Did Adolf Hitler win?

I was brought up to believe that an eye for an eye was “old testament” barbarism, superseded by teachings from Jesus, Gandhi etc.

But now we have Israel which has taken 1,300 Palestinian lives, while losing roughly 13 Israelis–a ratio of 100:1.

100 eyes for one eye? It is beginning to appear that Hitler suceeded.  He seems to have won in the end; we now have a large number of Jews (those in Israel and those that support Israel’s current policy in Gaza)  behaving like Nazis.  They kill indiscriminately and have converted Gaza into a ghetto.

You may not agree, but I am no anti-Semite.  Had the same thing been done to the Jews in Israel, I hope I would be there to protest likewise.

Practice what you Preach Index

Here is a “Practice what you Preach” index–a quantitative way of measuring whether a group of people really do practice what they preach.

The index can be applied to various groups ex. income based groups, or race based groups or age based groups. However, since “practicing what you preach” is an index of morality, I thought it would be interesting to calculate this measure for various religions.

So here goes. I break the 109th Congress–yes, the very one that voted in favor of authorizing Bush’s war in Iraq–into its religious components and express that as a percentage of the total number of people in congress. Since these are members of Congress, I call them the “preachers” as they preach and legislate what we ought to do. I then normalize this percentage by the group’s corresponding percentage in the general public in this case Americans 18 years of age and older. I call the resulting index, the “Preach Index”.

I do the same thing for the military–break them into their religious groups and express that as a percentage of the total. These I call the “practicers” as they put into practice what the preachers have called for. I normalize this percentage just as I did those for the members of Congress by their corresponding percentage in the general public. and I call this the “Practice Index”.

Then I simply divide the Preach Index by the Practice Index to obtain the “Practice what you Preach Index”.

If a religious group has an index of one, it means they do indeed practice what they preach. If the index is less than one, then they practice, but do not preach. And if the index is greater than one, then lo and behold, here are those that preach, but do not practice. A number of zero indicates that this group has no “preachers”.

The results are shown below. Catholics, and Christians in general preach a bit more than they practice, Muslims, Budhists and Hindus have no preachers and so are at zero. Atheists and those with no religion practice far more than they preach, while the reverse holds true for Jews.

Note:
* reported as less than 0.5% and so 0.4 % is used as the possible upper bound–results in total % exceeding 100.
Civilian population numbers obtained from the 2002 General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Center
Military figures are for 2001 and are from the DoD Defense Manpower Data Center

Religion at war with science, not the other way

I often hear people say that religion and science are at war with each other. Till now, always accepted this at face value. However, this is wrong–science and religion are not at war with each other–rather, it is religion that is at war with science.

The recent demotion of Pluto from being a full planet, came as a shock to me. It shows the brutal way in which science deals with facts–acknowledges them even though they may cause discomfort to many.

If science were to discover proof of “god”, then it would be the staunchest defender of “god”. It would elevate god to something that it would defend.

In short, it is not science that is at war with religion. Rather, it is religion that is at war with science.

Israel’s Undigested Meme

One thing curiously missing from all the discussion about Israel and the Occupied Territories is the clearly observable, recognizable Nazi techniques in the Israel state. This is not surprising–the trauma of the holocaust, part and parcel of Israel’s founding meme, undigested, has been passed on through generations. In this post, I attempt to, make my case.

At the outset, let me make clear that I am not (or do not think that I am) anti-Semite. Rather, I feel for both sides and hope that they both make peace with each other and live in harmony. My fear is that the lack of acknowledgement of this meme will cause its continuous acting out, and that consequently peace will never be reached. Hence the motivation for this article.

The main thrust of my argument is that certain obvious actions of the state of Israel are demonstrably found in the actions of Nazi’s to the Jews in Europe during the World War II, and before. These main actions by the Nazi’s were: 1) acting against the Jews “legally” i.e. within “state law”, 2) appropriating Jewish land and property 3) ghettoizing of the Jews including the use of walls and barriers and 4) killing a multiple of Jews or their supporters for every single German death.

Aspects of this Nazi driven meme can also be found in hard-core supporters of Israel outside of Israel such as AIPAC–who subscribe to the policy of “Israel, right or wrong” strangely oblivious to the old Nazi slogan “Deutscland uber alles.” In most cases, you willl find that the supporters have close ties to someone who suffered horrendously at the hands of the Nazis. I do not go into these points as they dilutes from my main case–that the current actions of Israel contain clearly observable latent Nazi techniques.

