Ramanisblog

Category: Hinduism

  • Atheism and Diversity: Is It Wrong For Atheists To Convert Believers?

    Atheists can try converting people into their school of thought.This is nothing new.This has been happening since 5000 years, as Indian Philosophy states.There is no harm in in it. It makes life interesting and a chance to note the fact that with out knowing that they are limited, human beings are arrogant enough to unravel the Universe which , as far as knowledge goes,is one a billion years old and Nature is yet to give up all Her secrets.
    If religious belief makes the world drab and dull by its attempt by imposing its doctrines, what exactly are the Atheists trying to do by converting Theists into Atheists?
    It is old wine under new label.
    Yes, what is said about Christianity id true,in terms of trying to convert and imposing nonsensical religious edicts that do not agree with our basic moral sense, especially the sanctions of Papacy and intolerance.Also the concept that you are not responsible for your actions ;it is Satan that makes you to do so;that your salvation is through one individual and others are doomed to Hell.
    Christianity is not the only Religion.
    Hinduism calls for introspection and analysis of oneself and self inquiry.
    It has included theism as school of Philosophical thought.
    By systematic logic it proves that the world and the senses we have are illusory and goes on to guide one to realize oneself.
    Religion ,according to Hinduism, is intensely personal and no dogma is allowed.
    What is Reality/Too big a topic.Please refer to some of my blogs under Religion/philosophy/Indian Philosophy)

    Story:
    Do atheists hate diversity?

    Is the very act of atheist activism (trying to persuade people that atheism is correct and working to change the world into one without religion) an act of attempted conformity? Are atheists trying to create a drab, gray, uniform world, where everyone else is just like them?

    It’s probably pretty obvious that I think the answer is a big fat “No!” (Probably said in the Ted Stevens voice.) But it certainly is the case that many atheist activists, myself among them, are working very hard to persuade religious believers out of their beliefs. Not all atheists do this, of course; many have the more modest goals of separation of church and state and religious tolerance, including tolerance of atheists and recognition of us as equal citizens. But a good number of atheists are, in fact, trying to convince religious believers to become atheists. I’m one of them.

    And since many believers see this as an intolerant attempt to enforce conformity — particularly believers of the progressive, ecumenical, “all religions perceive God in their own way and we have to respect them all” stripe — I want to take a moment to address it.
    http://www.alternet.org/story/144199/atheism_and_diversity:_is_it_wrong_for_atheists_to_convert_believers?page=entire

  • How the Brain Filters out Distracting Thoughts to Focus on a Single Bit of Information

    Difference between Mind and Matter is one of degree ,not of kind.While mind vibrates at a higher rate, matter vibrates at a lower frequency.
    Lower frequencies are associated with past experiences, higher frequencies are linked to present and Ultra high frequencies with the future.
    Consciousness is a stream that is Universal.Individual variations are due to limitations of Space and Time.Mind can relate to and transcend Time and Space with proper discipline.
    The exposition of this thought will take too much space;separate blog follows.
    What the current studies attempt to prove and proved partially have already been practiced in Hinduism.
    ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2009) — The human brain is bombarded with all kinds of information, from the memory of last night’s delicious dinner to the instructions from your boss at your morning meeting. But how do you “tune in” to just one thought or idea and ignore all the rest of what is going on around you, until it comes time to think of something else?

    Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have discovered a mechanism that the brain uses to filter out distracting thoughts to focus on a single bit of information. Their results are reported in 19 November issue of Nature.
    Think of your brain like a radio: You’re turning the knob to find your favourite station, but the knob jams, and you’re stuck listening to something that’s in between stations. It’s a frustrating combination that makes it quite hard to get an update on swine flu while a Michael Jackson song wavers in and out. Staying on the right frequency is the only way to really hear what you’re after. In much the same way, the brain’s nerve cells are able to “tune in” to the right station to get exactly the information they need, says researcher Laura Colgin, who was the paper’s first author. “Just like radio stations play songs and news on different frequencies, the brain uses different frequencies of waves to send different kinds of information,” she says.
    Gamma waves as information carriers
    Colgin and her colleagues measured brain waves in rats, in three different parts of the hippocampus, which is a key memory center in the brain. While listening in on the rat brain wave transmissions, the researchers started to realize that there might be something more to a specific sub-set of brain waves, called gamma waves. Researchers have thought these waves are linked to the formation of consciousness, but no one really knew why their frequency differed so much from one region to another and from one moment to the next.
    Information is carried on top of gamma waves, just like songs are carried by radio waves. These “carrier waves” transmit information from one brain region to another. “We found that there are slow gamma waves and fast gamma waves coming from different brain areas, just like radio stations transmit on different frequencies,” she says.
    You really can “be on the same wavelength”
    “You know how when you feel like you really connect with someone, you say you are on the same wavelength? When brain cells want to connect with each other, they synchronize their activity,” Colgin explains. “The cells literally tune into each other’s wavelength. We investigated how gamma waves in particular were involved in communication across cell groups in the hippocampus. What we found could be described as a radio-like system inside the brain. The lower frequencies are used to transmit memories of past experiences, and the higher frequencies are used to convey what is happening where you are right now.”
    If you think of the example of the jammed radio, the way to hear what you want out of the messy signals would be to listen really hard for the latest news while trying to filter out the unwanted music. The hippocampus does this more efficiently. It simply tunes in to the right frequency to get the station it wants. As the cells tune into the station they’re after, they are actually able to filter out the other station at the same time, because its signal is being transmitted on a different frequency.
    The switch
    “The cells can rapidly switch their activity to tune in to the slow waves or the fast waves,” Colgin says, “but it seems as though they cannot listen to both at the exact same time. This is like when you are listening to your radio and you tune in to a frequency that is midway between two stations- you can’t understand anything- it’s just noise.” In this way, the brain cells can distinguish between an internal world of memories and a person’s current experiences. If the messages were carried on the same frequency, our perceptions of the world might be completely confused. “Your current perceptions of a place would get mixed up with your memories of how the place used to be,” Colgin says.
    The cells that tune into different wavelengths work like a switch, or rather, like zapping between radio stations that are already programmed into your radio. The cells can switch back and forth between different channels several times per second. The switch allows the cells to attend to one piece at a time, sorting out what’s on your mind from what’s happening and where you are at any point in time. The researchers believe this is an underlying principle for how information is handled throughout the brain.
    “This switch mechanism points to superfast routing as a general mode of information handling in the brain,” says Edvard Moser, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience director. “The classical view has been that signaling inside the brain is hardwired, subject to changes caused by modification of connections between neurons. Our results suggest that the brain is a lot more flexible. Among the thousands of inputs to a given brain cell, the cell can choose to listen to some and ignore the rest and the selection of inputs is changing all the time. We believe that the gamma switch is a general principle of the brain, employed throughout the brain to enhance interregional communication.”
    Can a switch malfunction explain schizophrenia?
    People who are schizophrenic have problems keeping these brain signals straight. They cannot tell, for example, if they are listening to voices from people who are present or if the voices are from the memory of a movie they have seen. “We cannot tell for sure if it is this switch that is malfunctioning, but we do know that gamma waves are abnormal in schizophrenic patients,” Colgin says. “Schizophrenics’ perceptions of the world around them are mixed up, like a radio stuck between stations.”
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091120000140.htm

  • Move your phantom limbs Mentally!-Fox News.

    Indian philosophy recognizes mind as an organ like other organs, but ranked Superior.Sri Krishna declares in the Bhagavad Gita-“I am Mind among organs”
    Activity of the brain is mind;activity of the mind is intellect and Chitta is on a higher plane.
    By controlling and channelizing Chitta any thing is possible(incidentally, nothing is Super natural according to Indian Philosophy,everything is Natural).
    Yoga is built around this concept.We are what we think;we think because of what we eat.
    Story:
    “Phantom” pain is like a ghost in the body — but it’s anything but imaginary. People who have had an arm or leg amputated can often still feel sensations of the missing limb, even though it’s no longer there. These sensations can be painful, and scientists are always looking for new ways to help relieve this phantom pain for amputees. Treatment often involves using mirrors to visually trick the person’s brain. The thinking is that, if a person can “see” his own body in a new way, his brain may stop sending pain messages.

    In a new study, a team of neuroscientists have made another surprising discovery about amputees: They can be taught to mentally move their missing limbs in ways that are impossible in the real, physical world. It’s impossible for a person to bend his wrist down and then twist his hand around in a full circle.

    Seven people who had had their arms amputated above the elbow participated in the experiment. After extensive mental training, four of the seven were able to feel the sensation of this impossible act, and describe it in detail.

    “It is very surprising that anybody — amputees or not — can learn impossible movements just by thinking about it,” Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, told Science News. Ehrsson is a neuroscientist, which is a scientist who studies the brain and nervous system.

