Occulture

This time around we’re chatting with Gilbert Bates, author of a book I stumbled across earlier this year called “Love and the Three Levels of Consciousness”. Gil has authored a couple other books on similar themes, but this is the one that we focus on for the purpose of this conversation. The book is about the three levels of the brain, the brainstem, the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex, and how early emotional trauma is registered as a painful sensation in the lower brain, the brainstem. The need to repress this pain from conscious awareness leads to a disconnection between the cognitive brain and the social and emotional brain. Gil posits that the disconnection between these three distinct levels as well as the lack of essential input from the deeper sensing/feeling brain areas are the root cause of nearly all mental illness, and the reason why humans have so much trouble relating to each other in loving ways. We also talk a bit about how to heal ourselves with primal therapy, which is a therapeutic