Unio Mystica: Most of the nuns are, so to speak, faking it (Economist)

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> Since November 1993 the spiritual experiences of children's souls

> witnessing the mystical Kingdom of God thousands of times over the

> years have been recorded. All have independently corroborated and

> irrefutably identified Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi as the incarnation

> of the Divine Feminine sent to deliver God Almighty's Divine

> Message to humanity.

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> http://adishakti.org/index.htm

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Meeting His messengers

 

He came through the Celestial Clouds and found himself standing in

the middle of the semi-circle made up of all the prophets and

messengers of God Almighty — Jesus, Prophet Muhammad, Buddha, Guru

Nanak, Shri Radha & Krishna, Shiva & Parvati, Lakshmi & Vishnu,

Saraswati & Brahmadeva, Sita & Rama, Ganesha, Hanuman and others.

 

In front of him sat the Divine Mother on a golden throne. Above the

radiance of the extremely brilliant Eternal Light shone into infinity.

 

Every time Kash extended felicitations Shri Bhedanasini Devi 2

translated his English " Happy New Year " .into Sanskrit for the benefit

of the Vedic Messengers.

 

He then noticed that there was an ethereal body squatting beside the

Golden Throne, in deep meditation. It was that of a adolescent. The

body size and facial features were similar to his own. It fact it was

his own spirit self, semi-transparent in nature. (All the Heavenly

Hosts are of this form which, though of spirit, had 'body', i.e. it

can be dressed with different garments just like a physical human

body.)

 

Kash then walked towards it, sat down and merged into this body. It

fitted him perfectly, right from each single hair on his head to the

cuticle of his toe. It was his spiritual self in the Kingdom of God

Almighty. Only his corporeal body was on this Earth. Then, again, his

spiritual self was living within his physical body that was on Earth.

 

Note: According to Kash Shri Krishna is very handsome — saumya-vapuh

(of a very beautiful form.) So far there has not been anyone better

looking than Him in all the Celestial Worlds. He also has excellent

attire. His dresses are of one piece, with the bottom half pleated

and glistening with many colors, just like precious stones glittering

in bright light. He is more light dark blue than blue and always

appears in His normal two-armed form.

 

According to him all the Universal Beings always look very fresh,

clean and neat, as if they had just taken a bath and groomed

themselves. Immaculate cleanliness is one of the many distinguishing

characteristics of the Heavenly Hosts. The sight, neatness and

radiance of Shri Jesus especially struck Kash. It was on his first

encounter with Him that this radiating cleanliness was overwhelmingly

evident.

 

Shri Adi Shakti: The Kingdom Of God page 321

 

2. Bhedanasini (179th): Destroys distinction between body, mind,

soul, etc., and finally between Sakti and Siva. She rains forth

weapons in return to every weapon released by Bhandasura. Once Sri-

Lalita as Vimarsa-Sakti takes hold of the devotee, She will control

every downward egotistic pull of his mind and every notion of dualism.

 

 

 

Source: Economist

4 March 2004

A mystical union

 

A small band of pioneers is exploring the neurology of religious

experience

 

THE renowned French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot once scribbled

some notes while under the influence of the psychedelic drug

mescaline. Colleagues were puzzled because among the scribbles was

the incongruous statement, written in English, " I love you Jennifer " .

Still more puzzling was the question: who was Jennifer? That was not

the name of his wife nor of anyone else they thought he knew. Despite

the mystery, Dr Charcot's colleagues never thought to question the

scientific value of the experiment.

 

The same cannot be said of Mario Beauregard, a brain-imager from the

University of Montreal, who has also experimented with mescaline. But

that is because Dr Beauregard is interested in one particular, and

far more contentious, aspect of the mescaline experience - the

capacity of the drug to inspire feelings of spirituality or closeness

to God. It was experiments of the type carried out by Charcot that

opened up the possibility of investigating spirituality in a

scientific manner, by showing that it could be manipulated. Dr

Beauregard is following up on these by trying to discover where in

the brain religious experience is actually experienced.

 

In the first of what he hopes will be a series of experiments, Dr

Beauregard and his doctoral student Vincent Paquette are recording

electrical activity in the brains of seven Carmelite nuns through

electrodes attached to their scalps. Their aim is to identify the

brain processes underlying the Unio Mystica, the Christian notion of

mystical union with God. The nuns (the researchers hope to recruit 15

in all) will also have their brains scanned using positron-emission

tomography and functional magnetic-resonance imaging, the most

powerful brain-imaging tools available.

