Science of Identity Foundation:

Any questions, does anyone have anything to say?

Girl: Jagad Guru, I was wondering why some people can have damage to their brain and lose their memory temporarily or permanently?

Jagad Guru: Yes, people can. They can damage their brain, and they can damage their leg and lose their memory. Some people just lose their memory for no reason at all. There's no physical problem, you can't even see any physical problem. It’s called amnesia. They lose their memory. We're not saying that the brain cannot be used by the self and that the brain is not in any way ever hooked up to the mind. It can be. But if you look at a plant, a plant has memory. But it has no brain. Therefore, there must be some other… if the… the mind is using some other mechanism. And often also, there's another point here, that some people lose part of their brain, a lot of their brain. But others, you will find that the mind starts to use other portions of their brain to do what it had previously been using. The portion of the brain that had been destroyed, it starts using this other portion of the brain instead. In other words, part of the brain takes over what the other part of the brain was doing before. In other words, the mind starts using another part of the body for what it was doing. And this is the only way you can explain how people can't have brains, but they have memory and so on and so forth, is that somehow the mind is using some other part of the body, or even the body as a whole. As far as, you know to, to make it so that this function was there, or this function was there.

There's a difference between saying that the mind and the brain can be hooked up, okay? And they obviously are hooked up in many cases. That my mind is hooked up to my brain. But it's also hooked up to my hands, and it's also therefore hooked up to the world, okay? It doesn't mean that I am my brain, or that my mind is my brain anymore than it means that my mind are my hands, or the things which touch my hands.

The self is not the brain, the brain is not the self, and the mind is not the brain. The mind is the subtle material body which covers the self and the gross physical body is covering the mind, and the mind somehow manifests or connects up with this gross physical body so that the self can use this gross physical body, okay? Now in many cases the brain can be the primary organ and in many cases it may not be. But this is much different than saying that the mind… or that the brain is the mind. Do you understand this?