One of the curious aspects of the Nazi actions against the Jews is that they were all “legal” as per Government rules in effect when the Nazi regime was in power. Thus the majority of Israeli incursions into the Occupied Territories, the assassinations of Palestinian targets, while all illegal under international law, are legal under Israeli law.

Another prominent aspect of the Nazi oppression of the Jews was that all property was confiscated not just by the Nazi state, but also opportunistically by rank and file citizens of the Nazi states. For example, to this day there exist living Poles who live in houses that Jews once owned, the Poles having settled into these houses, when the Nazi’s, often with their help evicted and deported the Jews to concentration camps. So too the Israeli settlers. They see nothing wrong in their actions, as the still undigested meme handed down to them by those who in turn lost their property, continues to operate.

Conditions in the occupied territories resemble those within many Jewish ghettos. The barriers and checkpoints that the Palestinians go through to reach their work resemble similar barriers that Jews had to go through in order to go outside the ghetto.

A standard Nazi technique was to kill multiple members of Jews and their supporters for every single Nazi death at the hands of the Jews or their supporters. So to the “kill ratio” i.e. the ratio of Palestinians to Jews is typically three and sometimes higher. As in the case of the Nazis, the Palestinians killed often have no direct connection to the Palestinian that did the original killing.

Sadly, Adolph Hitler’s hatred still lives today, ironically embedded in a meme that exists at the heart of Israel’s psyche, driving the very targets of his hate, making them act in a fashion he would have immediately recognized and understood. The unpalatable, unfortunate result is Israel’s harsh actions, which in turn create a lot of new anti-Semitism and cause many would be or one time sympathisers to loose their empathy for Israel.

Gandhi was correct to say that one should guard against imitating and following the same techniques of ones own oppressors. Rather one should identify those aspects of the oppressor in oneself, and then consciously guard against acting out these tendencies. India itself has failed to do this so how can one really blame Israel. They are trapped in their own nightmare.

I too have failed in this regard. When I look into my own heart, I find that I too tend to use the tools and techniques of those that did me the greatest damage, and that enshrined in my own heart, is the image of the person that had the greatest negative impact on my own life. In this way, I am no different from Israel, but I hope to change by my conscious recognition of this interior landscape of my psyche.

Posted by Path at 7:45 PM 0 comments  

Blue Pearl–Part II

It was March 19th when I first accidentally stumbled on the blue pearl during my meditation (see my previous post). I have an update for those of you who may find it of interest.

I have had four insights, two changes in my behavior and one extremely puzzling and tantalizing type of experience directly as a result of this blue pearl meditation. For those of who are interested, the rest of this posting provides details.

The insights I had were first, that this experience of the blue pearl is pretty “robust”. Thus after my first experience of it, I was afraid to meditate again for fear that the pearl wouldn’t show up once more. The literature I had read on it suggested that its appearance was “outside of one’s control” and so I thought it was “beginner’s luck” and that it would not show up again. After a week, I convinced myself that it would not show up again and so lost my fear and started meditating once more. Within ten minutes, the pearl showed up…and it keeps showing up. Now I find that it shows up immediately, then five minutes or so into my meditation I lose it, but then after another five minutes or so, it is back, brighter than ever. Some times it is light blue, others deep blue and also on occasion, purple. On the rare occasions when it hasn’t shown up, it has been mostly because I was too excited about something that may have happened during the day. In short, the pearl appears to be pretty “robust”, showing up almost every time I meditate. It also shows up reliably when I do “yoga nidra” and once during yoga nidra, I also first saw a sparkling orange oval. Was this the “orange chakra”? See for ex. http://www.healer.ch/orangechakra.html

The second insight was that the feeling I get when I breathe “from” the blue pearl is that of imbibing a nectar…perhaps I should say a “drug”, and that the fact my meditation is now something I do daily is perhaps more because I need my “daily fix” of this drug. I used to drink a lot of alcohol, but for the last seven years, I have not had a single drink. What I really mean is I am too familiar with over imbibing, but, the experience with the blue pearl and the self generated “blue pearl drug” is something else. It seems to have no negative side effects it seems, has positive effects (more on that later), and seems “deeper” and to have more “body” to it then alcohol. I have to conclude that it is indeed some kind of a drug, though a highly positive one.

