IndiaVed - Knowledge, Research and Analysis in Arts, Commerce & Science

Oh Arjuna ! Become a Yogi !

2009-08-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

Question: By Isha (name changed), US via email

I had been loving a guy in fact we had an affair. There are few things which I was not liking in that guy .......... I got ready to marry one guy which my parents decided and I got married to him. Now the problem is I can't not forget the first guy. I made a big mistake to go ahead with my parents and marry that guy. Now I don't want to live with him. I made a big mistake in my life it seems. Now I am regretting like anything. I am feeling guilty because my desire of getting better ruined my life.
Now I am thinking to go back to the guy whom I love after getting divorce.
One day I talked to my parents that I am not happy with my marriage. They said If you don't want to leave with him commit suicide. So far two times I had thought of doing that .....
Do you think because of family and all I should not break the marriage and forget the guy whom I love?
I hate my self by doing all of this mess. How could I play with my life. like this?
Please help me else would get mad. want to come out from all the mess ASAP and also want to find some respect for myself

Answer:

Generally people send me questions related to meditation. Anyway I will guide you on this personal issue also although my focus is on meditation.

Now coming to you. I will answer you now even though I dont know much about you. I will tell you the truth.

First of all understand this that even if you would have married the guy of your choice you would not have been happy. You will be in the same situation more or less. Then you would be thinking that why didnt I leave this guy as I knew his weak points and married a guy of my parents choice.

The reason is that the term "HAPPINESS" OR "SATISFACTION" has been misunderstood throughout the history. But if you are really a para-scientific thinker you can understand what I am telling you now very rare and secret thing.

When we were born we were with brain but without the mind. Just understand the mind is an artificial bundle of thoughts, conditions you learn in his society. It can be shattered with meditation. Mind is not a real thing.

Hence as you or most of the people who are inside mind thinks that by achieving something or by getting this or that they will get happiness. Inside the mind the Happiness is like a mirage. You spend you whole life thinking that yes now I will get happiness...now I have boy friend and have little sex..i will be happy ...now i am graduated ..i will be happy ..now i get a job..i willl be happy ..now i am married ..i will be happy ..now i have children i will be happy ...now i have new house...more money i will be happy ...now my children married and have their children..i will be happy .... haha ..and this goes like this and we never gets to that extreme of happiness which is driving us throughout the life and we die consciously without knowing the secret.

Got my point? Actually till we are inside the mind we can never reach that deep happiness and satisfaction which consciously or unconsciously we are looking for.

As now I understand the nuts and bolts of all of our body, organs , brain, mind and beyond mind , soul. I can tell you we are actually unconsciously searching for something else.

Few people due to this as they suppress their desires to get to that happiness become mad or become violent or murderer. As they have lost their consciousness and conscious part of thinking.

So the people who understand this whole process ......actually start their life in a different way. Those people are called "Yogis". Sri Krishna says in Geeta ..some people do pooja... some people do rituals ..some do donations ...but the biggest is the path of Yoga (read karmayoga) hence oh Arjuna BE A YOGI !

Once you understand this whole process and become and thinks and lives like a Yogi. Then you start your life in REVERSE ORDER.

As our mind cannot give us that DEEP HAPPINESS and as a YOGI now you know that actually that extreme happiness is not inside but outside the MIND.

So be a yogi and go beyond the mind. But also taking care of all small happiness in your mind and fulfilling them like tasty food, friends, drinking or whatever small happiness your mind wants. Once as a yogi you will fullfill these small desires you will leave them for whole life and they will not bother you in your mind.

Now comes the question, How to go Beyond the MIND? and is there really some way to go out of mind and have feeling of that EXTREME and DEEP HAPPINESS which will transform your life forever.

Yes, ancient Yogis and Rishis have found ways to go beyond mind and these techniques are called MEDITATIONS OR DHYAN OR YOGA.

Shiva was the GREATEST of all YOGIS alongwith KRISHNA.

Hence if you want you can learn these techniques which can include many different types of yogas, meditations, love expressions, aerobics etc.

Now the question is who is a Yogi and why I need to become a yogi to do all these beyond mind experiences?

A Yogi is who understands all the phenomenon of this universe, earth, human beings, life and death and concept of god and lives in this world like it is a DRAMA and he is playing a role given to him by someone. Although he is doing his role but he is not attached to it and he is just Acting and doing it like it is his KARMA which he has to do. Otherwise he is totally happy even without it also. As he knows and have already tasted that fruit of extreme happiness possible in a life time by way of meditation methods. He is living his life and doing his activities just as in a Drama and Enjoying each of his role upto fullest but Being AWARE of what he is doing ALL THE TIME. As an actor is aware of all of his acting. A Yogi never do anything unconsciously. He is playing his role as conscious and aware all the time and never waste a moment to enjoy and laugh whenever some moments like that comes in life.
AS IN DEEPEST LEVEL OF HIS BODY AND MIND HE IS ALL THE TIME HAPPY.

By reading till now I hope you must have got answers to many of your questions.

But dont misunderstand me here. I never said you should not take divorce. If you really want to leave your husband then you can leave him whether you will again marry your old boy friend or you will search of a new man taking care of your children if you have.

But again the question is whether even after marrying your old or new boy friend WILL YOU BE HAPPY ?
You cannot know now. Hence better is that FIRST you get that taste of deep love and happiness and after that you can decide on your own what really you want and ready to do. And at that moment whatever you will decide you will be happy throughout your life by that decision and will never repent of it again.

Hence be a Yogi and Remain Happy Forever ! Start from right this moment that You are the most happiest girl of this world and whatever happened to you in past you are not carrying it any further. Live by moment to moment.... sucking the entire juice of that moment and Enjoying it upto fullest. This is the biggest meditation of all.

Meditate and Smile now,
Read osho books and learn more about his meditations here www.oshoworld.com, www.osho.com

love,
Noone

Music has neurological, physical, psychological benefits, Experiments says

2009-06-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

Music a 'mega-vitamin' for the brain

Story Highlights
London choir is made up of sufferers of neurological conditions, friends and carers
Growing evidence that music has neurological, physical, psychological benefits
Music used to boost rehabilitation of stroke patients, improve motor function
New approaches to music therapy could bring field into mainstream rehab practice

By Simon Hooper

LONDON, England (CNN) -- When Nina Temple was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2000, then aged 44, she quickly became depressed, barely venturing out of her house as she struggled to come to terms with living with the chronic condition.

Sing for Joy is a choir made up of sufferers of neurological conditions plus friends, family and carers.

1 of 3

"I was thinking of all the things which I wished I'd done with my life and I wouldn't be able to do. And then I started thinking about all the things that I still actually could do and singing was one of those," Temple told CNN.

Along with a fellow Parkinson's sufferer, Temple decided, on a whim, to form a choir. The pair placed notices in doctor's surgeries inviting others to join them and advertised for a singing teacher.

By 2003, with the help of funding from the Parkinson's Disease Society, the resulting ensemble "Sing For Joy" was up and running, rehearsing weekly and soon graduating to public performances.

The group now consists of around two dozen singers, including sufferers of Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis, others recovering from conditions including stroke or cancer, plus their carers, family and friends. Led by acclaimed jazz performer Carol Grimes, the group's genre-defying repertoire ranges from Cole Porter classics to ethnic punk. Watch Sing for Joy perform »

"It's quite easy to get overwhelmed by the disease and having something that you do every week that makes you forget all your troubles and keeps you from feeling isolated is a great pleasure," says Temple.

But singing also has physical and neurological benefits for the choir's members. A common symptom of Parkinson's disease and similar conditions is voice loss and each week the group begins its rehearsals with vocal exercises worked out with speech therapists.

Vital Signs

Each month CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta brings viewers health stories from around the world.

See more from the show »

"All neurological conditions affect the throat because it has so many muscles," says Sarah Benton, another choir member with multiple sclerosis. "So singing, which makes you lift up your body and expand your lungs, is perfect for neurological diseases."

While "Sing for Joy's" DIY-style music therapy has provided obvious social, mental and physical benefits for its members, there is a growing body of clinical evidence suggesting that music can play a key role in aiding recovery or helping sufferers cope with a broad range of brain-based conditions.

Doctor Wendy Magee, International Fellow in Music Therapy at London's Institute of Neuropalliative Rehabilitation, describes music as a "mega-vitamin for the brain," capable of influencing and improving motor function, communication and even cognition.

"When neural pathways are damaged for one particular function such as language, musical neural pathways are actually much more complex and much more widespread within the brain," Magee told CNN.

"Music seems to find re-routed paths and that is why it is such a useful tool in terms of helping people with different kinds of brain damage because it can help to find new pathways in terms of brain functioning."

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Researchers in Finland have demonstrated that listening to music for several hours a day can enhance the rehabilitation of stroke patients.

In another study, stroke patients who were taught to play the piano or drums made speedier progress in their general recovery than patients who received only traditional therapy.

At Colorado State University, researchers have used musical and rhythmic cues as an effective tool to improve the movement and balance of Parkinson's disease sufferers and those with other degenerative diseases.

Melodic Intonation Therapy, in which musical exercises are used to improve speech, has proved an effective treatment for patients with aphasia, a disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain responsible for language.

Musical memories also seem to be more resilient to neural degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and dementia, enabling therapists to use familiar tunes to cue memories which might otherwise have been lost.

One American World War II veteran whose dementia was so severe he couldn't remember his own name and would barely acknowledge his own wife was brought alive through ballroom dancing and the music of Frank Sinatra, the sufferer still able to lead his wife through the foxtrot as if it was the 1940s.

The power of music to enhance moods and emotions has long been harnessed by psychologists, but, as Dr. Lauren Stewart, director of a recently established course in Music, Mind and Brain at Goldsmiths University of London told CNN, "recent advances in neuroscience and brain imaging technology are now radically transforming conventional music therapy into a more rigorous and research-based clinical practice."

Professor Michael Thaut of Colorado State University's Center for Biomedical Research in Music, who has helped pioneer a new research-based approach known as Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT), says recent developments amount to a "paradigm shift."

"Therapists in all fields have been doing things for decades; now they're trying to figure out the research to support their work," Thaut told CNN. "NMT started as a science and now it's turning into a clinical field. And that's very exciting."

For now NMT remains on the fringes of standard neurological rehabilitation. But Magee believes its application and a general move away from psychoanalytical approaches dominant in the past, could bring music therapy towards the mainstream and make it an ever more effective tool.

"We are now starting to see the evidence for why we see things work. That also means we can fine tune what we do because we understand more about the neurological processing behind it," she said.

"But we're still at the point where we need to build the evidence base and translate that evidence base into practice so we can convince funders that music therapy is an important part of rehab practice."

For the members of Sing For Joy however, the proof of the therapeutic power of music is already self-evident. "There is something about coming together and making a communal sound," said Sarah Benton. "There is nothing like it and it's wonderful."

Sing For Joy perform at London's TUC Congress Centre on Saturday, June 6. For more details see the group's Web site or MySpace page.

Source:- CNN - Music Therapy Cures many neurological, Psychological and Physical diseases

Words of Wisdom

2009-05-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

01. Your whole life is cyclone of change, of changing scenes, changing colors; but just in the middle of the cyclone there is a silent center. That is you.

02. The mind should be trained to be servant of the heart. Logic should serve love. And then life can become a festival of lights.

03. In the existence of the tree there is no division, no judgment. The flower is not favored, the thorn is not just tolerated; they are both accepted totally. And this should be our approach in our own life.

04. The real adventure begins only when you start moving deeper into your being and also higher into your consciousness, and the processes are two sides of the same coin.

05. Life is an opportunity, an opportunity to realize yourself. One can miss it, many miss it, only a few rare people fulfill i

06. Wisdom is by product of meditation. It doesn't come trough learning; on the contrary it comes through unlearning.

07. The only problem is being in mind. And only solution is to get beyond mind. I call it meditation.

08. You are always given a single moment. You are not given two moments together. If you know how to live one moment you know the whole secret of life.

- Words of Osho

Activating Evolution

2009-05-11T05:47:00.000-07:00

"Mohinder" Quotes in a TV serial "Heroes"

• Man is a narcissistic species by nature. We have colonized the four corners of our tiny planet. But we are not the pinnacle of so-called evolution. That honor belongs to the lowly cockroach. Capable of living for months without food. Remaining alive headless for weeks at a time. Resistant to radiation. If God has indeed created himself in his own image, then I submit to you that God is a cockroach. They say that man uses only a tenth of his brain power. Another percent, and we might actually be worthy of God's image. Unless, of course, that day has already arrived. The human genome project has discovered that tiny variations in man's genetic code are taking place at increasingly rapid rates. Teleportation, levitation, tissue regeneration. Is this outside the realm of possibility? Or is man entering a new gateway to evolution? Is he finally standing at the threshold to true human potential?

• There are many ways to define our fragile existence; many ways to give it meaning. But it is our memories that shape its purpose and give it context. The private assortment of images: fears, loves, regrets… for it's the cruel irony of life that we are destined to hold the dark with the light, the good with the evil, success with disappointment… this is what separates us, what makes us human. And in the end, we must fight to hold on to.

• When confronted by our worst nightmares, the choices are few; Fight or flight. We hope to find the strength to stand against our fears but sometimes, despite ourselves, we run. What if the nightmare gives chase? Where can we hide then?

• The Earth is large. Large enough that you think you can hide from anything. From Fate. From God. If only you found a place far enough away. So you run. To the edge of the Earth. Where all is safe again. Quiet, and warm. The solace of salt air. The peace of danger left behind. The luxury of grief. And maybe, for a moment, you believe you have escaped.

• You do not choose your destiny, it chooses you. And those that knew you before Fate took you by the hand cannot understand the depth of the changes inside. They cannot fathom how much you stand to lose in failure...that you are the instrument of flawless Design. And all of life may hang in the balance. The hero learns quickly who can comprehend and who merely stands in your way.

• When a change comes, some species feel the urge to migrate, they call it zugunruhe. "A pull of the soul to a far off place," following a scent in the wind, a star in the sky. The ancient message comes calling the kindred to take flight and gather together. Only then they can hope to survive the cruel season to come.

• It is man's ability to remember that sets us apart. We are the only species concerned with past. Our memories give us voice and bear witness to history, so that others might learn; so they might celebrate our triumphs and be warned of our failures

• Sometimes questions are more powerful than answers. How is this happening? What are they? Why them and not others? Why now? What does it all mean?

• This force, evolution, is not sentimental. Like the earth itself, it knows only the hard facts of life's struggle with death. All you can do is hope and trust that when you have served its needs faithfully, there may still remain some glimmer of the life you once knew.

• For all his bluster, it is the sad province of Man that he cannot choose his triumph. He can only choose how he will stand when the call of destiny comes. Hoping that he'll have the courage to answer.

• Some individuals, it is true, are more special. This is natural selection. It begins as a single individual born or hatched like every other member of their species. Anonymous. Seemingly ordinary. Except they're not. They carry inside them the genetic code that will take their species to the next evolutionary rung. It's destiny.

• To survive in this world, we hold close to us those on whom we depend. We trust in them our hopes, our fears... But what happens when trust is lost? Where do we run, when things we believe in vanish before our eyes? When all seems lost, the future unknowable, our very existence in peril... All we can do is run.

• When we embrace what lies within, our potential knows no limit. The future is filled with promise. The present, rife with expectation. But when we deny our instinct, and struggle against our deepest urges... Uncertainty begins. Where does this path lead? When will the changes end? Is this transformation a gift... or a curse? And for those that fear what lies ahead... The most important question of all... Can we ever change what we really are?

• We dream of hope. We dream of change. Of fire, of love, of death. And then it happens. The dream becomes real. And the answer to this quest, this need to solve life's mysteries finally shows itself. Like the glowing light of a new dawn.? So much struggle for meaning, for purpose. And in the end, we find it only in each other. Our shared experience of the fantastic. And the mundane. The simple human need to find a kindred, to connect. And to know in our hearts... that we are not alone.

• When we embrace what lies within, our potential has no limit. The future is filled with promise; the present rife with expectation. When we deny our instinct, and struggle against our deepest urges, uncertainty begins. Where does this path lead? When will the changes end? Is this transformation a gift or a curse? For those who fear what lies ahead, the most important question of all - can we ever really change what we are?

• Where does it come from, this quest? This need to solve life's mysteries, when the simplest of questions can never be answered. Why are we here? What is the soul? Why do we dream? Perhaps we'd be better off not looking at all. Not doubting, not yearning. That's not human nature. Not the human heart. That is not why we are here.

• This quest. This need to solve life's mysteries. In the end, what does it matter when the human heart can only find meaning in the smallest of moments? They're here. Among us. In the shadows. In the light. Everywhere. Do they even know yet?

Source: TV Serial Heroes on NBC and http://activatingevolution.org/

Shiva the destroyer presides over Big Bang mock-up

2008-09-10T00:10:00.000-07:00

CERN experiment – Glimpse of Shiva’s dance?

In all his images, Lord Shiva is depicted in a human form. His body his naked and covered with ashes. The naked body indicates that He is free from attachments to the material things of the world. Since most things get reduced to ashes when burned, ashes symbolize the essence of all things and beings in the world. The ashes on the body of the Lord signify that. He is the source of the entire creation which emanates from Him.

Photo Credit: Giovanni Chierico
Shiva's cosmic dance at CERN in Geneva

Lord Shiva is depicted as having three eyes. The two eyes on the right and left indicate His activity in the physical world. The third eye in the centre of the forehead symbolizes knowledge (Gnana), and is thus called the eye of wisdom or knowledge. The powerful gaze of Lord Shiva’s third eye annihilates evil, and is the reason that evil-doers fear His is third eye.

September 10, 2008, HT

The symbolism is strong. As scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva smash subatomic particles in the world’s largest experiment, Shiva, the destroyer, will be in close proximity.

On Wednesday, a powerful particle accelerator will use massive energy surges to simulate the universe’s creation with the Big Bang. And it would not have been possible without India, says Dr Amit Roy, director, Nuclear Science Centre, Delhi. “We’ve made precision-made jacks on which the 27-km machine is resting.”

Over 100 Indian scientists from institutes like the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Bhabha Atomic Energy Centre are involved in the Large Hardron Collider (LHC) project.

The Department of Atomic Energy gifted a two-metre bronze statue of the Nataraja to CERN on June 18, 2004 to celebrate the centre’s India connection.

{The statue of Nataraja, the Cosmic Dancer, Dr. Aymar, DG of CERN, Dr. Anil Kakodkar, Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary to the Government of India.}

Indian Atomic Energy Commission boss Anil Kakodkar had then said: “The Indian scientific community is part of the quest for understanding the universe.”
{Related News:- }

Author Fritjof Capra first drew a parallel between Shiva’s dance of creation and destruction and the dance of subatomic particles in The Tao of Physics.

A plaque next to the statue quotes Capra: “Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists... Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.”

Collision course| Underground

More about Shiva Cosmic Dance :-

{

In choosing the image of Shiva Nataraja, the Indian Government has acknowledged the profound significance of the metaphor of Shiva’s dance for the cosmic dance of subatomic particles, which is observed and analyzed by CERN’s physicists. The parallel between Shiva’s dance and the dance of subatomic particles was first discussed by Fritjof Capra in 1972 in an article titled ‘The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics Shiva’s cosmic dance then became a central metaphor in Capra’s international bestseller The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975 and still in print in over 40 editions around the world.

‘The Wave Structure of Matter Explains the Atomic Structure of Matter. The ‘Particle’ as the Wave-Center of a Spherical Standing Wave in Space explains the cosmic dance of Nataraja’

— FRITJOF CAPRA(1939)

A special plaque next to the Shiva statue at CERN in Geneva explains the significance of the metaphor of Shiva’s cosmic dance with several quotations from The Tao of Physics. Here is a quotation from Fritjof Capra that has been put in that special plaque ‘Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter and for the modern physicists, then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created different forms of visual images of dancing Shiva in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics.’

Read the complete article on Shiva:-

}

Russians claim to have built McFadden-style EM field consciousness hardware

2008-09-08T07:18:00.000-07:00

Another Step Towards Artificial Intelligence

13.02.2008

Typical structure of neuron

Fellows of experimental physics department of Ural University of Physics and technology have developed necessary hardware components for “electromagnetic consciousness” according CEMI (consciousness electromagnetic information field) theory of Johnjoe McFadden.

      Russian think tank created a model of neural network on neurons (EM (electromagnetic) neurons) with additional channels for information exchange via electromagnetic field and patented it (patent No. 2309457 “Neural field model”).

      Channels for interaction via electromagnetic field are implemented in an original construction of neural axon, looking like a chain of in-series radio-frequency pulse self oscillators with self-quenching circuits and radio-pulse envelope separators. The concept of EM neurons is almost the same like McFadden’s CEMI theory, but with following exception: mechanism of information exchange process between neurons via EM field is different.

      EM neurons have much in common with its biological prototype and correspond with usual processes of neurophysiology.

      However, the issue of spontaneous generation of consciousness in networks with this type of architecture remains open.

Source:-

Conscious Mind is the Brain's Electromagnetic Field : Theory Says

2008-09-08T07:07:00.000-07:00

Our minds are radios

Brainwaves: em field
connects the neurones

CONSCIOUSNESS, we might all agree, is precious stuff: it what sets us apart from earthworms and pocket calculators, and allows us to build cathedrals and argue with football referees. But what is this faculty that we’re so proud of? How the conscious mind works, where it’s located, and why it evolved all the fundamental questions are still entirely unresolved. Neuroscience has failed to discover any region or structure of the brain specialising in conscious thinking could it be because there isn’t one?

Professor Johnjoe McFadden, of Surrey University, has thrown his hat into the ring with a theory equating the conscious mind with the brain’s electromagnetic (em) field. The theory proposes a solution to one of the great puzzles of neuroscience: how conscious brain activity that we experience as thought and emotion differs from unconscious brain activity, and how the two interact. In McFadden’s model, our conscious thoughts are composed of fluctuations in a distributed em field a kind of low-wattage local radio network. The subconscious mind, controlling autonomous activity such as walking or balancing on a chair, is wired into neural pathways in the brain itself, which interact with the em field when a conscious decision is made.

McFadden, of Surrey’s School of Biomedical and Life Sciences, is confident that his theory can withstand the most rigorous interrogations of scientists and philosophers. He claims: “the theory solves many previously intractable problems of consciousness and could have profound implications for our concepts of mind, free will, spirituality, the design of artificial intelligence, and even life and death.”

The key to McFadden’s theory is the synchronous firing of neurones, which act to ‘switch on’ conscious thought in the brain’s em field when enough of them fire simultaneously. When we see an object, signals from our retina travel along nerves as waves of electrically charged ions. When they reach the nerve terminus the signal jumps to the next nerve via chemical neurotransmitters. The receiving nerve decides whether or not it will fire, based on the number of firing ‘votes’ it receives from its upstream nerves. Familiar patterns experiences or actions that the brain has learned are hard-wired into neural pathways, and produce correspondingly lower neuronal vote counts; only when an experience is unfamiliar or decision-making is required, do enough neurones fire to stimulate conscious activity in the em field.

McFadden uses the experience of driving along a familiar route as an example of how this interaction occurs. While driving home from work our conscious minds may be busy reviewing the events of the day; at the same time, we are watching traffic, changing gear and following the road, without being aware of these operations. Yet if we encounter a hazardous situation such as a child in the road we instantly become aware of the child, the road, the motor operations of driving, and thereafter slow down to drive more carefully under conscious control. The sudden rush of new information (the child) sparks synchronous firing of fresh neurones, stimulating the conscious mind to ‘take over’ at the wheel.

The em field theory also offers an explanation of the role of consciousness in the learning process. McFadden points to the example of a learner driver: the first (very conscious) fumblings are transformed through constant practice into automatic actions. The neural networks driving unlearnt activity are in an undecided state a small nudge from the brain’s em field can topple them towards or away from firing. As the conscious mind perfects the new activity, the em field ‘fine-tunes’ the neural pathways: the neurones are connected so that as they fire together, they wire together, to form stronger connections. After practice, the influence of the field becomes dispensable. The activity is learnt and may thereafter be performed unconsciously.

