Indigo children refers to a New Age belief that some children, especially those born after the late 1970s, represent a higher state of human evolution. The term itself is a reference to the belief that such children have an indigo colored aura. Beliefs concerning the exact nature of Indigo children vary, with some believing that they have paranormal abilities such as the ability to read minds, and others that they are distinguished from non-Indigo children merely by more conventional traits such as increased empathy and creativity.

Check out this awesome video from ABC, featuring Diane Sawyer investigating the issue:

Find out more about Indigo Children here

This has been floating around the net for quite some time. But everytime I see it, it never fails to bring a bit of hope into my day!

I hope this trailer for this very exciting movie does it for you too.

We’ll be trying to contact the producers of this movie and hopefully we’ll be able to land an interview, right here on Mindhacks.org – SO STAY TUNED!

Case 2: In Season 6, a contestant, someone simultaneously criticized for being too Christian and not Christian enough,  sings a dc Talk tune that subtly caters to his Christian fans and lands in the final 10.

Case 3: Outside the performer’s circle, a contestant from Season 6 signs John Lennon’s Imagine and gets lambasted for the lyrics

Imagine no possessions/It isn’t hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too

… because audience members considered it a slam against faith.

And there are 7 other cases as well!

So what do you think? Do you see Spirituality becoming a larger part of American Idol? Will it some day have a role in determining the winners? Leave your predictions in the comments.

All of it would not be here today if it wasn’t for the wisdom of an ordinary man that would light the way to my personal self discovery and journey towards enlightenment.

His name, Burt Goldman.

He was a disciple of Yogananda, the legendary yogi that was instrumental to bringing Yoga to the West. He was also the protege of Jose Silva, the parapsychologist that would unlock the secrets of ESP and mind power. Burt is also a psychic healer, qi-gong proponent, hypnotherapist, awarded photographer, author, and personal development speaker.

Now, for the first time ever, Burt will be sharing his experiences through a world changing project;

The American Monk.

—

Special Preview

Taken from a special seminar held in Anaheim, California, Burt Goldman gives us an introduction on how mantras are used to quell emotions:

And this is only the first part of a series of videos that we will be sharing with you for FREE, exclusively on MindHacks.org – courtesy of Mr. Goldman.

So start the journey, join Burt Goldman and myself at The American Monk.

We can’t wait to get started!

Interested in reading more about Burt Goldman?
- Let Burt teach you Psychic Healing
- Watch as he performs real qi-gong healing

Spiritual Awakening – Is Life one Big Dream?

Experiencing a spiritual awakening is a life changing experience. Once you have a spiritual awakening your life is likely to change for the better and you will never think the way that you did before. Once you realize that the inner and outer are intertwined things will become so much clearer in life and you are on the road to enlightenment.

THE UNIVERSE IS DREAMING ITSELF AWAKE

by Paul Levy

Spiritual Awakening

When you begin to spiritually awaken, it is like waking up inside of a dream and recognizing that everything you are experiencing is nothing other than a very convincing projection, or display of your mind. The boundary between inner and outer, between dreaming and waking starts to dissolve, and you begin to realize that the same dreaming mind that is dreaming your dreams at night is dreaming your life. You realize that there is a Deeper Dreaming Self that is having a dream and we are it!

This Deeper Dreaming Self is active in us at all times and is continually seeking to express it itself. If we recognize the dreaming process that is happening right now, we can step into it and help it unfold consciously. It will activate our own inherent process of awakening and reconnect us with ourselves.

It is as though there is a dream that is trying to be dreamt through each and all of us — both individually and collectively. The universe is seen as a field not separate from and through which this deeper, dreaming process is continually expressing it itself.

The Deeper Dream

Recognizing the deeper dream, or archetypal myth that we have been unconsciously acting out in our waking life reconnects us not only with the deeper ground of the psyche but also with other people, as everybody is seen to be fellow actors in a divine drama. It takes one’s life out of a purely personal framework and gives it a deeper sense of meaning, which makes suffering so much more bearable.

When you begin to awaken to the dream-like nature of things you realize that waking reality doesn’t exist in the way you thought it did, as something separate from you. Saying it is a dream, your own projection, reflection, etc. is the same thing as saying it is nothing other than your own mind appearing in a convincing, externalized display. Everything that happens is seen to be the unmediated expression of your mind, which you now understand can just as easily express it itself in outer events as it does in inner feelings, dreams or intuitions.

