For weeks I've been wanting to write about mind over matter, which a few people have asked me to. But it's difficult to write about mind over matter without also writing about neural plasticity and what neural plasticity is all about. Therefore I'm going to write about the mystical transaction which involves both mind over matter and also neural plasticity.

But see we've got to start with the basics - the basics of life and existence. So let's start from a position of common ground. Life - no matter how you perceive it and no matter how you're living it - is predicated entirely upon a relationship with an environment. If there is no environment life is not possible. No matter at what stage in life you are, whether you're an embryo or a foetus in the womb, or in the last stages of your dying process, you are always relative to a wider environment.

But see also life is also an experience of a relationship with biology. You cannot have a mind without a brain, and the brain needs a nervous system, senses, and an organism or physical body. However if we understand that an environment can be many different things coexisting together in relationship, the 'biology' of your organism is just as much an environment as the environment which you feel surrounds you.

But see both these environments, the biology of our physical bodies, and the wider environment, are interconnected and relative in many different ways, some of which we can perceive and understand - such as breathing air, the need for food and water, shelter, heat and warmth - and other ways which lie mainly beyond our perception and comprehension. For example I could get into fields - for example what lies behind your ability to transform your hand into a fist - but I won't. At least not here.

Please also keep in mind that the mystical transaction is all about the relationship between the wider environment and biology, i.e. the brain, senses, body and everything you associate with you. As everything is relative and also because the environment creates and brings things into our reality and perception, there is no separateness. As there is no separateness, there is also no such thing as free will. No free will simply because you're never separate from either your environment or your body and brain.

So with that covered, let's jump into neural plasticity.

Neural plasticity

Neural plasticity is an aspect of neurology which studies how and why the brain changes either in terms of its shape, it's structure, it's functioning and also the relationship between different parts of the brain. The human brain is one of the most complex aspects of anatomy and biology, and as I'm neither a neurologist nor have I a clinical background please don't expect too much detail here. All I know is understanding the different parts of the brain is rather like knowing every street in every village across the whole of Europe. In other words it's vast.

Therefore I'm going to be extremely superficial here and give you what I hope is the gist of what neural plasticity is all about.

Neurology is one of the youngest sciences out there, as it's roughly a century old. But it is a rapidly developing science with new discoveries emerging at an extremely fast pace and - because it's about who we are, what we do, how we live and why - it's one of the great frontiers of medical science. The brain is not only the most complex of our organs, it's also the most powerful. The brain burns through the lion's share of our natural energy. Brain cells die out much quicker than most other biological cells, and are replenished just as quickly, and so what you have is a constantly changing but powerful organ and it is this knowledge which gives us neural plasticity.

Now keep in mind that our brains are the most active organ in our body. We used to think that the brain could not change after childhood and adolescence. Not true. We also used to think that at times our brains are inactive. Not true. We also used to think that we only use parts of our brain. Also not true. Even when we're at rest or asleep, our brains are still highly active.

But what I want to point out here is that there is an extremely close relationship between karma (which I will cover later) and neural plasticity. In fact in many cases karma - which means 'action' - and neural plasticity are one and the same thing. Everything you do, everything you think, everything you say, every aspect of your behaviour - it all changes and reorganizes your brain. It is this close relationship between karma and neural plasticity which forms the basis of the mystical transaction.

The three basic ways neural plasticity occurs

Here it's very important to understand that learning - as per the mystical principle of 'the environment creates, the individual (organism) grows - is a lifelong process. In fact I would even go as far to state that learning is an existential process, because it's something that you do incarnation after incarnation. Learning does not stop when you finish school or graduate from college or university. That's just formal education. Formal education is simply designed to train you how to think and behave on a basic level. You do most of your learning after your initial formal education process.

In fact I would even suggest that you lump learning together with growth, evolution, enlightenment, especially in this context of neural plasticity. But back to the three main ways in which neural plasticity occurs:

• Chemical

  Brain cells or neurons interact with each other through chemical signals and these trigger a series of actions and reactions. So in learning your breain can increase the amount and intensity of these chemical signals between different neurons.

