Mindhacks

Einstein attempted to explain the close relationship between science and religion which gave him a reputation of being an atheist. He believed that science could not be created if there was not an interest in understanding the invisible laws of the universe.

However, the existence of something supreme was not the question for him. The fact that he suggested that the universe and its events could be controlled by human will was what created a lot of controversy. 

“The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God,” he argued.

Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic causality.”

 

Einstein & Faith

By WALTER ISAACSON

He was slow in learning how to talk. “My parents were so worried,” he later recalled, “that they consulted a doctor.” Even after he had begun using words, sometime after the age of 2, he developed a quirk that prompted the family maid to dub him “der Depperte,” the dopey one. Whenever he had something to say, he would try it out on himself, whispering it softly until it sounded good enough to pronounce aloud.

“Every sentence he uttered,” his worshipful younger sister recalled, “no matter how routine, he repeated to himself softly, moving his lips.” It was all very worrying, she said. “He had such difficulty with language that those around him feared he would never learn.”

His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to declare that he would never amount to much. These traits made Albert Einstein the patron saint of distracted schoolkids everywhere. But they also helped make him, or so he later surmised, the most creative scientific genius of modern times.

His cocky contempt for authority led him to question received wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And as for his slow verbal development, he thought that it allowed him to observe with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted. Instead of puzzling over mysterious things, he puzzled over the commonplace.

“When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance,” Einstein once explained. “The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up.

Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.”

It may seem logical, in retrospect, that a combination of awe and rebellion made Einstein exceptional as a scientist.

But what is less well known is that those two traits also combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith.

The rebellion part comes in at the beginning of his life: he rejected at first his parents’ secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world.

But the awe part comes in his 50s when he settled into a deism based on what he called the

“spirit manifest in the laws of the universe” and a sincere belief in a “God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists.”

Einstein was descended, on both parents’ sides, from Jewish tradesmen and peddlers who had, for at least two centuries, made modest livings in the rural villages of Swabia in southwestern Germany.

With each generation they had become increasingly assimilated into the German culture they loved–or so they thought. Although Jewish by cultural designation and kindred instinct, they had little interest in the religion itself.

In his later years, Einstein would tell an old joke about an agnostic uncle who was the only member of his family who went to synagogue. When asked why he did so, the uncle would respond, “Ah, but you never know.” Einstein’s parents, on the other hand, were “entirely irreligious.” They did not keep kosher or attend synagogue, and his father Hermann referred to Jewish rituals as “ancient superstitions,” according to a relative.

Consequently, when Albert turned 6 and had to go to school, his parents did not care that there was no Jewish one near their home. Instead he went to the large Catholic school in their neighborhood. As the only Jew among the 70 students in his class, he took the standard course in Catholic religion and ended up enjoying it immensely.

Despite his parents’ secularism, or perhaps because of it, Einstein rather suddenly developed a passionate zeal for Judaism. “He was so fervent in his feelings that, on his own, he observed Jewish religious strictures in every detail,” his sister recalled. He ate no pork, kept kosher and obeyed the strictures of the Sabbath. He even composed his own hymns, which he sang to himself as he walked home from school.

Einstein’s greatest intellectual stimulation came from a poor student who dined with his family once a week.

It was an old Jewish custom to take in a needy religious scholar to share the Sabbath meal; the Einsteins modified the tradition by hosting instead a medical student on Thursdays.

His name was Max Talmud, and he began his weekly visits when he was 21 and Einstein was 10.

Talmud brought Einstein science books, including a popular illustrated series called People’s Books on Natural Science, “a work which I read with breathless attention,” said Einstein. The 21 volumes were written by Aaron Bernstein, who stressed the interrelations between biology and physics, and reported in great detail the experiments being done at the time, especially in Germany.

Talmud also helped Einstein explore the wonders of mathematics by giving him a textbook on geometry two years before he was scheduled to learn that subject in school. When Talmud arrived each Thursday, Einstein delighted in showing him the problems he had solved that week.

Initially, Talmud was able to help him, but he was soon surpassed by his pupil. “After a short time, a few months, he had worked through the whole book,” Talmud recalled. “Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.”

