Meaning: The Enduring Gift to Spirit

By Denise Winn | January 4, 2023

After two years in Auschwitz, and having survived two death marches, 15-year old Hugo Gryn and his father were imprisoned in a Nazi forced labour camp near Lieberose, in Germany. Although maybe they didn’t know it yet, it was the last days of World War Two and they, along with the other captives, were starving. On the first night of Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights, they huddled around an improvised nine-branched candelabrum and tried to light it, using a smear of fat from their paltry food allocation. It wouldn’t take.

Hugo Gryn, later to become a rabbi well known for his wisdom and tolerance, recalled the incident in his autobiography, Chasing Shadows. He had angrily accused his father of wasting the vital calories in the fat and remembered his father replying, “Don’t be so angry—you know that this festival celebrates the victory of the spirit over tyranny and might. You and I have had to go once for over a week without proper food and another time almost three days without water, but you cannot live three minutes without hope.”

When I heard this powerful anecdote retold on the radio recently, another, equally powerful, came into my mind. Edith Eger recounts it in her book, The Choice. She tells, amongst other things, of her own experience of being taken as a teenager to Auschwitz, where she was imprisoned with her sister Magda. When freezing winter came, the inmates were issued coats of varying quality, which were flung at them with no regard for size or fit. Magda was lucky enough to receive a long, thick coat, which buttoned to the neck. Yet she rushed to exchange it for a flimsier, more becoming one. As Eger describes it, “For Magda, wearing something sexy was a better survival tool than staying warm. Feeling attractive gave her something inside, a sense of dignity more valuable to her than physical comfort.”

For me, both these stories vividly illustrate how human beings can sometimes still manage to put above physical needs emotional nourishment that carries meaning, even when in extreme duress. It is telling, perhaps, that all four did survive the war—Edith and Magda were among just 100 people who survived the death march that they were forced to embark on, originally setting out with 2,000 others.

These stories make me think of a Mulla Nasrudin story, retold by writer Idries Shah, who has brought Sufi understandings to Western culture in a large body of work.

The Mulla had one day gone to market and bought a very tasty-looking piece of meat. Proud of his purchase, he was even more pleased when he met a friend who gave him a recipe that would enable him to cook it to perfection. Then, suddenly, a crow swooped down, seized the meat and flew off with it in its beak. The Mulla yelled angrily after the crow and then thought to inform it, “You may have taken the meat but it won’t do you much good. Because I’ve got the recipe!”

Stories, as Shah shows us, give us patterns for seeing things differently. If the tales are humorous, we might at first just enjoy the punchline. Only later when conditions enable us to see them, might other layers of meaning reveal themselves.

Many decades ago, as a young person distressed by the inequalities in the world and active in local campaigns for this or that, I went to a public meeting where local council representatives attempted to answer people’s concerns about inadequate services in the urban, somewhat deprived, area in which we lived. We were told that, amongst its plans, the council was going to plant trees along residential streets where, currently, there were none.

“What?!” roared one audience member after another, “What a waste of time and money when there are potholes to fill and illegal waste dumping needs stopping and homes need repairs” and so on and so on. I was fully with them. And then someone stood up and said that greenery would lift the spirits of all who lived, often not by choice, in our concrete jungle.

In that moment, some scales fell from my eyes. I could see that, yes, it was important to clear blocked drains and remove graffiti from stairwells and get rid of mould—but trees would endure long after we had gone, along with their gift to the spirits. And all these years later, it has now been scientifically shown that living on a tree-lined street is calming, good for general wellbeing and reduces depression.1

It is apposite, perhaps, that the expression ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ describes missing the big picture—however vital (sometimes in its literal sense) the requirements of prevailing circumstances may appear to be.

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Denise Winn is a writer, journalist and psychotherapist. She is author of The Manipulated Mind: Brainwashing, Conditioning and Indoctrination, editor of Human Givens Journal and a human givens practitioner.

Beyond East and West: Human Nature and World Politics

By John Bell | December 21, 2022

As someone both Canadian and Lebanese, the issue of East and West has always interested me. I was born into it, it’s the story of my family, and then became my lifelong career as diplomat and mediator.

