Essay By Dr. K. Sadananda
[Dr. K. Sadananda (http://www.advaitaforum.org/) is a research scientist specialized in material science. He worked with the USA Naval Labs until his recent retirement. Starting from a VisishTadvaita environment, he shifted to J. Krishanmurti and later moved on to traditional Advaita under the tutelage of Swami Chinmayananda. He has been teaching Vedanta for over two decades and has been conferred with the title of “Acharya” by the Chinmaya Mission. His easy style of narration laced with wit and unerring focus on the essence of Vedanta earned him a large following on and off the internet.
I am deeply obliged to Dr. Sadananda for readily consenting to post the following interesting write up by him on Devotion. -- ramesam]
On Bhakti Yoga
By Dr. K. Sadananda
Krishna talks of only two paths in Bhagavad-Gita (Ch. III-3) – one is karma yoga for those whose mind is set in yoga of action and the other is jnaana yoga for those whose mind is in yoga of knowledge. Bhakti yoga is not specifically mentioned. The reason is very simple – both have common theme and that is yoga. Yoga means one’s mind is yoked to the higher nature of reality. That demands commitment towards the higher, that is Bhakti or unwavering devotion towards the goal. Hence karma yoga is Bhakti through action and jnaana yoga is Bhakti through knowledge. Thus, Lord Krishna does not consider Bhakti as a separate yoga since it is the bottom line for both karma and jnaana. Nevertheless, Bhakti is emphasized throughout Gita. For example,
samoham sarva bhuuteShu na me dveShyosti na priyaH|
ye bhajantitu maam bhaktyaa mayi te teShu caapyahaM||
“I maintain equanimity to all – I do not favor or disfavor anybody. However, those who worship me with devotion, they are in me and I am in them” -- BG. IX-29.
Karma yoga involves Iswaraarpita buddhi that is offering action as the prayer to the Lord. When action itself becomes a prayer, then we have to make sure what we offer is the best that we can; therefore, dexterity in action is essential for a karma yogi – yogaH karmasu koushalam -says Krishna.
The whole of 12th chapter is called Bhaktiyoga with the emphasis on –
etu sarvaaNi karmaani mayi sanyasya matparaaH|
ananye naiva yogena maam dhyaayhanta upaasate||
teShaamaham samudharthaa mRityusamsaara saagaraat|
bhavaami na ciraatpArthaa mayyaaveshita cetasaam|
“Those who surrender all their actions in me, and meditate on me without any other thoughts, and those who have surrendered everything and whose minds are fully abiding in me, I shall ere long uplift them from the thralldom of the cycle of birth and deaths.”
Shankara defines Bhakti in VivekachuudaamaNi as –
moksha kaaraNa samaargryaam bhaktiH eva gareeyasii|
swaswaruupanusandhaanam bhaktirtyabhidIyate|
swaatmatatvaanusandhaanam bhaktirityaparE jaguH||
“Of all the paths for liberation Bhakti is the supreme. Bhakti is continuous contemplation on one’s own essential nature. Others say that continuous contemplation of the truth of one’s own Atma is Bhakti.”
Atma jnaana vicaara is therefore supreme Bhakti as per Shankara. Krishna classifies devotees into four groups as ArthaH (who thinks of me when in despair), arthaarthii (who prays for prosperity, artha), jignaasu (who desires to know Me) and jnaani (who knows Me), and says jnaani is the highest bhakta since “he loves me the most and I love him the most.”
Hence Bhakti is not a choice here but is the essence in all saadhanas. We shall examine what is involved in Bhakti or devotion in order to understand how a karma yogi perceives bhakti in relation to jnaana yogi, and why Krishna says jnaani is the highest Bhakta.
There is a difference between devotion and love (a word used in common parlance). Love towards a higher is devotion. Love towards lower is actually lust but mistakenly called love. Hence one rises in devotion while one falls in love!
Now what is higher and what is lower? Higher is that wherein the mind becomes calm, quiet and dissolves itself. Dissolving implies all mental agitations are sublimated at the altar of love. This is also called prapatti – a term which has a special significance in VishiShTaadvaita. In Gita we find that until Arjuna surrendered, Krishna did not start teaching – shiShyatvoham saadhimaam tvam prapannam – I am your disciple (prapanna) and I am ready to subject myself to your discipline. That should be the attitude of a student as Krishna himself enumerates that one should approach a teacher with that attitude of surrender – tat viddhi praNipaatena praripraShNena sevayaa – That is devotion towards the teacher and the teaching is essential for knowledge– Only in that attitude of devotion the mind becomes free from agitations and ready to learn. In contrast, lower is that wherein the mind gets more and more agitated – one cannot sleep or eat or do anything constructively since mind is always pre-occupied – that is what happens when one is falling in love.
Love or devotion can be classified into three types: 1) Means Love 2) End-Love and 3) Self-Love. Means love is love of the means to achieve some goal in mind – that is the path to reach the goal. Some are so obsessed with the means that they forget the goal and fanatically fight for the means. We can remind ourselves the story in Gulliver’s travels where the two Lilliputian countries fight among themselves – the issue is how to break the egg – One country says Egg should be broken from the fat end while the other insists on breaking from the thin end. The Means became more important than the end. Religions try to survive by arguing that theirs is the only means to reach the goal and declaring that all other means will lead to eternal hell. Some are ready to kill others in support of their cause to save life of the unborn babies. Since I love the end or the goal so much that I tend to love the means too. That is one kind of love. But some love the means only to get to the goal they want. Once the goal is reached there is no more love for the means since the mission is accomplished. I love my uncle so much since I like to have the wealth that he has; but once I got that wealth, uncle is of no importance; in fact he is considered a nuisance.
How is this related to Bhakti? For the most of the people, God’s love is only a means-love. That is God is considered as a means to achieve some goal in mind. What I love is actually the goal that I want, and means is only a way to get what I want. Everybody has lots of desires – for self and also for family (spouse, children, grand children, etc.) and ‘this’ includes health, wealth, position, power, etc. which are projected as the goals of life. I want to be on the good side of God, since I have learned that He is the one who is the giver. Hence I go from temple to temple, one holy place to another, of course with a big list of what I want from Him. I will make sure I do not forget to prostrate to all the gods in the temple (nowadays there are many in each temple) to make sure that I am not blacklisted by any one of the Gods there.
Whenever we go to a temple, the priest asks during sankalpa that involves informing the God who we are and why we are praying the Lord, - our gotram and our star, etc, so that when God sends the goodies he has the right address. Pujari has a standard wish list for all; he repeats it for everybody without even asking what we really want. Thank God, Krishna lists us also as one of his Bhaktas under the category of artha arthiis – that is all those who are always with begging bowls, however much he has already given. That is called Means-Love.
The second one is called End-Love, not end of love. God itself is the end not the goodies that he gives. I do not care for the goodies, what I love is God. This kind of love is rather rare and is what is really emphasized in most of the devotional paths. The nine modes of Love are the modes of expressing this love towards God. He is the master and I am the servant is the one that is mostly emphasized in VishiShTAdviata. The service according to them involves serving the forms of God – through daily puja and idol worship etc. This Bhakti is exemplified by the twelve Alwars in the vishiShTAdviata tradition. Their Bhakti includes not only serving God but also serving the Bhaktas of the Lord. It is easier to serve the Lord than serve the bhakta of the Lord. In Mukundamaala Kulashekhara Alwar says – tat bRitya bRitya paricaaraka bRitya bRityasya iti maam – I am the servant of the servant of the servant.. .
There is an interesting communication between an advaitin and vishiShTaadvaita. Advaitin signed his letter as so2ham meaning He is me – the mahaavaakya. Obviously the vishiShTaadvaitin did not like that. He put da- in front making it as daaso2ham (I am (His) servant). When advaitin saw the letter he put another –sa- in front making it sadaa so2ham – (eternal identity of He and ‘me’). Of course the vishiShTaadvaitin put another da in front of it making it daasa daaso2ham – servant of the servant. The extended communication is still going on!
The third type of love is the Self-love that Shankara emphasized in the above quoted sloka from VivekacUDAmaNi. This is considered as the supreme love. How can Self love be the supreme love? Yajnavalkya says to his wife Maitreyi in Br. Up. – aatmanastu kaamaaya sarvam priyam bhavati – essentially we love everything or anything else only because we love our selves. I love this – this can be anything (means-love) or even God (end-love) – not for the sake of this but for my sake. I love ‘this’ only because ‘this’ that I love gives me happiness. Hence whether it is means-love or end-love the real love is only self-love. What I love is actually the happiness that I hope to get more than the thing itself. Hence even God lovers do not love God for God’s sake. What they really love is self-contentment or fulfillment. They want to be complete without any inadequacies since full and contented mind is a happy mind. Shree Vidyaaranya says in pancadasi – the love for oneself is the supreme and expresses as – maanabhuuvamhibhuuyaasam – Let me not cease to exist or Let Me Be All the Time. I love myself so much that I want to live eternally. Lakshmiidhara Kavi also makes the same statement in Advaita Makaranda – ahamasmi sadaabhaami kadaachinnaahapariyaH – I am not only existent and conscious but also ananda swaruupa since never I dislike myself.
A jnaani is the one who loves himself – since he revels by himself in himself – atmanyeva aatmanaa tuShTaH, and he has no desire for anything else including God since he has discovered that the God he loves is nothing but his own essence. I am in everyone’s heart; and heart in Vedanta means the very core of one’s individuality. Hence Krishna says jnaani is he who realizes - sarva bhuutastam aatmaanam sarva bhuutaanicha aatmani –that he is the self in all and all are in himself – he is jnaani and that jnaani is the one Krishna says is the supreme bhakta. The self realization is also God realization as Krishna himself in the very next sloka says– yo maam pasyati sarvatra sarvan ca mayi pasyati – those who see Me everywhere and everything in Me.
Hence pure Bhakti should culminate in jnaanam. Therefore, Self-love is God-love – not a God separate from him – it is the culmination of Bhakti where lover and loved have become one - that is advaita. In advaita, Bhakti reaches its pinnacle – and that is moksha or liberation. That is the culmination of Bhakti yoga – same as culmination of jnaana yoga. Hence, Shankara’s definition of Bhakti – swaswaruupa anusandhaanam bhaktirityabhidiiyate.
(The above write up is inspired by a talk given by Swami Paramarthanandaji).
***
DEVOTION
By Rupert Spira
My nephew Dr. Chandra alerted me about a short write up by Rupert on Devotion. Rupert kindly permitted me to reproduce it here.
Question: Is there a place for bhakti or devotion in this [Advaita] approach?
Rupert: To be truly devoted means to give our whole self to the object of our devotion at all times. Therefore, the only object worthy or even available for such devotion or love must be something that is always present, for we cannot give ourselves completely to something that is intermittent.
There are no true objects of devotion because all objects are intermittent. Only Consciousness is ever-present and therefore, only Consciousness merits true devotion. And what could give Consciousness this devotion? Obviously an intermittent object such as a body or a mind cannot render devotion to something that is present when it is not. Therefore only Consciousness is able to impart this devotion to itself.
So, it is only Consciousness that can be truly loved and it is only Consciousness that can truly love. However, Consciousness does not love and is not loved. It is love.
So, the highest form of love or devotion is simply to abide as Consciousness, knowingly.
Any other sort of devotion would be the devotion of any imagined entity towards an imagined object.
However, the imagined entity that looks for a direction in which to turn and for something to turn towards, does not realise that the ‘attention’ it is ‘using’ for this purpose is already the Consciousness that it seeks. It is like a current of water searching the ocean for water.
Every object or direction which appears as a possible recipient of the mind’s devotion is an object that it has created within itself and cannot therefore be the true object of its devotion. Any object is simply more mind.
As the mind searches for a direction in which to turn, it is, without knowing it to begin with, tracing itself back to its source.
Finally, having explored all directions, it comes to a dead end. It comes to the knowledge that there is no known direction in which it can turn nor is there an object worthy of true devotion. In short, the mind cannot know what devotion is.
With this understanding the mind falls silent, which means it dissolves and what is revealed is devotion.
Devotion is what we are, not something we do.
* * *
The investigation within the mind for the true object of devotion is sometimes known as self-enquiry or higher reasoning. It is a concession to the mind that thinks it has the capacity to direct its attention at will towards an object.
However, this is not a process of the mind going towards its source, although it may appear to be so to begin with. It is rather, the dissolution of the apparent mind in its source.
[Note: Only something that is not the source could dissolve in its source, so the idea of the dissolution of the mind in its source is part and parcel of the mind’s belief that it is something other than its source. In other words, the idea of a source from which something emerges is a dualitic idea which itself ‘dissolves’ upon understanding that there is no independent entity, mind or object.]
How could a mind go towards Consciousness? In what direction would it go?
It is rather the source itself, Consciousness, that gradually reclaims the mind.
In taking the shape of mind, Consciousness seems to become something other than itself. It seems to become separate, other and outside. At the end of every perception, Consciousness folds the mind back up within Itself and, as a result, ceases to seemingly veil itself with its own creativity.
However, even that formulation is not quite right: the mind has no other substance other than Consciousness so there is nothing there to be dissolved.
When an image that seems to veil the [TV] screen fades, leaving only the screen in view, did the image really dissolve?
The image was only made of screen. However, by seeming to become something other than itself (the landscape on the screen) the screen seemed to become hidden by taking the shape of the landscape and the subsequent fading of the image seemed to reveal the screen.
Likewise, the mind is an appearance within Consciousness, made only of Consciousness, but has the capacity to seem to veil the Consciousness out of which it is made.
In self-enquiry or higher reasoning the mind fades like the image on the screen, leaving only the background of Consciousness in plain view.
It is not the mind that undertakes this process, any more than it is the image in the landscape that is responsible for its own dissolution. The mind does nothing. The mind is not an independent entity with the capacity to do or not to do anything.
In fact, it was always only Consciousness that was in plain view, simultaneously the background and the foreground.
[Note: One of our esteemed members of this Blog, Cathy has a different take on "Devotion" at her Blog .]
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
QUANTUM PHYSICS AND JAZZ MUSIC SPEAK ADVAITA
Excerpts from an Essay by Paula Marvelly
[Paula Marvelly is a young trained Web-designer, playwright and author in search of the Ultimate Truth for over two decades. As a seeker, she carved out a unique path for herself interviewing over fifteen living Advaita teachers from India, Europe and USA and studying the lives of over twenty enlightened women. Her two books published in 2003 and 2005 received rave reviews, describing her conversations with Advaita masters as “intense and energy-filled” and “touching and deeply personal in a way” and her work on the women of wisdom as “meticulously researched and erudite.”
Paula is now helping a charitable trust, The Advaita Academy in the U.K. My thanks to her for the ready consent to present here excerpts from her essay published here. -- ramesam]
QUANTUM PHYSICS AND JAZZ MUSIC SPEAK ADVAITA
By Paula Marvelly
It was Einstein’s protégé, David Bohm, who put together a fascinating model of reality in a theory, which he called Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
Bohm postulates that the phenomenal world as we know it, consisting of time and space and causality, is the ‘unfolded’ or explicate order of the universe; supporting this unfoldment is the ‘enfolded’ or implicate order, a substratum of information, if you will, within which the archetypal templates of reality are contained.
So, tying this up with the observations made in quantum mechanics and wave/particle complementarity – the implicate order consists of waves; the explicate order represents collapse or unfoldment into particles.
Bohm then goes on to say that underlying both orders is what he calls the holomovement, an undivided wholeness in flowing movement, where all parts of the universe, whether they be at the microscopic or macroscopic levels, are united in one indefinable and immeasurable totality.
