In our society right now, the coronavirus pandemic has been highlighting the importance of managing your health in your daily life. The World Health Organization (WHO) is presenting a new concept called “health promotion.” It is a shift from treatment to prevention, and now, to promoting health.
Behind this message is the realization that although treatment is provided by a doctor, healing is something you do on your own. It’s also the understanding that health is not only the absence of disease, but a condition in which the body’s metabolic function and vital phenomena are active, which means that natural healing power and immunity are enhanced.
Increasing natural healing power and immunity starts first and foremost with feeling the condition of our body, including our body’s temperature, breathing, and energy. This sensitivity to our body is the beginning of Human Technology, the technology for increasing human beings’ quality of life.
You could say that my Brain Education method is the key to Human Technology, but what is Brain Education? Brain Education is, first, the skills for living youthfully. Everybody wants to live a youthful and healthy life, and there are skills to be able to do that. Those skills are found in Brain Education.
Second, many people want to live a happy life. But to be happy, we have to know what happiness is. Brain Education is an academic study that lets you know what happiness is. When you practice Brain Education, you come to know the value and meaning of happiness. It’s when you know the true meaning of happiness that the technology emerges.
Third, we are life forms who cannot live alone; we need to live together. Since we are interdependent, it’s natural to want everyone to have a happy life, not only ourselves, but the society we’re living in doesn’t always allow for that. Therefore, we need something that lets people have this dream of everyone having a happy life.
Brain Education is about empathizing with ourselves and each other to create this shared dream of a happy life for all. The essence of this is each person loving themselves.
I talk about the brain for the purpose of directing interest
and attention to ourselves first. The brain can’t be seen. It’s hard to feel it, and you can’t touch it, either. When something is too close, it’s hard to feel it.
From the moment I was cognizant of my brain and understood my value, I started having conversations with my brain. My life changed, and I became proactive and creative, and even loneliness and fear vanished. I started to see and hear what I needed to do.
This is an experience. It’s not something that you can get from theories. That’s why meditation is important; it’s about feeling your brain. We need this in order to make our brain our own. This is what we’re talking about when we say our brain is awakened.
Having the awareness to be able to diagnose the condition of our body ourselves rather than relying on a doctor to do it happens when our brain is awake.
For example, our brains can tell when we are in a Water Up, Fire Down energy state. Ordinarily, such a state is expressed as just being happy and comfortable, or liking something. On the other hand, when we get stressed, our brains get hot. Our bellies are supposed to be warm, but if the heat from our bellies goes up into our heads, then, conversely, the cold energy goes down into our lower bellies. The energy has been switched. This is what we call “Reversed Water Up, Fire Down.”
Knowing through the cognition of our brains that this state isn’t normal means we’re connected with our brains. If we keep getting stressed and our heads get too hot, what happens? Does our eyesight become more vivid and clear, or dim and fuzzy? Do our mouths become as dry as the Sahara, or not dry? Does our skin become dry, or not? They all get dry when we’re in a Reversed Water Up, Fire Down state.
To keep our energy state in Water Up, Fire Down, I suggest checking our energy at least once a week. This will give our brains time to examine ourselves and make necessary changes. Whatever we want to do, we need to give our brains time to do it.
The skill of staying young has to do with effective self-management and having good habits for always keeping ourselves in a state of Water Up, Fire Down. This involves eliminating bad habits and praising what’s good. It’s important to keep complimenting and encouraging ourselves. Just as we praise and give love to a dog that we’re raising, getting our brain to stay true to us for life also depends on how we treat it.
If we want a happy life, we need a brain that is balanced. Water Up, Fire Down is a balanced state. When we don’t have that, our brains’ condition is unstable. Then we tend to want what other people have, even if we don’t need it. But happiness isn’t something that someone else hands to us; it’s something we make for ourselves.
If we feel satisfied with our current circumstances and feel grateful
and keep working hard and giving our best effort in our lives, real happiness keeps growing bigger. But if we think happiness comes from money, fame, and power and pursue them in inappropriate ways, our brains don’t have a chance to calm down. They can’t create our happiness.
If we don’t feel happiness ourselves, or have hope that we can create happiness, would we be able to think of our neighbors and hope for all people in the world to be happy? There are so many countries that are struggling. Even now, there is a tremendous number of people who are starving to death because they don’t have enough food to eat.
It’s said that this is the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, and although there are tremendous conveniences that come from the developments of the 4th Industrial Revolution, what will happen if we continue with the it on the wrong track, without the goal of everyone living a happy life? In order to correct the wrong direction of the 4th Industrial Revolution, I would like to talk about the 5th Industrial Revolution.
The 5th Industrial Revolution is based on an industry of character. It’s necessary to recover humanity’s character. Whatever work we do, whether we’re working at a restaurant or cleaning, if we do it with the mindset of thriving collectively and coexisting because we’ll all face co-destruction if we keep going the way we are now, we’ll realize for ourselves that we’re all necessary for the future of the earth.
We are all going through the process of Birth – Aging – Illness – Death. Perhaps having an intention to live a life that’s helpful to the earth before we go demonstrates the brain’s awakening. In that sense, finding the goal of life is precisely the way to become the master of the brain. Looking at this, it’s a question of, “Is the purpose of your life success, or is it completion?”
For a person whose purpose is completion, their interpersonal relationships are based on respect instead of control, harmony instead of competition. Their profits are based on promoting public interest. If we just change our purpose to completion, then we can all live in harmony with one another and the earth. However, if we keep going the way we have been, we’ll end up with collective destruction. Ultimately, what’s produced is misery.
Choosing completion as our purpose does not require engaging in ascetic practice for 5 or 10 years. Once we put ourselves in a state of Water Up, Fire Down, we can make determinations about ourselves. When we reach a conclusion about what kind of life we’re resolved to live, as the master of our brains, we’ll come up with our own skills for living youthfully. And we’ll be able to design happy lives for ourselves.
Let’s utilize the 4th Industrial Revolution well. Out of everything that’s produced from the earth, even if we only produced one-tenth of it, if we distributed it well, there would never be anyone starving to death. There have to be a lot of people who feel the same about this. It doesn’t work with just one or two people talking about it. In the future, if many people share this sentiment, then we can find the answer not only to domestic problems, but to global problems.
Note: Ilchi Lee gave this keynote lecture at the Human Technology Conference hosted by the Global Cyber University on July 17, 2021. Ilchi Lee founded this 4-year undergraduate accredited university in Cheonan, South Korea in 2010. He serves as its president.
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