One of the fundamental questions of consciousness, known as the binding problem, can be explained by looking at a tree. Neurobiology has shown that the packets of visual information the individual leaves and branches are scattered amongst millions of widely separated neurones. Neuroscientists are seeking to explain where in the brain all those leaves are stuck together to form the conscious impression of a whole tree. How does our brain bind information to generate consciousness?

McFadden argues that every time a nerve fires, the electrical activity sends a signal to the em field. The information that reaches the em field is automatically bound together with all the other signals in the brain the characteristic binding process of consciousness. McFadden and, independently, the New Zealand-based neurobiologist Sue Pockett, argue that, rather than functioning simply as an information sink, the em field is consciousness: it selectively controls behaviour by pushing some neurones towards firing and others away from firing. This influence, McFadden proposes, is the physical manifestation of our conscious will.

The challenge for the scientific community is now to upset McFadden’s grandiose convictions by disproving the em field theory, known in neuroscience as the conscious electromagnetic information field (cemi field) theory. Pockett identifies a potential problem: that present measurements seem to show a variable relationship between the brain’s em field and sensation. Another key objection to an em field theory of consciousness is that if our minds are electromagnetic, why don’t we pass out when we walk under an electrical cable or any other source of external electromagnetic fields? The answer, according to McFadden, is that our skin, skull and cerebrospinal fluid shield us from external electric fields.

McFadden looks forward to the intense critical scrutiny that is bound to follow publication. He concludes: “The conscious electromagnetic information field is at present still a theory. But if true, there are many fascinating implications for the concept of free will, the nature of creativity or spirituality, consciousness in animals and even the significance of life and death. The theory explains why conscious actions feel so different from unconscious ones it is because they plug into the vast pool of information held in the brain’s em field.”

Source:-

Worlds Biggest Scientific Experiment - The Big Bang - on 9/10

2008-09-07T03:56:00.000-07:00

Scientists look to the spin-offs of a miniature ‘big bang’

By Clive Cookson

Published: September 4 2008 18:27 | Last updated: September 4 2008 18:27

In their quest to understand the secrets of the universe, physicists are about to launch their biggest experiment. Next Wednesday, the first atoms will race round a 27km track beneath the Swiss-French border outside Geneva, at almost the speed of light.

It will be the first step towards the real moment of truth for the $8bn (£4.5bn, €5.6bn) Large Hadron Collider. In a few weeks, two beams of protons – hydrogen nuclei – will accelerate in opposite directions and smash together, creating in miniature the intense energies of the newborn universe just after the “big bang” some 14bn years ago.

Scientists at Cern, the European centre for particle physics, hope the LHC will reveal new forces and even extra dimensions of space and time. It may also enable researchers to produce and study miniature black holes.

Yet the LHC may eventually be a final flourish for Cern – and indeed for the whole of particle physics – after a glorious half-century in which increasingly powerful atom smashers enabled scientists to build up a coherent, though incomplete, understanding of the universe, based on studying the smallest building blocks of matter.

Some influential scientists are already suggesting that the world will not be able to fund another large-scale accelerator. “We need a re-evaluation,” says Sir David King, former UK chief scientist. “We have to ask: what is the end-point for particle physics? How big do we have to go?”

In an increasingly pragmatic world, governments have already been directing more money to applied science and technology, while cutting spending on fields aimed essentially at advancing knowledge for its own sake. The cancellation of the US Superconducting Super Collider in Texas 15 years ago left Cern the field’s undisputed global centre.

Lyn Evans, LHC project leader and a 38-year Cern veteran, says: “The only way we justify our existence is to build more and more powerful machines on a budget that is constant in real terms.”

Not surprisingly, Cern scientists often feel compelled to defend their spending in terms of its direct spin-offs, such as the high-speed computing grid that will handle the vast data flow from LHC. (Cern also loses no opportunity to remind people that the world wide web was invented there in 1989.) But “the real reason is to satisfy intellectual curiosity,” says Jos Engelen, Cern chief scientist.

Big spin-offs from the LHC, if any, will occur far in the future, in ways that we cannot predict or even comprehend today. “Who is to say that the strong nuclear force [being investigated by Cern] will not be propelling spaceships across the galaxy in 300 years?” asks David Evans, senior scientist at Alice, one of four giant underground detectors built to analyse the particles produced by LHC collisions.

Putting a comprehensible intellectual case for the LHC is extremely difficult if not impossible. Yet particle physicists have to make the effort. Government funding decisions today depend on public understanding and political support much more than they did after the second world war, when European governments set up Cern as a centre for peaceful research into atomic physics.

At the heart of the case is the “standard model” – a framework of fundamental particles and forces that provides a partial explanation for the way the universe works but does not cover gravity. It also fails to account for recent observations such as the mysterious “dark matter” that appears to dominate the universe.

First order of business for the LHC will be to fill in gaps in the standard model. The best known gap is what gives matter its mass. Favourite here is the fabled Higgs boson, a particle originally proposed in the 1960s, which – if it exists – should be accessible within the LHC’s energy range.

But physicists disagree about where the LHC is most likely to move the field next. Robert Aymar, Cern’s director-general, likes supersymmetry. According to this theory the LHC should be able to make and detect at least the “neutralino” – a massive yet elusive particle that is a leading candidate for filling the universe with dark matter.

His deputy Jos Engelen, on the other hand, is rather dismissive of this. He is a fan of string theory, according to which our four familiar dimensions of space and time conceal several extra dimensions, which might conceivably open up in the extreme conditions of LHC collisions. Under these circumstances, the particles associated with gravity might reveal themselves for the first time.

Slightly easier for the lay mind to understand is the prospect that the LHC will produce microscopic black holes – tiny concentrations of matter so dense that their gravity prevents light escaping. Then Stephen Hawking, the leading black hole theorist, could expect to win a Nobel prize.

However, black holes carry a fear factor that has provoked lawsuits in the US and Europe seeking to stop the LHC from opening. The project’s opponents argue that the collisions could generate black holes capable of swallowing up the whole earth.

Cern recognises that there is genuine concern but insists that the risk of catastrophe is zero. “If you look at the blogosphere, you will find a lot of people taking the threat seriously,” says John Ellis, Cern’s leading theoretician. “But there is no evidence for any conceivable threat from the LHC.”

While large black holes at the centre of galaxies can suck up whole stars, their microscopic counterparts would be unstable and disappear, Cern insists.

The best outcome would be for the LHC to spring a stupendous surprise that does not threaten the planet. But particle physicists would not want the project to answer all the big questions. From their point of view, the universe should be left with enough secrets to justify spending billions of dollars on the next giant experiment.

Source and Related Articles:-

North pole may be ice-free by 2013

2008-09-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

North pole may be ice-free by 2013
11 Aug 2008, 0042 hrs IST,PTI

LONDON: The meltdown in the Arctic is speeding up and as a result the north pole could be ice-free by 2013 instead of in 60 years' time as earlier predicted, scientists have warned.

Their apprehensions are based on computer studies of satellite images that reveal that ice at north pole melted at an unprecedented rate last week - the disappearance is said to have exceeded the record loss of more than a million square kilometres in 2007 as global warming tightened its grip.

"It does not really matter whether 2007 or 2008 is the worst year on record for Arctic sea ice.

"The crucial point is that ice is clearly not building up enough over winter to restore cover and that when you combine current estimates of ice thickness with the extent of the ice cap, you get a very clear indication that the Arctic is going to be ice-free in summer in five years.

"And when that happens, there will be consequences," British newspaper The Observer quoted Prof Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey as saying.

Using the US navy supercomputers, his team produced a forecast which indicated that by 2013 there will be no ice in the Arctic - other than a few outcrops on islands near Greenland and Canada between mid-July and mid-September.

Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University added: "The most detailed computer models suggest the Arctic's summer ice is going to last for only a few more years - and given what we have seen happen last week, I think they are probably correct."

Source:- Only 5 years left for North Pole due to Global Warming

Laughing is Life

2008-08-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

When asked "BELOVED OSHO ......... I Love ...but I also feel seriousness. WHY IS LAUGHTER SO DIFFICULT FOR ME?

Osho :

Laughter is one of the things most repressed by society all over the world, in all the ages.

Society wants you to be serious. Parents want their children to be serious, teachers want their students to be serious, the bosses want their servants to be serious, the commanders want their armies to be serious. Seriousness is required of everybody.

Laughter is dangerous and rebellious.

When the teacher is teaching you and you start laughing, it will be taken as an insult. Your parents are saying something to you and you start laughing -- it will be taken as an insult.

Seriousness is thought to be honor, respect.

Naturally laughter has been repressed so much that even though life all around is hilarious, nobody is laughing. If your laughter is freed from its chains, from its bondage, you will be surprised -- on each step there is something hilarious happening.

Life is not serious.

Only graveyards are serious, death is serious.

Life is love, life is laughter, life is dance, song.

But we will have to give life a new orientation. The past has crippled life very badly, it has made you almost laughter blind, just like there are people who are colorblind.

There are ten percent of people who are colorblind -- it is a big percentage, but they are not aware that they are colorblind.

George Bernard Shaw was colorblind, and he came to know it when he was sixty years old. On his birthday somebody sent a present, a beautiful suit, a coat, but the person forgot to send a tie. So Bernard Shaw went with his secretary to find a matching tie. He liked the suit very much. He looked at ties and he chose one, and the secretary was surprised; she could not believe it -- because the suit was yellow and the tie was green. She said, "What are you doing? This will look very strange."

He said, "Why will it look strange? It is the same color."

The manager, the salesman... they all gathered, and they tried in many ways to find out.... He could not distinguish between yellow and green; they both appeared the same to him. He was colorblind.

But for sixty years he was not aware of it.

And there are ten percent of people in the world who are colorblind. Some color they are missing, or maybe they are mixing it up with some other color.

The constant repression of laughter has made you laughter blind.

Situations are happening everywhere, but you cannot see that there is any reason to laugh. If your laughter is freed from its bondage, the whole world will be full of laughter. It needs to be full of laughter; it will change almost everything in human life.

You will not be as miserable as you are. In fact, you are not as miserable as you look -- it is misery plus seriousness that makes you look so miserable. Just misery plus laughter, and you will not look so miserable!

In one apartment house... And modern apartments have such thin walls that whether you want to or not, you have to hear what is going on on the other side of the wall. In a way, it is very human.

The whole apartment house was puzzled about one thing.... Every couple was fighting, throwing pillows, throwing things, breaking cups and saucers, shouting at each other, husbands beating wives, wives screaming -- and they don't need any loudspeaker systems or anything, and the whole apartment house enjoyed.

The only problem was with one sardarji. From his flat they never heard any fight; on the contrary, they always heard laughter. The whole crowd was puzzled: "What is the matter? These people never fight. There is always laughter -- and both are laughing so loudly that the whole building can hear it!"

One day they decided that it had to be looked into: "We are missing so much, and they are enjoying so much. What is their secret?"

So they caught hold of the sardarji as he was coming from the market, carrying vegetables and other things. They all caught hold of him and they said, "First you have to tell us that what the secret is -- why do you laugh when everybody fights?"

The sardar said, "Don't force me, because the secret is very embarrassing."

They said, "Embarrassing? But we thought you are doing great. We always hear laughter -- either you laugh or your wife laughs... no fight."

The sardar said, "What happens is, she throws things at me. If she misses, then I laugh; if she hits me then she laughs. The same things are going on, but it is just that we have made a different arrangement -- what is the point? So I have learned how to dodge her, and she is learning how to...."

After twenty years the same sardar wanted to divorce his wife. The magistrate had heard about them, that this was the only couple in the whole city who had never been known to fight. They simply laugh -- the whole city knows them as the laughing couple.

The magistrate said, "What has gone wrong? You are so famous."

The sardar said, "Forget all about that -- just give us permission to divorce."

But the magistrate said, "I have to know the reason."

He said, "The reason is very clear -- she hits me. And it is too much; I have been getting those hits for years."

The magistrate asked, "How long have you been married?"

He said, "Almost thirty years."

The magistrate said, "If you have been able to cope with the woman for thirty years, then just ten, twenty years more...."

He said, "That is not the point. At first I used to dodge, but now she has become such a good... there is no way that I can dodge! So only she laughs, I have not laughed for ten years. This is unbearable. In the beginning it was perfect; it was almost fifty-fifty, there was no problem. I was laughing, she was also laughing. But now a hundred percent of the time she laughs, and a hundred percent I am just standing there, looking like a fool. No, I cannot tolerate it any more.

So there is no harm... even just sitting in your room, close the doors and have one hour of simple laughter. Laugh at yourself.

But learn to laugh.

Seriousness is a sin, and it is a disease.

Laughter has tremendous beauty, a lightness. It will bring lightness to you, and it will give you wings to fly.

And life is so full of opportunities. You just need the sensitivity. And create chances for other people to laugh. Laughter should be one of the most valued, cherished qualities of human beings -- because only man can laugh, no animals are capable of it.

Because it is human, it must be of the highest order. To repress it is to destroy a human quality.

-Osho (for more visit www.osho.com or www.oshoworld.com)

What is WRONG with the EDUCATION SYSTEM???

2008-08-11T02:10:00.000-07:00

This article is written and sent to IndiaVed by Vishal Rathee, an Electronic Engineer. Vishal enjoys his life bravely and as much as his many creative hobbies.

What is WRONG with the EDUCATION SYSTEM???

Well A SYSTEM MEANS A WAY TO MAKE THINGS WORK IN THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY, SUCH THAT EVERYONE GETS MAXIMUM OUT OF HIS ABILITIES AND MINIMUM SUFFERINGS.
A country's government is meant for the same pupose and the constitution helps people to live in harmony and peacefully {Acc. to the normal vision that pumped the socialsts to make the system}.
But is the system working the way it must have been working? In a well working system or well driven country there is something for everyone, and no one suffers in the long term but is it so that the deserving
people are getting things in the way they should be getting? The criteria for selections :: In the higher studies like IIT JEE, CAT, MBBS, DCE and even the small level exams, the system is being used against itself and it is so helpless that it can not avoid it. We have the coaching centres that guide the students to the way they can
solve the questions, what will be the question paper like, what questions and puzzles will be asked in the interview, how you have to crush others possibility in the Group Discussions and similar things.
When everything can be taught then how can it be assured that the selection procedure is neat and lustified?
People work for money everywhere and this is hurting the society the most, a person wants to become a doctor because on opening the clinic he / she will be paid well and same is the reason for becoming teacher, policeman, engineer or scientist. The teachers in the school do not educate the students, they threat them to study with the line that IF YOU WILL NOT STUDY, THEN YOU WILL BECOME SOME MECHANIC OR YOU
WILL NOT GET A GOOD JOB. A GOOD JOB, is it all we work for? Is it the real purpose of education?
What is the solution? Well the solution is to change the basic components of the system, make equal places for all type of citizens,finish the dissimilarities and those who are sportsmen, singers, dancers, actors, writers, everyone must be able to earn bread for himself and a respected position in society for what he / she has
got. Things will be alright only when people will start thinking in the right way so we need better teachers, better selectors, better selection criteria and a better system for all so that the artist gets paid for its art, Education must be mandatory for all up to a level that can help them survive the crooks, and the artists and there art must get the nourishment. A system must work for all, specially for the poor people as they need it the most, they are the most dependable sorts and we can fix the problems in many ways. Those who dont work, let them live in ashrams or communes, make them work there and give them good food. This way they will start working and may earn food for them as well. Bring in more alternative ideas in a way that the system starts working.
Dont let the system die or get crippled, we need a way to live and that shud be flawless, make the desired changes according to the need of time and make the world a better place to live. Take care of the
corruption, stop it from growing and in step by step manner finish it. Think of the poor who come to school for the food in the mid day meal schemes and get death instead because the food was of very low
quality. It is just like killing your pet by poisioning its food, this is the worst case of killing someones trust.
Do something for people that drives out the need for money out & they can see the humanity and give the combined efforts to preserve humanity. We need it now or it will be too late, PREVENTION IS ALWAYS
BETTER THAN THE CURE. The basic purpose of Education was always to make a better human, a better social element who can take responsibility of the things around and can take care of the world that was meant for his good. Selfishness needs to be finished and the only way it is the EQUALITY FOR ALL CITIZENS. Someone will have to work in a different way, make more chances for the undeveloped or the underdeveloped people. Make them independent by implementation of various ways, let the politics work for the good, have better people
on the higher posts. HUMANITY.

~Vishal Rathee~

'Dhyan' Meditation, the way to Satchidananda - Truth, Conscioussness and Bliss

2008-07-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

Starting from a small answer I update this article regularly to make it upto date in order to to write the most effective way of meditation. Hence keep reading.... Love - Dhyan; A psychological analysis of Who am I?, What is purpose of life? What is meditation and what is the need of meditation anyway? and What is Real Happiness?
and in the process knowing about meaning of these terms:-

Thoughtless Awareness, Breathing Awareness, Mindless Consciousness Meditation

first of all read this conversation between Buddha and his discipline Ananda...; Ananda said to Buddha, "I have observed you for years and years together. It seems like a miracle: you sleep as if you are awake. You are in the same posture the whole night." The hand would not move from the place where it had been put; the leg would remain in the same posture. Buddha would sleep in the same posture the whole night. Not a single movement! For nights together ananda would sit and watch and wonder, "What type of sleep is this!" Buddha would not move. He would be as if a dead body, and he would wake up in the same posture in which he went to sleep. Ananda asked, "What are you doing? Were you asleep or not? You never move!" Buddha said, "A day will come, Ananda, when you will know. This shows that you are not practising anapanasati yoga rightly; it shows only this. Otherwise this question would not have arisen. You are not practising anapanasati yoga -- if you are continuously aware of your breath in the day, it is impossible not to be conscious of it in the night. And if the mind is concerned with awareness, dreams cannot penetrate. And if there are no dreams, mind is clear, transparent. Your body is asleep, but you are not. Your body is relaxing, you are aware -- the flame is there inside. So, Ananda," Buddha is reported to have said, "I am not asleep -- only the body is sleep. I am aware! and not only in sleep. Ananda -- when I die, you will see: I will be aware, only the body will die."
Now Continue......and Read this article for Knowledge and Awareness. Read like an interesting story and get a feeling of what you have read. Dont try to remember anything out of it...or think so much..... Just Read and Feel.
: Question:- ...could you please let us know how to exactly do meditation? I alwsys try to do meditaion on regular basis but I am not sure how to exactly do because on internet some people say do it that way, some say do it other way. I have tried couple of ways and I dont feel sleepy at all during my working hours but before, I used to feel sleepy in office even this article has mentioned this benefit of meditaion. Still dude let us what do you feel about the correct way of meditaion?; Ans: Basant a one line answer can also be given for your question about best form of meditation which is “Mindless Consciousness” or “Thoughtless Awareness” or "Pranayam". But we should not accept anything until we do "Darshan" i,e Witnessing ourself. Hence Experiencing and witnessing is more important then accepting any meditation as a right or wrong.; "विचारो के परवाह में बहना भर नही ! बस जागे रहना ! जानना स्वयं को प्रथक और अन्य ! दूर और मात्र द्रष्टा ! जेसे राह पर चलते लोगो की भीड़ देखते हैं , ऐसे ही विचारो की भीड़ कोदेखना ! जसे पतझड़ में सूखे पतों को चारो और उड़ते देखते हैं, वैसे ही विचारो के पतों को उड्तेदेखना ! न उनके करता बनना , न उनके भोक्ता ! फ़िर शेष सब अपने आप हो जाएगा ! उस शेष को ही मैं ध्यान (meditation) कहता हूँ !" - Osho

If you dont have this Hindi font, then read Dhyan meaning at this image: Dhyan Meaning

Its simple English translation is:

Not flowing uncontrolled in the flow of thoughts. Remain Awake ! Know your being as separate and something else ! from far like Watchman ! Like we watch the crowd of people walking on the road, likewise Watch the crowd of Thoughts ! Like we watch the dried leaves flying all around in autumn, likewise Watch the leaves of Thoughts flying around ! Do not become their doer or their follower ! Then the remaining will Happen itself ! That what Remains is what I calls Dhyan (Meditation) ! - Osho

Thoughtless Awareness: This state of mind to watch thoughts with awareness till they disappears is called Thoughtless Awareness. and this दर्शन or Experience is what we call ध्यान, meditation.
This is very important to note that Dhyan or Meditation is not Concentrating on something. It is actually the opposite. i.e. Not Thinking of Anything.
Concentration will put actually more stress on mind which you want to relax.
Recently a doctor who wants to learn meditation asked me, "I know how to do meditation..but just tell me what to think of in meditation...what to concentrate in meditation?"
What she was understanding of meditation is actually a misconception generally in many people and also even in English dictionary it is written that "meditation is to concentrate on something.....". Actually there is no appropriate word in English for Dhyan as its origin is from ancient India only when it was called Dhyan in Sanskrit. Bhuddhists called it Jhan in their Pali Language about 2500 yrs ago. Bhuddhist took it to Tibet, China where it become Chan and in Korea it become Seon and in Japan, Zen. But the meaning of Dhyan remained the same in whole east.
Hence the meaning of Dhyan and Meditation should be understood first that it is not concentrating on something. It is actually letting the mind free till it become empty itself.
Now in order to reach in this state of meditation i,e Thoughtless Awareness, mind and the self goes through some transformation and cleaning. These are the psychological changes take place in ones mind and beyond when he is starting doing meditation or Dhyan.

These simple psychological experience during meditation, in step by step, are:-

Awakening
De-conditioning
Awareness
Only Consciousness
Self Realization of Truths
Enlightenment

Sat-Chit-Ananda: Unconsciously the main purpose of anyones life after getting birth is Sat-Chit-Ananda i.e Truth-Consciousness-Bliss and the above 6 steps helps in getting that Ultimate Joy of Life. Sat is the Truth a meditator starts searching out of curiosity and awakening. Chit or Consciousness is the Truth what he found after meditation and Ananda or Bliss is what he experience at that moment. If naturally this realization happens to us then this is the best meditation otherwise just by reading this and other articles you already know about the meditation. What is more important is to know reasons and philosophy behind meditation and then you will realize yourself which is the best way of meditation specifically for you or anyone else. Even you can create a new technique for us. There are so many ways for meditation and it depends on the person's present state of mind that which is the best right now. Some person cannot do meditation at all and they need other person help to first go in hypnosis, for some even listening to music is a meditation and for some even their work has become a meditation and they dont need anything else.

Hence the best meditation is "Remain what you are"..just Live in the present moment..Live without any Fear, Guilt or Greed...Just Live... Smile...Laugh...Celebrate each moment.......You dont need to change yourself, You dont need to do anything new. And as you know the best meditation now, hence Stop reading this article further now and get back to your work.

But if you dont know who you are and want to know and understand better the process behind then first you have to understand the basic psychology of human being because most of the thing he does in his life are governed by unconscious mind like pumping of heart, contractions of muscles, breathing, reaction after touching fire etc. The vast amount of data stored at each moment in Unconscious mind plays a major role in deciding our false personality i,e "Who I am?"

Need of Meditation : First of all the question itself is what is the need of meditation? And leave meditation what is the main reason behind our doing all other things in life. Happiness is only reason behind us doing any activity.
Purpose of Life: The activity can be either higher education, working in big company, earning wealth, looking for bigger position and opportunity always, going to theater, playing sport or even listening to music, talking to girl or boy or even doing sex. The only answer is either we want to know something out of curiosity or we want Happiness and Joy. But then again after fulfilling our curiosity and gaining knowledge we feel Happiness. And no doubt that should be the purpose of life too. Some people can say they dont want only their happiness but are doing social service to make others happy. But then it is again a mechanism of brain that after doing this particular activity i.e social service they will feel Happiness.

