SCIENCE, CREATION & SOUND STUDIES
WHAT IS NEUROPLASTICITY AND THE POWER OF THE BRAIN?
Our brains are constantly being shaped by experience. Most of us have very different behaviours and thoughts today than we did 20 years ago. This shift is neuroplasticity in action; changes in brain structure and organisation as we experience, learn, and adapt.
With every repetition of a thought or emotion, we reinforce a neural pathway - and with each new thought, we begin to create a new way of being. These small changes, frequently enough repeated, lead to changes in how our brains work.
Neuroplasticity is the 'muscle building' part of the brain; the things we do often we become stronger at, and what we don’t use fades away. That is the physical basis of why making a thought or action over and over again increases its power.
Over time, it becomes automatic; a part of us. We literally become what we think and do and this includes sound, what we speak out and what we hear..
Neuroplasticity is at work throughout life. Connections within the brain are constantly becoming stronger or weaker, depending on what is being used. Younger people change easily; their brains are very plastic. As we age change doesn't come as easily; the brain loses some of its plasticity and we become more fixed in how we think, learn, and perceive.
Since the brain is pivotal to all we think and do, by harnessing neuroplasticity we can improve everything we do and think and experience.
OK WHAT IS NEUROTHEOLOGY?
Neurotheology is a new revelatory science on creation truths of how we are truly created. It explores and reveals how the brain and nervous system might create, align or inform our understanding of faith, spiritual and religious experiences.
With the new scientific equipment, we can explore our bodies and how they respond to various types of Prayer. intercession, decreeing, declaring and yes the very accepted and practiced meditation experiences especially in true faith and religions.
What are the origins of neurotheology?
Without question, Herbert Benson’s work at Harvard Medical School and the Mind/Body Medicine Institute in Boston are the origins of neurotheology. Benson was a cardiologist interested in the role that the involuntary or autonomic nervous system plays in the human disease process.
Benson established that the Stress Response System affects the entire nervous system. Under pressure, the fight/flight response goes out from the sympathetic nervous system, causing various reactions;
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Heart rate increases
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Blood pressure increases
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Oxygen increases
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Breathing rate increases
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Palms and face sweat
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Blood sugar increases
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Adrenaline begins to flow
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Digestive track shuts down blood to muscles
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Blood vessels constrict in hands and face
When the fight/flight response takes over the nervous system, both the physical and the psychological posture of the triggered individual enters into a primitive creaturely function – a survival mode;
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Perception narrows
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Memory becomes coarse and imprecise
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Learning is blocked
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Condition overall is generally defensive
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The tendency is to regress or perseverate
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Expectations become negative
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The person is driven to flee or destroy, neurologically driving anxiety or anger
In other words, the person with the active fight-flight response loses their physiological serenity and essentially functions like a scared animal being chased.
Using the instrumentation of biofeedback, a study was made by Herbert Benson of subjects who meditated using repetitive, prayer - or meditative based techniques using words and sound.
He found that the neurophysiology of the fight-flight response was reversed by sound and focus based meditation.
Actually, the nervous system would switch from fight-flight to relaxation, or to put it in more neurologically precise terms, from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation.
As Benson studied people who prayed and mediated, he found that relatively shortly following their practice of meditation the subjects experienced;
1. The metabolic rate would decrease
2. Blood pressure would go down
3. Heart rate would decrease
4. The rate of breathing would decrease
5. And slow (alpha) brain waves, indicative of healthy relaxation would increase
6. As people persisted in practising sound and word-based meditation over time they would
7. Being more resilient to stress
8. Have less low-grade depression
9. Live Longer
10. Get sick less
11. Experience more pleasure in living
12. And feel closer to The Creator, God of all the Universe.
This last point is the neurotheological point. After years of research, Benson found that those who practice meditation as a form of prayer tended to have greater health gains than those who practised meditation merely as a vehicle to greater physical and psychological health benefits.
When people meditate via the Rosary, the Jesus Prayer, or self Centering Prayer – with some psychological posture of faith in a creator God – they achieve greater measurable health benefits than subjects who mediate simply to improve their health.
Believing in God which is, in fact, exercising faith while stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system during faith-based meditative behaviour is a superior means of delivering health benefits to the mind/body than via mere agnostic or behavioural medical meditation.
So Benson established that incorporating belief and faith into the triggering of the Relaxation Response actually offers more health benefits than non-faith based mediations?
Effectively casting out all the scientific dogma of Christianity and Religion in our human history, the new developments in the acceptance of "neurotheology" means that our brain's potential is not set at birth and there is far more hidden — we can actually strengthen and improve our selves in ways once believed impossible.
Sound, the Wonder, Mystery, Blessing & Energy of The Creation
Over centuries of time, the mystics and spiritual seekers, teachers and many powers that be have been telling us that sound actually creates matter. These mystics who sought direct contact or union with God. Jewish mystics, early Christians, Buddhists, Hindus etc all believed that the Word creates and pervades everything that exists and the word is a multi-faceted truth and meaning, for the sound by which all things are created isn't just any sound.
It's the Word of God, the creator which is not only written but spoken and In the Bible John wrote, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Interestingly, the ‘New age’ teachings through ancient Hindu Vedas we read, “In the beginning was Brahman with whom was the Word, and the Word is Brahman.” And this is part truth, wrong names or association but it points at a greater known mystery.
Mystics, believing scholars and even many scientists are discovering that world is a reflection of infinite combinations of sound patterns that create and can change. They say that all things, from the biggest star to the smallest flower and even you and I are coagulations of sound waves and patterns.
This is exciting as well as it is overwhelming because, on a cosmic scale, there may be evidence that sound has left its imprint on the galaxies.
Some scientists argue that the galaxies are not arranged at random but in a regular pattern of clusters. Some researchers are suggesting that it was primordial sound waves that helped create this pattern of clusters.
In the exciting and interesting field of cymantics, Prof. Hans Jenny, a Swiss scientist, found that sound waves passed through various kinds of malleable matter, such as paste and sand, caused the formation of geometric patterns and even using old semantic languages created the letter and patterns.
Later on further boundaries were pushed following Han’s Jenny's lead, photographer Alexander Lauterwasser photographed the patterns on the surface of water set into motion by the sound of pure sine waves, vocal music and music by Beethoven.
Looking at these patterns, we can begin to imagine how creation by sound might occur and the power of the word and ancient languages in correlation to how we are affected by music, thoughts and what is spoken from us and to us….
The more one embraces and studies these truths, the more one realizes that sound is the creative principle of all and it can literally change lives. It must be regarded as primordial. No single phenomenal category can be claimed as the aboriginal principle. We cannot say, in the beginning, was number, or in the beginning was symmetry, etc.
These are categorical properties which are implicit in what brings forth and what is brought forth. By using them in the description we approach the heart of the matter. They are not themselves the creative power. This power is inherent in tone, in sound. – Hans Jenny
We can harness that sound force for positive change. The mystics of East and West have connected with the power of creation by repeating spoken mantras and the names of God.
Many people are discovering that if they use the energy of sound properly, they can create positive change in every area of life.
By ultimate knowledge of sound, man can not only create, but he can also destroy.
This is why the masters and gurus of the East require long periods of testing and proving of the chelas before each level of greater power can be bestowed by the giving of the inner secrets of the Word.
Nevertheless, the use of sound is available to anyone who makes the effort or wants to enter its wonders, the wonders of the word and creations power and beauty. The magnitude of effort rests the degree of control, power and spiritual attunement that comes into our lives when we consciously think of our words, thoughts and how we interact with the world and others.