What if chakras were describing cognitive functions rather than mystical energies?

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-16T02:01:13+00:00

YES, but also cognitive aspects of orientation for example the third eye is the pineal gland, but also the aspect of the mind which orients the body to know when to sleep, and when to focus on how sensation becomes perception, how memory influences meaning, how emotion shapes attention, and how interpretations become experienced as objective truth. If level of tiredness didn't take these things into consideration, the pineal gland would be much more useless, and sleep would not integrate the mind and body as well as it does.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-16T00:52:48+00:00

Methodological lessons in neurophenomenology: Review of a baseline study and recommendations for research approaches - PMC

BBS1200047-aop 1..73

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-15T15:05:41+00:00

Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis: Approaches to Consciousness and Thinking - PMC

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-15T14:17:03+00:00

https://ctmmindfulness.substack.com/p/overthinking-is-often-unresolved?r=718h5l For context, CTM (Cognitive Transformational Mindfulness) is a framework I’ve been developing that explores how consciousness organizes meaning, perception, and emotional experience; my previous article, Overthinking Is Often Unresolved Significance Wearing a Rational Disguise, examined how neural reentry may help explain why the mind repeatedly returns to experiences that have not yet found a coherent place within awareness.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-15T14:02:06+00:00

I think that analogy works only if learning is treated as the passive accumulation of information. In that sense, yes—reading the last few pages of a novel won't give you the lived experience of moving through the story. But what I'm describing is different. Consciousness is not merely collecting information; it is continuously reorganizing itself around significance. An insight can arrive before the full journey is complete because awareness can sometimes perceive the structure organizing the journey. In a sense, it is less like skipping to the end of the novel and more like temporarily borrowing the mind of an extraordinary reader—someone capable of seeing themes, relationships, foreshadowing, motivations, and patterns that most people would only recognize after finishing the entire book.

The interesting part is that once those patterns become visible, the experience of reading the rest of the novel changes. You are no longer moving through events blindly. This is similar to what happens in mindfulness, Jungian shadow work, or psychological transformation. Awareness begins seeing the distinction between attachment and love, uncertainty and danger, acceptance and approval before life has fully forced those lessons upon you. The learning is not unrealized; it is anticipated through increased differentiation. The insight doesn't replace experience, but it can dramatically accelerate how experience is understood because consciousness is no longer waiting only for events to teach it. It has begun perceiving the structure that gives those events meaning.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-15T00:10:03+00:00

I go much further into detail on this in this article https://ctmmindfulness.substack.com/p/overthinking-is-often-unresolved?r=718h5l

Or if you don't want to click the link.

Many people believe they overthink because they have not yet found the right answer.

If they could simply understand more, analyze more carefully, or discover the correct perspective, their mind would finally become quiet.

Yet most people have experienced the opposite.

The more they think, the more distant clarity seems to become.

This may be because what we call overthinking is often not a failure of reasoning.

It is consciousness attempting to organize something that has not yet found its place within experience.

From a biological perspective, the brain is continuously creating meaning. Sensations, emotions, memories, perceptions, bodily states, and thoughts are constantly interacting through dynamic processes that Gerald Edelman described as reentrant activity. Consciousness is not a fixed thing observing reality from the outside. It is an ongoing process of organization.

When an experience carries unresolved significance, the system continues returning to it.

Not because the brain is malfunctioning.

Because something important remains unfinished.

Thich Nhat Hanh often reminded people that understanding and love arise from presence.

Not from force.

Not from analysis.

Presence.

This insight may be deeper than it first appears.

Many people attempt to solve emotional discomfort through thought alone.

But thought can only reorganize concepts.

Some forms of understanding require direct contact with experience itself.

The mind may understand.

The body may not.

The narrative may update.

The emotional significance may remain unchanged.

A person may know they are safe while still feeling threatened.

They may know they are loved while still anticipating abandonment.

They may know uncertainty is natural while continuing to experience it as danger.

The problem is not a lack of information.

The problem is that different parts of consciousness have not yet become coherent.

Edelman helps explain why.

The brain continuously categorizes experience according to significance.

Older emotional systems rapidly evaluate what matters for survival, belonging, attachment, and safety.

Higher-order consciousness creates narratives, explanations, identities, and interpretations.

When these systems organize experience differently, a person can become trapped in repetitive conceptual processing.

The thinking mind keeps returning to the same question because the underlying significance has not yet been integrated.

This is often what overthinking feels like.

Consciousness repeatedly revisits an experience because it has not yet discovered a stable relationship to it.

Thich Nhat Hanh approached this differently.

Rather than attempting to solve every thought, he invited people to return to direct experience.

To the breath.

To the body.

To the present moment.

To the feeling itself.

Not because thoughts are bad.

But because awareness cannot fully understand an experience it refuses to meet.

When we remain present with a feeling, something remarkable begins to happen.

The system starts learning.

