This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our
military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the
challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and
open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America
safe.
- Sen. Barack Obama

Rumi's Tavern

who can say they are

In the school of love who has learned all the
lessons? Or why would we still be in school?
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
P.S. Have not read Borges.Do not know Persian.Am
looking for some hardy pistachios and persimmons to grow...
if one ever sobers up.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Dec 6, 2001 11:05 pm
Re: who is not a lover?
Dear Namtoo
Do you know Persian language?
If Yes I invite you to another club of Molana Jalaladin Rumi I found you as a drunkard. beh_yas
beh_yas

Dec 6, 2001 8:50 am
who is not a lover?
Why is this pub empty?Where are all the other drunkards?

Dec 6, 2001 3:29 am
you're not kidding
"Lover's don't meet somewhere along the way They are in each others souls all along."- Rumi

How wonderful that the creator has chosen to reveal some of his beauty and glory to you through the form of this creature!For the qualities you have seen in this person ,are they not the qualities of God? Perhaps it is really He
whom you feel separated from and seek union with--the
Eternal Beloved who is to be found in your own heart.
Who is sick with love will receive the healer.An
unexpected means of fulfilling your need for union(and
relieving the anguish of separation that tears you
apart)will be revealed.The veil of form and multiplicity
will be rent asunder and the secret of oneness will be
revealed.It will be as if your eyes are opened to the essence
that is behind all form. He will show you a way to
love her always--even in her absence.(for how could
she be ever absent/separate?) For is she not in the
clouds and the grass,in the ground that you walk
upon,and in the very air that you breathe?Is she not in
every person that you encounter?Are you not able to
recognize her in every creature that comes to stand before
you? Can you not see that she is everywhere and in all
things --the very essence of all that there is! Knowing
this you will be able to relinquish your attachment to
her physical form,and you will be liberated from the
anquish that has resulted from that attachment. And if
you choose not to relinquish that anquish,then count
it also as joy!
Only in the Infinite is there true joy.

Dec 6, 2001 2:07 am
back to Rumi

Fascinating how Rumi's masterful use of words guides us through the labyrinth of duality and brings us magically to that place of Oneness from which he (and we through him)beholds the grandeur and the glory of what is. His words ring true because they take us to that Truth and give us a momentary glimpse of that
experience which all the scriptures are about.
One senses that here is someone who's been there.

Dec 6, 2001 12:10 am
more than welcome

Jeff,where are you ?.This place isn't the same without you.I miss you already. . . Where does love come from?
namtoo

Dec 5, 2001 9:23 pm
Re: Can I give enlightenment back ?

Sounds like a pretty far out/in space!Why would anyone want to give it back? Who is there to give anything? Who is ... intoxicated with the words?

financial fraud (predatory lending)and the subprime mortgage meltdown

Recession:Paying the piper:The final reckoning

The debt that we have racked up in this frenzy of consumption/acquisition has to be paid!

84% of the U.S. government's budget is now spent on three things: Disease(health care), debt (annual budgetary deficit is 400 billion)and war (By the end of 2008, the U.S. federal government will have spent more than $800 billion on combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (government accounts make it hard to separate the two). On top of that comes a mountain of future costs: caring for war veterans (to date, more than 1.6 million troops have been deployed), replacing the military hardware that is being used and worn out in Iraq and paying interest on the enormous sums of money we've borrowed to finance the war.)

Too much debt!
The national debt is now over $10 trillion .This is a ticking time bomb!In 2008,21% of the total budget (of 3 trillion dollars)went to paying the interest on the national debt.Even for a rich nation such deficit spending is not sustainable indefinitely.The U.S. dollar is losing value. Unless it makes a correction,this nation will not survive its own crushing debt.

Such a debt load is fiscal and economic suicide!

Expect hyperinflation of an increasingly- worthless currency.

All the U.S. coins and bills in general circulation today have a total worth of about $829 billion.Two thirds of that cash (excluding treasury bills etc.)is held overseas.


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http://www.gregpala st.com/elliot- spitzer-gets- nailed/?print= 1



The $200 Billion Bail-Out for Predator Banks and Spitzer Charges are Intimately Linked



By Greg Palast
Reporting for Air America Radio’s Clout

March 14th, 2008



While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and . But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.



Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.





How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’



Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 monthly payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. The Grinnings move into their Toyota.



Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.



‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.



But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hearty – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.



But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.



Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.



Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”



What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinning’s, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).



When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.



But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.



Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.



The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.



Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.



And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.



Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” - made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.



It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”



Bush, Spitzer said right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.



Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.



A note on “Prosecutorial Indiscretion.”

Back in the day when I was an investigator of racketeers for government, the federal prosecutor I was assisting was deciding whether to launch a case based on his negotiations for airtime with 60 Minutes. I’m not allowed to tell you the prosecutor’s name, but I want to mention he was recently seen shouting, “Florida is Rudi country! Florida is Rudi country!”



Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It’s up to something called “prosecutorial discretion.”

Funny thing, this ‘discretion.’ For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC s to put him in diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him.


Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer – rarely done in these cases - was made at the ‘discretion’ of Bush’s Justice Department.

Or maybe we should say, ‘indiscretion.’

************


Greg Palast, former investigator of financial fraud, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers [1] Armed Madhouse and [2] The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Hear The Palast Report weekly on [3] Air America Radio’s Clout.

And next Wednesday March 19, join Palast and Clout host Richard Greene on a dinner cruise on the Potomac River. For more information click [4] here.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The coming financial collapse of the U.S. government: Fed papers reveal what's in store for Americans
by Mike Adams

The bankruptcy of the United States government has been talked about for years by independent observers. If you've read the book, "Empire of Debt," then you know where the U.S. is headed financially. But most people have no idea about the ultimate financial consequences of decades of borrowing and spending by Washington, and they remain irrationally convinced that the status quo will remain intact for eternity. No one in any position of authority, you see, has yet admitted that the U.S. government is indeed going bankrupt.
Until now, that is.

In a remarkable paper posted by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, and authored by a Boston University teacher named Prof Kotlikoff, it is revealed in blunt, powerful language that the era of borrowing and spending without consequence may soon come to a close. The paper, entitled, Is the United States Bankrupt?, may not remain posted for very long once the public gets word of what it actually says.