In real there is no Purpose of Life. It is just happens due to existence and if the direction of this energy flow is not stopped or diverted then it will pass through all different aspects of life energy forms and then ultimately merge into the infinite energy of existence. But this doesnt happen.

Biggest Happiness: Now the question arises which is the biggest Happiness? Whether it is one of the above listed like food, education, money, power, sex? We go on looking for more... more money..more power..No doubt they also gives some happiness but this happiness is not the highest...it looks highest until ones awareness is inside the mind i.e Maya. You are under control of your thoughts and mind. Awake yourself and Become Aware so much that you can even watch and observe your mind and the thoughts coming. Then you are out of the Maya and the real journey of Happiness Begins actually now and which is real and is truth. Truth means which are universal. We can change our thoughts, our perception, our statement but Truth remains the same. When Kopernicus and Kaplor first time found the truth that Earth revolves around the Sun, Church didnt accepted it as it was against the Bible. But that couldnt change the Truth. Galileo used the Telescope to prove this Truth only to anger the Church. But Truth remains the Truth even if you dont know it.
Truth Realization as Real Happiness: Yes we can know the Truth and feel the real Happiness if we utilize the full potential of our brain and beyond. We came to know the Truth after becoming aware and witnessing the infinite within as infinite outside. There is a whole lot of bigger infinite universe inside your brain. But this infinite is nothing, it is kind of vacuum with huge energy within, it is the Brahman space-time, the creator of the universe, the infinite energy where time stops. As soon as mind stops and you are aware of it, time also stops. Brahman is the fully aware emptiness with huge amount of energy within. Then we realize that The ultimate happiness is Anand, the Bliss, the Ecstasy which we feel now after our Consciousness merges with the plane of Brahman, its originator in the state of thoughtlessness and timelessness. You realize the Truth that Now you are not the Body, you are not the Mind, You are even not the Intuition, You are only the Consciousness which is at the energy center at navel. The connection of inner Consciousness with outer infinite Consciousness happens at the navel which is the connecting energy center between mother and the new creature inside the womb at the time of pregnancy. But unawake people remains unaware of most of the truths. Hence their perception of Happiness remains within their Maya or illusion of mind.
No Mind Happiness: But why we actually search for Happiness in first place? If you just traverse at the whole life of a person the Happiest and the most Joyful moment for any living being is when it is in the Womb of the mother. This is the time when there is only joy and no worry. It floats in the water in which it has spent most part of its evolutionary life in ocean. Readymade food and oxygen supply. But the main reason for its happiness is that the brain doesn’t start to work until few months before its time of birth. Hence at this time there is NO MIND hence NO THOUGHTS, Hence the Highest level of HAPPINESS. This is the only time when there is only Consciousness as nothing to think about. This is the time when we are most close to the Godly energy i.e the infinite Universe within. The baby is connected to the mother’s body from its navel. Hence the first energy center which develops in the body is at naval and not the brain and throughout life navel remains the energy center of body. Even in terms of scientific calculation navel is the Center of Gravity of any body. See the navel at the center of circle in the Leonardo Da Vinci's Spread Eagle Painting at this link

The important thing to note here is that inside the womb even without working of the brain, the body, heart, lungs and other organs of the baby are working. After 5-6 months in womb the brain starts working. And when child took birth it continue working and storing data which is mostly forced to him or her. And then for full time till the death the Mind doesn't stop working.
Navel Dhyan: Navel is source of our energy, breathing, the Pran, the Jhana (just put your finger in naval and inhale and exhale fast you will know not lungs but navel is the source of breathing or Prana). Jhana or Dhyan or Zen is the same and when we say do 'Dhyan', it means taking your Awareness to the Navel center after stopping your mind. Actually there is no appropriate word in English for Dhyan. As explained earlier Meditation is used for Dhyan which is same. Hence Dhyan or meditation here means to stop mind and take awareness at the emptiness at navel, the source of Prana, the breathing, it is called consciousness, the Atman. Being Aware of Inhaling and Exhaling breathing is also called the 'Pranayam' as given in ancient Yoga books and now taught by Swami Ramdev and called as 'Anapanasati Yoga' in Bhudhism.

Unconscious Search for Womb: Hence after taking birth for the full life unconsciously the child within us always wants to go to mothers womb or in a similar kind of experience for the ultimate happiness. And all its action throughout our life are unconsciously governed by this factor of Search for that Maximum Happiness. But he never gets the maximum as its mind is no more the same as it was inside the womb. He is always searching for comfort like in womb. He wants to automate everything like food, travel, home, AC like comfort in womb to make womb like environment.
FEAR: After taking birth The first data which is fed to the child's mind which takes him away from his Natural Happiness and True Being is the FEAR. Unconsciously the whole life he is under some FEAR...though from outside he may look very calm. It was always warned that dont do this...if you eat this the Devil will come, if you will touch this...the Doggie will bite you and then in school if you will play you will be beaten..if you will learn music or some other creative work you will be the poorest in life..what will your parents think if they will know about your sin that you masturbate and watch porn?...what will your parents and society think if they know you have girl or boy friend?..and you did the biggest sin, sex too?..then after graduation if you will not do normal job and if you want to do research or phd....or you want to become something else which most of your others friend didnt become you wont have money and No girl will marry you...and if you will not go to mosque or church or temple God will punish you....or some fool people send the sms that if you will not forward this sai baba message to 12 people something bad will happen to you..and ...when young if you will marry the person of other caste of religion ...we will kill you or the society will..and in marriage if you will leave your dominating husband who drinks and beats you...what will the society say? who will accept you?.. ....and so on and so forth. And finally the biggest fear....the FEAR of DEATH.

The Truth is in Real all these Fears and conditions imposed on after Birth are superfluous and unnecessary and they do more harm then anything good.

GUILT:- But in whatever best possible way you try to follow these society superstitions, castes, religions and RULES, unconsciously you always have other desires, your creativity needs some freedom. But you keep on suppressing them thinking what my parents will say, what the society will say and this control and suppressions becomes a feeling of GUILT and it takes away most of the processing power of your neural network and mind. Your creativity is buried under this GUILT feeling. Recently I went to a marriage party with some of my Foreign friends which have come to see indian wedding. These girls with no fear and no guilt were the first to start dancing. And soon many other indian girls and elder woman joined them who were hesitating after breaking their fear. I was observing the faces of many other indian girls who didnt danced clearly showing the FEAR and GUILT at their face. Clearly they wanted to dance from inside but their mind didnt allow them to come out of this FEAR and GUILT. There was not even a sign of smile on their face. They have lost even their smile and happiness in this FEAR. From outside they looked normal but from inside they were dead.

RAPE AND SOCIETY: If a girl is raped no doubt that is a crime and the maximum punishment should be given to the rapist but from girls point of view it is still a sexual act on body. But the society has created such a bad image about sex, virginity, sex before marriage, love marriage, inter caste marriage and the kind of eyes by which people even from her own family look at her makes her mind a SUFFOCATED JAIL with no light, no fresh air inside. It creates a high level of FEAR and GUILT inside her mind and she is DEAD now. Actually not dead but KILLED by the Society and its SUPERSTITIONS. Otherwise just look at some other angle. She takes some necessary medicines and testing. Her mind says whatever happened has happened and her body, mind and soul are still with her. She can forget the past and it is like nothing has happened. The society and even family and relatives dont look at her with some pity and help. She is alright, CHEERFUL, DANCER, SINGER and Happy as she was earlier and she can do all the work and she can go anywhere as she was going earlier. Understand this the so called people who come and talk to help her from family and society do much more harm to her then any other thing by making feel her mind FEAR, GUILT and IMPURE. Remove these thoughts and it is Ms. Pretty and Ms. CHEERFUL as always.

CONDITIONING: This State of living with FEAR and GUILT is called CONDITIONED MIND. Now you have forgotten completely your true self. Whats your personality now is and what other people thinks about you is what picture of you your mind portraits and falsely created by its thoughts and actions. And your mind is not real. It is just a bundle of thoughts and conditions imposed on them by society.

Roles of School in Conditioning the Mind: Most of the content of school are most to memorize the facts then to understand, analyze the concepts and proving and further working on them using reasoning and creativity. And it is very unfortunate that mostly the criteria for intelligence of any child is linked to the marks he scores. Even if he scores 90% he is told it is not enough. But the creative part of his work is often ignored and not considered as a factor for his intelligence and position. Hence it is often seen that generally the highly creative children which want to do something in painting, music, astronomy, scientific experiments and toys, sports, if scores less in class are often condemned and beaten by the parents and the teachers. This is the worst thing which can happen to the mind of a child to make it highly conditioned and to suppress his creative energy.
De-conditioning is the only to get rid of Conditioned Mind and know your true being. De-conditioning means removing the glass filter of Mind to look at things and everything happening around us in this society, the world and the universe its entirety, beauty and reality. Then you will be able to see the TRUTHS and FALSE RULES. Then you will see how beautiful this whole natural existence is.
Generally De-conditioning doest happen to Unawake people and the people who are always unconscious, fighting with others for small and insignificant things like ego, greed, anger, money, caste, religion etc.

Thats why Meditation is the easiest and natural way to become Awake and Awake and get rid of Unwanted Conditioning of our Mind and to remove almost all problems of worlds like Violence, Hatred, Wars, Women and Child Abuses etc. And also if all people can understand each other then even solutions to problems like pollution and global warming etc can be found and implemented easily.

UNNATURAL DEATH: These people whose mind is so much conditioned and they have truly forgotten their true self dont die naturally. Most doctors and people will say it was natural death. They die unconsciously when their mind refuses to carry these unnecessary conditions further. Their awareness remained buried under unconscious mind. They didnt get Happiness throughout their life which can be satisfy their mind. This is something similar to like in Matrix when the brains or Neo and others were connected to the Matrix then it is all the mind game. If they die in mind, their body also dies. Understand that this whole body is so much controlled and affected by mind that 80% of diseases are created by mind only. I am not talking of psychological problems but even problems like heart attach, diabetes, liver or kidney failure, loose of eye sight and hearing, weakness in body at old age etc. Unconsciously the start of failure of brain leads to many hormonal imbalances, creation of those hormones and antibodies are actually controlled by brain and imbalances of these creates all forms of diseases.

Hence Dieing with Unconscious Mind, Conditioned Mind, with Unawareness cannot be a Natural Death.
An Awakened and Aware person who is in a state of meditation, also increases his brain power and also it has been found that how meditation is even effective in curing AIDS and meditation also improves the immune system. In these 2 recent articles it is proved using scientific research and data.
Rather if one of Awakened and Aware and he sees death as Leaving the Body, can even master the Death and its timing and as Buddha said in the start of this post "If I am aware, my Body will die, I am not". This is the only Natural Death which is under awareness.

False Personality: Hence now you must have understood how since the time baby is in the Womb, when its Born, when the child mind start conditioning by parents, society, and then ultimately he has lost his identity completely in some kind of many of his actions which he did because of fear and he didnt want to do in real like forced marriage etc which he has to undergo and this conditioned mind is the only reason of his Unnatural Death and he never knew what Happiness is and What Orgasmic Happiness and Ecstasy is. Hence now you have to decide whether you want to know your true self or not? Read some more to understand how to Witness Your True Being Yourself including some psychology behind it.

AWAKENING : You are already Awakened if you are reading this article and wants to know your true self or the Truth. When you become curious to know something, the reasons behind everything, and always search for truths among the random data, and You Starts asking genuine Questions, that means you are Awakening. Awakening is needed to breaks the unnecessary conditions in our conditioned mind.
DECONDITIONING:

If you want to know about your true self...your true being...DECONDITION your mind by awakening and asking questions. This process will free your mind which leads to awareness. Deconditioning doest mean that you will forget anything rather your intution and creativity will become so strong that you can take any decision and action much quickly and those will be the best decisions in any particular moment. If you want to decondition yourself do this....as you are reading this...just at once think that your mind is a bundle of thoughts, wrong rules and superstitions and Break them atonce. Free yourself from all these rules which you have learned since childhood either at home, school, society of religious gurus. Now what is left is only pure Creativity. Deconditioning means removing the glass filter of Mind to look and speak at things and then Looking at everything in this world in its entirety, beauty and reality. Then you will see how beautiful this whole natural existence is.
In reality Each child is unique in itself. It has so much tremendous creative energy that if his mind is not fed up with FEAR and unwanted superstitions of the family and society, he can do any work and it will be thorough work and with Best Quality which is good for him also and the development of the society also.
Deconditioning doesnt implies that as he will not follow any rule and he can do some crime. Actually when he is under Full Awareness and Deconditioning he cannot do any harm to anyone as he can see the Truth within and outside. Rather now he will even leave his wrong intentions even if he carried them earlier even before Deconditioning. Now he can clearly identify the Truths, the Karma and the Dharma.

Awareness:

Full Awareness can only Happen after DE-CONDITIONING
In an earlier article (From Unconsciousness to Consciousness) It is explained that we use only 10% of our mind which is conscious and 90% of our mind which is unconscious remain hidden as that 90% of the brain power is consumed in Taking Care of these FEARS which are stored permanently inside our unconscious mind.
Only Awareness is the process by which we can convert our unconscious mind into conscious mind and that state is what we call Thoughtless Awareness or Mindless Consciousness.

Breathing Technique, Pranayam, Anapanasati Yoga

This is the best technique to become Aware. To become aware one has to come out of the Maya of Mind. Mind should become thoughtless and you still should be aware of it, rather watching it. But initially it is not easy to become thoughtless hence one can start by Witnessing Breathing.
Become Aware of your breathing while you Inhale and Exhale. This is the best way to become thoughtless because as soon as you become aware of your Breathing your thoughts disappear.
You can become aware of only one thing at a time Either Breathing i.e Prana or the Thoughts.
Anulom-Vilom and Kapal-Bhati Pranayam promoted widely by Ramdev are also very effective in becoming aware of Breathing and becoming thoughtless.

Thoughtless Awareness or Mindless Consciousness

The person is in Full Awareness and there are no thoughts. This is the state of No Mind and pure consciousness.
Our mind is 24 hours in thinking. Even when you sleep your conscious mind stop working but your unconscious mind is still working and thats why dreams come while in sleep. Thoughtless Awareness means thoughts from both conscious as well as unconscious mind disappears and it becomes a one full and single Consciousness.
Emotions are the byproduct of Conditioned Mind. If the person has deconditioned his mind and become aware he has overcome all his emotions. Now the Default state of being is Extreme Happiness and Love.

Absolute Consciousness, Max. Happiness, Bliss and Benefit in Real Life:

Prolong Orgasmic Happiness: If you want to understand the extent of Happiness at this state of full Consciousness, sex is the best example. Actually sex is the momentarily meditation which people do in order to get that happiness and relief which unconsciously everyone is looking for after birth. Orgasmic Happiness at this Aware Consciousness is similar to the momentary happiness and extreme relief a person feels at the climax of sex i.e Orgasm. The similarity between these two different kind of Orgasmic Happiness is that in both cases the Mind Stops, the Thoughts Stops for some time and hence the Biggest Happiness. The difference between sexual orgasm and Happiness in Pure Consciousness is :-

In sexual orgasm the direction of energy flow is outwards and one has to loose energy out of the body to feel relaxed while in meditation orgasm the direction of energy is inward and the infinite energy and Consciousness inside merges with the infinite Consciousness outside.
and the sexual orgasm pleasure last only for few seconds while the Happiness, Bliss, the Ecstasy at this stage of Meditation lasts for many hours, days or can remain forever. It is like whole life you were thinking that your town (sex) is the biggest place you imagined by your conditioned mind while at this meditation stage (Bliss) you are getting an infinite wide Universe Space to traverse.
Hence the Orgasmic Happiness during Meditation is far better then that in Sex. Thats why after witnessing that experience of Absolute Consciousness we become free of sex. Now no need to suppress your sexual desires. One can do sex if it is needed for procreation but for Orgasmic Happiness he has much better option now.
Those people who force them to become celibate without actual understanding whole of the above process of how to reach at "Sex Free" state are actually the wandering Dynamite. You listen to any religious guru and they will say "Control your desires.. control your sexual desires", "Sanyam Karo". They are creating wandering Sex Bombs. Because when they control their sexual desires it gets buried deep into their unconscious mind though from outside they will look Mahatma or Saint but they have to be always alert of it and if they are alert it means actually unconsiously they are always thinking of it. Thats why they always avoid woman because they know it can explode any time.
Hence the best thing is to go into Dhyan by understanding the above psychology and let your sexual thoughts come and then disappear themselves. It is like you are watching a road where people are coming and going. Let these thoughts also pass by. They are just like any other thoughts. Dont control or suppress them.

Full of Bliss and Laughing: When you will reach in Absolute Consciousness First time you will witness such kind of Bliss inside. From now onwards you will always laugh and will remain unaffected to anything. Laughing is the best way to live life. Now you are so full of love and happiness that it will start pouring outside and hence you can give and spread love and happiness to others.

Silence is a Truth: laughing is a life and silence is a truth for a person in Dhyan
Max. Brain Utilization: Just imagine if you do this 'Dhyan' and we are able to use say 40, 50 or 80 % of your brain you will be the next Albert Einstein or anytop researcher or successful person in any field you want to work.
Natural Concentration: And now with Deconditioned mind and Full Awareness whatever work you will do it will become meditation. As you are not thinking anything else hence it will be a natural concentration on anything you are working on and not the forced concentration.

Whatever you do is meditation: Now Everything is a meditation be it Dancing, Singing, Music Listening, Painting, Gardening, Studying, Traveling, Farming, Programming, Cleaning, Cooking, Washing, Playing, Driving, Bathing, Laughing, Loving and Even Sex is Meditation and it will last hours and one can fully utilize Kaamsutra with full awareness.

Now if you have understood the reasons behind the need and the psychology behind doing anything in life and also the meditation you can choose any creative activity for yourself which you enjoy the most. Normally a person can understand the simple reasons given above and can start the meditation or Dhyan. But some people are in so much deep sleep with their highly conditioned mind which do not even allow them to sit, read, talk and understand comfortably, means they are drunk and unconscious under emotions and fears. Hence for them some other psychological method is required so that they can come out of their unconsciousness and deep sleep.

Dynamic Meditation for people who cannot sit in Dhyan: Osho has given this very good technique of meditation for the people who are under lots of stress and are not ready to do Dhyan Meditation as they cannot Awake, Decondition and Aware by themselves. Dynamic meditation is also the Sanjivini or life Saving for the people who are under Severe Depression and on the verge of suicide. Osho has given these 5 steps in this dynamic meditation which involves rigorous physical activity to take more oxygen inside to clean the blood, give more oxygenated blood to brain and also it awakens the Kundilini Energy. There should be a fast rock kind of music running while doing this. Each step is for 10-15 minutes.

Fast Breathing - Fast inhaling and exhaling
Gibrish - Shout and Cry as much as you can. Express your full anger...Abuse to those people who has done highly wrong and injustice to you.....take a knife and mentally kill them....cut into pieces....make any kind of sounds... Then Weep..Cry...and Laugh..Laugh as much loud as you can...Move your body parts randomly..release all your anguish, anger and energy from your unconscious mind
Jump with the music while making sound of Ho-Ho continuously...
Keep Standing silent for 15 minutes with no music now
Dance like anything on the music....Dance like you become the dance. There remains nothing else but dancing.

Watch these videos to Learn and Get Free Yourself:-

This Dynamic meditation will help prepare the person to get enough awakening, energy , deconditioning and awareness to go deep into meditation. For more learning, visit at OSHO center at pune or OshoDham in Delhi.

Hypnosis and Reiki If a person is on the verge of unnatural death due to conditioned mind which has created so much stress then a spiritual guru who is expert can save his life by using Hypnosis and Reiki or other way to pass spiritual energy into him.

10 Easy Steps for Meditation:-

Now as you have understood all aspects of meditation in brief you can follow these simple 10 Steps for meditation to relax your body and mind, to excel in your work and to get extreme Joy in life:-

Awakening

Acceptance of Truth and the Accepting Death as ultimate Truth. Starts Questioning the untruths and reasons behind everything.

De-conditioning

Removing Fear and unwanted rules and superstitions

Awareness with Thoughts

Can watch your thoughts like on a screen, coming and disappear until all disappears

Awareness without Thoughts

Become aware of your breathing, the Prana, the Oxygen that will help in disappearing the thoughts. Till you are aware of Breathing, thoughts cannot come.
There are no thoughts, Mind is Empty and you are Watching it with full Awareness

Unconscious becomes Conscious

The 90% unconscious mind merges with 10 % conscious mind and becomes full Conscious
Aware about your Breathing as it inhales and exhales, Follow it

Full Creativity and Intuition

With such a huge network of neurons which were in unconscious territory are all accessible by conscious mind with huge bandwidth of communication. It is pure creativity at work.
Aware about Inhaling-Exhaling Breathing and reach the source
Highest Happiness
Cannot Stop Laughing.
Great Sense of Humor. Humor is the byproduct of Creativity.

Absolute Consciousness

After breathing now become aware of Breathing source, the Prana energy center.
Now the awareness reaches the navel energy center. Its pure Consciousness with Awareness.
Self-Realization of Truths starts happenings. Einstein and other scientist and inventor found about untold truth at this state.
Always smiling.

Inner Consciousness Merges with the Plane of Outer Consciousness (Atman meets Pramatman, the Brahman, the creative energy of universe)

Some people call this state as Witnessing God like Shiva-Shakti which is one when merged. Actually Shiva and Shakti complements each other when merged becomes the Brahman, the infinite energy of universe which is everywhere. When there is nothing there is Brahman, the Unified Field, the Super-String Field. Is the merging of particle-antiparticle, electron-positron fields to create only one energy wave, related to this?
One is All and All is One. Non-dualism principle.
This is the Ultimate Truth, witnessing the Godliness, the creative energy.
Now you are part of the Global Consciousness surrounding the earth. Now you can communicate with other people on this plane with the speed of light. As this plane is infinite hence your consciousness can create a ripple in this 'Brahman' space-time towards your friend which can travel at the speed of light. How Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics mystery 'Entanglement' are related to this concept? (Some food for thoughts here Are we connected by Entanglement?)
Love and Spiritual Energy starts pouring outside of the Body.

Anand, Bliss and Ecstasy

Enlightened
Becomes like a child. God energy is always more near to children.
Extreme Bliss like in a womb
One of my relative has met Dalai Lama once and spent some time with him. He told me that Dalai Lama is just like a child, so innocent and always smiling. His face, voice and even his presence gives some kinds of spiritual energy. He is in this state.

Life is Celebration

No fear, No Guilt, No Greed, No Anger, No Stress. Only Joy.
Now one can do any work or job which he was doing earlier or wants to do now as a normal human being. You can create music, songs, scripts, paintings, movies, mantras, medicines, theories, new dishes, new laws and truths, ideas, company, procreation of extraordinary child using sex, machines, robots, and also logically at the highest level of creativity one can create living and non living beings. Taking this concept further with your infinite power of consciousness you can even create Big Bang and the Universe. As such there is no God but now logically God as a Superintelligent, SuperCreative, SuperEnlightened Being in the state of Breathlessness and Timelessness cannot be ruled out completely. (Related Videos: Power of Brain and Universe and Is Quantum Physics and Consciousness connected?)
With this immense Bliss, he will always be in in Awareness, Balance, Happiness and Smiling all the time even at his death.

Hence completed the natural process of 'Dhyan' or 'Meditation' as the way to know our true being which is:

"You are not the Body, You are not the Mind, You are even not the Intuition,

You are only the Consciousness"

and witnessing the natural flow of our life by process of:

"Sat-chid-ananda - Truth - Consciousness - Bliss"

Related Posts:-

Scientific Proof for benefit of Meditation:-

Meditation slows AIDS progression

2008-07-26T19:19:00.000-07:00

Meditation May Slow HIV Immune Effects

By Michael Smith, North American Correspondent, MedPage Today
Published: July 25, 2008
Reviewed by Dori F. Zaleznik, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston.