Einstein’s exposure to science and math produced a sudden transformation at age 12, just as he would have been readying for a bar mitzvah. He suddenly gave up Judaism.

That decision does not appear to have been drawn from Bernstein’s books because the author made clear he saw no contradiction between science and religion. As he put it,

 ”The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.”

Einstein would later come close to these sentiments. But at the time, his leap away from faith was a radical one.

“Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”

Einstein did, however, retain from his childhood religious phase a profound faith in, and reverence for, the harmony and beauty of what he called the mind of God as it was expressed in the creation of the universe and its laws.

The Dichotomy between Science and Religion

Around the time he turned 50, he began to articulate more clearly–in various essays, interviews and letters–his deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.

One particular evening in 1929, the year he turned 50, captures Einstein’s middle-age deistic faith. He and his wife were at a dinner party in Berlin when a guest expressed a belief in astrology. Einstein ridiculed the notion as pure superstition. Another guest stepped in and similarly disparaged religion. Belief in God, he insisted, was likewise a superstition.

At this point the host tried to silence him by invoking the fact that even Einstein harbored religious beliefs. “It isn’t possible!” the skeptical guest said, turning to Einstein to ask if he was, in fact, religious. “Yes, you can call it that,” Einstein replied calmly.

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

Shortly after his 50th birthday, Einstein also gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious sensibility. It was with George Sylvester Viereck, who had been born in Germany, moved to America as a child and then spent his life writing gaudily erotic poetry, interviewing great men and expressing his complex love for his fatherland.

Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish. In fact, Viereck proudly traced his lineage to the family of the Kaiser, and he would later become a Nazi sympathizer who was jailed in America during World War II for being a German propagandist.

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew.

“It’s possible to be both,” replied Einstein. “Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.”

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Thousand and thousands of people have experienced Near Death Experiences. Even some of Hollywood’s most A-List celebrities have admitted to these supernatural, most spiritual of experiences such as seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Refresh your memory on these Hollywood stars’ experiences.

Very rarely, however, have scientists studied the functions of the brain during a near death experience. This article goes into the neurology of this supernatural phenomenon. How much do we actually know about the human brain??

Neural pathways to enlightenment

Stephen Pincock
December 8, 2006

Researchers are exploring the science behind mystical experiences.

They’re among the most personal and mysterious sensations we might encounter - a vision of blinding light as death draws near, the ecstasy of prayer or meditation or the sensation of floating outside our own bodies.

For millenniums, people have given these experiences religious significance. But in recent years, scientists have begun exploring this spiritual realm, asking their own questions about what goes on in our brains during these extraordinary events and coming up with some fascinating answers.

In laboratories around the world, a few specialists have had their own insights into the neurology of spiritual experiences, using precise techniques to stimulate and monitor the brain’s function.

These new studies delve into questions that have long fascinated scientists, says John Watson, a neurologist at the University of Sydney.

“Neuroscientists are now doing bolder and bolder things,” Watson says. “We’ve already seen studies into the neurology of things like love, thirst and hunger, so it wasn’t a big step for them to start wondering about these religious and quasi-religious experiences.”

Some people call this new field “neurotheology”, a term coined by Aldous Huxley in his 1962 novel Island. Scientists often refer to it as the cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality.

In 1997, researchers from the University of California in San Diego announced there might be dedicated neural machinery in the brain’s temporal lobes specifically linked with religion. Vilayanur Ramachandran and his team studied the brains of people with an unusual type of epilepsy that affects the brain’s temporal lobes.

People who suffer this kind of seizure often report having intense mystical and religious experiences as part of their attacks. The researchers found that one effect of the seizures was to strengthen the involuntary response of the patient’s brain to religious words.

‘God Spots’

It wasn’t long before these regions were being referred to by newspapers as the “God spot” or “God module” - areas of the brain that become electrically excited when people think about their deity.

Most scientists, including Ramachandran, regard the idea of a single “God spot” as too simplistic. Last September, for example, a Canadian researcher, Mario Beauregard, and his student Vincent Paquette used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of Carmelite nuns while they were reliving the experience of unio mystica, an intense sensation in which they feel the physical presence of God.