And what, exactly, does it say? For starters, Kotlikoff explains, "Unless the United States moves quickly to fundamentally change and restrain its fiscal behavior, its bankruptcy will become a foregone conclusion."


The country is bankrupt
He goes on to explain, "[that] the United States is going broke, [and] ...that radical reform of U.S. fiscal institutions is essential to secure the nation’s economic future."
Failure to engage in these massive reforms will inevitably result in the financial demise of the United States, Kotlikoff says: "[W]e have a country at the end of its resources. It’s exhausted, stripped bear, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, and wrecked (at least in terms of its consumption and borrowing capacity) in consequence of failure to pay its creditors. In short, the country is bankrupt and is forced to reorganize its operations by paying its creditors (the oldsters) less than they were promised."

We might possibly be saved, he explains, if the nation engages in massive, radical reform in three areas: 1) Eliminating the current income tax system and moving to a national retail sales tax of 33 percent. 2) Privatizing social security so that workers own their savings accounts and the federal government can no longer swipe funds from Social Security. 3) Launching a national health insurance program that covers everyone and relies on a system of government-issued vouchers that citizens can spend with health insurance companies.

These radical reforms are necessary because the future gap between what the government owes and what it stands to receive in revenues is already monstrously large, and it's growing by the minute. This gap, called the Gokhale and Smetters measure, currently stands at an astonishing $65.9 trillion. (Yes, with a "T".) As Kotlikoff explains, "This figure is more than five times U.S. GDP and almost twice the size of national wealth. One way to wrap one’s head around $65.9 trillion is to ask what fiscal adjustments are needed to eliminate this red hole. The answers are terrifying. One solution is an immediate and permanent doubling of personal and corporate income taxes. Another is an immediate and permanent two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits. A third alternative, were it feasible, would be to immediately and permanently cut all federal discretionary spending by 143 percent."

If you read that last paragraph with any presence of mind, you now begin to understand the magnitude of the fiscal problem facing the United States. It could be solved, as explained above, by doubling all personal and corporate income taxes. But then what's the point in working? It could also be solved by slashing promised benefits in Social Security and Medicare. But what about the inevitable street riots?

None of these solutions are likely to occur. And that leaves the Ace up the sleeve. It's the Ace that all government eventually play on their way to bankruptcy and collapse, and it's the Ace that the United States will ultimately be forced to play, too: hyperinflation. The U.S. will have to print more money to escape the financial consequences of its unbridled spending.


Hyperinflation is inevitable
As Kotlikoff explains:
"Given the reluctance of our politicians to raise taxes, cut benefits, or even limit the growth in benefits, the most likely scenario is that the government will start printing money to pay its bills. This could arise in the context of the Federal Reserve “being forced” to buy Treasury bills and bonds to reduce interest rates. Specifically, once the financial markets begin to understand the depth and extent of the country’s financial insolvency, they will start worrying about inflation and about being paid back in watered-down dollars. This concern will lead them to start dumping their holdings of U.S. Treasuries. In so doing, they’ll drive up interest rates, which will lead the Fed to print money to buy up those bonds. The consequence will be more money creation—exactly what the bond traders will have come to fear. This could lead to spiraling expectations of higher inflation, with the process eventuating in hyperinflation."

It's not like it hasn't happened before. Hyperinflation is actually the norm, not the exception, and it's the escape route taken by virtually every country suffering under the burden of payment promises is cannot possibly keep. Whether we're talking about Germany after World War I, or the United States over the next few years, hyperinflation is the only option remaining for politicians who refuse to practice fiscal sanity.

No politician ever got elected by promising voters their entitlements would be halted, did they? Political popularity is derived from promising voters precisely what the nation cannot afford: Endless entitlements and runaway spending without apparent consequence.


The China factor
The only thing keeping the U.S. afloat right now is the temporary willingness of Asian countries to keep buying U.S. debt, thereby pumping up the U.S. economy with dollars earned on the backs of Chinese laborers.
But even the Chinese -- known for their tolerance of hard times and manual labor -- may eventually tire of lending money to a posh, arrogant Western nation that has all but abandoned the concept of saving money. Says Kotlikoff, "China is saving so much that it’s running a current account surplus. Not only is China supplying capital to the rest of the world, it’s increasingly doing so via direct investment. The question for the United States is whether China will tire of investing only indirectly in our country and begin to sell its dollar-denominated reserves. Doing so could have spectacularly bad implications for the value of the dollar and the level of U.S. interest rates."

By "spectacularly bad implications," Kotlikoff means the value of the U.S. dollar would plummet, the level of U.S. interest rates would skyrocket, and hyperinflation would be well underway. U.S. citizens would find not only their dollars to be near-worthless on the global market, but their savings to be all but wiped out as well. Sure, you'll still have the same number of dollars in your bank account, but they won't be worth anything.

This is what eventually happens, by the way, when a government eliminates the gold standard and separates its currency from precious metals. The U.S. dollar, a green piece of paper, technically stands for nothing other than the U.S. government's promise to pay. But when push comes to shove, the government will have no choice but to hyperinflate its way out of financial obligations, thereby rendering all currently-held U.S. dollars to be virtually worthless. Those investors or citizens who hold savings in U.S. dollars will be wiped out by a government that will essentially steal their wealth without having to a single physical dollar from their hands.


Future obligations cannot be met
And yet, despite the seriousness of the U.S. fiscal situation, Americans and their elected representative live their merry lives oblivious to financial reality. National newspaper headlines even add to the denial, running headlines that claim the nation's economy is strong because the 2006 budget deficit will be "only" $296 billion.
That this is considered a success by the Bush Administration is testament to the psychotic fiscal self-deception that now serves as the norm in the United States. It's like a family that owes $1 million on a $200,000 home announcing "success" because it has just reduced its monthly credit card borrowing from $15,000 to $12,000. And that's if you actually believe the numbers, because if there's one area where Washington has proven its skill, it's the expert deployment of smoke and mirrors on all things involving numbers.