LOS ANGELES, July 25 -- Stress-reducing meditation may slow the progression of HIV, researchers here said.

In a small, randomized controlled trial, an eight-week course of "mindfulness meditation" halted the decline in the number of CD4-positive T cells in recently diagnosed HIV patients, according to David Creswell, Ph.D., of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of California Los Angeles and colleagues.

However, there was no observable effect on HIV viral load, possibly because the study included only 67 people, the researchers reported online in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

Action Points

Explain to interested patients that there is some evidence that stress can affect the immune system, which is the target of HIV infection.
Note that this preliminary study showed that an eight-week course of meditation, combined with practice at home, can slow the decline in the number of CD4 lymphocytes, which is a hallmark of HIV progression.

Although more study is needed, the results "provide a promising first indication that mindfulness meditation may have benefit as a complementary adjunct treatment for HIV-1," the researchers concluded.

The meditation technique is group-based and inexpensive, Dr. Creswell said in a statement, so that if the study is replicated it could be a low-cost way to improve treatment.

The researchers recruited 67 recently diagnosed HIV patients in the Los Angeles area and randomized them on a two-to-one basis to either the eight-week course or a one-day seminar on the same topic.

During the eight-week course, participants had weekly two-hour group sessions guided by an instructor, a day-long retreat in the seventh week, and 30 minutes of daily audio-guided practice at home.

Patients in the control arm had a one-day session outlining the same information, but the instructors did not suggest daily routines at home.

The endpoint of the study was change in CD4 cell count from baseline.

Using mixed effects linear models, the study showed a significant time versus treatment interaction both on log-transformed and raw CD4 cell counts, at P=0.02 and P=0.03, respectively.

Specifically, the treatment participants had a raw average increase of 20 CD4 cells, compared with an average decline of 185 cells for those in the one-day control session, the researchers found.

The effect of antiretroviral medication, either on or off treatment, did not affect the strength of the time versus treatment interaction, the researchers said.

To attempt to measure the clinical effect, the researchers compared the post-study rate of CD4-defined AIDS -- a CD4 count of fewer than 200 cells per cubic millimeter of plasma -- in both groups.

None of the participants had CD4-defined AIDS at baseline and none of those in the treatment group reached that state after the study.

In contrast, two of the control participants had a CD4 cell count below 200 after the study ended.

The difference in HIV RNA levels at baseline was not significant and the study was unable to detect any differences between the groups after the study, Dr. Creswell said.

Limitations of the study included its small size, a relatively high attrition rate, and absence of long-term follow up, the researchers said.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, and the UCLA General Clinical Research Center. The researchers reported no conflicts.

Primary source: Brain, Behavior, and Immunity
Source reference:
Creswell JD, et al "Mindfulness meditation training effects on CD4+ T lymphocytes in HIV-1 infected adults: A small randomized controlled trial" Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 2008; DOI: 10.1016/j.bbi.2008.07.004.

Related News:-
Meditation May Slow HIV Immune Effects
Meditation slows AIDS progression

Meditation builds up the brain

2008-07-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

Meditation builds up the brain

* 11:01 15 November 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Alison Motluk

Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better – and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have reported that the brain works differently during meditation – brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise. But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits of sleep has remained largely unexplored.

So Bruce O’Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, US, decided to investigate. They used a well-established “psychomotor vigilance task”, which has long been used to quantify the effects of sleepiness on mental acuity. The test involves staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond, but sleep-deprived people take much longer, and sometimes miss the stimulus altogether.
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Ten volunteers were tested before and after 40 minutes of either sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects trying all conditions. The 40-minute nap was known to improve performance (after an hour or so to recover from grogginess). But what astonished the researchers was that meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

“Every single subject showed improvement,” says O’Hara. The improvement was even more dramatic after a night without sleep. But, he admits: “Why it improves performance, we do not know.” The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice.
Brain builder

What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and 15 non-meditators.

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

“You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing".

The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.

The new studies were presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, in Washington DC, US.

Source: Meditation builds up the brain

Related Post: - Meditation Can Cure AIDS

Just to be Born is Not Enough to be Alive

2008-07-26T05:44:00.000-07:00

Someone said, "people visiting here ask, WHY DO WE LEAD SUCH A RICH LIFE?

Osho:-

- Life means abundance, richness, in every possible dimension. Just look at existence. Do you think it is poor? Look at the millions of flowers, their fragrance; look at the millions of stars. Man has not been able yet to count them, and I don't think he is ever going to be able to count them. With your bare, naked eye you only see, at the most, three thousand stars -- and that's nothing. And these stars are expanding. Just as a flower opens up and the petals start going away from the center, the universe is continuously flowering, blossoming, opening -- and with a tremendous speed. The stars are going farther away from the center. We don't know exactly where the center is; but one thing is certain, that the whole universe is running fast, moving, alive.

Those people who ......(ask that question) don't know what life is for. They have never lived. Yes, they have been born; but just to be born is not enough to be alive. They will vegetate and think they are living. And one day they will die, without ever having lived at all. These are the miracles that go on happening all around the world; people who have never lived, die -- such an impossibility! But it happens every day. And many have recognized it at the moment of death, and have said it is so, that "it is strange; for the first time I am realizing that I missed life."

If you live, for what? To love, to enjoy, to be ecstatic -- otherwise why live at all?

And what is 'richness'? -- just making life more and more enjoyable, more and more lovable, more and more comfortable, more and more luxurious.

The man who knows nothing of the great world of music is poor; he is missing one of the greatest luxuries of life. The man who does not know how to enjoy Picasso, van Gogh, does not know anything about the colors. If he cannot enjoy Leonardo da Vinci, how can he enjoy a sunrise, a sunset? Millions of people go on living, never recognizing a sunrise, never stopping for a moment to look at a sunset and all the colors that the sunset leaves behind in the sky. Millions of people never raise their eyes towards the sky and the splendor of it.

Living can only mean one thing: living life multidimensionally -- the music, the poetry, the painting, the sculpture... but it is all luxury. I am not a worshipper of poverty; I worship luxury. And existence is luxurious, abundantly luxurious. Where one flower will do, millions of flowers blossom. Have you ever felt that existence is miserly? What is the need of so many stars?

If these fools who ask you the question, if they meet the creator they believe in, they will ask, "What is the need of so many stars? Why this luxury? A few less won't do? What is the need of so many birds, animals, human beings?"

..........................................................

I teach you to live tremendously, ecstatically, in every possible way. On the physical level, on the mental level, on the spiritual level, live to the uttermost of your possibility. Squeeze from each single moment all the pleasures, all the happinesses possible, so that you don't repent later on that, "that moment passed and I missed." Do not think of the past, because in thinking about the past you will be missing the present moment, which is the only moment, which is all that exists. And don't think of the future: of another life, of the kingdom of God -- all sheer nonsense.

Tomorrow does not exist at all. It is always today -- always and always today.

It is always this moment. So squeeze it. Don't leave any juice in it. Once you learn to squeeze all the juice out of it, you will never think of the past. What is there left to think of? Then the past leaves no traces on you. It is only the unlived past which becomes your psychological burden.

Let me repeat: the unlived past... those moments which you could have lived, but you have not lived... those love affairs which could have flowered, but you missed... those songs which you could have sung, but you remained stuck to some stupid thing and missed the song.... It is the unlived past which becomes your psychological burden, and it goes on becoming heavier every day.

That's why the old man becomes so irritable. It is not his fault. He does not know why he is so irritable -- why every thing and each thing irritates him, why he is constantly angry, why he cannot allow anybody to be happy, why he cannot see children dancing, singing, jumping, rejoicing, why he wants everybody to be quiet -- what has happened to him.

It is a simple psychological phenomenon: his whole unlived life. When he sees a child start dancing his inner child hurts. His inner child was somehow prevented from dancing -- perhaps by his parents, his elders, perhaps by himself because it was respected, honored. He was brought before the neighbors and introduced: "Look at this child, how quiet, calm, silent; no disturbance, no mischief." His ego was fulfilled. Anyway, he missed. Now he cannot bear it, he cannot tolerate this child. In fact it is his unlived childhood that starts hurting. It has left a wound. And how many wounds are you carrying? Thousands of wounds are in line, because how much have you left unlived?

So the people who come here...(and ask the question), they come here almost dead, carrying their own dead bodies here. When they see you alive, they are shocked. They would have been immensely happy if they had seen ascetics sitting under juniper trees, naked, starving, praying to God, who does not exist. They would have been immensely happy, because then you were far more dead than they were; in comparison they have managed better than you. They would have respected you because you helped them to feel better. When they come to visit here, seeing you, they feel themselves empty, spent -- meaninglessly. It hurts. It hurts deeply, hence the question, "Why do you live so rich a life?"

But richness is your birthright.

You have not come with anything written on your forehead. You can go to the surgeon and let him look into your forehead. Nothing is written there, and nothing is written in the lines of your hand. You come in this world absolutely like a plain, unwritten, open book. You have to write your fate; there is nobody who is writing your fate. And who will write your fate? And how? And for what? You come in the world just an open potentiality, a multidimensional potentiality. You have to write your fate. You have to create your destiny. You have to become yourself.

You are not born with a readymade self. You are born only as a seed, and you can die also only as a seed. But you can become a flower, can become a tree. And out of one seed there can come millions of seeds. Do you see the abundance and richness of existence? One seed can make the whole earth green, the whole universe green -- what to say of the earth! Just one seed... how much potential is carried in a single small seed! But you can keep it in your safe, bank account, and live a life which is not life at all.

I am all for richness in every possible way. And remember that richness is possible only if you allow it in all the ways.

Do not be deceived by the old idea that you will be spiritually rich if you starve your body; if you physically torture your body you will be spiritually rich -- no. It is absolutely unscientific. I have seen people who have tortured their body their whole life, but I have not seen their soul being enriched by it. In fact their soul has died long ago.

Your body and soul are not enemies. They live in harmony.

You are a harmonious whole. Everything is integrated with everything else. You cannot make one part rich and another part poor. The whole becomes affected, becomes either poor or rich. You have to accept your wholeness.

So live, and live intensely. Burn the torch of your life from both the ends together. Only such a man can die blissfully, smiling.

A master was dying... it was just the last moment. His disciples had gathered. One disciple asked, "Master, you are leaving us. What is your last message?"

The master smiled, opened his eyes, and said, "Do you hear the squirrel running on the roof?" Then he closed his eyes, died. The disciples were at a loss... what kind of message is this? "Do you hear the squirrel running on the roof?" But that was his whole life's message: just the moment. At that moment he was enjoying the squirrel. Who bothers about death? And who bothers about the last message? He was in the moment, herenow. And that was his message: don't move anywhere else, just remain here and now. Even at the moment of death... the sound of the squirrel on the roof, and he enjoyed it.

Now, such a man must have lived immeasurably, immensely, incredibly. No regret, sheer gratitude... smiled -- what else do you want as a last message? A smile is enough. And to smile at the door of death is possible only if there are not unlived moments standing in a row behind you, pulling, asking you, "What about me?"... those incomplete moments.

But if there is nothing incomplete, every moment has been completed, there is nothing; it is just silence. And if every moment is completed, there is nothing in the future either, because it is only the incomplete moment which asks for tomorrow: if you have not been able to fulfill it yesterday, fulfill it tomorrow. But if there is no yesterday incomplete, then there is no projection for tomorrow. Then this moment is all.

- Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness, 1984

Is God Dead?

2008-07-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

This picture is taken during Sudan Famine and is quite widespread over emails and probably you must also have seen it before. If you believe in God then Just think a little but more deeply and tell me what the more urgent work God was doing in heaven when this child was dying... Everyone says children are the reflection of God .... So how can a God keep looking at this small, innocent child dieing and that due to hunger....and then eaten by vulture may be even before died fully...

If god can create this world, the earth, the sun and the universe and all the living beings.. why cant he create enough food for all of them.... If God is Perfect why did he create an imperfect world with so many sufferings?

Where is God anyway?
Is God Dead now?
or he was never in real....is God a Fiction of the religious businessman and thieves who uses its name to run their shop be it Church, Mosque or Temples?
or God is a Director of the movie 'The World' like the Matrix in which we all are playing our roles...be it good or bad..and everyones fate is already decided....like Oracle knew everything?

No doubt many God like Enlightened people have been seen on the earth which came to help the needy and gave them a message to live happily and peacefully like Krishna, Buddha, Osho (exactly at the interval of 2500 years). That was real and still such people are with us which guide us. But is God the 'ONE' who is always looking at you from somewhere in the sky and who knows everything beforehand? or is the philosophy and the message which he gave is more important if we want to live our life more happily and peacefully?

Is this the same fictious God for which muslims are killing innocent people all over the world? When will they realize the Truth that the Existence and the Creativity itself is God. There is no need to fight for it. It is evolving itself.

The message given by many enlightened soul in East is very clear about God. It is the Sat-Chit-Anand i.e Truth-Consciousness-Bliss. Everyone has it in their inside. One has to know its source by Meditation and Awareness. Meeting God is the Realization of the Truth that You are not the Body, You are not the Mind, You are only the Consciousness which is beyond body and mind.

By looking at the above picture if you still think that God is alive somewhere listens to your prayers then request him that he helps those who needs it the most especially the poor and the children. Probably you can forward this Picture to your god if he says that "I am always with you...you dont worry". It is said that God help those who help themselves...ask him why he cant help those who cannot help themselves...like the child above !

Why all Nice Girls go to the Bad Guys?

2008-07-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

The article below is written and sent to me by my friend who is an Engineer and who is one of the most intelligent guy I have ever met. It expresses beautifully the present situation in society about Why all Nice Girls go to the Bad Guys? and the good guys busy in research work and helping society and country by doing creative work remains single most of the time. He requested anonymity hence I am not writing his name along with this article.

Nonmales

It is interesting to speculate on the reasons that make females so anxious to debase themselves. Though they would never admit it openly. But it is quite obvious from their actions. Apart from other things, it is quite obvious from their mating behavior. Human females, like most other mammals, have the responsibility to select the opposite sex. The selection mechanism is the same as the natural selection process, i.e. the survival of the fittest. The nature has designed this entire system so that the best genes are carried to the future species. This has been the selection mechanism for all the other animals, which has triggered the evolution of species and the variety of life forms on earth. This fundamental reason of natural selection has been the key factor in deciding the behavior of the female animals in all the species. The best genes in case of animals are of course of the strongest animals in terms of physical parameters. So the female animals select those male animals, which win over other males in the battle preceding sex. In other words the strongest and the most influential of the males have the first right to sex in animal kingdom. This of course means that many male animals are deprived of sex throughout their lives. But this ensures the best genes are being propagated. This wonderful mechanism of the nature has created the variety of life forms on earth. The selection mechanism of human females has also been the same since the beginning. That was required to be the same during the stone ages and even early days of ancient civilizations. The best genes were of those men who were the most dominating in the society and hence the females selected those. But since the evolution of technology and science, the growth of the human civilization has been largely dependent upon the intellectuals who have leashed fire, found wheel, steam, electricity, crossed oceans, built sky scrapers. The survival is no more dependent upon the brute physical strength or domination, but the intellectual soul. So the best genes are not of those, who are just strong enough to collect the food, but of those who can modify the genes so that the food becomes unnecessary. But it seems that the human females have not evolved enough to match the speed of social evolution to modify their selection mechanism to select the right genes. They are still lingering in their naked pasts. They still need to look up at the man’s eyes, as if they were pleading for food in exchange of sex. They still need to be dominated and tampered like their ancestors. Only difference is that now, there is no true purpose behind it. They have not yet recognized that the society has already offered them equality and they no more need to be dependent on a strong and dominating man. One of the interesting traits of the modern female is, she cries for independence to go for a man, who treats her no better than a slave. This thrills them for some obscure reasons. As if it gives them the assurance that, “yes this is the man who is strong enough to save me from the beasts, who can bring me food.” They will not feel attracted towards a man who treats them as equal, because he is not strong enough to dominate them. Why is it that they think so weak of themselves that they cannot defend themselves in a society that is almost secure? Why is it that they want to be dominated, tampered, and abused? Why can’t they take up an equal position with male, when it is being offered to them? When will they recognize that the strength in the human society has changed its focus? It is no more with the people who are merely strong enough to dominate a female or a few of their fellowmen. They can’t recognize the strength of the human soul that is driving the human society, human civilization further, when the rest are simply adding to the inertia of it. It is the strength of these intellectuals, which has controlled the nature, tamed the brute force of the fire. Which has measured the sky and the sea. It is these humans, which are strong enough to stand against the god. It is the wealth created by these men that they are feeding upon. These are the people who are strong enough to stand by their own ideals. This is the true representation of the strength in the present human society. The females should recognize this changed nature of measure of strength among males and perform their responsibility correctly before the growth of the civilization becomes stagnant due to the extinction of the strong men.

Doubt, Explore and Experience..... Dont Believe Blindly !

2008-07-20T17:03:00.000-07:00

No religion has been courageous enough to say, "We know this much, but there is much we don't know; perhaps in the future we may know it. And beyond that, there is a space which is going to remain unknowable forever."

A true religion will have the humbleness to admit that only a few things are known, much more is unknown, and something will always remain unknowable. That "something" is the target of the whole spiritual search. You cannot make it an object of knowledge, but you can experience it, you can drink of it, you can have the taste of it - it is existential.

All these religions have been against doubt. They have been really afraid of doubt. Only an impotent intellect can be afraid of doubt; otherwise doubt is a challenge, an opportunity to inquire.

There is doubt, and doubt is not destroyed by believing. Doubt is destroyed by experiencing.

They say, believe. I say, explore. They say, don't doubt; I say, doubt to the very end, till you arrive and know and feel and experience. Then there is no need to repress doubt; it evaporates by itself. Then there is no need for you to believe.

You have to be again innocent, ignorant, not knowing anything, so that the questions can start arising again. Again the inquiry becomes alive, and with the inquiry becoming alive you cannot vegetate. Then life becomes an exploration, an adventure.........

- OSHO

The Corporate Servants

2008-07-20T06:38:00.000-07:00

Contributed to IndiaVed by Bhaskar Tripathi, an Computer Scientist, Adventure Freak and World Traveler by Email

The Corporate Servants

Guys, Normally, I dispense from using offenseive slang in my vocal conversation. However when I get pissed off from my current 8-9 hour office cubicle life, enthusiasm spurts the influx of energy in my hot blooded muscles and my fingers are compelled to type the instructions recieved from "that thing" resting above my two shoulders.
This might force all you non-sportsmen,non-entreprenuers,non-rockstarts,non-artists (in crux non-achievers), to think what have you really done in your life...read-on these thoughts,you might get the courageto show that middle finger to everyone in the world when you disagree!!

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? You, hear those boring mission statements from your business leaders,nod your head in approval and come back to your seats and again start earning your living.
You are taught to think out-of-box,innovate,communicate,inspire,manage (blah-balh-blah) etc. As if this were not enough, you will also be constantly expected by your bootless corporate bosses to be good,gel up with tardy,old people and be coroborrating in every statement they utter.

Purpose and achievement of your life ?
These are my thoughts for our so called corporate leaders.No offence meant please ! , plain facts...

You are proud of being a mere corporate servant . As if you were a politician,sports superstar,business tychoon or a celebrity.
You still do not have those guts and courage to do something different in life.
You followed a 10-15 year cumbersome process to climb up the corporate ladder and managed to become a VP/country head,however it was a process not a business legacy.
Face this hard fact that you have burnt out your body and do not have any other physical skills left in your body to earn a living in a non-intellectual way.You cannot even become a yoga instructor.
You have always worked for others, never for yourself for more than 10-15 years, so you cannot innovate and run a business empire.If you cannot run a bussiness, even after learning it for that long,you are not the best.

I think enough of bashing the business leaders. :):)
Its a rule of the game that they have to be like this...and they have achieved quite a lot in their lifes.You should take inspiration from them to to think out-of-the-box,innovate,communicate,inspire,manage (blah-balh-blah) etc. LOL :)

Become Empty

2008-07-19T19:47:00.000-07:00

"If you really want to know who I am,
you will have to be absolutely empty as I am.
Then two mirrors will be facing each other,
and only emptiness will be mirrored."

- Osho

- Contributed to Indiaved by DJ Chadda, a Businessman and World Traveller via Email

Just a lament - Yamuna Bike Rally as covered by 'Down to Earth'

2008-07-16T02:53:00.000-07:00

RAVLEEN KAUR

VAIBHAV RAGHUNANDAN

Biking along the Yamuna from Delhi to Agra, ravleen kaur hears constant calls for saving the river, but witnesses little action. Photographs by vaibhav raghunandan

The roaring of motorcycles shattered the early morning calm on the Yamuna floodplains in Delhi (I am sitting on my Bullet with white helmet). On World Environment Day on June 5, a group of professionals, farmers, activists and journalists gathered for a bike rally along the river at the Yamuna Satyagraha site, where a bunch of farmers and activists have been campaigning against the construction of the Commonwealth Games Village on the riverbed for over 300 days.

As the river drifted into Faridabad its burden of sewage and industrial waste kept on increasing and the spectacular failure of the Yamuna Action Plan began to unfold.

In Dhadhasiya, 40 km from Delhi, a sewage treatment plant (stp) of 20 million litre per day capacity sprawled over 7 hectares made a great showpiece of the plan, but it was shut down for upgradation. Untreated sewage was being discharged into the river. “Who is interested in knowing where their daily muck is going?” said the stp contractor with a shrug. Even when the plant functions, it treats the sewage only partially. In not even one place we visited, stps were functional.

“It is you people who have polluted the Yamuna. All the muck that comes down here is from Delhi. Everybody just shouts about cleaning it; in the evening aarti they chant prayers of Yamuna Maiya, but nobody takes a single step.” ”

—HERO HIRALAL a boatman in Vrindavan

On the first night of the journey we slept in a temple of Tigaon village, 3 km from the river, in Faridabad. Heavy rainfall brought with it stench and mosquitoes which were effective in keeping everybody up and ready by 4 in the morning. The only source of inspiration throughout the night was the songs of fellow traveller Kishorilal Tomar. His land on the Yamuna floodplain in Delhi was acquired when Akshardham temple came up. Since then he has been tilling others’ land. The campaign against the Games Village turned this 50-year-old farmer into a poet, composer and singer. Armed with an earthen pot, Kishorilal would fling himself into high-pitched singing in all the villages we went to.

The next day took us to Manjhawli village in Ballabgarh. Dogs and cows easily crossing the river gave away its shallowness. A little ahead an embankment over Bhudiya Nala was being constructed. “You would think it’s a project of national importance. Actually, 40 hectares have been bought on the floodplain for making a golf course, hence the embankment,” said Ram Chandra of Manjhawli. To keep the villagers quiet, SRS Constructions, the company developing the golf course, was making roads in Manjhawli and nearby Akbarpur. “People are happy that the rates of land will go up and they will sell and leave. Who wants to do farming anyway? Once farming goes, the river will no more be a part of the social structure,” he said.

A cow’s body floated in Beduki Nala, 30 km from Manjhawli, and on the bank lied a skeleton. Some farmers have discovered benefits in using the polluted water. “When we use this water, we need less fertilizers because it comes from industries,” said Satwant Kumar of Beduki village on the Haryana-Uttar Pradesh border.

The river is indeed getting estranged from society. Until 30 years ago, Kushak village in Haryana used to have a three-day fair of Peer Sidh Baba on its banks. “In the month of Baisakh, people from all over Haryana would come here to have a dip in the river and sell their wares near her. That used to be the time of water melons and jalebis. Then the water in the river receded and the pollution went up. Now the fair has practically died down, with nobody wanting a dip in the dirty water,” said Gajraj Bainsla, sarpanch of Kushak.