***
Two eminent living scientists, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, have proposed their own theory suggesting that ‘moments’ of conscious experience are orchestrated by gamma wave synchrony, which are mediated by microtubules present in brain tissue and which are used as instruments of information processing.
Indeed, EEG experiments performed on Tibetan monks chosen by the Dalai Lama found that levels of gamma synchrony were the highest ever recorded in terms of amplitude, frequency and degree of coherence (as compared to a control group of college students).
***
So what, ultimately, has science to do with advaita? On one level, ultimately nothing. And yet, what contemporary scientific theory is pointing to is that at the fundamental level of existence, the universe is essentially one, from which all manifest phenomena are born. Indeed, when consciousness is taken as a priori, the mind/matter problem, the classical/quantum dilemma, no longer appear to exist. The universe is now perceived as a hierarchical structure, with every level of the physical word – macroscopic, molecular, atomic, nuclear, sub nuclear – having has own inner logic, its own inherent truths, and yet all the while sustained by an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent source.
Indeed, rather than being an epiphenomenonal process, consciousness is fundamental to the universe, pervading all levels of nature and giving rise to conscious experience. Everything in the universe – planets, trees, human beings, thoughts – are a manifestation of consciousness, are a celebration of That.
And out of this dynamic subjectivity, the universal all-pervading Self, we as human beings individualise our consciousness through the filter of our nervous systems, our body-minds, giving rise to the experience of ‘I’, and the apparent divisions between knower and known, observer and observed. Knowing this fundamental paradoxical premise – that diversity is inherent in unity and unity is inherent in diversity – is called self-knowledge and is the inherent message of advaita Vedanta philosophy.
The literary critic, Terry Eagleton, in his book, The Meaning of Life, also uses the analogy of music to conclude his philosophical analysis of the value of human existence in terms of individuality manifesting in the collective whole:
Take as an image of the good life, a jazz group. A jazz group, which is improvising obviously differs from a symphony orchestra, since to a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performances of the other musicians. The complex harmony they fashion comes not from playing from a collective score, but from the free musical expression of each member acting as the basis for the free expression of the others. As each player grows more musically eloquent, the others draw inspiration from this and are spurred to greater heights… There is self-realisation, but only through a loss of self in the music as a whole… There is pleasure to be reaped from this artistry, and – since there is a free fulfilment or realisation of powers – there is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because this flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak, remotely and analogically, of a kind of love… that when we act in this way, we realise our natures at their finest.
[Note: Jerry Katz in his NDhighlights # 3844 reported the 23 March 2010 Article "Quantum Science Proving Mysticism" by Philip. F. Harris. Philip's essay is based on two recent findings in the field of Quantum Physics. His artilce is available here.
[Paula Marvelly is a young trained Web-designer, playwright and author in search of the Ultimate Truth for over two decades. As a seeker, she carved out a unique path for herself interviewing over fifteen living Advaita teachers from India, Europe and USA and studying the lives of over twenty enlightened women. Her two books published in 2003 and 2005 received rave reviews, describing her conversations with Advaita masters as “intense and energy-filled” and “touching and deeply personal in a way” and her work on the women of wisdom as “meticulously researched and erudite.”
Paula is now helping a charitable trust, The Advaita Academy in the U.K. My thanks to her for the ready consent to present here excerpts from her essay published here. -- ramesam]
QUANTUM PHYSICS AND JAZZ MUSIC SPEAK ADVAITA
By Paula Marvelly
It was Einstein’s protégé, David Bohm, who put together a fascinating model of reality in a theory, which he called Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
Bohm postulates that the phenomenal world as we know it, consisting of time and space and causality, is the ‘unfolded’ or explicate order of the universe; supporting this unfoldment is the ‘enfolded’ or implicate order, a substratum of information, if you will, within which the archetypal templates of reality are contained.
So, tying this up with the observations made in quantum mechanics and wave/particle complementarity – the implicate order consists of waves; the explicate order represents collapse or unfoldment into particles.
Bohm then goes on to say that underlying both orders is what he calls the holomovement, an undivided wholeness in flowing movement, where all parts of the universe, whether they be at the microscopic or macroscopic levels, are united in one indefinable and immeasurable totality.
***
Two eminent living scientists, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, have proposed their own theory suggesting that ‘moments’ of conscious experience are orchestrated by gamma wave synchrony, which are mediated by microtubules present in brain tissue and which are used as instruments of information processing.
Indeed, EEG experiments performed on Tibetan monks chosen by the Dalai Lama found that levels of gamma synchrony were the highest ever recorded in terms of amplitude, frequency and degree of coherence (as compared to a control group of college students).
***
So what, ultimately, has science to do with advaita? On one level, ultimately nothing. And yet, what contemporary scientific theory is pointing to is that at the fundamental level of existence, the universe is essentially one, from which all manifest phenomena are born. Indeed, when consciousness is taken as a priori, the mind/matter problem, the classical/quantum dilemma, no longer appear to exist. The universe is now perceived as a hierarchical structure, with every level of the physical word – macroscopic, molecular, atomic, nuclear, sub nuclear – having has own inner logic, its own inherent truths, and yet all the while sustained by an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent source.
Indeed, rather than being an epiphenomenonal process, consciousness is fundamental to the universe, pervading all levels of nature and giving rise to conscious experience. Everything in the universe – planets, trees, human beings, thoughts – are a manifestation of consciousness, are a celebration of That.
And out of this dynamic subjectivity, the universal all-pervading Self, we as human beings individualise our consciousness through the filter of our nervous systems, our body-minds, giving rise to the experience of ‘I’, and the apparent divisions between knower and known, observer and observed. Knowing this fundamental paradoxical premise – that diversity is inherent in unity and unity is inherent in diversity – is called self-knowledge and is the inherent message of advaita Vedanta philosophy.
The literary critic, Terry Eagleton, in his book, The Meaning of Life, also uses the analogy of music to conclude his philosophical analysis of the value of human existence in terms of individuality manifesting in the collective whole:
Take as an image of the good life, a jazz group. A jazz group, which is improvising obviously differs from a symphony orchestra, since to a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performances of the other musicians. The complex harmony they fashion comes not from playing from a collective score, but from the free musical expression of each member acting as the basis for the free expression of the others. As each player grows more musically eloquent, the others draw inspiration from this and are spurred to greater heights… There is self-realisation, but only through a loss of self in the music as a whole… There is pleasure to be reaped from this artistry, and – since there is a free fulfilment or realisation of powers – there is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because this flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak, remotely and analogically, of a kind of love… that when we act in this way, we realise our natures at their finest.
[Note: Jerry Katz in his NDhighlights # 3844 reported the 23 March 2010 Article "Quantum Science Proving Mysticism" by Philip. F. Harris. Philip's essay is based on two recent findings in the field of Quantum Physics. His artilce is available here.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
JIVANMUKTI AND VIDEHAMUKTI
Extracts from the works of Shri S.N. Sastri
[How often does one come across a Computer savvy eighty seven year old Sanskrit Scholar and Vedic pundit well versed in all the major Upansihads as well as the commentaries of Revered Sankara? This rare genius is Shri S.N. Sastri, a retired Senior Finacial Officer of the Indian Government and author of several acclaimed works like Commentaries on Narayaniyam, Hastamalakiyam etc. His agile mind gets reflected in his writings through the lucid, balanced and comprehensive assessment of all the intricate issues of Advaita . Shri Sastri’s articles are available at:
http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/s_n_sastri/s_n_sastri.htm
and also at: http://www.celextel.org/
I am grateful to Shri S.N. Sastri for his ready consent to publish excerpts from his essays at this Blog on the subject of Liberation right in this Life (Jivanmukti) and Liberation without body (Videhamukti) -- ramesam.]
JIVANMUKTI AND VIDEHAMUKTI
(i) Extract taken from “Introduction to Advaita Vedanta”:
“The world has no reality apart from Brahman, just as the illusory snake has no reality apart from the rope. When the knowledge of Brahman arises, the world is seen as a mere appearance of Brahman. The illusory snake arose from the rope, was sustained by the rope and ultimately merged into the rope.
"Similarly, the world arises from Brahman, is sustained by Brahman and merges into Brahman on the attainment of knowledge. Another example is also given to explain this. Ornaments of different sizes and shapes are made out of one gold bar. Their appearance and the use for which they are meant vary, but the fact that they are all really nothing but gold, in spite of their different appearances and uses, cannot be denied. The appearance may change, a bangle may be converted into rings, but the gold always remains as gold. When we begin to look upon the bangles, rings, etc., as nothing but gold in essence, the differences between bangle and ring, ring and chain, etc., cease to count though they continue to retain their different shapes.
"[O]n the dawn of the knowledge of Brahman (which is the same as the Self), though the different forms continue to be seen by the j~nAni, the realised soul, he sees them all only as appearances of the one Brahman. Thus the perception of difference between one person and another, or one thing and another, and the consequences of such perception, such as looking upon some as favourable and others as the opposite, and the consequent efforts to retain or get what is favourable and to get rid of or avoid what is not favourable, come to an end. This is the state of liberation even while living, which is known as jIvanmukti.
* * *
"[L]iberation is not the attainment of some new state in some other world after the end of the present life. It is only the realisation, in this life itself, of what one has always been, namely Brahman, by the removal of the wrong notion that one is the body-mind complex. The illusory snake never existed. What existed even when the snake was seen was only the rope. Similarly, bondage has no real existence at all. Even when we are ignorant of Brahman and think of ourselves as limited by the body, we are really none other than the infinite Brahman. Liberation is thus only the removal of the wrong identification with the body, mind and senses."
(ii) Extract taken from a Summary (by Shri Sastri) of Jivanmuktiviveka of Swami Vidyaranya:
Jivanmukti and Videhamukti are distinguished only by the presence and absence of the body and the sense-organs. The awareness of duality is absent in both of them.
The Jivanmukta is one for whom this phenomenal world, in which he moves and acts, has ceased to exist. In the case of an ordinary person, his mind reacts to the various forms in the world and gives him knowledge of their variety and their differences from one another. But the mind of the Jivanmukta does not get so transformed and so he does not see differences, but sees all forms only as Brahman.
"In deep sleep the mind does not undergo any transformation, but the seed for transformation remains. So sleep cannot be equated with the state of Jivanmukti. The Jivanmukta remains unaffected by both pleasure and pain. He is not elated by something good happening, nor is he depressed when a calamity occurs. He does not crave for anything, but subsists on whatever comes of its own accord.
"Though his senses function and can experience everything, his mind is absolutely calm and does not react to anything. Though his eyes see everything before him, his mind does not judge them as good or bad, favourable or unfavourable and so he is free from agitation and attachment or aversion. The senses themselves do not cause any harm. It is the mind which judges what is experienced by the senses and develops likes and dislikes in the case of an ordinary person. Since the mind of the Jivanmukta does not make any such judgment, he is free from all attachment and aversion."
Videhamukti:
When the body of the Jivanmukta falls, he becomes a Videhamukta, freed from his empirical existence and attains his real nature, like air resuming its tranquillity when the wind stops blowing. His subtle body is dissolved here itself. He cannot be described as 'sat', that is to say, he cannot be called 'praajna' conditioned by avidya or 'Isvara' conditioned by maayaa. He cannot be called 'asat', or made up of mere matter. He does not experience the gross objects of sense. He is neither Virat, nor Hiranyagarbha nor Isvara. Nor is he Visva, Taijasa or Praajna. Thus he does not come under the category of microcosm (vyashti) or of macrocosm (samashti).
Characteristics of the Jivanmukta:
(iii) Extract taken from a Summary (by Shri Sastri) of Jivanmuktiviveka of Swami Vidyaranya:
"Because of the absence of transformation of the mind, the Jivanmukta is free from Vasanas. His mind always remains pure. He never looks upon himself as a doer of actions since he does not identify himself with the body-mind complex which alone performs all actions. Consequently he is neither elated nor depressed by the good or bad results of the actions. Others do not have any reason to fear him, because he never insults or harms others in any way. He is also not afraid of any one. He remains unaffected even if some wicked man insults or harasses him. He does not distinguish people as friend or foe. Though full of learning, he never exhibits it. His mind is absolutely free from worldly thoughts and is always fixed on contemplation of the Self.
"[A Jivanmukta] remains cool even in matters concerning himself, just as a man attending a marriage or other ceremony in another's house remains unaffected by the gain or loss of that other person. This coolness is due not only to his freedom from worry, but also to his awareness of the fullness of his own Self. These are the characteristics of the Jivanmukta."
(iv) Extract taken from Vedanta Saara:
"When a Jivanmukta is not in samaadhi, he experiences sense-objects as well as hunger, thirst, etc, but does not consider them to be real and is therefore not at all affected by them. He is like a man witnessing a magical performance, being fully aware that what he sees is not real.
“He who does not see anything in the waking state as in sound sleep; who, though seeing duality, does not really see it as he sees only the Absolute; who, though engaged in action (for the good of the world), is in reality inactive (being totally free from the idea of agency); he, and none other, is the knower of the Self. This is the truth.” (Sankara’s Upades’asaahasrii,10.13).
“Such qualities as freedom from hatred are natural to one who has attained Self-knowledge. They have not to be cultivated with effort (as in the case of an aspirant for liberation)”--- Naishkarmyasiddhi,4.69."
Some of the Relevant Scriptural Sources for the above Material:
Mundaka Upanishad – 2.2.8
Sankara’s Upadesa saahasri – 10.13
Naishkarmya siddhi – 4.69
Sankara’s Vakya vrittis – verses 52, 53
Sankara Bhashya On Bruhadaranyaka Upanishad – 3.2.11; 4.4.6
Sankara Bhashya on Bhagavad Gita - II.51, V.24, VI.27
[How often does one come across a Computer savvy eighty seven year old Sanskrit Scholar and Vedic pundit well versed in all the major Upansihads as well as the commentaries of Revered Sankara? This rare genius is Shri S.N. Sastri, a retired Senior Finacial Officer of the Indian Government and author of several acclaimed works like Commentaries on Narayaniyam, Hastamalakiyam etc. His agile mind gets reflected in his writings through the lucid, balanced and comprehensive assessment of all the intricate issues of Advaita . Shri Sastri’s articles are available at:
http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/s_n_sastri/s_n_sastri.htm
and also at: http://www.celextel.org/
I am grateful to Shri S.N. Sastri for his ready consent to publish excerpts from his essays at this Blog on the subject of Liberation right in this Life (Jivanmukti) and Liberation without body (Videhamukti) -- ramesam.]
JIVANMUKTI AND VIDEHAMUKTI
(i) Extract taken from “Introduction to Advaita Vedanta”:
“The world has no reality apart from Brahman, just as the illusory snake has no reality apart from the rope. When the knowledge of Brahman arises, the world is seen as a mere appearance of Brahman. The illusory snake arose from the rope, was sustained by the rope and ultimately merged into the rope.
"Similarly, the world arises from Brahman, is sustained by Brahman and merges into Brahman on the attainment of knowledge. Another example is also given to explain this. Ornaments of different sizes and shapes are made out of one gold bar. Their appearance and the use for which they are meant vary, but the fact that they are all really nothing but gold, in spite of their different appearances and uses, cannot be denied. The appearance may change, a bangle may be converted into rings, but the gold always remains as gold. When we begin to look upon the bangles, rings, etc., as nothing but gold in essence, the differences between bangle and ring, ring and chain, etc., cease to count though they continue to retain their different shapes.