- Read the full Article

Related Links

- Hollywood Showcases Its Near-Death Experiences

- Spirituality

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Editor’s Note: one sciencist has revealed that belief in reincarnation has adverse effects on a person’s memory. On the flipside, believers generally have more creative minds.

 Recent tests have shown that there are big differences in memory between people who believe in reincarnation and people who don’t. The studies revealed that people who believe are more likely to have memory errors.

This article outlines the study and believes that the tests explain how people hang on to implausible reincarnation stories of past lives. It can also be argued that believers hang on to their stories for spiritual reasons. One plus point for believers that was revealed is that they are generally more creative than non-believers.

Belief in Reincarnation Tied to Memory Errors

Melinda Wenner

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.

The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to  implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

Power of suggestion

People who are likely to make these kinds of errors might end up convincing themselves of things that aren’t true, said lead researcher Maarten Peters of Maastricht University in The Netherlands. When people who are prone to making these mistakes undergo hypnosis and are repeatedly asked to talk about a potential idea—like a past life—they might, as they grow more familiar with it, eventually convert the idea into a full-blown false memory.

This is because they can’t distinguish between things that have really happened and things that have been suggested to them, Peters told LiveScience.

Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors.

Creative minds

As for what might make people more prone to committing such errors to begin with, McNally says that it could be the byproduct of especially vivid imagery skills. He has found that people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.

“It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you’d generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw,” McNally in a telephone interview.

Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes.

And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said.

 ”It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses. . . We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death.”

original article >>

The debate rages on between conventional medical practices with scientific models and alternative forms of medicine. Let’s be honest it’s never going to die down. While exploring this topic a wonderful article came along my path.

This article shows how spirituality and enlightenment can be achieved alongside conventional medical practices. It has numerous stories of remarkable people who have overcome illness through alternative methods such as visualization in the case of Morris Goodman aka ‘Miracle Man’.

Delve into the article:

The Source Of All Illnesses

By Lorenzo @ RealitySeeds.com

For thousands of years humans have been trying to cure illnesses afflicting body and mind. Endless types and strands of disorders seem to be ever changing and constantly mutating into more complex forms.

Modern Day Science

We try hard to study and understand them with a scientific methodology, but we often have hard time making progress because our scientific models fail to describe much detail of how the human body works. While the science of health is making great steps forward, there is still a lot of guess work involved in applied medicine that often is more like a form of art based on the experience and gut feelings of the doctors, than a science with clear rules.

When we study illness, we notice the symptoms and we explore them; this research gives us clues on how to fix the symptoms, and often we discover possible causes and we attempt to attack these as well. This approach is similar to the approach we take when a car breaks, except that it is much more difficult given how complex the physical body is.

Treat The Symptoms But No Cure

 It often works, but often doesn’t fix the cause, and the illness comes back to hunt us again. Many times things just resolve themselves and we have no idea what the problem was, and why it is gone.

The First Of Many Real Life Alternative Thinking Cases

I remember when I was a teenager I started having troubles breathing at night. I was a young and healthy, much into all kinds of sports and always active. Nevertheless, this night breathing problem was bothering me a great deal.

 I went to my doctor. He asked me if I had that problem only at night, which I did. He also asked me if I had that problem while in vacation somewhere else, or if I had any known allergies. I answered “no” to both questions. In fact, I could sleep just fine while in vacation, and I had no known allergies.

He asked me if I spent much time in my room, which I did. That’s all he needed to hear. His prescription was “Change your room around! Move the furniture, take whatever is on the walls and change it with something new, paint the room with a different color. In short, make it feel new”. I thought it was an odd cure for my problem, but he is a very experienced doctor and I trusted him.

Well, believe it or not, that “cure” fixed my problem, which never came back again. Later he explained that I had problems breathing because I was associating my room with something bad that happened in my life, putting me in a negative state of mind and stress. Changing the room around was a way to deactivate these negative memories.

He didn’t really understand all the details of why that negative state of mind was causing the problems with the breathing; he just knew that it worked that way.

What is the real cause of illness? Most important, why is the body sometimes unable to fix itself?

Read More Here>>

What’s Your Take On This? Share Your Views

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Miracle Man>>

The old saying ”the eyes are the window to the soul”  has now been proven by Science.

Editor’s Note: I found this article on the BBC Website- psychics throughout history have talked about the huge potential knowledge that can be gained from staring at a person’s eyes. This might be one step along the path of proving them right.

 Swedish scientists and researchers have detected patterns between people’s irises and the personality traits they possess, such as warm-heartedness and trust or neuroticism and impulsiveness. So someone just looking at the shape of your iris can tell what kind of person you are.

The team from Orebro University read pits and lines in the irises of 428 people.

Experts said the study in Biological Psychology showed that at least some aspects of personality were determined by genetics.

Close-up pictures were taken of the study participants’ irises, and they also filled out a questionnaire about their personalities.

About The Iris. . .

The Iris is the most visible part of the eye. The word comes from Greek mythology, in which Iris is the anthropomorphized form of the rainbow.

Crypts

These are a series of openings, also known as pits.

Contraction Furrows

These are the lines curving around the outer edge of the iris which are formed when pupils dilate.

Left: Iris

The iris is the green, brown and grey area that surrounds the pupil.

The Findings

It was found that those with more crypts were likely to be tender, warm and trusting, while those with more furrows were more likely to be neurotic, impulsive and give in to cravings.

Is this down to Genes?

The researchers say that PAX6, a neurodevelopmental gene, could also play a major role. It is known to help control the development of the iris in an embryo.

Do you know someone very impulsive? Or someone that lacks social skills? Previous research has shown that this is linked to a mutation of the PAX 6 gene.

Dr. Matt Larsson- team leader:

“These findings support the notion that people with different iris configurations tend to develop along different trajectories in regards to personality.

“Differences in the iris can be used as a biomarker that reflects differences between people.”

Dr George Fieldman, principal lecturer in psychology at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College:

“This is very interesting. It shows that some aspects of personality have a genetic base and to identify them in the eye in this fascinating way is significant.”

The Future

Airports are using iris scanning to identify people, who knows what the future holds? Maybe people will have their irises scanned to find out their personalities.

What can you tell from a person’s eyes? Share your Thoughts here

Click Here for the full article >>

I found the following study from University College in London amazingly interesting. I brough to mind what I learned in a Silva class 15 years ago, that we can learn to tap into our inner intuition to help us get guidance to solve major problems in life. And that this intuition is often the first thought entering our mind, and subsequent thoughts are more logical and often not as right. The study below mentions how these “first thoughts” about a given situation are often far more correct than than logical thoughts. Strong evidence for the existance of ESP in all of us.

A University College London (UCL) study has found that you are more likely to perform well if you do not think too hard and instead trust your instincts. Appearing in the journal Current Biology, the research shows that instinctive snap decisions are sometimes more reliable than decisions taken using higher-level cognitive processes.

The experiment involved subjects picking the odd symbol (a rotated version) out of over 650 identical symbols presented on a computer screen. Tracking participants’ eye movements, the researchers controlled the time allotted to each individual’s search for their target. The visual display screen was switched off at various time intervals either before or after the subjects’ eyes landed on the target (between 0 and 1.5 seconds). They then had to decide whether the odd one out was on the left or the right-hand side of the screen.

Intriguingly, the researchers found that participants scored better if they were given no scrutinizing time at all. With only a tiny fraction of a second for scrutinizing the target, subjects performed with 95 percent accuracy. With over a second to scrutinize the image, subjects were only 70 percent accurate. Accuracy was recovered if scrutinizing was allowed to run for more than 4 seconds.

“This finding seems counter-intuitive. You would expect people to make more accurate decisions when given the time to look properly. Instead they performed better when given almost no time to think. The conscious or top-level function of the brain, when active, vetoes our initial subconscious decision - even when it is correct - leaving us unaware or distrustful of our instincts and at an immediate disadvantage.

