Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos

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Let us, then, die and enter the darkness; let us impose silence upon our cares, our desires and our imaginings” are some of the final words of The Soul’s Journey into God, which remind me of Psalm 46:10 “Be still and know that I am God”. Today this Psalm is often used in Centering Prayer to help quieten intellect and emotionally build up our relationships with God, in centering prayer the mind can be helped to relax and the body to emotionally feel by slowly saying and feeling: The most exciting book that I have read this century is Journeys of the Mind (Princeton), an intellectual memoir by the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown. Immaculately written, radiant with wisdom, generous, grateful and gladdening, it matches The Education of Henry Adams without the haughty wounded misanthropy."—Richard Davenport-Hines, Times Literary Supplement Day seven is about faith as St Francis understood it, that is spiritually and with feeling. It’s about allowing ourselves to be with God without over-thinking or analysing, just being in His presence as everything shines forth from Divine goodness and love. Day seven is concerned with finding our own unity with God by grace and not instruction, desire and not understanding, by prayer and not diligent reading, through Spouse not the teacher, God not man. Bonaventure tells us we must “give over” or “die to the self”, to be less of our own self allowing more of God to be within us and this is an emotional feeling not intellectual knowledge. It is dwelling with the love of God’s Holy Trinity. A dance of divine expression. Therefore, if we wish to enter again into the enjoyment of truth as into paradise, we must enter through faith in hope and love of Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and men. The image of our soul, therefore, should be clothed with the three theological virtues, by which the soul is purified, illuminated and perfected … when by faith the soul believes in Christ as the uncreated Word and Splendour of the Father, it recovers its spiritual hearing and sight, its hearing to receive words of Christ and its sight to view the splendours of that Light. When it longs in hope … it recovers through desire and affection the spiritual sense of smell. When it embraces in love the Word Incarnate … it recovers it senses of taste and touch.”

Two neuroscientists reveal why consciousness exists and how it works by examining eighteen increasingly intelligent minds, from microbes to humankind―and beyond. While you might think that human consciousness is the final destination on this evolutionary journey, the authors blow right past this. Although they admire human consciousness, Ogas and Saddam argue that individual human minds are hardly the most sophisticated ones on the planet. They claim that the principles that govern human self-awareness and thinking also govern the development of civilizations. And at the center of both is the unique ability to communicate with language, which has given humans the capability to share knowledge with one another and pass it down to future generations. This ability has allowed the collective human race, or the “supermind”, to accomplish great things like going to the moon… or TikTok. On the flip side, it also has had the capacity to cause great pain. The authors leave the reader with a reminder that each neuron making up this “supermind” consists of an individual person and that it is up to each one of us to make choices that nudge it towards kindness and away from devastation.Karl Friston, University College London, ranked by Semantic Scholar as the most influential neuroscientist in the world

The authors are two scientists — Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam — who succeed in making complex ideas accessible to the general public. (Ogas is so comfortable venturing out of the ivory tower and into the public square that he was once a contestant on TV’s “ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”) The final day of the Mind’s Road to God is about rest, resting the intellect of the mind “little importance should be given to inquiry, but to unction [emotions]; little importance should be given to the tongue, but much to inner joy; little importance should be given to words and to writing, but all to the gifts of God, that is, the Holy Spirit; little or no importance should be given to creation, but all to the creative essence, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Journeys of the Mind is a rich and personal recounting of the birth of late antiquity, full of unexpected and fresh insights. It is also an engrossing tableau of now-vanished social worlds, from prewar Ireland to mid-twentieth-century Oxford to prerevolutionary Iran to 1970s Berkeley. Lyrical, profound, and deeply moving, the book puts Brown’s powers of empathy and imagination on full display and ranks as one of his finest accomplishments.”—Kyle Harper, author of Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History As part of the BEDLAM Arts and Mental Health Festival 2021 , this exhibition will be hosting a variety of community engagement events, Art of the Mind being one of them. This discussion connects art, spirituality and mental well-being through the exploration of the mind. Panelists include artist Kanwar Singh, ex Vogue/Dazed creative and curator of Journey of the Mind , Deep Kailey, along with a local Birmingham artist. for function and behavior of real biological creatures. This is the first book to lay out “the GreatWritten by Caitlin Goodpaster Illustrated by Melis Cakar Edited by Lauren Wagner and Shiri Spitz Siddiqi Journey of the Mind explains a lot about the brain and its evolution in plain, accessible language without the technical abbreviations that make most neuroscience reading so unpleasant.…A daring book and an absorbing read. The publication has been created as an illustrated introduction to the history, stories, and teachings of Sikhism. The Gurus–– the teachers of the Sikh faith––shared a message of kindness, equality, and inclusivity, helping all humanity find peace in troubled times and connect with truth through the journey of the mind. Brown] delivers an insightful and detailed chronicle of his life and academic career. . . . A rewarding combination of the personal and the scholarly, this is a valuable resource for students of the ancient world and the early Middle Ages."— Publishers Weekly

Quotation Library - Source materials from the Course and from various writers who have inspired me. Journey of the Mind' was not as I expected. I've read a fair few books by neuroscientists, and you start to notice a 'pop science' template after a while. But Ogas' and Gaddam's book focuses less on vignettes and case studies, using these more sparingly and more often for metaphor than examples. The authors opt for a more abstract approach instead. In less adept hands this would be a real struggle to read, but I found most of the book to be engaging (with even a small sharp edge of humour). It helps that the prose is so whip-smart and assured. There's also a very cool moment when the subject of AI is under discussion - you'll know what I mean when you get there.Grossberg found neither model satisfactory. His central new idea was that the mind is not a thing but an activity — not something you use but something you do. Hence the basketball analogy. But he also argued that the mind was not an airy concept but very much seated in the human body. Second Teacher Effect - Again organized by theme, Course quotes are combined with non-Course teachings that I've used over the years to enhance understanding of the Course's metaphysics Further, and crucially, the basketball game, through its flurry of activities, never becomes conscious of itself. Yet out of the physical dynamics of our brains, our minds do become self-aware, somehow, and so the analogy fails, or at least loses its power to explain anything. The mission of the Gurus was supported by brave and inspiring warriors who, following the teaching of the Gurus, devoted their minds to Waheguru (the Creator) and found peace in the face of adversity. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.