"[O]n the dawn of the knowledge of Brahman (which is the same as the Self), though the different forms continue to be seen by the j~nAni, the realised soul, he sees them all only as appearances of the one Brahman. Thus the perception of difference between one person and another, or one thing and another, and the consequences of such perception, such as looking upon some as favourable and others as the opposite, and the consequent efforts to retain or get what is favourable and to get rid of or avoid what is not favourable, come to an end. This is the state of liberation even while living, which is known as jIvanmukti.
* * *
"[L]iberation is not the attainment of some new state in some other world after the end of the present life. It is only the realisation, in this life itself, of what one has always been, namely Brahman, by the removal of the wrong notion that one is the body-mind complex. The illusory snake never existed. What existed even when the snake was seen was only the rope. Similarly, bondage has no real existence at all. Even when we are ignorant of Brahman and think of ourselves as limited by the body, we are really none other than the infinite Brahman. Liberation is thus only the removal of the wrong identification with the body, mind and senses."
(ii) Extract taken from a Summary (by Shri Sastri) of Jivanmuktiviveka of Swami Vidyaranya:
Jivanmukti and Videhamukti are distinguished only by the presence and absence of the body and the sense-organs. The awareness of duality is absent in both of them.
The Jivanmukta is one for whom this phenomenal world, in which he moves and acts, has ceased to exist. In the case of an ordinary person, his mind reacts to the various forms in the world and gives him knowledge of their variety and their differences from one another. But the mind of the Jivanmukta does not get so transformed and so he does not see differences, but sees all forms only as Brahman.
"In deep sleep the mind does not undergo any transformation, but the seed for transformation remains. So sleep cannot be equated with the state of Jivanmukti. The Jivanmukta remains unaffected by both pleasure and pain. He is not elated by something good happening, nor is he depressed when a calamity occurs. He does not crave for anything, but subsists on whatever comes of its own accord.
"Though his senses function and can experience everything, his mind is absolutely calm and does not react to anything. Though his eyes see everything before him, his mind does not judge them as good or bad, favourable or unfavourable and so he is free from agitation and attachment or aversion. The senses themselves do not cause any harm. It is the mind which judges what is experienced by the senses and develops likes and dislikes in the case of an ordinary person. Since the mind of the Jivanmukta does not make any such judgment, he is free from all attachment and aversion."
Videhamukti:
When the body of the Jivanmukta falls, he becomes a Videhamukta, freed from his empirical existence and attains his real nature, like air resuming its tranquillity when the wind stops blowing. His subtle body is dissolved here itself. He cannot be described as 'sat', that is to say, he cannot be called 'praajna' conditioned by avidya or 'Isvara' conditioned by maayaa. He cannot be called 'asat', or made up of mere matter. He does not experience the gross objects of sense. He is neither Virat, nor Hiranyagarbha nor Isvara. Nor is he Visva, Taijasa or Praajna. Thus he does not come under the category of microcosm (vyashti) or of macrocosm (samashti).
Characteristics of the Jivanmukta:
(iii) Extract taken from a Summary (by Shri Sastri) of Jivanmuktiviveka of Swami Vidyaranya:
"Because of the absence of transformation of the mind, the Jivanmukta is free from Vasanas. His mind always remains pure. He never looks upon himself as a doer of actions since he does not identify himself with the body-mind complex which alone performs all actions. Consequently he is neither elated nor depressed by the good or bad results of the actions. Others do not have any reason to fear him, because he never insults or harms others in any way. He is also not afraid of any one. He remains unaffected even if some wicked man insults or harasses him. He does not distinguish people as friend or foe. Though full of learning, he never exhibits it. His mind is absolutely free from worldly thoughts and is always fixed on contemplation of the Self.
"[A Jivanmukta] remains cool even in matters concerning himself, just as a man attending a marriage or other ceremony in another's house remains unaffected by the gain or loss of that other person. This coolness is due not only to his freedom from worry, but also to his awareness of the fullness of his own Self. These are the characteristics of the Jivanmukta."
(iv) Extract taken from Vedanta Saara:
"When a Jivanmukta is not in samaadhi, he experiences sense-objects as well as hunger, thirst, etc, but does not consider them to be real and is therefore not at all affected by them. He is like a man witnessing a magical performance, being fully aware that what he sees is not real.
“He who does not see anything in the waking state as in sound sleep; who, though seeing duality, does not really see it as he sees only the Absolute; who, though engaged in action (for the good of the world), is in reality inactive (being totally free from the idea of agency); he, and none other, is the knower of the Self. This is the truth.” (Sankara’s Upades’asaahasrii,10.13).
“Such qualities as freedom from hatred are natural to one who has attained Self-knowledge. They have not to be cultivated with effort (as in the case of an aspirant for liberation)”--- Naishkarmyasiddhi,4.69."
Some of the Relevant Scriptural Sources for the above Material:
Mundaka Upanishad – 2.2.8
Sankara’s Upadesa saahasri – 10.13
Naishkarmya siddhi – 4.69
Sankara’s Vakya vrittis – verses 52, 53
Sankara Bhashya On Bruhadaranyaka Upanishad – 3.2.11; 4.4.6
Sankara Bhashya on Bhagavad Gita - II.51, V.24, VI.27
Sunday, January 24, 2010
SCRIPTURES
Extract From "The Book of One" (Second Edition) by Dennis Waite
[Dennis Waite hardly needs an introduction in the Advaita circles. He is very well known through the multitude of his books promoting and spreading the ancient Indian Thought of Non-Dualism. His encyclopedic Website is a highly reliable source of authentic Advaitic material. In addition, he encourages a catholic approach to the subject by publishing articles on Non-Dualism by diverse teachers and writers at his Website. The site is fast becoming a de facto "standard" in the compilation and presentation of Advaita philosophy.
I am very happy to open this Blog with his Essay titled "Scriptures" as the first Post in the year 2010. I thank him for readily consenting to contribute this Post in spite of pressing demands on his time. -- ramesam]
SCRIPTURES
By Dennis Waite
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei
Gods, then, do not have any ultimate reality and religions may sometimes be misguided. Both of them have their utility, however, as a means of mental preparation and for helping to quell the demands of the ego and point us in the right direction, away from the material and external and toward the truth within. These limitations need to be appreciated. But what of the scriptures upon which religions are based? Whichever religion might be under consideration, it has to be acknowledged that writers of major scriptural texts have attempted to record important information for posterity. There are many reasons why such attempts might seem to fail. The historical context in which they were written is now often poorly understood. Truths are often couched in obscure terms or hidden in the depths of seeming irrelevancies (which were probably not irrelevant to the culture which originated them). Vague or ambiguous presentation may have been used because writers at that time were persecuted for attempting to communicate ideas considered heretical by the prevailing society. Translations, too, inevitably lose something in the process – often their essential meaning! And stories written down only after many generations have communicated them verbally, with varying degrees of artistic license, may not be altogether factual.
The Hindu Vedas, with their philosophical Upanishads, are said not to suffer from these problems. They are supposed to have been passed on verbatim from generation to generation since their original observation by realized Sages. Strictly speaking, they are said to be unauthored – apauruSheya in Sanskrit, literally ‘not coming from men’. The idea here is that the knowledge was given to man by God at the time of creation and passed down thereafter. But such statements need not confound us. The truths expressed in the Upanishads have been validated time and time again by successive Sages and they are there only to provide guidance and to act as an incentive for us to discover those same truths for ourselves – and in this lifetime, not the next! It is essential to know where we are trying to get to and it is always valuable to have some understanding of the processes by which we might reach that destination.
(I have to say that my preferred (reasonable) interpretation of the adjective ‘unauthored’ is that the words were originated by self-realized sages and subsequently passed on by word of mouth until such time as written materials became common. These sages, being self-realized, no longer identified themselves as body-minds, as named individuals, so they had no wish whatsoever to have their bodily-assigned names attached. They knew that what they were conveying was non-personal, eternal truth that has nothing to do with personality. The sole purpose was to pass on this knowledge so that other minds, initially believing in separation, might be enlightened. Such absolute truth is beyond authorship and hence is reasonably construed as ‘unauthored’).
A useful metaphor for understanding how the scriptures operate is that of a mirror. We are totally unable to see our own face without the aid of a mirror, no matter how good our eyes may be. In an analogous manner, no matter how clever and perceptive the mind might be, we can have no knowledge of our true self. We are always the witness, never the witnessed.
In order to find out about this Self, we need the equivalent of a mirror. Scriptures (and the guru who interprets them for us) provide this mirror.
Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. -- Eckhart Tolle (Ref. 93)
As already mentioned, in Advaita, the scriptures (mainly Upanishads, together with the Bhagavad Gita) constitute one of the six pramANa-s or sources of knowledge – it was referred to as ‘testimony’. And we will see in the chapter on ‘The Limits of Knowledge’ that reality is defined as that which cannot be sublated by any new experience. (The word ‘sublate’ will be explained, too, if you haven’t encountered it before’.) Furthermore, any cognition is said to be valid if its content can never be sublated. As we know from experience, and will be discussed in the third section of the book, perception, inference etc. are all subject to later correction or modification as additional information comes to light. John Grimes, in his excellent book ‘Perspective on Language’ (Ref.140) summarizes this and concludes that scriptural knowledge is the only source that does not suffer in this way:
“Perception and all the other pramANa-s, except words as knowledge, produce cognitions which ultimately suffer sublation. Brahman, which is the content of the cognition produced by religious discourse, remains unsublated. Because Brahman is eternal, there is no possibility of Its sublation at some later time. Thus, the cognition which religious discourse gives rise to is valid.”
[Note: The above extract is from the extensively revised second edition of ‘The Book of One’ by Dennis Waite. It will be published in April 2010 by O-Books, ISBN 978-1846943478.
Visit http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/thebook/thebook.htm for further details and to read more extracts. The Book is available for advanced purchase from Amazon.]
[Dennis Waite hardly needs an introduction in the Advaita circles. He is very well known through the multitude of his books promoting and spreading the ancient Indian Thought of Non-Dualism. His encyclopedic Website is a highly reliable source of authentic Advaitic material. In addition, he encourages a catholic approach to the subject by publishing articles on Non-Dualism by diverse teachers and writers at his Website. The site is fast becoming a de facto "standard" in the compilation and presentation of Advaita philosophy.
I am very happy to open this Blog with his Essay titled "Scriptures" as the first Post in the year 2010. I thank him for readily consenting to contribute this Post in spite of pressing demands on his time. -- ramesam]
SCRIPTURES
By Dennis Waite
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei
Gods, then, do not have any ultimate reality and religions may sometimes be misguided. Both of them have their utility, however, as a means of mental preparation and for helping to quell the demands of the ego and point us in the right direction, away from the material and external and toward the truth within. These limitations need to be appreciated. But what of the scriptures upon which religions are based? Whichever religion might be under consideration, it has to be acknowledged that writers of major scriptural texts have attempted to record important information for posterity. There are many reasons why such attempts might seem to fail. The historical context in which they were written is now often poorly understood. Truths are often couched in obscure terms or hidden in the depths of seeming irrelevancies (which were probably not irrelevant to the culture which originated them). Vague or ambiguous presentation may have been used because writers at that time were persecuted for attempting to communicate ideas considered heretical by the prevailing society. Translations, too, inevitably lose something in the process – often their essential meaning! And stories written down only after many generations have communicated them verbally, with varying degrees of artistic license, may not be altogether factual.
The Hindu Vedas, with their philosophical Upanishads, are said not to suffer from these problems. They are supposed to have been passed on verbatim from generation to generation since their original observation by realized Sages. Strictly speaking, they are said to be unauthored – apauruSheya in Sanskrit, literally ‘not coming from men’. The idea here is that the knowledge was given to man by God at the time of creation and passed down thereafter. But such statements need not confound us. The truths expressed in the Upanishads have been validated time and time again by successive Sages and they are there only to provide guidance and to act as an incentive for us to discover those same truths for ourselves – and in this lifetime, not the next! It is essential to know where we are trying to get to and it is always valuable to have some understanding of the processes by which we might reach that destination.
(I have to say that my preferred (reasonable) interpretation of the adjective ‘unauthored’ is that the words were originated by self-realized sages and subsequently passed on by word of mouth until such time as written materials became common. These sages, being self-realized, no longer identified themselves as body-minds, as named individuals, so they had no wish whatsoever to have their bodily-assigned names attached. They knew that what they were conveying was non-personal, eternal truth that has nothing to do with personality. The sole purpose was to pass on this knowledge so that other minds, initially believing in separation, might be enlightened. Such absolute truth is beyond authorship and hence is reasonably construed as ‘unauthored’).
A useful metaphor for understanding how the scriptures operate is that of a mirror. We are totally unable to see our own face without the aid of a mirror, no matter how good our eyes may be. In an analogous manner, no matter how clever and perceptive the mind might be, we can have no knowledge of our true self. We are always the witness, never the witnessed.
In order to find out about this Self, we need the equivalent of a mirror. Scriptures (and the guru who interprets them for us) provide this mirror.
Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. -- Eckhart Tolle (Ref. 93)
As already mentioned, in Advaita, the scriptures (mainly Upanishads, together with the Bhagavad Gita) constitute one of the six pramANa-s or sources of knowledge – it was referred to as ‘testimony’. And we will see in the chapter on ‘The Limits of Knowledge’ that reality is defined as that which cannot be sublated by any new experience. (The word ‘sublate’ will be explained, too, if you haven’t encountered it before’.) Furthermore, any cognition is said to be valid if its content can never be sublated. As we know from experience, and will be discussed in the third section of the book, perception, inference etc. are all subject to later correction or modification as additional information comes to light. John Grimes, in his excellent book ‘Perspective on Language’ (Ref.140) summarizes this and concludes that scriptural knowledge is the only source that does not suffer in this way:
“Perception and all the other pramANa-s, except words as knowledge, produce cognitions which ultimately suffer sublation. Brahman, which is the content of the cognition produced by religious discourse, remains unsublated. Because Brahman is eternal, there is no possibility of Its sublation at some later time. Thus, the cognition which religious discourse gives rise to is valid.”
[Note: The above extract is from the extensively revised second edition of ‘The Book of One’ by Dennis Waite. It will be published in April 2010 by O-Books, ISBN 978-1846943478.
Visit http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/thebook/thebook.htm for further details and to read more extracts. The Book is available for advanced purchase from Amazon.]
Saturday, December 26, 2009
CONVERSATIONS WITH A LIVING GAUDAPADA
[FIRST A WELCOME: Trey, Neil and Juhana and a FaceBook user are the new members to our Blog. A VERY HAPPY WELCOME TO ALL OF THEM. Trey has been kind to introduce the Blog at the FaceBook; I am grateful to him for this -- ramesam.]
CONVERSATIONS WITH A LIVING GAUDAPADA:
As we end the year 2009 to snuggle cozily into the welcoming arms of 2010, thoughts on the Past, Present and Future do hover in our minds. We accumulate our experiences as memory. Our brains decipher certain inviolable patterns in those experiences. The patterns and their recurrence go to reinforce and solidify our belief in the reality of our experience.
Ancient Indian scriptures talk of three levels of ‘reality’ – (i) Absolute; (ii) Transactional and (iii) Dream. The Absolute Reality is the ultimate, unchanging Truth. Transactional reality is what we live with in our daily life. The ephemeral reality is the one we experience in a dream world.
