Quotes by Neuroscientists - Page 6

Religion is the Self revealing secrets of the Self to the Self.
Abhijit Naskar
All states of consciousness, no matter how mystical, ecstatic or divine, are gloriously born through the protoplasmic activity of the brain.
Abhijit Naskar
All endeavors, heroic or monstrous, scientific or philosophical, rise from the electrochemical functioning of the mind, that takes place relentlessly in the little specks of protoplasm inside the head. These specks of jelly inside the brain, known as the neurons, determine our identity, personality and everything that we are.
Abhijit Naskar
My goal is simple. It is to take the human civilization with me on the path of sweet general harmony.
Abhijit Naskar
Just imagine, among 8.7 million species, only one has become smart enough to ponder over the meaning of life. This simple evolutionary fact itself implies the gravitas of human life.
Abhijit Naskar
No Scripture comes from any Supreme Creator.
Abhijit Naskar
Be sincere to nobody else, but yourself.
Abhijit Naskar
Act like you have a lot of venom inside you, but never inject them into anyone.
Abhijit Naskar
The highest creed is Universal Acceptance.
Abhijit Naskar
Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface. Are you in an abusive relationship? A refusal to lie to others – How did you get that bruise? – would oblige you to come to grips with this situation very quickly. Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol? Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others noticing.Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow but haven’t.
Sam Harris
Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one's thoughts and feelings can—paradoxically—allow for greater creative control over one's life. It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings: A bit of food may be all that your personality requires. Getting behind our concious thoughts and feelings can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives (while knowing, of course, that we are ultimately being steered).
Sam Harris
Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here, nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.
Colleen McCullough
Survive, survive and survive – these are the quintessential laws of Nature. But survive does not always mean being mean.
Abhijit Naskar
Quran, like most other scriptures, is a book of most wonderful truth mixed with the most disgraceful superstitions of human nature.
Abhijit Naskar
Despite the fact that we cannot be absolutely altruistic in our behavior, we can still build our character to be loving and compassionate – to empathize with others.
Abhijit Naskar
There are no other heaven and hell outside the human mind. Goodness is heaven, hatred is hell. Acceptance is religion, sectarianism is blasphemy. Love is holiness, discrimination is sin.
Abhijit Naskar
Never forget O Brave One, the best kind of existence is to exist for others.
Abhijit Naskar
Most of Jesus’ life is told through the four Gospels of the New Testament, known as the Canonical gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are not biographies in the modern sense but accounts with allegorical intent. They are written to engender faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the incarnation of God, and not to provide factual data about Jesus’s life. This left the door of exaggeration open. And through that door all kinds of mystical non-sense crept in and made place right alongside the good philosophical teachings of Jesus.
Abhijit Naskar
Real teachers like Jesus, Buddha, Nanak, Rumi have much more to teach humanity, than the imaginary figure Krishna, concocted by an ancient Indian man named Vyasa.
Abhijit Naskar
But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation that is only a dim and often inaccurate copy of the real experience. Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just replaying, but a rewriting.
Daniel J. Levitin
We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.
Abhijit Naskar
The more emotional you are in a situation, the more memories you’ll have of that situation in the long run.
Abhijit Naskar
How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.
Colleen McCullough
He was, he admitted, a man who liked to have his cake and eat it too.
Colleen McCullough
The best thing about being 40 is that you can appreciate 25-year-old men more.
Colleen McCullough
Ideally, friends are people with whom we can be our true selves, with whom we can fearlessly let our guard down. (Arguably, a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of our different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)
Daniel J. Levitin
​You are only limited by your imagination.
Abhijit Naskar
In your imagination, 16,000 animals can fit into a boat that is only 440 feet long, 73 feet wide and 44 feet high. You can even decapitate a boy and then fit an elephant’s head on his headless body to bring him back to life. You can construct a demon with as many as ten heads and conceive him to be immortal unless he is hit at his navel. As far as your imagination is concerned, there is no boundary to perception.
Abhijit Naskar
Everything in your mental life proceeds in proper neurological order. If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.
Abhijit Naskar
The more you learn the biology behind your every action, emotion and behavior, the better you become at accepting others the way they are.
Abhijit Naskar
Never question the conviction of a scientist, based on mere scriptures.
Abhijit Naskar
Learn to be true to yourself, and everything good will follow.
