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How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.
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V.S. Ramachandran (The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human)
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Surely, there's strength in being dressed for a storm, even when there's no storm in sight?
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Yaa Gyasi (Transcendent Kingdom)
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The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.
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Abhijit Naskar (Principia Humanitas (Humanism Series))
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If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs—and becomes automatic—it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
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Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice.
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Bernd Heinrich (Why We Run: A Natural History)
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Each of your brains creates its own myth about the universe.
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Abhijit Naskar (Autobiography of God: Biopsy of A Cognitive Reality)
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Most people stand in the same place until it becomes dangerous to stay there. Then they act.
Exceptional people act today to write their story.
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Jim Lawless (Taming Tigers: Do Things You Never Thought You Could [Mar 05, 2012] Lawless, Jim)
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A fulfilling long-term relationship is not accomplished by just finding the one. It is rather a co-operation between two passionate and highly motivated partners working together, figuring out every single situation holding hands. If there is trust at the root of the relationship, if the partners make an effort to keep it interesting, if difficulties are handled tactfully and if you can appreciate every single deed of your partner no matter how insignificant it is, the flames of love would never burn out and your love can truly live happily ever after.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Art of Neuroscience in Everything)
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Everything that makes you, you, is a biologically existential expression of your entire brain.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
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All the repressed emotions and subconscious desires in time lead to some kind of psychological or physiological breakdown, if kept unchecked.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Krishna Cancer (Neurotheology Series))
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Are you a kind of person who likes to keep all your emotions hidden from the people around you! Do you prefer restraining your feelings a little too much! In that case, you must know that too much emotional suppression can have catastrophic impact over your body.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Art of Neuroscience in Everything)
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Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing.
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Steve Grand (Creation: Life and How to Make It)
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A BS in any neuroscience without a master's or PhD was a three-legged dog of a degree: pitiable, adorable, and capable of inspiring applause when it did anything for you at all.
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Daryl Gregory (Afterparty)
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All the terrorism in the world that fester in the name of religion, are in fact not religious in nature, rather they are socio-political. Their roots are not religion, but socio-political condition. Religion is only used as a divine tool of authoritative justification in the search of absolution.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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You are your mind, so if you can see it, you can achieve it.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Neurons giveth and neurons taketh away.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Fundamentalism not only fuels devastating acts of violence, but also all kinds of primitive prejudicial behaviors, such as Misogyny, Polygamy, Homophobia, and Islamophobia.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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All our sentiments - religious, romantic or any other - are born in the neurons.
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Abhijit Naskar (Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker)
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Soul neither comes from somewhere, nor does it go somewhere.
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Abhijit Naskar
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We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
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All achievements – all feats of excellence, rise from the protoplasmic realm of the brain.
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Abhijit Naskar (7 Billion Gods: Humans Above All)
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Anyone who utters “salvation only through Christ” inadvertently commits to the greatest blasphemy of all, which is differentiation, and this in turn diminishes the very essence of the title Christian.
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Abhijit Naskar (Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker)
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Human nature is a combination of modern conscience and ancient primitiveness. As the creation of the human mind in a state of transcendence, all scriptures are also a fusion of human conscience and gruesome primitiveness.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
“
Freedom of will is born from the neurons. And that freedom allows you to sometimes make even the worst decisions ever in your life. And by making the worst decision, you simply learn what would be the better decision in future.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
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Neurons can create time – they can destroy time – those neurons can create future, they can destroy future – those neurons can create a beautiful world, they can also create a horrible planet to live on – those neurons are both the pedestrians and the path of truth and liberty.
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Abhijit Naskar (Time to Save Medicine)
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The best way to build rapport with people or companies is to share in their beliefs and behaviors. When we don’t mesh with someone, when he or she rubs us the wrong way, or when we don’t aspire to the same values and passions, we routinely dismiss that person, just as we reject brands that are out of sync with our own lives.
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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How do we learn? Is there a better way? What can we predict? Can we trust what we’ve learned? Rival schools of thought within machine learning have very different answers to these questions. The main ones are five in number, and we’ll devote a chapter to each. Symbolists view learning as the inverse of deduction and take ideas from philosophy, psychology, and logic. Connectionists reverse engineer the brain and are inspired by neuroscience and physics. Evolutionaries simulate evolution on the computer and draw on genetics and evolutionary biology. Bayesians believe learning is a form of probabilistic inference and have their roots in statistics. Analogizers learn by extrapolating from similarity judgments and are influenced by psychology and mathematical optimization.