Village after village accused Delhi of polluting the water.

“There was a time when one dropped a coin and it could be seen on the floor of the river. Now even a human body will not be visible. All because of Delhi, which takes away all the river water for drinking and releases this dark, stinking filth for us,” said Sukhbeer Mistry of Kushak. Later in Mathura we saw a coin diver struggling with grime to get a mouthful of coins—under water, coin divers find it convenient to collect coins in the mouth.

As the villagers collected around us, our leader and convenor of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, Manoj Mishra, exhorted, “It is you all, the people of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, who have to tell Delhi to stop polluting, else you will not give them any water from upstream.”

The next day our journey entered into the religious sphere. Now we were traversing the land of Krishna. An iskcon follower among us removed his footwear for the rest of the journey. It was June 8 and we were very close to Ganga Dushehra, the day when millions of devotees take a dip in the holy river. The religious fervour was at a heightened pitch, but only at few places did it transform into cleaning of the river, like at Vishram Ghat in Mathura.

From the pontoon bridge of Shergarh in the Braj region the Yamuna presented a different sight—and smell. For the first time during the journey, it did not stink. People considered it the benevolence of Krishna. Mishra said it was the river’s self-cleansing capacity. “From Faridabad till here, there is no major town, so very little sewage has been thrown into the river,” he said. The river rejuvenated with each passing village till Vrindavan, where we halted for the night. A little before Vrindavan, 50 cusecs of water from Ganga Nahar is released into the Yamuna to improve its water quality. But at Vrindavan Kosi Nala pours its muck and garbage into it.

In the morning we took a boat ride around the ghats, most of which were 500 metres from the river, divided from it by a sand beach and a concrete road. “It is you people who have polluted the river. All the muck that comes down here is from Delhi. Even if Rs 30 crore of the Rs 400 crore spent on the Yamuna Action Plan were utilized, the Yamuna would have been much cleaner. Everybody just shouts about cleaning it; in the evening aarti, they chant prayers of Yamuna Maiya, but nobody takes a single step,” said our boatman Hero Hiralal, who claims never to have stepped out of Braj, summarizing my entire journey. We heard this lament often during the journey.

The Yamuna was choking on silt, garbage and debris. “The thick layer of sand and plastic under water does not let it penetrate underground. The groundwater level has gone down from 30-40 feet eight years ago to below 150 feet. Most of the environment ministry funds are for awareness. What should be the next step after awareness?” asked Neeraj Saigal of ngo Food for Life, Vrindavan. Shrivatsa Goswami, the Mahant of Jaisingh Ghera, the erstwhile haveli of Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur in Vrindavan, told us how a road was built on the flood plain to the ashram of a prominent priest and how a ring road is being planned around Vrindavan, which will involve erecting pillars on the riverbed. “A river is the image of society. If it is polluted, the society is polluted. If religion can be used for corrupt purposes, why can’t it be used for the cause of the river?” asked Goswami.

By the time it reached Mathura, the Yamuna looked feeble and tired. Gokul Barrage considerably reduced its current. Even the wells along the ghats had dried up. “The barrage was meant to improve water level in Mathura and Agra, but the level has plunged because of silt in the river,” said Gopeshwarnath Chaturvedi of Shrikrishan Janmasthan Sewa Sansthan, Mathura.

As we approached Agra, the short respite from stench was over. And the image of the city, as Goswami said, reflected in the river. Mantola Nala, the drain that passed through the heritage corridor between the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort, presented the ugliest sight of the trip as it fell into the river. The foam was accompanied by waste from leather factories. And this when the sewage from the nala had just started going back to the stp after 15 days.

In violation of the Supreme Court order and the Water Act, sewage is often diverted into the river “due to old and worn out pumping stations and stps which do not work half the time”, said Ravi Singh, an environmentalist. The city administration is now contemplating bringing drinking water to the city from the Ganga through a 130 km pipeline. There goes the Yamuna Action Plan.

Though activists led us into the city in a procession, river conservation as a motive was lost somewhere along the way. During the next two days water and beverages were served to us in plastic glasses, which were thrown away on the riverbed, as were the used dry-leaf plates and plastic bowls. There was more talk and noise. Sabhas were organized to welcome the “team from Delhi” and hundreds of leaders and politicians launched into speeches. The journey, which had taken a religious turn from Shergarh, now went into the politics of an urbanized town. The wheel had turned a full circle.

The boatman’s words came back to my mind as I looked at the river, black with filth and reduced to a trickle. How it covers the rest of its journey before finally merging into the Ganga at Sangam is difficult to comprehend. Perhaps it is the divinity attached to it.

Read the Related Article and GoogleMap Images from Yamunotri to Sangam about the Present State of Yamuna

Read This Article Here from Down to Earth Website
More Related Articles on Environment at:- Down to Earth - http://www.downtoearth.org.in/

Noosphere - Sphere of Human Thought and GCP

2008-07-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

In the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere (sometimes spelled nöosphere) can be seen as the "sphere of human thought" being derived from the Greek νούς ("nous") meaning "mind" + σφαίρα (sfaira) meaning "sphere", in the style of "atmosphere" and "biosphere". In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky's noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements.

For Teilhard, the noosphere is best described as a sort of 'collective consciousness' of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This is an extension of Teilhard's Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, added that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the goal of history.

The noosphere concept of 'unification' was elaborated in popular science fiction by Julian May in the Galactic Milieu Series. It is also the reason Teilhard is often called the patron saint of the Internet.

One of the original aspects of the noosphere concept deals with evolution. Henri Bergson (1907) was one of the first to propose that evolution is 'creative' and cannot necessarily be explained solely by Darwinian natural selection. L'évolution créatrice is upheld, according to Bergson, by a constant vital force that animates life and fundamentally connects mind and body, an idea opposing the dualism of René Descartes. In 1923, C. Lloyd Morgan took this work further, elaborating on an 'emergent evolution' that could explain increasing complexity (including the evolution of mind). Morgan found that many of the most interesting changes in living things have been largely discontinuous with past evolution, and therefore did not necessarily take place through a gradual process of natural selection. Rather, evolution experiences jumps in complexity (such as the emergence of a self-reflective universe, or noosphere). Finally, the complexification of human cultures, particularly language, facilitated a quickening of evolution in which cultural evolution occurs more rapidly than biological evolution. Recent understanding of human ecosystems and of human impact on the biosphere have led to a link between the notion of sustainability with the "co-evolution" [Norgaard, 1994] and harmonization of cultural and biological evolution.

Gaia hypothesis and Daisyworld simulations

2008-07-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth's conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life. The release of this image prompted the formulation of the proposition that the Earth was alive erecting massive erections on the internet, and fostered acceptance of that proposition.

The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis that proposes that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are coupled together to form a complex interacting system. This system is proposed to act in a homeostatic fashion that preserves climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth that are suitable for living organisms. Named after the Greek Titan of the earth, the hypothesis is frequently described as viewing the Earth as a single organism
The Gaia hypothesis was first scientifically formulated in the 1960s by the independent research scientist Dr. James Lovelock, as a consequence of his work for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars.^[1]^[2] He initially published the Gaia Hypothesis in journal articles in the early 1970s^[3]^[4] followed by a popularizing 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth.
The theory was initially, according to Lovelock, a way to explain the fact that combinations of chemicals including oxygen and methane persist in stable concentrations in the atmosphere of the Earth. Lovelock suggested using such combinations detected in other planets' atmospheres would be a relatively reliable and cheap way to detect life, which many biologists opposed at the time and since. Later other relationships such as the fact that sea creatures produce sulfur and iodine in approximately the quantities required by land creatures emerged and helped bolster the theory. Rather than invent many different theories to describe each such equilibrium, Lovelock dealt with them holistically, naming this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess Gaia, using a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same village as Lovelock at the time (Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, UK). The Gaia Hypothesis has since been supported by a number of scientific experiments and provided a number of useful predictions, and hence is properly referred to as the Gaia Theory.
Since 1971, the noted microbiologist Dr. Lynn Margulis has been Lovelock's most important collaborator in developing Gaian concepts.
Until 1975 the hypothesis was almost totally ignored. An article in the New Scientist of February 15, 1975, and a popular book length version of the theory, published as The Quest for Gaia, began to attract scientific and critical attention to the hypothesis. The theory was then attacked by many mainstream biologists. Championed by certain environmentalists and climate scientists, it was vociferously rejected by many others, both within scientific circles and outside them.
Read More :-

Gaia Hypothesis/Theory

Daisyworld simulations

Run the Simulation and see result here - http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/nania/daisyworld/daisyworld.html

Lovelock responded to criticisms by developing the mathematical model Daisyworld with Andrew Watson to demonstrate that feedback mechanisms could evolve from the actions or activities of self-interested organisms, rather than through classic group selection mechanisms.^[18]
Daisyworld examines the energy budget of a planet populated by two different types of plants, black daisies and white daisies. The colour of the daisies influences the albedo of the planet such that black daisies absorb light and warm the planet, while white daisies reflect light and cool the planet. Competition between the daisies (based on temperature-effects on growth rates) leads to a balance of populations that tends to favour a planetary temperature close to that which is optimum for the daisy growth. Lovelock and Watson demonstrated the stability of Daisyworld by forcing the sun that it orbits to evolve along the main sequence, taking it from low to high solar constant. This perturbation of Daisyworld's receipt of solar radiation caused the balance of daisies to gradually shift from black to white but the planetary temperature was always regulated back to this optimum (except at the extreme ends of solar evolution). This situation is very different from the corresponding abiotic world, where temperature is unregulated and rises linearly with solar output. Later versions of Daisyworld introduced a range of grey daisies and populations of grazers and predators, and found that these further increased the stability of the homeostasis. More recently other research, modelling the real biochemical cycles of Earth, and using various "guilds" of life (eg. photosynthesisers, decomposers, herbivores and primary and secondary carnivores) has also been shown to produce Daisyworld-like regulation and stability, which helps to explain planetary biological diversity^{[citation needed]}.
This enables nutrient recycling within a regulatory framework derived by natural selection amongst species, where one being's harmful waste becomes low energy food for members of another guild. This research on the Redfield ratio of Nitrogen to Phosphorus shows that local biotic processes can regulate global systems (See Keith Downing & Peter Zvirinsky, The Stimulated Evolution of Biochemical Guilds: Reconciling Gaia Theory with Natural Selection).
Read More:-

From Unconsciousness to Consciousness

2008-07-14T01:34:00.000-07:00

Your Mind

Take a look at the above image of the iceberg. Notice the small 10% showing above the water, and the enormous 90% below water. The top 10% is your conscious mind, and the bottom 90% is your unconscious mind.

THE UNCONSCIOUS can be transformed only through awareness. It is difficult, but there is no other way. There are many methods for being aware, but awareness is necessary. You can use methods to be aware, but you will have to be aware.

If someone asks whether there is any method to dispel darkness except by light, howsoever difficult it may be that is the only way -- because darkness is simply the absence of light. So you have to create the presence of light, and then darkness is not there.

Unconsciousness is nothing but an absence -- the absence of consciousness. It is not something positive in itself, so you cannot do anything except be aware. If unconsciousness were something in its own right, then it would be a different matter -- but it is not. Unconsciousness doesn't mean something; it only means not consciousness. It is just an absence. It has no existence in itself; in itself it is not. The word "unconscious" simply shows the absence of consciousness and nothing else. When we say "darkness" the word is misleading, because the moment we say "darkness" it appears that darkness is something that is there. It is not, so you cannot do anything with darkness directly -- or can you?

You may not have observed the fact, but with darkness you cannot do anything directly. Whatsoever you want to do with darkness you will have to do with light, not with darkness. If you want darkness, then put off light. If you don't want darkness, then put on light. But you cannot do anything directly with darkness; you will have to go via light.

Why? Why can you not go directly? You cannot go directly because there is nothing like darkness, so you cannot touch it directly. You have to do something with light, and then you have done something with darkness.

If light is there, then darkness is not there. If light is not there, then darkness is there. You can bring light into this room, but you cannot bring darkness. You can take light out from this room, but you cannot take darkness out from this room. There exists no connection between you and darkness. Why? If darkness were there then man could be related somehow, but darkness is not there.

Language gives you a fallacy that darkness is something. Darkness is a negative term. It exists not. It connotes only that light is not there -- nothing more -- and the same is with unconsciousness. So when you ask what to do other than to be aware, you ask an irrelevant question. You will have to be aware; you cannot do anything else.

Of course, there are many methods for being aware -- mm? -- that is a different thing. There are many ways to create light -- but light will have to be created. You can create a fire and there will be no darkness. And you can use a kerosene lamp and there will be no darkness, and you can use electricity and there will be no darkness. But whatsoever the case, whatsoever the method of producing light, light has to be produced.

So light is a must, and whatsoever I will say in reference to this question will be about methods to produce awareness. They are not alternatives, remember. They are not alternatives to awareness -- nothing can be. Awareness is the only possibility for dispelling darkness, for dispelling unconsciousness. But how to create awareness? I talked about one method which is the purest: to be aware inside of whatsoever happens on the boundary line of the unconscious and to the conscious -- to be aware there.

Anger is there. Anger is produced in darkness; anger has roots in the unconscious. Only branches and leaves come into the conscious. Roots, seeds, the energy source, are in the unconscious. You become aware only of faraway branches. Be conscious of these branches. The more conscious you are, the more you will be capable of looking into darkness.

Have you observed at any time that if you look deeply in darkness for a certain time, a certain dim light begins to be there? If you concentrate in darkness, you begin to feel and you begin to see. You can train yourself, and then in darkness itself there is a certain amount of light -- because, really, in this world nothing can be absolute and nothing is. Everything is relative. When we say "darkness", it doesn't mean absolute darkness. It only means that there is less light. If you practise to see in it, you will be capable of seeing, Look! Focus yourself in the darkness! And then, by and by, your eyes are strengthened and you begin to see.

Inner darkness, unconsciousness, is the same. Look into it. But you can look only if you are not active. If you begin to act, your mind is distracted. Don't act inside. Anger is there -- don't act, don't condemn, don't appreciate, don't indulge in it, and don't suppress it. Don't do anything -- just look at it! observe it! Understand the distinction.

What happens ordinarily is quite the reverse. If you are angry, then your mind is focused on the cause of anger outside -- always! Someone has insulted you -- you are angry. Now there are three things: the cause of anger outside, the source of anger inside, and in between these two you are. Anger is your energy inside, the cause which has provoked your energy to come up is outside, and you are in between. The natural way of the mind is not to be aware of the source, but to be focused on the cause outside. Whenever you are angry you are in deep concentration on the cause outside.

Mahavir has called KRODHA -- anger -- a sort of meditation. He has named it ROUDRA DHYAN -- meditation on negative attitudes. It is! -- because you are concentrated. Really, when you are in deep anger you are so concentrated that the whole world disappears. Only the cause of anger is focused. Your total energy is on the cause of anger, and you are so much focused on the cause that you forget yourself completely. That's why in anger you can do things about which, later on, you can say, "I did them in spite of myself." You were not.

For awareness you have to take an about-turn. You have to concentrate not on the cause outside, but on the source inside. Forget the cause. Close your eyes, and go deep and dig into the source. Then you can use the same energy which was to be wasted on someone outside -- the energy moves inwards. Anger has much energy. Anger is energy -- the purest of fires inside. Don't waste it outside.

Take another example. You are feeling sexual: sex is again energy, fire. But whenever you feel sexual, again you are focused on someone outside, not on the source. you begin to think of someone -- of the lover, of the beloved, A-B-C-D -- but when you are filled with sex your focus is always on the other. You are dissipating energy.

Not only in the sexual act do you dissipate energy, but in sexual thinking you dissipate it even more because a sexual act is a momentary thing. It comes to a peak, the energy is released, and you are thrown back. But sexual thinking can continuously be there. You can continue it in sexual thinking, you can dissipate energy. And everyone is dissipating energy. Ninety percent of our thinking is sexual. Whatsoever you are doing outside, inside sex is a constant concern -- you may not even be aware of it.

You are sitting in a room and a woman enters: your posture changes suddenly. Your spine is moire erect, your breathing changes, your blood pressure is different. You may not be aware at all of what has happened, but your whole body has reacted sexually. you were a different person when the woman was not there; now again you are a different person.

An all-male group is a different group, and all-female group is a different group. Let one male come in or one female, and the whole group, the whole energy pattern, changes suddenly. You may not be conscious of it, but when your mind is focused on someone, your energy begins to flow. when you feel sexual, look at the source, not at the cause -- remember this.

Science is more concerned with the cause and religion is more concerned with the source. The source is always inside; the cause is always outside. With cause you are in a chain reaction. With cause you are connected with your environment. With source you are connected with yourself. So remember this. This is the purest method to change unconscious energy into conscious energy. Take an about-turn -- look inside! It is going to be difficult because our look has become fixed. We are like a person whose neck is paralyzed, and who cannot move and look back. Our eyes have become fixed. We have been looking outside for lives together -- for millennia -- so we don't know how to look inside.

Do this: whenever something happens in your mind, follow it to the source. Anger is there -- a sudden flash has come to you -- close your eyes, meditate on it. From where is this anger arising? Never ask the question: who has made it possible? who has made you angry? That is a wrong question. Ask which energy in you is transforming into anger -- from where is this anger coming up, bubbling up, what is the source inside from where this energy is coming?

Are you aware that in anger you can do something which you cannot do when you are not in anger? A person in anger can throw a big stone easily. When he is not angry he cannot even lift it. He has much energy when he is angry. A hidden source is now with him. So if a man is mad, he becomes very strong. Why? From where is this energy coming? It is not coming from anything outside. Now all his sources are burning simultaneously -- anger, sex, everything, is burning simultaneously. Every source is available.

Be concerned with from where anger is bubbling up, from where the sex desire has come in. Follow it, take steps backwards. Meditate silently and go with anger to the roots. It is difficult but it is not impossible. It is not easy. It is not going to be easy because it is a fight against a long, rooted habit. The whole past has to be broken, and you have to do something new which you have never done before. It is just the weight of sheer habit which will create the difficulty. But try it, and then you are creating a new direction for energy to move. You are beginning to be a circle, and in a circle energy is never dissipated.

My energy comes up and moves outside -- it can never become a circle now; it is simply dissipated. If my movement inwards is there, then the same energy which was going out turns upon itself. My meditation leads this energy back to the same source from where the anger was coming. It becomes a circle. This inner circle is the strength of a Mahavir. The sex energy, not moving to someone else, moves back to its own source. This circle of sex energy is the strength of a Buddha.

We are weaklings, not because we have less energy than a Buddha: we have the same quanta of energy, everyone is born with the same energy quanta, but we are accustomed to dissipating it. It simply moves away from us and never comes back. It cannot come back! Once it is out of you, it can never come back -- it is beyond you.

A word arises in me: I speak it out; it has flown away. It is not going to come back to me, and the energy that was used in producing it, that was used in throwing it away, is dissipated. A word arises in me: I don't throw it out; I remain silent. Then the word moves and moves and moves, and falls into the original source again. The energy has been reconsumed.

Silence is energy. Brahmacharya is energy. Not to be angry is energy. But this is not suppression. If you suppress anger, you have used energy again. Don't suppress -- observe and follow. don't fight -- just move backwards with the anger. This is the purest method of awareness.

But certain other things can be used. For beginners certain devices are possible. So I will talk about three devices. One type of device is based on body awareness. Forget anger, forget sex -- they are difficult problems. And when you are in them, you become so mad that you cannot meditate. When you are angry you cannot meditate; you cannot even think about meditation. You are just mad. So forget it; it is difficult. Then use your own body as a device for awareness.

Buddha has said that when you walk, walk consciously. When you breathe, breathe consciously. The Buddhist method is known as ANAPANASATI YOGA -- the yoga of the incoming and outgoing breath, incoming and outgoing breath awareness. The breath comes in: move with the breath; know, be aware, that the breath is moving in. When the breath has gone out again, move with it. Be in, be out, with the breath.

Anger is difficult, sex is difficult -- breath is not so difficult. Move with the breath. Don't allow any breath to be in or out without consciousness. This is a meditation. Now you will be focused on breathing, and when you are focused on breathing thoughts stop automatically. you cannot think, because the moment you think your consciousness moves from breath to thought. you have missed breathing.

Try this and you will know. When you are aware of breathing, thoughts cease. The same energy which is used for thoughts is being used in being aware of breath. If you start thinking, you will lose track of the breath, you will forget, and you will think. You cannot do both simultaneously.

If you are following breathing, it is a long process. One has to go into it deeply. It takes a minimum of three months and a maximum of three years. If it is done continuously twenty-four hours a day... it is a method for monks, those who have given up everything; only they can watch their breathing twenty-four hours a day. That's why Buddhist monks and other traditions of monks, they reduce their living to the minimum so that no disturbance is there. They will beg for their food and they will sleep under a tree -- that's all. Their whole time is devoted to some inner practice of being aware -- mm? -- for example, of breath.

A Buddhist monk moves. He has to be continuously aware of his breath. The silence that you see on a Buddhist monk's face is the silence of the awareness of breathing and nothing else. If you become aware your face will become silent, because if thoughts are not there your face cannot show anxiety, thinking. Your face becomes relaxed. Continuous awareness of breathing will stop the mind. The continuously troubled mind will stop. And if the mind stops and you are simply aware of breathing, if the mind is not functioning, you cannot be angry, you cannot be sexual.

Sex or anger or greed or jealousy or envy -- anything needs the mechanism of mind. And if the mechanism stops, you cannot do anything. This again leads to the same thing. Now the energy that is used in sex, in anger, in greed, in ambition, has no outlet. And you go on continuously being concerned with breathing, day and night. Buddha has said, "Even in sleep try to be aware of breathing." It will be difficult in the beginning, but if you can be aware in the day, then by and by this will penetrate into your sleep.

Anything penetrates into sleep if it has gone deep in the mind in the day. If you have been worried about a certain thing in the day, it gets into the sleep. If you were thinking continuously about sex, it gets into the sleep. If you were angry the whole day, anger gets into the sleep. So Buddha says there is no difficulty. If a person is continuously concerned with breathing and awareness of the breathing, ultimately it penetrates into the sleep. You cannot dream then. If your awareness is there of incoming breath and outgoing breath, then in sleep you cannot dream.

The moment you dream, this awareness will not be there. If awareness is there, dreams are impossible. So a Buddhist monk asleep is not just like you. His sleep has a different quality. It has a different depth and a certain awareness in it is there.

Ananda said to Buddha, "I have observed you for years and years together. It seems like a miracle: you sleep as if you are awake. You are in the same posture the whole night." The hand would not move from the place where it had been put; the leg would remain in the same posture. Buddha would sleep in the same posture the whole night. Not a single movement! For nights tog3ether ananda would sit and watch and wonder, "What type of sleep is this!" Buddha would not move. He would be as if a dead body, and he would wake up in the same posture in which he went to sleep. Ananda asked, "What are you doing? Were you asleep or not? You never move!"
Buddha said, "A day will come, Ananda, when you will know. This shows that you are not practising anapanasati yoga rightly; it shows only this. Otherwise this question would not have arisen. You are not practising anapanasati yoga -- if you are continuously aware of your breath in the day, it is impossible not to be conscious of it in the night. And if the mind is concerned with awareness, dreams cannot penetrate. And if there are no dreams, mind is clear, transparent. Your body is asleep, but you are not. Your body is relaxing, you are aware -- the flame is there inside. So, Ananda," Buddha is reported to have said, "I am not asleep -- only the body is sleep. I am aware! and not only in sleep. Ananda -- when I die, you will see: I will be aware, only the body will die."