Cutting the annual budget deficit won't save us anyway. It only means that we're barreling head-first into a brick wall at a slightly slower pace than before. The entitlements will still come due:

"There are 77 million baby boomers now ranging from age 41 to age 59. All are hoping to collect tens of thousands of dollars in pension and healthcare benefits from the next generation. These claimants aren’t going away. In three years, the oldest boomers will be eligible for early Social Security benefits. In six years, the boomer vanguard will start collecting Medicare. Our nation has done nothing to prepare for this onslaught of obligation. Instead, it has continued to focus on a completely meaningless fiscal metric—“the” federal deficit—censored and studiously ignored long-term fiscal analyses that are scientifically coherent, and dramatically expanded the benefit levels being explicitly or implicitly promised to the baby boomers."

The result of this is not in question: The United States government is already running on fumes, and in a few more years, it will suffer financial collapse.

"Countries can and do go bankrupt," says Kotlikoff, and the U.S. is no exception to the laws of economic reality.


Oblivious to what's coming
The American people, as usual, remain oblivious to the financial future that awaits them. Even as the housing bubble is now beginning to burst in the nation's most overpriced real estate markets, most people don't have a clue what "hard times" really means. To today's debt-ridden yuppie spenders, "hard times" means shuffling six different credit card accounts to cover the payments on an overpriced house, two new SUVs in the driveway and a vacation to Paris, none of which the yuppie couple can afford.
The idea of ever having to pay back their debt and live within their means is as foreign to most Americans as it is their own government. Financial consequences have been put off so habitually, for so long, that people forget they even exist. And thus the reality awakening becomes ever more rude when it finally appears. To say that most Americans will be in a state of shock when their life savings are suddenly wiped out is an understatement: These people will have never even imagined such an event is possible, much less contemplated how it might affect them.


Rome is burning
It's too late to save the United States from its financial meltdown, I believe. For starters, there is a complete lack of willingness to make tough financial decisions and begin paying off the national debt. Such an idea is so foreign to the U.S. that no presidential candidate in the last two decades has even seriously proposed such a plan, save perhaps Ross Perot, a man with such well-grounded ideas of cutting government spending that he was immediately branded a pot by the status quo.
Even worse, there's not even recognition among the masses that a financial problem exists. As long as the President continues to proclaim the economy is in good shape, and the press remains complicit with its printing of economic half-truths, few will recognize any problem at all. Besides, any such recognition of the financial problems now facing this nation requires the observers to actually be able to do basic math. Our public education system, which is now largely considered institutionalized day care for nutritionally-deficient children, has seen to it that mathematics instruction never gets in the way of diagnosing children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and ging them up on amphetamines so powerful that they actually have a street value as recreational .

Thus, few young Americans can even do math. And none of them lived through the Great Depression, nor did they understand the study of it in school, meaning they are precisely the kind of naive, overconfident yuppie spenders who are ripe for being financially obliterated by an economic meltdown. When their ignorance turns to fear, the ever-widening spiral of financial panic becomes unstoppable until the whole system hits rock bottom. And "rock bottom" is far, far below the relatively luxurious lifestyle to which American consumers have become so smugly accustomed.


Protecting yourself from the inevitable
The timetable for this economic collapse is unknown, but it's very unlikely to happen in the next year or two. A collapse by 2012 is certainly possible, and seeing it by 2020 is almost certain.
That leaves the more intelligent among us plenty of time to prepare. But the usual preparatory actions by Americans won't suffice in such a large-scale collapse. FDIC-insured banks, for example, will almost certainly collapse and take the DFIC down with them. Even if you are repaid by the FDIC, you'll only be paid in worthless U.S. dollars anyway.


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http://www.stansberryresearch.com/pro/1103PSIEOAVD/OPSIM526/PR

(Viewer discretion is advised)