I was born in Lebanon, a country that, in the 1960s, was a lively forum for the meeting of East and West. Beirut, with its St. Georges and Phoenicia hotels, was an emblem of intercontinental travel and cosmopolitanism. The Lebanese are Easterners, but also polyglots and cultural chameleons, and so, they once represented an intimate blending of the two.

My first eight years were in Tripoli, Lebanon, an Arab city whose prominent monument is the Crusader castle of St. Gilles—a reminder that the battles of East and West go deep. But I was mostly raised in Canada, and so I could switch-hit between being Lebanese and Canadian. It remains interesting to see which ethnicity people decide I am.

My background spurred me to pursue a career as a diplomat and international mediator that has spanned a quarter century of working in the Middle East. I have lived in Cairo, Jerusalem, Gaza and Beirut, and my work crossed Arab geography, from Casablanca to the relatively unknown region of Mahra, in Yemen.

Cultural differences are woven into a diplomat’s work and manifest in varying negotiation techniques or in communications styles (Easterners like to maximize position before sitting down, including through conflict, while for westerners, war is the last resort, after talks fail). As I was once told, Omanis don’t hear anything unless someone is whispering, and Americans don’t listen unless, metaphorically, someone is screaming.

Although diplomats are experienced in reading other cultures, many suffer from an unconscious cultural autism and meetings can devolve into a ‘miss’—mere ships passing in the night. Those from both worlds have an advantage: they are ‘bifocal’ and can better see the world through two cultural lenses, if not always in perfect harmony.

Experience and intuition—even birth—worked together to construct a sense in me a that East and West were profoundly and positively linked. So, it was quite a revelation when I read Idries Shah’s The Sufis and discovered his explanations of the many interesting linkages between the two.

In this seminal book, Shah goes beyond the well-known idea that Islamic civilization preserved Greek philosophy and science for later transfer to Europe. His exegesis is of an organic, living process of knowledge from the East influencing key Western figures such as Chaucer, Dante, St. Francis, and even, some believe, Shakespeare. The frames of contact included The School of Translators in Toledo, the Order of the Garter, the Normans of Sicily and the Templars. For example, even the tale of William Tell originated in Faraduddin Attar’s ‘Parliament of the Birds’.

As a great fan of’ ‘tarab,’ a hypnotic form Arabic music sung by stars such as Umm Kalthoum and Sabah Fakhri, it was a pleasure to learn that the term Troubadours, and the development of chivalry and romantic love in Europe, were rooted in that Arabic word, with its multiple meanings.

Idries Shah was himself of East and West, a child of an Afghan-Indian father and Scottish mother, and his body of work is the very embodiment of the linkage between the two worlds. His contribution of passing deeper patterns of knowledge from the East to the West is premised on the idea that the West is potentially fertile ground for his ideas to blossom.

Today, extreme political positions and polarization are on the rise. These fixations are fed by resentment of past defeats or suffering, or imaginings of compelling—if unachievable—ideals.  Many of our political leaders play their citizens like marionettes, instinctively using cultural conditioning and untamed emotional states, and abetted by today’s great accelerator, digital technology, to pursue grand schemes that promise reward, but deliver destruction. Yet, as much as we can see others being manipulated or blindly caught up in the herd, we are often oblivious when it happens to us.

Such problems are beyond East and West. They are part of a human inheritance, an old mind built to survive occasional existential threats on the savannah, not the constant minute-by-minute pings of the digital world. Yet, we have never fully tamed this mind, nor are fully aware of its operation.

Diplomats and mediators are hard at work at the coal-face trying to create a semblance of order amidst this chaos, but methods are old, assumptions untested, and knowledge of human nature, weak. International politics can teeter on such unsound foundations, as we have seen in the past in the Middle East, and as acutely now, in Ukraine. We need a degree of greater knowledge about ourselves to manage international crises, and Shah’s works are an antidote to the knot of habits, instincts and conditioning that make up the building blocks of cultural misunderstanding and group madness.