The third insight is this: that perhaps a strong case could be made for the evolution of a “positive feelings drug” production system within human beings. My reasoning is simple, though some would probably say “simplistic”. It is that of all the creatures in the world, only humans have enough brain capacity to make a decision to end their own lives. In the primitive past, life must have been pretty terrible, and so, people who did not have a built in system in their bodies to generate “optimistic” chemicals probably chose to kill themselves, gradually increasing the pool of people who did generate these chemicals. Most of our waking moments our minds are too busy to be aware of the effect of these chemicals, and perhaps stilling the mind by meditation, triggers off the intense awareness of these chemicals and possibly also their more intense generation. One way to test this would be to see to find out what these chemicals are, the physiology behind their generation, and whether other animals have this physiology.

The fourth and last insight is this–that emptying the mind can only be done if one has a deep internal relationship with oneself so that one is comfortable with ones life experiences and has resolved to ones own satisfaction any traumas or other psychic imbalances that live experience may have created. To have resolved the traumas of earlier life is not sufficient. Daily dialogue either with oneself or with a trusted other is required to wash away the accretions of daily life that reside in the mind. Unless this is done, “issues” keep surfacing when one is trying to empty ones mind. While Swami Rama claims that one can resolve ones own traumas on ones own, I personally doubt it–I think that the Swami may have been personally lucky and not experienced deep trauma–or that he in fact did not himself resolve his own traumas (hence a possible basis for his purported behavior before he left the US.) I feel that the best way to resolve these issues is to have a trusted person who can help you through the trauma in question. Once this is done, the mind can be emptied. The reduction in trauma and the mental baggage only needs be sufficient to where one can still the mind—i.e. it does not need to be 100% complete.

The two changes in my behavior are first that I mediate daily before going to bed, on my own volition and without a bit of compulsion. I suspect that what is behind this is mostly because my need to get my “optimistic drug” fix. My sleep quality seems to have increased, and as a result, I seem to sleep less–the ten minutes of meditation being paid back by 30 minutes less of sleep.

Second, a big change seems to have come over me. All my life I have tried to control my outbursts of irritability and grumpiness at home but for have failed, try as I might. I also used to go through bouts of pessimism and sadness, possibly depression. Since the advent of the blue pearl, all this seems to have simply washed away. I no longer am irritable, nor do I experience the moods I used to have before. I seem to be on the other hand, at my creative peak in my life, and the most positive I have ever been. My wife too acknowledges this change in behavior!

The extremely puzzling and tantalizing experience was this. Thrice in the first month of my blue pearl experiences, something happened in my head that I guess is what they call “bindu”. What happened was I saw a tiny speck of bright light–about the size of the head of a pin like the one in the Sprint telephone ads. The first time it happened the speck was blue, the second time white and the third time yellowish. Each time it seemed to last a moment of time–a flash, thought it felt timeless. It would feel like as if a silent, painless hydrogen bomb had gone off and around it to seemingly infinity, it was lighted by the light from this speck. Concepts of time and space seemed to vanish though in reality, it probably lasted but a second.

I have been unable to reproduce this and I suspect that what happened is that in the beginning, my “route” to the blue pearl was not “set” i.e. I had no experience and so no set path that I consciously or unconsciously followed other than to close my eyes, try to empty my mind and look through my “third eye”. Consequently, I may have accidentally touched upon an approach to “bindu”. With more and more experience with attaining the blue pearl experience, sad to say, I may have become set in my “path”, a path that for whatever reason is by passes what ever it is that triggers bindu.

This then remains my quest–to see if I can consciously attain and maintain the state of “bindu”. Again, the thrust will be to identify a robust mechanism that is fact based and not “supernatural”.

Meditation for Atheists–Blue Pearl and Beyond

Heard of a game called “Googlewhack”? It consists of finding two words that when “googled” return exactly one result. Within a few days of finding such a word combination, it gets compromised i.e. subsequent searches will find more than one result, since its listing at the googlewhack.com site, itself becomes a valid Google result.

At the time of this writing, a Google search with the phrase “meditation for atheists” returned exactly zero results. Here is what the search returned:

—————————
Your search – “meditation for atheists” – did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

• Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
• Try different keywords.
• Try more general keywords.

————————

This is somewhat surprising – why is meditation thought to be something religious? I am an atheist, and have been meditating for the last two years. Also, during my meditation, I regularly see the “blue pearl”. When I first saw it, I did not know what it was. However, I was filled with an intensely positive attitude for many days after that, and meditation, instead of becoming a chore, suddenly became like “nectar in a flower” that I went to time and again, in order to “taste”.