    Although the study itself is interesting, it may be able to help people with other kinds of mental disorders. A person with anorexia nervosa, for example, loses her appetite and/or stops eating, sometimes with fatal results. People with anorexia are usually believed to have a distorted self-image and often see themselves in an extremely negative way. But people suffering from this condition may benefit from this new research, Lorimer Moseley of the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Randwick, Australia, told to Science News. Just as amputees imagined their phantom limbs could move in impossible ways, a person with anorexia may be able to change self-image by concentrating on a change to the body.

    V.S. Ramachandran is a neuroscientist and the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego. In his research, Ramachandran has shown that phantom pain can be reduced with the help of a mirror. The mirror is placed so that when the amputee looks in the mirror, it looks like he has both hands. As he looks at the reflection, he clenches and unclenches his one hand while—and it appears as though both hands and are clenching and unclenching. At the same time, he mentally clenches and unclenches his phantom hand. When he sees both hands unclenching, he feels pain lessen.

    Ramachandran says his mirror therapy, as well as the new research, show that much is left to learn about how the brain perceives the body. “Body image turns out to be extraordinarily plastic,” Ramachandran told Science News. “We think of ourselves as stable people with a stable body image — but we can inhabit a body that cannot exist in the physical world.”

    http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49687/title/FOR_KIDS_New_twists_for_phantom_limbs

  • Message for God.

    .”Lead us from Untruth to Truth;Lead us from Darkness to Light;Lead us from Death to Immortality.Lead us to be good human beings.Lead us to be worthy of you.”

  • Doctor says near-death experiences are in the mind -Really?

    Doctors and Psychologists seem to think what they declare as gospel truth is final.Evidence collected by them alone is correct,not description by those who underwent the experience.
    By the way , have these gentlemen defined ‘Mind”?
    Is it the Brain or the activity of the Brain?
    Are you aware of Brain because of its activity or the activity because of brain?
    Indian Philosophy classifies Mind as an organ just like other sense organs like eyes,nose,ear,mouth,body.
    These are the organs endowed with the functions(functions are different from organs-you may have organs, but no function,as in a deaf),seeing,smelling,hearing,tasting,and tactile sensations.
    Activity of the brain is Mind;activity of mind is intellect;intellect is guided by Chiththa(modifications of the mind)
    Brain is like a CPU,collects information,mind sifts them category wise,intellect discerns action to be taken and chiththa watches all
    In near Death experiences, Chiththa cuts through brain,mind and intellect and experiences directly.
    Straight perception by Chiththa is grasping knowledge unfetterd by prejudices.
    It is experience, pure and simple.
    Near Death experiences can not be wished away by offering high sounding pseudo scientific non sense.
    Those interested in the subject may refer Rev.Leadbeaters book on this and also works published by Theosophical Society of India.These works contain proofs as well as photographs taken at the time of life or soul leaving the body.
    Story:
    For Laura Geraghty, April 1, 2009, started out just as any other day. It was sunny but cool, she remembers.

    Laura Geraghty was shocked 21 times before she came back from cardiac arrest with tales of the afterlife.

    The mother of two, also a grandmother, was at her job, driving a school bus for the Newton Public School District in suburban Boston, Massachusetts.

    Her passengers, special-needs children, were wheelchair-bound.

    Seemingly in good health and in good spirits, Geraghty was finishing up her late-morning run, transporting a student and teacher back to Newton South High School, when she realized she was in trouble.

    As she was pulling into the school parking lot, she began having sharp stomach pains. She was able to park her bus, but she kept feeling worse.

    The pain “went right up my arm and into my chest, and I said, ‘Uh-oh, I’m having a heart attack,’ ” she said.

    The teacher ran from the bus to get help. Newton South’s nurse, Gail Kramer, and CPR instructor Michelle Coppola arrived moments later with the school’s new automated external defibrillator.

    Geraghty, barely conscious, was fading fast. She was weak and having trouble breathing. And then she went into full cardiac arrest.

    “Her eyes were wide, and all of a sudden she stopped talking to us,” Coppola said. “I grabbed the two pads, stuck them on her, started it up, and I’d say within 20 seconds, she had her first shock.”

    Coppola and Kramer performed CPR while they waited for paramedics. See an expert give a quick lesson in CPR »

    At that point, Geraghty says, her body died. She remembers watching the scene unfold — as if from above.

    “I floated right out of my body. My body was here, and I just floated away. I looked back at it once, and it was there.”

    Geraghty says she saw deceased loved ones, her mother and her ex-husband.

    http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/16/cheating.near.death/index.html