What's a Brain For?

One of our friends asked, "Are there "mental" things that you are unable to do without a physical body, specifically a brain? For example, can you still do math (assuming you could when you *did* have a brain!)?" What about Languages?

---

• MY ANSWER:
• We have access to much more information when we are freed from our bodies. There might be some categories of mental activity we don't participate in because they depend directly on the physical senses.  But I can't think of any. Activities that depend on the passage of time are hard for us because we don't think of time the way you do.  But we can just borrow a clock or calendar from one of our embodied friends and fit our consciousness temporarily into linear time.  Questions about things like whose grandchild is the prettiest or the smartest are meaningless to us because obviously mine is all that.
• The brain is there to coordinate the activities of the body. If you didn't have a body you wouldn't need a brain.
• Being embodied creates the divisions that you perceive as real. You see apples and eggs as individual things that need to be counted and added and subtracted.  Hence the need for math. Fortunately much of math involves hypothetical numbers and even imaginary numbers and we can play that game as well as anyone. 
• Languages are just ways of putting thoughts into manageable boxes, once again arbitrary divisions that don't exist.  You can tell that this is true when you realize that different languages divide the color spectrum differently.  They have different points where one color ends and another begins.  So, yes, disembodied people can understand all languages but not the way you think.  We understand vibrations and thought forms. I suppose I could learn how to conjugate irregular verbs in German or Russian since I don't have a physical brain slowing me down or limiting my memory capacity.  But I don't need to.  I can talk to someone who speaks Japanese the same way I speak to Donya.  I give them thoughts and they translate the thoughts into words that come as close as possible to the meaning of the thought. When someone speaks to me in Japanese (and they do) I don't hear the Japanese; I hear the thought  
• I won't say you will understand everything after you leave your body because everything is still being created.  But you will understand a lot.  And the things I am saying about there being no divisions will make sense to you. 
• Mostly what you need in order to use words is a body.  You need a voice, something to make sounds.  Or since gorillas don't have the appropriate apparatus for making human word sounds they can be taught to use sign language.  Or you can learn to write words.  There are legends of dead people using radio receivers and telephones to help them make words.  It's a whole lot easier if you have someone like Donya who can make the words for you.
• The things that happen to language and memory and personality in cases of brain damage are indicative of the way your 3D brain and body make artificial divisions in reality.  Someone who suffers aphasia or amnesia is having trouble with the physical processes of speech and memory.  As I learned, much to my own amazement, my mind was active and my thoughts were lucid even when I was comatose.  When I was conscious but unable to speak, my brain and my nervous system were not able to do the things needed to allow me to speak but my mind was perfectly functional outside of my body.  Ask Donya.  We had many conversations while my brain was too damaged to enable me to communicate with the people in the room with me. Sometimes when Donya can't quite get what I want her to say I will spell out a particular word for her.  It's much slower than when she just takes a thought and runs with it.  This is what happened when I tried to explain my near-death experience to her.   Since there was so much that didn't make sense to her I had to spell out a lot of the words myself.  It reads very differently than most of our other conversations.  
• There are lots of legends of talking ghosts.  Since it is possible for a non-local consciousness to learn to manipulate matter with energy it is theoretically possible for a ghosty energy person to  make words.  But think about what words are.  You need something physical to vibrate, like vocal chords and you need some way to shape the sounds, like tongue and teeth and palate. Some musical instruments can be made to sound like they are talking.
• If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, is there a sound?   That old chestnut (ha!) reminds us that sound waves are a meaningless form of energy until they are captured by a receiver such as a human ear and brain combo and converted into meaningful sounds.
• The physical body puts limits on what a consciousness is able to perceive.  We all know that there are sounds above and below the range human ears can hear.  There are colors beyond the visible spectrum but in your physical body your attention is directed to a certain limited range.  It's like you have one window to look out of. There might be another window just a few feet away that would give you an entirely different view but in this lifetime you have chosen to learn everything you can through this window.
• Your brain and your sense organs and your skin and your heart and your gut give you access to whatever is available including as much of infinite love as you can perceive. When your brain or nervous system or any part of your body are damaged they can distort your perception of what is.  Even something as apparently mundane as chronic pain can distort how you perceive yourself and the world around you and the world beyond.  Your brain and your nervous system communicate with electrical impulses and chemical changes.  Mental illnesses are treated with chemicals because the disruptions to normal thought processes and emotional responses are caused by chemical imbalances.  Unfortunately the chemicals used medicinally rarely do an adequate job of replacing the original chemicals that are controlled by a well functioning brain and other organs.
• The brain "controls" thinking in a manner of speaking by organizing thoughts and sending out messages that put the thoughts into action.  However the brain does not originate thoughts.  I know because I was originating thoughts like crazy when I was outside of my body when I was alive and ever since I died.  
• Infinity is really really big.  Generally the only way people experience infinite anything is from outside their bodies.  Julia Assante tells about a time as a small child she had a moment in which she saw infinity and that moment changed her life. She didn't say so but I suspect she was temporarily seeing from outside of her body. You can't see infinity or feel infinite love with a physical body.  But you can experience a lot.  And more if you allow yourself to be open to it.  
• XO Ben