Triune brain

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The past twenty years have given modern culture substantial chance to understand that spiralling consumption jeopardizes our planet. But even in the difficult circumstances society is facing, mainstream opinion seeks only to return to the norm of self-satisfaction and eternal expansion. It is a prime case of what psychologists call congnitive dissonance, believing one thing but doing the opposite: like a 40-a-day smoker, we know our behaviour will kill us, but we can't stop. One may ask, why?

Medical-scanning science makes the asnwer increasingly clear. Western culture and its influential role on other cultures overstimulates the wrongs parts of the human brain -the primitive areas that are awe-stricken by modern life- into feeling beset by famine and poverty. This in turn creates great forage for consumerism, but it threatens to send us into ecological disaster.

This grey-matter crisis results from the way human neocortex, the intelligent brain we evolved in the Pleistocene era, runs alongside far older systems driven by primordial instinct. American neuroscientist Paul MacLean refers to this as the triune brain, a structure resembling an archeological site inhabited by successive civilisations. At the core of its structure is the reptilian brain, responsible for arousal, basic life functions and sex. The old-mammal brain, which learns, recalls and emotes, surrounds it. The new-mammal neocortex sits on top.

It is interesting that many esoteric spiritual traditions taught the same idea of three planes of consciousness and even three different brains. Gurdjieff for example referred to Man as a "three-brained being." There was one brain for the spirit, one for the soul, and one for the body. In similar fashion, we also enter upon the chakra paradigm - the idea that points along the body or the spine correspond to nodes of consciousness, related in an ascending manner, from gross to subtle depending upon the level of awakening experienced by the spiritual practitioner in its karmic journey to merge with the Absolute.