DISEASE - CURE (Cure Your Self - 7)

 Is Prayer Scientific? 

(Excerpts from book “Cure Yourself”, author Swami Vijnananand, S.V.)

Recipropathy neither encourages nor discourages the institution of prayer. Because, in one sense Recipropathy believes in the power of silence. From the view-point of truth, in meditation there is a lesser risk of positive untruth being uttered. The question can be viewed from two angles:

(A)                     An option can be exercised in favor of leading life of as much "reactions" as possible. Live detached life to your capacity.

(B)                    Try to make mind vacant, call it prayer or use any word of your choice. This option is open only if it is feasible for one to take mind in a state really devoid of emotion. There is nothing unscientific if the pursuer of prayers can visualize the true tenet of prayer. Abusing prayer is as much a dogma as abuse of prayer itself, yet a real prayer leaves no room for abuses of either description. Scientists who stamp action-less state as a mystic affair have more to learn from the fact that at the speed of light, length contracts to zero and clocks stand still. Strictly speaking, an action-less state in its truest sense is equivalent to the maximum speed of any mass conceivable; whether such possibility is feasible or not, is no issue at this point. This observation leads to contradiction; nevertheless, the contradiction is born out of scientific investigation. Till the contradiction is un-riddled by science, we have hardly any privilege to play the fool of prayer-believers. On the background of this premise a Recipropath can suggest the following points for the consideration of a seeker elevating his mind to a comparatively blank, vacant, detached state.

1.   As you set in for concentration, take a pen, note book and a mirror. Spend the first few moments in setting yourself and then look into the mirror. Stare straight in your own eyes.

2.   Speak to yourself. Be conscious of an energy penetrating through. Imagine that you now propose to explain to the origin of that energy, your actions in last 24 hours, as if you are submitting a report of yesterday to yourself. Begin with an interrogation: Can all actions of yours be defended? No white-washing now.

3.   It is a discourse between you and yourself. Promise yourself not to repeat what ills you should have refrained from. If it cannot be set right immediately, ask for time.

4.   Continue the check-up each day.

5.   If not on the first day, after a lapse of a few days following the daily check-up, try to spare a few minutes to close your eyes during the prayer.

6.   Try to visualize energy in yourself beyond your eyes, ears, and every tissue of yourself.

7.   Put up an attempt to forget every entanglement which may try to disturb you at the moment.

8.   If a thought is irresistible, open your eyes and record the gist of though disturbing you in the note book.

9.   Close your eyes again. If another thought disturbs you, repeat the same process. Register it in your note book.

10.                     On pursuing the process for a month, go through the entire record.  Subsequently every day before closing the eyes for the meditation, ask yourself if you cannot live without these thoughts even for a few seconds? You will be ashamed to find that causes interrupting your prayer were too trifling to imagine. The revelation will give your mind more tranquility as you resume the prayer.

11.                     Now, the success awaits you. At least for a few seconds, keeping your mind cool, undisturbed, collected may be achieved.

12.                     Repeat the process day after day. Use the note book as friend, philosopher and guide. It remains a good tutor. Day by day self-recognition will instruct you that each thought disturbing your prayer on previous days can be attributed to one emotion or the other. The record should serve you to understand that the so called engrossing thoughts are too petty to brood over. This finding strengthens your mind and assists you to do away with them during the prayer.

13.                     Another way. At times, at the resumption of prayer overpowering sentiment paralyses you - say embittering anger about one-time comrade.  Try to recollect a good point in the old mate. A note of music, instead of an old friend, may disturb the concentration. Imagine the tune's finest wave identifies with your "mind". The ultimate object of concentration is to realize that incredible speed resembles inertness and resort to a state of "active inactivity".

14.                     The process is languid. It is an uphill task to do away with petty emotions and angularities. Convince yourself that these angularities so dear to you, eat you up.

15.                     Analysis of anger may turn over a new leaf in life. Guess Mr. X and yourself at a cross purpose. You quiver with rage. In the situation, multifarious probabilities are conceivable.

(A)                    Mr. X may be your family member, friend or a well-intentioned relative, who in your eyes has committed a blunder. Obviously, you should ignore the unintentional slip.

(B)                    Mr. X may be, alternatively, your adversary. He wants you to get irritated. Your fury serves his purpose. Your resentment has to be curbed so that you would not assist your own foe.

