(April 20, 2014 at 7:02 am)enrico Wrote: It is important to understand where the concepts come from.
Before a religion is born there is pure spirituality.
After some time the pure get polluted and spirituality turn into dogma
or false truth.
This is the stage where religion born.
How does anyone know that there's always pure spirituality before a religion is born? Many religions have mystical traditions but did the very first mystics just experience things and not try to come up with explanations for what was happening?
We have very little idea of what Prehistoric Religions were about because the people who followed them didn't leave any written records.
(April 20, 2014 at 7:02 am)enrico Wrote: The concept of Brahma came long long before Hinduism was born.
Lord Shiva came 7000 years ago while Hinduism much much later.
Hinduism Periodisation
Quote:The earliest prehistoric religion in India that may have left its traces in Hinduism comes from mesolithic.[113][note 42] and neolithic[114][note 43] times. Several tribal religions still exist, predating the dominance of Hinduism, though "[w]e must not assume that there are many similarities between prehistoric and contemporary tribal communities."[web 8]
As nobody living today was around 7,000 years ago I don't know how it's possible to prove that Brahma and Shiva came before Hinduism.
Anyway, back to mysticism. The following explains why the Dalai Lama is interested in neuroscience.
God On The Brain Transcript
Quote:NARRATOR: Michael (Baime) is a Buddhist, a faith that requires its followers to enter into the spiritual through meditation.
BAIME: As you relax more and more and let go of the boundary between oneself and everything else begins to dissolve, so there's more and more of a feeling of identity with the rest of the world and less and less separateness.
NARRATOR: Researcher Dr Andrew Newberg set up a brain imaging system that could for the very first time track exactly what happened inside Michael's brain as he meditated.
NARRATOR: .....The results revealed that as in other experiments the temporal lobes were certainly involved, but they showed something else. As Michael's meditation reached its peak an area of the brain called the parietal lobes had less and less blood flowing into them. They seemed almost to be shutting down. This was significant new information. The parietal lobes help give us our sense of time and place.
NEWBERG: This part of the brain typically takes all of our sensory information and uses that sensory information to create a sense of ourselves. When people meditate they frequently describe a loss of that sense of self and that's exactly what we did see in the meditation subjects was that they actually decreased the activity in this parietal or this orientation part of the brain.
NARRATOR: This strange sensation of a loss of self is central to religious feelings in all the world's faiths. Buddhists seek a feeling of oneness with the universe, Hindus strive for the soul and God to become one and the Catholics search for the Unio Mystica. Dr Newberg wondered if these very different religions might actually be describing the same thing. To test this theory he took scans of Franciscan nuns at prayer to see if there was any similarity between what was going on in their brains and those of Buddhists.
NEWBERG: Interestingly when we look at the Franciscan nuns we see a similar decrease in the orientation part of the brain as we saw with the Tibetan Buddhists.
The above is a very simplified account, of course, but it does show that something happens in brains when people have mystical experiences.