Meditation works

http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/

MEDITATION

The Pursuit of Happiness

CBC News Online | April 23, 2004

Reporter: Eve SavoryProducer: Marijka HurkoFrom The National

Erin Gammel is a shoo-in for the Canadian Olympic swim team. Canadian record holder, champion backstroker – unless something wildly unexpected happens, she's going to Athens . But four years ago she was a sure bet for the Sydney Olympics, too."Everyone kept telling me you're a shoo-in," she says. "And we had the strategy and everything was perfect. And I thought this is it, I'm going to the Olympics."She was racing at the Olympic trials in Montreal . She hit the lane rope, lost her concentration and lost her place on the team."It was just extremely disappointing. I was depressed. I was just really sad. I was crying and I couldn't control myself," Gammel says.Erin Gammel cried for two years. Help was to come in a way she would never have dreamed, from Dharamsala in Northern India , 5,000 kilometres and cultural eons away.Dharamsala is the home in exile to thousands of Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama, after China occupied Tibet .For 25 centuries Tibetan Buddhists have practised and refined their exploration. For generations they probed their inner space with the same commitment with which western science explored the external world and outer space. The two inhabited separate worlds.But now, they are finding common ground in a remarkable collaboration.In March 2000, a select group of scientists and scholars journeyed to Dharamsala. They came to share insights and solutions – to human distress and suffering.Among them was Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin . He finds nothing contradictory about doing science with Buddhists."There is almost a scientific-like attitude that is exemplified by Buddhist practitioners in investigating their own mind," he says. "Their mind is the landscape of their own experimentation, if you will." The westerners had been invited by the Dalai Lama himself to his private quarters.For five days, monks and scientists dissected what they call "negative emotions" – sadness, anxiety jealousy craving, rage – and their potential to destroy.One of the participants, Daniel Goleman, author of the book Destructive Emotions, says, "As we were leaving the U.S. to come here the headline was a six-year-old who had a fight with a classmate and the next day he came back with a gun and shot and killed her. It's very sad."Why would the scientists seek answers in Tibetan Buddhism?Because its rigorous meditative practices seem to have given the monks an extraordinary resilience, an ability to bounce back from the bad things that happen in life, and cultivate contentment.Richard Davidson's lab is one of the world's most advanced for looking inside a living brain. He's recently been awarded an unprecedented $15-million (Cdn) grant to study, among other things, what happens inside a meditating mind."Meditation is a set of practices that have been around for more than 2,500 years, whose principal goal is to cultivate these positive human qualities, to promote flourishing and resilience. And so we think that it deserves to be studied with the modern tools of science," Davidson says.A little over a year later, in May 2001, the Dalai Lama returned the visit to Davidson's lab in Madison , Wis.His prize subjects – and collaborators – are the Dalai Lama's lamas, the monks. "The monks, we believe, are the Olympic athletes of certain kinds of mental training," Davidson says. "These are individuals who have spent years in practice. To recruit individuals who have undergone more than 10,000 hours of training of their mind is not an easy task and there aren't that many of these individuals on the planet."The Dalai Lama has said were he not a monk, he would be an engineer.He brings that sensibility – the curiosity and intellectual discipline – to the discussion on EEGs and functional MRIs. But this isn't really about machines.And it isn't about nirvana. It's about down-to-earth life: about the distress of ordinary people – and a saner world. "The human and economic cost of psychiatric disorder in western industrialized countries is dramatic," says Davidson. "And to the extent that cultivating happiness reduces that suffering, it is fundamentally important."The monk and the scientist are investigating – together – the Art of Happiness."Rather than thinking about qualities like happiness as a trait," Davidson says, "we should think about them as a skill, not unlike a motor skill, like bicycle riding or skiing. These are skills that can be trained. I think it is just unambiguously the case that happiness is not a luxury for our culture but it is a necessity."But we believe we can buy happiness?if we just had the money. That's what the ad industry tells us. And we think it's true.People's theories about what will make them happy often are wrong. And so there's a lot of work these days that shows, for example, that winning the lottery will transiently elevate your happiness but it will not persist.There's some evidence that our temperament is more or less set from birth. So and so is a gloomy Gus?someone else is a ray of sunshine – that sort of thing.Even when wonderful or terrible things happen, most of us, eventually, will return to that emotional set-point.But, Davidson believes, that set point can be moved. "Our work has been fundamentally focused on what the brain mechanisms are that underlie these emotional qualities and how these brain mechanisms might change as a consequence of certain kinds of training," Davidson says.His work could not have been done 20 years ago. "In fact, 20 years ago, we had dreams of methods that allows you to interrogate the brain in this way, but we had no tools to do it."Now that we have the tools we can see that as our emotions ebb and flow, so do brain chemistry and blood flow. Fear, depression, love ? they all get different parts of our brain working.Happiness and enthusiasm, and joy – they show up as increased activity on the left side near the front of the cortex. Anxiety, sadness – on the right.Davidson has found this pattern in infants as young as 10 months, in toddlers, teens and adults.Davidson tested more than 150 ordinary people to see what parts of their brains were most active.Some were a little more active on the left. Some were a little more active on the right.A few were quite far to the right. They would probably be called depressed. Others were quite far to the left, the sort of people who feel "life is great."So there was a range. Then Davidson tested a monk.He was so far to the left he was right off the curve. That was one happy monk. "And this is rather dramatic evidence that there's something really different about his brain compared with the brains of these other 150 people. This is tantalizing evidence that these practices may indeed be promoting beneficial changes in the brain."Here, the Olympic athletes of meditation meet the Cadillac of brain scanners.Khachab Rinpoche, a monk from Asia, came to Madison to meditate in perhaps the strangest place in his life: the functional MRI.It let's scientists watch what happens inside his brain when he switches between different types of meditation. They want to know how his brain may differ from ordinary people, and whether that change is related to the inner contentment the monks report.So they test how subjects react to unpleasant sounds and images flashed into the goggles they wear in the MRI.Normally when we're threatened one part of the brain is tremendously active, but in the monks, "the responsivity of this area is specifically decreased during this meditation in response to these very intense auditory simuli that convey strong emotions," Davidson says.It's very preliminary work, but the implication may be that the lamas are able to move right through distressing events that overwhelm the rest of us – in other words, one of the keys to their happiness.It may tell us something about our potential. "Our brains are adaptable, our brains are not fixed. The wiring in our brains is not fixed. Who we are today is not necessarily who we have to end up being," Davidson says.Tibetan Buddhism is said to be one of the most demanding mental endeavours on the planet. It takes 10,000 hours of meditation and years in retreat to become adept. Few of us can imagine such a commitment.But that doesn't mean the benefits of meditation are out of our reach.Zindal Segal is a psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto . He uses meditation to treat mood disorders.It's based on Buddhist teachings and its called mindfulness.

