Intelligence predicts, it allows me to plan, hope, imagine, hypothesize. It also allows me to worry. Worry so that I can anticipate negative outcomes. Sometimes it may seem like it’s all in my mind, but that’s part of me being the real me. When it comes to wellness, it may appear that the problem is in my body yet wellness also infects the mind. Long after the body has mended, pain and healing develop an afterlife. It may just be a phantom form of my pain, but why should I think it is less real than ordinary pain?
Although it feels that everything I do these days is in my immaterial mind, it leaves material traces. Every thought and everything I imagine, even if it isn’t real alters the tendrils in my living brain and becomes part of the living me just as external events leave permanent memory traces in my mind. As I understand this better, it contributes to both the constrained and unconstrained aspects of my nature so that I can find my way.
There are always thousands of activities going on in my brain at once but only so many actions I can take outside of my brain. How do I inhibit, control and regulate my brain in order to keep myself organized and in control of myself so I don’t derail and become a train wreck?
Action and imagination are both activated in my mind.
The brain can change.
I can just be myself.
A Patient Voice 
A fine and concise article Harlon, for which many thanks. I think you demonstrate well with your words that to fabricate a dichotomy of our lives as we do – i.e. the supposedly immaterial phenomena of consciousness and the apparently tangible world together with our body – only works up to a point. The causal points in experience, were we to be able to trace them all, may well not fall neatly upon either side of a boundary we ourselves create with this dichotomy, yet which ultimately may prove meaningless: the division between mind and body. Peace, Hariod.
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Being yourself might be just the thing, Harlon, to encourage the brain to un-wire the ghosts of past pains, regrets and uncertainties. The plasticity of the brain is amazing to me, like a frontier we haven’t even begun to explore… I read once that some brain researchers found that people who had lost their sight recovered at least a portion of it when electrodes containing a “map” of visual images was placed against their skin. Over time, their brain realized the signal from the “screen” was the information it was no longer getting from the optical nerve, so it re-routed that signal int the optical centers of the brain, and voila! Unbelievable! Our brains are smarter than we’ll ever be! Ha!
Peace
Michael
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