(C)                    One more salient point. When Mr. X fans your anger, either he is unfair or you are in the wrong. If Mr. X has misbehaved, there is no propriety in yourself heating up and hitting at your own body. On the other hand, in the instance of your being inequitable, thank Mr. X that he struggles to put you on the right path.

16.                     Most often, adherents of Recipropathy experience sudden recovery from ailment. Yet, it is advisable to attribute it to "coincidental cure". Set aside part of your prayer in inflicting pain on yourself under such circumstances in acceptance of your unpunished sins. It is a gallant gesture in right direction. It gives you no license to commit sins during the rest of the day. It merely keeps the conscious awake and alert.

17.                     Wrath is not a solitary example. Every emotion can be dispensed with on proper analysis. An analysis offers a breathing space, infuses confidence and makes your mind vacant or steady. Slowly increase this period of vacuum and state of equilibrium. Infallibly and automatically, ability to work for the whole day in serene, unruffled way multiplies. It is the surprise gift of the prayer.

18.                     The process of inactivating the mind should be slow and natural. To convince ourselves is the most irksome adventure. We hesitate and eschew conceding Truth as a single factor that can redeem us in our worldly life; however, in theory truth is known to us having a supreme second-to-none strength. No purpose is served by declaring a war against ourselves, in a superficial sense. No doubt mind is to be ultimately won. Yet an undue haste bears no fruit. It impairs rather than repairs.

(To be continued)

Vijay R. Joshi.

SPEED OF LIGHT, A CLUE TO DEFINE MIND (W.M.M. - 6)

Excerpts from book: WHAT MIND MEANS (Author Swami Vijnananand, Manashakti publication).

Measurement of mind is too frequently considered to be an idle enquiry by a section of scientists. This is not because it lacks significant support from the learned but perhaps because the controversy has dragged on for centuries. An explanation of mind, howsoever workable, shall be gladly welcomed appreciably by thinkers and leaders of science alike. This book aims at interpreting psyche in understandable terms, keeping away logomachy (arguments about words). Mind is interpreted in two diagonally opposite ways by two schools of philosophers, standing poles apart.

Prima facie (primarily) to prove the non-spiritual or worldly nature or character of mind on scientific principles is very shaky and difficult task. Notwithstanding the indirect and rare lacuna (missing part in logical argument) of mind, it can be established in clear and comprehensive term. The task indeed is suitable with the set beliefs or principles of a rational person.

An unprejudiced, detached thinking blended with allowable imagination should be implemented in our quest (search) for the unknown.

The laws of physics hold out no promise to un-riddle (solve) the whole mystery surrounding the psyche. Matter (smallest fundamental particles) itself has eluded physicists and also their most powerful electronic microscopes and the like instruments. Of course this cannot be a reason why science/physics should not be continued to be exploited to have glimpses into the unknown (i.e. science still can be used to a greater extent in trying to understand the psyche, non-matter). As it is foolish (absurd) to attempt to insert round peg in a square hold, it is wrong to attempt to satisfy the growing human choice of consequential reasoning by keeping away science.  Idealists are likely to face a miserable failure because of their very hard disregard to the rationale. Limitations of reason accelerate their nonreligious (undue) respect for science, which they consider as sorties (quick raids by force). They are reluctant to employ methods of physics even for an approach to the deepening enigma (ever growing riddle) of mind.

Expression ‘failure of science’ is virtually (almost) a misnomer (inappropriate name). Indeed, intrinsically (within itself) science predominantly implies (means) observation and inference thereof. Therefore, science in capsized (upturned, upset) situation, simply speaks of –Omission of our observation capacity or Impotency (incapability to conceive) of our power of synthesis at a given moment.

In this aspect, logical imagination based scientific attitude provides us a broad hint. We may note here that scientists tend to encourage logical imagination. The logical imagination is used more particularly when the observation confuses the understanding of the description (observation is not sufficient to make correct description). Physics is the pillar stone of science. At some threshold (limit), physics declares its incompetency (inability) to observe obviously evident matter and this provides a positive proof for existence of non-matter.

1.  Materialists – They have been commitment to the dogma that the entire macrocosm (universe) derives its basic constituents from matter in various shaped and shades.

 2. Spiritualists – They have a total opposite stand. They have their firm belief in the dogma that matter is not a truth (illusion) and what essentially true is mind, the spirit.

 3. Scientists – They stand divided on the issue.  Many of them stand divided in their own mind and the rest adapt to an indifferent attitude.