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Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
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It is much easier to concentrate the mind on external things, than to concentrate on the mind itself. For example, a Neuroscientist can be the smartest man (or woman) on earth in his understanding of the human mind. He may know all the neurochemical changes underlying an outrageous behavior of a person. But when he gets mad himself, very little of his own scientific intellect would actually come in handy for him to control his rage. The virtue of self-control is a skill, which requires practice, regardless of all the neurobiological expertise in the world.
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Abhijit Naskar (In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience (Neurotheology Series))
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Social: Alizé grew up in an environment that was contributing to lower blood flow in the brain. When she came to live with me and my wife, however, we surrounded her with people who live brain-healthy lives. It has inspired her to start adopting healthier habits that are boosting blood flow to her brain. Spiritual: For many people, like my grandfather, taking care of others takes precedence over taking care of themselves. Making your own health a priority may feel selfish, but making sure you are happy, healthy, and energetic is the key to being there for your family and friends.
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Daniel G. Amen (The End of Mental Illness: How Neuroscience Is Transforming Psychiatry and Helping Prevent or Reverse Mood and Anxiety Disorders, ADHD, Addictions, PTSD, Psychosis, Personality Disorders, and More)
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At a cellular level of the human mind, Islamophobia is not really a matter of social stigma, rather it is a natural biological fear response of the general human mind, conditioned through countless pairings between terrorist attacks (unconditioned stimulus) and their apparent association with Islam (conditioned stimulus). Hence, Islamophobia cannot be eradicated completely, unless that pairing is severed and thereafter the conditioned stimulus of Islam is paired with something optimistic such as the heartwarming works of the 13th century Persian Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
“
During the chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, when northern France was decimated by English troops and the French monarchy was in retreat, a young girl from Orléans claimed to have divine instructions to lead the French army to victory. With nothing to lose, Charles VII allowed her to command some of his troops. To everyone’s shock and wonder, she scored a series of triumphs over the English. News rapidly spread about this remarkable young girl. With each victory, her reputation began to grow, until she became a folk heroine, rallying the French around her. French troops, once on the verge of total collapse, scored decisive victories that paved the way for the coronation of the new king. However, she was betrayed and captured by the English. They realized what a threat she posed to them, since she was a potent symbol for the French and claimed guidance directly from God Himself, so they subjected her to a show trial. After an elaborate interrogation, she was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen in 1431. In the centuries that followed, hundreds of attempts have been made to understand this remarkable teenager. Was she a prophet, a saint, or a madwoman? More recently, scientists have tried to use modern psychiatry and neuroscience to explain the lives of historical figures such as Joan of Arc. Few question her sincerity about claims of divine inspiration. But many scientists have written that she might have suffered from schizophrenia, since she heard voices. Others have disputed this fact, since the surviving records of her trial reveal a person of rational thought and speech. The English laid several theological traps for her. They asked, for example, if she was in God’s grace. If she answered yes, then she would be a heretic, since no one can know for certain if they are in God’s grace. If she said no, then she was confessing her guilt, and that she was a fraud. Either way, she would lose. In a response that stunned the audience, she answered, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The court notary, in the records, wrote, “Those who were interrogating her were stupefied.” In fact, the transcripts of her interrogation are so remarkable that George Bernard Shaw put literal translations of the court record in his play Saint Joan. More recently, another theory has emerged about this exceptional woman: perhaps she actually suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. People who have this condition sometimes experience seizures, but some of them also experience a curious side effect that may shed some light on the structure of human beliefs. These patients suffer from “hyperreligiosity,” and can’t help thinking that there is a spirit or presence behind everything. Random events are never random, but have some deep religious significance. Some psychologists have speculated that a number of history’s prophets suffered from these temporal lobe epileptic lesions, since they were convinced they talked to God.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
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When you hear “Neuroscience” you would probably be thinking about the study of the nervous system. And that’s exactly how the field began its journey into scientific investigation. But I wanted to do something with it, which no other scientist or philosopher had done before. I began moulding the soft clay of Neuroscience with the ingredients of my own philosophy to prepare the actual science of self-realization.
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Abhijit Naskar
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When a leader is excited about a project, or trusts the people in the team, this too is infectious; fears are calmed and people are inspired to do their best.