  These chemical signals support short term memory or the short term improvement or enhancement of a motor skill. But see the brain can actually change its own shape through these chemical signals which is why you get different thoughts, not just chemical but also organic and even mechanical.

  So already we can see how chemical changes in the brain occur on the basis of karma - which is all about memory and action, or action, reaction and interaction. I will write about karma later in this post but some of you who are familiar with my work and this blog, or Qultura, might already be aware of the different types of karma.

• Structural changes

  Another way change can occur in neural plasticity is through restructuring and reorganizing the brain. You see short term concentration of chemical signals and thought processes do not really affect long term memory or long term development of motor skills.

  In order to restructure or reorganize the brain there has to be reincarnation, or the repetition of cycles over and over and over again, which corresponds to either practice or training. There's certain things which require a lot of training and practise to develop the brain to say handle different variables at the same time, such as learning the piano, the drums, juggling, or learning to play certain sports. Learning a new language is another example which requires sustained application, learning and practice.

  In some cases the restructuring of the brain impacts on changes to the senses and even physical changes in the body. For example people who are blind and learn to read Braille develop an enhanced sense of touch and heightened sensitivity in their fingertips. London taxi drivers, who spend some years riding a moped around London doing The Knowledge before they get their Green Badge, develop a highly increased spatial awareness and are usually exceptional at mapping.

  You see, as you learn to shape your brain a certain way, some parts of your brain become more excitable than others or have more intense chemical signalling. This can mean that there are complex networks of brain cells are shifting and changing as we think and function.

• Changes in function

  However when it comes to learning and developing the mind and brain, practice and repetition is not enough. You also need to make changes to the way you think and also use your brain.

  This is where we get into mind over matter. You see you can not only learn new things, you can also forget things you've already learned. Even if you learn new skills or abilities, you can also subsequently lose such skills and abilities if you don't vary or change or make changes to the way your brain functions. It's almost like you can only make such changes to your brain when it's all part of the mystical transaction between the brain and your environment.

The universe v. the mind

Next we need to understand the vast differences in scale and dimension when it comes to our environment and our mind. Both are defined by space. Space is the basis of all relationship. Your thoughts are space. This is important to understand so as to understand the mystical transaction.

Now the universe via the environment is a vast, infinite continuum of sensation and experience. In other words everything is happening everywhere all the time. Constantly.

By contrast your mind is infinitely miniscule by comparison - despite the complex and powerful nature of the human brain. While you can look up to the sky and see stars at night your perception is limited by the capabilities of your physical brain. Even if you have a well developed brain, are highly intelligent or a genius you're still only capable of handling four separate variables simultaneously while the universe is coming at you across an infinite number of different variables, most of which you cannot even perceive, let alone comprehend.

The Triangular Relationship: perception of reality

So now we come to another major plank in understanding the mystical transaction - perception of reality. As you can see on some basic level you can perceive both actual reality (that of the universe, Nature and biology) and also conceptual or cultural reality (the kind of reality which has been created by human thinking and human imagination). However these two main forms of reality manifest as different levels of reality which require perception in a certain plane of consciousness.

Now here it's extremely important to understand perception =/= reality, i.e. perception does not equate to reality.

This is because your ability to perceive reality in both forms will be determined by your neural plasticity or shape, structure and functioning of your brain. Perception occurs across different parts of the brain through what is known as the Felt Sense of Immediate Experience. As I'm neither a doctor nor a neurologist I'm not going to specify or list those parts of the brain because (1) it will massively complicate this blog post (2) I have no way of explaining how each part of the brain specifically relates to how you perceive your environment.

But see there are three parts of the brain worthy of a mention:

• The frontal cortex

  Particular regions of the frontal cortex are responsible for numerous capabilities, most notably the performance of motor tasks, judgment, abstract thinking, creativity, and maintaining social appropriateness.