Physics strongly lends its constructive support to establish this non-matter which is known as ‘mind’ in common terms. To use a simile, it is nothing short of a senseless statement to emphasize that science can establish the existence of light but not of darkness. Once science reaches clearly last limit of light but perceives something beyond it, then the cool affirmation that ‘non-light’ is established in terms of science is true statement which cannot be challenged.

However, such a situation does not issue license to idealists to put forward the theory of variety of minds based on the dreamy, imaginative thinking. Chapter two and five give arguments which forbid such excess in name of science.

Mystic idealists have always put forward their favorite theory of multiplicity of mind, soul or such non-material entities. The inner pure mind is considered as idol by spiritualist. If we are called upon to suppose that such a divine purity in us remains impotent and renders itself powerless before the odd occurrence of emotional burst, then it all speaks ill of the pure inner mind, soul, etc.

For mechanical materialists everything is matter. For spiritualists everything is non-matter. The only disadvantage to the later (spiritualists) is that they attempt further classification in the field of already what is admittedly unknown. If every smallest entity of this universe is either wholly matter or non-matter, then gentlemen, friends and foes meet, since in any case such campaign ends in substitution of noun with the same connotation and these terminates the polemic. If both are serious about the dual they cannot go on with negative definitions respectively of matter and mind.

The task on our hand at the moment is to hunt out a commonly acceptable description of mind not subjected to denial/dispute by two representative hostile groups

It takes a time of about 8 minutes for travelling the sun rays from sun to earth. But my look to the Sun and correlated thoughts do not require eight minutes to reach to the Sun. In fact, they may not take time – not even one-eighth of a micro-second. This obviously leads to unavoidable conclusion.

It will be seen that Eddington leaves his notion of ‘mind-stuff’ very indefinite. It is pertinent to note that authority like Heisenberg too endorses mind beyond laws of physics and deductively (it is) non-matter.

Heisenberg in certain terms places psychology that peeps in mind, beyond the scope of physics. Physics deals with matter and once the claim of physics over psychology is abrogated then in Heisenberg’s opinion, mind must pass into non-material realm (region).

We see no prospects of affording ourselves to count upon the modern psychologists for an unambiguous clue to mind.

Freud defines mind and takes himself in the direction of mystic verbiage (mysterious style of expressing the same thing in different words) in the same breath, he says: “consciousness appears to us as positively the characteristic that defines mental life. We regard psychology as the study of content of consciousness. This even appears so evident that any contradiction of it seems obvious nonsense to us. Yet it is impossible to avoid this contradiction or to accept the identity between the conscious and psychic. The psycho-analytical definition of mind is that it comprises processes of the nature of (i) feeling, (ii) thinking, and (iii) wishing. It maintains that there are such things as unconscious thinking and unconscious wishing. But in doing so, at the outset, psycho-analysis has lost the right of the sympathy of the scientifically minded and self- restraining people and has become suspicious of being a fantastic cult occupied with dark and mysteries which cannot be understood”.

Both spiritualists and Marxists (materialists) insist that what remains imperceptible (unrecognizable) to them matches respectively with mind and ‘highest’ or ‘finest’ form of matter. That is the crux of the problem. It looks strange that both show confidence in their notion. At the same time, both of them go with the stream that the remaining entity is unknown in all its details and perhaps unknowable.

Einstein has insisted that our notion (general understanding) about the physical world will never be final. Lenin has also endorsed that Nature is infinite. To dig out (excavate) the secrets of Nature and being overpowered by her un-understandable vast kingdom to give it a name either as ‘matter’ or ‘mind’ finally turns out to be a subjective notion (concept) about the ‘unknown’.

As Lincoln Barnett puts it, “matter and energy are interchangeable. If matter sheds its mass and travels with the speed of light, we call it radiation or energy. And conversely, if energy congeals (contracts into fluid) and becomes inert, and we can ascertain it as a mass, we call it matter. Up till now science could only note their transitory properties and relations as they touched the perceptions of earthbound man. But since 16^th July 1945, man has been able to transform one into the other. For on that night of Alamogordo, New Mexico man for the first time transformed a substantial quantity of matter into the light, heat, sound and motion which we call energy. Yet the fundamental mystery remains. The whole march of science towards the unification of concepts such as follows still leads to the unknown”.