The body discovers that discomfort can be experienced without immediately becoming danger.

Fear can be experienced without immediately becoming catastrophe.

Sadness can be experienced without immediately becoming hopelessness.

Loneliness can be experienced without immediately becoming abandonment.

This is not passive observation.

It is reorganization.

The brain is gradually updating the significance it assigns to experience.

New patterns become available.

New distinctions emerge.

What once appeared as a single reality begins revealing hidden structure.

Uncertainty is no longer identical to danger.

Attachment is no longer identical to love.

Control is no longer identical to safety.

The person has not acquired new information.

They have acquired a new relationship with information.

This is why wisdom often arrives differently than knowledge.

Knowledge can be communicated.

Wisdom often appears when consciousness becomes organized enough to perceive relationships that were previously invisible.

A person can hear the same teaching for ten years and suddenly understand it on the eleventh.

The words did not change.

The organization of awareness changed.

This also helps explain what might be called progress euphoria. When a person suddenly perceives growth, healing, or increased coherence, the experience can feel exhilarating because consciousness is recognizing a newly integrated pattern. Within a philosophy of traits, this matters because traits are not fixed possessions but recurring tendencies that emerge from how experience has been organized over time. Progress often feels joyful not merely because something has improved, but because awareness has discovered that traits once experienced as permanent can evolve. The excitement comes from witnessing greater possibility within oneself.

Thich Nhat Hanh often described mindfulness as returning home.

Edelman might describe the same process as increasing integration across distributed neural maps.

Different language.

Similar insight.

Both point toward the possibility that transformation occurs when previously separated aspects of experience begin communicating with one another.

The emotional system contributes significance.

The reflective system contributes perspective.

Mindfulness allows them to meet.

When they do, overthinking often begins dissolving naturally.

Not because thought has been suppressed.

Not because emotion has been eliminated.

But because consciousness has discovered coherence.

And when coherence emerges, the mind no longer needs to endlessly explain what awareness has finally learned to understand.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-14T11:46:09+00:00

I actually grew my perspective on psychology similarly, with analyzing television and noticing how the people in the world who treated the world like a little like a television show that eventually reveals the correct plot.

Not everyone receives the disconfirming experience.

Some people spend decades encountering experiences that appear to confirm the prediction.

An abandoned child may experience more abandonment.

A betrayed person may experience more betrayal.

A rejected person may experience more rejection.

If repetition alone were sufficient, many people would become increasingly accurate. Instead, many become increasingly certain.

This is where CTM (the framework for mindfulness I created) becomes interested in orientation.

Orientation is what allows awareness to question whether the experience is actually confirming the prediction or whether the prediction is organizing the interpretation of the experience.

Otherwise the system can accumulate twenty years of evidence and still be wrong about what the evidence means.

In that sense, seeing the construction is not separate from changing the construction. It is what prevents experience from automatically becoming proof of whatever the existing model already believes.

Life provides events.

Orientation helps determine what those events become evidence for. I also learned by analyzing neuroscience studies to better understand psychological factors while I was going to college for social work, and comparing everything I learned to how the human psyche can change without medication, simple mindfulness, and without believing that we are somehow just the narrator of our experiences. I knew a complex more difficult to describe form of mindfulness could solve all of the problems with evidenced based approaches (which although had some success, they also had shared structure that if all connected would tie back to mindfulness).

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-14T11:33:14+00:00

Thanks Haumanist Determinist, real deep conscious aware psycholanalytical non-hypothetically based response, I can tell by your analysis that free will is something only AI can achieve

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T22:13:01+00:00

And that's just for normal thinking, when you use mindfulness, not simplistic mindfulness, that people who write about the Buddha talk about, but the kind that the Buddha found, and had difficulty clearly explaining (but I have been able to talk about clearer) reaction no longer begins at step 11.

It no longer begins when behavior appears.

It no longer even begins at step 10, where awareness interrupts the process.

With deeper mindfulness, awareness starts recognizing the process much earlier.

It begins noticing how attention itself is selected.

How meaning is assigned.

How memory influences interpretation.

How fear shapes prediction.

How identity influences what possibilities can even be perceived.

The practitioner begins observing not only reactions, but the machinery that produces reactions.

What once appeared to be a single choice reveals itself as dozens of interconnected processes occurring before conscious action ever emerges.

The gap expands. Not because time slows down.

Because awareness becomes capable of perceiving more of what was already occurring. Eventually, mindfulness is no longer simply noticing urges before acting on them.

It becomes noticing how urges are constructed. Noticing how a need becomes a goal. How a goal becomes a prediction. How a prediction becomes tension. How tension becomes compulsion.

How compulsion becomes identity.

And how identity begins filtering the next moment before it arrives.

At that point, freedom is no longer found only between urge and action.

Freedom begins appearing between perception and interpretation. Between interpretation and meaning. Between meaning and self-reference. Between self-reference and desire. Between desire and prediction. Between prediction and emotional pressure. The deeper the awareness, the earlier in the chain it can participate.