• The anterior insular cortex

  The anterior insular cortex (AIC) is implicated in a wide range of conditions and behaviours, from bowel distension and orgasm, to cigarette craving and maternal love, to decision making and sudden insight.

• The insula cortex

  The insula is important for gustatory and sensorimotor processing, risk-reward behavior, autonomics, pain pathways, and auditory and vestibular functioning.

I'm giving you these three example parts of the brain to show how your perception of the different levels of reality all involve some kind of emotional and psychological overlay which gives you a predominantly individual perception of reality. There is no objective perception of reality shared between different people. That is the illusion. All you have is an individual and subjective perception of reality and it is this individual and subjective perception of reality which defines your mystical transaction.

Creative Law (Natural Law)

Now we move back into my domain, which is mysticism and mystical principles. Just as free will and determinism is an illusion, so too is chaos and what is known as Chaos Theory. Existence and life is largely cyclical in nature. The Moon orbits the Earth, and the Earth orbits the Sun. At no point does the Moon suddenly disappear and the Earth so far has not shot off in some random direction further out into the solar system. Chaos is how we perceive things when we don't understand what's going on.

If you want to dig deeper into the mystical principles you can find lots of information down in the footer under the heading 'Qultura methodology' plus you can check out my FAQs on the left hand menu. But what I'm going to give you now are the three components of either Natural Law or Creative Law (which I developed as a simplificarion of Natural Law).

• Dependent arising (mutual arising)

  This is essentially the mystical principle of relationship. Fundamentally 'as this arises, that becomes'... Everything in existence is relative and mutually dependent on everything else in existence.

  We can use as an example the mystical transaction between the brain and the wider environment via the Felt Sense of Immediate Experience. Changes in your wider environment will lead to either a sensation or an experience, which in turn will lead to further changes in your brain through neural plasticity. Similarly changes in your brain through neural plasticity will bring a response through your behaviour which will lead to a change in your perception of your wider environment.

• Karma

  Karma is a Sanskrit word which means quite simply 'action', as in action, reaction, interaction. On the one hand it refers to the behaviour of energy and physicality.

  However when it comes to human beings it covers all aspects of physical existence and living - so memory, action, thinking, communication, interaction, choices, consequences, experiences and physical sensations, emotions and feelings.

  Karma encompasses all aspects of the mystical transaction, both in what happens to you and everything you do in response. Karma is a massive subject area with many different explanations and interpretations, but I will give you four basic types of karma below.

• Reincarnation

  Most people associate reincarnation with life after death, which is a tiny, miniscule part of what reincarnation is really all about. In reality reincarnation goes hand in hand with karma as the basis of energy and physical existence but also relative to space.

  So if we understand the basic pattern of energy is a cycle (illustrated by the Creative Cycle in the Creative Law meme above). Unlike consciousness and space, both of which are infinite, energy is constant, cannot be destroyed or created, and is defined by cycle or wavelength, frequency (of cycles or waves) and relationship to consciousness and space.

  The basis of all physical existence (and karma) is vibration and pulsation - or on off on off on off. Reincarnation is essentially these patterns, rhythms and vibrations. Just as you cannot have physical form or energy without space, you cannot have life without death or say sound without silence. This means that life and death are intertwined - we can see from neural plasticity and the constant reincarnation of brain cells and neurons as the brain changes shape, form and function.

The Felt Sense of Immediate Experience

A central part of the mystical transaction is the Felt Sense of Immediate Experience. I wish to point this out because the mystical principles which govern the brain through neural plasticity are the exact same mystical principles which govern your wider environment. Your brain does not behave in mystical terms from your wider environment and this means that what connects the two is your mind.

Your experience of life manifests as a wide range of sensations and experiences, hence the name The Felt Sense of Immediate Experience, through which you perceive your individual reality.