The core tensions between nations and cultures derive from patterns of tribalism that have evolved over millions of years. An excessive sense of tribal supremacy and dominance can cause unnecessary conflict and suffering. This all-too human tendency can be tempered by greater perspective and a view of a larger context. This is where Shah’s work, and its provision of larger patterns, can help as do the more recent efforts by scholar and scientist Iain McGilchrist and his exposition of the workings of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Both encourage and inform a greater flexibility of mind that is critical for the development of better international relations in the future.

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John Bell is Director of The Conciliators Guild. He is a diplomat and mediator who has worked for over 30 years on Middle East politics with the Canadian government, the United Nations and several international mediation and peace building organizations. He is also the author of the book, How to Tame the Political Animal: The Missing Piece.

Forest Smarts: A Part of or Apart From?

By David S. Sobel, MD | December 14, 2022

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to take a walking tour of a rainforest in Australia. My guide had trained many years with Aboriginal guides before him and had a deep love and appreciation of the forest. This section of forest had been designated as a national preserve to protect it from further human destruction. There could be no logging, no hunting, no harvesting. In fact, humans were prohibited from touching, moving, or removing anything from this forest. This seemed to me to be a smart move.

Then the guide shared with me the unintended consequences of these well-intentioned government rules. I was told that the Aboriginal people learned over thousands of years how to live sustainably in this forest by selective harvesting and hunting to meet their needs to survive and at the same time keep the forest healthy. The new rules which removed all human participation in the ecosystem had an unfortunate effect. Without selective culling of pythons (remember, no hunting or even relocation of animals permitted), the python population exploded and decimated the mammal and bird population of the forest. These losses rippled through a disordered ecosystem of which humans were once an active part.

We now think that nature needs to be protected from humans. True enough, for modern civilizations do tend to set humans above and apart from natural systems.  But is that always the case for all human activity? Is there a strict dichotomy between humans and the rest of nature? Perhaps we can learn much from indigenous populations who lived as an integral part of nature—and the ‘forest smarts’ they practice. This is not to romanticize indigenous people living with nature. Life can be hard: predators, famines, climate events make their lives less than idyllic. But respecting and learning from the practices of traditional societies may suggest solutions to be tried to address global problems.

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“Earth has endured and survived extreme climate change more than once, with varying impacts on natural life. This time is different. We know the history. We know what’s happening and the impact of our own actions. We understand the limits to crucial resources and what will happen if we do nothing. Most importantly, we have the ability to correct our course in pursuit of a viable future. Are we up to the challenge?”

 – The Human Journey website: A Sustainable Planet

Given the global environmental and climate crisis, how do we shift the hearts and minds to protect the planet? Some mindsets can be shifted with facts and figures—graphs of rising temperatures, CO2 emissions, rising sea levels, etc. Others maybe changed by directly experiencing the effects of climate change—record temperatures, severe droughts, or unprecedented flooding. Still, others must first learn to love natural environments before they can take action to defend and protect them.

Yet, the current generation of children raised in the “concrete jungles” of urban environments may suffer from “nature deficit disorder”- mental and physical health problems associated with lack of exposure to nature. In one survey, 41% of children do not know where eggs come from. How will these children understand the importance of natural environments, let alone fight to save them?

So, as I walked through a primordial rainforest, my thinking shifted. Instead of seeing humans as intruders at odds with nature, I tried to see myself as a part of the ecosystem. Exposure to natural environments is critical to rediscovering that we are a part of nature. It can be as grand as a hike in awesome mountains or as simple as a stroll through the neighborhood to notice the smallest glory of the natural world (a flower, bird call, sunlight through leaves, etc.). To protect nature, we must fall in love with nature. People protect what they love, and what they feel part of.

As Satish Kumar, author of Soil, Soul and Society and Editor Emeritus of the Resurgence Trust said, “We are nature. What we do to nature, we do to ourselves.”

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David S. Sobel, MD, is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is coauthor of ten books including three with Robert Ornstein, entitled The Healing Brain, Healthy Pleasures, and The Mind & Body Health Handbook.