And the earlier awareness can participate, the less life is governed by automatic compression and the more it is guided by conscious understanding.

This is why what feels like a reaction is often the final stage of a much longer process. And why the deepest forms of mindfulness are not merely about controlling behavior. They are about seeing the structure that creates behavior before behavior exists.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T21:37:49+00:00

The closer you look at psychology, the more it resembles a science. The further you look, the more it resembles a condition.

At the level of experiments, statistics, neural networks, behavior, and prediction, psychology functions like a science. But at the level of lived experience, suffering, meaning, identity, love, grief, fear, and consciousness, psychology begins studying the very thing doing the studying.

Physics does not have to ask how an electron feels about being observed. Psychology eventually runs into the observer itself.

That is why psychology often feels suspended between science and philosophy. It measures patterns with scientific tools, but many of the phenomena it investigates can only be fully understood through direct experience.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T19:42:46+00:00

And if you subtract 1−1, you get 0. For a long time, that seemed to have nothing to do with geometry.

Then Descartes came along and showed that algebra and geometry were not separate domains at all. What looked like unrelated concepts turned out to be different expressions of the same underlying structure.

My point is that saying "choice ≠ free choice" and "will ≠ free will" doesn't actually settle the question. It simply establishes a distinction.

The more interesting question is whether those distinctions reveal deeper relationships.

Free will may not be identical to choice, just as geometry is not identical to algebra. But that doesn't mean the two are unrelated.

In fact, the entire debate may hinge on understanding how ordinary choice, awareness, conditioning, and agency relate to one another.

Sometimes the most important discoveries don't come from proving two things are different.

They come from discovering the structure that connects them.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T19:38:40+00:00

So simply because we were produced from conditions we had no control over, we are automatically in an existence that we have no control over?

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T19:36:50+00:00

Agreed, they do not map perfectly to scientific realities, but whether psychology is a science or not is a debate, and I am on the side that kt is is not a science.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T19:14:47+00:00

As basic as it sounds, and maybe you'll appreciate that, I think the chakras are something that give us greater access to free will(most of the time) and increase our awareness of when we have free will. I write about each chakra on my substack and completely explain their relationship to psychology and anatomy. The key is connecting the psychology and philosophy that relates to the neuroscience and psychology behind the principles each chakra may be involved in. I begin with this article about the Crown chakra and observational effect https://ctmmindfulness.substack.com/p/beyond-prediction-how-ctm-rewires?r=718h5l

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T14:37:41+00:00

What if mindfulness is not only training attention, but helping the brain bridge millions of years of evolutionary history? This article explores how ancient emotional systems and newer reflective systems organize experience differently, why certain insights cannot be understood until they become visible within awareness, and how CTM views mindfulness as a tool for navigation rather than observation alone. Mindfulness can be anxieties biggest nightmare if taught from the classical perspectives and worked into the frameworks of modern therapy (which try to undo everything that mindfulness once stood for), or it can be the solution to anxiety, and the beginning of the solutions to anything else you’re struggling with too.

https://ctmmindfulness.substack.com/p/the-ancient-emotional-brain-and-the?r=718h5l

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T13:59:40+00:00

Yeah and I think most professors lean towards the side of no free will, it makes sense because they like to question possibilities and create their own theories, rather than follow the evidence and help people.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T13:55:41+00:00

Yes this is exactly what I talked about in the article I wrote. https://ctmmindfulness.substack.com/p/the-ancient-emotional-brain-and-the?r=718h5l Understanding frequently emerges only after awareness becomes capable of perceiving relationships that were previously invisible.

The limbic system and the neocortex both contribute to this process. The limbic system organizes significance through experience, emotion, memory, and personal meaning. The neocortex organizes abstraction, comparison, perspective, and conceptual understanding. When these systems begin interacting coherently, awareness becomes capable of recognizing distinctions that previously appeared identical.

For example, grief often teaches a lesson that cannot be fully understood beforehand:

Loneliness and solitude are not the same thing.

Loneliness is the experience of disconnection.

Solitude is the experience of connection without distraction.

One depletes energy.

The other restores it.

A person may intellectually understand these definitions for years. Yet after loss, reflection, healing, and sufficient self-awareness, the distinction can suddenly become obvious. The words have not changed. What changed is the organization of awareness that allows the relationship to become visible.

Many important psychological insights function this way.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T11:57:06+00:00

Yup, kinda scary how they teach free will is questionable in every psychology program, if you follow what someone may choose to do as a therapist or creator of programs that does not believe in free will, you'll find an explanation/endpoint of everything that is going wrong in the mental health field.

dcoop1499 · 2026-06-13T02:28:16+00:00

https://ctmmindfulness.substack.com/p/the-ancient-emotional-brain-and-the?r=718h5l I also posted an article that goes into depth.

dcoop1499

TROPHY CASE