To make it simpler for you to understand karma I'm going to give you four main types of karma. Please keep in mind that any choices you make and actions you take create the consequences and opportunities you face in the future. Also it's important to understand that many of the situations and circumstances you find yourself in in life may arise from one or more different types of karma. This is just a general guide and in practice you usually have to play it how you feel it.

• Past karma

  Past karma is arguably the most significant form of karma and usually the most difficult to resolve. We all have a past. Primarily it is memory in different forms, past experiences both from life and previous incarnations, social and mental conditioning, past trauma, in some cases past abuse, and so on and so forth. Past karma is also an accumulation of all other types of karma from the past. It is polar in nature to flow karma.

  What makes it more complex is the fact that past karma involves what is known as the Akashic Record, which means it also involves human evolutionary memory shared between members of a generation and other people. Please keep in mind that life must always be sustained, and you can only sustain life through reproduction, i.e. between different generations of human beings. This refers of course to past karma coming from your grandparents and parents, children and grandchildren. But see you also reproduce yourself through different incarnations and life cycles where in each case you take on a different physical identity.

  Nature on principle is not geared towards or interested in you as an individual human being, but is only interested in humans as a species. Human evolution is a multi-dimensional process. It's also important to understand that your past karma contains all the answers to all the questions you ask in life and for this reason it is very closely related to flow karma. This means that neural plasticity is not only influenced by your behaviour and what you do in life, but also by what is natural in terms of human evolution across a species.

• Direct karma

  Direct karma is the chain of choices and consequences which relate specifically to you as an individual human being and your mystical transaction or your relationship with your environment. For example if you put your hand in fire you get burned. If you jump into water you get wet. Ig you misplace your house keys, you start to believe you have lost your keys and experience anxiety and start looking for your keys. Direct karma is polar in nature to relationship karma.

  The problem here is, as you're probably aware from your own life experiences, in life you experience big choices and you also make minor insignificant choices. There is no direct logical correlation between choices and consequences. Some of your major choices in life don't work out or result in very minor consequences. Some of your least significant 'throwaway' choices carry major, life-changing consequences.

  Quite often direct karma is often that type of karma associated with problem solving or those 'penny dropping' moments. Maybe you remember trying to learn to ride a bicycle as a kid. You fall off, get grazed knees. You reach a point of despair and maybe started to feel that you were going to be the weird kid who will never be able to ride a bike. But you got on your bike one more time, started pedalling, and discovered you can keep your balance. Notice how this type of experience directly corresponds to having restructured and reorganized your brain through neural plasticity and your brain starts to function differently in its new configuration or shape.

  What's happened in terms of karma, you made some kind of subconscious choice, found the connection between past karma and direct karma, and experienced that penny dropping moment. This is something you've been doing, time and time again, throughout your life.

• Relationship karma

  Relationship karma, as the term suggests, is all the karma you experience from relationships with anyone and anything which isn't you. It includes your mystical transaction and relationship to your environment, for example when you go out in the rain and get wet. You come into contact with a virus and become ill with the flu. A flying bird shits on your hair.

  It also includes all relationships you have with other humans, i.e. social, romantic and sexual relationships. Note here that there's two types of relationship karma. You have given karma and chosen karma, depending on whether you were born into a relationship or chose to be in a relationship. For example your relationship with your parents and children is given karma. You didn't choose your parents or who your kids developed into. You didn't choose your parents. You cannot usually replace your parents so any karma arising out of your relationship with them you're kind of stuck with.

  But then you have chosen karma, friends, romantic partners, neighbours, employers and even complete strangers. It's a different type of karma coming from these relationships.

  Here again, just like direct karma, you get those problem solving and penny dropping experiences. It's a similar situation where you're struggling with some issue, you can't see a way forward or a way out of some predicament. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, someone turns up to save the day or a friend says something and what they say leads you to figure something out. It doesn't always happen, primarily because usually today many people are too self-absorbed or self-focussed, so also quite often even if you hope for someone to turn up and help and support you quite often it turns out that you realize that you can only rely on yourself.