- Osho, 1972, The Light of Awareness

Ego

2008-07-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

- Contributed to Indiaved by DJ Chadda, a Businessman and World Traveller via Email

"Ego is never satisfied with what it gets, but it is always dissatisfied with what it does not get. That which is attained is inevitably my right; but that which is not attained becomes a source of pain. Then, there is a great attraction to conserve what is attained. I should
at least keep on getting as much praise, if not more, as I have attained. " -Osho

"I see now
that all creatures
have perfect enlightenment
- but they do not know it. " - Buddha

Global Consciousness Project

2008-07-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

The Global Consciousness Project, (GCP) also called the EGG Project, is a long-running science experiment maintained by an international collaboration of about 100 research scientists and engineers. It is based on technology developed at Princeton to study interactions of consciousness with physical systems. The GCP has been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The network currently maintains about 65 sites around the world running custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a trial (sum of 200 bits) once every second, 24/7, continuously over months and years. The data is transmitted over the Internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where they are archived for later analysis. The result is a database of synchronized parallel sequences of truly random numbers.

The research question is whether there are deviations from randomness correlated with major events that engage the attention of large numbers of people. Such correlations are interpreted as reflecting the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.

The research examines the output of some 65 networked hardware random number generators located around the world. The remote devices have been dubbed Princeton Eggs, where EGG is short for electrogaiagram, a portmanteau of electroencephalogram and Gaia. The general hypothesis holds that events that have a significant human impact may affect the randomness of the data from these generators in a statistically significant way.

Roger D. Nelson developed the project as an extrapolation of two decades of experiments from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) which repeatedly show that electronic noise-based, truly random number generators (RNG or REG) seem to be intentionally influenced to bring about a less random sequence of data - in other words, that human intention can reduce natural entropy and create greater coherence within a random series of events.

In an extension of the laboratory research called "FieldREG", investigators examined the outputs of REGs in the field, before, during and after highly focused or coherent group events. The group events studied include intense psychotherapy sessions, captivating theater presentations, religious rituals, popular sports competitions, like Football World Cup, and high-interest television broadcasts like the Academy Awards (Bierman, 1996; Blasband, 2000; Nelson, 1995, 1997; Nelson et al, 1996, 1998a, 1998b; Radin, 1997; Radin et al, 1996;)

The group consciousness FieldREG studies were extended to global dimensions in studies looking at data from 12 independent REGs in the US and Europe during a web-promoted "Gaiamind Meditation" in Jan. 1997, and then in Sept. 1997 during the Princess Diana funeral ceremonies. The results suggested it would be worthwhile to build a permanent network of continuously running REGs. This became the EGG project or GCP, which began operation in 1998, collecting and archiving a continuously growing database. At each node in the network, the RNG is sampled once per second to produce a 200-bit trial sum that is recorded and transmitted over the Internet to Princeton, NJ, for archiving and analysis. Pre-planned tests indicate that many "global events" do correspond to deviations from randomness in the data.

The formal analysis consists of a series of replicated tests of the basic hypothesis that the data will show deviations from statistical expectation that are correlated with major events in the world. Before the data are examined, a hypothesis test is fully defined: The beginning and end of the data segment to be analysed and the statistical test to be used are specified in the GCP Hypothesis Registry. All the pre-specified analysis are reported and all are included in composite statistics.

The best evidence for the hypothesis of an effect of mass consciousness, according to the GCP, is the continuing series of formal hypothesis tests. Over the eight-year history of the project, more than 200 events have been assessed. The majority show small departures from random expectation corresponding to the predictions, and the odds against chance for the composite outcome are greater than 500,000 to 1. An important result is that the mean effect size is small, about 0.3 sigma. This means that individual events cannot test the general hypothesis. Many results must be compounded before the statistical reliability of the correlation can be assessed.

Peer reviewed publications include a methodology description in the Journal of Parapsychology, an examination of the data surrounding Sept 11, 2001 in Foundations of Physics Letters, and a descriptive article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. A recent mainstream publication is in the Proceedings of the AAAS for a symposium on retrocausation in June 2006.

Criticism:- Skeptics have questioned methodology of the Global Consciousness Project. Most of this criticism centers on how the data are selected and interpreted. Spikes and fluctuations are to be expected in any random distribution of data, and there is no set time frame for how close a spike has to be to a given event for the GCP to find a correlation. For example, on September 11, 2001, it was alleged that in addition to the spikes occurring at the times of the plane impacts and the building collapses, changes in the level of randomness seen in the EGG data began hours and even days before the attacks were themselves caused by the attacks, implying subconscious mass precognition or backwards causality (which is, in fact, not an absurd hypothesis if the theory of retrocausality is accepted)

Related Article :-

Sphere of Human Thought - The Consciousness
Read here from Source

Top 10 Quotes Against Work

2008-07-11T06:06:00.001-07:00

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
—Charles Bukowski, Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975

"My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men's room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell."
—American Beauty, 1999

"One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy."
—William Faulkner, interview in Writers at Work, 1958

"I was called to the bathroom at the cemetery to take care of something. I walked in the bathroom and in the middle toilet right there . . . somebody didn't shit in the toilet, somebody shat on the toilet. They shat on the wall, they shat on the floor. I had to clean it up, man, but before that, for about 10 to 15 seconds man, I just stared at somebody's shit, man. To be totally honest with you, man, it was a really, really profound moment. Cause I was thinkin', 'I'm 30 years old and in about 10 seconds I gotta start cleaning up somebody's shit, man.'"
—American Movie, 1999

"Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement."
—Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 1944

"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
—Fight Club, 1999

“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.”
—Oscar Wilde

"For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again."
—Goodfellas, 1990

"But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in the old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before."
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

"We don't have a lot of time on this earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements."
—Office Space, 1999

Read here from source.

Creator of Non-Dualism/Advaita - Sankara Rishi

2008-07-11T04:03:00.000-07:00

Introduction:- Closely related to the philosophy of monistic idealism is the teaching of nonduality (in Sanskrit called Advaita). Nonduality as a coherent teaching was first formulated by Sankara (c. 788-820), a philosopher and theologian born in Kerala in southern India. A Hindu ascetic who lived for only 32 years, he interpreted the Vedanta (see note below) monistically, and ascribed all reality to a single unitary source that he identified as Brahman. In this, he declared all plurality and differentiation to be nothing but an illusion.

[Note: Vedanta is one of the six orthodox systems of Indian philosophy, and the one that forms the basis of most modern schools of Hindu philosophy. The term Vedanta means the “conclusion” of the Vedas, which comprise the earliest sacred literature of India. The three fundamental Vedanta texts are the Upanishads; the Brahma-Sutras, which are very brief, even one-word interpretations of the doctrine of the Upanishads; and the famous poetic dialogue, the Bhagavadgita (“Song of the Lord”), which, because of its immense popularity, Sankara drew upon for support of the doctrines found in the Upanishads.]

SANKARA'S LIFE

SankarAcArya ashThottaram

The following is based upon accounts known through oral tradition and texts like the mAdhavIya Sankara vijayam. There exists some controversy about Sankara's date, but most traditions are quite unanimous about other details.

Birth and childhood: Sankara was born to the nambUdiri brAhmaNa couple, Sivaguru and AryAmbA, in a little village called kAlaDi in Kerala. The couple had remained childless for a long time, and prayed for children at the vaDakkunnAthan (VRshAcala) temple in nearby Trichur. Siva is said to have appeared to the couple in a dream and promised them a choice of one son who would be short-lived but the most brilliant philosopher of his day, or many sons who would be mediocre at best. The couple opted for a brilliant, but short-lived son, and so Sankara was born.

Sankara lost his father when quite young, and his mother performed his upanayana ceremonies with the help of her relatives. Sankara excelled in all branches of traditional vaidIka learning. A few miracles are reported about the young Sankara. As a brahmacArin, he went about collecting alms from families in the village. A lady who was herself extremely poor, but did not want to send away the boy empty-handed, gave him the last piece of Amla fruit she had at home. Sankara, sensing the abject poverty of the lady, composed a hymn (kanakadhArA stavam) to SrI, the goddess of wealth, right at her doorstep. As a result, a shower of golden Amlas rewarded the lady for her piety. On another occasion, Sankara is said to have re-routed the course of the pUrNA river, so that his old mother would not have to walk a long distance to the river for her daily ablutions.

sam.nyAsa: Sankara was filled with the spirit of renunciation early in his life. Getting married and settling to the life of a householder was never part of his goal in life, though his mother was anxious to see him as a gRhastha. Once when he was swimming in the river, a crocodile caught hold of his leg. Sankara sensed that he was destined to die at that moment, and decided to directly enter the fourth ASrama of sam.nyAsa right then. This kind of renunciation is called Apat sam.nyAsa. The crocodile released him when he thus mentally decided to renounce the world, and Sankara decided to regularize his decision by going to an accomplished guru. To comfort his anxious mother, he promised that he would return at the moment of her death, to conduct her funeral rites, notwithstanding the fact that he would be a sannyAsI then.

Sankara then traveled far and wide in search of a worthy guru who would initiate him and regularize his vow of sam.nyAsa, till he came to the banks of the river narmadA in central India. Here was the ASrama of govinda bhagavatpAda, the disciple of gauDapAda, the famous author of the mANDUkya kArikAs. Sankara was accepted as a disciple by govinda, who initiated him into the paramahamsa order of sam.nyAsa, the highest kind of renunciation. Seeing the intellectual acumen of his disciple, govinda commanded Sankara to expound the philosophy of vedAnta through commentaries on the principal upanishads, the brahmasUtras and the gItA. Sankara took leave of his guru and traveled to various holy places in India, composing his commentaries in the meantime. At this time he was barely a teenager. He attracted many disciples around him, prominent among whom was sanandana, who was later to be called padmapAda. In this period, Sankara wrote commentaries on bAdarAyaNa's brahmasUtras, the various upanishads and the bhagavad gItA. These commentaries, called bhAshyas, stand at the pinnacle of Indian philosophical writing, and have triggered a long tradition of sub-commentaries known as vArttikas, TIkAs and TippaNis. He also commented upon the adhyAtma-paTala of the Apastamba sUtras, and on vyAsa's bhAshya to patanjali's yogasUtras. In addition to these commentarial texts, Sankara wrote independent treatises called prakaraNa granthas, including the upadeSasAhasrI, Atmabodha, etc.

In addition to writing his own commentaries, Sankara sought out leaders of other schools, in order to engage them in debate. As per the accepted philosophical tradition in India, such debates helped to establish a new philosopher, and also to win disciples and converts from other schools. It was also traditional for the loser in the debate to become a disciple of the winner. Thus Sankara debated with Buddhist philosophers, with followers of sAm.khya and with pUrva mImAm.sakas, the followers of vedic ritualism, and proved more than capable in defeating all his opponents in debate. Sankara then sought out kumArila bhaTTa, the foremost proponent of the pUrva mImAm.sA in his age, but bhaTTa was on his deathbed and directed Sankara to viSvarUpa, his disciple. viSvarUpa is sometimes identified with maNDana miSra.

Sankara's debate with viSvarUpa was unique. The referee at the debate was viSvarUpa's wife, bhAratI, who was herself very well-learned, and regarded as an incarnation of Goddess sarasvatI. At stake was a whole way of life. The agreement was that if viSvarUpa won, Sankara would consent to marriage and the life of a householder, whereas if Sankara won, viSvarUpa would renounce all his wealth and possessions and become a sannyAsI disciple of Sankara. The debate is said to have lasted for whole weeks, till in the end, viSvarUpa had to concede defeat and become a sannyAsI. bhAratI was a fair judge, but before declaring Sankara as the winner, she challenged Sankara with questions about kAmaSAstra, which he knew nothing about. Sankara therefore requested some time, during which, using the subtle yogic process called parakAya-praveSa, he entered the body of a dying king and experienced the art of love with the queens. Returning to viSvarUpa's home, he answered all of bhAratI's questions, after which viSvarUpa was ordained as a sannyAsI by the name of sureSvara. He was to become the most celebrated disciple of Sankara, writing vArttikas to Sankara's bhAshyas on the yajurveda upanishads, in addition to his own independent texts on various subjects.

Establishment of maThas: Sankara continued to travel with his disciples all over the land, all the while composing philosophical treatises and engaging opponents in debate. It is said that none of his opponents could ever match his intellectual prowess and the debates always ended with Sankara's victory. No doubt this is true, given the unrivaled respect and popularity that Sankara's philosophical system enjoys to this day. In the course of his travels, Sankara stayed for a long time at the site of the old ASrama of the Rshis vibhAndaka and RshyaSRnga, in the place known as SRngagiri (Sringeri). Some texts mention that Sankara stayed at Sringeri for twelve years. A hermitage grew around him here, which soon developed into a famous maTha (monastery). sureSvara, the disciple whom he had won after long debate, was installed as the head of this new ASrama. Similar maThas were established in the pilgrim centers of Puri, Dvaraka and Joshimath near Badrinath, and padmapAda, hastAmalaka and troTaka were placed in charge of them. These are known as the AmnAya maThas, and they continue to function today. Their heads have also come to be known as SankarAcAryas, in honor of their founder, and revered as jagadgurus, or teachers of the world. Sankara also organized the community of ekadaNDI monks into the sampradAya of daSanAmI sannyAsins, and affiliated them with the four maThas that he established.

Meanwhile, Sankara heard that his mother was dying, and decided to visit her. Remembering his promise to her, he performed her funeral rites. His ritualistic relatives would not permit him to do the rites himself, as he was a sannyAsI, but Sankara overrode their objections, and built a pyre himself and cremated his mother in her own backyard. After this, he resumed his travels, visiting many holy places, reviving pUjAs at temples that had fallen into neglect, establishing SrI yantras at devI temples as in Kancipuram, and composing many devotional hymns.

Ascension of the sarvajnapITha: In the course of his travels, Sankara reached Kashmir. Here was a temple dedicated to SAradA (sarasvatI), the goddess of learning, which housed the sarvajnapITha, the Throne of Omniscience. It was a tradition for philosophers to visit the place and engage in debate. The victorious one would be allowed to ascend the sarvajnapITha. It is said that no philosopher from the southern region had ever ascended the pITha, till Sankara visited Kashmir and defeated all the others there. He then ascended the sarvajnapITha with the blessings of Goddess SAradA. (A few centuries later, rAmAnuja, the teacher of viSishTAdvaita, would visit the same sarvajnapITha in search of the baudhAyana vRtti. However, a variant tradition places the sarvajnapITha in the south Indian city of Kancipuram.)

Sankara was reaching the age of 32 now. He had expounded the vedAnta philosophy through his writings; he had attracted many intelligent disciples to him, who could carry on the vedAntic tradition; and he had established monastic centers for them in the form of maThas. His had been a short, but eventful life. He retired to the Himalayas and disappeared inside a cave near Kedarnath. This cave is traditionally pointed out as the site of his samAdhi. Other variant traditions place Sankara's last days at Karavirpitham or at Mahur in Maharashtra, Trichur in Kerala or Kancipuram in Tamil Nadu. It is a measure of SankarAcArya's widespread fame that such conflicting traditions have arisen around his name.

True to the traditions of sam.nyAsA, Sankara was a peripatetic monk, who traveled the length and breadth of the country in his short lifetime. His fame spread so far and wide, that various legends are recounted about him from different parts of India. The true sannyAsI that he was, he lived completely untouched by the fabric of society. So much so that even the location of kAlaDi, his birth-place, remained generally unknown for a long time. The credit of identifying this village in Kerala goes to one of his 19th-century successors at Sringeri, SrI saccidAnanda SivAbhinava nRsimha bhAratI. Similarly, the credit of renovating Sankara's samAdhi-sthala near Kedarnath, goes to SrI abhinava saccidAnanda tIrtha, his 20th-century successor at Dvaraka.

Read here from Source

Google co-founders talk tech

2008-07-11T02:19:00.000-07:00

Trio dishes on Microsoft, branded mobile phones

By Dan Cox

July 10, 2008, 10:55 PM ET

SUN VALLEY, Idaho -- Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt sat down unexpectedly Thursday for 75 minutes with a dozen journalists to give their impressions on the state of the technology community and Google's place in it.

In a relaxed discussion, the trio fielded questions about Yahoo, Microsoft and their relationships to Google. The discussion was unusual because Allen & Company, which organizes and runs the Sun Valley Media Conference in this remote corner of Idaho, allows for journalists to ask occasional questions. But a 75-minute press conference is very much the oddity. Moreover, most of the moguls gathered here have studiously avoided answering anything substantive about their dealmaking plans when accosted by journos.

The trio of Google execs also used the opportunity to talk about the inroads the company is making with its own branded mobile phone as a replacement for the iPhone, as well as the Chinese market and how they're treated there -- and even Google's inhouse educational programs and the salaries and potential of teachers.

But first they had a few words about Bill Gates' company.

"Microsoft has a long history of having deals that look quite good and end up looking not so good when you look at the fine print," Schmidt said of Microsoft's dealings with and to acquire Yahoo.

"We took the position that the world is better off with an independent Yahoo!"

Currently, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and president Sue Decker have been trying to structure a deal with Microsoft, but everything has been in limbo as Yahoo investors like Carl Icahn have stirred the waters with demands for board control. The initial pact was negated by Microsoft president Steve Ballmer, who thought the price of $37 a share was too high. So, that too has been a contract point.

Google stepped in to create a deal for advertising, not necessarily a search engine, which had been conjectured.

Schmidt and Page said Google's deal was agreed upon nearly a month ago, but the company is still waiting for regulatory confirmation that could take another two or three months.

"I think it's very hard for people on the outside to know where we are," Schmidt said. "I think that's the right thing for all."

Co-founder Brin breathlessly joined Page and Schmidt about half an hour into the interview. Brin had been riding a bicycle and said he had a flat.

In his remarks, Brin was very emotional about the need for good teachers and schools in the U.S. He was responding indirectly to New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein's earlier presentation about the state of education in the country.

"Another important factor that nobody talks about is teachers' salaries," Brin said. "Teachers are among the lowest paid professionals. At Google, we've been paying our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they're among the lowest paid employees. I think it's really important to have a living wage for teachers."

Read here the full Article.

Russia, US Swap Warnings as Condoleezza Rice Visits Georgia

2008-07-10T04:49:00.000-07:00

Russia claimed that it would be prepared to act militarily in response to regional threats

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Tbilisi Wednesday, July 9 as the US and Russia accused each other of stoking unrest in Georgia while US troops began exercises with regional armies near Russia's borders.

Her trip came a day after she signed a deal allowing Washington to base part of a new US missile defense system in the Czech Republic, prompting a stark warning from Moscow that it would respond militarily.

The former Cold War rivals have traded accusations of fanning separatist tensions in Georgia itself, where violence has flared in the past week in Abkhazia, one of two regions that broke from Tbilisi after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Frankly, some of the things that Russia did over the last couple of months added to tensions in the region," Rice was quoted by Georgian media as saying. "Georgia is an independent state. It has to be treated like one. We have said that both Georgia and Russia need to avoid provocative behavior," she added.

Referring to Russia's reaction to the missile shield deal she signed with the Czech Republic on Tuesday, Rice said she was disappointed, "given all the effort both US Defense Secretary (Robert) Gates and I have made to offer to the Russians significant ways for transparency, confidence and for cooperation."

A senior State Department official echoed Rice's comments on Moscow's moves in the separatist Abkhaz region to reporters traveling with the secretary of state to Tbilisi, saying on condition of anonymity that "Russia needs to resume its role as a neutral arbiter of peace rather than a party to the conflict, which Russia is in danger of becoming."

"Russia needs to realize the empire is gone," he added.

Fears of escalation increase

Rice was disappointed by Russia's response

The official warned that Washington feared that "a military cycle of escalation will simply develop a momentum of its own and could lead to a catastrophe in the region," one involving "horrific" new "fighting."

Hours before her arrival, Russia's foreign ministry issued a statement accusing Georgia of pushing the region towards war through actions openly supported by the United States.............................

For Full Article Read - http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3472781,00.html

Do you Believe in God?

2008-07-04T22:12:00.001-07:00

When asked "BELOVED OSHO, DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? " .........

I do not believe in believing. That has to be understood first.

Nobody asks me, "Do you believe in the sun? Do you believe in the moon?" Nobody asks me that question. Millions of people I have met, and for thirty years continuously I have answered thousands of questions. Nobody asks me, "Do you believe in the roseflower?" There is no need. You can see: the roseflower is there or it is not there. Only fictions, not facts, have to be believed.

God is the greatest fiction that man has created. Hence you have to believe in him. And why does man have to create this fiction of God? There must be some inner necessity. I don't have that necessity so there is no question. But let me explain to you why people have believed in God.

One of the significant things to understand about man's mind is that the mind is always seeking and searching some meaning in life. If there is no meaning, suddenly you feel then what are you doing here? Then why go on living? Then why go on breathing? Then why tomorrow morning have you to get up again and go through the same routine -- the tea, the breakfast, the same wife, the same children, the same phony kiss to the wife, and the same office, and the same work, and comes the evening, and bored, utterly bored, you are back home -- why go on doing all this? The mind has a question: Is there any meaning in all this, or are you just vegetating?

So man has been searching for meaning. He created God as a fiction to fulfill his need for meaning. Without God, the world becomes accidental. It is no more a creation of a wise God who creates it for your growth, for your development, or for something. Without God -- remove God and the world is accidental, meaningless. And the mind has an intrinsic incapacity to live with meaninglessness, so it creates all kinds of fictions -- God, nirvana, heaven, paradise, other life beyond death -- and makes a whole system. But it is a fiction, to fulfill a certain psychological need.

I cannot say, "There is God." I cannot say, "There is not God." To me the question is irrelevant. It is a fictitious phenomenon. My work is totally different.

My work is to make your mind so mature that you can live with meaningless life, and yet beautifully.

What is the meaning of a rose, or a cloud floating in the sky? There is no meaning but there is such tremendous beauty. There is no meaning. The river goes on flowing but there is so much joy, meaning is not needed. And unless a man is able to live without asking for meaning, moment to moment, beautifully, blissfully, for no reason at all.... Just to breathe is enough. Why should you ask for what? Why do you make life a business?

Is not love enough? Have you to ask what is the meaning of love? And if there is no meaning in love, then of course your life becomes loveless. You ask a wrong question. Love is in itself enough; it needs no other meaning to make it beautiful, a joy. The birds singing in the morning... what is the meaning? The whole existence, to me, is meaningless. And the more I became silent and became attuned with the existence, the more it became clear that there is no need for meaning. It is enough as it is.

Don't create fictions. Once you create a fiction then you have to create a thousand and one other fictions to support it, because it has no support in reality.

For example: there are religions which believe in God, and there are religions which do not believe in God. So God is not a necessity for religion. Buddhism does not believe in God, Jainism does not believe in God. So try to understand, because in the West it is a problem. You are aware only of three religions which are all rooted in Judaism: Christianity, Judaism and Mohammedanism. All three believe in God. So you are not aware of Buddha. He never believed in God.

I am reminded of H.G.Wells, his statement about Gautam Buddha. He said, "He is the most godless person, yet the most godly." A godless person, and godly? Do you think there is any contradiction? There is no contradiction. Buddha never believed in God, there was no need. He was so utterly fulfilled that his whole fulfillment became a fragrance around him. Mahavira never believed in God, yet his life was as divine as life can be.

So when I say God is a fiction, please do not misunderstand me. God is a fiction but godliness is not a fiction; that is a quality. 'God' is a person... as a person it is a fiction. There is no God sitting in heaven creating the world. And do you think a God will create such a mess that you call the world? Then what is left for the devil? If anybody has created this world it must be the devil, it cannot be God.

But fictions -- and old fictions, repeated millions of times -- start taking a reality of their own. It has been repeated so much that you don't even ask what kind of world God has created, what kind of man God has created. This mad humanity.... In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars. This is a creation of God? And still man is preparing for the total, suicidal, ultimate war. 'God' is behind it.

