A falling drop.

"... one must accept the thoughts that go within oneself of their own accord as part of one's reality." (1)

 

There was a time when there was no time
To experience it you must loose your identity
And having lost your identity no one is left to describe it.

When your identity returns
There you are not anymore;
That time comes back to time
Existence defeats description.

The experience of it
That is our lot.
And that comes at the end
Of our allotted time.

As for those who get a glimpse of it,
That is a glimpse of a timeless time
And no one was there to witness it.

These may seem
Just reveries of the mind,
But how does the mind get to it
If it is not there?

There was a time when there was no time ....
.

   

‘Me’ was never born, while ‘I’ is a different story, a natural planetary happenstance close to eighty years old; I cannot recall how it happened nor have I have ever fallen in the hands of a depth psychologist to find out, somewhat like a guinea pig in a deep hypnotic trance, to learn the truth. I presume that my link with the safe and warm uterine world was severed, I was extracted, slapped on wet and tender butts and surely I did make a hell of it and my prenatal ‘me’ went into oblivion while ‘I’, willy nilly, had to get a start; it does not really needs hypnotic regression to find out how it happened. Time went by before I was told, and had to accept, that I was born but that is not unusual, you too might have been told a similar story and had to accept it but the similarity may, for environmental and familiar events, end here. Like every son/daughter with reasonably good parents, I was not considered completely normal and that is fine, normality pertains to robots and not to human beings; abnormal robots are somehow recycled while abnormal humans are not easily disposed off and, in most cases, more tenderly cared of. My great luck, even if I lived within a Catholic Christian community, is that, even if I never understood to what extent my parents were religious, they were not in the least bigots although all those nonsensical Christian sacraments demanded by tradition and the social milieu were my lot. Useless to say, this saved me a lot of brainwashing and nonsense (2) and, to my parents, I have but to be deeply grateful for this. My first great Christian experience was in a Catholic kinder garden where an old nun, possibly somewhat 'Alzheimer-ed', used to repeat incessantly "time goes by and death approaches" and did not brainwash those little souls in her care with the Ten Commandments. But thus she pushed me in a more rational view of life than towards monasticism ... should I not, now beyond average age-span when the angel of death is just beyond the corner, thank her? Time went by ... in my school, that was Asmara’s Comboni College, there were Catholic and Coptic Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Protestants and more and surely that contributed to an open mind, freed from racial and religious prejudices. A rare blessing the contact with indigenous Eritrean students in this pot that contained Indians, Arabs, Italians, Greeks, Armenians and more; there were not whites, blacks of yellows among us. A garden with no stinging plants! The teachers were Christian Missionaries of the order of Daniele Comboni (3) but, due to the ethnic diversity and related religious background of the students, religious teaching was not compulsory and this, as well, avoided noxious widespread brainwashing; education reinforces the habit of seeing the world through a certain lens.
As luck would have it and with a rebellious temperament during adolescence I realized that not a few veils were obscuring my mind’s sight so that I started, in one way or another, to try rid myself of this darkness and never did I desert this task which, day by day brought into my life many books and more bits of knowledge, not less so a deeper obscurity into which a mysterious, very hard to catch, small ray of light shone on the difficult path of infinity. There, in the nowhere, my ‘me’ had patiently been waiting to be discovered and what did I find? That, that ‘me’ is an insubstantial non-entity which does not, in the least, carry the label ‘private property’ since ‘me’ it is a universal pillar sustaining each ‘I’ anywhere in the universe wherever a sentient being is capable of attaching an ego to himself. And, as such, it cannot but be unborn and is not contained within the fringes of time and space, less so in a multitude of erect-walking bags of flesh and bones, although it takes pleasure to hide himself in the nowhere as soon as we fall in the somewhere.
 