How to Improve Group Decision-Making

By John Zada | December 8, 2022

Many human achievements stem from our special ability to band together and work in groups. By doing so we not only generate social dividends, but also enhance and magnify our effectiveness as individuals. Cooperation is how gargantuan megastructures like the Neolithic-era temples and the ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats get built, astronauts propel themselves into space and back, and how a million smaller successes are achieved every day.

But there is a serious paradox built into this usually-advantageous group dynamic: the collective, in its zeal for cohesion, can often stifle initiative and originality and thereby predispose itself to mediocrity and failure.

The reason for this isn’t hard to grasp. Regardless of the enterprise, whether we are on the hunt, fighting a war, or building a commercial enterprise, a high degree of group solidarity—a single-mindedness of purpose and action—is required for success. Too much disagreement or working at cross-purposes is counter-productive, which is likely why we seek out like-minded people and demand conformity in our groups. It’s hard-wired in us to some degree.

But that tendency, like anything else, can overreach with negative consequences. In excess, it can negate one of the greatest assets of any group: dissenting views and a diversity of perspective.

We’ve all seen or experienced this drive towards uniformity. Companies, organizations and other collectives tend to cherry-pick their recruits based on a certain ‘type.’ Once brought in, they are further homogenized through various pressures. Groupthink dynamics create a singularity of perspective. Dominance hierarchies and status considerations discourage the less influential from sharing dissenting views that might more accurately reflect reality and be beneficial for the group.

Author Matthew Syed, in his book Rebel Ideas, argues that these group dynamics can be deadly for organizations and companies as they create monocultures and encourage myopic thinking that result in cognitive errors or mistakes.

Syed cites the failure of the American intelligence community to predict and thwart the September 11 attacks. Another notable example is the bad team decisions at the heart of the disastrous 1996 Mount Everest climbing expedition made famous in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air.

Syed also tells us that mistakes have occurred, costing lives, in both the healthcare and airline industries when subordinate staff were too intimidated to contradict the errors in judgment made by their superiors. Airline pilots and surgeons wield military-like authority over their juniors. Because of this, it is extremely difficult for subordinates to bring themselves to voice their observations, let alone convince their higher ups of their mistakes.

I’ve also seen similarly poor outcomes result from discouragement of dissent during my time working as a television news writer and producer. The hard news business can be just as fanatically top-down in its decision-making hierarchy as the most martial organizations. In such environments, when there are also exceedingly strict deadline requirements, and everyone is working furiously on autopilot to get their jobs done on time, dissenting feedback about the quality, appropriateness, or treatment of any given story, is often shot down. In this case, society pays the price for the inability of the organization to harness the strength of multiple perspectives to improve its product.

So, what is the takeaway from this?

Syed says groups can avoid the crippling damage that this myopia can cause by actively seeking and building what he calls “cognitive diversity.” He defines this as group diversity marked by differences in the perspective, experiences and thinking styles among its members. When diversity in a group is embraced and encouraged—rather than quashed—it results in a kind of easygoing natural feedback, which he calls “rebel ideas.” That feedback provides a wider range of options for the collective for seeing the world, and navigating it.

“Groups that contain diverse views have a huge, often decisive, advantage,” he writes.

One ‘rebel ideas’-type technique Syed references is the use of what he calls a ‘shadow board’: which is a group of young people, drawn from within the ranks of an organization, to advise executives on key decisions and thus lift the conceptual blinkers that can attach to age. The Italian high-end fashion company Gucci, he says, is one such organization to have employed a shadow board to great effect. The company’s sales increased 136% in the first four years since they started using the board, which interact with the senior team on all major decisions.

These types of open-minded collectives, Syed says, tend to make far better decisions because they accept divergent views and see the bigger picture, while still retaining the necessary cohesion, leadership and hierarchy required to effectively channel its energy to get things done.

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John Zada is a writer and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of the books, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond and Veils of Distortion.

