Polynomial

No doubt those of you following these writings will have noticed that the theme running through this website is all about thinking correctly… And understanding, as best as we currently can, where we all came from i.e. the processes that brought about the Universe – and all of us here on Earth – into being naturally flowing dynamical systems. The ultimate purpose of this website is to provide a knowledge, for those of you who desire it, to free yourself with. For, once one grasps the essential patterns that flow through life, they might then be able to think afresh, and place their actions into a truer more valid context of life, thus enhancing their experience and, more importantly, allowing them to act more accordingly within reality’s parameters. As we saw with Spinoza’s “Ethics” i.e. a book concerned with the human life and the right way to live, there really is no use in writing about ethics if we have an erroneous conception of nature in general and of human nature in particular.

Thus, in order to move on from the “unenlightened age of man” into an “age of renewed awareness” we must let go of the old and embrace the new. By thinking about this deeply, you will be carving yourself out a new brain, better habits and healthier lives, all of which will allow you to function more appropriately within the Universe in which we find ourselves. Once We have done this, we just might function better ecologically, morally, intellectually and more happily than we ever have done before.

20 Jan 2007 (Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal) Dalai Lama helps scientists show the power of the mind to sculpt our gray matter.

Although science and religion are often in conflict, the Dalai Lama takes a different approach. Every year or so the head of Tibetan Buddhism invites a group of scientists to his home in Dharamsala, in Northern India, to discuss their work and how Buddhism might contribute to it.

In 2004 the subject was neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change its structure and function in response to experience. The following are vignettes adapted from “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain,” which describes this emerging area of science:

The Dalai Lama, who had watched a brain operation during a visit to an American medical school over a decade earlier, asked the surgeons a startling question: Can the mind shape brain matter?

Over the years, he said, neuroscientists had explained to him that mental experiences reflect chemical and electrical changes in the brain. When electrical impulses zip through our visual cortex, for instance, we see; when neurochemicals course through the limbic system we feel.

But something had always bothered him about this explanation, the Dalai Lama said. Could it work the other way around? That is, in addition to the brain giving rise to thoughts and hopes and beliefs and emotions that add up to this thing we call the mind, maybe the mind also acts back on the brain to cause physical changes in the very matter that created it. If so, then pure thought would change the brain’s activity, its circuits or even its structure.

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