I googled (of course!) “meditation and colors” and came across fairly precise descriptions of what I saw. There was a lot of (to me) nonsense about it being a “gateway to a higher dimension”, “a portal through which god showers HIS (of course it would be “his”!) love on me”, “the essence of the soul” etc. and that to see it, one had to be “pure”, “brahmacharya” and so on.

But I know that I am not pure, and no brahmacharya either! Also I knew, that I had taken a precise action during my meditation, an action based on some scienctific research that I had read about, but which I did not think would have any impact. I took this action more out of curiosity but within a couple of minutes of taking this action, saw the “blue pearl”. My meditation practice has gone from where it had been stuck at for about two years, to a whole new level.

Reading the meditation literature that is currently available, I get the strange feeling that I am reading something “pre-scientific” i.e. much like how problems of physics were described prior to Galileo and Newton.

I think that descriptions of meditation are “pre-scientific” and could remain pre-scientific for another millennia, except that just as the telescope and Galileo changed physics making it precise and measurable, so too will someone with brain-scanning equipment make the process of meditation measurable and founded completely on physiological processes.

Anyway, for those who are curious about what I did to see the “blue pearl” here is the story:
For two years I had been practicing a form of meditation called “Blue Mountain” meditation, taught by Eknath Easwaran. This form of meditation consists of finding a “mantra” – a piece of poetry or prayer or even a word, that inspires you – and then repeating this mantra slowly while seated comfortably, and with eyes closed. When the mind wanders, one is to simply notice that the mind has wandered and come back to the mantra.

I practiced this daily for about six months and thought it was wonderfully calming. However, I guess it wasn’t sufficiently beneficial for me to continue a daily practice and soon I found myself meditating only once a week.

Then recently (March 2006) as a result of an article I read on the brain, I concluded that the mantra was a “distraction” and that I would probably go into a deeper state of meditation if I stopped repeating it. I then forgot about my conclusion till a few weeks later, when about ten minutes into my meditation, I suddenly remembered my conclusion and decided to try it out. Simultaneously, I decided that there was no “smoke without a fire” and so I imagined I had an eye at the center of my forehead and tried to look out through it.

Again, my basis for doing this was also reality based and quite funny. When I was young there used to be a boy in my class who could wiggle his ears. Try hard though I did, I was unable to do so. I had a strange feeling of “paralyisis” in my face/ears and not even a sense that there was a muscle or set of muscles in place to do the wiggling. But I kept trying, and suddenly one day to my amazement, I was able to wiggle my ears. I can still wiggle them, something that causes babies to cry and old men to weep piteously and ask me to stop. But my thought was…let me try it and see if anything happens, like how I tried to wiggle my ears thirty years ago.

I first saw a reddish haze and throughout it was just the blood in my eyelids. Then it went black, and suddenly a tiny blue oval appeared. It had flecks in it and shimmered. It moved around, then stabilized. I thought to myself – “What is going on here? I am hallucinating!” The blue oval looked like the surface of a sparkling ocean. I thought that could it be, that having stilled the parts of my brain associated with reasoning, I was accessing some kind of vestigial memory from the primitive parts of my brain? The blue spot suddenly became a “sheet of blue” and then “rushed” towards me at which point it disappeared.

Later I googled for “colors and meditation” and that is when I came up with “blue spot” experiences of others along with a lot of nonsense of having to be pure, a believer in god, a brahmacharya etc. Later I tried again, fully expecting to NOT see the blue pearl. But I find that I am able to systematically prepare my mind and conjure it up, and that the impact while not as strong as the first time…is definitely a source of comfort and peace.

This blog is to try to create a type of meditation that is based on results of brain studies done on experienced meditators. The hope is to leverage these results and to provide a way for a rationalist to systematically and fairly quickly experience the highest fruits of meditation.

I also do believe that while unscientific, folklore almost always has a kernel of truth. Thus I do believe the reports that beyond the “blue pearl” there exists a higher state of meditation – that of “bindu”. For the next few years I hope to explore meditation and to find out what is behind the “blue pearl” experience and what (“bindu?”) lies beyond it. I will post my experiences into this “blogspot”. If you too are an atheist/rationalist and meditate (or for that matter even if you don’t), please, please do provide me with your own views and experiences.

I suspect that a lot of the practices and requirements currently associated with meditation are counter productive ex. listening to music, or watching a flame and prevent one from reaching very deep meditative states. I also suspect that other requirements are needless and based on prejudices from 2000 years ago. Thus the belief that one has to be “brahmacharya” is I think needless based on my present observations.

For those who care, here is the “unscientific, intuitive” way in which I reached the conclusion that the mantra was counter productive beyond a certain point.

One day, I read an article, in of all places Foxnews.com (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,182641,00.html) that said when people are confronted with facts that do not jell with their political opinions, the parts of their brain associated with emotions become very active, but no activity is seen in the parts of the brain associated with reason. It struck me that when I am in a situation where the facts don’t agree with my opinion, I often sense a “freezing/clenching” in the front of my head, about two inches or so behind my forehead, and I seem unable to provide “rational reasons” for my stance, and have to resort to “sputtering” and making illogical or weak claims and attributions. It feels as if a “shutter” has come down and closed down my ability to think.

Fair enough…except that next Sunday, I did a “Blue Mountain” meditation when lo and behold, I felt the same “freezing/clenching/shutter coming down” in my head. “Hullo!” said I….”can this be what scientists say – that when meditating, brain scans indicate that the reasoning centers of the brain shut down” i.e. just as when confronted with facts that do not jell with my opinions, does meditation create the same reaction in the brain (without the emotional overload can come with the former situation), and if so, does that mean keeping ones eyes open, listening to music, uttering mantras, or smelling incense etc. all distract the brain?

I immediately forgot about this, till the next week, when as I mentioned, about ten minutes into my meditation, I dropped the mantra, and the “blue pearl” suddenly appeared.

So there you have it. I’ll keep you posted on my futher “research”!

Some Bad Poetry

Darwin was Right

When I went to the church
And saw the conviction
The faith, the sincerity, the devotion
And the lack of questions

When I went to the streets
And saw the rich in their luxury
Drive by the poor in the gutter
With not a second thought

When I went to the office
And saw the clever engineer
Talk proudly about his latest bomb design
Righteous and brightly confident

When I went to the polls
And saw the frightend people
Led by articulate, confident, handsome leaders
To cause further terror, destruction and mayhem

I knew – Darwin was right
We are, but intelligent monkeys

In the end it was not the DNA analysis
(which I do not understand)
Nor the anthropology
(which also I do not understand)
But the behavior
That convinced me.

Darwin was right
We are, but intelligent monkeys

What is Art?–the DeCordova and the Louvre

Recently the family decided to have a picnic in the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. It was a beautiful afternoon and we began to examine the various sculptures in the Cordova’s garden. One was a strange burnt looking object about 20 feet tall and titled “No more cookies and cream”. “What did it mean?” I asked my brother, and he replied – “Its a burnt out girl scout’s tent. There are going to be no more cookies and cream.”

Now it made sense to me. It dawned on me, that the exhibits in this museum, were all along a similar vein – the whimsical products of an upper middle-class environment – either of the artists or of the patrons of the artists. This in a country where about 2,000 people have just died in a war that many view as needless, and in a state that is the first in the country to legalize same-sex marriage.

The contrast with the Louvre that we had visited the month before, was startling, and not because of the age or value of the art work in either place, but because of the “safe art” in the DeCordova vs. the “controversial art” at the Louvre.

When we were at the Louvre, we came to a balcony overlooking the main lobby and found that the place had been flooded by students who were doing a “lying in”. They were chanting something in French, and also had a huge banner saying something in French. There were three students next to me on the lobby and I asked them what the protest was about. They smiled enigmatically at me and repeated my question in fluent English. Then they looked at each other and laughed, but did not explain what the protest was about.

It turned out that these three were actually leaders of the protest. From the balcony, they would shout a phrase, that the other students below would respond to. There were a few policemen nearby and I ask them what the protest was about. I got the same smile and knowing looks among them. I also asked the Museum guides and got the same treatment. The other visitors to the museum appeared to be as ignorant as us as to what the protest was about.

It seemed that if one did not know what the protest was about, that then it could not be explained. Either one was “on the bus, or off the bus” and explanations were not going to help. There was one clue however and that was that the students were from an “arts college” and some how I got the impression that they were protesting the shape of the “new” Louvre – the pyramid structure created by I.M. Pei and this, well over a decade after the structure was created.

Contrast this with the safe “white bread and milk” art of the DeCordova, and one realizes that great artists make great statements with their art. They do not simply create things that are simply pretty, whimsical, or self-indulgent. Great art points to great, deep things – things that stir the soul.

Karl Jung used to paint the dreams that he had and his patients tried to get him to give an “art show” of these paintings. Jung refused. He said the paintings were not art – that simply reproducing the images of the subconscious did not create objects of art.

Picasso on the other hand, very consciously used the symbols of the subconscious as a language with which to frame issues that were both relevant to the day and timeless because both the symbols/imagery he used as well as the ideas they were conveying were timeless. This is what great artists do – phrase important issues in a way that transcends the immediate impetus for the painting. They use timeless symbols/imagery to convey the idea. A burnt out girl scout’s tent that seeks to convey the idea that there are going to be no more cookies and cream seems to me to be whimsical, not framing any important question or idea.

The art at the DeCordova is “pretty” art – not great art. The reason it is not a museum on par with the Louvre is not that it lacks money. What it lacks is the will to depict stirring art. It is the natural outcome of the background of both its backers and its visitors – privileged residents of a rich first world country, who by and large are very comfortable with the status-quo.

The Long Trip to India–This Very Body the Buddha, This Very Earth the Paradise

This one single thing has made the whole trip (at least so far) worth it – the discovery of OSHO and his writings. Before you roll your eyes and move on, I beseech you to read the rest of this write up.

Standing in a bookstore in Chennai called Landmark, in front of the Cafe, I came across a whole shelf of books by OSHO. I had always thought (though I had read none of his books) that OSHO was a stereotypical guru – someone who had fooled Westerners into giving him a lot of money in return for “metaphysical garbage”.

However, one book grabbed my attention, and I picked it up, flicked it open and lo and behold was confronted by OSHO’s explanation of a favorite parable of mine – Nietzsche’s delightful story about the “camel, the lion, and the child” in “Thus Spake Zaruthashtra”. OSHO’s elaboration on the meaning of this parable was remarkable – I have so far seen nothing like it. Impressed and humbled by OSHO’s explanation, I bought the book, and also, his “Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic.”

This autobiography was an eye-opener. to say the least. The man is profound – really profound and a “must read” for any spiritual seeker. I was completely wrong about the man and am deeply sorry for the glee I felt when I was in the US back in 1983 and read the news that he had been arrested in Oregon. “A fake guru gets his just deserts” I had thought then. Wrong, very wrong! Anyway, here are his findings, and here too, the profound insight that I had and which he missed, but which I think he himself may have been open to had he still been around.

But first, here is OSHO’s premise in a nutshell. That about 3000 BC, the first of the 24 Jain Tirthankaras – Adinatha – concluded that there is nothing higher than man, that any evolution was going to happen within man and in his consciousness, and that there was no God. With God disposed of, man became the center and thus was born Jainism, with its emphasis on austerities to purify man. Adinatha’s concept of purity was to detach from the world, and ultimately, from ones own body.

Adinatha’s quantum leap disposed of God, but left a vacuum, a continued sense of being unfulfilled. Buddha (says OSHO) created the next quantum leap 2500 years after Adinatha. He filled the vacuum created by Adinatha’s destruction of God by introducing mediation. Through meditation, one could reach nirvana. But the Buddha, without realizing it, laid the seeds of a priesthood, a priesthood that ultimately corrupted Buddha’s teachings by making the Buddha a god – someone to be worshiped.

So says OSHO, the next quantum leap, was by none other than OSHO himself. He wishes to destroy priesthoods. To show individuals, that nothing stands between them and the attainment of “nirvana”. The book goes on to explain that the technique to do this still remains mediation, but meditation modified to suit modern man.

So far so good – give or take a little, there is nothing I disagreed with here. However, a few days of later, it dawned on me, that so many of the worlds religions, the ones that come from the East at any rate, stress that the key to fulfillment, the key to enlightenment or reaching nirvana, is meditation. OSHO too, for all his revolutionary statements, is still very conservative – the key to nirvana, remains meditation.

This is significant – a radical, someone who absolutely speaks his mind controversy or not (read his book if you don’t believe me), continues to insist – no – to hammer the point – that the way to enlightenment – to nirvana – IS meditation – i.e. the same thing that the Buddha preached 2,500 years ago.

Mulling over this, it struck me, that a phrase that he keeps using to describe this state is “no thought mind”, and it is this phrase, I think, is what explains to me what is going on. Neither the Buddha nor any of the other masters (including OSHO) who reached enlightenment, had access or knew anything of how the brain works.

Here is my premise. Meditation’s effect on the brain has been measured and the description of the physiological process matches what OSHO calls “no thought mind”. In this state, the brain waves show a simple strong rhythmic pattern. The parietal lobe shows markedly decreased activity. Dr. Andrew Newberg, of the radiology department at the University of Pennsylvania, and his late colleague Dr. Eugene d’Aquili, in the Department of Psychiatry, state in their book “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief” (Ballantine; $24.95) that with no sensory stimulus to delineate the borderline between the self and the world, the brain would “have no choice” but to perceive that the self is “endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses.”

Or in the words of mystics who have attained nirvana, one seems to feel “infinite (no concept of space) and oceanic and whole” – i.e. one has reached “nirvana”, a state that feels truly ecstatic, compared to our normal state. In other words, “nirvana” is physiologically real, can be experienced regardless of whether one believes in God or not, cannot be intellectualized, feels ecstatic, and has no elements of the supernatural about it.

Again, “nirvana” or the state described above is a VERY physical experience. When in nirvana, the brain CANNOT be thinking in terms of “the other”. Some people (for example Baron Baptiste in his Power Yoga book) think that enlightenment is “understanding” and an appreciation of the different religions, and the underlying beauty of life. This kind of enlightenment is nothing but an advanced knowledge of the world and its belief systems. But it is NOT enlightenment as in “reaching nirvana”. It is not the physical, non-intellectualizeable experience that would occur when activity in the parietal lobe is almost shutdown.

So ultimately, brain science brings the whole premise of OSHO, and also the Eastern meditative religions crashing to the ground. From what I read, nirvana is VERY HARD to reach, requiring years of meditation practice and a freedom from psychological issues to still the mind. It is reached only by those privileged few who through hard work, or talent have attained the ability to shut down the parietal lobe.

Yes it is a physical feeling of ecstasy, an immediate, experience of complete unification with everything, of feeling oceanic. And yes, in this respect, it probably feels like one perpetual orgasm (OSHO notes that in orgasm, the minds thought process stops, and this, OSHO claims, is how the ancients discovered meditation.) And finally yes, by shutting down the causes of our stress (rooted in our sense of otherness obtained from the parietal lobe), stress chemicals stop flowing through our body and we feel rejuvinated. This latter experience is to some extent accessible to those who do not reach nirvana and so accounts for why the benefits of mediation are accessible even to beginners.

I agree completely with OSHO when he says that the science of the West and the religions of the East can work together to the benefit of both. This is my interpretation of how this would work: There exist commercially available meditation aides, where the meditator’s brainwaves are made visible on a computer screen, together with information on where the brainwaves should be when in one is in a deep meditative state (“nirvana?”) The technology claims, that with this feedback, one can quickly reach this stage of deep meditation.

Further research should be done using this technology to validate whether it works and whether all it takes to reach “nirvana” is to completely shut down parietal lobe activity. Further studies should be done to determine what the brain activity is of someone who is experiencing nirvana. Also, research should be conducted on what the brain activity is when one has an orgasm.

Based on such research, everyone who wants to can learn quickly and effectively, how to reach nirvana. Going by the behavior of those that have experienced nirvana, this experience of what is within – this “enlightenment”, is so profound that the persons feels that they have encountered “God” within them and it forever changes their subsequent interaction with the world for the better.

So there you have it – the Fourth Quantum leaps of religion, quite possibly its last – that nirvana is REAL, it is completely physiological with nothing supernatural about it and yes, as OSHO says, it can be experienced by any one who can control their brain activity, regardless of their beliefs (or lack of), and lastly, it will greatly improve ones health and sense of well being. Working together, science and “religion” may just be able to bring about WORLD PEACE and OSHO’s vision – “This very body the Buddha, this very earth the Paradise.

Thus was made worth, my visit to Chennai.

The Long Trip to India–Cattle Truck to Chennai

So far, we have been treated very well in Paris – every one polite and courteous to us, as everyone should be to every other human being. Stories told by my father’s generation about Indians abroad getting second rate treatment seem (as they do in the US) absurd. Things begin to change though as we board the Delta flight to Chennai. The second rate treatment of Indians it will turn out, is done exclusively b other Indians themselves.