We Know More Than We Think We Do

By Sally Mallam | December 1, 2022

“We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, life.”                                                            —Sir William Osler (1848-1919)

Dr. William Osler was the most influential and important physician of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His contributions to medicine were so important that the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) devoted a large section to him in its December 22, 1969 issue. In it, an Oxford physician recounted Osler’s treatment of his three-year-old brother in 1906. The boy was quite ill, probably dying, from disorders common at the time. He wrote:

One remembers a young brother with very severe whooping cough and bronchitis, unable to eat and wholly irresponsive to the blandishments of parents and devoted nurses alike. Clinically it was not an abstruse case, but [medical] weapons were few and recovery seemed unlikely. The Regius [Osler], about to present for degrees and hard pressed for time, arrived already wearing his doctor’s robes. To a small child this was the advent of a doctor, if doctor in fact it was, from quite a different planet. It was more probably Father Christmas.

After a very brief examination this unusual visitor sat down, peeled a peach, sugared it and cut it into pieces. He then presented it bit by bit with a fork to the entranced patient, telling him to eat it up, and that he would not be sick but would find it did him good as it was a most special fruit. As he hurried off, Osler, most uncharacteristically, patted my father kindly on the back and said with deep concern, ‘’I’m sorry Ernest but I don’t think I shall see the boy again, there’s very little chance when they’re as bad as that.”

Happily, events turned out otherwise, and for the next forty days this constantly busy man came to see the child, and for each of these forty days he put on his doctor’s robes in the hall before going into the sick room. After some two or three days, recovery began to be obvious, and the small boy always ate or drank and retained some nourishment which Osler gave him with his own two hands.

The little boy, Jack Mallam, was my father, who thankfully lived another 86 years. There’s an amusing twist to the end of this tale that is a wonderful example of how stories travel and change over time. Sixty-five years after Osler’s death a local newspaper announced that the great physician’s gown would be displayed at his home, and that it was “said to have magical powers.”

In 1984 my father retrieved the JAMA article from a desk drawer when my husband, Robert Ornstein, told him about a book he was writing with David Sobel. The authors included it in The Healing Brain. By the end of the nineteenth century the placebo and other intuitive models and methods of healing had begun to fade, such that when this book came out, writing about the mind-body connection and “alternative” therapies, was described as “breakthrough” and “pioneering.”

I’ve thought frequently how valuable information, like the placebo effect, seems to disappear as the culture focuses on something new.

Another example concerns our vulnerability to conditioning. Attention was first drawn to it in 1953 when American POWs, who had been brainwashed in various ways by their Chinese captors, returned from the Korean War. I remember it was discussed extensively again in the 1970s as a reaction to the many cults that captured the minds of the young and vulnerable. Yet recent and current politics show how little, if any, understanding of the techniques of indoctrination have been absorbed by the culture. By now they should be common knowledge. Making such important information common knowledge, and preserving it as such, are major goals of The Human Journey website.

An overarching reason that we face so many problems today is that, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve relied too much on one way of knowing the world. This likely came about because, as Bob Ornstein and James Burke suggest in The Axemaker’s Gift, tool-making conferred power on “the axemakers” who became leaders and created an artificial and predominantly left-brained environment. Education and intellectual training focused on sequential, logical thinking.

Because of our preoccupation with isolated facts, we now face so many problems whose solutions obviously depend upon our ability to grasp the relationship of parts to wholes. As Bob once said: “The problem is not that our technology is ‘leading us to destruction,’ but that our technical innovations have outstripped our perspective and judgment.”

The good news is that we are not tied to this one way of knowing. In fact, for almost all of human history we’ve survived in large part thanks to the activation of a right-brained ‘second mode of cognition.’ We speak about this now latent faculty in GOD 4.0.

We all experience its unique quality from time to time—a sudden solution to a problem pops into the mind, an unexpected insight, a coincidence, a spontaneous decision that just “seems right” and works out. We see it in the creativity of poets, artists, inventors and scientists, the intuitive insights and actions of healers like Osler, and in the prophets and spiritual teachers that have guided humanity throughout history.

Our human story proves we know much more than we think we do, but in a different way. Like the mind-body connection, this complementary way of thinking fell into disuse as humanity favored intellectual analysis over intuitive understanding.

It’s clear that we need to reactivate and develop this faculty now. Doing so will expand our perception and understanding of our connection to each other. It will provide solutions to both our individual and global concerns, based on an intuitive perceptive ability—not trial and error. In GOD 4.0, Bob describes what happens neurobiologically when this capacity is activated,
and we suggest ways in which it can be developed.