This is related to Jung’s idea of synchronicity, those “meaningful coincidences,” where an inner situation gets mirrored through an outer event. They are examples of where there is a fissure in reality and one gets a chance to glimpse the underlying unity.

Waking Reality?

By saying that our waking reality is some sort of a dream, which is the same thing as saying that it is a projection of your mind, the implication is that how you view it actually effects how it appears. This is very clear in lucid dreaming, where the dream is realized to be the unmediated manifestation of your mind.

Once you realize this, you don’t become conditioned by, and react to, the reflections as something solid, real, and autonomous (as a kitten would looking in a mirror), you just recognize them as your own energy appearing externally. Your relationship to the universe changes dramatically.

Waking reality is seen to be a manifestation of “something deeper,” just like the rays of the sun are the manifestation of the sun. In the same way that the rays are not separate from the sun, but rather are a perfect expression of it, waking reality is not separate from this “something deeper” but is it itself a perfect expression of it.

The question then becomes: what would you do if you did wake up in THIS dream and recognize that IT was all your own mind? How would you dream it on if you were to have this realization? Imagine that there are all these other people in your dream who are so asleep that it is as though they have fallen under an enchantment. They’ve gotten absorbed into the dream and have become so identified with their roles that they literally have forgotten who they are. They are truly suffering a case of mistaken identity. And they’re all just aspects of you.

It is like your task is to try and wake up parts of yourself that have fallen asleep. How you do this is totally up to you; it is the ultimate creative challenge. In essence you are figuring out a way to wake yourself up, to break the spell you have fallen under.

As the Deeper Dreaming Self, we are always dreaming each other up in exactly the role that is needed. It is an amazing realization when you discover that we can’t help but play the role that other people have dreamt up for us.

For example, you, as the Deeper Dreaming Self (your True Self) have dreamt up this article right now — at this very moment. And I, of course, by writing it, effortlessly stepped right into playing and fulfilling exactly the role you dreamt up for me. Even to say that someone else stepped into a role that you dreamt up for them is to say too much. As it is all just you. There is no one else.

It is exactly as if you were having a dream and into your dream walked a dream character who was having an awakening (he has become lucid in “his” dream). Let’s make it even more real than that, let’s imagine that this dream character expressed himself by sending you an article such as this. Who is this dream character other than the awake part of yourself? He knows that he’s being dreamt by something deeper. He is a mirror, a reflection, a manifestation of the awake part of you.

It is also no accident that he has delivered this article into your dream; he is trying to engage you. It is your own awakeness appearing in seemingly separate, externalized form. It is clearly your own projection, something you’ve thrown out of yourself. And it is trying to step back into you. Or better yet, you’re trying to step back into yourself. It is a situation that you, as the Deeper Dreaming Self, have clearly dreamt up.

This dream character realizes that the “I” who he thought he was, including the body that he’s been identifying with all this time, is not only not who he is, but is itself being dreamt by “something deeper” — what I call the “Deeper Dreaming Self.” Becoming lucid means that he’s recognized his true identity with the Deeper Dreaming Self, which is dreaming the entire dream.

This is the same thing as saying that he has recognized his unity with the entire dream, which is realized to be nothing other than the manifestation, or expression of the Deeper Dreaming Self, not separate from it in one iota. Just like the waves of the ocean are not separate from, and are the expression or manifestation of the ocean. It is as if one wave discovered that it was one with the entire ocean, and hence, with all waves. Nothing has to be added, one just discovers an already existing fact.

This awakening dream character has had an expansion of identity from a skin-encapsulated ego, or separate self — which experiences it itself as being disconnected from the rest of the dreamscape — to a larger, much more all-embracing identity, which recognizes that the dream is nothing other than a very convincing display of his true nature. This is analogous to having an archetypal death/rebirth experience.

Our dream character also realizes that he can consciously step into this universal dream that we all are sharing and help it unfold. He can help co-create and co-dream the dream to its highest unfolding, whatever and wherever that may be. When he realizes his identity with the Deeper Dreaming Self, he also recognizes that everybody else has the same Deeper Dreaming Self. He realizes that there is just one Deeper Dreaming Self and it is not only his own True Self, but it is the True Self for everyone. He understands that he’s not even the slightest bit special, as everybody else is in the same condition, but they just haven’t recognized it yet.

At the point when you understand this, is when you become that awakened dream character who can then step consciously into the next person’s dream. You then become the mirrored reflection of their own awakened part. And what would you do other than to try and awaken them in as gentle, loving and creative a way as possible?