And what kind of foolish fictions can become realities once you start believing in them! 'God' created the world -- Christians think it was exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ. Of course it must have been a Monday morning, the first of January, I assume -- because The Bible says so. Now there are proofs, a thousand and one proofs, that this earth is millions of years old. We have found, hidden in the earth, animals millions of years old and even man's fossilized bodies, thousands of years old. But what has the last pope said about it? He said, "The world was created exactly as it is said in The Bible." Four thousand and four years before Jesus? That means six thousand years ago. All the evidence goes against it.

In India we have found cities which are seven thousand years old. In India we have the Vedas which are at least ten thousand years old, according to the very scientific approach. According to the Hindus they are ninety thousand years old, because in the Vedas there is a mention of a certain state of the stars which happened ninety thousand years ago. Now, how can that be described in the Vedas if they are not ninety thousand years old?

But what has the last pope said? He said, "God created the world with all these things. Everything is possible for him; he created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus, with animal bodies looking millions of years old." Everything is possible for 'God'. One fiction, then you have to support it with another fiction, and you can go to the point of absurdity. And why? Again and again man has asked this question.

A simple, very simple argument has been behind it. You see an earthen pot. You know it cannot be created by itself; there must have been a potter. This has been the simple argument of all these religions: that if even a single earthen pot cannot be created by itself and needs a potter to create it, this vast universe needs a creator. And it has satisfied the simple human mind. But it cannot satisfy a sophisticated, rational mind.

If you say the universe needs a God to create it, then the question is bound to arise, "Who created God?" And then you fall into a regress absurdum. Then God one is created by God two, and God two is created by God three, and God three by God four, and then there can be no end. I don't want to be absurd like that. It is better to stop the first fiction; otherwise you are sowing the seeds for other fictions.

I say existence itself is enough, it needs no creator. It is creativity itself.

So rather than asking me do I believe in a creator, you should ask me what is my substitute for God, the creator. My substitute is the existential energy of creativity.

And to me, to be creative is the most important religious quality.

If you create a song, if you create music, if you create a garden, you are being religious. Going to the church is foolish, but creating a garden is tremendously religious. That's why here in my commune, work is called worship. We don't pray in any other way, we pray only through creating something. To me, creativity is God. But it will be better if you allow me to change the word god into godliness, because I don't want to be misunderstood. There is no person like God, but there is tremendous energy -- exploding, unending, expanding. This expanding, unending, exploding energy, this creativity, is divine.

I know it; I don't believe in it.

I have tasted it; I don't believe in it.

I have touched it, I have breathed it.

I have known it in the deepest core of my being.

And it is as much in you as it is in me. Just a look inwards, just a little one hundred and eighty degree turn, and you become aware of a truth.

- Osh0

Watching Experiment !

2008-07-01T01:01:00.000-07:00

(Posted at on 5th may 2008 in reply to a Query about Alternative Medicines while discussing women issues)

@ .... I am replying if someone has doubt about the possibility of cure without medicine when discussing about pregnancy and after. If you learn this technique it may work for you.

Close your eyes and read this message..if u can then u dont need Medicine.

Yes.....now start from the basics..

Question:- I have lot of stress in my mind and I am depressed. What to do with my mind?
Answer:- You cant do anything but just to Watch it !

Yes Watching is that medicine which can cure many diseases. Watch your mind and all your stress, problems will disappear. If you have pain anywhere at body part(or with a thought)...it is nothing but the signal given by brain to army of WBC, Blood Platelets, RBC etc to go to that particular body organ and repair it. You can change the signal or you can create urself too.

Simple Experiment:- Whenever you get angry...just WATCH it ...it will disappear.
Now got my point?

Yes If there is some problem or malnutrition in your heart or chest or eyes or legs or any part of body CLOSE YOUR EYES and START WATCHING IT ....that organ or part will star getting NOURISHMENT and REPAIRING.

If u are pregnant and some days/weeks left for birth of child and doctor is saying complication/malnutrition in child and they cant help... Dont Give Up.... CLOSE YOUR EYES and START WATCHING YOUR CHILD and its organs ...It will get good nourishment and repairing.

If you think it is all impossible then a small hint. Close your eyes and eat...your hand will go itself to your mouth bcoz u can vision it.

WATCHING or VISION can be one of the alternative medicine if someones uses it.

You dont need any medical degree to do it nor it can kill you...Thanks

Approach in Current Falling Market

2008-07-01T00:40:00.000-07:00

Question:- (asked on 28th June 2008 via Email)

Hello There,

nice to read your article which apparently has been a year later on the investment in shares. True to an extent that investment and saving can lead ahead.

would like to have your views on the current scenario, with the inflation rising and markets tumbling. what approach should one take. is booking part profits at this level or there can be some kind of relief movement upwards where one should take to invest

with regards

Sonal

Answer:-

Hi ,
We all know now it is too late to talk on any think happening in the market. In other words...Its all over. Free Falling from 21k and after breaking 15300 decisively it was all looking towards 14k sooner or later. The reaction upto 18k was a relief rally only.

I have warned investors when the Reliance Power Ipo came and subscribed so heavily that its all over. This ipo was best example of worst ipo to avoid. Irrational things weaken the market and actually become time bomb for the market.

So after that what happened we all know. Interest rates and especially crude oil rate and Inflation climbed like everest and engulfed the stock market inside it.

I have advised to exit most of the positions during rel power ipo and when oil was crossing $100 as I predicted it going $ 125-150 and its economy puncturing effect on most of the economies all over the world. And now we live in a globalized village hence everything matter to each other.

Now this market after breaking another level at 13900 can go to as low as 11500 and should stabilize there but worst is also not ruled out in case of election year and uncertainty all over the country. In worst case we can even touch/break 10k level. Congress is going to loose for sure and BJP coming can bring some good news for investor who have been crushed and their hopes and greeds shattered till now by the roller coaster sliding from the hill of 21000.

There can be at least 1-2 year of consolidation after bottoming out.

But around 12k-13k value picking can be done in only few gems with risk.

13000-13300 is a very Strong Support. Watch out how much it will struggle there before finally breaking it.

I will not advice to buy in anytime soon if you cannot wait for more than 2 years. Value picking can be done as some companies are at discount to their NAV but only if you are ready to average at further lower levels. Atleast till elections are over market will be nervous.

Inflation can go to even 13-15% in coming months and further interest rate hikes not ruled out for more disaster.

Traders can get opportunity to see sensex at 14500-15000 once again in reaction to the current fall before finally possibly touching bottom around 10600-11500 in coming year.

Long term fundamentals will revive once again if government takes positive steps in right direction for long term which can give clear cut signal that govt. is serious on Economic progress and infrastructural growth rather than putting immense burden on fiscal deficit for vote bank politics.

Have a Nice Investing,

Investment in Shares

2008-07-01T00:34:00.000-07:00

Posted on 22 July 2007 at IndiaStockMarket Group in reply to a query on "Investment in Shares"

Hi Friends,
I would like to tell all of you that Stock Market is one of the best way to create wealth even if you are not so rich (2 other ways are to invest in real estate and other is to become successful entrepreneur itself).
Hence those people who says we should not invest our hard earned money in stock market are not investors rather gamblers. and I agree if you will gamble in the market you will not even loose your money but even your shirt and sometimes pants too if something like 1994,2000 happen just after you enter.

Hence the best way to create wealth is :-
1. Do thorough research on the stock you are buying right from the start of the company.
2. Always remember that when you are investing... you are investing in a business and not in a stock or a company. Check whether you will buy the business at present rate.
3. Also do thorough research in Sectors. That which sector will outperform and do well based on the macro or micro economic factors of the country and the world.
4. After finding the right sector ....find out the best companies in that and invest in that.
5. Always remember.... ........Investin g Early and Exiting Early is the best strategy.
6. Time and not Timing is important in market for long term success..
7. Whenever entering first time in the stock market make a strategy and then invest or trade according to that. That strategy should be based on your age, risk profile, income, savings, your own psychology, time you can give to market, knowledge of finance you have and also the 6 the sense if you have to see the future.
8. One simple step to start with this is make not one but 2 portfolio of stocks. One of long term and one for short term. If you are very much convinced about your long term research don't sell your stock whatever way market go....up or down. You will be rewarded.
The short term stock which you have bought based on some sectoral uptrend or economic cycle...sell it once you earn a handsome profit whatever target you have set say 10 %, 25 % or 100%.

9. There is always 2nd bus and chance in stock market. So never invest in a stock at very high valuation. Soon You will be able to buy it cheaper or you can find some other better stock at lower valuation.

10. Use 100-you age. That much % of your saving you can invest in stock market. Say if you are 20 years then you can invest upto 80% (Though When I was 20 i was more than 90%).
If you are 40 years old then your investment in stock market should not increase 100-40 i.e. 60% of your savings (Though when I will be 40 still my 90% will be in stock market).

11. If you find a very good idea that you are very much convinced of .........take a big position in that to make a significant change in your balance sheet. As I always have those ideas with so much good entrepreneurs in India I will always overweight on Equities.

I will write more later........ .......

Regards,

Online Yamuna from Yamunotri to Sangam

2008-06-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

Check how Humans killed the Yamuna river which starts from Himalaya to give water and life to humans.
Can we do something to save our Yamuna along where Life of Sri Krishna and the oldest civilization on earth flourished some 5000 years ago.

We say only Delhi is responsible for polluting Yamuna. Just look and analyze from start. I think Uttaranchal and Upper Haryana are equally responsible. Yamuna never enters in Delhi...its no more much earlier at Dak ka Pathar and Taje Wala where water of yamuna is distributed among states.

Now see the Pics:-

One of Yamuna Stream starting at Har Ki doon which is above and north of yamunotri. Before this point there is a Morinda Tal where The Har Ki Doon River is blocked by a big stone piece. This stream is called supin river and merges with rupin river and makes the famous Tons river. Then swarn river and pawar river also merges into Tons river.

At such a early stage of yamuna tributary tons a huge concrete 236 m high Krishna dam is being built.

Yamuna main stream starting at Yamunotri Glacier shown below joining to make one yamuna river

Many streams coming across Dehradoon to merge to Yamuna river

Yamuna River Stopped at Dak ka Pathar Barrage. See most of the water diverted to a canal below

This barrage and bird sanctuary near Ponta Sahib also diverts most of the water to canal below

See the yamuna river with so less water and the canal

The Final Death of Yamuna is at Taje Wala. Can you identify which is the original Yamuna river and whivh is canal? The the left one is canal where is the yamuna water?

See Below a huge polluted Nala Falling into Yamuna near Yamuna Nagar, Haryana. Must be coming from some industrial waste.

Yamuna with very less water enters delhi and face some huge Nalas and Drain right at waziarabad junction. There is no Yamuna After that. It is all waste black sewage water in yamuna.

See at Okhla Barrage, Delhi most of water which is mix or treated and untreated water diverted to Agra Canal below.

Yamuna after delhi near Faridabad, Greater Noida is just a Nala, Drain. There is no sign of a river.

Yamuna Near Vrindavan. See the color of water and many drain falling into it.

See Yamuna near Mathura Refinary. The waste of refinary which may be carrying chemicals also falling into yamuna downstream.

Yamuna near Gokul

Highly Polluted Yamuna at Agra Between red fort and Taj Mahal. See a highly polluted Nala from a leather industry falling into yamuna before Tajmahal.

Sangam of Chambal river and Yamuna river. Can u guess which river is yamuna and which is chambal?

The Maha Sangam at Allahabad of Yamuna below and Ganga above.

Note:- I will keep updating pics and their information as I will get to know more.

Related Article about the Yamuna Rally as published in Down To Earth Magazine

Mars team ponders whether lander sees ice or salt

2008-06-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer Mon Jun 16, 7:37 PM ET

LOS ANGELES - Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt? That's the question bedeviling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix lander began digging into Mars' north pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable.

Shallow trenches excavated by the lander's backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt.

Phoenix merged two previously dug trenches over the weekend into a single pit measuring a little over a foot long and 3 inches deep. The new trench was excavated at the edge of a polygon-shaped pattern in the ground that may have been formed by the seasonal melting of underground ice.

New photos showed the exposed bright substance present only in the top part of the trench, suggesting it's not uniform throughout the excavation site. Phoenix will take images of the trench dubbed "Dodo-Goldilocks" over the next few days to record any changes. If it's ice, scientists expect it to sublimate — or go from solid to gas, bypassing the liquid stage — when exposed to the sun because of the planet's frigid temperatures and low atmospheric pressure.

"We think it's ice. But again, until we can see it disappear ... we're not guaranteed yet," mission scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis said Monday.

Even if it's not ice, the discovery of salt would also be significant because it's normally formed when water evaporates in the soil.

Preliminary results from a bake-and-sniff experiment at low temperatures failed to turn up any trace of water or ice in the scoopful of soil that was delivered to the lander's test oven last week. Scientists planned to heat the soil again this week to up to 1,800 degrees, said William Boynton of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic plains on May 25 on a three-month, $420 million mission to study whether the polar environment could be favorable for primitive life to emerge. The lander's main job is to dig into an ice layer believed to exist a few inches from the surface.

The project is led by the University of Arizona and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The lander was built by Lockheed Martin Corp.

For Latest Phonix News : - http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/index.php

Life as Dance

2008-06-16T06:34:00.001-07:00

- Contributed to Indiaved by DJ Chadda, a Businessman and World Traveller via Email

Start with meditation, and things will go on growing in you — silence, serenity, blissfulness, sensitivity. And whatever comes out of meditation, try to bring it out in life. Share it, because everything shared grows fast. And when you have reached the point of death, you will know there is no death. You can say goodbye, there is no need for any tears of sadness — maybe tears of joy, but not of sadness. But you have to begin from being innocent.

So first, throw out all crap that you are carrying. Everybody is carrying so much crap, and one wonders, for what? Just because people have been telling you that these are great ideas, principles.... You have not been intelligent with yourself. Be intelligent with yourself.

Life is very simple; it is a joyful dance. The whole earth can be full of joy and dance, but there are people who are seriously vested in their interest that nobody should enjoy life, that nobody should smile, that nobody should laugh, that life is a sin, that it is a punishment. How can you enjoy when the climate is such that you have been told continuously that it is a punishment? — that you are suffering because you have done wrong things and it is a kind of jail where you have been thrown to suffer?

I say to you life is not a jail, it is not a punishment. It is a reward, and it is given only to those who have earned it, who deserve it. Now it is your right to enjoy; it will be a sin if you don't enjoy.

It will be against existence if you don't beautify it, if you leave it just as you have found it. No, leave it a little happier, a little more beautiful, a little more fragrant.

You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it. Thats what gives you dignity, that the whole existence will miss you. The stars and sun and moon, the trees and birds and earth - everything in the universe will feel a small place is vacant which cannot be filled by anybody except you. This gives you a tremendous joy, a fulfillment that you are related to existence, and existence cares for you. Once you are clean and clear, you can see tremendous love falling on you from all dimensions.

3.The moment you start seeing life as non-serious, a playfulness, all the burden on your heart disappears. All the fear of death, of life, of love - everything disappears. One starts living with a very light weight or almost no weight. So weightless one becomes, one can fly in the open sky. Zens greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children.

In this world the greatest courage is to drop the mind aside. The bravest man is who can see the world without the barrier of the mind, just as it is. It is tremendously different, utterly beautiful. There is nobody who is inferior and there is nobody who is superior -- there are no distinctions

The Payoff in Unhappiness
Misery has many things to give to you which happiness cannot give. In fact, happiness takes away many things from you. Happiness takes all that you have ever had, all that you have ever been; happiness destroys you.

Misery nourishes your ego, and happiness is basically a state of egolessness. That is the problem, the very crux of the problem. That's why people find it very difficult to be happy.
That's why millions of people in the world have to live in misery...have decided to live in misery. It gives you a very very crystallized ego. Miserable, you are Happy, you are not. In misery, crystallization; in happiness you become diffused.
If this is understood then things become very clear. Misery makes you special. Happiness is a universal phenomenon, there is nothing special about it. Trees are happy and animals are happy and birds are happy. The whole existence is happy, except man. Being miserable, man becomes very special, extraordinary.
Misery makes you capable of attracting people's attention. Whenever you are miserable you are attended to, sympathized with, loved. Everybody starts taking care of you. Who wants to hurt a miserable person? Who is jealous of a miserable person? Who wants to be antagonistic to a miserable person? That would be too mean.
The miserable person is cared for, loved, attended to. There is great investment in misery. If the wife is not miserable the husband simply tends to forget her. If she is miserable the husband cannot afford to neglect her. If the husband is miserable the whole family, the wife, the children, are around him, worried about him; it gives great comfort. 1 feels 1 is not alone, 1 has a family, friends.
When you are ill, depressed, in misery, friends come to visit you, to solace you, to console you. When you are happy, the same friends become jealous of you. When you are really happy, u will find the whole world has turned against you.

Nobody likes a happy person, because the happy person hurts the egos of the others.

6.The others start feeling, "So you have become happy and we are still crawling in darkness, misery and hell. How dare you be happy when we all are in such misery!"

Of course the world consists of miserable people, and nobody is courageous enough to let the whole world go against him; it is too dangerous, too risky. It is better to cling to misery, it keeps you a part of the crowd. Happy, and you are an individual; miserable, you are part of a crowd — Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Indian, Arabian, Japanese.

Happy? Do you know what happiness is? Is it Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan?

Happiness is simply happiness. One is transported into another world. One is no longer part of the world the human mind has created, one is no longer part of the past, of the ugly history. One is no more part of time at all. When you are really happy, blissful, time disappears, space disappears.

Albert Einstein has said that in the past scientists used to think that there were two realities — space and time. But he said that these two realities are not two — they are two faces of the same single reality. Hence he coined the word spaciotime, a single word. Time is nothing else but the fourth dimension of space.

Einstein was not a mystic, otherwise he would have introduced the third reality also — the transcendental, neither space nor time. That too is there, I call it the witness. And once these three are there, you have the whole trinity. You have the whole concept of trimurti, three faces of the divine. Then you have all the four dimensions. The reality is four-dimensional: three dimensions of space, and the fourth dimension of time.

But there is something else, which cannot be called the fifth dimension, because it is not the fifth really, it is the whole, the transcendental.

When you are blissful you start moving into the transcendental.

It is not social, it is not traditional, it has nothing to do with human mind at all.

If you really want to know who I am,
you will have to be absolutely empty as I am.
Then two mirrors will be facing each other,
and only emptiness will be mirrored."

" Looking at a sunset, just for a second you forget your separateness: you are the sunset. That is the moment when you feel the beauty of it. But the moment you say that it is a beautiful sunset, you are no longer feeling it; you have come back to your separate, enclosed entity of the ego. Now the mind is speaking. And this is one of the mysteries, that the mind can speak, and knows nothing; and the heart knows everything, and cannot speak. Perhaps to know too much makes it difficult to speak; the mind knows so little, it is possible for it to speak. "
osho

9.Misery is not so big as you make out. So the first thing is to reduce it to the right
proportions. Before you can get out of it, let the tiger disappear. Be very factual.
If you really want to transform your life, be factual. You cannot get out of fictions.
You can get out of facts; facts can be tackled, but fictions cannot be tackled.

10.

The beauty of facing life unprepared is tremendous.
Then life has a newness, a youth; then life has a flow
and freshness. Then life has so many surprises.
And when life has so many surprises
boredom never settles in you."

- By Osho

On The Brain

2008-06-16T00:02:00.000-07:00

02:51 PM CDT on Wednesday, June 11, 2008

"U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy."

On Monday, June 2, 2008, surgeons at Duke University Medical Center announced that they had successfully removed a cancerous tumor from Sen. Edward Kennedy's brain.

Kennedy remained awake and alert during the entire procedure, doctors said. By keeping him awake, they were able to map the brain's key areas, like those that control movement and speech, and avoid cutting into them. His doctors were also able to use "neuronavigation techniques" to map his brain's cancerous areas. Doing this helped surgeons to better target the cancer and get all of it out.

Medical researchers have learned a lot about the brain in recent years, especially about the relationships between the brain's structure and functions. Understanding the brain has revolutionized diagnosis, treatment, and further research of a variety of conditions, including brain cancer and Alzheimer's disease. In this lesson, your own investigations will discover how exactly the brain works within the larger network of the nervous system.

Brain Basics

"An image of a brain scan"

Begin with some brain basics by going Inside the Brain. This interactive tour at the Alzheimer's Association has two parts, with the second part going into detail about the Alzheimer's affects the brain. For now, stick with part one exploring Brain Basics. On the first screen, roll your mouse over the colored text to see the brain's three main parts. Draw your own diagram of the brain (like the one shown in this diagram, which is basically a side view), labeling each part and describing its functions.

On the next screen, you will get an inside look at the brain's Supply Lines. About how much blood and oxygen does your brain need compared to the rest of your body? Next, find out more about those Thinking Wrinkles of yours. As you roll over the text to see and read about the specific regions of the cortex, which parts are you using right now? Add to your brain diagram, by color coding the smaller parts of the brain shown here, and adding labels and descriptions. Draw a second diagram of the brain&mdasha top view&mdashillustrating the Left/Right Brain sections and general functions.

Stepping deeper into the brain, wade your way through The Neuron Forest, Cell Signaling, and Signal Coding. What kinds of problems could a person have if a disease or tumor hampered the proper functioning of brain neurons? List at least two possible effects related to each cortex section. Discuss your lists with classmates.

Brain Games

"An illustration of the brain and the spinal cord."

Now it is time to play a few true "brain games" where Brains Rule! When you click open each game, maximize the browser window so that the game screen fills your computer screen. First, take a ride on the Brain-o-Coaster. In this game, you will get an inside view of the brain's early development. Take any seat on the neural plate for your first ride, and then grab a snack. Take the ride up to four times, choosing a different seat every time.

Next, Neuron Explosion will train and test you on what makes up a nerve cell. In Neuron Navigator, choose your favorite car to drive a leg to move.

Get up your nerve to enter the Neuron Laboratory. As master of the castle, it is up to you to straighten out Frankenbrain. After your assistant tells you what is going on, click the left-hand side of the room to take a look at the book shelf. Click on every item to see what they are. What do you notice about Frankenbrain's behavior?

"Nerve cells use electrochemicals to communicate in the nervous system."

Return to the middle of the room, and then go upstairs to get the laboratory key. Check out the lesson on the computer. As you answer each question correctly, you will get a number for the keycode. Once finished, your second assistant will use the code to unlock the door. Get downstairs and enter the lab.

Examine Frankenbrain through the machine, and try to fix the problem. What are the two different problems Frankenbrain has? Once you have sewn up the neuron circuit, fix the neuron's function. To blast the blue blockers, double-click on them.

Lastly, play Brain Attack. This game shows the different ways blood and oxygen can get cut off from our brains. What are the four ways? What happens when one of these occur?

If you have time, learn more about how illness affects the brain, by examining Alzheimer's Disease and the Brain and Brain Cancer.

source:- http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spe/nie/weeklylessons/stories/20080611-dnnieactivities.20ff5266.html

Consciousness a Problem

2008-06-03T04:09:00.000-07:00

The inner universe of our minds is ironically one of the hardest of phenomena to study. We all should know the basics. Senses, emotions, memories, ideas - all are the raw materials of consciousness. But where does the brain come in? How are your subjective experiences explainable by neurons and synapses? (Or are they explainable?) Generally, in neuroscience and psychology, these questions are phrased as two different problems of consciousness.

The first part is the “easy problem.” It is basically a question of cognition, or how we process information. Our attention span, language skills, learning abilities, memory capacity, perception qualities, and problem solving abilities have been well-documented and explain a great deal of mental activity. After that there is the second part, or the “hard problem,” and it is in a totally different league. Why is there any experience at all if we are only physical machines and bodies of cells? More generally, what kind of automaton (e.g. the brain, a computer, a cell, and so forth) could generate consciousness? This is a harder scientific question than the easy problem for one simple reason: it could even be metaphysical.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the questions of consciousness into three categories: descriptive, explanatory, and functional. Essentially this asks What? How? and Why? Describing consciousness is the easy problem, explaining it is the hard problem, and the question of its function is something not normally addressed with the first two. The question of its function comes down to how it is an adaptation in our evolutionary past. There are some ideas that say it is for free will, motivation, better flexibility (like learning), social coordination, and better cognition (like accessing cumulative information we gather). I’ll say a little more about the first two in the rest of this article.

