An article was posted on a Facebook group in which the researcher is reporting that “supposedly nonconscious preparatory brain activity is really just part of a fairly random ebb and flow of background neural activity, and that movements occur when this activity crosses a certain threshold. By this account, people’s willful movements should be quicker when they’re made at a time that just happens to coincide with when the background ebb and flow of activity is on a high point, ( which comes across as an intuition).”

The article is pasted below. But for anyone who studies and practices either Raja Yoga and Patanjali’s Sutras or the teachings of the Buddha leading to Buddhist Tantra, the researcher was speaking of that which has been already well understood within both those frames of wisdom, as offered in my response on Facebook.

The article (posted below my bulleted thoughts) is describing the complex rubric of recognition that Buddhist masters have taught for millennium and that Patanjali taught as well. It is amazing to me how humanity insists on constantly re-creating the wheel in every factor of human existence! Once the split in the Atlantean root race happened (represented for communication in the mythic Tower of Babel), the sharing of wisdom among us has been left to rudimentary means, which means that not everyone gets the message.Yet, in this article one can read into the researcher and hear his previous lives of training in the Raja Yoga-and Buddhist understanding of how to tease out the aggregation of factors that create and re-ify the sense of self as the automatic notion that perceives reality.

Within Buddhist tantra and a variety of symbols used for teaching and applicable method, the essence of the article is rendered eloquently.

1. The knife or katrika or a variety of sharp tools. These represent the acuity required to catch the mind in its patterned thought processes. As the posted article states, “These researchers believe that the supposedly non-conscious preparatory brain activity is really just part of a fairly random ebb and flow of background neural activity, and that movements occur when this activity crosses a certain threshold.”  Yes, this non-conscious background neural activity is the automatic unmindful quality of daily habits and living that are predicated upon attachment, craving, the sense of separate this and that’s that ceaselessly engage the common (lower) mind and reinforce the rubric of reality in which the sense of self exists. The sharp instrument is a reminder to be sharp, be present and alert to each moment. Do not live in the somnambulism of the mindlessness regarding oneself and reality. Cut through the fog of by-rote habituized existence.
2. The filled skull cup: The skull represents many things, but germane to this article, it represents the contents of one’s mindstream. This includes all emotions, beliefs, preferences, fears, and how one identifies everything in existence. We are to empty the skull cup – always through some imbibing process. But as one looks at the contents of the skull cup, they are gross, so the thought of “drinking or eating” this morbid content is repulsive and one avoids doing so. The day one begins to – that’s the tantric path of self-transformation on a deep causative level. The contents are given in the article which is almost a word for word quote from Shakyamuni Buddha 2600 years ago. “The ‘I’-consciousness is built up on the basis of the experiences of sense-perception, sensations, feelings, thinking and expressions of will. To develop the ‘I’, the human being must therefore enter into relations of many kinds with the world around him.” To drink the contents of our mind-stream is to empty it of the clutter and unreality that we have collected. The article offers, “And it is his task to bring these into a right interaction. Intuition in fact becomes self-observation here. This activity is necessary, above all for the human being himself. It is an instrument … of a permanent metamorphosis of the lower ‘I’ to the higher ‘I’. “
3. The flaming Sword of Insight: When the above two processes are recognized of value and necessary, then one begins to wield the flaming Sword of Insight. The article states, “The human being, metamorphoses which involves his entire threefold being: body, soul and spirit. This process takes place by means of the destruction of one kind of harmony and the setting up of another.” The old harmony was one predicated upon attachment and delusion. There was a congruence to the person as a person, but, as such, that person is doomed to cyclic unhappiness. This is because the foundation of the existence is predicated upon the delusion of the “I-consciousness.” The Sword represents alignment of the three aspects of being on a micro and macro scale, meaning body, soul, spirit, or body, mind, spirit, or body, emotions, mind for the micro. And the macro could mean personality, Soul, and Triad, or Monad and such macro considerations. The Sword also is Insight: the insight into the delusory condition of one’s self-made reality. The article again, “Intuition is a direct being-within, a penetrating into the truth that gives us everything that pertains to it at all. It merges completely with what is given to us in our intuitive judgment.”