When enough people awaken to this situation, and this is simply a matter of when the Deeper Dreaming Self dreams that enough people awaken to it, we can begin to create an art happening that we can title “global awakening”. This is really a question of stepping into and owning not only your negative shadow, but your positive shadow also. It becomes so easy to project your own enlightenment out there onto whatever guru. It is a question of realizing who you are, for God’s sake. I would like to suggest that there is nothing stopping us from doing this right now. And not only that, I would like to further suggest that IT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW and it is simply a question of recognizing it.

Don’t place any limits on yourself. It is your dream, please dream it all the way, go totally far out, over every edge. If you woke up and realized that it was your dream, how would you then dream it on? Remember, I am not addressing you as the little egoistic self but as the True Self.

I would like to suggest that if you are having a genuine awakening, you have no other recourse than to let the Deeper Dreaming Self dream itself through you. The question then becomes, if we are the dream of the Self, where is this dream going?

We need to really expand our realm of possibilities and realize that we are living a historic time, maybe more amazing then if we lived in Palestine during the life of Christ. We are actually living in the time period where human beings wake up. We need to realize, to see that the universe is dreaming itself awake through us. And it takes the most visionary among us to help further the momentum of the process until it actually builds up a life of it is own, which it already has in us.

Isn’t it just a question of whether you see the situation or not? And if you do see it — it is not a question of thinking about it but of seeing it — then at that very moment you become an awake, responsible player in this dream drama you’ve found yourself in. And not just a player, but writer, director, producer and the audience, too. You begin to realize that this isn’t a universe that you are just passively observing but one that you are also actively participating in and co-creating with. At this moment you step into your Bodhisattvahood, which is who we are meant to be. You realize that there is no separate “self” or “other”, just “Self”. Out of this awareness naturally arises genuine compassion.

Finally, you realize it is total insanity to be waiting for the Messiah to arrive. We are the Messiah.

Source

Further Reading . . .

Do you want to learn more about spiritual awakening? You should look into these great affirmations and spiritual awakenings.

Study Reveals Prayers For Healing are being Answered

It’s extremely difficult for you to assess whether your prayers for healing are really working. If you find yourself in this situation I’m sure you’re constantly racking your brain wondering . . . Are my prayers for healing being answered?  

I have some good news for you . . .

At the turn of the century scientists did some controlled experiments on the power of prayers for healing and came up with some wonderful results.

“The group receiving prayers fared 11 percent better than the group that didn’t, a number considered statistically significant.”

Find out the details of this prayers for healing study below:

Probing the power of prayer

By Catherine Rauch

When Aretha Franklin crooned the words “I say a little prayer for you” in the hit 1960s song she probably didn’t imagine that the soulful pledge would become the stuff of serious science. But increasingly, scientists are studying the power of prayer, and in particular its role in healing people who are sick.

Most research in the field looks at how people who are sick are affected by their own spiritual beliefs and practices. In general, these studies have suggested that people who are religious seem to heal faster or cope with illness more effectively than do the nondevout.

But a few scientists have taken a further step: They’re trying to find out if you can help strangers by praying for them without their knowledge.

A recent, controversial study of cardiac patients conducted at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, concludes that this type of prayer — known as intercessory prayer — may indeed make a difference. “Prayer may be an effective adjunct to standard medical care,” says cardiac researcher William Harris, Ph.D., who headed the St. Luke’s study. The study was published in the October 25, 1999 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Harris and team examined the health outcomes of nearly 1,000 newly admitted heart patients at St. Luke’s. The patients, who all had serious cardiac conditions, were randomly assigned to two groups. Half received daily prayer for four weeks from five volunteers who believed in God and in the healing power of prayer. The other half received no prayer in conjunction with the study.

The volunteers were all Christians. The participants were not told they were in a study. The people praying were given only the first names of their patients and never visited the hospital. They were instructed to pray for the patients daily “for a speedy recovery with no complications.”

Read the full story

Why not discover more about the power of prayer and prayers for healing by reading more information – check out Is What We Pray For What We Need?

In this exclusive video Burt Goldman’s talks in his finest wisdom on the difference between spirituality and religion, and his concept of God. He sings the praises of spirituality, whilst at the same time expressing his concerns of “dogma” in religion.

Who is God? What is God?

Burt Goldman has trained with spiritual gurus and interacted with religious leaders all over the world. He shares his views based on his 50 year journey of spirituality in understanding who God truly is.

