The Two Pillars

Two pillars rise before the entrance.

In Solomon’s temple they were named Jachin and Boaz. They marked the passage into the sacred building. Here, in our journey through the living brain, they become an image for the paired architecture of the cerebral hemispheres, the great structures through which so much of our embodied experience unfolds.

We pass between them.

The skull encloses us like the walls of a sanctuary. Beneath its bone, protective membranes surround the brain. Clear fluid cushions its living tissue. The folded surface opens into a landscape of pathways and hidden relationships.

We have entered a place untouched by direct sunlight.

Yet the world experienced through it is filled with brightness.

Somewhere outside, the sun may be crossing a window. Here, within the body’s darkness, that light becomes part of a visible room, a remembered morning, a face recognized after years of absence.

The ancient temple has become an intimate mystery. A hidden interior makes a whole experienced world available.

Farther in, the passage brings us toward the thalamus, involved in relaying much of the sensory information reaching the cortex. The arrivals of the outer court pass through the living arrangements by which the world becomes known. Around us, regions work together in perception, feeling, recollection, and response.

The temple is alive with this work.

A narrower passage brings us beside the claustrum, a thin sheet of gray matter with extensive connections. Its Latin name evokes an enclosure, a closed place. The image has made it a favorite chamber in modern esoteric accounts of the brain.

Francis Crick and Christof Koch asked whether its relationships might help explain the unity of conscious experience. A later clinical report described disrupted awareness during stimulation near this region in one patient. Such encounters have made the claustrum part of the continuing inquiry into how an experienced world holds together.

Here it gives our journey an image of coordination.

There are many arrivals, yet you experience a life. The color of a face, the sound of a voice, the feeling of recognition, and the history of a relationship can become one encounter.

The private room of prayer now acquires an inward resonance. Jesus’ instruction to enter a room and close the door belongs to a teaching about the intimacy of prayer. As we carry it into this temple, the closing of the door becomes the recollection of attention.

The world remains present. Its claims no longer have to fill every chamber at once.

The quiet makes the next doorway visible.