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Paul Brown (The Fear-free Organization: Vital Insights from Neuroscience to Transform Your Business Culture)
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Criticisms are critical opportunities to purify your soul, for they have the potential to spark astounding neurochemical thought processes in your brain, which may not occur in a comfortable, supportive environment.
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Abhijit Naskar (Conscience over Nonsense)
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An entire life, lavishly colored with ecstasies and agonies, is exclusively born from the functional expression of neurochemistry. Every time that we sob in sorrow or laugh in joy, we do so, steered by a glorious storm of hormonal interplay within the deepest parts of our mind. And with each drop of tear that we shed in our times of excruciating pain, our brain constructs majestic new cellular connections to aid in the pursuit of our passion - in the pursuit of truth.
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Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
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I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, nor did I have access to information like you do today via the internet. I had to learn everything the hard way. And I had to become a scientist the old-fashioned way, which is, not through academia, but through trial and error. And my hardship opened up unforeseen gateways of perception in my mind. And through these gateways, today the whole world is able to see its inner self.
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Abhijit Naskar (I Am The Thread: My Mission)
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If you take a neuroscientific approach to rewiring your brain, then it requires you to stop remembering, retelling, reiterating, and maybe even repeating the past. It demands that you remember something new.
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Jennifer Fraser (The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health)
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We use science to find the courage of a child and get to the naked truth.
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Jennifer Fraser
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The development of quantum mechanics in the late 1920s expanded the classical notion of fields in a way that would have shocked Newtonian physicists. Quantum fields do not exist physically in space-time like the classically inferred gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Instead, quantum fields specify only probabilities for strange, ghostlike particles as they manifest in space-time. Although quantum fields are mathematically similar to classical fields, they are more difficult to understand because, unlike classical fields, they exist outside the usual boundaries of space-time. This gives the quantum field a peculiar nonlocal character, meaning the field is not located in a given region of space and time. With a nonlocal phenomenon, what happens in region A instantaneously influences what occurs in region B, and vice versa, without any energy being exchanged between the two regions. Such a phenomenon would be impossible according to classical physics, and yet nonlocality has been dramatically and convincingly revealed in modern physics experiments. In fact, those experiments are independent of the present formulation of quantum mechanics, which means that any future theory of nature must also embody the principle of nonlocality. We’ll return to nonlocality again in chapter 16. Consciousness Fields Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. —Claude Levi-Strauss The idea that consciousness may be fieldlike is not new.2 William James wrote about this idea in 1898, and more recently the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a similar idea with his concept of morphogenetic fields.3 The conceptual roots of field consciousness can be traced back to Eastern philosophy, especially the Upanishads, the mystical scriptures of Hinduism, which express the idea of a single underlying reality embodied in “Brahman,” the absolute Self. The idea of field consciousness suggests a continuum of nonlocal intelligence, permeating space and time. This is in contrast with the neuroscience-inspired, Newtonian view of a perceptive tissue locked inside the skull.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
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Because unconscious thoughts and muscle movements originate outside of conscious awareness, he argued, they feel alien and are readily interpreted as originating with spirits or other entities.19 The unconscious, as an “other” inside, is, when you think about it, really a very “occult” idea. Freud’s “hermeneutics of suspicion”20 naturally invited a suspicious rationalist skepticism in return. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, could not abide an unconscious formation in the psyche. To him, it smacked of bad faith, inauthenticity, the failure to take responsibility for our actions. For instance, he pointed out the contradiction inherent in the idea of a “censor” in the mind that could be aware enough of what it was censoring to form a judgment yet also be completely alien to our conscious experience. The “resistance” that impedes patients from developing self-insight implies a similar non-aware awareness: “the patient shows defiance, refuses to speak, gives fantastic accounts of his dreams, sometimes even removes himself completely from the psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of himself can resist.”21 There is no unconscious, Sartre argued, just the avoidance of responsibility. Claims of an unconscious mind that could only be explored through a highly subjective process of interpretation also offended the philosopher of science Karl Popper, one of Freud’s harshest critics. How would you test claims about an unconscious? Psychoanalysis is not a science, Popper contended, not only because its claims cannot be falsified but also because the clinical situation, with suggestible patients in a kind of trance-like thrall to their doctor, is an echo chamber—a machine for producing evidence in support of its premises (the usual meaning of “self-fulfilling prophecy”).22 Although 20th-century psychological science and neuroscience rejected Freud (and ignored Freud’s contemporaries in psychical research), it ultimately came around to embracing some notion of an unconscious—or what came to be called “implicit processing”—as a domain of cognitive functioning that is hypersensitive to subliminal signals and much quicker at making inferences and judgments than the conscious mind. Abundant experimental evidence shows implicit processing’s overriding dominance over anything like conscious will. A large school of thought, much of it inspired by Benjamin Libet’s work described in the preceding chapter, holds that we are mere spectators of our lives and that conscious will is an illusion, a kind of overlay. If the unconscious was for Freud the submerged majority of the iceberg, for some contemporary cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, it is all submerged—the tip is a mirage. We are unaware of the bulk of what seems to occur in our heads—there is thinking, sensing, and feeling that is not thought, sensed, or felt, and our non-experience of this huge domain is much more than a matter of bad faith (although there is that also). As with Freud’s unconscious, you can only probe the implicit domain indirectly, obliquely, via tools and paradigms such as priming tasks, like the ones Daryl Bem inverted in some of his “feeling the future” experiments.