“Experience is what God is” – Burt Goldman

About Burt Goldman

It was in 1975 that Burt Goldman, a practicing hypnotist, heard about Jose Silva. Always a seeker he wanted to see if Silva’s Mind Control training was anything like what he himself was doing.

As a hypnotist his primary objectives were to motivate people to do the things they only dreamed about doing. Hypnosis, when handled correctly, did just that. He noted that the Silva Mind Control method was a form of hypnosis, well that was right up his alley. He joined Jose’s organization and shortly became the number one instructor in the worldwide organization.

Noting that many of the concepts fell a bit short of their potential he asked Jose Silva to allow him to write a manual for the thousand or so instructors teaching around the world at that time. With Jose’s approval he co-wrote the instructors manual that became a veritable bible on how to present a seminar for many of the instructors. The name of the manual, that ultimately turned into a book for the general public, was Better and Better.

In 1980, after achieving every goal he had set for himself, Burt retired, joined a country club, played golf for eight months and discovered he needed more out of life. People were clamoring for him to come back. His retirement ended abruptly, Burt created Supermind, a two day seminar that featured, and was based on, the 7 basic principles of Hermes. Supermind was a sensation. Burt taught the class all over the US and Europe. He trained others to do the seminar and soon, SuperMente was being offered throughout South America.

His active mind, seldom at rest, created other seminars. He trained people in hypnosis, and for ten years educated thousands of hypnotherapists who use his methods in Greece, Switzerland, England, Austria, Holland, France, and most major cities in the U.S. Along the way he picked up more and more knowledge and with the hermetic principles to guide him he became a feng shui master, an NLP trainer, and a teacher of psychic healing.

Read more information:

- about Burt Goldman

- The Goldman Method

People are realizing more and more the importance of developing their spirituality. People try to reach a higher state by preparing their souls with prayers and meditation. However, some people complain about not seeing results from their prayers.

What they don’t realize is that they may have been putting their energy in the wrong areas. They are focusing in the fruit not in the root of the problem. Sometimes what we want is not what we need to be fulfilled. What we really need to achieve is a greater spiritual state.

What should we pray for?

People pray for many different things. Pray can be a form of desire. We pray for material comforts or release from physical pain. However prayer can be more than just praying for the satisfaction of our material needs. The highest prayer is merely to become one with the highest spiritual realisation.

A Little Story

There is a story of two great Spiritual figures, Sri Ramakrishna and his beloved disciple Swami Vivekananda. Due to the death of his father Swami Vivekananda’s family were living in extreme poverty; his mother started to criticise Vivekananda, saying why did he spend his time praying to God when God could not even provide for the family’s basic needs.

Vivekananda felt cut to the bone, so he went to his Spiritual Master Sri Ramakrishna and explained his family’s dire financial predicaments. Sri Ramakrishna compassionately replied to Vivekananda and said if he went to the Temple of Mother Kali and prayed for the boon of financial wealth all his family’s financial problems would be solved.

Encouraged by his master’s promise Vivekananda went to the temple of Mother Kali to pray for money. However Vivekananda was a seeker of the highest order.

His inner nature yearned for God. When he entered the temple of the Mother, Vivekananda became absorbed in the spiritual vibrations of the Temple. He felt his consciousness soar as he became enamoured of the bliss of the Mother.

In such an exalted spiritual state Vivekananda forgot his desire for financial freedom. His only prayer was

“O Mother, please give me Jnana (wisdom) and Bhakti (devotion).” – Vivekananda

After praying and meditating Vivekananda returned to his Master and told him he had forgotten to pray for money in the Presence of Kali. Ramakrishna smiled and advised him to go back into the temple but this time to pray for money.

Vivekananda returned but again he became so absorbed in his meditation that he could not bring himself to ask for money. 3 Times Ramakrishna sent Vivekananda into the temple to pray but each time Vivekananda couldn’t bring himself to pray for money. Eventually Ramakrishna compassionately said he would pray on his disciple’s behalf.

He would pray that his family would always have enough to pay for the basic essentials of life. After this his family’s dire financial hardship was removed, although they never experience material prosperity. Vivekananda was a great seeker, who eventually became a spiritual Master in his own right.

 What bring us real hapiness?

This story is illustrative of how the human mind often doesn’t know the best thing to pray for.

On many occasions we feel that if our desires for more money and wealth can be fulfilled, all our problems will be solved.

However no matter how much money we may have we will never attain lasting satisfaction.