Vedanta shouts from roof-tops: The dream and transactional experiences are equally FALSE and UNREAL. There is nothing like a past and future of things happening. Everything just happens in the NOW. There is NO thing other than Nowness, the Aliveness, the very Beingness. It is Alone. No second one is there. And that is Advaita.
That is the view from the Absolute Reality that Gaudapada gives us.
Venerable Gaudapada was a Great Sage of the 8th Century. He expounded the above philosophy of Ajativada (nothing is ever born), the true gist of Vedanta, in his classic Karika (commentary in verses) on Mandukya Upanishad. The Second Chapter of the Karika discusses the illusory nature of the world that we experience and the non-difference of dream and awake states of man. The Mandukya Upanishad and Karika hold these two states to be mere 'arisings' in the deep sleep state.
Quoting Gaudapada Karika:
A question arises then: who cognizes the illusory objects of dream and wakeful states, if the objects cognized in both the states are unreal? (Karika II – 11).
The 12th verse of the Chapter II goes to answer (Swami Nikhilananda’s translation, Advaita Ashrama, 1995):
“Atman, the self-luminous, through the power of his own Maya, imagines in himself by himself (all the objects that the subject experiences within or without). He alone is the cognizer of the objects (so created). That is the decision of the Vedanta.”
Gaudapada further explains that internally conceived things like thoughts, ideas etc. are no different from objects seen ‘out there’. He says in the 14th verse:
"Those that are cognized within only as long as the thought of them lasts, as well as those that are perceived by the senses and that conform to two points of time, are all mere imaginations. There is no other ground for differentiating the one from the other."
Swami Nikhilananda amplifying on the word “imaginations” writes as follows:
“That a thing exists independently of the perceiving mind is also an idea. …. Past, present and future are nothing but ideas present in the mind at the moment.”
Peter Dziuban provides us, like Gaudapada, the worldview from the stance of and as Absolute Reality. His teachings echo Gaudapada’s Ajativada.
We are fortunate that he explains with great clarity, irrefutable logic and inimitable expression our questions at his Blog: Reality Check.
I posed him the following question:
Though we seem to understand intellectually the non-dualism, how is it that a sense of ‘lack’ continues to haunt us?
I want to get to the root of this 'lack' - a lack not for any objective 'thing' but that gut feeling of "not satisficing".
One way is to see the 'lack' to be "ALL", the very Being. However, this looks to be a mere explanation.
Peter’s response is available at his Post of 23rd Dec 2009.
What Peter said, in brief (as I understood in my words) was:
1. Notice that "something" has cognised that sense of 'lack'.
2. Be that very "Cogniser" rather than claiming ownership for that sense of 'lack'.
3. The sense or gut feeling of 'lack' is time dependent (hence transitory) and therefore, sure to 'dissolve'.
4. The sense of 'lack' has its origin because of an 'assumed add-on' i.e. some unspelt 'expectations' of a person in 'me' looking for 'object-oriented experience'.
Later Peter answered in three Posts of 25th Dec 2009, the following question of mine:
I do not find anywhere, either in the ancient Indian lore or in the modern non-dualism teachings, anybody explaining the emergence of the wakeful state with all the phenomenal 'world' and its goings on.
Words like 'Maya', 'Leela' (play), 'Freedom', [Vibhuti, Karma, Cyclicity] etc. are used to explain how from that Immutable Oneness the first 'I-thought' is engendered to manifest later as the variegated manifold. But these are admittedly just explanatory fictions. Such explanations take all the mathematical precision and scientific regularity in the phenomenal 'world' as 'given'. They accept the inevitability of inexorable natural laws and never provide any clue as to why a law is the way it is.
[.....,] we see a 'signature' of dream state in a dreaming brain (REM sleep). How do you think the brain state would be when one is "abiding" as ALL, One, Consciousness, Brahman.
I would like to draw the attention of the readers of this Blog to the excellent Posts of Peter in reply to my query, a befitting way to end the year 2009.
[The possible state of the brain of a “realized” man (Jivanmukta) is obviously something he cannot comment. It would fall under Neuroscience. However, his surmise is that there would be no thinking activity, and little or no experience of sensations — so he speculates that those apparent related areas of brain activity would be greatly reduced or inactive. Meanwhile, in such states the body usually still appears to breathe, pump blood, etc. so it would seem that whatever brain activity is involved in these apparent functions would continue.
This topic can be a good study for Barrow Neurological Institute, Arizona, U.S.A. One of their Directors attended the Oct 2009 'Science and Non-dualism Conference' in San Rafael, California.
As no thinking can happen without stored information, it will also be interesting to see how memory will behave in a Jivanmukta. Our ancient scriptures say that vasana-s (past stored impressions) will become ineffective like burnt out seeds. Memory is still an active on going research topic in Neuroscience.
Information we have from Neuroscince on retention, loss or erasure of memory, abnormal memory of a savant brain and related issues will form the subject of a future Blog Post.]
WITH BEST WISHES FOR A HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR
CONVERSATIONS WITH A LIVING GAUDAPADA:
As we end the year 2009 to snuggle cozily into the welcoming arms of 2010, thoughts on the Past, Present and Future do hover in our minds. We accumulate our experiences as memory. Our brains decipher certain inviolable patterns in those experiences. The patterns and their recurrence go to reinforce and solidify our belief in the reality of our experience.
Ancient Indian scriptures talk of three levels of ‘reality’ – (i) Absolute; (ii) Transactional and (iii) Dream. The Absolute Reality is the ultimate, unchanging Truth. Transactional reality is what we live with in our daily life. The ephemeral reality is the one we experience in a dream world.
Vedanta shouts from roof-tops: The dream and transactional experiences are equally FALSE and UNREAL. There is nothing like a past and future of things happening. Everything just happens in the NOW. There is NO thing other than Nowness, the Aliveness, the very Beingness. It is Alone. No second one is there. And that is Advaita.
That is the view from the Absolute Reality that Gaudapada gives us.
Venerable Gaudapada was a Great Sage of the 8th Century. He expounded the above philosophy of Ajativada (nothing is ever born), the true gist of Vedanta, in his classic Karika (commentary in verses) on Mandukya Upanishad. The Second Chapter of the Karika discusses the illusory nature of the world that we experience and the non-difference of dream and awake states of man. The Mandukya Upanishad and Karika hold these two states to be mere 'arisings' in the deep sleep state.
Quoting Gaudapada Karika:
A question arises then: who cognizes the illusory objects of dream and wakeful states, if the objects cognized in both the states are unreal? (Karika II – 11).
The 12th verse of the Chapter II goes to answer (Swami Nikhilananda’s translation, Advaita Ashrama, 1995):
“Atman, the self-luminous, through the power of his own Maya, imagines in himself by himself (all the objects that the subject experiences within or without). He alone is the cognizer of the objects (so created). That is the decision of the Vedanta.”
Gaudapada further explains that internally conceived things like thoughts, ideas etc. are no different from objects seen ‘out there’. He says in the 14th verse:
"Those that are cognized within only as long as the thought of them lasts, as well as those that are perceived by the senses and that conform to two points of time, are all mere imaginations. There is no other ground for differentiating the one from the other."
Swami Nikhilananda amplifying on the word “imaginations” writes as follows:
“That a thing exists independently of the perceiving mind is also an idea. …. Past, present and future are nothing but ideas present in the mind at the moment.”
Peter Dziuban provides us, like Gaudapada, the worldview from the stance of and as Absolute Reality. His teachings echo Gaudapada’s Ajativada.
We are fortunate that he explains with great clarity, irrefutable logic and inimitable expression our questions at his Blog: Reality Check.
I posed him the following question:
Though we seem to understand intellectually the non-dualism, how is it that a sense of ‘lack’ continues to haunt us?
I want to get to the root of this 'lack' - a lack not for any objective 'thing' but that gut feeling of "not satisficing".
One way is to see the 'lack' to be "ALL", the very Being. However, this looks to be a mere explanation.
Peter’s response is available at his Post of 23rd Dec 2009.
What Peter said, in brief (as I understood in my words) was:
1. Notice that "something" has cognised that sense of 'lack'.
2. Be that very "Cogniser" rather than claiming ownership for that sense of 'lack'.
3. The sense or gut feeling of 'lack' is time dependent (hence transitory) and therefore, sure to 'dissolve'.
4. The sense of 'lack' has its origin because of an 'assumed add-on' i.e. some unspelt 'expectations' of a person in 'me' looking for 'object-oriented experience'.
Later Peter answered in three Posts of 25th Dec 2009, the following question of mine:
I do not find anywhere, either in the ancient Indian lore or in the modern non-dualism teachings, anybody explaining the emergence of the wakeful state with all the phenomenal 'world' and its goings on.
Words like 'Maya', 'Leela' (play), 'Freedom', [Vibhuti, Karma, Cyclicity] etc. are used to explain how from that Immutable Oneness the first 'I-thought' is engendered to manifest later as the variegated manifold. But these are admittedly just explanatory fictions. Such explanations take all the mathematical precision and scientific regularity in the phenomenal 'world' as 'given'. They accept the inevitability of inexorable natural laws and never provide any clue as to why a law is the way it is.
[.....,] we see a 'signature' of dream state in a dreaming brain (REM sleep). How do you think the brain state would be when one is "abiding" as ALL, One, Consciousness, Brahman.
I would like to draw the attention of the readers of this Blog to the excellent Posts of Peter in reply to my query, a befitting way to end the year 2009.
[The possible state of the brain of a “realized” man (Jivanmukta) is obviously something he cannot comment. It would fall under Neuroscience. However, his surmise is that there would be no thinking activity, and little or no experience of sensations — so he speculates that those apparent related areas of brain activity would be greatly reduced or inactive. Meanwhile, in such states the body usually still appears to breathe, pump blood, etc. so it would seem that whatever brain activity is involved in these apparent functions would continue.
This topic can be a good study for Barrow Neurological Institute, Arizona, U.S.A. One of their Directors attended the Oct 2009 'Science and Non-dualism Conference' in San Rafael, California.
As no thinking can happen without stored information, it will also be interesting to see how memory will behave in a Jivanmukta. Our ancient scriptures say that vasana-s (past stored impressions) will become ineffective like burnt out seeds. Memory is still an active on going research topic in Neuroscience.
Information we have from Neuroscince on retention, loss or erasure of memory, abnormal memory of a savant brain and related issues will form the subject of a future Blog Post.]
WITH BEST WISHES FOR A HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR
Saturday, December 12, 2009
RE-ENGINEERING YOUR 'self'
HEARTY WELCOME:
[I am happy to welcome Sivavasanta, Katie and Dr. Kirk Crist to our Blog. It is particualry noteworthy that Katie Davis chose to join us. She herself is a Non-Dualism teacher who spontaneously realized the Oneness of Brahman in 1986. We look forward to their active participations/contributions.]
BODY ILLUSION, BRAIN PLASTICITY, MEDITATION AND LIBERATION:
"Re-engineering your 'self'" was the title of a Talk I gave a year ago. I sent a copy of about 40 supporting ppt slides to Jerry Katz at that time. He was quite appreciative of the material. I thank him very much for the encouragement.
The principal argument of my presentation was as follows:
Our usual sense of 'self' is quite fragile and illusory. Neuroscience as yet does not know how this sense of self is generated. Certain gateway nodes of neuronal networks in our brain processing autobiographical information can be understood to be the correlates of 'self'. But no specific part of the brain contains a spot for 'self'. It was proposed by me that if a particular gateway node represents the 'self' node, there could be another gateway node which represents the feel of Oneness, obliterating all perceived boundaries between 'me' and 'the other'. We could call it the "Universal Self" node.
For example, Dr. Jill B. Taylor, a neuroscientist graphically described her experience of losing the sense of individuating 'self' when the left hemisphere of her brain was non-functional (due to an hemorrhage) in 1996. She felt a universal Oneness when the right hemisphere of the brain alone was functioning.
Recent developments in Neuroscience have shown that our brain is not like a fixed pre-programmed printed circuit board. The neural connections are not rigid but highly labile. This is called by neuroscientists as the "plasticity of brain." In view of this, it is suggested that we can retrain our brain to process the perceptions to go through the Universal Self node instead of the usual self node gateway. Dr. Greg Goode would describe it as "Standing as Awareness."
Direct Path Advaitins tell us clearly that the 'collapse of the sense of separate self' is enlightenment. Many of them describe it as re-orientating, or a shift in, the way we perceive (i.e. without a 'me' as perceiver). This would obviously involve (i) a clear understanding of the percepts (= what is perceived) , (ii) be thoroughly convinced that the percepts to be no more than mere thoughts, sensations and perceptions in our brain (and not to be any solid objects to be 'existing' out there) and (iii) finally retraining the brain through practice in this worldview. Therefore, the re-engineering involved is to manage a shift from the 'self' gateway node to the "Universal Self" node.
Even traditional Vedanta advocates Shravana (Gaining Knowledge), Manana (Reflection on what is learnt) and Nidhidhyasana (constant contemplation and remembering), corresponding to the three steps spelt out in the above para.
Bhagavad-Gita too lays considerable emphasis on Practice (abhyaasa) and giving up a claim of 'ownership (of possessions) and doership (agency for actions)' - i.e. vairaagya (Chapter VI Sloka 35; VIII-8; XII-9).
Practice evidently takes advantage of the plasticity of the brain.
Neuroscientific Findings:
We all experience our body to be part of ourselves. It is a fundamental aspect of self-awareness. But this sense of self can be easily altered by manipulating our perceptions. It is illustrated by the "Rubber Hand Illusion." In this experiment we feel that 'a rubber hand is our own, when our corresponding real hand is hidden, and both the rubber hand and the real hand are touched synchronously for a few seconds by a friend. Not only that, our brain starts disowning our own real hand. The body temperature in the real hand drops down! Can you believe it!!
Such perceptual phenomenon does not happen just for a limb. It can happen to your entire body as proved by Swedish scientists a year ago.
See the video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rawY2VzN4-c
You feel the body of another person or of a mannequin standing in front of you as your body. Sort of "Parakaaya pravesha" (entering some other's body)!
Videos of the studies along with the virtual reality studies being carried out by Prof. Mel Slater are available at:
http://www.bodyinmind.com.au/mel-slater-on-inducing-illusory-ownership-of-a-virtual-body/
Meditation:
Various forms of meditation have been found to be quite efficient tools in bringing about a change in the texture and structure of the brain. Dr. P. B. Reiner reports on the work at Stanford and MIT in November 2009 as follows:
"Regular deep meditation changes the brain in positive ways. This type of meditation seems to be associated with gamma waves, the electromagnetic rhythm of neurons firing very rapidly in harmony.
Neuroscientists have pinpointed the cells responsible for producing these gamma rhythms and demonstrated a technology that can induce the brain-wave pattern in mice... In the future it might be possible to use this technology to reproduce some of the beneficial effects of meditation."
The Stanford and MIT scientists further say: "...it is worth remembering that both deep-brain stimulation, whereby implanted electrodes act as a kind of pacemaker in the brain, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which powerful magnetic fields are transmitted through the skull to affect brain activity, are rapidly moving from the lab to the clinic. Both these techniques represent relatively crude forms of brain stimulation."
Carnegie Mellon University scientists Timothy Keller and Marcel Just have uncovered in December 2009 the first evidence that intensive instruction to improve reading skills in young children causes the brain to physically rewire itself.
Dr. E. Phelps and her colleagues reported in Dec 2009 Nature, "A drug free, non-invasive method for semi-permanently blocking the return of fear memories in humans" by training their brains. These works are still in development stage. Yet their research is significant towards erasure of fear memories.