The reduction of all matter to elements and then to a few types of particles

The reduction of forces to the single concept of energy and then

The reduction of matter and energy to a single basic quantity

(From wiki: Reductionism is a philosophical position which holds that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents)

Evidently both the spiritualists and the Marxists (materialists) irksomely (annoyingly/irritatingly) count upon their conjectures (guess or speculation) in admitted unknowable and unknown. There is no reason for the detached scientist to go out of way and justify anyone. While one uses aggressive language with the aid of some scientific phrases and the other clearly and humbly admits his limitations. There awaits very complicated confusion still. On one hand the spiritualists or, to be precise, many amongst them adopt a belief in mind and also in matter as separate, real entity. And yet others insist on Trinity, (soul, mind and matter) or such other terms. The materialists on the other hand will not reconcile en bloc to the term ‘material universe’ without suitable modification as (because), Mechanical materialist would hasten to supplement the expression by the words “with a motion externally supplied” while the Marxists would insist on describing the matter having ‘inherent motion’.

At the end of 19th century the study called the photo-electric effect showed that different types of radiation behave as streams of minute particles, known as photons. Each type of radiation is characterized by photons of strictly definite energy. The shorter the wage of electro-magnetic radiation, the more energy do the photons of this radiation possess. Each photon is capable of being absorbed by an atom of matter, in which case it gives up its energy to the atom and one electron of corresponding energy is ejected.

Using this effect as a basis, it was very easy to explain both (i) the photo-electric effect and (ii) the ability of different radiations to ionize gas. Numerous experiments showed that photons, like particle of matter, possess a mass that is computed by dividing the energy of the photon by the square of the speed of light (E=mc² i.e. m=E/c²). It then became possibly in certain sense, to co-relate particle of radiation (photon) and particle of matter. True, there still exists an essential difference between particles of matter and photons.

·         Mind can be in motion.

·         In the ability to sustain restless as a hyena (cruel, untrustworthy and greedy person) in an active life, mind is associated with brain, which in turn links with the entire organism.

·         Mind incorporates and/or possesses, and/or is made up of, and/or is the same as emotions, sensation, thought, knowledge, consciousness.

The cautious though candid description may bring round the dissident groups to chime with it.

Thought (an expression of mind) cannot remain purely and absolutely individual in strict sense of the term when we set the eye upon an object and brood over (look closely, completely, minutely).

To supplement the above, Eddington, Russel and Heisenberg are referred to.

Eddington – Besides the direct knowledge contained in each self-knowing unit, there is inferential knowledge. The inferential knowledge includes our knowledge of the physical world. It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness. Obviously the messages travel in codes, e.g. when message relating to a table are travelling in the nerves, the nerve-disturbance does not in the least resemble either the external table that originate the mental impression or the conception of the table that arise in consciousness. In the central clearing station, the incoming messages are sorted and decoded partly by resulting image-building inherited from the experience of our ancestors, partly by scientific comparison and reasoning. By this very indirect and hypothetical inference all our acquaintance with and our theories of a world outside us have been built up.

Russel – Describes seeing the table – The light waves cause occurrence in our eyes. These caused occurrence in the optic nerve and in turn caused occurrence in the brain. The unbroken chain between the object and brain is undeniable.

Heisenberg – (Book Physics and Philosophy) Quantum theory does not allow completely objective or subjective picture of Nature and our self. Observation itself changes probability function. Heisenberg therefore would not consider a complete dis-union between subject and object in the process of thinking.

Thinking and seeing – Simultaneity

We have seen the difference. But again, none can deny simultaneity between thinking and seeing. Science goes from known to unknown and it is very right to investigate what happens when we see while thinking.

Mind independent of matter

·         Light travels at the speed of 3, 00,000 km/sec.

·         Considering the distance between the Earth and the Sun, the Sun ray we ‘see’ has already travelled about 8 minutes from the Sun, i.e. we see the Sun in eight minutes (8x60=480 sec or approximately 500 sec).

·         But we can ‘think’ of the Sun in a fraction of second, i.e. our thought can reach the Sun in a very short time, i.e. our ‘thought’ travels at the rate of 500 times than the Sun light. Thinking is much faster than seeing.

·         Thought (mind) can travel transcending the limiting speed of matter. (which presently is considered as speed of light)

·         This fact asserts that mind is “non-matter which can transcend the limiting speed of matter which presently is considered as speed of light”.

Matter can’t exceed speed of light, while thoughts (i.e.) can exceed. This is enough to assert that limiting speed of light proves mind independent of matter. This is a historical definition of mind on most rational concept which should be acceptable to all.

(Note: This is an attempt to make reader friendly interpretation of the book “WHAT MIND MEANS” based on my perception. Readers are requested to refer to the original book to cross check their understanding.)

Vijay R. Joshi.