Falling back on our inbuilt, involuntary subconscious processes for certain tasks is actually more effective than using our higher-level cognitive functions,” explained Dr Li Zhaoping, of the UCL Department of Psychology.

The researchers say the instinctive decisions were more likely to be correct because the subconscious brain recognizes a rotated version of the same object as different from the original, whereas the conscious brain sees the two objects as identical. For the conscious brain, an apple is still an apple whether rotated or not.

So while the lower-level cognitive process spots the rotated image as the odd one out, the higher-level functions override that decision and dismiss the rotated object because it is the same as all the other symbols. When subjects were given the time to engage their higher-level functions, their decisions were therefore more likely to be wrong.

“If our higher-level and lower-level cognitive processes are leading us to the same conclusions, there is no issue. Often though, our instincts and higher-level functions are in conflict and in this case our instincts are often silenced by our reasoning conscious mind. Participants would have improved their performance if they had been able to switch off their higher-level cognition by, for example, acting quickly,” explained Dr Zhaoping. ”

Our eye movements are often involuntary. What seems like a random darting of the eye is often an essential subconscious scanning technique that allows us to pick out unique and distinctive features in a crowd - such as color or orientation. Soon after our eyes have fixed on a target, the conscious or top-down part of cognition engages and examines whether the candidate really is the target or not. If the target is not distinctive enough in the ‘eyes’ of the conscious, failure of identification can occur.”

Source: University College London.  Discovered via Scienceagogo.com

Scientist and author Rupert Sheldrake has announced what is perhaps, the most famous example of telepathy and scientific research.

Sheldrake, a UK scientist, claims he has evidence of what he calls “telephone telepathy” - the phenomenon by which you think about someone and, lo and behold, the phone rings…

According to Reuters, Rupert Sheldrake reported on Tuesday the results of experiments which “proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even emails”.

Sheldrake’s guinea pigs gave researchers the names and phone numers of four relatives or friends. One of these was contacted at random and asked to give the subject a bell. Forty-five per cent guessed correctly who was on the other end of the line, Sheldrake told the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science shindig - “well above the 25 per cent you would have expected.”

Sheldrake further commented:

The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one.

A similar test involving email yielded the same result, although the researchers’ limited pool of testees - 63 for the phone and 50 for the email - coupled to the fact that only nine subjects were filmed across the two tests, prompted “some scepticism”.

Sheldrake has vowed to continue his experiments, however, to prove what he believes is the “interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping”.

Next up for scrutiny is text message telepathy. Will more cases of telepathy and scientific research come to public light? We certainly hope so.

Article from The Register. Orginally found on Reuters, Sep 2006.

Can you beleive in the creation of the universe,  the Big Bang and God?

Can you beleive in spirituality AND science.

The answer is yes.

Bestsellers by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have denounced the evils of religion and proclaimed that science has proven that there is no God. Their angry accusations are partially correct.

Religions have been used to justify crimes against humanity: witness the Inquisition of centuries past or the sectarian slaughter in the Mideast today.

Religions are indeed a problem.

But the human misuse of religions and the existence of God are very different matters.

What then, is God?

Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications. In his new book, The God Theory he proposes the following:

A remarkable discovery has emerged in astrophysics: that key properties of the Universe have just the right values to make life possible. Most scientists prefer to explain away this uniqueness, insisting that a huge, perhaps infinite, number of unseen universes must therefore exist, each randomly different from the other. That way ours only appears special because we could not exist in any of the other hypothetical universes.

I propose the alternative that the special properties of our universe reflect an underlying intelligence, one that is consistent with the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution. Both views are equally logical and beyond proof. However exceptional human experiences and accounts of mystics throughout the ages do suggest that we live in a purposeful universe. In The God Theory I speculate on what that purpose might be… what that purpose means for our lives… how it might explain the riddle of evil.

View this Four minute video discussing why it is possible to believe in both science and God, a God that is compatible with the Big Bang and evolution.

Is there a plausible purpose behind the Universe consistent with modern astrophysics? And when we discover the reason - will religion become obsolete and give away to Science and Spirituality?

The God Theory

For information on the God Theory is available from TheGodTheory.com