neurotheology

Essentially prayer and meditation are one and the same thing.

A prayer/meditation a day, keeps the Doctor away.

I never attempt to take away people__ God from them, because that God is associated with a lot of human sentiments in the human psyche that act as fuel in daily survival. If you try to take away some hungry man__ stale bread, he would fight back, but if you give him something healthier and more substantial than the bread, then he would throw away the bread himself and accept your better food. The same is for God.

It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions.

Any thought sequence that minimizes anxiety would get reinforced over time. The sequence would be maintained during the person__ development and would be provoked in contexts where refutation of the belief might occur. So, any kind of refutation of a person__ religious beliefs makes the beliefs only stronger.

Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.

Pathology can indeed cause experiences of the Kingdom of God, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology.

All deities are external manifestation of humanity's internal divinity.

__elief is exclusively a matter of personal domain. It has nothing to do with reality.

When I am fully immersed in my work of nourishing humanity, it fills my head with all kinds of feel-good chemicals, such as endorphins, serotonin and dopamine. Problems occur during the brief intervals between the finishing of one work and the beginning of another. During these intervals, my biology starts to get filled with stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin, that worsens my OCD. That is why, I can__ sit still even a day after I finish writing a book. Because if I do, my OCD begins to suffocate me inside my head. Hence, as soon as I deliver a work, I have to start working on my next scientific literature.

I don__ make any pretence of knowing about the existence of a Supreme Entity, neither do I make any attempt to create any friction among religions. If anything, I have spared myself no pains in my endeavor to smoothen the ongoing friction among all religions of the world.

It is pretty simple - mind is a part of life - consciousness is a part of mind - God is a part of consciousness.

Meditation has also been proven scientifically to untangle and rewire the neurological pathways in the brain that make up the conditioned personality. Buddhist monks, for example, have had their brains scanned by scientists as they sat still in deep altered states of consciousness invoked by transcendental meditation and the scientists were amazed at what they beheld. The frontal lobes of the monks lit up as bright as the sun! They were in states of peace and happiness the scientists had never seen before. Meditation invokes that which is known in neuroscience as neuroplasticity; which is the loosening of the old nerve cells or hardwiring in the brain, to make space for the new to emerge. Meditation, in this sense, is a fire that burns away the old or conditioned self, in the Bhagavad Gita, this is known as the Yajna;__ll karma or effects of actions are completely burned away from the liberated being who, free from attachment, with his physical mind enveloped in wisdom (the higher self), performs the true spiritual fire rite.

Humans are not simply higher than Gods, Gods are mere mystical representations of the humans themselves.

Through Neurotheology, I and my fellow scientists of twenty-first century have already taken the first step from the side of Science, to diminish the gap between Science and Religion. Now it is time for Religion to do the same.

Once the lotus of your inner divinity gets full-blown and you reach the mental state where all the religious giants of human history experienced the all-encompassing sense of godliness, the exuberance of the human mind turns infinite. Awakening into that state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean.

The transcendental state of Absolute Oneness sets the human mind free.

I realized the universe had consumed my whole entity with its divine sensation of eternal bliss. All I could consciously perceive in that state of mind was absolute oneness. I felt being one with the banyan tree, under which I was sitting. I felt one with the corns in the field. I felt one with the sky and the clouds in it. As if everything was me, and I was everything. I didn__ have any perception of time or space. All that there was, was an all- pervading eternity _ a state of non-dualism.