 

The study has met with scepticism from both subjects and scientists.

Dr Beauregard had first to convince the nuns that he was not trying

to prove or disprove the existence of God. Scientific critics,

meanwhile, have accused him of being too reductionist of pretending

to pinpoint the soul in the brain in the same way that the Victorians

played phrenology as a parlour game by feeling the contours of each

others' skulls to find a bulge of secretiveness or a missing patch of

generosity.

 

Dr Beauregard does not, in fact, believe there is a neurological God

centre. Rather, his preliminary data implicate a network of brain

regions in the Unio Mystica, including those associated with emotion

processing and the spatial representation of self. But that leads to

another criticism, which he may find harder to rebut. This is that he

is not really measuring a mystical experience at all, merely an

intense emotional one.

 

This is because the nuns are, so to speak, faking it. They believe

that the Unio Mystica is a gift of God and cannot be summoned at

will. Most of them have only experienced it once or twice, typically

in their 20s. To get around this, Dr Beauregard has drawn on previous

experiments he carried out with actors, which showed that remembering

an intense emotional experience activates the same brain networks as

actually having that experience. In effect, he has asked the nuns to

method act, and they are happy to comply.

 

God and the gaps

 

Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at the Hospital of the University of

Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who has scanned the brains of Buddhists

and Franciscan nuns in meditation or at prayer, is familiar with such

criticism. He says that, because religious experience is not readily

accessible, unusually high standards of experimental rigour are

demanded of this kind of research. We have frequently argued that

many aspects of spiritual experiences are built upon the brain

machinery that is used for other purposes such as emotions, he says.

Very careful research will need to be done to delineate these issues.

 

But that is not a reason for shying away from them, says Olaf Blanke

of the University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland, whose paper in the

February edition of Brain describes how the brain generates out-of-

body experiences. He points out that plenty of research has been done

into another kind of bodily illusion, phantom limbs. This has

identified the brain mechanisms responsible, and even suggested

treatments for these disabling appendages. The same cannot be said

of out-of-body experiences, which can also be disturbing, but occupy

a neglected position between neurobiology and mysticism.

 

Having subjected six brain-damaged patients to a battery of neuro-

imaging techniques, Dr Blanke's group concludes that damage at the

junction of two lobes of the brain the temporal and parietal causes

a breakdown of a person's perception of his own body. The boundary

between personal and extrapersonal space becomes blurred, and he sees

his body occupying positions that do not coincide with the position

he feels it to be in.

 

Some patients give this a mystical interpretation, some do not. What

is interesting is that several of the patients suffered from temporal-

lobe epilepsy. An association between this kind of epilepsy and

religiosity is well-documented, notably in a classic series of

neurological papers written by Norman Geschwind in the 1960s and

1970s. Dr Blanke argues that all the lobes of the brain play a part

in something as complex as religious experience, but that the temporo-

parietal junction is a prime node of that network.

 

The parietal lobe is thought to be responsible for orienting a person

in time and space, and Dr Newberg also found a change in parietal

activation at the height of the meditative experience, when his

volunteers reported sensing a greater interconnectedness of things.

At the end of each recording session, Dr Beauregard asks the nuns to

complete a questionnaire which gauges not only feelings of love and

closeness to God, but also distortions of time and space. The more

intense the experience, the more intense the disorganisation from a

spatio-temporal point of view, he says. Typically, time slows down,

and the self appears to dissolve into some larger entity that the

nuns describe as God.

 

Whether the Unio Mystica has anything in common with out-of-body

experiences, or even phantom limbs, remains to be seen though all are

certainly mediated by the brain. According to Dr Blanke, this is only

just starting to become an accepted topic of research in

neuroscience. Perhaps its acceptance will depend ultimately on how

the knowledge is used. Dr Beauregard may have done himself a

disservice by arguing that mystical union should not be reserved for

the spiritual few, but should be made available to everyone, for the

benefit of society. Perhaps, like Charcot, he should stick to

describing it, however incongruous the result may be.

 

http://www.wireheading.com/brainstim/spiritual-neurology.html