• Flow karma

  Flow karma is the kind of karma you need to develop in order to progress in life or to develop what is known as a flow of life. Here I need to address a couple of popular misconceptions.

  Working within my particular field you will come across many spiritual guides, healers, gurus and leaders who will tell you that you need to resolve all your karma to attain enlightenment. Please don't listen to them. They are idiots. This is a bit like the inactive brain fallacy. It's not possible to resolve completely all your karma. Life is a process of resolving karma through creating new karma. Enlightenment is not some 'higher consciousness' or a different mental state. Enlightenment is all those penny dropping moments, enlightenment is learning, enlightenment is figuring shit out. This is what enlightenment is.

  But then there's the more common misconception of free will which usually comes hand in hand with moral reasoning or morality. You think you had freedom of choice, you made the right decision (rather than a wrong decision or a bad decision) and things worked out. If you remember perception isn't reality and believing that you had free will and made the right decision simply means you're in denial of your mystical transaction and the relationship between your brain, your environment and karma. See that flow karma was once your past karma, hence the polar relationship between the two. In making that transition from past karma to flow karma you changed your brain, made the 'right' choice, and altered your thought process.

  This is the other aspect of mind over matter. Just like turning your hand into a fist without knowing how, you used mind over matter to make a choice or decision without knowing how. See mind goes into matter and back into mind. This is reincarnation. It's still the relationship between energy and consciousness, between physical form and space. Trust me, 24 hours later you will not remember the thought process which led to the choice. You will only be grateful that you did.

Ignorance

So now we come to the subject of what mind over matter is all about. Fundamentally mind over matter is all about ignorance. I'm going to give you an example of past karma which affects all of us, and which has done so over the past 10,000 or 15,000 years or thereabouts. I'm referring to the so-called Fall of Man, the belief in separateness where collectively the human species somehow chose not to develop the different planes of consciousness but instead focus on the narrow focus of conscious attention (Ego), a belief in separateness between man and his environment and each other. Out of this we get the notion of free will. Out of this we get many concepts, languages, and have created through nothing more than thinking and imagination a range of different (conceptual) levels of reality, familial, social, political, religious, socio-economic and so on.

Now we have gained benefits from this evolutionary choice. We have concepts of past and future, history, culture, a concept of social security and healthcare, sciences, arts, music and so on. But we have also paid the price and taken on detrimental and negative consequences. The main price we pay, collectively, in believing in our separateness and free will, is ignorance. The undercurrent through history of war, conflict, violence, cruelty, inhumanity and bigotry.

This affects each of us in our life experience. We are all chronically and profoundly ignorant. We have narrowed our conscious awareness to focus on a sense of (separate) self we call Ego. We emphasize our individual life experiences and focus on the choices we make.

To understand how this generally plays out in reality I give you the example of playing a harp. You do not play a harp by simply running your fingers back and forth across all the strings. This does not make music. You play the harp by plucking individual strings which produce the notes to make music. But see, when playing the harp, for each individual string you pluck, you reject all the other strings. Similarly when making a choice and acting on it, you consider two, three maybe four possible options or variables before settling on a choice. You often don't even consider many other opportunities or possibilities but quite often you don't even perceive them.

This is where we come to mind over matter. While I call myself a mystic, shaman and dream weaver, fundamentally I'm a magician. My main interest in life is magic, only I'm not a stage magician. The illusion I create is the special insight I bring to people's lives which makes them think and raises their conscious awareness. This is why I don't call myself a psychic. Calling myself a psychic would imply that I have special powers, function on a higher plane of consciousness, or that I communicate with the dead. None of this is true. I've just studied the occult, Kabbalah and magic for 40 years, have undergone training as a Buddhist shaman, and have a better awareness of mystical principles than most other people. I have no different powers, abilities or consciousness to you. I simply make use of my mystical insight and awareness for healing and social purposes. I walk a shamanistic path through life. This path is accessible to you and everyone else. The only difference is individual choice, karma and neural plasticity.