"Very few of us can sit for 10,000 hours to be able to do this but the interesting thing is that we don't need to. These capacities are available to all of us," Segal says. " We're talking about paying attention, we're talking about returning wherever our minds are to this present moment. These are things that we all have. We don't have to earn them, we just have to find a way of clearing away the clutter to see that they are already there." Meditation is now out of the closet. The word is, it eases stress, drops blood pressure, helps put that bad day at the office in perspective.Meditation is being mainlined by the mainstream, from corporate offices to factory floors.These days it's not unusual to find hospitals like St. Joseph 's in Toronto offering meditation programs. Some 360 people pass through the eight-week course every year.Like most, this program has taken the simplest form of Buddhist teaching and adapted it for busy lives. "Meditation is a skill, and like any skill it needs to be practised. So we use the breath as the place where we start to practise but eventually what we want to be able to do is to be able to use the awareness of the breath in our daily lives," Segal says."When we have the ability to do that we can then use the breath when we're standing in line at a bank, or if we're having an argument with a spouse, as a way of grounding ourselves in the middle of something that is disturbing."Something disturbing, like the mind movie Erin Gammel couldn't escape: the day when she failed to make the Olympic team."I just remember my hand getting caught in a lane rope and thinking to myself, it's over," Gammel says. She lost her focus, her place on the team, and her heart to swim. "It affected my entire life. I cried at the drop of a hat. I wasn't improving and it didn't look like anything was really improving. And I felt everything I did I seemed to fail at," she says. "That was part of the depression and the sadness because I felt like I was failing at the time. Nothing was going well." Until she hooked up with the National Swim Team's sports psychologist, Hap Davis. Davis had been fascinated by scientist Richard Davidson's work.He had a hunch that reliving the trauma was suppressing that part of Erin 's brain on the left that Davidson had found was so active in happy people.He devised a rescue plan – a breathing meditation that she was to do before and after repeatedly viewing the video."If a person can ground themselves and feel centred with meditative breathing they can get to the point where they can look at it and view it with a critical mind, with a mind that is capable of being open to the experience and looking objectively at what took place," Davis says."You know what it felt like during the race. It felt like I stopped absolutely dead. But in the video I look and it looks like just a little glitch. Nothing."It's more than two years since they've needed to study the tape – because it worked. Erin 's joy of swimming returned; she's winning race after race."She's more resilient emotionally. She's more stable emotionally. She's more consistent in terms of performance," Davis says."Meditation isn't necessarily about happiness but it makes you happier. I guess that is how you would say it. And I feel more confident. That I know how to work with this stuff and work with bad things that happen in my life," Gammel says.Once again there's one more race to win – the trials to make the team that goes to Athens ."This is my year. That's what I keep telling everyone. This is my year to make the Olympic team because making it through all those times there it's just going to happen, I know it is. lt's just going to happen," she says."Meditation has been around for 2500 years so it's not like a new practice," Davis says. "But science is catching up to an old tradition and the evidence seems to be emerging that meditation can change the pattern of brain chemistry or blood flow in the brain."And now there's proof meditation can change the brains of ordinary people and make them healthier.Promega is a biotech company in Madison , Wis. , where the researchers from the Brain Imaging Lab recruited typical stressed out workers – office staff, managers, even a skeptical research scientist, Mike Slater. "Things were chaotic and crazy. We had a newborn. We had three deaths in the family. So it was a pretty topsy-turvy time," Slater says.All the subjects had activity in their brain measured?and half – including Mike Slater – were given an eight- week course in meditation.Then everyone – meditators and controls – got a flu shot, and their brains were measured a second time.The meditators' brain activity had shifted to that happy left side. Mike Slater was almost too successful. "I was pretty happy all the time and I was worried that maybe I was masking some stuff that might really be irritating me so I stopped it and my wife noticed an increase in my irritability, so, you know, I have both sides of the experiment now. It calmed me down and I stopped doing it and my irritability increased," he says.That wasn't all. Their immune systems had strengthened."Those individuals in the meditation group that showed the biggest change in brain activity also showed the biggest change in immune function, suggesting that these were closely linked," Davidson says.Davidson and his team had shown meditation could shift not just mood – but also brain activity and immunity in ordinary people.And they'd answered a potential flaw in the monk study."Someone may say, well, maybe these individuals are that way to start out with. Maybe that's why they're attracted to be monks," Davidson says. "And we actually can't answer that on the basis of those data, but with the Promega study, we can say definitely that it had to do with the intervention we provided."There are reasons to believe the insane pace and many aggravations of daily life can be dangerous to the health of our minds and our bodies.We can't push the delay button on a busy world and we can't bail out. But perhaps meditation is a way to encourage a sense of well-being – a deep breath in the centre of the whirlwind."As the Dalai Lama himself said in his book The Art of Happiness, we have the capacity to change ourselves because of the very nature, of the very structure and function of our brain," Davidson says. "And that is a very hopeful message because I think it instills in people the belief that there are things that they can do to make themselves better."

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How Meditation Changes Your Brain


There is growing evidence to show that meditation can make people healthier and happier. It may even increase lifespan, alter brain structure and change personality.

Now, mainstream medicine is beginning to take notice of meditation’s effects. For example, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which is about 80 percent meditation, has been approved in Britain for use with people who have experienced three or more episodes of depression.

MRI scans of long-term meditators have shown greater activity in brain circuits involved in paying attention. Long-term meditation can also cause changes in the actual structure of your cortex, the outer layer of your brain. Brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing have been shown to be thicker in meditators.

Studies suggest that meditation can help you to train your attention and focus, even in the midst of distractions. For instance, when disturbing noises were played to a group of experienced meditators undergoing an MRI, they had little effect on the brain areas involved in emotion and decision-making.

About 10 million people meditate every day in the West, and many more in other parts of the world.
Sources:
The London Times March 14, 2008



Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Before you brush off meditation as something only for Buddhist monks or hippies, it would serve you well to find out what you may be missing.

Meditation is the equivalent of giving your mind an escape valve to blow off steam.

This is such a necessary tool in today’s 24/7 society that many people naturally engage in some form of meditation whenever they feel stressed -- listening to music, journaling, prayer, soaking in a bath, all of these work similarly to meditation in that they focus your mind and help promote a state of calm.

In so doing, your pulse, breathing and heart rate are likely to slow down, and your muscles will begin to relax. Your mind, too, will begin to unwind and forget about its racing thoughts.

At its most basic level, meditation helps you take a deliberate break from the stream of thoughts that are constantly flowing in and out of your mind. Some people use it to promote spiritual growth or find inner peace, while others use it as a relaxation and stress-reduction tool.

And while it’s not unusual for the most experienced meditators to have spent decades, even a lifetime, perfecting this art, you can gain benefits just from meditating in your home for 20 minutes a day.

What Can 20 Minutes a Day do for You?

Meditation has been shown to alter the workings of your brain not only in the short-term, but quite possibly permanently. Meditating thickens the areas of your brain where memory and attention reside, according to a Harvard study, and although the aging process lightens the brain in certain sectors, 20 minutes of meditation a day slows that down a bit.

Meditation can also improve your attention span, even while you’re performing mundane tasks in the mid-afternoon, a time when people typically have problems concentrating. Interestingly enough, according to one study the benefits of meditation remained strong even after patients lost a night's sleep in follow-up research.

Meanwhile, because meditation works so well to relieve stress, it can benefit all types of stress-related illness … and as you regular newsletter readers know, just about every illness is stress-related. This may explain why meditation can help to relieve:

High blood pressure
Chronic pain, including headaches
Respiratory problems such as emphysema and asthma
Sleep disturbances and fatigue
Gastrointestinal distress and irritable bowel syndrome
Skin disorders
Mild depression and premenstrual syndrome

Clearly, meditation ranks right up there with exercising and eating right when it comes to improving your health. And it’s something that just about everyone can carve out the time to do.

Simple Guidelines to Start Meditating

If you’d like to give meditation a try, sit quietly, perhaps with some soothing music, breathe rhythmically and focus on something such as your breathing, a flower, an image, a candle, a mantra or even just being in the moment. Some people prefer to close their eyes to block out visual stimulation. If you find that your mind starts to wander, direct it back to your focus point and continue from there.

Ideally, set aside 15-20 minutes a day to practice meditation. You can also try it in shorter segments, but ultimately try to work your way up to 20 minutes.

I’m also a major fan of brainwave entrainment technology, which is usually available in CD form. When you listen, you’re exposed to a combination of frequencies that induce powerful states of focused concentration or deep relaxing meditation while stimulating various parts of your brain to work together.