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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LOCAL SELF AS HOST FOR NONLOCAL SELF When you drop back into your daily life after meditation, you’re changed. You’ve communed with nonlocal mind for an hour, experiencing the highest possible cadence of who you are. That High Self version of you rearranges neurons in your head to create a physical structure to anchor it. You now have a brain that accommodates both the local self and the nonlocal self. My experience has been that the longer you spend in Bliss Brain, whether in or out of meditation, the greater the volume of neural tissue available to anchor that transcendent self in physical experience. Once a critical mass of neurons has wired together, a tipping point occurs. You begin to flash spontaneously into Bliss Brain throughout your day. When you’re idle for a while, like being stuck in traffic or standing in line at the grocery store, the most natural activity seems to be to go into Bliss Brain for a few moments. This reminds you, in the middle of everyday life, that the nonlocal component of your Self exists. It also brings all the enhanced creativity, productivity, and problem-solving ability of Bliss Brain to bear on your daily tasks. You become a happy, creative, and effective person. These enhanced capabilities render you much more able to cope with the challenges of life. They don’t confer exceptional luck. When everyone’s house burns down, yours does too. When the economy nosedives, it takes you with it. But because you possess resilience, and a daily experience of your nonlocal self, you take it in stride. Even when external things vanish, you still have the neural network that Bliss Brain created. No one can take that away from you. DEEPENING PRACTICES Here are practices you can do this week to integrate the information in this chapter into your life: Posttraumatic Growth Exercise 1: In your journal, write down the names of the most resilient people you’ve known personally. They can be alive or dead. They’re people who’ve gone through tragedy and come out intact. Make an appointment to spend time with at least two of the living ones in the coming month. Listen to their stories and allow inspiration to fill you. Neural Reconsolidation Exercise: This week, after a particularly deep meditation, savor the experience. Set a timer and lie down for 15 to 30 minutes. Visualize your synapses wiring together as you deliberately fire them by remembering the deliciousness of the meditation. Choices Exercise: Make 10 photocopies of illustration 7.4, the two doors. Next, analyze in what areas of your environment you often make negative choices. Maybe it’s in online meetings with an annoying colleague at work. Maybe it’s the food choices you make when you walk to the fridge. Maybe it’s the movies you watch on your TV. Tape a copy of the two doors illustration to those objects, such as the monitor, fridge, or TV. This will help you remember, when you’re under stress, that you have a choice.
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Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
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A second component of creativity is utility, very broadly defined. For example, it is possible to conceive of something novel—such as a car without wheels—that has no creative value at all. The concept of utility must be broadly defined, however, because creativity in the arts is not always obviously useful. Its utility resides primarily in its ability to evoke resonant emotions in others, to inspire, or to create a sense of awe at what the human mind/brain can achieve. A
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Nancy C. Andreasen (The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius)
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A second component of creativity is utility, very broadly defined. For example, it is possible to conceive of something novel—such as a car without wheels—that has no creative value at all. The concept of utility must be broadly defined, however, because creativity in the arts is not always obviously useful. Its utility resides primarily in its ability to evoke resonant emotions in others, to inspire, or to create a sense of awe at what the human mind/brain can achieve. A final component of creativity is that it must lead to a product of some kind. That
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Nancy C. Andreasen (The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius)
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how much is creativity under conscious control? To what extent do unconscious processes predispose to the creation of a poem or an idea? Alternatively, how important is careful preparation, logical planning, and detailed thinking-through of a sequence or a topic in advance of the act of creation? By all accounts, Kubla Khan was literally created as “a vision in a dream,” which was later recalled verbatim. It was not a consequence of any conscious effort. In fact, when Coleridge attempted to finish the poem using conscious effort, he failed completely. We have to ask how typical this is, and what other writers, artists, mathematicians, musicians, or scientists have to say about how they get their best ideas. How important is reason? How important is inspiration
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Nancy C. Andreasen (The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius)
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senses take in about 11 million bits of information every second, but we are only consciously aware of about 40 bits of that information! Which
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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Today cognitive neuroscience is proving that humans make decisions irrationally, perception is illusory, and our minds are designed for self-deception.
