Power Up Your Brain (33 page)

Brian’s cadaver was that of a young woman. The rubber sheet had
been folded back to expose her upper chest, neck, and head. Her skin was
like a calf’s hide, her complexion gray and tinged with olive drab.

“This is Jennifer,” Brian said. “We’ve been together all semester.” He lifted the surgical saw. “She’s taught me more about the human body
than I knew there was to learn. I’ll never forget her.”

“Brian—”

“Tonight she is going to lose her head for me, and I wanted you to
be here.”

“Thanks.”

His eyes held mine in a matter-of-fact stare.

“You don’t get to see a decapitation these days without a hundredgrand
student loan and a year’s worth of medical school. I thought
you’d be interested.”

“Why?”

“Psychologist.”

“Yeah,” I said. “When people lose their heads, they come to me.”

He stared at me for a second, trying to gauge my tone of voice.

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he said. “I just
thought—I mean, if you’re uncomfortable . . .”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“If you’d rather . . .”

I looked at the bucket of chicken. “I’m just trying to stay away from
fried foods,” I said. I wasn’t prepared to admit that I was strangely
revolted, yet irresistibly fascinated, by the body on the table. He handed
me a beer.

“Eat afterward?” he said.

“If we can.”

“Incredible, huh? Just down the hall, there’s a lab where they
conduct the foremost research in recombinant DNA. One floor down,
neurologists are teaming up with biochemists and computer gurus to
simulate the neural pathways of simple brain functions. But here we
are cutting up dead people just like Leonardo da Vinci did five hundred
years ago.” He looked around the room at all the black-draped figures.

“We start on the back,” he said, “because it takes a while to get
used to what you’re doing, and it’s easier if you don’t have to look at the
face—as if they can really look back at you and make you feel guilty for
violating them with a scalpel.”

He reached down and cupped the cadaver’s chin in the palm of his
hand. Her head moved back slightly. Decisively, he placed the serrated
blade of the saw on a wedge of cartilage between the exposed vertebrae
of her neck. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. When the head was free
from the body, he held it in both hands. While we talked, he took what
looked like a large dental drill from a drawer, plugged it into an electrical
socket, and selected a bit, a round, disklike blade about two inches
in diameter.

“They save the best for last,” he said, and the handpiece whirred. “Hold her for me, will you?”

I took the head in my hands and positioned it for him, and he brought
the spinning blade down on the forehead. When he was through, when
he had rotated the head a full 360 degrees, he switched off the little saw. The whine of the blade still rang in my ears. There was a curious smell
in the air, and a fine powder of bone dust lay on the face and clung to
its eyelashes. He leaned over and gently blew it away.

“Imagine,” he said. “No human being has ever seen Jennifer’s brain. You and I are the first. Drum roll, maestro.”

And he pulled the calavarium away from the skull. I had seen a
human brain. I had seen many, floating in formalin-filled lab jars. But
that moment will always live for me.

Aristotle thought that the brain cooled the blood, that thinking
was a function of the heart. Rene Descartes described the brain as the
pump of a nerve fountain. It has been compared to a clock, a telephone
switchboard, a computer; yet the mechanics of the brain are far more
intricate than any analog. Theorist Lyall Watson wrote that if the brain
were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that
we couldn’t. And the source of all this theory and speculation was the
walnut-shaped, fleshy, gray mass of tissue before me.

Brian looked at me and nodded his head toward Jennifer’s. Once
again, I placed a hand on either side of her face, and Brian eased the
brain from her head. He stood weighing it in his hands for a moment,
then handed it to me. It was heavy.

Brian interrupted the silence. “I don’t believe it either,” he said.
¹

That evening, I took with me a tiny portion of Jennifer’s brain that we had sliced and diced and placed on a glass slide, the kind you use in a microscope. I said to myself that I wanted to “look inside her head” more carefully at a later date. The slide contained a small piece of Jennifer’s prefrontal cortex.

Weeks later, I was in Cuzco, the capital of the ancient Inca empire and the longest continually inhabited city in the Americas. The ancestors of the Inca had built the original mud-and-straw structures, and the Inca had built great stone palaces on top of them. I was visiting Don Antonio Morales, my translator and informant as I investigated the healers and sages of the Andes, and whom I would later discover was one of the great shamans in the area. That night, when I entered Don Antonio’s simple cabin, the first thing he said to me was, “You’ve brought someone with you.” I immediately replied that I had come alone, but he gazed beyond me to the back of the room, and he said that the guest that I had brought had come uninvited. And then he began to describe Jennifer to me, how she had lived, whom she had loved, and how she had died.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I was not used to having uninvited guests accompany me, but I recalled that I had been sleeping restlessly since that experience with Brian in the anatomy laboratory. And now this old sage was telling me that Jennifer’s soul had attached itself to me.

“It’s because you are warm-hearted and compassionate,” the old man said. “Although she had died, her soul was caught between the world of the living and the world of spirit. She was trapped in a nightmare that she could not wake up from. And perhaps she knew, somewhere deep inside, that you would bring her to me and that we would relieve her suffering.”