The benefit is that you can begin experiencing the deep frequencies right away, as opposed to having to work up to that level with traditional meditation.

However you choose to do it, just make sure you are giving your mind some down time to relax, regroup and recharge on a regular basis.


Related Articles:


Meditation Can Boost Your Immune System

Meditation Improves Your Attention

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The London Times

March 14, 2008

Meditation can alter brain structure
Barbara Lantin

Kathy Sykes, a Bristol University professor, has long known that if she does not find at least 30 minutes a day in her frantically overcrowded schedule to lie down and listen to music, she is grumpier, more tired and less able to concentrate.

What Professor Sykes, who holds the chair in the Public Engagement of Science and Engineering at Bristol, did not realise until recently is that she was, in effect, practising a fairly crude form of meditation. She also didn't know that there was growing evidence to show that this ancient practice can make people healthier and happier. It may even increase life span, alter brain structure and change personality.

Ancient traditional therapies do not always stand up to close scientific scrutiny. But when Professor Sykes put meditation under the metaphorical microscope for the second series of Alternative Therapies: The Evidence, which she is presenting on BBC Two on Monday, she was surprised to find that the saffron-robed monks of Kathmandu and the white-coated scientists of Harvard shared more common ground than might have been expected.

“Several people have told me that meditation can affect your emotions,” she says, “and one of the areas of the brain that scientists are finding may be affected by meditation is involved in processing emotions, among other things. These are early days and we need more trials, but this is potentially very exciting.”

Related Links
Buddhist monks really are happier
There are signs that mainstream medicine has already started to sit up and take notice of meditation. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which is about 80 per cent meditation, has been approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for use with people who have experienced three or more episodes of depression. And MBCT is now offered by some UK primary care trusts.

Finding a state of calm

About ten million people meditate every day in the West and, while there are many different techniques, the purpose is always to focus the mind - sometimes through the use of a mantra, a sound or the breath - and promote a state of calm.

Although Professor Sykes had always found her own ad hoc methods useful, she noticed a change after her visit to Kathmandu for instruction with Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who has been meditating for more than 30 years. “It would be absurd to say that I have learnt to meditate when people spend a lifetime doing that, but when I try to meditate now it does have a more powerful effect,” she says.

“My dad died from cancer about two months before I made the programme, but I had not cried about him for a while because I was just so busy filming. Matthieu had suggested I try to focus on unconditional love so, the next time I was trying to meditate, I thought about that and inevitably about my love for my dad. Within milliseconds I was bawling my eyes out. It was quite an intense experience and I found it comforting in my grief.

“Not long ago, I was on a crowded train where there was standing-room only going from Paddington to Bristol. I sat cross-legged on the floor to meditate and felt like I was transported to a delightful place. It was glorious to feel it was possible to ‘escape' like that.”

As a scientist, Professor Sykes wanted to know what was happening to her body to make her feel this way, so she checked into the famous Massachusetts General Hospital, where Dr Herbert Benson, a Harvard Medical School professor, put her through a barrage of tests.

After hooking her up to a range of monitors “like a lab rat”, doctors measured her resting pulse, muscle tension, respiration and sweat. They then subjected her to some humiliating mental arithmetic on camera, during which her stress levels and all her readings soared.

But after a short period of meditation, her pulse and breathing dropped below the resting rate. Dr Benson calls this the “relaxation response” and believes it can help with a wide range of conditions, including heart disease, asthma, diabetes and infertility. “To the extent that any disorder is caused or made worse by stress, regular elicitation of the relaxation response will counteract that condition,” he saysMeditation changes the brain

For Professor Sykes, the most exciting part of her investigation took place in the laboratories, where scientists are demonstrating that meditation appears to be associated with changes in the brain. These studies suggest that we could all benefit from regular meditation.

MRI scans of long-term meditators have shown greater activity in brain circuits involved in paying attention. When disturbing noises were played to a group of meditators undergoing an MRI scan, they had relatively little effect on the brain areas involved in emotion and decision-making among those with the most experience of meditation.

“Attention can be trained in a way that is not that different to how physical exercise changes the body,” says Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Long-term meditation seems not only to alter brain-wave patterns: early research suggests that it may also result in changes in the actual structure of the cortex, the outer parts of our brains. “We have found that brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing were thicker in meditators than in the controls,” says Dr Sara Lazar, an assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“The data give credence to some of the claims of long-term meditators and suggests that meditation can play a role in reducing stress, improving emotion regulation and perhaps slowing the effects of ageing on brains - slowing the normal decrease in mental agility, ability to learn new things and memory that comes with age.”

It is possible, of course, that people with a thicker brain cortex in areas associated with awareness and sensory processing are more likely to meditate. So Dr Lazar is investigating whether changes in brain structure can be detected before and after learning the technique.

All this means that Professor Sykes will be sticking with meditation and thinks the rest of us should try it, too. “I find it incredibly empowering to think that how happy we feel or our ability to focus or concentrate may not be fixed character traits but may be skills that we can train and get better at,” she says. “This must be worth investigating. If evidence is found that meditation can help us all to think better, to be happier and to be more compassionate, that would be amazing.”





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Meditation Improves Your Attention


Buddhist monks have claimed for centuries that meditation helps increase attention and concentration. New findings offer support for this notion.

Increases Thickness of Brain Regions

Researchers at Harvard Medical School examined Westerners who meditated for about 20 minutes every day, but didn't necessarily believe in the tenets of Buddhism. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) was used to look at brain parts involved in memory and attention. The thickness of those regions had increased.

Those areas generally shrink as people get older, but older meditators in the study were able to avoid some of that shrinkage. This suggests that a regular meditation practice might help people maintain their ability to remember and focus on details.

Boosts Performance on Attention Tests

Another study indicates that meditation may boost performance on tests that measure attention. A University of Kentucky study showed that 10 people taught to meditate for 40 minutes did better on a test of attention than they did after reading for 40 minutes.

The study also showed that meditation can improve attention worsened by lack of sleep.

Produces a Jump in Brain Waves

A third study, of mostly Buddhist monks, found that meditation produced a jump in brain waves associated with vigilance. The study also showed that meditation activated brain regions involved in attention.

