<nettime> neurvana digest [bethune-leamen, guderian, recktenwald]

["nettime's_syncretic_materialist" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Re: <nettime> Is the religious impulse a neuro-chemical condition?
     "T. Bethune-Leamen" <tv_bl@hotmail.com>
     Carl Guderian <carlg@vermilion-sands.com>
     Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>

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From: "T. Bethune-Leamen" <tv_bl@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Is the religious impulse a neuro-chemical condition?
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 20:08:35 -0000

what i want to know is why?!?!?! why are people separating the 2 things. or 
at least, why are they surprised by the this information. having 
neurological explanations for nirvana and spiritual experiences in no way 
devalues the spirituality of the experience.  it's one in the same.  of 
course anyone who believes in a god entity separate from us is going to have 
trouble with this. but you will never change these people's minds about 
that.

just as god is equally as formidable if it is our creation as opposed to the 
other way around.  we are formidable as god, and even the creation of 
spiritual and religous systems that are our placebo for our strength within 
us, that for some reason some people can't acknowledge (or weren't allowed 
to acknowledge), well the history, culture and art created by religions and  
its self-help applications are amazing.  and if that's what we needed to get 
this far, so be it.  not that many religions weren't/aren't tyranical and 
stifling.

the experiences are spiritual and neurological.  of course they are, how 
else would they manifest in us but to be created by us.

you can paint a painting of the universe but you can also 'reduce' it to a 
mathematical equation, they're both valid/real/whatever.


"Could the flash of wisdom that came over Siddhartha Gautama �  the
Buddha � have been nothing more than his parietal lobe quieting down?
Could the voices that Moses and Mohammed heard on remote mountain tops
have been just a bunch of firing neurons �  an illusion? Could
Jesus's conversations with God have been a mental delusion?"


Siddartha Gautama's revelations (and all those other people mentioned above) 
were not an illusion, they are experiences based in science, they would have 
been more of an illusion if they weren't.

I think it's more important that we find the parallels in different schools 
of thought as opposed to building arguments to discredit eachother.  they 
are just different languages from the same source.

Tara Bethune-Leamen
tv_bl@hotmail.com


>From: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@mail.earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@mail.earthlink.net>
>To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
>Subject: <nettime> Is the religious impulse a neuro-chemical condition?
>Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 10:54:29 -0400
 <...>

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Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 09:23:53 +0000
From: Carl Guderian <carlg@vermilion-sands.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Is the religious impulse a neuro-chemical condition?

Yikes! Maybe Julian Jaynes was on to something after all. Can these waves be
projected? This could give rise to a whole new level of pranks. Neighbor
calls the cops on your parties? Give him/her a few doses of satori (samadhi?)
and they'll be off to a monastery/convent quicker than you can say Jesus H.
Christ! Can you aim it at their crotch to cause spontaneous tantric orgasms?

Yrs,

Ol' Dirty Buddha

"Paul D. Miller" wrote:

> A quick side-viewpoint on the genomics of the imagination....
> phenotype/genotype - the structures encoded  in the hardware of how
> we live in the world. Corpus delecti.... Again, the idea becomes a
> modification of the body in an environment conditioned by culture AND
> nature. Trace the routes that people use language to map onto
> neurochemistry. Prosthetic Realism meets Ali Babba and the 40
> Thieves... Who speaks through you? Genomics should be fun, and
> probably will be soon....
>
> Paul
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8545-2001Jun15.html
>
> Tracing the Synapses of Spirituality
>
> By Shankar Vedantam

--
Happiness is the maximum agreement between reality and desire -- Joseph
Stalin

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Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 14:04:52 +0200 (CEST)
From: Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Is the religious impulse a neuro-chemical condition?

Hi,

On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Paul D. Miller quoted:

> What creates that transcendental feeling of being one with the universe?

Isnt it more than a feeling ? And is it more about to be 1 with the
universe or 1 with your fellow humans ?

H.

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