MEDITATION - Does it really happen in the brain?

Many of you may be wondering whether ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ are one and the same. For one thing, most modern scientists believe that to be so. But that raises other questions, some of which I have discussed in my book “Important Missing dimensions in our current understanding of the Mind”.

There are no answers to these questions as far as our current science is concerned. Does it mean that we should altogether forget our scientific achievements and go after some illusive entity as some modern Gurus do?

Definitely not.  The progress we have made in understanding the brain, and its association with our mental faculty is too precious to just discard. That way, we make no progress. What I believe is the following.

Let me give a simple analogy – don’t stretch this analogy too much.

Let us say, you have your computer which has a central processing unit - CPU, memory and a secondary storage (disk).

For most purposes, the CPU works on the memory – it not only gets its instructions but also stores all the information in it. Only those information that are needed for long term, go to the secondary storage – not directly, but again through the memory.

So for most practical purposes, memory is what drives the CPU. It is only when you ‘shutdown’ your computer, some of the information in the memory gets transferred to the secondary storage. Next time when you boot the computer, you can start from ‘where you left’. I don’t want to speculate on what ‘shutdown’ and ‘reboot’ mean and leave them to your imagination ;-)

I will only suggest that our brain is like computer memory which is the stage on which most of our mental drama goes on. Brain may not be ‘everything’ but it definitely has the main role to play and surely not something that can be just overlooked. After all, the computer cannot work without its memory, no matter what is stored in its secondary storage!

So Gurus, don’t keep weaving webs about things you are  not capable of acting directly. You need your brain to do even that ;-)

Start(Meditation)            Previous       Next