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Meditation Can Boost Your Immune System
Researchers found that people who did eight weeks of meditation training produced more antibodies to a flu vaccine. They also showed signs of increased activity in brain areas related to positive emotion than people who didn't meditate.

While most of you know that I am not a major fan of flu vaccines, the study does show the value that meditation has to the immune system. I am sure there are some outstanding meditators out there, but I suspect most of you are similar to me and remain seriously challenged to remain focused and not let your mind wander.

Fortunately, there is a major new advance involving brain wave entrainment. Over the last year I have been using the Holosynch system to provide the benefits of meditating for more than a decade nearly instantly. If you haven't read my recent article on Holosynch yet please do as I suspect you will find it fascinating.

Psychosomatic Medicine Jul-Aug 2003;65(4):564-70

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Meditation trains the mechanism wch controls the deployment of attention.

Bringing intensely focused/concentrated attention to bear upon a task is crucial to learning.

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Dr Davidson's website: http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/

Recent publication on meditation:
http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/pubs/2007/10.1371_journal.pbio.0050138-L.pdf


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http://www.project-meditation.org/community/learn-how-you-can-benefit-project-meditation/26-longevity-beneficial-hormones-released-during-meditation.html

Longevity & Beneficial Hormones Released During Meditation.

By Michael Mackenzie

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In certain brain wave frequencies the brain releases numerous highly beneficial substances, including (HGH) human growth hormone.

As we become older, the brain creates lesser quantities of these beneficial substances and we therefore develop various ageing symptoms and diseases.

Recent research performed by Dr. Vincent Giampapa, M.D., a prominent anti-aging researcher and past-president of the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine, revealed that regular deep meditation dramatically affects production of three important hormones related to increased longevity, stress, and enhanced well-being: cortisol, DHEA, and melatonin.

At the slower Alpha and Theta brainwave patterns, production of DHEA and melatonin increases significantly.

One study noted an increase in DHEA of as much as 44%.

Some even had DHEA increases of up to 90%.

Melatonin increases were even more astounding, with average increases of 98% recorded. Many participants even had increases of up to 300%.

On the other hand, cortisol levels declined by an average of 47%. Of course, not all study participants showed the same results, but about 70% of the study participants recorded the above improvements.

Cortisol is the major age-accelerating hormone.

Cortisol


Cortisol is a hormone naturally produced by the adrenal glands. According to Dr. Giampapa, cortisol is the major age-accelerating hormone. It also interferes with learning and memory and is, in general, bad news for your health and your well-being.

Cortisol is the "stress hormone," and the more of it you have, the more stressed you feel...the more vulnerable to disease you are and the faster you age!

DHEA is extremely important.

DHEA


Another hormone, DHEA, is also produced by your adrenal glands. DHEA is a precursor, or source ingredient, to virtually every hormone your body needs.

DHEA level is a key determinant of physiological age and resistance to disease. When levels are low, you're more susceptible to aging and disease; when they're high, the body is at its peak—vibrant, healthy, and able to fight disease successfully.

DHEA acts as a buffer against stress-related hormones (such as cortisol), which is why as you get older and make less DHEA you become more susceptible to stress and disease.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (December 11, 1986) found that a 100 microgram per deciliter increase in DHEA blood levels corresponded with a 48% reduction in mortality due to cardiovascular disease—and a 36% reduction in mortality for any reason!

The benefits of Melatonin

Melatonin


Melatonin is a hormone produced by the pineal gland and helps to create restful sleep. The inability to sleep soundly can dramatically decrease the quality of your life and greatly speed up the aging process. The production of this important hormone rapidly declines with age.
New research also reveals that Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant.

Biological implications of reduced melatonin:

Melatonin is a ubiquitous neurohormone whose production is low during the day and high at night. It passes through cell membranes and acts as a highly potent antioxidant to scavenge free radicals that cause damage to DNA, Reiter (1995).

Hence melatonin reduction is involved with diseases produced by free radicals, including cancer, aging, neurological diseases, acute heart disease and heart attack, Reiter and Robinson (1995).

The circadian cycle involvement of melatonin shows that reduced melatonin will alter blood pressure and heart rate, neurological cardiopulmonary and reproductive functions.

It suggests that reduced melatonin will also reduce immune system competence and enhances the risk of cardiac, neurological and carcinogenic disease and death through reducing its antioxidant activity. These predictions are checked against clinical studies.

Melatonin reduction and health effects:

Reiter and Robinson (1995) and Brzezinski (1997) reviewed the clinical studies involved with reduced melatonin. Dr Brzezinski identifies roles for melatonin in sleep and circadian rhythm, mood, sexual maturation, reproduction, cancer, immune system response and aging.

Dr Russell Reiter, an eminent melatonin researcher, is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pineal Research.

Reiter and Robinson confirm all of the effects identified by Brzezinski, and add arthritis, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, blood clotting and stroke, cardiac arrhythmia, ischemic heart disease, heart attack, epilepsy, manic depression, suicide, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases.

Published papers are cited to justify each of these health effects. Most of the
21 associated conditions relate to the oxidative damage by free radicals and melatonin's multiple roles as a potent antioxidant, sleep enhancer and immune system booster.

Serotonin

Meditation increases the production of serotonin which is a calming neurotransmitter in the brain.

Human Growth Hormone

It is within delta that our brains are triggered to release great quantities of healing hormones, one of which is human growth hormone (HGH) which we make less of as we age, resulting in many symptoms and diseases associated with aging.

Hollywood stars pay up to $20,000 a year for synthetic human growth hormone injections, because it brings back youthful energy, looks, and stamina. And I agree, the effects of HGH are dramatic:-

Greater muscle tone,
Stronger bones,
Less fat,
Increased brain function and younger-looking, tighter skin!

HGH is one of the reasons kids have endless energy—their pituitary glands spew out heaps of the stuff!

Unfortunately, your body produces less HGH as you get older—as much as 50% less by our late 50s.

And it shows!

But HGH injections are dangerous, expensive and can cause frightening side effects!!

Now you know you can produce HGH and many other healing hormones, naturally and safely with a little daily meditation.