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Sally Mallam is the current executive director of The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK) and executive editor of The Human Journey project.

How Deep Can a Story Go?

By Andrew Boden | November 21, 2022

When I finished Lolita by the Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov, I decided to quit writing fiction. I’d never be as good as Nabokov, I thought. I’d never be as sharp as him with a sentence, a character or a plot. For days, I couldn’t write. I was in my twenties and when I eventually got over myself and my harsh comparison to a genius novelist (to say, the least), I began to write again, to aim to be the best writer that I could with the talent that I’d been gifted. It felt like the least I could do for my grandfather’s and father’s calling and, later, mine.

Now, that’s a personal anecdote about writing fiction, writing what Robert Ornstein called stories and narrative focused on an “emotional resolution.” Around the same time, I came across stories and tales presented by Idries Shah. At first, I read them as entertaining stories—tales of djinn, young seekers on quests and travels to far flung places—sometimes historical, sometimes fantastical. Later, when I’d understood more of Shah’s work, I began to see these collections of tales as something else—something instrumental. A tool, like a key to one of our many inner doors.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re wandering lost in the Sahara. You come across a magnetic compass lying on a stone. If you know what a compass is and how to use it, you could help yourself find your way again. If you don’t know what a compass is you might conclude that it’s a toy, something to spin around with your hand and amuse yourself as you grow thirstier. Or you might think, “Well, there’s a bit of fluid in there, if I crack the case, I could drink it and maybe not be so parched.”

What might seem initially like an amusing toy (the compass) becomes a vital instrument in the hands of someone with the right kind of experience and information. That a certain kind of tale or story can function in the same way is generally not an idea that we’ve permitted ourselves to consider. That there might be a whole kind of story craftsmanship designed to function on ranges of human experience other than the emotional or intellectual is also an idea we haven’t explored.

An example. One of my favourites is the tale of The Mouse and the Elephant, which you can find in Idries Shah’s The Commanding Self:

Despite the opposition of their respective families, an
elephant and a mouse who were in love decided to get
married.

On their wedding night, the elephant keeled over and died.

The mouse said: ‘O Fate! I have unknowingly bartered one
moment of pleasure and tons of imagination for a lifetime of
digging a grave!’

You could, as I did, read this as funny anecdote. Crazy mouse, right? You could also read it as a commentary on how romantic love can lead us down all sorts of troubling paths (think of the body count in Romeo and Juliet). Another, perhaps clearer-sighted part of us might transpose the mouse’s thinking into our own lives. Yes, I could choose seeking pleasure as my life’s compass, but it may be leading me away from wider contexts and other advantages that I haven’t considered.

Perhaps slightly more contemporarily, this seemingly simple tale could also reveal a very ancient understanding of how the brain works: that as you increase a pleasurable state, as you increase the brain’s dopamine response, the brain being a homeostatic organ, must find its natural set point again. Or, as the old song goes, “What goes up, must come down.”

There are almost certainly other layers to this tale, just waiting to be explored at the right time under the right circumstances. The key is not to try and demand meanings from these stories, no more than you would insist of a compass that it reveal its significance. These tales and stories need to be, as Shah writes so eloquently, digested and integrated into our thinking. This can sometimes take months or years, which might be a difficult proposition for modern attention spans with modern demands for “real-time delivery.”

But there can be benefits to learning patience with these stories and tales. I’d first read The Mouse and Elephant in the early nineties and it wasn’t until the early morning when I sat down to write this piece that the idea that the story might be describing our neurophysiology blossomed in me. If I’d just flung the story aside because its instrumental function didn’t go to work on me on my schedule, I might never have made the connection I did. I might’ve not learned in which direction to take the next small step.

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Andrew Boden is a writer and novelist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of The Secret History of My Hometown and co-editor of Hidden Lives: True Stories from People Who Live with Mental Illness.