 
Hence, it all it makes a hide-and-seek game which creates not a few problems to anyone who feels a sense of it. This is natural and normal, so much so as it is normal in this hectic timeframe in which we live, for most humans, not to care about the ‘me’ while, on the other hand, nothing is more important than the ‘I’ for them who struggle for survival; so much so for those vampires who feed on them in this strange technological era. Yet history is replete of abnormal beings that threw, or strenuously tried to throw, the ‘I’ behind their shoulders in order to quest after that strange non-entity which, unrecognized is part and parcel of our being without belonging to any of those beings that to him belong even if it is not empowered to have any belonging. All the same, I feel that it is erroneous to say that we are 'those beings that to him belong.' It does not matter if it is intangible and nowhere because perceptibly we are, hence, am I not me? Who, in relation to the physical plane, can prove the contrary? Not only ‘me’ does not claim any possession but I am informed that I, just like anyone else, am it so long as I am. It is a simple matter of awareness, still this awareness is hardly spontaneous, the key which opens the door to its perception is hidden in the deep subconscious; finding the key does not really solve the problem since, once found, we are not wont to handle it in the darkness of our being and the lighted lamp is beyond the threshold. And this brings about the other face of the coin: what about when I am not anymore? Well, not being anymore cannot happen but for this un-comprehensible bag of flesh and bones which carries an ‘I’ in search of a ‘me’. The satisfaction of the most normal animal instinct brought about myriads of ‘I’ strolling in sorrow or in joy in every corner of this gorgeous planet, their existence is more or less certain and certified but, except as a bag of flesh and bones, none of them was ever born and perhaps these bags of flesh and bones populate the planet, strive and toil, only within an illusory shadow brought about by those clouds of ignorance which can be pierced but by that minority that becomes aware of the fact that beyond the clouds the sun shines; but each and everyone of us is given a chance and clues as to how pierce and sail beyond these clouds without recourse to NASA’s technology, the means to achieve this are within our mental structure. A mental structure? What is it made of and built upon? Mystery upon mystery! We dissect brains, stain their cells to explore their structure, plant electrodes inside them, turn them around into magnetic apparatus which show their metabolism, record encephalic waves and all this tells us that brains are brains and minds are minds, that brains belong to individuals while minds belong, or rather, are a common substratum which speaks the language it learned from ‘me’ and which is translated and read from ‘I’ by that delicate mass of convoluted soft tissue encased within its bony shrine above our necks. And this is the tower of Babel, the translations may be similar but never identical, the books’ context may be similar but each reader’s ‘I’ has developed in a different context hence differences arise. Unsolicited brainwashing is the first thing which is acted upon us and retains a strong grip; its effects on a young, receptive and plastic brain leaves a deep track along which he has to trod his more or less precarious way. A "born stupid" is quite uncommon, the stupid is created subsequently!
'Me’ is the essence of ‘I’; it develops, grows and matures feeding of the subjective experience of ‘I’. It is the psyche’s play field and as well, it receives feedback from the psyche.
Everyone has his own belief, his own interpretation and his own say, to what extent am I off track? That is a difficult question, perhaps for all of us since the mind is a stormy wave never at rest.
I do not believe in pure coincidence, there is an exact, even if often hidden or inexplicable meaning-connection in whatever seems coincidental or pure chance; (4) to me not a rare happenstance. In a moment of relaxation from this insane "I-me" I went to some old magazines bound together and opening at random through its pages, the following passage, which I interpolate in this writing, showed up begging to be reproduced in between these lines before I resume digging into ‘my’ mind:

Can the Obvious be seen?.
The notion of a conceptual ‘ego’ confuses the issue. The word ‘ego’ means ‘I’-and no such thing (object) could possibly be conceived, for ‘an I’ is merely a contradiction-in-terms.
What is conceptual is the notion represented by the pronoun ‘me’.
As ‘I’ I am forever inconceivable: as ‘me’ I am a conceptual image extended in space-time, manipulated psychically, and assuming an illusory autonomy.
My space-time ‘life’ as ‘me’ consists of a series of spatial and temporal incidents experienced by an objectivised ‘entity’ whose sole virtuality is that it is I.
As such I cannot experience at all- since only what is objective can suffer experience (which is any sensation whatever).
In preaching the abolition of ‘suffering’ the Buddha sought to make this evident. We are still trying to do this. Could it be too obvious to be seen?

