Our cognitive thinking is very apparent during most of our waking hours. Less apparent and less accessible are the feelings we have. I believe that our feelings are quieted or subdued by our active cognitive processes and the everyday practical work that we do in the real world. I think the willful emphasis on work and earning money dampen or even numb our innate capacity to feel love, joy, and sadness.

It would be great if we can learn to master how to gracefully access the non-cognitive aspects of ourselves like our feelings, our soul and beyond. Think how a memory, or music can suddenly change your mood and how goosebumps come over your body. In these moments we experience a feeling of freedom, happiness and peacefulness. Why do we not experience this aspect of our humanity more of the time? How can we achieve this state on demand? Is it a trait that is being selected for or against from a Darwinian natural selection point of view?

I suggest that we do not experience this part of our reality because the environment that we live in is not perceived as a safe place by our reptilian brain at our brainstem. We may not experience that our safety is in imminent life threatening danger and nor do we experience that we are totally without worry or repressed fears. In our routine normal existence we are numb to the possibility of a (higher) different experience of ourselves. Perhaps mostly we never make the effort to exercise the more evolutionarily recent cognitive brain.

Meditation is a practice to train the mind to be one with the body. In it you focus the mind on breathing and work on making your body flexible and nimble. That, however, is not what I am describing. I am describing a feeling that is like a force coming over you that makes your body tingle with power that normally you do not feel. A feeling that you are little afraid of to let it take over you. It is a feeling that to be one with, that is to fully experience, you must surrender to it. Is it God’s presence?

I think, however, we have the ability to access this power by just mentally granting permission to whatever this force is to be with us. I think this is how we can access and experience the universe independent of our biological senses of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. This experience may be a form of energy which I suggest is the home of where all things arise from, return to and our renewed in the cycle of life.

In our understanding of our physical world we know that all things arise from a singularity. Over time the singularity grew by addition and the physical world was made. The opposite of addition is subtraction and we know death and the transient nature of all things. From the singularity first there was energy and invisible gasses. Later liquids and solids were formed and last plants and animals arose from this singularity.

The goosebumps you feel are perhaps our body’s nascent capacity to sense more than our normal biologically based reality. It is possible that the biological tissue that makes up our brain is evolving to heighten its capacity for extra sensory perception. In the future we may not depend upon or need our body’s five senses and limbs to know the universe. The force of creation is always around us and perhaps our “antenna” (i.e., brain) is a growing biological receptor for connection with the invisible energy and force of the universe and all that it brings with it!