things they remembered! Imagine lab rats recalling past lives.
So how do we best benefit our children’s, and our children’s children’s brains through epigenetics? One way is by learning about, and improving our own brain. By doing what it takes to optimize the Nine Integration Pathways I’ve previously written about. A challenge with this, of course, is that it is often very hard work, especially if we come from less than optimal early environments. In order to bring more neural real estate online in our own brains, it can involve revisiting past traumas and working to effectively finish up early unfinished business. Reawakening painful memories retained in Dissociation Capsules in our brains and connecting them back up in an integrated fashion is not work for the timid. It’s painful, time-consuming and currently can be very expensive. But are the alternatives any less painful, time-consuming and inexpensive? We could argue that all the wars we have, all the starvation and poverty in the world, and the economic crises we are currently experiencing, are the result of our great grandparents not knowing how, or not being able to do this work of brain healing and neural integration. For us, however, if we’re reading this column, we no longer have the justification of ignorance.
Each One Preach and Teach One
Beyond professional therapeutic brain healing and integration, there are many things all of us can do to improve our brain function. First of all we can learn about our brains and how they work. Here are some Cool Facts about your brain and mine. I’m convinced that simply knowing a few specific things – for example, that brains are plastic and neuron numbers and connections can change, that they are deeply affected by stress, exercise and our interpersonal relationships, and that anytime I’m angry or upset or depressed, that’s a signal there is brain healing and integration work longing to be done. And that it is our responsibility to do it. Our children or other people don’t make us angry or overwhelmed. For the most part, they simply trigger the places in us where we are most disorganized, where we have the weakest functional capacities. They hold up a mirror to us, inviting healing growth and change, much of it, especially in the moment, mostly unwelcome. Another lovely growth opportunity? Who needs it? We have enough to do just picking up toys, making meals, earning a living and positively disciplining.
But what if we knew that taking on this healing work for ourselves would insure that our children never get cancer, that they’d be smarter than the average monkey, or that they would not be vulnerable to bullying in school or business, or that they would develop exceptional social intelligence? What if we knew at the cellular levels of our being that by doing the hard work of healing ourselves, we were actually, truly, significantly unburdening our children … and their children … and their children? Isn’t this part of the reason we have children in the first place?
One Sunday a number of years ago I opened the morning paper and there staring back at me on the front page was the picture of a good friend. He’d been arrested for brutally murdering one of his clients. Confusion, shock and disbelief were my first responses – I’d just been playing poker with him the Friday night before! My next thoughts were generated by the self-protective brain/mind as I immediately began assessing any ways, means or opportunities the I might somehow become his next victim. That brain/mind craves details, presumably in order to safeguard that I don’t become a murder victim, in the present or in the future.
What made it especially complex and confusing was that my friend Russ was a really nice guy, pretty much liked by all who knew him. He was quick with a joke; he was an attentive, compassionate listener; and in his work as a criminal lawyer, he did tons of pro bono work.
A Neuro-Theory of Murder
I have a neuro-theory – necessarily over-simplified – about how Russ came to be a murderer. But first I want to tell you about his parents.* Russ’s father was severe and disciplined, a Marine officer who served in the Korean War. He worked as a gym and history at the local high school. He had a clandestine relationship with the assistant principal for many years. Russ’s mother was an attractive woman who, like 50-70% of the other young girls in America – was sexually and emotionally abused as an adolescent. She worked as an admin at a small Boston law firm. She spent much of her time at home knitting or watching TV or doing jigsaw puzzles, lost in one reverie or another. She was occasionally physically abused by Russ’ father, who was periodically given to outbursts of rage. She was eight months pregnant and taken by surprise when the doctor told her the weight she had been gaining was going to be a healthy baby boy.
Growing up, Russ dismissed his mother and feared his father, who wasn’t above a little “well-deserved” corporal punishment. Russ’s parents weren’t to blame and didn’t cause him to become a murderer. They, like all parents, did the best they could at every turn, given the limits of their own personal histories and neurophysiologies.
But Russ grew up brain-damaged and didn’t know it. Like many of us, his damage was transitory, situational and particularly sensitive to allostatic load that ratchets up like a deadly summer day that dawns hot from the start. Years ago, a supervising psychiatrist refugee from Chile, Antonio Wood, once told me: “Circumstances can be deliberately or accidently created that can drive even the sanest of us crazy.” In my mind, Russ is clear confirmation of Antonio’s assertion.
Stress Ratcheting
The circumstances that started Russ down the road to insanity began in childhood, but I’m sure ratcheted up when his first wife filed for a divorce he didn’t want. Next came the news that the law firm where he worked had decided against taking him on as a partner and they asked him to leave. Meanwhile, the clients he was working with, sometimes violent, life-long criminals, were also adding to his allostatic load. Not able to generate enough business in Silicon Valley, Russ opened another office closer to his home in the Santa Cruz Mountains. More overhead; more load.
When Russ met Terry, the woman who would become his second wife, she already had children of her own. Russ had little experience with little kids – more load. Having a baby of his own, added even more stress to his life. As finances continued to be a struggle for him – trying to support multiple kids and two law offices – Russ made the main mistake that led to the travesty that would ultimately unfold. He kept and spent part of a client’s legal settlement and didn’t tell her about it. When she found out, she threatened to have him disbarred. Getting disbarred would have been experienced as enormously life-threatening, I’m sure. To save his own life, Russ made the deliberate decision to murder his client! I’m guessing in his mind, it was a bizarre kind of self-defense.
Had his brain been operating reasonably well, he never would have embezzled the client’s money in the first place. Having done so, however, lots of creative possibilities to correct that transgression could have been negotiated. The fact that murder was even on his list of solutions, is an indicator of a brain simply not working properly. And, in fact, when I went to visit him in jail, it was clear that this was not the person I’d played golf and poker with, the guy whose house I’d helped reroof only the summer before. There was little emotion present at all. It was as if he didn’t have any real awareness of the seriousness of what he had done – an emotional vacuity found throughout the brain trauma literature.
But Russ did commit this capital crime. And he paid the ultimate price for committing it – he ended up dying in prison a few years after he was sent away. Strangely, I feel the world is a bit worse off for his loss.
* partly fabricated.