Abhijit Naskar
In order to attain extraordinary greatness, first you need to be drowned in the deepest fathoms of helplessness, misery and heartache.
Abhijit Naskar
The more you keep your religious beliefs concealed from others, the lesser religious conflicts occur in the society.
Abhijit Naskar
First know the Self and then talk of social reformation.
Abhijit Naskar
My question to the atheist is, do you want an atheist world or a peaceful world? And to the believer, do you want a religious world or a peaceful world? Religious orientation doesn't define peace, but the answer here may define one's true nature.
Abhijit Naskar
A handful of lion-hearts can wake the whole world up.
Abhijit Naskar
Religious unity and religious tolerance are not the same thing. Unity doesn’t come merely through tolerance. You don’t need to tolerate people from other religions. It is time you start loving them. Toleration may make you a decent person, but it is love that makes you a true human being.
Abhijit Naskar
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.
Abhijit Naskar
Man and woman are the two wheels of society. If either one becomes defective, the society cannot make progress.
Abhijit Naskar
For religion to truly become an aid to humanity as a whole, every human being must make sincere efforts to break down the dogmatic barriers among different religions constructed by the pathologically ill and dangerous fundamentalists.
Abhijit Naskar
In the domain of true religion, mere book-learning has no right to enter.
Abhijit Naskar
​God is hardwired within the neural circuitry.
Abhijit Naskar
If you don’t act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists.
Abhijit Naskar
Respect yourself and the whole world will respect you.
Abhijit Naskar
Dare to exercise rational thinking.
Abhijit Naskar
​Through ignorance a common man considers his own religion to be the best and makes much useless claims, but when his mind is illuminated by Self-Knowledge, all sectarian quarrels disappear.
Abhijit Naskar
One who has just learnt a foreign language, constantly resorts, while talking, to words belonging to that language in order to make a show of his or her achievement. But one who knows the language well, seldom uses it when speaking in his or her own mother tongue. Such is the case with those who are well advanced in religion.
Abhijit Naskar
A healthy brain leads to a healthy you.
Abhijit Naskar
Truth is a T-Rex. Let it out and you won't need to defend it. It'll defend itself.
Abhijit Naskar
Whether in the name of Just War, Witch-Hunt or the Inquisition, at various points of history for various poppycock reasons the cross had been the weapon of mass destruction in the hands of the orthodox church.
Abhijit Naskar
Think of the good that Christ imparted on the society. And think of the great evil that has been done through fanaticism over one damn phrase “salvation through Christ, the Son of God.
Abhijit Naskar
It’s time that Christianity should be redefined by the world based upon the original teachings of Jesus, instead of the Old and New Testaments which have been interpreted, reinterpreted and distorted by all the Ecumenical Councils, i.e. the Church Councils.
Abhijit Naskar
Religion, as it is generally taught all over the world, is said to be based upon faith and belief, and, in most cases, consists only of different sets of theories, and that is the reason why we find all religions quarreling with one another. These theories, again, are based upon belief. One man says there is a Supreme Being sitting above the clouds governing the whole universe, and he asks me to believe that solely on the authority of his assertion. But if you actually attempt to realize what Christ realized, the entire structure of the Church would collapse.
Abhijit Naskar
Mother Nature gave Jesus, the Son of Nature the biological elements to see things that nobody else could, or rather nobody else would. And you are the child of Nature as well. As such you have all the powers within you, just like Jesus, to rise above the laws of the society that tend to bind your conscience with textual mysticism and fanaticism.
Abhijit Naskar
Jesus recognized that God within him and became Christ - so did Siddhartha Gautama and became Buddha - so did I - and so can you.
Abhijit Naskar
If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.
Abhijit Naskar
By infusing Jesus the man with the divine magic – by making him capable of earthly miracles as well as his own resurrection, the early church turned him into a god within the human world. Thus, the church reinforced the monopoly on the so-called route to heaven, i.e. salvation only through Jesus Christ. And during those days, whoever kept the keys to heaven would rule the world.
Abhijit Naskar
Progress begins when you liberate your mind from the shackles of your ingrained tendencies of authoritarianism – the tendencies of greed – the tendencies of hatred, rage and lust.
Abhijit Naskar
Our mind has evolved in such a way that new wants keep appearing in it relentlessly. But do not confuse them with needs. Needs are necessity, but wants are luxury.
Abhijit Naskar