Neurotheology Quotes

Through the newly emerged field of Neurotheology, Scientists such as Andrew Newberg, Michael Persinger, myself and a few others have already taken the first step from the side of Science, to diminish the gap between Science and Religion. Now it is time for Religion to do the same. And the moment any religion does that, the eternal battle between Science and Religion would slowly start to disperse.

Regardless of the perpetual battle between believers and atheists, for me, religion is a tool of making friends, rather than making enemies.

I am proud to say to you that, I am a scientist and I accept all religions to be biologically true and equal. My pursuit of understanding the human mind has taught me universal tolerance.

Abhijit Naskar is a self-trained scientist and thinker who discovers the paradigm shifting phenomena of the human mind.

A man woke up at midnight and wanted to smoke. Therefore he looked for some fire, for which he went to a neighbor’s house and knocked at the door. The neighbor opened the door and asked him what he wanted. The man said, I wish to smoke. Can you give me a little fire? The neighbor replied, O.M.G.! What the heck is wrong with you? You have taken so much trouble to come and wake us up at the middle of the night, while in your own hand you have a lantern! The God that human beings so keenly seek, lives within the human biology, yet they wander hitherto searching for it.

Religion is deeply intertwined with a person’s cultural identity. Hence, trying to take it away, is not only unethical from a humane standpoint, but also it is immoral and downright inhuman.

It is in the nature of the human mind to give in, and hold on, to the source of solace with all the might it can muster. Life is hard and any figure that tends to ease the subjective perception of that hardship, attains a high pedestal of utmost reverence in the realm of the individual mind. It all takes place at a molecular level in the human brain with the purpose of self-preservation.

It is pretty simple - mind is a part of life - consciousness is a part of mind - God is a part of consciousness.

Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.

You can reach the roof of your house by stone stairs, by wooden stairs, by bamboo steps or by a rope. Likewise, there are diverse ways of experiencing the Absolute Divinity – the Ultimate Oneness. In fact, in that blissful state of oneness, you and God are one and the same thing.

A religious individual may most gloriously carry out his or her own rituals, as a part of his or her cultural identity, but the moment, that person starts to build a wall of separation between the self and the rest of humanity, coaxed by the textual commands of a scripture, the healthy religiousness turns into dangerous fundamentalism, which is a threat to both the self and the society.

Spirituality is to Religion, what Love is to Marriage. Spirituality is an emotional state of the mind, just like Love, while Religion on the other hand, is a social construct, quite like Marriage.

Christ attained the ultimate spiritual oneness through prayer and devotion, Moses and Mohammed through prayer, Buddha and all the Indian sages through intense meditation and so did I. And so can you.

Other than the substantial physiological impact of prayer/meditation, there is another much simpler mind-body intervention that helps all religious and spiritual individuals in all walks of life, regardless of whether they pray regularly or not. It is commonly known as faith.

The purpose of Neurotheology shall be to ease human sufferings with a deeper understanding of the neurobiological substrates of spirituality and divinity.

Any thought sequence that minimizes anxiety would get reinforced over time. The sequence would be maintained during the person’s development and would be provoked in contexts where refutation of the belief might occur. So, any kind of refutation of a person’s religious beliefs makes the beliefs only stronger.

Qualia of God refers to the private subjective experience or conception of God in people.

Ten minutes of meditation a day, keeps the psychiatrist away.

Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.

Each of the sapiens brains generates its own perception of God in uniquely different ways. Ergo, it imposes different qualities of meaning and value on God. You see God the way your brain wants you to see it. There is no right and wrong, or fact and fiction on this matter. It is all personal.

When I am fully immersed in my work of nourishing humanity, it fills my head with all kinds of feel-good chemicals, such as endorphins, serotonin and dopamine. Problems occur during the brief intervals between the finishing of one work and the beginning of another. During these intervals, my biology starts to get filled with stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin, that worsens my OCD. That is why, I can’t sit still even a day after I finish writing a book. Because if I do, my OCD begins to suffocate me inside my head. Hence, as soon as I deliver a work, I have to start working on my next scientific literature.

There can never be a conflict between science and religion, once you understand the spiritual knack of the human brain circuits.

Once the lotus of your inner divinity gets full-blown and you reach the mental state where all the religious giants of human history experienced the all-encompassing sense of godliness, the exuberance of the human mind turns infinite. Awakening into that state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean.

I (God) am only a part of your own human consciousness, but a really bizarre part.

Now you know that the fascinating phenomenon of love has nothing to do with the supernatural entity known as Cupid, but everything to do with neurochemistry. Likewise, divinity is a cerebral creation, not a supernatural one. And it has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

The more a person is united within himself or herself and inwardly simple, the more and higher things he or she understands, because he or she receives the light of understanding from within.

Most of Jesus’ life is told through the four Gospels of the New Testament, known as the Canonical gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are not biographies in the modern sense but accounts with allegorical intent. They are written to engender faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the incarnation of God, and not to provide factual data about Jesus’s life. This left the door of exaggeration open. And through that door all kinds of mystical non-sense crept in and made place right alongside the good philosophical teachings of Jesus.

In most cases, people argue over the term God, without having the perception of another person’s own idea of the word. Hence, often people with an atheistic perspective of the world attribute the God of many religious individuals to be an angry, authoritarian and vengeful God who acts like a human being and lives in the clouds or in heaven. But the irony is, most religious individuals do not conceive God in an anthropomorphic or angry way. Rather, in their personal psychological domain of religious or spiritual beliefs, they conceive God in more abstract, spiritual and merciful way.

A person may hold his own beliefs and creeds to be dearest, and nourish them with all his might, but the moment he starts preaching the exclusive greatness and dominance over all other systems of beliefs and creeds, the world begins to plunge into a death trap.

