Healing (our) criminal minds

Would you like to peek inside with me? Inside the mind of a criminal? You needn’t be afraid. However, I’d like to offer a warning before you do; you may well find such a mind (in many ways) to be not so different from your own. In fact, you may not even be able to discern any superficial difference at all.

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Nearly a quarter of a century of teaching jail inmates twice a week can alter the chemistry of one’s brain (as it surely did mine). Actually, there are lots of things that can alter one’s brain; from sex, drugs, and rock and roll … to a beloved grandparent’s hug, the fragrance of a wildflower, and any stimulus that triggers the memory of an adverse childhood experience.

Science tells us that our brain chemistry constantly changes at every nanosecond. At our every thought and action.

And our brain chemistry is “who we are”.

One of the great discoveries of modern medicine and psychology is the unfathomable effect of the “unconscious” mind on our conscious thoughts and actions. Indeed, much evidence seems to point to our unconscious mind as the unseen entity that rules us all (no matter how much we may swear to high heaven, plead, pray, barter, or believe that it doesn’t).

The more physicists have experimented within the quantum world (the reality of things that happen at the subatomic level all around us all the time), the more it appears that yet another great paradox of nature exists; we appear to have a free will - yet our every thought and action appear also to be predestined. Both appear to be true, both at the same time; free will and predestination (as Forrest Gump once stated so succinctly near the end of his movie.)