From the article, “The principle of ‘beholding’ ( on the contrary), is based on the capacity to identify with the object of cognition, preconditions for which are the pure will in thinking and love for the object of cognition.” This is mindfulness – literally meaning that one’s presence of mind is brought fully to the given moment. In being fully present to the moment as it is, the person as he or she is, the situation as it is, without inner labeling, projecting, commenting, assuming, judging, etc, then the “power” of Clarity, sharp and precise, simple and plain, arises as the only mind state. This is the “interruption of the movement” stated in the beginning of the article. Patanjali offers it this way:

• In the lucidity of coalesced, reflection-free contemplation, the nature of the self becomes clear. 1:47;
• The wisdom that arises in that lucidity is unerring. 1:48;
• and lastly, Experience consists of perceptions in which the luminous aspect of the phenomenal world is mistaken for absolutely pure awareness. Focusing with perfect discipline on the different properties of each yields insight into the nature of pure awareness. 3:36

********    The article *******

The lead researcher, Dr. John-Dylan Haynes of Charité – Universitätsmedizin in Berlin, said in the study’s press release:

“A person’s decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves. “They are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement. Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought.”
This new finding comes on the back of research by French neuroscientists published in 2012 . These researchers believe that the supposedly nonconscious preparatory brain activity, is really just part of a fairly random ebb and flow of background neural activity, and that movements occur when this activity crosses a certain threshold. By this account, people’s willful movements should be quicker when they’re made at a time that just happens to coincide with when the background ebb and flow of activity is on a high point, ( which comes across as an intuition).

The human being as the subject of the cultural-historical process is placed in the centre of the activity of higher and lower forces. And it is his task to bring these into a right interaction. Intuition in fact becomes self-observation here,
This activity is necessary, above all for the human being himself. It is an instrument for his individualization and bears the character of a permanent metamorphosis of the lower ‘I’ to the higher ‘I’. In this process the human being stands at the crossing-points of the lemniscates which unite within themselves metahistory, history and sub-history.

The development of the ‘I’ and of ‘I’-consciousness cannot take place in a linear fashion, in the form of a continually ascending movement. The human being, metamorphoses which involve his entire threefold being: body, soul and spirit. This process takes place by means of the destruction of one kind of harmony and the setting up of another.

The ‘I’-consciousness is built up on the basis of the experiences of sense-perception, sensations, feelings, thinking and expressions of will. To develop the ‘I’, the human being must therefore enter into relations of many kinds with the world around him.
Intuition is generally distrusted, but it is the sole mode of cognition applicable to the living world. All thinking- conscious and subconscious – is a direct apprehension of reality. Intuition means being within truth.

With intuition a truth is not imposed upon us from outside, because, from our standpoint, there is no inner and outer characterized by opposition to our own perception. Intuition is a direct being-within, a penetrating into the truth that gives us everything that pertains to it at all. It merges completely with what is given to us in our intuitive judgment.

Every organism is an individuality that governs and determines itself from a center. Every activity of our personality is connected with this center of our being.

The unified soul is given to us in experience just as much as its individual actions are. If one disregards this connection between the intention and will, everything is reduced to physical or physiological processes. The principle of abstract thinking, however, is based on ego-centredness.

The principle of ‘beholding’ ( on the contrary), is based on the capacity to identify with the object of cognition, preconditions for which are the pure will in thinking and love for the object of cognition.

Then, this means that in relations of productive activity, of intuition, we must move away from the ego-centredness of competition and the struggle for survival, to the principle of mutual support.In this way the will is developed that is necessary for the ‘power of judgment in beholding’.
from R.Steiner. G. A. Bondarev – Macrocosm and Microcosm