Wei Wu Wei (
5)

Back, to my possibly insane cerebration, I turn now to another subject concerning my apparent subjectivity. The question 'what am I?' has never insistently intrigued me, so much so also the 'who am I?' although it might have received more personal attention; “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts”. (6) That which really intrigues me is the 'why am I?' Surely, I did not gain existence on this beautiful planet just to feed the so many cats who filled my life to the brim. Then, on the assumption that there is purpose in the universe, 'why?'
Why am I writing these lines, why are you reading them, why are we, unknown to each other and separated by a given period of time and an indefinite distance involved in this intellectual task? This can easily be surmised: that we may understand and be reciprocally discursive, even in disagreement, points to a mysteriously shared substratum, an intangible wide-expanse intellectual chessboard where our lives are played otherwise this could not happen, everyone would be a lonely stranger helplessly stranded on the planet. The conundrum is 'why are we?'
I am an heretic, an iconoclast: no religion, godless, no divine or other celestial guides. Nor are dogs, hirudineans and rotters allowed in my compounds; this does not mean that I despise or hate the aforementioned, the words despise and hate do not belong to my dictionary; I simply try to avoid foolishness and ignorance: mine are enough and far from being overcome, if ever. My teachers in life have been mostly printed pages from remarkable individuals, most of them belonging to the planet’s eastern hemisphere; a long time have I spent fishing out the best fishes from the rivers of their thoughts and, not less so, from the ocean of the world’s religions; "... whoever does not want to die of thirst among men must learn to drink from all cups." (7) All the same the 'why am I?' baffles me while ‘me’ won’t disclose this paramount secret and here I am out of a limb!

Perhaps ... since a plausible idea wriggles the shrunk convolutions inside the bony shrine above my neck, it has been there for quite a long time and still begs for a resolute answer to the 'why am I?' and I am forced to travel in a circle. But…

 
     
  .I was a thread of mist,
That from the immensity of the ocean
Rose high up in the atmosphere
And joined a cloud.
Therewith I became a drop,
But a bright sun above dethawed the cloud
And back into the ocean the drop fell.
There it dissolved,
And became the ocean.
 
 

.
This is what I mean when I say that life is not 'my' experience, but that I am an experience of 'Life'. I cannot find a better answer to the 'why' but while the above metaphor seems reasonable, again, I travel in a circle since the ocean is a source of life but what is this inexplicable ocean, 'Life'? I am lost, 'me' is struck dumb. The human intellect, brainwashed into traditional beliefs and more often than not confined among walls of senseless dogmas runs in circles. Smashing these walls is a great evolutionary gift. But crossing the boundary is also a perilous adventure since the traveler can be ensnared in the fields of insanity or, otherwise, in the cage of mysticism; in the last case he will return speechless, a typical madman that only a few can comprehend.

"Before enlightenment you chop wood and carry water …
After enlightenment you chop wood and carry water …"

 
 

Apparently nothing happens except that, freed from the cage, consciousness thrives on a different mental level where it can use the power added to it either in a positive or a negative way, or plunge itself, as well, in the field of insanity.

"There are things in the psyche which we do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life." (8)

The drop which dissolves in the wide expanse of the ocean can restitute an inadequate, indeed poor, idea of what 'Life' builds upon and how it enriches its own experience on this speck of cosmic dust which is our planet; we cannot span the cosmic infinity where 'Life' thrives. What is sure is that the drop cannot return as the very same drop, it has dissolved in the ocean; still, perhaps some of its atoms and molecules may appear in other drops within other clouds with, encoded within, the experience gained within a former cloud. This discounts the theory of reincarnation. Yet some lingering memories may reach other drops which will attach themselves to some receptive psyche, memories which a receptive psyche will attach to a "my" past life. Might it not be that some of these dispersed atoms and molecules carry with themselves or, rather, are the seeds of an evolutionary process since nothing whatsoever gets lost in the cosmic experience? This is a crude, indeed poor, explanation of what my intellect can grasp up to this point; there is another wall to smash: what is the purpose of life? 'Me' is once more struck dumb nor will it ever smash this other wall; speculation and wild theories abound, none of them reasonable; we are looking at the problem from an infinitesimal "inside" constricted within the illusion of space and time. 'Life' itself may not be aware of its purpose, it may be just a great cosmic machine yet, behind this there ought to be something inconceivable, an intelligence with those two qualities which are most manifest in planetary life: purpose and will. That is why 'me' was never born and 'I' am pounding my computer's keyboard. We have something in common with that mysterious beyond, purpose and will. "There is no such thing as chance, and what we regard as blind circumstance actually stems from the deepest source of all." (9).

From end to end, with labor keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before.
(10)

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There are several ways to become an enlightened being in this wonderful planet, a fully realized homo somewhat sapiens.

