Neurotheology Quotes - Page 2

I realized the universe had consumed my whole entity with its divine sensation of eternal bliss. All I could consciously perceive in that state of mind was absolute oneness. I felt being one with the banyan tree, under which I was sitting. I felt one with the corns in the field. I felt one with the sky and the clouds in it. As if everything was me, and I was everything. I didn’t have any perception of time or space. All that there was, was an all- pervading eternity – a state of non-dualism.

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.

Humans are not simply higher than Gods, Gods are mere mystical representations of the humans themselves.

When a person believes that a God is truly concerned about the well-being of life on earth, and especially of human life, the belief adorns that person with various positive psychological elements such as emotional stability, in times of distress and a highly functional moral compass. Here this belief has nothing to do with reality whatsoever, rather it serves the evolutionary purpose of self-preservation.

Quite surprisingly the majority of religious and spiritual practices actually diminishes your brain’s ability to act out of rage and fear.

All deities are external manifestation of humanity's internal divinity.

If I had been born in the medieval times, my subjective union with God and the Universe would have evoked the rise of another Gnostic religion. But, by the grace of Mother Nature, I am born in an era of Science and Reasoning. Hence, I have dissected my own experience of Absolute Divinity as well as the experiences of all the religious giants in my works, in order to discover the physical truth underneath these apparently supernatural experiences.

God is created by the brain and can also be destroyed by the brain. But this way ‘Love’ doesn’t exist either, because it also is the result of molecular interaction within the brain. Love is a result of complex and mind-blowing interactions between neurotransmitters like Oxytocin, Dopamine, Serotonin, Endorphins and the reward center of the brain. Does this mean we should downright stop loving our family or friends? Since there is no existence of actual ‘Love’, should we just deny what our heart feels for our beloved ones? Whatever the answer is, the same goes for the faith upon divine existence. Only one thing to remember – Love gives life, so should faith.

Fundamentalism not only fuels devastating acts of violence, but also all kinds of primitive prejudicial behaviors, such as Misogyny, Polygamy, Homophobia, and Islamophobia.

Religious faith as a whole induces various health benefits in the general population through complex biological processes.

Religions began as realization of the self, but ended up being retaliation against each other.

Whatever may be the position of science, whatever may be the position of philosophy, as long as there is such a thing as death in the world, as long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, as long as the human heart sheds a drop of tear in weakness, there shall be a faith in God and divinity.

Pathology can indeed cause experiences of the Kingdom of God, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology.

My experience of that liberation, what Buddha had called Nirvana, set me off in the path of scientific investigation of that Oneness, the thing people call, meeting with God. And that meeting triggered an unquenchable thirst in me to develop a proper scientific method to understand and further explore that apparently bizarre domain of Universal Consciousness.

Through the sacred verses filled with violence and self-righteousness, the minds of the angry individuals find a way to get rid of all their misery. At that unstable state of consciousness, they are drawn to the description of the Holy War. They visualize a glimmer of hope. They feel absolutely immersed in it. Finally when they emerge as holy warriors, they are no longer humans, from the emotional perspective. They emerge as wild beasts, neurologically almost unable to feel human emotions, like empathy, love, kindness and compassion. Consequently the whole world faces the wrath of the most primitive of all human elements in the name of God’s judgment.

The argument against faith is all based upon the rigorous analysis of the scriptures, and not upon the objective observation of the actual individual sensation of faith. Historical experiences of the Kingdom of God gave rise to all the scriptures in the world, but the scriptures themselves don’t account for the actual globally prevalent psychological element of faith or divinity in the human mind. Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.

The Kingdom of God is an earthly experience which manifests in an unearthly manner.

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. Likewise, no person should think “my perception of the reality is the only absolute reality, and all others’ are false”, because each human brain has its own unique way of perceiving the reality.

The transcendental state of Absolute Oneness sets the human mind free.

Current research in any field of Science has not yet reached the point where we could start exploring the existential question regarding God as a Supreme Entity driving causality in the universe. However, as modern Neuroscience progresses further and gets more advanced, we shall get to dive deeper into the physiological processes underneath the Qualia of God in human mind.

Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.

​God is hardwired within the neural circuitry.

It is necessary for the future scientists interested in the field of Neurotheology, to have a bit naïve approach towards the whole idea of God and religion beyond the conventional labels of religion and atheism.

Various fascinating psychological elements are involved in the transcendental state of human consciousness. One may lose the ability to distinguish one’s self from the rest of the world in transcendence, but still it is the human brain that constructs that state of mind. Hence, even in that altered state of consciousness one is not totally devoid of one’s beliefs, conjectures, ideas and fantasies. In fact, these ideas fill up the transcendental experience with all kinds of fanatic stories that happen to be unique, based on the person’s inner urges and drives.

The one ultimate rule of the Quranic fundamentalists is “there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet”. Everything beyond that not only is bad, but must be destroyed forthwith. At moment’s notice, every man or woman, who does not exactly believe in that, must be killed.... This is not religion my friend. This is primitiveness at its worst.

Religion is not a book, it is a neurological sentiment.

The Qualia of God have paramount potential to alter your body chemistry through mind-body substrates of neurobiology.

God is simply a magnificent state of the mind, where the finite turns infinite.

Religion doesn’t mean obeying some textual rules from books that were written hundreds or thousands of years ago. Religion means realization of the self.

Lastly I’d say this – true religion, as a part of Neuroscience – a study of the mind – is the greatest and healthiest exercise that the human mind has. In some form or other, it is an evolutionary necessity of the human mind, not a luxury.

He (Mohammed) was an ordinary man just like any other man. And as such his personal instincts, urges, drives as well as his philosophical goodness bubbled to the surface of his consciousness when he attained the Absolute Unitary Qualia.

It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions.