[Advaita-l] Reconciling current research with Advaitic theory of mind

[Mahesh Ursekar]

Pranams:

The same issue of TIME mentioned in my earlier post has another article
entitled "How the Brain Rewires Itself". In this article most of experiments
conducted seem to indicate just the opposite of the previous posting. The
activity of the mind can reorder the physical brain! The full article can be
found at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438,00.html

An excerpt:
But perhaps the most striking difference was in an area in the left
prefrontal cortex--the site of activity that marks happiness. *While the
monks were generating feelings of compassion, activity in the left
prefrontal swamped activity in the right prefrontal (associated with
negative moods) to a degree never before seen from purely mental activity*.
[...]

*For the monks* *as well as the patients with depression [...], the
conscious act of thinking about their thoughts in a particular way
rearranged the brain.* *The discovery of neuroplasticity,* *in particular
the power of the mind to change the brain*, is still too new for scientists,
let alone the rest of us, to grasp its full meaning. But even as it offers
new therapies for illnesses of the mind, it promises something more
fundamental: a new understanding of what it means to be human.

Then I recalled reading about this lady called Louise L. Hay, who teaches
that most illnesses have their origin in the mind. Her web-site is:
http://www.louisehay.com/
She has written a small book called 'Heal your body' (an apparent
best-seller) in which she gives a startling account of how she cured herself
of cancer by merely changing her pattern of thinking! Another apparent
indication that the mind seems to have a power of its own and can affect the
physical body thereby.

While the above does seem to support and idea that the mind may be an
independent entity, it is hard (for me) to reconcile the tests in the first
article and this one.

Pranams, Mahesh



On 2/24/07, Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian <rama.balasubramanian at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> On 2/23/07, S Jayanarayanan <sjayana at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Rest assured that every one of the objections raised against
> > Consciousness by the materialists have answers in Sankara's Brahma
> > Sutra Bhashya 3.3.54. I will try to post on these topics soon. It is
> > unfortunately too difficult to explain in one posting.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Kartik
> >
>
> I am looking forward to this. I remember that you once mentioned that
> Sri Ramanujas arguments in this regard are not as incisive as that of
> Bhagavatpaadas. If you could do a small comparison of their arguments,
> it would be great.
>
> Rama
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