You may try with a complicated Tibetan mandala of your choice. It is advisable to be shut in a dark and deep cave up in the Himalayas clad in a light cotton robe and in a given number of years you will emerge, a Milarepa reborn.
Or you may pin your mind and intellectual faculties to a Hindu yantra, a complicated image of intertwined triangles with a deep symbolic meaning. It is better to lay, with a loincloth, on a bed of mails in the proximity of the river Ganges; it is not compulsory to paint your body and face with multicolored stripes, nor need you have a long braid rolled up on the top of your head. Resist the temptation, unless you are an Indian, to bathe in the Gange's waters, only Indians possess immunity against its horrible pollution. And one day you will be a perfect Jagadguru, a reincarnated Sri Sankaracarya.
Alternatively try an easier way, introspectively contemplate your mind: "The mind is like an impetuous stream brought about by a torrential rain uphill. We must see the rain abating, the clouds dispersing and a clear sky above. We must learn to restrain the stream’s current, slow it down until it comes to a standstill and like a polished mirror it reflects the illusion of the world, our world. Then, patiently, bit by bit we must dissolve this image, the illusion of this world of ours, until nothing remains and we are stunned by another vision, the vision of reality." But what is reality? Read it between the lines:

"Before enlightenment you chop wood and carry water …
After enlightenment you chop wood and carry water …"

The enlightened Zen monk chopping wood and carrying water would explain it in a single word, ‘satori’; a Dervish mystic would say ‘fana’, an Hindu ascetic would say ‘moksha’, a Buddhist would say ‘nirvana’, a Tibetan anchorite would say ‘tharpa’ . We translate these words as ‘enlightenment’, ‘illumination’ or ’spiritual realization’ and the mystic experience cannot be conveyed in words. But whatever the vision, the experience reflected by the aforementioned words is a subjective experience, even Lao Tzu’s

“The Tao that can be told is not the
eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the
eternal name.” (11)

is a mental concept. Can the human experience of reality, the unconditioned realization of our primordial nature, reflect that Reality which lies beyond the power of the human mind?

Another method is to use your imagination as best it reflects your personal dispositions; a long time ago, since the Himalayas and the Ganges are beyond my reach, I conjured the visualization described below and it seemed fairly effectual, notwithstanding I am still in a dark cave with no rays of light. Clearly, you may devise your own visualizations as it best suits your disposition, but beware, psychical games may be dangerous.

"Imagine that a large sphere is interposed somewhere between the sun and the floor – an eclipse of sphere! And, again in your imagery, you are the shadow cast on the ground, a flat bi-dimensional shadow in Flatland but, as luck would have it, endowed with a sense of sight, and some sort of intellectually active machinery. Hence, you will perceive a dark disk with a dim and fading aura of light around it somewhere above in the deep blue sky but all that will be perfectly flat simply because, being a shadow, you lack the perception of the third dimension, in your ill-fated case height; and, worst of all, lacking the sense of height that dark disk will be intolerably oppressive. It will be some kind of immaterial but indeed real weight on your shadow-body and no matter how you slide on the floor to evade it, it will follow you everywhere. A perennial daily nightmare with no way out; and there is no way you can comprehend that situation because you do not know what is causing it, you cannot visualize, still less, imagine the bright sun shedding light above the sphere. As it happens, due to some unexplainable portentous event and an extreme effort somehow your shadow leaps on the sphere. There cohering to the sphere, it experiences a strange sensation due to its curvature and the possibility of a different, strange and mysterious world is envisaged, verily a different dimension; hence it slides, not without a supreme effort, upwards; but as it crosses above the sphere’s middle section it is annihilated by the sunlight and no one but an inert sphere, a psyche without a brain, is left to tell the story. You are annihilated! Fused into the sunlight the shadow returns where it belongs to, that domain of eternal light which gave you a tangible, albeit flat ineffable existence." Such a situation is not difficult to imagine; nor does it require a dark cave or a bed of nails, just make yourself comfortable. "And only when he turns away from himself, will he jump over his shadow-and verily, into his sun." (7)