 

As we queue up to board the flight, we pass through a luggage “spot check”. All our luggage is selected to be checked by the supervisor. The supervisor waves through other single Europeans, but has deemed that my family with two little girls, is a security threat. He makes us step to a table, where he opens and systematically goes through all our luggage.

As he does this he starts chatting to me in a mixture of pure Tamil, and broken English. He is from Pondicherry (a part of Tamilnadu, once colonized by the French and where every original inhabitant was given French citizenship.) He tells me, he has chosen us for a security check SPECIFICALLY because we are Indian and because we are a family with small children.

Seeing that I look puzzled, he explains that he has given the rest of the persons in the queue, a “psychological signal”, that absolutely no one is immune from a security check. He seems a nice guy, but I am irritated at his logic, and take petty pleasure when he opens my bag and finds he has to go through my used underwear which, I had simply thrown in at the top as per my usual method of packing.

It turns out, that it makes absolutely no sense for him to check my luggage at that point, because our luggage remains in our possession, unsupervised, for a further twenty minutes as we wait in a long queue to get to the check-in counter. This marks the first time in the five years that I have been abroad, that I have been singled out, for being an Indian (and it was done by an other Indian.)

We wait for the plane. Almost all the people waiting to board are Indian, with a smattering of non-Indians, and, judging from their clothes, a few people of Indian origin. The announcement that boarding has begun is made, and there is a mad rush to get to through the gates.

We decide to wait till the rush is over. Once through the gate, we enter the boarding walkway tunnel that typically would take us to the plane. It turns out, we end up at a stairwell, that takes us to the tarmac, where we find a crowded bus waiting to take us to the plane. My youngest daughter refuses to board the bus. I ask the waiting technician if there is going to be another bus, but he does not answer me.

I ask again, slightly irritated and he speaks into his walkie talkie, and continues to not answer me. We wait, refusing to board the bus. I know the plane cannot take of without us anyway. Meanwhile, other Indians, rush past us and squeeze into the already crowded bus. We continue to wait. Finally, an other bus, pulls up behind the crowded one. Interestingly, no one else seemst to believe that the second empty bus is going to go to the same plane and late comers continue to squeeze into the crowded first bus. Finally the crowded bus leaves. Since the plane is due to take off soon, the empty bus follows almost immediately after and we go in the empty bus.

It dawns on me that all this is carefully planned by someone at Delta – someone who must be an Indian and who knows that Indians are used to traveling in over crowded buses and that by keeping a single bus waiting, they can pack it to the maximum, simply by leveraging the “scarcity mentality” of the average Indian. This way, Delta’s overheads are reduced – they need to run fewer buses; plus their aircraft docking fees are greatly reduced, as the plane can be kept at some far corner of the airport and not at the premium docking spots where passengers can simply walk on to the plane.

Once on the plane, we find that the overhead bins above our seats have been already packed with luggage from persons sitting in other seats. I am amazed as in the US, the bins above a seat are meant to be used by the person whose seats are below them. I complain to the extremely attractive and sweet Punjabi air-hostess who says that there is nothing she can do. She finds the owner of the luggage and asks if he can make space for some of our luggage – but he refuses, even though there is plenty of space because he has put his luggage in very inefficiently. He says he is carrying “glass” items and so cannot have his luggage squeezed.

I stand there wondering what to do. Another Indian woman tries to help – she points to an open bin about ten feet from me and asks me to try that. Finally, the airhostess insists to the owner of the luggage above my bin, that he make space, and she arranges it herself. She then loads one of my carry-on pieces into the bin and prepares to carry the remaining to the front “coat” section for storage. I feel bad for her and take the luggage for her, and store it in the front.

I recall behaving much the same way as the “gentleman” whose luggage is occupying “my” bin, many years ago, when I was leaving India for the first time. It dawns on me, that there is a “scarcity mentality” that lies behind much of the petty behavior I have seen so far.

The Delta plane is old – it still has “ash trays” and there is no “console” behind every seat. Again it strikes me that this is all carefully planned by the higher-ups at Delta – some very savvy “operations” people who know just how much they can get away with.

We have an uneventful trip the rest of the way. The airhostess and one airhost, are all very helpful, and sweet. They go a long way to making the trip more enjoyable. This has been the one common feature on all the flights to India – the cabin crew are so sweet and helpful – going far out of their way to help the travelers, some of whom are quite boorish.