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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The future of marketing and branding depends on our capability to shift from this competitive mindset to a creative mindset. We need to live in the conscious presence of the frontal lobe, the part of the mind that doesn’t fear that the other guy will steal our slice of the market share pie, but envisions ways to bake a bigger pie.
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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Digital technology offers new, imaginative ways to connect personally and powerfully with potential customers in traditional ways like direct marketing. A great example of this comes from a Toronto Porsche dealer who went around some of the Canadian city’s most affluent neighborhoods with a shiny white 911 sports car, a digital camera, and a mobile printer. Taking photographs of the brand new vehicle parked in the driveways of these upscale homes, the dealer printed out custom ads and dropped them into the mail slots. The campaign featured the provocative headline: “It’s closer than you think.” The result was an astonishing 32 percent response rate, which means about a third of these prospects called to schedule a test drive, a staggering improvement over the very low single digit response rates typically deemed successful in traditional direct mail efforts.
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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Scott Bedbury, who is credited with building strong brands like Nike and Starbucks, says, “A great brand taps into emotions. Emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions. A brand reaches out with a powerful connecting experience. It’s an emotional connecting point that transcends the product.”17
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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In 2009 Southwest Airlines was the largest airline in the world based on the number of passengers that fly the airline each year,30 and in 2011 it was not only America’s leading low-cost carrier but was also rated America’s favorite airline by Consumer Reports.31 Joe Harris, a labor lawyer for Southwest, explains that the company’s harmonious employee relations are no accident. “At Southwest, our employees come first; our customers come second; and our stockholders come third,” he said. “The rationale is pretty simple. If we treat our employees right, they’re going to treat our customers right. If our customers are treated right, they will come back and our stockholders will benefit.
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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emotions influence our thinking more than our thinking influences our emotions. STEP
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Douglas Van Praet (Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing)
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In the society of thinking humanity, the natural law of trust should be - In I, I trust.
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Abhijit Naskar (Principia Humanitas (Humanism Series))
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He (Mohammed) was an ordinary man just like any other man. And as such his personal instincts, urges, drives as well as his philosophical goodness bubbled to the surface of his consciousness when he attained the Absolute Unitary Qualia.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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The one ultimate rule of the Quranic fundamentalists is “there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet”. Everything beyond that not only is bad, but must be destroyed forthwith. At moment’s notice, every man or woman, who does not exactly believe in that, must be killed.... This is not religion my friend. This is primitiveness at its worst.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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Why should a religion claim that it is not bound to abide by the standpoint of reason! If one does not take the standard of reason, there cannot be any true judgment, even in the case of religion.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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A person may hold his own beliefs and creeds to be dearest, and nourish them with all his might, but the moment he starts preaching the exclusive greatness and dominance over all other systems of beliefs and creeds, the world begins to plunge into a death trap.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
“
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’t 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.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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Lastly I’d say this – true religion, as a part of Neuroscience – a study of the mind – is the greatest and healthiest exercise that the human mind has. In some form or other, it is an evolutionary necessity of the human mind, not a luxury.
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Abhijit Naskar (In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience (Neurotheology Series))
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Biologically speaking, you are the child of Mother Nature, and neurologically speaking, you are the heirs of immortal bliss.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Science and Religion are two vividly different realms of the human mind. They work differently at the molecular level, but the purpose of both is alleviation of the mind from the darkness of ignorance.
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Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
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Every man is subconsciously promiscuous, but it is the conscious mind that keeps those primordial urges in check. A healthy brain creates a healthy mind, which keeps your relationship strong, safe and healthy.
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Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
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When circumstances pour the minds of some young helpless individuals with hatred and rage towards the society, and when that pain, hatred, and rage become unbearable, they turn to the scriptures as the final resort, in a pursuit to find absolution, guided by the psychopathic, misogynistic, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, fundamentalist preachers.
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Abhijit Naskar (In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience (Neurotheology Series))
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Love can literally transform a human being. It can make us do either heroic or evil deeds. It is the best inspiration ever.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Art of Neuroscience in Everything)
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Through the newly emerged field of Neurotheology, Scientists such as Andrew Newberg, Michael Persinger, myself and a few others 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. And the moment any religion does that, the eternal battle between Science and Religion would slowly start to disperse.
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Abhijit Naskar (In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience (Neurotheology Series))
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The universe perceives itself through us, or to be more specific, through our neurons.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
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You know who you are and what you are capable of, because of your own personal history and the experiences you gained throughout that history.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
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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.
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Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
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Pathology can indeed evoke experiences of Absolute Godliness, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology. They can also occur due to disturbance in the geomagnetic field of our planet, consumption of psychedelics, excruciatingly extreme level of stress during a near- death situation, or ultimately through a natural and healthy procedure of meditation or/and prayer.
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Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
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When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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A healthy brain leads to a healthy you.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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The more a person is united within himself or herself and inwardly simple, the more and higher things he or she understands, because he or she receives the light of understanding from within.
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Abhijit Naskar (Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker)
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The Self is the measure of everything.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Ten minutes of meditation a day, keeps the psychiatrist away.
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Abhijit Naskar
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God is hardwired within the neural circuitry.
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Abhijit Naskar (The God Parasite: Revelation of Neuroscience)
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There is no such thing as reincarnation, but only similar incarnation.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Nurturing Activities Self-Assessment In this section, you will discover the things you are doing now to nurture your well-being. In the section “Things I Do Now,” write all the activities you can think of that you really enjoy that you do now. For example, you may enjoy getting a massage, working out in the gym, playing tennis, reading a novel, or just taking a walk in the woods. Next think about how each of these activities supports one or more of the four dimensions of your personal growth and development: physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Activities that promote physical development include such things as exercise, relaxation, and massage. Those that promote emotional development include fun things with others that make you happy, such as attending a party with friends, seeing an inspirational film, or just sharing a meal with your family. You can promote your intellectual development by, for example, reading newspapers or intellectually stimulating magazines or books, attending courses, or having intellectual discussions with your colleagues. Activities that give your life meaning and help you connect to something greater than yourself give you spiritual meaning. These can be activities done in a religious context, such as attending services, but they can also be purely secular, such as reading an inspirational poem or practicing mindfulness. Next think about things that you are not doing now but would like to do. Again consider how each of these activities supports the four dimensions. This is your self-care plan. Things I Do Now: Activity Physical Emotional Intellectual Inner Life Self-Care Plan: Activity Physical Emotional Intellectual Inner Life
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Patricia A. Jennings (Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills for Peace and Productivity in the Classroom (The Norton Series on the Social Neuroscience of Education))
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We Neuroscientists have come a long way in proving that God is neither a Delusion nor an Almighty Being watching over life on Earth. God is the Event Horizon of Human Consciousness. I termed this state of attaining God, as 'Absolute Unity Qualia'.
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Abhijit Naskar
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A prayer/meditation a day, keeps the Doctor away.
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Abhijit Naskar
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All that two lovers want, is to be one with the other in a moment of ecstasy.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Art of Neuroscience in Everything)
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Qualia of God refers to the private subjective experience or conception of God in people.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
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Practice creates more connections among the neurons, which push you a little further towards perfection.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Through the sacred verses filled with violence and self-righteousness, the minds of the angry individuals find a way to get rid of all their misery. At that unstable state of consciousness, they are drawn to the description of the Holy War. They visualize a glimmer of hope. They feel absolutely immersed in it. Finally when they emerge as holy warriors, they are no longer humans, from the emotional perspective. They emerge as wild beasts, neurologically almost unable to feel human emotions, like empathy, love, kindness and compassion. Consequently the whole world faces the wrath of the most primitive of all human elements in the name of God’s judgment.
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Abhijit Naskar (In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience (Neurotheology Series))
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It is necessary for the future scientists interested in the field of Neurotheology, to have a bit naïve approach towards the whole idea of God and religion beyond the conventional labels of religion and atheism.
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Abhijit Naskar
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God heals as well as God kills.