When I devised this mental game I did not realize its symbolical importance, only much later it crossed my mind. The shadow is a projection, that is, what I think that I am. The object in the way, hard to reach, is my subconscious. The luminous source above the mysterious object is that which dispels ignorance, a face of reality – not reality in itself; self knowledge, within the limits available in our mental tool box. Our reality is what our sense perceptions posit us. Hence “Be your own guide and your torch.” (The Buddha) Even so, there is an indeed simpler way which can be summarized in only four words, an extreme shortcut: here forget the grammarian's and the psychologist’s scholarly definitions of ‘I’ and ‘me’. 'I' is your physical person, exactly the reverse of your image as it appears in a well-polished mirror while 'me' is the conceptual reality of that cherished 'I' and then, relaxed and breathing properly, close your eyes and meditate about "the Self beyond myself"; only four words! That is the shortest path to the effulgent insanity of the beyond. “What visage did you possess before your father and mother were born?” (12) Indeed, there are a plethora of methods to switch on your inner light and in this blessed era only a click of the mouse away! That is all it takes to join the beaming army of enlightened beings in this gorgeous, albeit maltreated, planet. As for me, a hoary one-eyed troglodyte, without an Internet connection, (13) I still have to totter in my dark psychic cave.
But whether you are in a cave, or lying on your back on rusty nails with just a loincloth, or squashed as a shadow on a green prairie or on the hot sands of the Sahara, or playing with your mouse do what most people don't: inhale slowly filling up from the navel to above the diaphragm, to you throat; retain as comfortable for a few seconds, exhale slowly and retain for a few seconds. Do not force, nor strain; rather, make a habit of such a practice, it means good health! Proper breathing is related to vitality, you are not inhaling just oxygen but vital energy (prana). Avoid exotic breathing exercises unless properly supervised by a competent adept, noxious results might ensue. (14) "For true men draw breath from their heels, the vulgar only from their throats." (15)


"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful". (16)

Are you afraid of death? Senseless and irrational unless you have a sure method to escape it, death! But there is no way out, your inescapable fate is to feed the worms, or wild creatures, or to be cremated. But this fear is terrible, what hallucinations will cross your mind during the last moments? It depends on your psychical propensities; perhaps a bright smile will enlighten your visage, a happy trespassing.
Do you believe in Heaven and Hell? Pathetic!
If you are a Christian, every Sunday morning after drinking Christ’s blood you will pay indulgence to a priest to have Saint Peter open the gates of paradise for you. That damned shrewd priest is then obviously better off than you are but he himself will never avoid hell, no Son of God will ever intercede for him and his irksome ignorance. Christian hell is terrific, appalling; you will not be given respite for all eternity. I have no information about the Jew’s hell, I never read the ‘Holy’ Bible but for a few textual passages. But surely Islam’s sensuous paradise is worth attaining to; alas, my bad luck is that I do not believe in it even if I read the Koran thrice; in two languages to be sure.
The Tibetan’s hell, if we are to believe to what they depict in their paintings, is all but pleasurable still you can escape from it, you will not be there for eternity like an inveterate Christian sinner. As for the Chinese hell, what about being reincarnated as a donkey, or a snake, a worm, a fox and so on?
The Buddhist’s paradise is the most rational, it is right here if you can grasp it within the days allotted to you, it is the attainment of Nirvana, enlightenment; it follows that you can live the rest of your life ‘awakened’ and in complete freedom from attachment to any earthly propensity. Anyhow I do not strive for it since 'me' was never born; even so I try to be more awaked, that is, free from life’s entanglements and somewhat less ignorant. To live confined in a bag of flesh and bones is conditioning even for the unborn.
There is no Heaven, there is no Hell but forget not, there is no exemption from a Knell. Shakespeare would not agree: "...it is a Knell, That summons thee to Heaven, or to Hell." (17) And Dante is crippled since the Church abolished Purgatory. (18)

All in all, you are your own paradise or hell.