A video of their work can be seen at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/memory/
In this context, we may note that Bhagavad-Gita says that surmounting fears is an important step towards ‘liberation’.
(This Blog is actually Posted on 12 Dec 2009).
[I am happy to welcome Sivavasanta, Katie and Dr. Kirk Crist to our Blog. It is particualry noteworthy that Katie Davis chose to join us. She herself is a Non-Dualism teacher who spontaneously realized the Oneness of Brahman in 1986. We look forward to their active participations/contributions.]
BODY ILLUSION, BRAIN PLASTICITY, MEDITATION AND LIBERATION:
"Re-engineering your 'self'" was the title of a Talk I gave a year ago. I sent a copy of about 40 supporting ppt slides to Jerry Katz at that time. He was quite appreciative of the material. I thank him very much for the encouragement.
The principal argument of my presentation was as follows:
Our usual sense of 'self' is quite fragile and illusory. Neuroscience as yet does not know how this sense of self is generated. Certain gateway nodes of neuronal networks in our brain processing autobiographical information can be understood to be the correlates of 'self'. But no specific part of the brain contains a spot for 'self'. It was proposed by me that if a particular gateway node represents the 'self' node, there could be another gateway node which represents the feel of Oneness, obliterating all perceived boundaries between 'me' and 'the other'. We could call it the "Universal Self" node.
For example, Dr. Jill B. Taylor, a neuroscientist graphically described her experience of losing the sense of individuating 'self' when the left hemisphere of her brain was non-functional (due to an hemorrhage) in 1996. She felt a universal Oneness when the right hemisphere of the brain alone was functioning.
Recent developments in Neuroscience have shown that our brain is not like a fixed pre-programmed printed circuit board. The neural connections are not rigid but highly labile. This is called by neuroscientists as the "plasticity of brain." In view of this, it is suggested that we can retrain our brain to process the perceptions to go through the Universal Self node instead of the usual self node gateway. Dr. Greg Goode would describe it as "Standing as Awareness."
Direct Path Advaitins tell us clearly that the 'collapse of the sense of separate self' is enlightenment. Many of them describe it as re-orientating, or a shift in, the way we perceive (i.e. without a 'me' as perceiver). This would obviously involve (i) a clear understanding of the percepts (= what is perceived) , (ii) be thoroughly convinced that the percepts to be no more than mere thoughts, sensations and perceptions in our brain (and not to be any solid objects to be 'existing' out there) and (iii) finally retraining the brain through practice in this worldview. Therefore, the re-engineering involved is to manage a shift from the 'self' gateway node to the "Universal Self" node.
Even traditional Vedanta advocates Shravana (Gaining Knowledge), Manana (Reflection on what is learnt) and Nidhidhyasana (constant contemplation and remembering), corresponding to the three steps spelt out in the above para.
Bhagavad-Gita too lays considerable emphasis on Practice (abhyaasa) and giving up a claim of 'ownership (of possessions) and doership (agency for actions)' - i.e. vairaagya (Chapter VI Sloka 35; VIII-8; XII-9).
Practice evidently takes advantage of the plasticity of the brain.
Neuroscientific Findings:
We all experience our body to be part of ourselves. It is a fundamental aspect of self-awareness. But this sense of self can be easily altered by manipulating our perceptions. It is illustrated by the "Rubber Hand Illusion." In this experiment we feel that 'a rubber hand is our own, when our corresponding real hand is hidden, and both the rubber hand and the real hand are touched synchronously for a few seconds by a friend. Not only that, our brain starts disowning our own real hand. The body temperature in the real hand drops down! Can you believe it!!
Such perceptual phenomenon does not happen just for a limb. It can happen to your entire body as proved by Swedish scientists a year ago.
See the video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rawY2VzN4-c
You feel the body of another person or of a mannequin standing in front of you as your body. Sort of "Parakaaya pravesha" (entering some other's body)!
Videos of the studies along with the virtual reality studies being carried out by Prof. Mel Slater are available at:
http://www.bodyinmind.com.au/mel-slater-on-inducing-illusory-ownership-of-a-virtual-body/
Meditation:
Various forms of meditation have been found to be quite efficient tools in bringing about a change in the texture and structure of the brain. Dr. P. B. Reiner reports on the work at Stanford and MIT in November 2009 as follows:
"Regular deep meditation changes the brain in positive ways. This type of meditation seems to be associated with gamma waves, the electromagnetic rhythm of neurons firing very rapidly in harmony.
Neuroscientists have pinpointed the cells responsible for producing these gamma rhythms and demonstrated a technology that can induce the brain-wave pattern in mice... In the future it might be possible to use this technology to reproduce some of the beneficial effects of meditation."
The Stanford and MIT scientists further say: "...it is worth remembering that both deep-brain stimulation, whereby implanted electrodes act as a kind of pacemaker in the brain, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which powerful magnetic fields are transmitted through the skull to affect brain activity, are rapidly moving from the lab to the clinic. Both these techniques represent relatively crude forms of brain stimulation."
Carnegie Mellon University scientists Timothy Keller and Marcel Just have uncovered in December 2009 the first evidence that intensive instruction to improve reading skills in young children causes the brain to physically rewire itself.
Dr. E. Phelps and her colleagues reported in Dec 2009 Nature, "A drug free, non-invasive method for semi-permanently blocking the return of fear memories in humans" by training their brains. These works are still in development stage. Yet their research is significant towards erasure of fear memories.
A video of their work can be seen at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/memory/
In this context, we may note that Bhagavad-Gita says that surmounting fears is an important step towards ‘liberation’.
(This Blog is actually Posted on 12 Dec 2009).
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
CONSCIOUSNESS IN COMA
"I Screamed, But There Was Nothing to Hear"
[FIRST A WELCOME:
I am happy to welcome to our Blog Mohan Suswaram and another member who gave only a link. I eagerly look forward to your inputs.]
"I Screamed, But There Was Nothing to Hear"
Many times discussants on Advaita raise the question about Consciousness in a Coma patient.
It is true, we do not have a clearcut definition of coma to be able to discuss the state of consciousness under comatose condition. In our Post dated 27th Sept 2009, how a patient in a vegetative state could 'learn' was talked about.
Now we have the shocking report of a patient who was in coma for 23 years but had been conscious all the time!!
What a horrific misery he must have gone through. Unimaginable and heart wrenching even to think!
"For 23 years Rom Houben was imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.........
"I screamed, but there was nothing to hear", he said, via his keyboard.
The Belgian former engineering student said he coped with being effectively trapped in his own body by meditating. ... Sometimes, he said, 'I was only my consciousness and nothing else'.......... 'Powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it,' he tapped out on to the screen during an interview with the Belgian network last night, AP reported.."
The following is from The Guardian:
"In 1988 Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker, fell in front of a train and was diagnosed as being in a coma. In 2007, he "woke up" to learn the iron curtain had fallen and he had gained 11 grandchildren. Doctors discovered he had been conscious throughout.
Terry Wallis of Arkansas fell into a coma after a road accident in 1984. When he woke up 19 years later, his wife had gone off with another man, had three children and was embroiled in a legal battle over who was deemed his legal guardian. His mother was with him the day he woke up and a nurse asked: "Terry, who is that?" He opened his eyes and replied, "Mom".
In 1996 Patricia White Bull from Albuquerque, New Mexico, woke after 16 years in a persistent vegetative state, scaring the life out of a nurse who was tucking in her bedding by shouting, "Don't do that!". She had fallen unconscious during the birth of her fourth child.
Twenty years ago, Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, regained consciousness after a year in a coma. Only days before, a judge had granted her family's request for the removal of her feeding tube.
Mark Newton from Hertfordshire fell into a coma in 1996 after surfacing too quickly while diving. Doctors considered him brain dead and recommended turning off his life support. His mother resisted and he woke up after six months. He had been aware of what was happening around him, but could not communicate."
From Associated Press:
"A coma is a state of unconsciousness in which the eyes are closed and the patient cannot be roused. A vegetative state is a condition in which the eyes are open and can move, and the patient has periods of sleep and periods of wakefulness, but remains unconscious and cannot reason or respond.
"It makes you think. There is still a lot of work to be done" to better diagnose such disorders, said Caroline Schnakers of the Coma Science Group."
Consious Under Anesthesia:
Patients under anesthesia too may oftener be conscious, said Dr. Wong, a surgeon a couple of years ago. The patient cannot express because his/her muscles are paralysed/too relaxed and do not move under his/her command though he/she may be conscious.
Mr. Rom Houben's condition came to light through brain scanning. His case has only just been revealed in a scientific paper released by the man who 'saved' him, top neurological expert Dr Steven Laureys, says a report in Mail Online.
So we can reasonably say 'consciousness' exists even under comatose condition. Modern scanning techniques can tell us many things about the brain as the case of Mr. Houben proves. Can the scans help us understand the brain of a Jivanmukta?
[Neuronal Correlates:
Please see my Posts on Neuronal Correlates of a Jivanmukta. My argument, in short is as follows:
We perceive a world.
But neuroscience clearly shows through studies on illusions/magic etc. that we hardly perceive what really exists 'out there.'
In other words, there is a disconnect between the ‘reality out there’ and our perception. This means that the sensory apparatus (senses and the respective cortical neurons) are inadequate to show what "exactly" is 'out there.'
2. Our brain makes a “map” of the perceptions received from the senses and interpretation made by the sensory cortex. We are actually aware of that map formed in our head. We don't have a clue what "exactly" is out there.
This “map” in our head is obviously made up of ‘thoughts’ (generated by neuronal electrical pulses as waves), or thought-stuff - whether it is beautiful girl or an ugly duck or a river or a table, these are all represented as thoughts in brain. So the constituent of all so called perceived ‘objects’ is thought-stuff.
3. The thought itself is cognized by us because we have "consciousness." Or as philosophers put it, consciousness illuminates (shows up) the thoughts.
4. A ‘me’-thought acts as the ‘seer’ of the map in our head. This is the ego providing continuity in time, coherence to experience and ownership to knowledge. It gets generated based on autobiographical information.
5. Neuroscience is as yet unable to understand how "Consciousness" is engendered in us.
6. Non-dualists find a shift in their perception. Instead of seeing the 'map' of the world in their brain with ego at the center, they identify themselves with the illuminating Consciousness. And this shift happens within and to an individual.
7. Can this shift then not be a play or happenstance in the brain itself of a Non-dualist ?
8. I wish we could get some brain scans of a Jivanmukta to see if the autobiographical memory based I-thought (i.e. 'self') collapses in him/her to give place to a "Universal Self."]
Comments are welcome.
***
Comment Added on : 19 May 2011: Vegetative and minimally conscious states:
"A person in a vegetative state will open their eyes spontaneously and make reflexive movements, but has no cognitive function and likely does not feel pain. Recovery is possible, but the chances of improvement are greatly diminished after a year. Someone in a minimally conscious state, by contrast, has intentional, non-reflexive but inconsistent responses to stimuli. They might speak a few words or track their image in a mirror, and they feel pain. In minimally conscious and healthy people the frontal cortex would then send a message back to the temporal cortex. The reason for this is uncertain; it may be to let the temporal cortex know what to expect in the future. But for people in a vegetative state, the communication was one-way: signals passed from the temporal to frontal area, but not back."
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110512/full/news.2011.287.html?WT.ec_id=NEWS-201\
10517
Comment Added on Sept 1, 2011: REM Sleep could prompt life-saving Decision:
http://the-scientist.com/2011/12/05/sleep-aid-revives-unconscious/
Added on Apr 06, 2012: As you awaken from anesthesia:
"We expected to see the outer bits of brain, the cerebral cortex (often thought to be the seat of higher human consciousness), would turn back on when consciousness was restored following anesthesia. Surprisingly, that is not what the images showed us. In fact, the central core structures of the more primitive brain structures including the thalamus and parts of the limbic system appeared to become functional first, suggesting that a foundational primitive conscious state must be restored before higher order conscious activity can occur."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-primitive-consciousness-emerges-awaken-anesthesia.html
Added on 16 Jun 2012: Communicating with people in a vegetative state:
"Despite highly controversial debate of consciousness, Owen believes that up to20 percent of people in a vegetative state in the United States are capable of communicating. "What we're seeing here is a population of totally locked-in patients. Over the past decade, he has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as a sort of interrogation tool—mapping the brain activity of comatose people as he asks them a series of questions. He has found that in a subset of patients thought to be far gone, the brain activity in response to questioning was comparable to what's observed in healthy people."
http://the-scientist.com/2012/06/14/fmri-mind-reader/
(See also: Brain Scans of Comatose Patients
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-brain-scans-comatose-patients-reveal-conscious-state)
Added on 14 Nov 2012: An “Unconscious” Man Talks:
"Scott Routley, a 39-year-old Canadian patient that doctors had considered vegetative and incapable of communicating following a car crash 12 years ago, was able to tell doctors that he’s not in pain via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of his brain. Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind."
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33264/title/An--Unconscious--Man-Talks/
Added on 27 Nov 2012: Brain in a Coma:
"Compared with healthy patients in the study, high-traffic hubs of brain activity are dark in coma patients while more quiet regions spring to life. Scientists still don't understand exactly how human consciousness works, but the twilight state of a coma could reveal some insight. Past research revealed that a person in a coma is closer to being anesthetized than being asleep. Other studies have found that vegetative and minimally conscious patients have very different brain activity. But for the most part, it was hard to find obvious differences in brain functioning between healthy patients and those who have lost consciousness. In healthy patients, about 40 regions lit up in concert with many other parts of the brain. These high-traffic hubs, like busy airports, apparently process much of the electrical firing in the brain. But in the coma patients, many of these hubs were darkened, and other, normally peripheral regions took their place. Intriguingly, coma patients had fewer hubs in a region called the precuneus, which is known to play a role in consciousness and memory."
http://www.livescience.com/25030-coma-brain-reorganized.html
Added on 05 Dec 2012: Brain networks restructured in comatose patients:
"By analysing the connectivity at a local level, the authors of the study have observed that some brain regions ("hubs"), which are highly connected in healthy volunteers, are less well connected in comatose patients. Conversely, the less densely connected regions in the network in healthy subjects become "hubs" in comatose patients."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/ind-trr120412.php
Added on 19 Apr 2013: Measuring Consciousness:
[FIRST A WELCOME:
I am happy to welcome to our Blog Mohan Suswaram and another member who gave only a link. I eagerly look forward to your inputs.]
"I Screamed, But There Was Nothing to Hear"
Many times discussants on Advaita raise the question about Consciousness in a Coma patient.
It is true, we do not have a clearcut definition of coma to be able to discuss the state of consciousness under comatose condition. In our Post dated 27th Sept 2009, how a patient in a vegetative state could 'learn' was talked about.
Now we have the shocking report of a patient who was in coma for 23 years but had been conscious all the time!!
What a horrific misery he must have gone through. Unimaginable and heart wrenching even to think!
"For 23 years Rom Houben was imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.........
"I screamed, but there was nothing to hear", he said, via his keyboard.
The Belgian former engineering student said he coped with being effectively trapped in his own body by meditating. ... Sometimes, he said, 'I was only my consciousness and nothing else'.......... 'Powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it,' he tapped out on to the screen during an interview with the Belgian network last night, AP reported.."
The following is from The Guardian:
"In 1988 Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker, fell in front of a train and was diagnosed as being in a coma. In 2007, he "woke up" to learn the iron curtain had fallen and he had gained 11 grandchildren. Doctors discovered he had been conscious throughout.