Real happiness comes from our oneness with God. When we attain oneness with God everything else seems unimportant

The highest prayer uttered by Jesus Christ was

”not my will but thine be done” – Luke 22:42

Through this prayer Christ surrendered his personal will to the will of God. Christ knew that our human prayers might not be in our best interest, the greatest prayer is merely to become with God.

Later Sri Ramakrishna offered Vivekananda all his occult powers. Ramakrishna even tempted Vivekananda by saying he would be able to use these powers to help others. Vivekananda only replies will this help me realise God. Ramakrishna replied it wouldn’t and so Vivekananda turned down the opportunity to gain occult powers. -Vivekananda – Heart Life

It is brings to mind the immortal quote of the Upanishads

” What shall I do with the things that cannot make me immortal?” - Brihadaranyaka Upanishada

Read more  information:

Neovedanta

Vivekananda

Click here for original article>>

Einstein attempted to explain the close relationship between science and religion which gave him a reputation of being an atheist. He believed that science could not be created if there was not an interest in understanding the invisible laws of the universe.

However, the existence of something supreme was not the question for him. The fact that he suggested that the universe and its events could be controlled by human will was what created a lot of controversy. 

“The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God,” he argued.

Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic causality.”

 

Einstein & Faith

By WALTER ISAACSON

He was slow in learning how to talk. “My parents were so worried,” he later recalled, “that they consulted a doctor.” Even after he had begun using words, sometime after the age of 2, he developed a quirk that prompted the family maid to dub him “der Depperte,” the dopey one. Whenever he had something to say, he would try it out on himself, whispering it softly until it sounded good enough to pronounce aloud.

“Every sentence he uttered,” his worshipful younger sister recalled, “no matter how routine, he repeated to himself softly, moving his lips.” It was all very worrying, she said. “He had such difficulty with language that those around him feared he would never learn.”

His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to declare that he would never amount to much. These traits made Albert Einstein the patron saint of distracted schoolkids everywhere. But they also helped make him, or so he later surmised, the most creative scientific genius of modern times.

His cocky contempt for authority led him to question received wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And as for his slow verbal development, he thought that it allowed him to observe with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted. Instead of puzzling over mysterious things, he puzzled over the commonplace.

“When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance,” Einstein once explained. “The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up.

Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.”

It may seem logical, in retrospect, that a combination of awe and rebellion made Einstein exceptional as a scientist.

But what is less well known is that those two traits also combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith.

The rebellion part comes in at the beginning of his life: he rejected at first his parents’ secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world.

But the awe part comes in his 50s when he settled into a deism based on what he called the

“spirit manifest in the laws of the universe” and a sincere belief in a “God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists.”

Einstein was descended, on both parents’ sides, from Jewish tradesmen and peddlers who had, for at least two centuries, made modest livings in the rural villages of Swabia in southwestern Germany.

With each generation they had become increasingly assimilated into the German culture they loved–or so they thought. Although Jewish by cultural designation and kindred instinct, they had little interest in the religion itself.

In his later years, Einstein would tell an old joke about an agnostic uncle who was the only member of his family who went to synagogue. When asked why he did so, the uncle would respond, “Ah, but you never know.” Einstein’s parents, on the other hand, were “entirely irreligious.” They did not keep kosher or attend synagogue, and his father Hermann referred to Jewish rituals as “ancient superstitions,” according to a relative.

Consequently, when Albert turned 6 and had to go to school, his parents did not care that there was no Jewish one near their home. Instead he went to the large Catholic school in their neighborhood. As the only Jew among the 70 students in his class, he took the standard course in Catholic religion and ended up enjoying it immensely.

Despite his parents’ secularism, or perhaps because of it, Einstein rather suddenly developed a passionate zeal for Judaism. “He was so fervent in his feelings that, on his own, he observed Jewish religious strictures in every detail,” his sister recalled. He ate no pork, kept kosher and obeyed the strictures of the Sabbath. He even composed his own hymns, which he sang to himself as he walked home from school.

Einstein’s greatest intellectual stimulation came from a poor student who dined with his family once a week.

It was an old Jewish custom to take in a needy religious scholar to share the Sabbath meal; the Einsteins modified the tradition by hosting instead a medical student on Thursdays.

His name was Max Talmud, and he began his weekly visits when he was 21 and Einstein was 10.

Talmud brought Einstein science books, including a popular illustrated series called People’s Books on Natural Science, “a work which I read with breathless attention,” said Einstein. The 21 volumes were written by Aaron Bernstein, who stressed the interrelations between biology and physics, and reported in great detail the experiments being done at the time, especially in Germany.