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As I wrote above, I discount the theory of reincarnation; it is a religious or psychological hook to dismiss man’s fear of death. That intolerable and frightful fear of utter extinction does not make sense, it is simply irrational. My drop dissolving in that cosmic reality symbolized by the ocean looses its strict individuality; as such it will not experience a past or a future, its constituents will be part of the ocean for ever and ever!
Seen from a physical point of view: the human brain is an incredible electrical powerhouse: If we consider 100 billion neurons at a resting negative potential of 7 millivolt it has a potential of -700 watts/ampere, -700 thousand volts. This is a conservative estimate, and patently all these neurons cannot be simultaneously at an equal potential; obviously the brain’s potential at any given instant gives rise to an electromagnetic field and, around the skull, it has been verified. (19) This electromagnetic field is radiant energy at a given frequency, that is, we are biological transmitters and this emission is lost in the universe with some encoded information.
When we die this transmitter is switched off, the biological organism will feed the worms, or whatever, and it will disappear for good. With the brain’s demise sense perceptions, intellectual and mental faculties will vanish as well, nothing physical, psychical or whatsoever will remain, but … the encoded energy lost in the universe, is it really lost? If the brain is a transmitter, can it not be also a receiver? This brings about an important point: if so it can tune into some of the encoded energy of the universe and react to it as a psychical manifestation. The psychical manifestation can be clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, abolition of gravity (levitation) or a mental perception of a different moment in time; in this last case, since the psyche appropriates any manifestation that affects it in given circumstances a person may see past events and speculate about it as a personal experience: reincarnation! And so we have a Shanti Devi and a host of individuals who claim past lives, reincarnations. This is not far removed from the Buddhist doctrine of the Alaya-Vijinana, that is "'store-consciousness" and the Hindu's "Akashic Record."

Notes.