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Abhijit Naskar (The God Parasite: Revelation of Neuroscience)
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It is pretty simple - mind is a part of life - consciousness is a part of mind - God is a part of consciousness.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Nanak wanted to preach people that God loves both the Hindus and the Muslims the same way. Believing in his spiritual encounter, he wanted to eliminate the distance between the Hindus and the Muslims by teaching the words of equality and One God. But just like usual, he ended up forming yet another religion which became more and more hardcore with its own rituals and regulations in the hands of the subsequent nine Gurus.
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Abhijit Naskar (The God Parasite: Revelation of Neuroscience)
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Each day I wake up with a naive perspective of life and universe, and walk towards understanding a little more about the true nature of human perception with all its vivacious nuances and behavioral expressions.
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Abhijit Naskar
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No Scripture comes from any Supreme Creator.
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Abhijit Naskar
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You are at the same time, a god and a demon. When the god in you lacks nourishment, the demon gets hold of your entire psyche. But if you keep fueling the god within, with courage, conscience and compassion, it keeps the demon under its conscientious control through the cortical gateway of your prefrontal cortex. Thus, racial attitude can be kept in check - prejudices can be kept in check – so can be supremacist egotism.
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Abhijit Naskar (Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human)
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I am very much aware of the fact that there would come people who would attempt to proclaim me being a reincarnation of various sages and monks. But mind you, o conscientious soul, soul doesn’t travel through time, only ideas do, for glorious ideas seek out various vessels through time and inspire the whole world by shaping their psyche, over and over.
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Abhijit Naskar (Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human)
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Find Meaning, Find Yourself.
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Diana Dentinger (Modus Vivendi - Your Life Your Way: 7 Days to Self Transformation)
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What you today perceive as beautiful and special, over time, becomes not so special. That’s how the human brain works.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
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The human brain is, after all, the best example we have of an intelligent system. If we can learn its methods, we can use these biologically inspired paradigms to build more intelligent machines. This book is the earliest serious examination of the human brain from the perspective of a mathematician and computer pioneer. Prior to von Neumann, the fields of computer science and neuroscience were two islands with no bridge between them.
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John von Neumann (The Computer and the Brain: Abused City (The Silliman Memorial Lectures Series))
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Don't let yourself loose without
tapping into your 'power to choose'.
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Dr. Sandeep Atre
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I don't write to inspire you, I write to destroy you, because without the bravehearts to destroy themselves, there'll be no society.
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Abhijit Naskar (Gente Mente Adelante: Prejudice Conquered is World Conquered)
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BROADCASTING RESONANCE Anchored in nonlocal consciousness, your local life begins to change. As you resonate with the cycles of nature, as your heart’s coherence conditions the energy space around you, as you vibrate to the signal of love and joy in your consciousness, you attract people and conditions that match your states and traits. Without effort, as your magnificent new signal broadcasts out around you, resonating with the music of the universe, you’ll come into synchrony with people and events that bless and delight you. You’ll discover that you’re not alone. As you tune to the great symphony of life each day, you’ll find that you’re tuned to millions of other people who are likewise attuned. With no effort at all, you’ll discover wonderful new friends and companions wherever you travel. As the light shines from your eyes, it meets the light in the eyes of others. When you’re awake, you naturally enjoy others who are awake. 9.3. Coming into synchrony. LOVING THE SLEEPER Not everyone is awake, and that’s fine. Sometimes your friends and family members are tossing in their sleep, suffering unnecessarily. Their plight touches you. You feel their misery. You would love to see them wake up, and shed those beliefs, thoughts, and habits that drag them down. You can’t force them to do so, no matter how much you love them. Everyone makes their own choice. What you can do for people who are suffering is shine brightly yourself. If they’re ready, they’ll wake up. If they don’t, trust the universe. We each wake up when the time is right. Their time might come later; it’s not up to you. You can share this book and other resources with them. You can share your story as I have shared mine, and perhaps these examples will inspire them. If and when each of us wakes up is our choice. UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL As you live in synchrony with the universe, enjoying the community of other Bliss Brainers, you find new possibilities opening up. You start to unlock potential that’s been trapped inside the suffering, selfing self. Increasingly, you’re not just in Bliss Brain during meditation. You’re in the Awakened Mind state with your eyes open, going about your day. All kinds of possibilities that were previously unavailable to you now become available.
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Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
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Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
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Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
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Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.
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Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)