Talmud also helped Einstein explore the wonders of mathematics by giving him a textbook on geometry two years before he was scheduled to learn that subject in school. When Talmud arrived each Thursday, Einstein delighted in showing him the problems he had solved that week.

Initially, Talmud was able to help him, but he was soon surpassed by his pupil. “After a short time, a few months, he had worked through the whole book,” Talmud recalled. “Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.”

Einstein’s exposure to science and math produced a sudden transformation at age 12, just as he would have been readying for a bar mitzvah. He suddenly gave up Judaism.

That decision does not appear to have been drawn from Bernstein’s books because the author made clear he saw no contradiction between science and religion. As he put it,

 ”The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.”

Einstein would later come close to these sentiments. But at the time, his leap away from faith was a radical one.

“Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.”

Einstein did, however, retain from his childhood religious phase a profound faith in, and reverence for, the harmony and beauty of what he called the mind of God as it was expressed in the creation of the universe and its laws.

The Dichotomy between Science and Religion

Around the time he turned 50, he began to articulate more clearly–in various essays, interviews and letters–his deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.

One particular evening in 1929, the year he turned 50, captures Einstein’s middle-age deistic faith. He and his wife were at a dinner party in Berlin when a guest expressed a belief in astrology. Einstein ridiculed the notion as pure superstition. Another guest stepped in and similarly disparaged religion. Belief in God, he insisted, was likewise a superstition.

At this point the host tried to silence him by invoking the fact that even Einstein harbored religious beliefs. “It isn’t possible!” the skeptical guest said, turning to Einstein to ask if he was, in fact, religious. “Yes, you can call it that,” Einstein replied calmly.

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

Shortly after his 50th birthday, Einstein also gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious sensibility. It was with George Sylvester Viereck, who had been born in Germany, moved to America as a child and then spent his life writing gaudily erotic poetry, interviewing great men and expressing his complex love for his fatherland.

Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish. In fact, Viereck proudly traced his lineage to the family of the Kaiser, and he would later become a Nazi sympathizer who was jailed in America during World War II for being a German propagandist.

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew.

“It’s possible to be both,” replied Einstein. “Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.”

Click here for full article>>

Very rarely, however, have scientists studied the functions of the brain during a near death experience. This article goes into the neurology of this supernatural phenomenon. How much do we actually know about the human brain??

Neural pathways to enlightenment

Stephen Pincock
December 8, 2006

Researchers are exploring the science behind mystical experiences.

They’re among the most personal and mysterious sensations we might encounter – a vision of blinding light as death draws near, the ecstasy of prayer or meditation or the sensation of floating outside our own bodies.

For millenniums, people have given these experiences religious significance. But in recent years, scientists have begun exploring this spiritual realm, asking their own questions about what goes on in our brains during these extraordinary events and coming up with some fascinating answers.

In laboratories around the world, a few specialists have had their own insights into the neurology of spiritual experiences, using precise techniques to stimulate and monitor the brain’s function.

These new studies delve into questions that have long fascinated scientists, says John Watson, a neurologist at the University of Sydney.

“Neuroscientists are now doing bolder and bolder things,” Watson says. “We’ve already seen studies into the neurology of things like love, thirst and hunger, so it wasn’t a big step for them to start wondering about these religious and quasi-religious experiences.”

Some people call this new field “neurotheology”, a term coined by Aldous Huxley in his 1962 novel Island. Scientists often refer to it as the cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality.

In 1997, researchers from the University of California in San Diego announced there might be dedicated neural machinery in the brain’s temporal lobes specifically linked with religion. Vilayanur Ramachandran and his team studied the brains of people with an unusual type of epilepsy that affects the brain’s temporal lobes.

People who suffer this kind of seizure often report having intense mystical and religious experiences as part of their attacks. The researchers found that one effect of the seizures was to strengthen the involuntary response of the patient’s brain to religious words.

‘God Spots’

It wasn’t long before these regions were being referred to by newspapers as the “God spot” or “God module” – areas of the brain that become electrically excited when people think about their deity.

Most scientists, including Ramachandran, regard the idea of a single “God spot” as too simplistic. Last September, for example, a Canadian researcher, Mario Beauregard, and his student Vincent Paquette used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of Carmelite nuns while they were reliving the experience of unio mystica, an intense sensation in which they feel the physical presence of God.

- Read the full Article

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