Terry Wallis of Arkansas fell into a coma after a road accident in 1984. When he woke up 19 years later, his wife had gone off with another man, had three children and was embroiled in a legal battle over who was deemed his legal guardian. His mother was with him the day he woke up and a nurse asked: "Terry, who is that?" He opened his eyes and replied, "Mom".
In 1996 Patricia White Bull from Albuquerque, New Mexico, woke after 16 years in a persistent vegetative state, scaring the life out of a nurse who was tucking in her bedding by shouting, "Don't do that!". She had fallen unconscious during the birth of her fourth child.
Twenty years ago, Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, regained consciousness after a year in a coma. Only days before, a judge had granted her family's request for the removal of her feeding tube.
Mark Newton from Hertfordshire fell into a coma in 1996 after surfacing too quickly while diving. Doctors considered him brain dead and recommended turning off his life support. His mother resisted and he woke up after six months. He had been aware of what was happening around him, but could not communicate."
From Associated Press:
"A coma is a state of unconsciousness in which the eyes are closed and the patient cannot be roused. A vegetative state is a condition in which the eyes are open and can move, and the patient has periods of sleep and periods of wakefulness, but remains unconscious and cannot reason or respond.
"It makes you think. There is still a lot of work to be done" to better diagnose such disorders, said Caroline Schnakers of the Coma Science Group."
Consious Under Anesthesia:
Patients under anesthesia too may oftener be conscious, said Dr. Wong, a surgeon a couple of years ago. The patient cannot express because his/her muscles are paralysed/too relaxed and do not move under his/her command though he/she may be conscious.
Mr. Rom Houben's condition came to light through brain scanning. His case has only just been revealed in a scientific paper released by the man who 'saved' him, top neurological expert Dr Steven Laureys, says a report in Mail Online.
So we can reasonably say 'consciousness' exists even under comatose condition. Modern scanning techniques can tell us many things about the brain as the case of Mr. Houben proves. Can the scans help us understand the brain of a Jivanmukta?
[Neuronal Correlates:
Please see my Posts on Neuronal Correlates of a Jivanmukta. My argument, in short is as follows:
We perceive a world.
But neuroscience clearly shows through studies on illusions/magic etc. that we hardly perceive what really exists 'out there.'
In other words, there is a disconnect between the ‘reality out there’ and our perception. This means that the sensory apparatus (senses and the respective cortical neurons) are inadequate to show what "exactly" is 'out there.'
2. Our brain makes a “map” of the perceptions received from the senses and interpretation made by the sensory cortex. We are actually aware of that map formed in our head. We don't have a clue what "exactly" is out there.
This “map” in our head is obviously made up of ‘thoughts’ (generated by neuronal electrical pulses as waves), or thought-stuff - whether it is beautiful girl or an ugly duck or a river or a table, these are all represented as thoughts in brain. So the constituent of all so called perceived ‘objects’ is thought-stuff.
3. The thought itself is cognized by us because we have "consciousness." Or as philosophers put it, consciousness illuminates (shows up) the thoughts.
4. A ‘me’-thought acts as the ‘seer’ of the map in our head. This is the ego providing continuity in time, coherence to experience and ownership to knowledge. It gets generated based on autobiographical information.
5. Neuroscience is as yet unable to understand how "Consciousness" is engendered in us.
6. Non-dualists find a shift in their perception. Instead of seeing the 'map' of the world in their brain with ego at the center, they identify themselves with the illuminating Consciousness. And this shift happens within and to an individual.
7. Can this shift then not be a play or happenstance in the brain itself of a Non-dualist ?
8. I wish we could get some brain scans of a Jivanmukta to see if the autobiographical memory based I-thought (i.e. 'self') collapses in him/her to give place to a "Universal Self."]
Comments are welcome.
***
Comment Added on : 19 May 2011: Vegetative and minimally conscious states:
"A person in a vegetative state will open their eyes spontaneously and make reflexive movements, but has no cognitive function and likely does not feel pain. Recovery is possible, but the chances of improvement are greatly diminished after a year. Someone in a minimally conscious state, by contrast, has intentional, non-reflexive but inconsistent responses to stimuli. They might speak a few words or track their image in a mirror, and they feel pain. In minimally conscious and healthy people the frontal cortex would then send a message back to the temporal cortex. The reason for this is uncertain; it may be to let the temporal cortex know what to expect in the future. But for people in a vegetative state, the communication was one-way: signals passed from the temporal to frontal area, but not back."
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110512/full/news.2011.287.html?WT.ec_id=NEWS-201\
10517
Comment Added on Sept 1, 2011: REM Sleep could prompt life-saving Decision:
The minimally conscious state, persistent vegetative state and coma are all disorders of consciousness caused by severe brain damage. Minimally conscious individuals tend to have better outcomes than vegetative individuals, but distinguishing between them is difficult and misdiagnosis is common. Getting it wrong can sometimes mean that a person who might otherwise recover has their life-support machine switched off.
The brain waves associated with sleep and dreaming could be helpful for distinguishing between people in a persistent vegetative state and those who are minimally conscious – a distinction that could seal the fate of the individual.
Comment Added on Dec 01, 2011: The mystery of anaesthesia:
"For years we had been looking at vegetative and coma patients whose brains were
responding to speech and getting terribly seduced by these images, thinking that
they were conscious," says Owen. "This told us that they are not conscious."
Similar findings are coming in from studies of people in a coma or persistent
vegetative state (PVS), who may open their eyes in a sleep-wake cycle, although
remain unresponsive. Laureys, for example, has seen a similar breakdown in
communication between different cortical areas in people in a coma. "Anaesthesia
is a pharmacologically induced coma," he says. "That same breakdown in global
neuronal workspace is occurring."
Comment Added on Dec 05, 2011: Ambien Revives the Unconscious:
"In 1999, Louis Viljoen was hit by a truck and declared vegetative, kept alive by machines for three years before his doctor prescribed him zolpidem thinking it might stop him from clawing his mattress in the middle of the night. Twenty minutes after receiving his first dose, he woke up and started talking to his mother. He floated in and out of consciousness over the next several days, waking up for increasingly long periods after receiving his zolpidem until he stayed awake without the drug."http://the-scientist.com/2011/12/05/sleep-aid-revives-unconscious/
Added on Apr 06, 2012: As you awaken from anesthesia:
"We expected to see the outer bits of brain, the cerebral cortex (often thought to be the seat of higher human consciousness), would turn back on when consciousness was restored following anesthesia. Surprisingly, that is not what the images showed us. In fact, the central core structures of the more primitive brain structures including the thalamus and parts of the limbic system appeared to become functional first, suggesting that a foundational primitive conscious state must be restored before higher order conscious activity can occur."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-primitive-consciousness-emerges-awaken-anesthesia.html
Added on 16 Jun 2012: Communicating with people in a vegetative state:
"Despite highly controversial debate of consciousness, Owen believes that up to20 percent of people in a vegetative state in the United States are capable of communicating. "What we're seeing here is a population of totally locked-in patients. Over the past decade, he has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as a sort of interrogation tool—mapping the brain activity of comatose people as he asks them a series of questions. He has found that in a subset of patients thought to be far gone, the brain activity in response to questioning was comparable to what's observed in healthy people."
http://the-scientist.com/2012/06/14/fmri-mind-reader/
(See also: Brain Scans of Comatose Patients
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-brain-scans-comatose-patients-reveal-conscious-state)
Added on 14 Nov 2012: An “Unconscious” Man Talks:
"Scott Routley, a 39-year-old Canadian patient that doctors had considered vegetative and incapable of communicating following a car crash 12 years ago, was able to tell doctors that he’s not in pain via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of his brain. Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind."
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33264/title/An--Unconscious--Man-Talks/
Added on 27 Nov 2012: Brain in a Coma:
"Compared with healthy patients in the study, high-traffic hubs of brain activity are dark in coma patients while more quiet regions spring to life. Scientists still don't understand exactly how human consciousness works, but the twilight state of a coma could reveal some insight. Past research revealed that a person in a coma is closer to being anesthetized than being asleep. Other studies have found that vegetative and minimally conscious patients have very different brain activity. But for the most part, it was hard to find obvious differences in brain functioning between healthy patients and those who have lost consciousness. In healthy patients, about 40 regions lit up in concert with many other parts of the brain. These high-traffic hubs, like busy airports, apparently process much of the electrical firing in the brain. But in the coma patients, many of these hubs were darkened, and other, normally peripheral regions took their place. Intriguingly, coma patients had fewer hubs in a region called the precuneus, which is known to play a role in consciousness and memory."
http://www.livescience.com/25030-coma-brain-reorganized.html
Added on 05 Dec 2012: Brain networks restructured in comatose patients:
"By analysing the connectivity at a local level, the authors of the study have observed that some brain regions ("hubs"), which are highly connected in healthy volunteers, are less well connected in comatose patients. Conversely, the less densely connected regions in the network in healthy subjects become "hubs" in comatose patients."
Added on 19 Apr 2013: Measuring Consciousness:
"Over the past 5 years, researchers have made significant progress
in understanding what happens in the brain as consciousness departs and
returns. Peering into the anesthetized brain with neuroimaging and
electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings, scientists have found evidence to
support the "integrated-information theory," which holds that
consciousness relies on communication between different brain areas, and fades
as that communication breaks down. EEG studies have also revealed distinctive
brain wave patterns that signal when consciousness is lost and regained,
offering easily identifiable markers for this impairment of communication.
Though many questions remain, advances in brain activity monitoring promise to
shed light the neural basis of consciousness."
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/35140/title/Measuring-Con\sciousness/
Also See: http://beyond-advaita.blogspot.com/2010/09/research-on-non-dualism-self-and.html
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/35140/title/Measuring-Con\sciousness/
Also See: http://beyond-advaita.blogspot.com/2010/09/research-on-non-dualism-self-and.html
Thursday, November 19, 2009
HAPPY END TO DUKHI’S SORROWFUL SAGA
HAPPY END TO DUKHI’S SORROWFUL SAGA
It is one more of the ostentatious gala functions of a jet set Swami who claims to possess the secret key for happiness. The pompous guru mumbled some mantra, loyal assistants furiously clapped and basketfuls of flowers were strewn all around him. Matching with the scene, the background music reached a tumultuous crescendo. The Swami obviously mastered the history, geography, science, linguistics and what-not of living happily. With condescending looks he began the sermon. He exhorted people to play-act thumping hay, pounding rice, grinding pulses and washing clothes. Dukhiram was one of over a hundred thousand who attended, every one trying to steal a slice of happiness from the Swami. Dukhi, however, returned home disappointed.
Dukhi has been on antidepressants for some time. Neurologists shifted him from simple tranquilizers to more impressive sounding 'serotonin re-uptake inhibitors'. Dukhi has a cushy job with handsome emoluments and all the perks that a modern society can offer - air-conditioned house, chauffeur-driven cars and latest gadgets that operate by a remote switch for all and sundry household chores you can name. He doesn’t have to exert nor strain the body for anything. There is no obvious reason for his unhappiness or depression.
The problem is we human beings seem to come with two-in-one personalities. Philosophers interpreted this in the east and west in their own style. Vyasa said that the ‘mind’ was irrepressible for ‘us’ like wind. Buddha compared our mind to an uncontrollable elephant. St. Paul said that the Spirit and the flesh were perpetually opposed to one another. Freud took this dualistic approach a step further. He designed a psychoanalytical system to strengthen ‘us’ (conscious self) to take control of the id (basic instincts). Psychologist Dr. Haidt compared ‘us’ to a meek rider sitting on a mighty elephant called mind.
Strictly speaking, we do not come with two (as many suppose) or three (as Freud hypothesized) or four (as ancient Indian scriptures said) parts of mind. It is all one mind, one brain and one purpose. Mind is simply what the brain does and its purpose is to protect the organism (you). The brain has been developing, learning its tricks of trade through evolution over several hundreds of millions of years. Like a renovated house with more rooms added upstairs utilizing same old type of building material, brain too has grown adding new layers over the pre-existing structure using the same old neurons.
The older part of the brain structure, however, perfected the art of living for the moment on a ‘here and now’ basis. It learnt to work on autopilot in preserving and protecting the organism without the need for ‘our’ conscious intervention. After all it comes with time-tested proof of its worth through millions of years of evolution and so we and other animals continue with it. Our brain suited us particularly well in our primitive living conditions in caves or in the wilderness where we never knew to which beast we could have possibly become dinner the next moment.
Group living, tool usage, agriculture, trade and allied skills gradually contributed over time for our greater security. These changes helped the new layers in our brain to develop confidence in ‘planning for future’ instead of ‘living for the moment’. A language module too coevolved in the brain. But the new modules vested with higher cognitive abilities have not yet had enough time in evolution to be perfected in their functioning. Consequently, the lower brain layers still continue to work for our protection. Because of this, an apparent clash of interests takes place between these two modules – the conscious ‘us’ with our plans, social niceties and etiquettes and the old proven devil working on autopilot. We find the base animalistic pulls of the old brain antagonistic and some times embarrassing in today’s secure environment where we do not have to struggle as much for food or mate. However, as Noble laureate Prof. Kandel said almost ninety percent of our functions are even now taken care of by the old brain without our conscious thinking or intervention.
When the body works hard for its needs – whether obtaining food (for sustenance) or sex (for procreation), the old brain rewards with a squirt of dopamine spray, a neurotransmitter. The spray produces a ‘feeling of happiness’. It is this ‘feel good’ mechanism that primes the organism to act. When the body gets all its requirements fulfilled without any exertion, this spray of dopamine doesn’t kick in. Consequently, the body feels unrewarded, bored and therefore unhappy. Continuous unhappiness depletes another neurotransmitter called serotonin and we begin to feel depressed. To avoid this trap it is necessary to make the body work for its needs and let it feel ‘Ha, I-earned-my-reward!’
It so happened that Dukhiram’s office arranged a retreat for their staff in a remote jungle far away from phones, conveyances or packed fast foods. No electric power, nor time-pieces. Participants had to depend on the sun for time, gather firewood, cook their meal and spend the day in hard labor while keeping the ‘planning, language etc. modules’ of the brain busily occupied with a constant vigil on issues of safety. At the end of the day, the body had earned its ‘reward.’ It slept soundly and was fully refreshed to face the challenges next morning. Dukhiram was so happy during the fifteen days of the camp-life that he resolved to give up a whole lot of his modern gadgetry at home. He decided to let his body do that little bit of extra work and earn its brownies. He also learnt that Psychologist Dr. Bargh discovered that even subliminally suggestive words like sad, sorrow, old etc. can impact our attitudes without our conscious knowledge. So Dukhi (sad) changed his name too fittingly to Santosh (happy).
Dr. S. Ilardi, author of “The Depression Cure” published in June 2009 says: “As a species, humans were never designed for the pace of modern life. We're designed for a different time — a time when people were physically active, when they were outside in the sun for most of the day, when they had extensive social connections and enjoyed continual face time with their friends and loved ones, when they experienced very little social isolation, when they had a much different diet, when they got considerably more sleep and when they had much less in the way of a relentless, demanding, stress-filled existence.” It was also found by anthropologist, Dr. E. Schieffelin “that the Kaluli people of the New Guinea highlands — whose day-to-day existence of foraging and gardening is akin to that of our remote ancestors — are almost completely free of depressive illness.”
Prof. Y. Shoenfeld believes “that depression has biological roots and may be an immune system response to certain physiological cues.” He finds that certain aromas are effective in relieving depression. Dr. J.S. Gordon says in his book “Unstuck” that depression isn't really a disease, but “a life out of balance.” He advises a change in life-style with adequate exercise, nutritional supplements and self-help strategies. Antidepressants should be the last resort according to him.
