Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran on mirror neurons and the self
“For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct. C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet. So, I’m saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings,and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings”.
VS Ramachandran, The Neurons That Shaped the Civilization, www.ted.com
121. samam sarvesu bhutesu
tisthantam paramesvaram …..
yah pasyati sa pasyati
The Bhagavad Gita(XIII-28)
The same in-all-beings-
dwelling-Paramesvar:
who see (this), sees indeed.
The highest level of spiritual realization consists in recognizing the divine principal in everything and in every event. These lines in the Gita express one of the fundamental tenets of the Hindu world view, indeed the doctrinal essence of Hinduism. The most important realization of Hindu seers, the fundamental revelation that comes from their meditation and spiritual search is that beneath and beyond the material and the physical world lies a spiritual reality. It is only when one recognizes this that one has truly lived the human life. This insight has been expressed by other thinkers and philosophers as well.
An analogy with the physicist’s endeavor may clarify this thesis. We see, observe, and experience countless physical phenomena around us: lightning and sunrise, erosion of rocks and the colors of the rainbow, the blossoming of flowers and the freezing of water in the cold, and many more. But when we become aware of these as various consequences of fundamental physical laws, our depth of understanding is enhanced, and our appreciation of the phenomenal world is enormously enriched. Likewise, say the seers, when we become aware of the spiritual substratum of the universe, our experience of it is heightened a thousandfold. Indeed, it is only when we achieve this that we really begin to see, i.e. understand, anything.
As the physicist can see through the mind’s eye the ultimate quarks and leptons of which the material world is constituted, so too the spiritually awakened person can recognize in the core of his/her being the all-pervading entity which is the spiritual substratum of reality.
“They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. “You say, ‘I’m surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos,’ ” he says. ‘I’m surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me.’
Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas.
The heart has its reasons that reason can not know.
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
-Pascal on God
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.
Rebecca Solnit, The Blue of Distance
The world is almost mind-numbingly dynamic. Out of the Big Bang came the stars. Out of stardust came the Earth. Out of Earth came single-celled creatures. Out of the evolutionary life and death of these creatures came human beings with consciousness and freedom that concentrates the self-transcendence of matter itself. Human beings are the universe become conscious of itself.
Elizabeth Johnson, theologian
Just as the Urnanâbhi, a species of spider, creates a thread out of his own body and takes it back, just as the plants grow by their own nature, and all these things are yet separate and apparently different (the heart is, as it were, different from the other parts of a man’s body; the plants are different from the earth; the thread is different from the spider — yet they [the earth, the spider and so on] were the causes, and in them these things act), so from this Unchangeable One has come this universe.
Vivekananda on the Mundaka Upanishads
Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”