May 23, 2015
How science came to agree:
the spiritual world-view is correct
The two people shown above recently met at a USA airport just by chance, but their meeting—and the picture—are symbolic of a major world development.
On the left is Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami, publisher of Hinduism Today and a renowned religious leader and mystic. On the right is Prof. Rudolph Tanzi of Harvard Medical School, a top scientist and expert on the humain brain and Alzheimer's disease.
Mystic and scientist. Their respective world views should be a strident mismatch, right? Well, not at all. In fact, they turn out to be blissfully harmonious, and augur most happily for the world. How can that be?
Bottom line is that, today, more and more scientists are concluding that the fundamental element of existence is not matter but consciousness. Rudolph Tanzi is such a one.
In the book that he co-authored with Deepak Chopra, Super Brain, (Harmony Books, 2012) Tanzi presents the major discoveries science has made about the brain in the last 20 years—of which there are a great number. These major breakthroughs depart so radically from earlier scientific models as to be astounding and hardly believable, even to one steeped in spirituality.
The author explains on p.111 that as he began to delve into Hindu teachings (specifically in the book Merging with Siva by Gurudeva, Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, founder of Hinduism Today), he found the key to pulling together the immense body of recent scientific discoveries about the brain into a one unified vision, which Super Brain describes.
As that vision unfolds through the pages, one is reminded of, well... the Upanishads! Reminded of, well... Hinduism Today's many insight articles!
The book turns the ordinary scientific view of who we humans are and how we function totally upon its head. The usual scientific confusion between brain and mind is instantly dismissed. It is the mind that directs the brain, not the brain that creates the mind or makes you who you are. Countless top scientists, says Tanzi, have now concluded that:
It is consciousness that creates matter, not the other way around.
We are not the result of the brain's activities or determined by them. On the contrary, it is the brain who is the faithful servant of "you," the intelligent, etheral being that guides it and whose every subtle command it responds to—even if we are not conscious of the fact.
And what does the brain do in response to the mind's needs and wishes? It gets busy creating nothing short of your whole world, for you, and for you alone, exactly the way you sincerely, truly want and need it, the way your highest self, the director of it all, wants it! They are not saying the world is wholly illusory or personal. They are saying that every attribute of every phenomenon is wholly created by the brain. It is in that sense that the brain creates one's world.
Tanzi quotes Bernard d'Espagnat, a French physicist:
The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with the facts established by experiment.
We did say above that some of these new scientific findings challenge the imagination, and our credulity. Of course, if you know Hindu scripture, it will sound familiar, but you may still find it incredible that these are scientists saying this.
We feel this scientific unfoldment is, or going to be a game-changer for our world. It is the "major world development" we heralded above.
Now, how does my one little brain create all the billion details of my entire world? Tanzi explains that the number of our brain cells is astronomical, and the number of pathways they can generate is far, far greater in number than any other quantity in the known universe. Plus, the brain can create new cells anytime it needs to. And further, it can even create cells with new DNA whenever the situation calls for it.
Thus, the brain can make manifest in one's life literally anything. There is no limit imaginable. Or, as Gurudeva promises in Merging with Siva, "You are a being with unlimited power within."
The unlimited power of prayer and affirmation, i.e., of your higher, intelligent self giving instruction to your brain (or subconscious) to create a certain positive effect, now has the full backing of science, and it is no longer tenable for anyone to say it does not.
NOTE: Though we mentioned Chopra minimally, he did contribute much to the book, mostly in giving examples of how the new brain discoveries can be applied to enhance the various levels of our life. That is a powerful part of the book. But in this article, we focused on the theoretical, scientific dimension only.
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