There are some simple features of consciousness that everyone is familiar with. I would mark qualia, phenomenology, subjectivity, and flow as the major ones that are most self-evident. Qualia are the raw feelings of sensory perception that you have. How the world sounds, looks, feels, tastes, and smells to us. Isaac Newton wrote “to determine by what modes or actions light produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour is not so easie.” Behind the experience of qualia is phenomenology. Phenomenology refers to the organization that is intrinsic in consciousness. The “phenomena” are our thoughts and ideas we use to model the world. (SEP says “… the phenomenal structure of experience is richly intentional and involves not only sensory ideas and qualities but complex representations of time, space, cause, body, self, world and the organized structure of lived reality …”) Subjectivity is something of a casual term that we all know of. Subjective experience is dependent on point of view, and perhaps to some degree, it is uncommunicable to other people. For example, what is it like to be a cat? How would you know for sure? Finally, the dynamic flow of mental life is the storyline played out in your head. William James called it the “stream of consciousness.”

There is an explanatory gap present in trying to account for how consciousness exists. In a physical, material universe, it is hard to make sense of how consciousness arises and emerges from it. In spite of this there are numerous attempts to respond to this problem. Some are pretty common such as dualism (from Rene Descartes), where the soul is independent of the physical universe, or a closely related concept, idealism (from George Berkeley), where some contents of consciousness are uninvolved with matter. Other explanations seem odd or just plain absurd, like direct realism (from Thomas Reid), which says that the contents of consciousness are the world itself, or panpsychism (from Gottfried Leibniz), the notion that all matter is conscious. Emergence theory and epiphenomenalism posit that consciousness is the result of the brain’s immense complexity, and is therefore a physical construct. (For example, Hofstadter wrote a book I am a Strange Loop, saying consciousness is analogous to a sort of feed-back loop due to its self-reference, the “I.”) A strange combo of this idea and quantum physics is supported by Roger Penrose and some other scientists, called OOR. Their theory says a special quantum computation goes on in the mind allowing it to supersede some of the capabilities of rigid programming that regular computers have. (He argues his case in his book Emperor’s New Mind.)

Another very impressive question is whether or not consciousness is actually something that makes choices. It is conceivable that our consciousness is merely a byproduct of our deterministic brain so that it is only an endpoint and does not have any control over the brain’s processing. Perhaps you’re just along for the ride!

Some people (like Colin McGinn) say the hard problem is insoluble. Others (like Daniel Dennett) say it is an illusion; there is no hard problem. Still more (like David Chalmers) disagree with that, saying purely physical explanations are lacking. Take a look at the philosophical zombie, the Chinese room, the color expert Mary, and the Turing test for an idea of controversial issues with physicalism. A philosophical zombie is a theoretical human being that functions just as we do, exhibiting all of the ordinary behavior, but is not conscious. This begs the question, “What distinguishes conscious from non-conscious beings?” The Turing test is a situation played out between computers and humans where both a program and a real subject communicate with real interviewers, and if the interviewers cannot agree if the program is human, it is declared sentient. This raises the issue of whether or not it is even feasible to discern between conscious and non-conscious beings. (In AI research, this Turing test has been carried out in real life and is a part of an annual competition to see who can code the “most” human program. Also, for fun: An xkcd-twisted version of the Turing test.) The Chinese room is where a man sitting in a closed room, using instruction books, “translates” Chinese to English (or back), but does not truly “understand” Chinese. What makes up true comprehension? Lastly, the color expert Mary is a hypothetical scientist who learns all of the academic information about the color red possible, but then experiences seeing it for the first time afterwards. (Many people debate what her experience would be like.) What is the difference between qualia and information about qualia? These thought experiments flesh out some of the ambiguities we have in understanding consciousness, which prove problematic in reliably answering the hard problem.

And so the debate on the hard problem still persists, and one still wonders how and even if the problem can be solved. Can it even be properly understood? Is it in the realm of metaphysics or naturalistic science? How can we tell? Is there anything obvious being overlooked? Surely, the hard problem of consciousness ranks right up there with solving the millennium problems and understanding quantum theory. It is easily one of the hardest problems of the universe, yet it is what you live with every day.
Source:- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness, Technorati

Bodhisattava

2008-06-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

My beloved bodhisattvas.... Yes, that's how I look at you. That's how you have to start looking at yourselves. Bodhisattva means a buddha in essence, a buddha in seed, a buddha asleep, but with all the potential to be awake. In that sense everybody is a bodhisattva, but not everybody can be called a bodhisattva -- only those who have started groping for the light, who have started longing for the dawn, in whose hearts the seed is no longer a seed but has become a sprout, has started growing.
You are bodhisattvas because of your longing to be conscious, to be alert, because of your quest for the truth. The truth is not far away, but there are very few fortunate ones in the world who long for it. It is not far away but it is arduous, it is hard to achieve. It is hard to achieve, not because of its nature, but because of our investment in lies.

- Osho

Inflation likely to hit double digits soon: Morgan Stanley

2008-06-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

2008-06-02 11:04:00 Source :-CNBC-TV18

Watch Video

Chetan Ahya, MD of Morgan Stanley said the GDP numbers are backward looking and the services sector lags industrial data. He thinks the GDP growth rate is likely to come off from the next quarter and sees Q1FY09 GDP at 7.5-8%, while FY09 at 7.1%.
On inflation, he said it will hit double-digits soon. The oil price hike will trigger inflation spike, he said. He believes RBI will hike rates if oil goes to USD 150 and stays there.

He sees FY09 headline fiscal deficit at 5.1% and it may cross 10% if oil stays at USD 120 per barrel.

Excerpts from CNBC-TV18�s exclusive interview with Chetan Ahya:

Q: What let to that GDP surprise you think and is it backward looking or do you think you can carry some of that momentum forward into the 2009 outlook?

A: I think it is backward looking. I think the sector which has really done well and the data if one looks at is services sector and that tends to lag the industrial production data and in fact there is a bit of divergence this time but we think next time it should come off.

Q: Do you expect this quarter to start showing slower numbers on the GDP?

A: Yes and I think the way to look at will be corporate revenue growth and if one looks at the corporate revenue growth that hasn�t moved back again to significantly higher levels. The last quarter number was for 1,500 companies that we looked at, at about 13% nominal growth from the peak of 29% in September �06 quarter and from the data which has come out so far, it doesn�t look like its going to be significantly better than that. So no matter what the GDP data shows, I think the underlying trend for growth is that of deceleration.

Q: To get down to the numbers: are you expecting Q1 sub 8% number?

A: We are expecting 7.5 - 8% for Q1 and for the full year we are expecting 7.1%

Q: You had no reason to scale up your GDP numbers for 2009 after looking at the Q4 numbers for 2008?

A: Not really.

Q: What about inflation already at 8.1% and we haven�t even had the fuel price hike. Do you need to now revise upwards the inflation projections because by this time a lot of analysts were hoping to see the first signs of moderation?

A: We are out with a note in the morning generally in the context of interest rate outlook - we are making a point that inflation will go to double digit soon; we are already at 8.1%. Typically the government has been revising previous week�s data by about 80-150 bps assuming that there is 100 bps revision; we are probably already at 9.1% and then we are going to see oil price hike of about 10-15%. So the moment we do the oil price hike, we will basically cross double digits.

Q: By when do you expect inflation to touch, Wholesale Price Index (WPI) to touch 10%?

A: I think the trigger will be the oil price hike and hopefully it is done in the next one week or so; then in other four weeks time we should see inflation at double digits.

Q: What do you think will be the RBI response to that? So far it�s managed or dealt with it through the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) route. Do you think more dire measures will be in place if we see that psychologically important 10% mark?

A: It is going to be complex task; the growth is slowing and we think growth will probably slow further. So ideally RBI should not tighten. But we are seeing two other added challenges - (1) fiscal policy is running extremely loose; we are continuing to run higher and higher deficit as oil keeps going up which makes RBI�s task more difficult. (2) If oil goes to USD 150 and stays there for four-five months, that will cause a lot of pressure on the currency which will basically then make RBI to consider the decision to hike the policy rates. So our view is base case right now - no policy rate hikes. But if oil goes to USD 150 and stays there considering that fiscal policy will still continue to be loose, the RBI will have to take the burden of tightening the monetary policy to reduce the pressure on currency.

Q: How do you see the RBI approaching the rupee now, which went to almost 43 to a dollar and is now cooled down a bit closer to 42 to a dollar; in the light of what is going around how do you see the Central Bank approaching that?

A: I think at this point of time, there seems to be active intervention from the Central Bank to hold the rupee below 43 to a dollar, but it is all predicated on what happens to global market place - particularly what happens to oil and what happens to the dollar.

The expectations in the US for the Fed rate cut is moving closer to the date; we were earlier expecting it to happen in the Q1 but the market is now beginning to discount it - probably happening even as soon as October still not fully priced in but if the Fed Futures expectation gradually turns, moves forward and the Fed does hike earlier then we will see the dollar strengthening and that will cause the added pressure.

So it will depend on where the Fed futures go and where the oil prices go. The combined effect of that will determine the direction of currency. At this point of time, we are expecting the dollar to appreciate generally against Euro and other currencies. I think the oil prices are not going to come down. So I think the rupee has got to move down going forward. The direction and magnitude will be determined by how the Fed Futures and oil prices move.

Q: What do you think is the most likely outcome of this impasse on oil price hike? What would be the contours of the package you think and how much would it stoke inflation?

A: It is not going to be a very significant move by the Government, it will be possibly be a weighted average hike of about 10-15% and that is also, if at all.

If they don�t touch kerosene, then diesel and petrol are the only ones which move then the weighted average hike will not be more than 10-15% which will not be enough to reduce the subsidy burden.

I think ideally the response right now from the government should have been to run a tighter fiscal policy; one good measure out of that would be to hike the oil prices. Although it will hurt the population at large right now but from a macro stability perspective, that is the ideal response from the policy makers needed right now. That will reduce the import bill for oil because the oil demand will come off too and that will help the overall macro stability. But I think we will probably not get that response soon.

Q: Do you think we will get substantial duty cuts, excise and customs. If yes, how much does it worsen the already precarious fiscal situation?

A: It�s just an accounting effect; so for our purposes we count that as a subsidy burden. Only if the consumer is bearing the increase in prices, then the overall subsidy reduces whether they account it by way of tax reduction in fiscal deficit or it stays with the oil companies. At the end of the day, it's still oil subsidy. So it�s just an accounting issue.

Q: What number are you penciling in, in terms of fiscal deficit? All these items put together above and below the line by the end of this year?

A: The headline fiscal deficit is 5.1%. But if you add the farm loan write-off, the fertilizer subsidy, food subsidy and oil subsidy with oil being at USD 100 per barrel for 12 months ended March �09, we are at 9.4% fiscal deficit and if oil stays at USD 120 per barrel average for F2009, then fiscal deficit will basically cross 10% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Q: Are you talking about just the center or Center plus States?

A: Center plus State plus all the off-Budget liabilities. I need to qualify; we have also taken the oil subsidy borne by the oil companies which the Finance Minister does not include in his estimates.

Q: What do the dealing room guys tell you about how nervous all this is making India in the eyes of global investors; this kind of macro, current account and fiscal situation?

A: I think everybody is hoping for oil to come down and the last two-three days' moves have raised that hope. So it�s all predicated on where oil goes and I think everybody is hoping for oil prices to come down. But there is quite a difficult macro environment and almost all of Asia is facing this. So India is not alone. But I think India�s fiscal balance condition is probably one of the worst compared to the rest of the region.

So everybody is watching on what happens - as you may have probably known there are some concerns on some of the other countries in the region -like Pakistan is facing some challenges, Vietnam is facing some challenges. So the environment is getting concerning, particularly from what�s happening on oil prices to a lot of the countries in the region.

British Leader Warns of Global Oil Price

2008-06-02T02:25:00.000-07:00

Published: May 29, 2008, NY Times.

PARIS — As protests against the soaring cost of fuel threatened to widen in Europe, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain warned on Wednesday that the world confronted a global shock caused by skyrocketing oil prices.

“The global economy is facing the third great oil shock of recent decades,” Mr. Brown said in an article published in The Guardian newspaper and on his Web site (www.pm.gov.uk).

The challenge, he wrote, demanded “global solutions” that should top the agenda of the forthcoming G-8 summit of industrialized nations in Japan.

“There is no easy answer to the global oil problem without a comprehensive international strategy,” Mr. Brown said.

“As continuing high oil prices present us all with an immense challenge,” he said, “the way we confront these issues will define our era.”

His warning was published a day after truck drivers protesting increases in the price of diesel fuel paralyzed parts of London by driving slowly in convoys and halting their rigs on a busy highway leading into the west of the capital. Other truckers took similar action in Wales. representatives said they were demanding a reduction of more than $2 a gallon in the price of diesel.

The protests mirrored action by French fishermen who blockaded ports on the English Channel. At the same time, 300 farmers in southern France near Toulouse blocked entry to a Total fuel depot.

Such is the anger in France that President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested on Tuesday reducing the value-added taxes on fuel to offset increases in the price of crude oil that have climbed beyond $130 a barrel. Such are the price increases, coupled with steep government levies on fuel sales, that diesel fuel in Britain and France costs about $10 a gallon — more than twice the price in the United States.

Mr. Brown met oil industry executives in Scotland on Wednesday at a time when he is under pressure from legislators to postpone increases in taxes affecting the cost of driving. Oil industry leaders also want taxes to be lowered on their operations in Britain’s North Sea and the government is urging oil companies to increase oil production from the aging oil-fields there

In addition to the demonstrations in France and Britain, Spanish truckers have joined fishing boat crews n protesting the cost of fuel and demanding that the European Union relax its rules to permit higher subsidies from their governments. Fishermen in Italy, Greece and Portugal are considering broadening the action later this week.

Monkeys control a robot arm with thoughts

2008-05-30T07:29:00.000-07:00

At You Tube:-
Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own

Source: NY Times, May 29, 2008

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

Andrew Schwartz/University of Pittsburgh

A grid in the monkey’s brain carried signals from 100 neurons for the mechanical arm to grab and carry snacks to the mouth.

Cortical Control of a Prosthetic Arm for Self-Feeding

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill.

The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

Experts not involved with the study said the findings were likely to accelerate interest in human testing, especially given the need to treat head and spinal injuries in veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This study really pulls together all the pieces from earlier work and provides a clear demonstration of what’s possible,” said Dr. William Heetderks , director of the extramural science program at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Dr. John P. Donoghue, director of the Institute of Brain Science at Brown University, said the new report was “important because it’s the most comprehensive study showing how an animal interacts with complex objects, using only brain activity.”

The researchers, from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, used monkeys partly because of their anatomical similarities to humans and partly because they are quick learners.

In the experiment, two macaques first used a joystick to gain a feel for the arm, which had shoulder joints, an elbow and a grasping claw with two mechanical fingers.

Then, just beneath the monkeys’ skulls, the scientists implanted a grid about the size of a large freckle. It sat on the motor cortex, over a patch of cells known to signal arm and hand movements. The grid held 100 tiny electrodes, each connecting to a single neuron, its wires running out of the brain and to a computer.

The computer was programmed to analyze the collective firing of these 100 motor neurons, translate that sum into an electronic command and send it instantaneously to the arm, which was mounted flush with the left shoulder.

The scientists used the computer to help the monkeys move the arm at first, essentially teaching them with biofeedback.

After several days, the monkeys needed no help. They sat stationary in a chair, repeatedly manipulating the arm with their brain to reach out and grab grapes, marshmallows and other nuggets dangled in front of them. The snacks reached the mouths about two-thirds of the time — an impressive rate, compared with earlier work.

The monkeys learned to hold the grip open on approaching the food, close it just enough to hold the food and gradually loosen the grip when feeding.

On several occasions, a monkey kept its claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel.

The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote.

“In the real world, things don’t work as expected,” said the senior author of the paper, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The marshmallow sticks to your hand or the food slips, and you can’t program a computer to anticipate all of that.

“But the monkeys’ brains adjusted. They were licking the marshmallow off the prosthetic gripper, pushing food into their mouth, as if it were their own hand.”

The co-authors were Meel Velliste, Sagi Perel, M. Chance Spalding and Andrew Whitford.

Scientists have to clear several hurdles before this technology becomes practical, experts said. Implantable electrode grids do not generally last more than a period of months, for reasons that remain unclear.

The equipment to read and transmit the signal can be cumbersome and in need of continual monitoring and recalibrating. And no one has yet demonstrated a workable wireless system that would eliminate the need for connections through the scalp.

Yet Dr. Schwartz’s team, Dr. Donoghue’s group and others are working on all of the problems, and the two macaques’ rapid learning curve in taking ownership of a foreign limb gives scientists confidence that the main obstacles are technical and, thus, negotiable.

In an editorial accompanying the Nature study, Dr. John F. Kalaska, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, argued that after such bugs had been worked out, scientists might even discover areas of the cortex that allow more intimate, subtle control of prosthetic devices.

Such systems, Dr. Kalaska wrote, “would allow patients with severe motor deficits to interact and communicate with the world not only by the moment-to-moment control of the motion of robotic devices, but also in a more natural and intuitive manner that reflects their overall goals, needs and preferences.”

Computer Model Reveals How Brain Represents Meaning

2008-05-30T05:23:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (May 29, 2008) — Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have taken an important step toward understanding how the human brain codes the meanings of words by creating the first computational model that can predict the unique brain activation patterns associated with names for things that you can see, hear, feel, taste or smell.

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Researchers previously have shown that they can use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect which areas of the brain are activated when a person thinks about a specific word. A Carnegie Mellon team has taken the next step by predicting these activation patterns for concrete nouns -- things that are experienced through the senses -- for which fMRI data does not yet exist.

The work could eventually lead to the use of brain scans to identify thoughts and could have applications in the study of autism, disorders of thought such as paranoid schizophrenia, and semantic dementias such as Pick's disease.

The team, led by computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, constructed the computational model by using fMRI activation patterns for 60 concrete nouns and by statistically analyzing a set of texts totaling more than a trillion words, called a text corpus. The computer model combines this information about how words are used in text to predict the activation patterns for thousands of concrete nouns contained in the text corpus with accuracies significantly greater than chance.

The findings are being published in the May 30 issue of the journal Science.

"We believe we have identified a number of the basic building blocks that the brain uses to represent meaning," said Mitchell, who heads the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department. "Coupled with computational methods that capture the meaning of a word by how it is used in text files, these building blocks can be assembled to predict neural activation patterns for any concrete noun. And we have found that these predictions are quite accurate for words where fMRI data is available to test them."

Just, a professor of psychology who directs the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, said the computational model provides insight into the nature of human thought. "We are fundamentally perceivers and actors," he said. "So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas of the brain associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it. Our work is a small but important step in breaking the brain's code."

In addition to representations in these sensory-motor areas of the brain, the Carnegie Mellon researchers found significant activation in other areas, including frontal areas associated with planning functions and long-term memory. When someone thinks of an apple, for instance, this might trigger memories of the last time the person ate an apple, or initiate thoughts about how to obtain an apple.

"This suggests a theory of meaning based on brain function," Just added.

In the study, nine subjects underwent fMRI scans while concentrating on 60 stimulus nouns -- five words in each of 12 semantic categories including animals, body parts, buildings, clothing, insects, vehicles and vegetables.

To construct their computational model, the researchers used machine learning techniques to analyze the nouns in a trillion-word text corpus that reflects typical English word usage. For each noun, they calculated how frequently it co-occurs in the text with each of 25 verbs associated with sensory-motor functions, including see, hear, listen, taste, smell, eat, push, drive and lift. Computational linguists routinely do this statistical analysis as a means of characterizing the use of words.

These 25 verbs appear to be basic building blocks the brain uses for representing meaning, Mitchell said.

By using this statistical information to analyze the fMRI activation patterns gathered for each of the 60 stimulus nouns, they were able to determine how each co-occurrence with one of the 25 verbs affected the activation of each voxel, or 3-D volume element, within the fMRI brain scans.

To predict the fMRI activation pattern for any concrete noun within the text corpus, the computational model determines the noun's co-occurrences within the text with the 25 verbs and builds an activation map based on how those co-occurrences affect each voxel.

In tests, a separate computational model was trained for each of the nine research subjects using 58 of the 60 stimulus nouns and their associated activation patterns. The model was then used to predict the activation patterns for the remaining two nouns. For the nine participants, the model had a mean accuracy of 77 percent in matching the predicted activation patterns to the ones observed in the participants' brains.

The model proved capable of predicting activation patterns even in semantic areas for which it was untrained. In tests, the model was retrained with words from all but two of the 12 semantic categories from which the 60 words were drawn, and then tested with stimulus nouns from the omitted categories. If the categories of vehicles and vegetables were omitted, for instance, the model would be tested with words such as airplane and celery. In these cases, the mean accuracy of the model's prediction dropped to 70 percent, but was still well above chance (50 percent).

Plans for future work include studying the activation patterns for adjective-noun combinations, prepositional phrases and simple sentences. The team also plans to study how the brain represents abstract nouns and concepts.

The Carnegie Mellon team included Andrew Carlson, a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department; Kai-Min Chang, a Ph.D. student in the Language Technologies Institute; and Robert A. Mason, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology. Others are Svetlana V. Shinkareva, now a faculty member at the University of South Carolina, and Vicente L. Malave, now a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. The research was funded by grants from the W.M. Keck Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

William Shakespeare a woman in disguise

2008-05-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

JERUSALEM: Shakespeare was actually a Jewish woman who had disguised to get her work published in Elizabethan London where original literature from women was not acceptable, an expert has contended.

The woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier Bassano, was of Italian descent and lived in England as a Marrano. She has been known only as the first woman to publish a book of poetry ("Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" in 1611) and as a candidate for "the dark
lady" referred to in the sonnets, daily Ha'aretz reported.

The theory rests largely on the circumstances of Bassano's life, which John Hudson, an expert in Shakespeare, contends matches much better to the content of "Shakespeare's" work.

The researcher has also identified technical similarities between the language used in Bassano's known poetry and that used in "Shakespeare's" verse.

The conginitive scientist has located several clues in the text like recently noted Jewish allegories and the statistically significant appearance of Amelia Bassano Lanier's various names in the plays, which he says point to her as the only convincing candidate as the author of Shakespeare's work.

When asked if this is the biggest literary hoax ever pulled off or the worst example of a man stealing a woman's glory, the researcher dubbed it a "stratagem".

"I don't think this is a hoax. It is a stratagem she used to get her work published, as many other women have done, by having their work published under a man's name. In Elizabethan London, women could not write original literature at all, let alone plays, so this was her only option", Hudson said in an interview published in Ha'aretz.

"The example I use is that of the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria. In order that his name might be known, the architect Sostratus had his name carved on the stone base, then covered over with a piece of plaster with a dedication to the king. In time the plaster fell away, revealing the architect's name", Hudson said.

"Amelia's strategy was to leave behind a preposterous case for William Shakespeare, which has now fallen away, revealing the true creator who is now at last visible", the cognitive scientist added.

He is so convinced of Bassano's authorship that he formed a theater company, The Dark Lady Players, to bring out, through performance, the true meanings of the plays as, he argues, Bassano intended them.

Hudson holds numerous degrees from various prestigious academic institutions, in a range of specialties from Shakespeare and dramaturgical theory to sociology and anthropology.

He has spent most of his career as a cognitive scientist, restructuring the communications industry and inventing new industry models, exactly what he is now doing with Shakespeare.

Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1167025

Summer Theatre Festival at NSD

2008-05-29T02:35:00.000-07:00