The old man pointed out that Jennifer’s soul had become attached to an object of hers that I had removed without permission. I immediately started digging through my backpack and pulled out the microscope slide.

“What is it?” Don Antonio asked.

“It’s her brain, a piece of it,” I said.

He looked at me and frowned. “You’ve done a very bad thing,” he said. “But maybe it was for the best. Now we will heal her and help her go back home to the world of spirit.”

Thus began my training with the shamans. Since then, I have had a direct and palpable experience of my own soul and the beauty of the souls of others around me. I have discovered the soul to be the finest aspect of human nature, that part of us that finds beauty everywhere regardless of how much ugliness there is around us. It is the part of us that no longer searches for the truth but, rather, brings truth to every encounter. It is the part of us that no longer seeks happiness but infuses every instant with joy. It is the part of us that practices kindness and lives in simplicity.

The shamans believe that the soul is all that is beautiful and noble about being human. The soul has the possibility of becoming eternal because beauty and nobility are eternal. But to experience this, we first have to heal the trauma and pain from our past and become enlightened.

The great experiment that each one of us can perform is to recover an essential aspect of ourselves that we have lost as a result of pain, trauma, and stress. In metaphorical terms, this is the part of ourselves that never left the Garden of Eden, that still walks with beauty in the world, connected to the rivers and the trees, and that speaks with God easily and readily. We believe that the key to this lies above our eyebrows, in our prefrontal cortex. Once this brain is awakened, we can experience brain synergy and understand who we are and what we want from life.

EPILOGUE

Alberto Villoldo:
The Seer’s Reward

Third day of fasting. I am on the southern slope, below the ruins of
Machu Picchu, in a temple cave that archeologists have not yet restored. Abandoned cultivation terraces that once fed an entire citadel now lie in
ruins above and below where I am camped. The refined Inca stonework
is evident in the back of the cave, and after cutting down the tall grass,
I was able to arrange a comfortable spot for myself, protected from the
sun and rain. This morning I found a snake, which had obviously been
warming itself all night from my body heat, coiled by the foot of my
sleeping bag. I am not sure which one of us was more startled, yet the
snake was still lethargic, as it had been a chilly night, and I was able
to coax it out of the cave with a stick. I am certain that this is its cave,
that I was the intruder, but there was no arguing over this. For two more
days, it would be my cave.

Yesterday was sheer torture. The groaning of my empty stomach
was nowhere near as bad as the torment of my mind. I would try to meditate,
but could not stop salivating every time my thoughts wandered to the
chocolate bar I had stashed away at the bottom of my backpack, to the
taste of the warm chocolate, and how every cell in my body longed for
the fortifying sugar and cacao. Finally, toward sunset, I tore through my
pack and found the object of my torture, opened the foil wrapper, and
tossed the bar to the Urubamba River below.

What a relief. Now I only had the rumbling in my belly to worry
about. . .

— Alberto’s Journal1

Someone once explained to me that the difference between religion and science is that in science, you come up with a hypothesis and you test it out against the facts. If the facts don’t support your theory, you toss it out and come up with a better one. If your assumption is that stones fall upward, and the facts prove you wrong, then you have to come up with a better premise. By contrast, in religion, if the facts don’t support your hypothesis, you dismiss the evidence until better proof is offered, because religion is the realm of faith, not facts. Faith has rallied men and women to heroic acts and inspired them to great works of art. Facts have seldom moved the soul or the imagination.

With religion, the older the better. There are few new religions. With science, the newer the better. Both the physics and the medicine of 20 years ago are dated, yet the religions of hundreds of years ago remain vibrant and alive. For shamans, old and new, past and present, all collapse into the eternal moment. Neither science nor religion, shamanism is based neither on proof or belief. It is based on experience.

Shamans, yogis, and mystics around the planet devised a series of experiments in consciousness that anyone willing to put the effort and time into the research could replicate. The experiment was elegantly simple:
Quiet the mind and discover the Seer within
. Once you discover the Seer, when you are able to drop in between the moments, when the clock stops ticking and you have not died, then you can experience infinity and become a master of your own destiny.

And while the Seers were often the men and women who were able to interpret what the crack in the turtle’s shell meant for the emperor’s future or where the bison where going to be the following morning, this was considered an outer manifestation of a deeper gift. The reward that the Seer discovered when he turned his gaze within was the understanding of the workings of Creation and his role in the unfolding of a heavenly design.

The master shamans of the Andes, refer to this as the “wisdom that can be known but not told.” I am not a good enough poet to express the freedom and joy one attains as a result of discovering the Seer. The experience is there for all who are willing to try it. And it is as old as humanity itself. But it requires taming the great beast of toxic emotions, a creature as fearsome as the chocolate bar that obsessed me in the Amazon, as terrifying as a many-headed serpent like the fabled Hydra that Hercules struggled against, for each time he cut off one of its heads, two more would grow back.