1- C. G. Jung in "Myths, Dreams and Mysteries"-p. 329-Collins, The Fontana Libray-1974.
What I write is not referable to direct experience, or self-realization. It comes from acquired knowledge, it is mere intellectualism and as such its value is.
2 -Have you ever realized why, if you do, you go to church? You where brainwashed into it. Whatever it may be 'god' has nothing to do with it. You are motivated by a mental concept firmly instilled in your mental frame and what do you gain from it? Hard to say but, most obvious, it is evident who gains from it: those leeches and parasites which infest the globe while, on the other hand, they could be much more profitable to society if they were tilling the land instead of preaching nonsense.
3 - They were very strict concerning discipline; a record of our misdeeds was kept and, at the end of the schoolday, those whose name appeared in that book had their due. The punishment was a piece of rubber hose, or a stick, or a kurbash (a long whip, used only by the warden on the most impenitent) unlashed on their buttocks or on the legs; the piece of rubber hose specialization was hands. Regretfully, modern society releases exempla, false hopes and even material gifts to try, hardly successfully, to gain disciplined young rebels. Estimable and dedicated teachers, they were deeply engrossed in their faith and several of this order, just like Daniele Comboni, were killed in Sudan, an Islamic country. This is the other face of that scourge of the world which the Mother Church has been and, behind the curtains, still is. Christianity as a whole, 'in the Name of God' may compete with the horrors of the German Dictator and the Mongol Conqueror of the Word. “Dr. Sprenger estimates that nine million persons have been burned or otherwise put to death as witches during the Christian epoch.” (The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mysteries of All Nations, by James Grant - 1880 - p. 558.) Noetically with its anthropomorphic doctrine, its lies and willful perversion of facts it has stifled the human mind and brought about an incredible mass of blind, lip-service tomfools. The greatest world catastrophe was not the sinking of Atlantis but the raising of St. Paul. Furthermore this does not take into account the slaughters, cruel, insentient, homicidal, and inhuman deeds of the biblical god. It baffles me how such a great part of the world's populations can still live with the 'holy' Bible under their pillow. But since I am a dunce why should I bother? Alas, even a dunce can be disconcerted, not so much so about the deeds of that ancient god still thriving somewhere up there in the sky (the future paradise of the obtuse) but about the peoples in the claws of the abominable mundane priestly caste. "Their bloodless souls crave blood, and so they sting in all innocence." (7)
4- So much so I am quite suspicious about chance and random events. I am more prone to think of a law which regulates the physical universe in an inescapable way. The electron which escapes from its orbit, so much so as the spermatozoon that succeeds, among millions, to fecundate an egg, or the leaf which falls there instead of here at such a time rather that at another time: while it all appears to be casual, to wit, singled out by chance the causal agent is always behind the phenomenon albeit by and large we lack means to access the causative agent.
5- From “The Middle Way”, the Journal of the Buddhist Society. Vol. XLVII No. 1 – May 1972.
6- Dhammapada.
7 - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in "Thus Spake Zarathustra".
8- C. G. Jung in "Myths, Dreams and Mysteries"-Collins, The Fontana Libray-1974.
9 - Schiller, 1952.
10 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust
11 - The Tao Te Ching - Translation by Gia Fu Feng & Jane. - [16 more translations for comparative studies.]
12 -Zen quote from "Initiation and Initiates in Tibet"- Alexandra David-Neel - Shambala Publications, Inc. -Berkley-1979.
13 - In town, Asmara, there are tens of cybercafé; connections are slow and maintenance not at it best. Even thus impaired, this site is fully public domain and does not have that omnipresent beggar's "d o n a t e" button.
14 - Two ebooks are here available: The Hindu Science of Breath by Yogi Ramacharaka and Sudarshan kriya yoga Breathing for health .
15 - Chuang Tzu: "The true men of old slept without dreams and waked up without worries. They ate with indifference to flavour, and drew deep breaths. For true men draw breath from their heels, the vulgar only from their throats." I am not sure about Chuang Tzu's meaning of 'draw breath from their heels' but my method is to visualize, i.e. to feel, with every inhalation breath as life energy, or prana, raising up from the soles of my feet all the way up to the crown of the head; completing the cycle, exhalation, I visualize it falling from the top of my head just like a fountain’s water falls back into the pool which contains it. The resulting feeling is just like being inside a life giving protective cocoon, just like a chrysalis in its own cocoon.
‘… the practices of magicians and hermits not only were intended to achieve heightened contemplation but had also a therapeutic purpose. This is confirmed by an inscription on twelve jade stones which has come down to us from the 6th century B.C.: “This is how breathing must be done: the breath is retained and collected. When it has collected it expands. When it expands, it goes downward. When it goes downwards, it becomes quiet. When it has become quiet, it grows firm. When it is firm, it begins to germinate. When it has germinated, it grows. When it has grown, it must be pressed back. When it has been pressed back, it reaches the crown of the head. At the top it presses against the crown of the head, down below it presses downwards. Whoever follows this principle lives; whoever does the contrary dies.”’ (Wilhem Helmut: A Chou Inscription on the Technique of Breathing. Quoted by Needham, Joseph: “Science and Civilization in China”. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press). I: 1954, II: 1956)- from The Chinese Art of Healing by Stephan Pálos. Bantam Book, 1972.
16 - Seneca the Younger.
17 - Shakespeare, Macbeth (txt).
18 - The Divine Comedy - Translated by Translated by Arthur John Butler (PDF) and by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (txt).
19 - "... the brain's electric field is not a by-product; it is a feedback loop." Scientific American Mind - November/December 210 - p. 10. It is strange that the scientific community realized such fact at such late date (clearly science needs experimental evidence, and this is the case here).
Ibid. "We knew that weak electrical fields could impact brain activity, but what no one had really tested before was whether electric fields produced by the brain itself could influence its own activity".
~ A personal note ~ We have been able to translate electricity into mechanical force, then into voice, afterwards as a carrier for both voice and images. In all these transformations there has always been a key component: a length of twisted wire, a coil; we also discovered that adding another component - a condenser - we could alter at will the frequency of oscillation of the generated electrical field so as to achieve desired results. The two components mentioned above, condensers and coils, have an equivalence in our brain, (if we reflect about the plethora of artifacts that we see around us we will discover that most mechanism are inspired by natural mechanisms) where the circuits between cells (condensers) and dendrites (coils) form resonant circuits besides driving the brain's biochemical processes. Hence, here and once more we just brought into the open - by that process that we call invention - what is inside ourselves. And the undisclosed mechanism which creates the interaction between brain and mind cannot but be in the interaction of some sort of electromagnetic field so as it is for the universe at large. All universal interactions - to our knowledge - depend on electromagnetism. By now we know far too well how to alter the functions of the brain with modulated (that is, with other superimposed signals) electromagnetic waves, both for good (the simplest example is music) or for bad (mind conditioning). Here is ample proof that by altering the functions of the brain we alter, as well, the response of the human mind. This, in itself, is the other face of the coin where on one side we can use psychoactive substances to act upon the chemistry of the brain while on the other side we have electrical fields which alter the oscillatory and hence chemo-electrical response of the same. That which we cannot get to terms with, is what is the channel of communication, or the route of exchange between the brain and the human mind, if we give for granted that brain and mind are two different entities.

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