*****
Added on 20 July 2011:
"We found that the more these drugs affect serotonin and other neurotransmitters in your brain -- and that's what they're supposed to do -- the greater your risk of relapse once you stop taking them. All these drugs do reduce symptoms, probably to some degree, in the short-term. Our meta-analysis suggests that when you try to go off the drugs, depression will bounce back. This can leave people stuck in a cycle where they need to keep taking anti-depressants to prevent a return of symptoms. Depression may actually be a natural and beneficial -- though painful - state in which the brain is working to cope with stress.. Longitudinal studies cited in the paper show that more than 40 per cent of the population may experience major depression at some point in their lives."
From: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-patients-anti-depressants-relapse.html
Added on 09 Aug 2011:
"Making music might help lift more depressed people out of the dumps than common antidepressant medications do, the results of a new study suggest. Music is known to have a strong effect on the human psyche. Learning to play an instrument boosts the brain's auditory ability and even makes it easier to learn foreign languages, studies show. Music can also trigger memories by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the brain just behind the forehead. This region is one of the last areas of the brain to atrophy during Alzheimer's, explaining why many Alzheimer's patients can recall songs from the distant past.
These emotional and communicative effects may explain the mood-boosted effect found in the new study."
It is one more of the ostentatious gala functions of a jet set Swami who claims to possess the secret key for happiness. The pompous guru mumbled some mantra, loyal assistants furiously clapped and basketfuls of flowers were strewn all around him. Matching with the scene, the background music reached a tumultuous crescendo. The Swami obviously mastered the history, geography, science, linguistics and what-not of living happily. With condescending looks he began the sermon. He exhorted people to play-act thumping hay, pounding rice, grinding pulses and washing clothes. Dukhiram was one of over a hundred thousand who attended, every one trying to steal a slice of happiness from the Swami. Dukhi, however, returned home disappointed.
Dukhi has been on antidepressants for some time. Neurologists shifted him from simple tranquilizers to more impressive sounding 'serotonin re-uptake inhibitors'. Dukhi has a cushy job with handsome emoluments and all the perks that a modern society can offer - air-conditioned house, chauffeur-driven cars and latest gadgets that operate by a remote switch for all and sundry household chores you can name. He doesn’t have to exert nor strain the body for anything. There is no obvious reason for his unhappiness or depression.
The problem is we human beings seem to come with two-in-one personalities. Philosophers interpreted this in the east and west in their own style. Vyasa said that the ‘mind’ was irrepressible for ‘us’ like wind. Buddha compared our mind to an uncontrollable elephant. St. Paul said that the Spirit and the flesh were perpetually opposed to one another. Freud took this dualistic approach a step further. He designed a psychoanalytical system to strengthen ‘us’ (conscious self) to take control of the id (basic instincts). Psychologist Dr. Haidt compared ‘us’ to a meek rider sitting on a mighty elephant called mind.
Strictly speaking, we do not come with two (as many suppose) or three (as Freud hypothesized) or four (as ancient Indian scriptures said) parts of mind. It is all one mind, one brain and one purpose. Mind is simply what the brain does and its purpose is to protect the organism (you). The brain has been developing, learning its tricks of trade through evolution over several hundreds of millions of years. Like a renovated house with more rooms added upstairs utilizing same old type of building material, brain too has grown adding new layers over the pre-existing structure using the same old neurons.
The older part of the brain structure, however, perfected the art of living for the moment on a ‘here and now’ basis. It learnt to work on autopilot in preserving and protecting the organism without the need for ‘our’ conscious intervention. After all it comes with time-tested proof of its worth through millions of years of evolution and so we and other animals continue with it. Our brain suited us particularly well in our primitive living conditions in caves or in the wilderness where we never knew to which beast we could have possibly become dinner the next moment.
Group living, tool usage, agriculture, trade and allied skills gradually contributed over time for our greater security. These changes helped the new layers in our brain to develop confidence in ‘planning for future’ instead of ‘living for the moment’. A language module too coevolved in the brain. But the new modules vested with higher cognitive abilities have not yet had enough time in evolution to be perfected in their functioning. Consequently, the lower brain layers still continue to work for our protection. Because of this, an apparent clash of interests takes place between these two modules – the conscious ‘us’ with our plans, social niceties and etiquettes and the old proven devil working on autopilot. We find the base animalistic pulls of the old brain antagonistic and some times embarrassing in today’s secure environment where we do not have to struggle as much for food or mate. However, as Noble laureate Prof. Kandel said almost ninety percent of our functions are even now taken care of by the old brain without our conscious thinking or intervention.
When the body works hard for its needs – whether obtaining food (for sustenance) or sex (for procreation), the old brain rewards with a squirt of dopamine spray, a neurotransmitter. The spray produces a ‘feeling of happiness’. It is this ‘feel good’ mechanism that primes the organism to act. When the body gets all its requirements fulfilled without any exertion, this spray of dopamine doesn’t kick in. Consequently, the body feels unrewarded, bored and therefore unhappy. Continuous unhappiness depletes another neurotransmitter called serotonin and we begin to feel depressed. To avoid this trap it is necessary to make the body work for its needs and let it feel ‘Ha, I-earned-my-reward!’
It so happened that Dukhiram’s office arranged a retreat for their staff in a remote jungle far away from phones, conveyances or packed fast foods. No electric power, nor time-pieces. Participants had to depend on the sun for time, gather firewood, cook their meal and spend the day in hard labor while keeping the ‘planning, language etc. modules’ of the brain busily occupied with a constant vigil on issues of safety. At the end of the day, the body had earned its ‘reward.’ It slept soundly and was fully refreshed to face the challenges next morning. Dukhiram was so happy during the fifteen days of the camp-life that he resolved to give up a whole lot of his modern gadgetry at home. He decided to let his body do that little bit of extra work and earn its brownies. He also learnt that Psychologist Dr. Bargh discovered that even subliminally suggestive words like sad, sorrow, old etc. can impact our attitudes without our conscious knowledge. So Dukhi (sad) changed his name too fittingly to Santosh (happy).
Dr. S. Ilardi, author of “The Depression Cure” published in June 2009 says: “As a species, humans were never designed for the pace of modern life. We're designed for a different time — a time when people were physically active, when they were outside in the sun for most of the day, when they had extensive social connections and enjoyed continual face time with their friends and loved ones, when they experienced very little social isolation, when they had a much different diet, when they got considerably more sleep and when they had much less in the way of a relentless, demanding, stress-filled existence.” It was also found by anthropologist, Dr. E. Schieffelin “that the Kaluli people of the New Guinea highlands — whose day-to-day existence of foraging and gardening is akin to that of our remote ancestors — are almost completely free of depressive illness.”
Prof. Y. Shoenfeld believes “that depression has biological roots and may be an immune system response to certain physiological cues.” He finds that certain aromas are effective in relieving depression. Dr. J.S. Gordon says in his book “Unstuck” that depression isn't really a disease, but “a life out of balance.” He advises a change in life-style with adequate exercise, nutritional supplements and self-help strategies. Antidepressants should be the last resort according to him.
*****
Added on 20 July 2011:
"We found that the more these drugs affect serotonin and other neurotransmitters in your brain -- and that's what they're supposed to do -- the greater your risk of relapse once you stop taking them. All these drugs do reduce symptoms, probably to some degree, in the short-term. Our meta-analysis suggests that when you try to go off the drugs, depression will bounce back. This can leave people stuck in a cycle where they need to keep taking anti-depressants to prevent a return of symptoms. Depression may actually be a natural and beneficial -- though painful - state in which the brain is working to cope with stress.. Longitudinal studies cited in the paper show that more than 40 per cent of the population may experience major depression at some point in their lives."
From: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-patients-anti-depressants-relapse.html
Added on 09 Aug 2011:
"Making music might help lift more depressed people out of the dumps than common antidepressant medications do, the results of a new study suggest. Music is known to have a strong effect on the human psyche. Learning to play an instrument boosts the brain's auditory ability and even makes it easier to learn foreign languages, studies show. Music can also trigger memories by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the brain just behind the forehead. This region is one of the last areas of the brain to atrophy during Alzheimer's, explaining why many Alzheimer's patients can recall songs from the distant past.
These emotional and communicative effects may explain the mood-boosted effect found in the new study."
From: Click
Added on 07 Jan 2012: Low vitamin D levels linked to depression:
"Low levels of vitamin D already are associated with a cavalcade of health woes from cardiovascular diseases to neurological ailments. Higher vitamin D levels were associated with a significantly decreased risk of current depression, particularly among people with a prior history of depression. Low vitamin D levels were associated with depressive symptoms, particularly those with a history of depression."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-vitamin-d-linked-depression-psychiatrists.html
Added on 2 Mar 2012: Depression could be evolutionary byproduct:
"Infection was the major cause of death in humans' early history, so surviving infection was a key determinant in whether someone was able to pass on his or her genes. The authors propose that evolution and genetics have bound together depressive symptoms and physiological responses that were selected on the basis of reducing mortality from infection. Fever, fatigue/inactivity, social avoidance and anorexia can all be seen as adaptive behaviors in light of the need to contain infection."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-depression-evolutionary-byproduct-immune.html
Added on 26 Apr 2012: A few days steeped in nature boosts creativity, insight and problem solving:
"We’ve got information coming at us from social media, electronics and cell phones. We constantly shift attention from one source to another, getting all of this information that simulates alarms, warnings and emergencies. Those threats are bad for us. They sap our resources to do the fun thinking and cognition humans are capable of. Nature is a place where our mind can rest, relax and let down those threat responses. Therefore, we have resources left over — to be creative, to be imaginative, to problem solve — that allow us to be better, happier people who engage in a more productive way with others.There’s growing advantage over time to being in nature."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-wild-boosts-creativity-insight-problem.html
Added on 15 May 2012:
A walk in the park gives mental boost to people with depression:
"Our study showed that participants with clinical depression demonstrated improved memory performance after a walk in nature, compared to a walk in a busy urban environment."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/
Added on 16 Jun 2012:
Socialising helps to alleviate symptoms of depression:
""Simply going out for a coffee or chatting to a friend can reduce the symptoms of depression experienced by people with mental health problems. Increased social interaction helps sufferers to rebuild their self-esteem which in turn enables them to maintain and develop positive relationships and friendships."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-socialising-alleviate-symptoms-depression.\htm
Added on 01 Jul 2012:
Why Stress Makes You Miserable:
"Stress really does mess with your mind. A new study has found that chronic stress can create many of the brain changes associated with mood disorders by blocking a gene called neuritin—and that boosting the gene's activity can protect the brain from those disorders."
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/06/why-stress-makes-you-miserable.html?ref=em
Added on 31 Aug 2012:
Added on 07 Jan 2012: Low vitamin D levels linked to depression:
"Low levels of vitamin D already are associated with a cavalcade of health woes from cardiovascular diseases to neurological ailments. Higher vitamin D levels were associated with a significantly decreased risk of current depression, particularly among people with a prior history of depression. Low vitamin D levels were associated with depressive symptoms, particularly those with a history of depression."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-vitamin-d-linked-depression-psychiatrists.html
Added on 2 Mar 2012: Depression could be evolutionary byproduct:
"Infection was the major cause of death in humans' early history, so surviving infection was a key determinant in whether someone was able to pass on his or her genes. The authors propose that evolution and genetics have bound together depressive symptoms and physiological responses that were selected on the basis of reducing mortality from infection. Fever, fatigue/inactivity, social avoidance and anorexia can all be seen as adaptive behaviors in light of the need to contain infection."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-depression-evolutionary-byproduct-immune.html
Added on 26 Apr 2012: A few days steeped in nature boosts creativity, insight and problem solving:
"We’ve got information coming at us from social media, electronics and cell phones. We constantly shift attention from one source to another, getting all of this information that simulates alarms, warnings and emergencies. Those threats are bad for us. They sap our resources to do the fun thinking and cognition humans are capable of. Nature is a place where our mind can rest, relax and let down those threat responses. Therefore, we have resources left over — to be creative, to be imaginative, to problem solve — that allow us to be better, happier people who engage in a more productive way with others.There’s growing advantage over time to being in nature."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-wild-boosts-creativity-insight-problem.html
Added on 15 May 2012:
A walk in the park gives mental boost to people with depression:
"Our study showed that participants with clinical depression demonstrated improved memory performance after a walk in nature, compared to a walk in a busy urban environment."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/
Added on 16 Jun 2012:
Socialising helps to alleviate symptoms of depression:
""Simply going out for a coffee or chatting to a friend can reduce the symptoms of depression experienced by people with mental health problems. Increased social interaction helps sufferers to rebuild their self-esteem which in turn enables them to maintain and develop positive relationships and friendships."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-socialising-alleviate-symptoms-depression.\htm
Added on 01 Jul 2012:
Why Stress Makes You Miserable:
"Stress really does mess with your mind. A new study has found that chronic stress can create many of the brain changes associated with mood disorders by blocking a gene called neuritin—and that boosting the gene's activity can protect the brain from those disorders."
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/06/why-stress-makes-you-miserable.html?ref=em
Added on 31 Aug 2012:
Depression Linked with
Hyperconnected Brain Areas:
"Scientists found that
the limbic and cortical areas, which together produce and process our emotions,
sent a barrage of neural messages back and forth to one another—much more than
in the brains of healthy patients. These signals can amplify depressed people's
negative thoughts and act like white noise, drowning out the other neural
messages telling them to move on.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-depression-connection&WT.mc\_id=SA_CAT_MB_20120829
Added on 06 Oct 2012:
The Evolutionary Advantage of Depression:
"Increasingly, researchers are identifying how genes contribute to depression. As we learn more about the human genome, scientists are finding evidence that while depression seems incredibly maladaptive, it was actually adaptive (helpful) to our ancestors. Some of the alleles (forms of genes) that increase one's risk for depression also enhance immune responses to infections. Depressive symptoms are inextricably intertwined with -- and generated by -- physiological responses to infection that, on average, have been selected as a result of reducing infectious mortality across mammalian evolution. While immune-modulating therapies may be effective in treating some cases of depression, these therapies may not be effective against all types of depression."
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/the-evolutionary-advantage-of-depression/263124/
Added on 06 Nov 2012:
ANGST - Origins of Anxiety and Depression by Jeffrey P. Kahn, OUP, 2012, pp: 312
"Basically, we are built to be sheep, but for some reason prefer to be human. The downside of this is that our sheepish instincts complain in the form of Anxiety and Depressive Angst. ANGST provides a reasoned and entertaining new framework for understanding our knowledge of psychiatric neuroscience, clinical research, diagnosis and treatment. Ranging from Darwin and Freud to the most cutting-edge medical and scientific findings—drawing from ancient writings, modern humor and popular lyrics, and with many amusing cartoons— ANGST offers us an exciting new slant on some of the most pervasive mental health issues of our time."
Sourced from: http://www.amazon.com/Angst-Depression-Jeffrey-P-Kahn/dp/0199796440
Added on 06 Oct 2012:
The Evolutionary Advantage of Depression:
"Increasingly, researchers are identifying how genes contribute to depression. As we learn more about the human genome, scientists are finding evidence that while depression seems incredibly maladaptive, it was actually adaptive (helpful) to our ancestors. Some of the alleles (forms of genes) that increase one's risk for depression also enhance immune responses to infections. Depressive symptoms are inextricably intertwined with -- and generated by -- physiological responses to infection that, on average, have been selected as a result of reducing infectious mortality across mammalian evolution. While immune-modulating therapies may be effective in treating some cases of depression, these therapies may not be effective against all types of depression."