Your spiritual goals can be as numerous as there are stars in the sky. And so can be your religions. But in all your vivid and diverse paths of practicing religion and spirituality, there is one very common and simple element that knows no bounds. That element is the eternal bliss that enables you to attain unimaginable feats of excellence. It is not tied to any scripture of yours, yet it is in every scripture of yours.

Through Neurotheology, I and my fellow scientists of twenty-first century have already taken the first step from the side of Science, to diminish the gap between Science and Religion. Now it is time for Religion to do the same.

There is no secret in attaining God. In the path of Enlightenment, any theoretical mystery-mongering preacher that weakens the mind, should be rejected at once. Science has no secrets. The very purpose of it is to unravel the secrets of Nature and the Universe. That is why it is so beautiful. And so should be the path of Enlightenment.

​Belief is exclusively a matter of personal domain. It has nothing to do with reality.

All our sentiments - religious, romantic or any other - are born in the neurons.

As the neo-cortex of the brain keeps getting more complex through further evolution, eventually our far away progeny will born in a world where there will be no more religion to be endowed upon them.

Meditation has also been proven scientifically to untangle and rewire the neurological pathways in the brain that make up the conditioned personality. Buddhist monks, for example, have had their brains scanned by scientists as they sat still in deep altered states of consciousness invoked by transcendental meditation and the scientists were amazed at what they beheld. The frontal lobes of the monks lit up as bright as the sun! They were in states of peace and happiness the scientists had never seen before. Meditation invokes that which is known in neuroscience as neuroplasticity; which is the loosening of the old nerve cells or hardwiring in the brain, to make space for the new to emerge. Meditation, in this sense, is a fire that burns away the old or conditioned self, in the Bhagavad Gita, this is known as the Yajna;“All karma or effects of actions are completely burned away from the liberated being who, free from attachment, with his physical mind enveloped in wisdom (the higher self), performs the true spiritual fire rite.

Historical experiences of this absolute godliness gave rise to all the scriptures in the world. Hence, the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human society. Faith is a crucial evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping- mechanism.

There has been more bloodshed in the name of God than for any other cause. And it is all because people never attempt to reach the fountain-head. They are content only to comply with the customs of their forefathers and instructions on some books, and want others to do the same. But, to explain God after merely reading the scriptures is like explaining the city of New York after seeing it only in a map.

There is no such thing as 'God given scripture', 'the messenger of God' or 'the Last Prophet'.

I don’t make any pretence of knowing about the existence of a Supreme Entity, neither do I make any attempt to create any friction among religions. If anything, I have spared myself no pains in my endeavor to smoothen the ongoing friction among all religions of the world.

It has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

I never attempt to take away people’s God from them, because that God is associated with a lot of human sentiments in the human psyche that act as fuel in daily survival. If you try to take away some hungry man’s stale bread, he would fight back, but if you give him something healthier and more substantial than the bread, then he would throw away the bread himself and accept your better food. The same is for God.

If Christ attained the state of Absolute Divinity, so can you. And once you do, then only you will understand the true meaning of Religion and God.

God lives in and through the human mind, and not in any church, synagogue, temple or mosque.

Once you attain the state of Absolute Oneness or Non-Duality, you become one of those spiritual legends that humanity so gloriously venerates as the founding fathers of religion.

Why should a religion claim that it is not bound to abide by the standpoint of reason! If one does not take the standard of reason, there cannot be any true judgment, even in the case of religion.

I am like the H2O in a lake. Some drink it at one place and call it “water”, others at another place and call it “jal”, and some others at a third place and call it “pani”. The Christians call it “water”, the Hindus “jal”, and the Muslims ”pani”. But it is one and the same thing. I am not tied to the doctrines of any church, synagogue, temple or mosque, yet I am the reason of their birth.

Religion is not a book, it is not an institution, and it is not even a person. True Religion is realization of the self.

Morality exists in the neurons as a natural sensation. Religion only tries to codify it.

Just like love becomes consummated upon the attainment of orgasm, all the faith and divinity in the world reach their ultimate existential potential upon the attainment of Absolute Unitary Qualia or simply Absolute Godliness.

God is nature’s anti-dote to misery.

God is not an Almighty Being watching over life on earth. God is the Event Horizon of Human Consciousness.

Once you emerge from the state of absolute divinity, the self within you becomes Christ – it becomes Buddha – it becomes Moses – it becomes Krishna. The sage who emerges from the state of non-duality begins to perceive the self as Christ, not Christ as Christ – the self as Moses, not Moses as Moses – the self as Mohammed, not Mohammed as Mohammed – the self as Krishna, not Krishna as Krishna.

Most religious individuals do not conceive God in an anthropomorphic or angry way. Rather, in their personal psychological domain of religious or spiritual beliefs, they conceive God in more abstract, spiritual and merciful way.

All the terrorism in the world that fester in the name of religion, are in fact not religious in nature, rather they are socio-political. Their roots are not religion, but socio-political condition. Religion is only used as a divine tool of authoritative justification in the search of absolution.

When circumstances pour the minds of some young helpless individuals with hatred and rage towards the society, and when that pain, hatred, and rage become unbearable, they turn to the scriptures as the final resort, in a pursuit to find absolution, guided by the psychopathic, misogynistic, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent, fundamentalist preachers.

It's been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn't made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain?

A true religious person should not think that “my religion alone is the right path and other religions are false.” Other religions are also so many paths leading to the same domain of transcendental bliss.

He (Jesus) gave up his life not because of the so-called sins of humanity, but because he was too adamant to give in to orthodox monstrosity.

The religion I am talking about here is plain everyday humanism. That’s exactly what the person named Jesus attempted to spread, but due to innate psychological reasons, his pupils ended up constructing yet another orthodox circle with its own distinct beliefs, ideals and fantasies.