There is a battle being fought right now — not in any war zone, not in any parliament, but inside the human skull. It is a battle as old as our species, between two competing forces of awareness: the older consciousness rooted in fear, and the newer consciousness rooted in love. The outcome of this battle, playing out in the minds of billions of people simultaneously, will determine whether humanity survives the century — or transcends it.
A Tale of Two Awarenesses
When the newer awareness gains the upper hand, something remarkable happens. We begin to see a God of love and compassion rather than a God of wrath. We extend religious freedom rather than wage holy wars. We practice generosity rather than hoard resources.
When the older awareness dominates, the story turns darker. We worship an angry god who scourges enemies with plagues and dispatches chosen armies on so-called holy wars. Greed and intolerance take the wheel. And everything — every mountain, every river, every forest, every child — becomes a commodity.
This is not metaphor. This is neuroscience.
When the World Becomes a Commodity
The lower awareness does not just shape theology. It shapes economics, politics, and our relationship with the living world around us.
Consider water — one of the essential elements of life, the home of aquatic organisms, a natural highway for civilisations. To the older awareness, water is simply a liquid to be bottled and sold. Air, the substance without which no human draws a second breath, becomes vacant space available for industrial waste. Soil — the thin, miraculous layer that feeds all human life — is reduced to property to be owned, fenced, and saturated with chemicals.
Mountains cease to be places of majesty and become open-pit mines. Forests are no longer animal habitats or places for contemplation — they are future planks and boards. Even the space beyond our atmosphere, that vast frontier of mystery, is treated as both a dumping ground for planetary trash and a surveillance platform for spying on neighbours.
This is the worldview of the old brain in full command: everything that exists has value only insofar as it generates profit.
People as Products
The commodification does not stop at nature. When fear governs consciousness, human beings become resources too.
Children in developing nations are pulled into sweatshop labour. Children in wealthy nations are groomed from birth to become obedient workers in a system that values output over personhood. The elderly — the keepers of living memory and hard-won wisdom — are warehoused in institutions and left to wait. And people in the years between childhood and old age are too often trained in warfare or programmed with the logic of “get even, get ahead, at any cost.”
Perhaps the most chilling expression of this dehumanisation is the bureaucratic phrase collateral damage — language carefully engineered to let us gloss over the killing of innocent civilians without feeling a thing.
The Ancient Brain and Its Ancient Gods
To understand why this keeps happening, we need to understand the brain that drives it.
The old brain — the survival brain — developed in our distant mammalian ancestors at a time when enormous predators still roamed the earth. In that world, the calculus was simple: fight or flee. Every rustling in the undergrowth was a potential threat. Every stranger was a potential rival competing for the same scarce resources.
That primal circuitry did not disappear when we built cities and wrote philosophies. It went underground. And it shaped our earliest mythologies — a spirit world populated with fierce gods demanding sacrifice, physical reality governed by invisible forces requiring appeasement, and a cosmos filled with titans and giants who had to be defeated.
The Incas spoke of primordial beings who could move mountains with bare hands. The Greeks gave Zeus a thunderbolt to wreak havoc on the earth. The Hebrew scriptures describe God telling Moses of a land once ruled by giants.
Out of this mythic inheritance grew the old brain’s most dangerous conviction: my god is stronger than your god. And with it, the corollary: only those of our faith are chosen; everyone else is a pagan destined for hellfire. This belief has justified more violence than perhaps any other idea in human history — and it continues to do so today.
The New Brain and Its Quiet Revolution
And yet there is another story running alongside this one.
The prefrontal cortex — the most recently evolved region of the human brain — is associated with everything that distinguishes us from our frightened mammalian ancestors. Reasoning. Creative thinking. The invention of music and the alphabet. The discovery of science. Personal initiative. The ability to project ourselves into the future and imagine how things might be different.
Most significantly, the prefrontal cortex appears to be the seat of individuality — the place where the sense of self first emerged. When the brain functions in full synergy and the prefrontal cortex is genuinely awakened, something profound becomes possible. We gain the capacity for the highest forms of intelligence and creativity. We understand who we are in relation to our community and our history. We can think originally. We can see clearly what holds us back and what will help us grow.
The new brain, operating at this level, understands something the old brain cannot: we do not have to live in a continuous state of threat. We are not locked in a hostile world haunted by death. We are, instead, interconnected — with each other, with every living thing, with the planet itself. It is this understanding that lies at the heart of every great spiritual tradition: love your neighbour as yourself. Turn the other cheek. Return to the source.
Two Callings, One Species
This tension — the ways of fear and the ways of love — is not new. For millennia, a small minority living in monasteries, ashrams, and contemplative communities have accessed this higher awareness. The wider population, however, has remained caught in the older patterns: seeking wealth, justifying greed, and returning again and again to violence as the preferred method of resolving conflict.
These two callings have plagued humanity for as long as we have written records. They continue today in every argument about ecological disaster and global warming, in every holy war, in every boardroom decision that treats a river as an asset and a community as a cost.
And reason alone has not been enough to tip the balance. If reason had ever truly prevailed over passion, the history of humanity would not be written in blood.
The Leap That Awaits
Here is the extraordinary possibility of this particular moment in history: we are standing on the edge of a genuine leap in consciousness — not as isolated mystics, but as a species.
For the first time, human beings can see the Earth from space. We can comprehend, in real and scientific terms, that the health of the planet and the health of its inhabitants are inseparable. We understand, at least intellectually, that we are woven into a web of life in which all creatures — and perhaps even inanimate matter — are interconnected as part of a vast field of information and energy.
To move from intellectual understanding to lived experience of this truth — to genuinely know it in the way that transforms behaviour — requires activating the full capacity of the prefrontal cortex. It requires healing and developing that part of the human brain that allows us not merely to analyse the world, but to dream a new one into being.
The battle between the old awareness and the new is not lost. It is, in fact, at its most critical juncture. The question is not whether the leap is possible.
The question is whether enough of us will choose to make it.
Source : Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment by David Perlmutter, Alberto Villoldo
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9403936-power-up-your-brain
Read the Previous Article in the Series :
Leave a Reply