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/the-evolutionary-advantage-of-depression/263124/
Added on 06 Nov 2012:
ANGST - Origins of Anxiety and Depression by Jeffrey P. Kahn, OUP, 2012, pp: 312
"Basically, we are built to be sheep, but for some reason prefer to be human. The downside of this is that our sheepish instincts complain in the form of Anxiety and Depressive Angst. ANGST provides a reasoned and entertaining new framework for understanding our knowledge of psychiatric neuroscience, clinical research, diagnosis and treatment. Ranging from Darwin and Freud to the most cutting-edge medical and scientific findings—drawing from ancient writings, modern humor and popular lyrics, and with many amusing cartoons— ANGST offers us an exciting new slant on some of the most pervasive mental health issues of our time."
Sourced from: http://www.amazon.com/Angst-Depression-Jeffrey-P-Kahn/dp/0199796440
Added on 27 Nov 2012: Lack of nutrients and Depression:
"A low intake of folate and vitamin B12 increases the risk of melancholic depressive symptoms, according to a study among nearly 3,000 middle-aged and elderly Finnish subjects. On the other hand, non-melancholic depressive symptoms are associated with an increased risk for the metabolic syndrome. Based on these new observations, melancholic and non-melancholic depression may be separate depressive subtypes with different etiologies in terms of proinflammation and diet. Melancholic depression involves typical depressive symptoms, such as a depressed mood. Non-melancholic depression is characterized by other types of symptoms, such as low self-esteem and feelings of worry and anxiety."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-lack-nutrients-metabolic-syndrome-linked.html
Added on 08 Dec 2012: Drug fights hard-to-treat depression:
"A first-of-its-kind antidepressant drug discovered by a Northwestern University professor and now tested on adults who have failed other antidepressant therapies has been shown to alleviate symptoms within hours, have good safety and produce positive effects that last for about seven days from a single dose."
"A low intake of folate and vitamin B12 increases the risk of melancholic depressive symptoms, according to a study among nearly 3,000 middle-aged and elderly Finnish subjects. On the other hand, non-melancholic depressive symptoms are associated with an increased risk for the metabolic syndrome. Based on these new observations, melancholic and non-melancholic depression may be separate depressive subtypes with different etiologies in terms of proinflammation and diet. Melancholic depression involves typical depressive symptoms, such as a depressed mood. Non-melancholic depression is characterized by other types of symptoms, such as low self-esteem and feelings of worry and anxiety."
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-lack-nutrients-metabolic-syndrome-linked.html
Added on 07 Dec 2012: Pathway leading to depression:
"Scientists have identified the key molecular pathway leading to depression, revealing potential new targets for drug discovery. The study reveals that the 'Hedgehog pathway' regulates how stress hormones, usually elevated during depression, reduce the number of brain cells. The severity of symptoms can range from feelings of sadness and hopelessness to, in the most severe cases, self-harm or suicide. Recent studies have demonstrated that depression is associated with a reduction in a brain process called 'neurogenesis'- the ability of the brain to produce new brain cells. Stress hormones, such as cortisol, are generally elevated in stress and depression. The researchers discovered that a specific signalling mechanism in the cell, the 'Hedgehog pathway', is responsible for damaging the production of new brain cells."
Added on 08 Dec 2012: Drug fights hard-to-treat depression:
"A first-of-its-kind antidepressant drug discovered by a Northwestern University professor and now tested on adults who have failed other antidepressant therapies has been shown to alleviate symptoms within hours, have good safety and produce positive effects that last for about seven days from a single dose."
Added on 08 Dec 2012: CBT proves effective at reducing depression:
"Studies done on 469 adults (aged 18 years) who had not responded to at least 6 weeks of treatment with an antidepressant from 73 general practices across the UK. Participants were randomised to either continue with usual care provided by their general practitioner, which included continuing on antidepressant medication (235 patients), or to receive CBT in addition to usual care (234 patients) and were followed up for 12 months. After 6 months, 46% of participants who received CBT in addition to usual care had improved (reporting at least a 50% reduction in depressive symptoms) compared to 22% of those who continued with treatment as usual."
Added on 13 Feb 2013: Most Common and Powerful Triggers of Depression:
"Certain painful experiences are more likely to precede depressive episodes than others. And some forms of loss can trigger depression more quickly than previously realized. For people who are especially vulnerable to depression, even mild stress or a minor loss can spark a depressive episode relatively quickly."
Added on 23 Feb 2013: Antidepressants alone are not enough:
"The latest studies have shown that antidepressants restore the capacity of certain areas of the brain to repair abnormal neural pathways. Recovery requires redirection of these pathways through practice, rehabilitation or therapy. Antidepressants reopen a window of brain plasticity, which allows the formation and adaptation of brain connections through the patient's own activities and observations, similarly to a young child whose brain and experiences about the world develop in response to environmental stimuli.When cerebral plasticity is reopened, problems caused by false connections in the brain can be addressed."
Added on 17May 2013: Body's clock (circadian rhythms) linked to depression:
"The disruption of sleep and other bodily rhythms that often
accompanies clinical depression may leave a mark on the brain. A study of
gene activity in the brains of people who suffered from depression reveals
that their daily clocks were probably out of whack. In mammals, daily rhythms
such as sleep,hormone cycles and eating patterns are guided by a master
clock in the brain whose rhythms are maintained in part by genes and patterns
of light and darkness. The master clock can get out of sync with clocks
elsewhere in the brain and body. This discord, for example, produces the
out-of-sorts feeling of jet lag. People with depression also often have
off-kilter body rhythms. But the molecular and cellular mechanisms behind
these disrupted cycles have been hard to pin down."http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350401/description/Bodys_clock_linked\_to_depression_
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
HOW MANY UNIVERSES MAKE A MULTIVERSE? – THE STORY OF BHETALA
First A WELCOME:
A Warm Welcome to The EMPEROR, Irene Harvey and Mark. We thank you for joining the Blog and look forward to your valuable contributions.
ONE UNIVERSE FOR EACH CREATURE!
We come across several instances in Yogavaasishta where the concept of multiverse (many universes) is exemplified. One such story is that of the enigmatic questions of Bhetala in Sarga 70, Book-I of Chapter: Nirvana.
Bhetala, the enlightened poltergeist, posed six questions to the King who was about to become Bhetala’s dinner with the promise that the King could save himself if he (the King) answered the questions correctly.
The first question was: What is that beginingless Star in whose illumination all the Universes appear as mere specks of dust?
The King replies poetically comparing the universe we live in to a fruit.
King: "Bhetala!
Think of the universe that we are all living in to be a humongous fruit.
There is a bough with thousands of those fruits.
There is a tree with thousands of such boughs.
There is a wood with thousands of such trees.
There is a mountain with thousands of such woods.
There is an island with thousands of such mountains.
There is a huge globe (mahi peetha) with thousands of such islands.
There is a huge star system with thousands of such globes.
There is a heavenly egg with thousands of such star systems.
There is a sea with thousands of such heavenly eggs.
There is an ocean with thousands of such seas.
Thousands of such oceans will be the waters in the stomach of a man.
That man’s name is Vishnu.
Another great man wears a necklace of a hundred thousand of Vishnus.
His name is Rudra.
Millions of Rudras shine in the form of hair-follicles on the body of a very great man. His name is Aditya (= one who has been there right from the beginning; sun).
He is none other than the Supreme Consciousness.
He illuminates all the universes of my gargantuan conception.
He is the Brahman with attributes.
He has also an absolute form that is much more fundamental.
The qualities of ‘doership’ and ‘experiencership’ which seem to exist in the Brahman with attributes do not at all affect the Absolute Brahman.
The star you are referring to is the Brahman with attributes."
Thus the King shows that Bhetala’s knowledge was as yet incomplete because Bhetala was still conceptualizing in terms of Brahman with attributes and not the attributeless (Nirguna) Brahman who is beyond. As long as one conceives of Brahman with attributes, worlds appear. Worlds cease and there is no "doer" or "experiencer" in attributeless Absolute Brahman.
Dr. Einstein had always been uncomfortable with Quantum Theory which states that multiple states exist until a measurement collapses the system to give raise to a single observed event. Dr. Schrödinger who helped in the development of quantum mechanics was himself puzzled with the possibility of multiple states. He designed the well known thought experiment: The Schrodinger's Cat. As per Quantum theory, the cat would both be living and dead at the same time until one actually lifts the lid and observes it either to be dead or alive in the cage. Dr. Niels Bohr explained it saying that our 'consciousness' influences the decision whether the cat is dead or alive. Thus we would become a partner in the system instead of a distant observer.
Hugh Everett, a young physicist at that time tried to resolve this problem of uncertainty in Quantum theory by proposing a theory of multiple worlds. According to him the world goes on splitting into many worlds at every moment and we exist in one of those daughter worlds. That is to say, as Dr. Tegmark expalined, "You are in Universe A as you read this sentence. Now you are already in Universe B as you read this sentence." Or saying it differently, you could be a little baby in some other universe at the time you are reading this Blog in this universe and 500 years old or dead in a different universe! That means all possibilities co-exist at the same time! This theory did not get much support at that time.
However, developments in String Theory showed the mathematical possibility of the existence of multiple universes (multi-verse instead of uni-verse). The calculations indicated that there could be 10 raised to the power of 500 ( i.e. one followed by 500 zeroes) universes in existence with different physical laws. Dr. Susskind called it a "lnadscpae" of universes. We live in one such universe where the conditions are favorable to our type of life.
This week "Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California raised the provocative notion that the [number of universes] may depend on the human brain.
If observers are an integral part of the cosmic formula, then it may not matter how many universes exist - just how many a single observer can tell apart. If the observer is a person, that depends on how many bits of information the brain can process. "Based on the number of synapses in a typical brain, a human observer can register 10 to the power of 16," says Linde. That means humans can differentiate 10 to the power of 10 raised to the power 16 (10^10^16) universes."
While discussing the neural circuits involved in the formation of memories in flies, Dr. Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford said that "even simple organisms may turn out to have a ‘surprisingly rich mental life.’"
Recently Non-Dualist Rupert Spira observed: "In fact each person's thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions are entirely private and personal, even when we are sitting next to one another conversing in a room." He further clarified: "[T]here is no evidence of a world outside perception and perceptions themselves are not ‘shared.’ They cannot perceive one another. In other words there is not one world shared by six billion people but rather there are six billion simultaneous ‘worlds’ shared by one Consciousness. It is the mind that says six billion, whereas Consciousness sees only One." [emphasis by me.]
Thus each universe may just be an imagination of that creature as Yogavaasishta holds! And every creature lives in its iamginary world!!
A Warm Welcome to The EMPEROR, Irene Harvey and Mark. We thank you for joining the Blog and look forward to your valuable contributions.
ONE UNIVERSE FOR EACH CREATURE!
We come across several instances in Yogavaasishta where the concept of multiverse (many universes) is exemplified. One such story is that of the enigmatic questions of Bhetala in Sarga 70, Book-I of Chapter: Nirvana.
Bhetala, the enlightened poltergeist, posed six questions to the King who was about to become Bhetala’s dinner with the promise that the King could save himself if he (the King) answered the questions correctly.
The first question was: What is that beginingless Star in whose illumination all the Universes appear as mere specks of dust?
The King replies poetically comparing the universe we live in to a fruit.
King: "Bhetala!
Think of the universe that we are all living in to be a humongous fruit.
There is a bough with thousands of those fruits.
There is a tree with thousands of such boughs.
There is a wood with thousands of such trees.
There is a mountain with thousands of such woods.
There is an island with thousands of such mountains.
There is a huge globe (mahi peetha) with thousands of such islands.
There is a huge star system with thousands of such globes.
There is a heavenly egg with thousands of such star systems.
There is a sea with thousands of such heavenly eggs.
There is an ocean with thousands of such seas.
Thousands of such oceans will be the waters in the stomach of a man.
That man’s name is Vishnu.
Another great man wears a necklace of a hundred thousand of Vishnus.
His name is Rudra.
Millions of Rudras shine in the form of hair-follicles on the body of a very great man. His name is Aditya (= one who has been there right from the beginning; sun).
He is none other than the Supreme Consciousness.
He illuminates all the universes of my gargantuan conception.
He is the Brahman with attributes.
He has also an absolute form that is much more fundamental.
The qualities of ‘doership’ and ‘experiencership’ which seem to exist in the Brahman with attributes do not at all affect the Absolute Brahman.
The star you are referring to is the Brahman with attributes."
Thus the King shows that Bhetala’s knowledge was as yet incomplete because Bhetala was still conceptualizing in terms of Brahman with attributes and not the attributeless (Nirguna) Brahman who is beyond. As long as one conceives of Brahman with attributes, worlds appear. Worlds cease and there is no "doer" or "experiencer" in attributeless Absolute Brahman.
Dr. Einstein had always been uncomfortable with Quantum Theory which states that multiple states exist until a measurement collapses the system to give raise to a single observed event. Dr. Schrödinger who helped in the development of quantum mechanics was himself puzzled with the possibility of multiple states. He designed the well known thought experiment: The Schrodinger's Cat. As per Quantum theory, the cat would both be living and dead at the same time until one actually lifts the lid and observes it either to be dead or alive in the cage. Dr. Niels Bohr explained it saying that our 'consciousness' influences the decision whether the cat is dead or alive. Thus we would become a partner in the system instead of a distant observer.
Hugh Everett, a young physicist at that time tried to resolve this problem of uncertainty in Quantum theory by proposing a theory of multiple worlds. According to him the world goes on splitting into many worlds at every moment and we exist in one of those daughter worlds. That is to say, as Dr. Tegmark expalined, "You are in Universe A as you read this sentence. Now you are already in Universe B as you read this sentence." Or saying it differently, you could be a little baby in some other universe at the time you are reading this Blog in this universe and 500 years old or dead in a different universe! That means all possibilities co-exist at the same time! This theory did not get much support at that time.
However, developments in String Theory showed the mathematical possibility of the existence of multiple universes (multi-verse instead of uni-verse). The calculations indicated that there could be 10 raised to the power of 500 ( i.e. one followed by 500 zeroes) universes in existence with different physical laws. Dr. Susskind called it a "lnadscpae" of universes. We live in one such universe where the conditions are favorable to our type of life.
This week "Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California raised the provocative notion that the [number of universes] may depend on the human brain.
If observers are an integral part of the cosmic formula, then it may not matter how many universes exist - just how many a single observer can tell apart. If the observer is a person, that depends on how many bits of information the brain can process. "Based on the number of synapses in a typical brain, a human observer can register 10 to the power of 16," says Linde. That means humans can differentiate 10 to the power of 10 raised to the power 16 (10^10^16) universes."
While discussing the neural circuits involved in the formation of memories in flies, Dr. Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford said that "even simple organisms may turn out to have a ‘surprisingly rich mental life.’"
Recently Non-Dualist Rupert Spira observed: "In fact each person's thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions are entirely private and personal, even when we are sitting next to one another conversing in a room." He further clarified: "[T]here is no evidence of a world outside perception and perceptions themselves are not ‘shared.’ They cannot perceive one another. In other words there is not one world shared by six billion people but rather there are six billion simultaneous ‘worlds’ shared by one Consciousness. It is the mind that says six billion, whereas Consciousness sees only One." [emphasis by me.]
Thus each universe may just be an imagination of that creature as Yogavaasishta holds! And every creature lives in its iamginary world!!
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