The central role of the mystical transaction in your life

Thank God there's such a thing as a QR code. Using the QR code as an example is going to make it much, much easier to raise your awareness just how important and how central the mystical transaction is to every single aspect of your life. Consider that I could just as easily use a bar code.

The QR code is a type of digital code. In order to make use of a QR code you need a smartphone with a camera and a QR scanner app. What happens when you open your QR scanner app on your smartphone and point your smartphone camera at the code, either a link to a website opens up automatically via the browser on your smartphone, you send data to another website say to verify your identity, or you receive a text message or email with information tied to a webpage. In other words you have an example of a mystical transaction.

The mystical transaction is exactly the same in your life.

Let's start with the environment. The basis of all physical existence is the energy vibration. However the basis of all existence is consciousness, which is information. However consciousness has no physical form and exists in a field between space and Akasha (spirit). We cannot reliably differentiate between space, consciousness and spirit (Akasha) except through energy and physical form. But what you have is a constantly changing vibration, pattern, rhythm or process which you perceive as environment. In other words what you have is code, just like a QR code - which I'm using as a hologram as an example of an environment.

In my above example of using a QR code the smartphone, camera and apps (software) correspond quite neatly to your body and biology, your sensory nervous system and your brain. However there is one major difference between my QR code example and how things work in reality. In my example the QR code is just a code, so it's objective. It doesn't matter what smartphone, camera and QT code app you're using, you still get the same information and data. When it comes to how things work in reality, there is no objective reality to speak of. Your perception of your environmental reality is always subjective and shaped by your unique, individual mystical transaction, your biology, and the shape and function of your brain (your neural plasticity).

So there you have it. There is no separateness anywhere in existence. No free will. No determinism. All there is in reality is a mystical transaction and a close relationship between your environment and your brain. All around you is whatever pattern or rhythm in your environment you recognize. Your response to your environment and also everyone and everything in it is determined by the chemistry, shape and function of your brain at that moment in time.

Everything you think is free will and what you are doing right in life is just you recognizing a vibration, a pattern, a rhythm and you being able to respond to it through the chemistry, shape and function of your brain. None of your conscious will or your intentions have that much influence or amount to much in comparison with your mystical transaction and the relationship between your environment and your brain. All your desires, your hopes, your fears, your anxieties are just minor energies and sensations which colour your perception of your environment and not much more than this.

Furthermore nothing is fixed or predetermined. This is not how karma works. Your life flows along a certain trajectory in accordance with the laws of physics, biology and mystical principles. Keep in mind with each new situation or circumstances the trajectory of your life changes, sometimes ever so slightly, sometimes not. But see with each and every single choice and decision you make you not only determine how you will respond, but you also modify and also change the trajectory and outcome in your life. Choices become consequences. Consequences become posssibilities. Possibilities become opportunities, Opportunities become choices. This is how karma works in reality and it's all cycles upon cycles of energies, sensations, experiences passing through your mystical transaction.

What you will find, if you take a step back and think about this, and how your life turns out, is that throughout your life works out best when you pay attention to your environment and relationships and then take the path of least resistance. Unless you've completely bought into the illusions of your social conditioning and messed up your perspective on life, this is what you've been doing all along ever since you were eight or nine years old. Don't pay attention to anyone who tells you that life is all about hard work. It isn't. Believing that hard work and effort - choosing the difficult path - gets you through life only adds to the stress, friction and conflicts you experience.

Maybe I need to write a separate blog post about stress and how it affects you in life. What do you think?

This is where I will leave this. Hopefully I have answered some of your questions and passed on some insight. Maybe I've elicited more unanswered questions. This is also good. Now go out, explore, experiment, please don't take my words here as gospel. See what really matters is what this insight means to you and how it benefits you.