June 2011-Violence and Its Direct Relationship to Transcendence or Enlightenment- Part One
The sun lowered itself below the horizon, bringing an end to another relaxing weekend at a lake resort. I left the convenience store and walked to my car, and within an instant a man with a rifle shoved an older woman and me into a boathouse. Looking into the man’s crazed and maniacal eyes, I understood immediately that he was tripping on drugs, probably cocaine. My first response, once my mind grasped the situation, was to plead with the man, telling him that he did not want to be holding us at gunpoint. The woman next to me had sunk to her knees and was rocking back and forth and whimpering. Her actions appeared to irritate him more, and he yelled for her to be quiet, as well as other things that my mind had difficulty processing. I grappled with the only image I can now remember clearly—a bullet going through my head and exiting out the back. This image paralyzed me.
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Joseph Chilton Pearce, scholar, scientist, and author on human development, describes the process that my brain encountered in this situation as the “fight-or-flight” modes of survival. These processes occur in a lower part of our brain called the “reptilian,” part, located directly above the spinal column. Even though the brains of human beings have developed a frontal lobe that can perform the highest neocortical functions, when a person is threatened, the reptilian brain has incorporated into its service the higher functioning ability of the frontal lobe. The person is operating from their brain’s lower capacity, as the higher functioning frontal lobes are limited in their capacity by being under the control of the reptilian part of the brain. The lower system is able to integrate the higher functioning system because of human beings’ thousands of years of fight-or-flight responses to situations and because it is difficult to transcend this pattern of reactivity.
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