Lost and Found: An Encounter with the Intuitive Mind

By David S. Sobel, MD | November 15, 2022

After working on a book manuscript for over a year, I was excited when I was finally called to pick it up from the typist. This was some years ago, well before word processing, personal computers, flash drives, and cloud storage. When I arrived there, I took into my hands the thick stack of paper, which was the only copy of the book. Let me say that again: the typed manuscript I was holding was the only copy on earth of my precious new work.

I carefully placed the papers in a thick canvas bag and headed to my San Francisco apartment. I could not wait to get home and begin to proofread the manuscript before turning it over to my publisher. Once there, I unlocked my apartment door and placed the canvas bag down to hold the door open while I carried several bags of groceries into my kitchen. Big mistake. I heard my apartment door slam shut. Curious, I thought. I was pretty sure I had secured it. When I went to check the door, it was indeed closed. And when I looked for the canvas bag with my manuscript it was gone. Vanished.

My mind snapped. In panic I raced out of the apartment and looked up and down the street for my missing bag. At that point my body took over. I dashed up the street and turned down an alleyway. I had no idea of why I turned right instead of left, or why I chose that particular alley out of many. As if on rails, I proceeded down the alley and suddenly spotted the canvas bag and my beloved manuscript scattered behind a garbage can. Clearly, the thief had rifled through the bag, and, finding nothing of value, tossed the sheaf of worthless papers.

I have no rational explanation for why, or how, I ran directly towards the manuscript. My rational mind was in a panic, not thinking clearly. In a sense, I was out of my mind. More likely, my rational mind was temporarily disabled as other parts of my mind took over and guided my body by some hidden sense. While my rational mind spun endlessly in panic, my body seemed to know exactly what to do, and where to go.

This tangible and visceral experience indicated that my everyday consciousness with its focus on linear and rational thought was not all that was available to me. Whether, as in this case, triggered by panic, or deliberately cultivated and developed, human capacities can be activated to allow us to perceive the wider and deeper connections between things.

Of course, such shifts in consciousness can be more, or less, dramatic and impactful than my example of the lost and found manuscript. Many of us have experienced unusual and inexplicable moments of precognition, or intuition, in our everyday lives, that seem to defy standard logic and reason.

Creative insights also seem to arise from a shift in consciousness. When I work hard on a problem (from how to repair a broken appliance, to how to organize the chapters in a book I am writing), I sometimes become frustrated and exhausted, and temporarily set the problem aside. Sometimes later that same day, or perhaps the next day, or even in a dream, the solution suddenly pops into my mind, revealing new connections and insights.

What happens at the moment of insight? Authors Robert and Sally Ornstein, in their book, God 4.0: On the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience Called ‘God’ describe research that illuminates the “brain blink” that occurs with insight.

When you have that “eureka experience,” it seems to appear out of nowhere. But in fact, the left hemisphere of your brain has actually been working continuously behind your “scenes,” in an intense, moment-to-moment, bit-by-bit mental search for relevant information — until it finally gets stymied and, at that point, goes offline. The brain switches over to its right hemisphere, to explore unpredicted ideas and associations.

Such “aha” moments are examples of shifts in consciousness that may range from small daily insights, to breakthroughs in artistic and scientific creativity, to transcendent understandings. The authors describe this as a “second system of cognition.”

The “second system” is a quiescent faculty; accidents can activate it, as can certain procedures, such as meditation, isolation, fasting, overstimulation, prayer and the use of drugs which have appeared in every known society. They all involve a breakup or a bypass of normal cognition, and the opening of “another world,” as it has been called metaphorically.

We now know how the mind and brain do this, and for the first time, we can explore how this innate mode of cognition can be activated in a way relevant to the rapidly changing modern world. The capacity for this development is a part of everyone’s natural endowment. All of us possess a nascent, intuitive sense which is the basis of an expanded consciousness; but it is not fully developed in most of us, just as a lot of other human capacities lie embryonic and untrained.

It may be that our ancestors were more familiar and experienced with exploring these altered states of consciousness. I know that in racing up that alleyway I found more than a lost manuscript: I caught a glimpse of such “embryonic and untrained” human capacities.

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David S. Sobel, MD, is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is coauthor of ten books including three with Robert Ornstein, entitled The Healing Brain, Healthy Pleasures, and The Mind & Body Health Handbook.