“By quieting the mind, which then quiets the body, and the less turbulent the body is, the more the self-repair healing mechanisms get amplified. In fact, scientists have shown that the better your DNA, your genetic machinery is at healing itself, the longer you live. That's how meditation lowers biological age.” Deepak Chopra

 

old friends

look at the photo of baby lion first and then watch the video

These two guys reared this lion from a baby in England but the authorities would not allow them to keep it once it reached maturity so they were forced to give it up, they took it back to Africa and placed it in a wildlife sanctuary, a year later they went to see it and were told it would not remember them...

Click to activate video


READ THIS BEFORE YOU CLICK ON THE VIDEO

A WOMAN IN COLUMBIA FOUND A LION CUB, WHO WAS WOUNDED AND HUNGRY. SHE TOOK HIM HOME AND RAISED HIM TILL HE WAS TOO BIG TO KEEP AT HOME. SHE THEN BROUGHT HIM TO THE LOCAL ZOO, BUT SHE VISITS HIM EVERY DAY... LOOK AT HOW HE GREETS HER!

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When the lion shall lie down with the lamb


the need to play

A non-threatened and non-threatening playful puppy induces the same response from a big growlly teddy bear:




The photographer (Norbert Rosing)was sure that he was going to see the end of his huskies when the polar bear materialized out of the blue, as it were:





Obviously it was a well-fed Bear...







The Polar Bear returned every night that week to play with the dogs..

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What's a soul?

Can a disembodied spirit exist,and could such an entity have any awareness?


Some say the soul is eternal,and not subject to dissoluton like the body.
Some say the soul is that life energy wch maintains the functioning of the body ,and the absence of wch is death.It is another name for attention or the awareness within us--that wch gives energy and life to the body. A human being is a combination of body and soul The body is for the use of the soul and all our connections with the world are through the body.
A disembodied soul is a meaningless concept. The soul cannot reside outside the body. The body is the temple of the soul and is worthy of respect as long as the soul resides within the body. But apart from or without the body the soul has no awareness nor means of expression. It is not a separate entity that can exist outside the body.What existence can it have separated from the body?
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From Forbes Magazine, 1996
©Forbes 1996



SORRY, BUT YOUR SOUL JUST DIED
--TOM WOLFE

Being a bit behind the curve, I had only just heard of the digital revolution last February when Louis Rossetto, cofounder of Wired magazine, wearing a shirt with no collar and his hair as long as Felix Mendelssohn's, looking every inch the young California visionary, gave a speech before the Cato Institute announcing the dawn of the twenty-first century's digital civilization. As his text, he chose the maverick Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who fifty years ago prophesied that radio, television, and computers would create a "noösphere," an electronic membrane covering the earth and wiring all humanity together in a single nervous system. Geographic locations, national boundaries, the old notions of markets and political processes--all would become irrelevant. With the Internet spreading over the globe at an astonishing pace, said Rossetto, that marvelous modem-driven moment is almost at hand.

Could be. But something tells me that within ten years, by 2006, the entire digital universe is going to seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a new technology that right now is but a mere glow radiating from a tiny number of American and Cuban (yes, Cuban) hospitals and laboratories. It is called brain imaging, and anyone who cares to get up early and catch a truly blinding twenty-first-century dawn will want to keep an eye on it.

Brain imaging refers to techniques for watching the human brain as it functions, in real time. The most advanced forms currently are three-dimensional electroencephalography using mathematical models; the more familiar PET scan (positron-emission tomography); the new fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which shows brain blood-flow patterns, and MRS (magnetic resonance spectroscopy), which measures biochemical changes in the brain; and the even newer PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe, which is, in fact, so new that it still has that length of heavy lumber for a name. Used so far only in animals and a few desperately sick children, the PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe pinpoints and follows the activity of specific genes. On a scanner screen you can actually see the genes light up inside the brain.

By 1996 standards, these are sophisticated devices. Ten years from now, however, they may seem primitive compared to the stunning new windows into the brain that will have been developed.

Brain imaging was invented for medical diagnosis. But its far greater importance is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, certain theories about "the mind," "the self," "the soul," and "free will" that are already devoutly believed in by scholars in what is now the hottest field in the academic world, neuroscience. Granted, all those skeptical quotation marks are enough to put anybody on the qui vive right away, but Ultimate Skepticism is part of the brilliance of the dawn I have promised.

Neuroscience, the science of the brain and the central nervous system, is on the threshold of a unified theory that will have an impact as powerful as that of Darwinism a hundred years ago. Already there is a new Darwin, or perhaps I should say an updated Darwin, since no one ever believed more religiously in Darwin I than he does. His name is Edward O. Wilson. He teaches zoology at Harvard, and he is the author of two books of extraordinary influence, The Insect Societies and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Not A new synthesis but The new synthesis; in terms of his stature in neuroscience, it is not a mere boast.

Wilson has created and named the new field of sociobiology, and he has compressed its underlying premise into a single sentence. Every human brain, he says, is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as "an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid." You can develop the negative well or you can develop it poorly, but either way you are going to get precious little that is not already imprinted on the film. The print is the individual's genetic history, over thousands of years of evolution, and there is not much anybody can do about it. Furthermore, says Wilson, genetics determine not only things such as temperament, role preferences, emotional responses, and levels of aggression, but also many of our most revered moral choices, which are not choices at all in any free-will sense but tendencies imprinted in the hypothalamus and limbic regions of the brain, a concept expanded upon in 1993 in a much-talked-about book, The Moral Sense , by James Q. Wilson (no kin to Edward O.).

This, the neuroscientific view of life, has become the strategic high ground in the academic world, and the battle for it has already spread well beyond the scientific disciplines and, for that matter, out into the general public. Both liberals and conservatives without a scientific bone in their bodies are busy trying to seize the terrain. The gay rights movement, for example, has fastened onto a study published in July of 1993 by the highly respected Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health, announcing the discovery of "the gay gene." Obviously, if homosexuality is a genetically determined trait, like left-handedness or hazel eyes, then laws and sanctions against it are attempts to legislate against Nature. Conservatives, meantime, have fastened upon studies indicating that men's and women's brains are wired so differently, thanks to the long haul of evolution, that feminist attempts to open up traditionally male roles to women are the same thing: a doomed violation of Nature.

Wilson himself has wound up in deep water on this score; or cold water, if one need edit. In his personal life Wilson is a conventional liberal, PC, as the saying goes--he is , after all, a member of the Harvard faculty--concerned about environmental issues and all the usual things. But he has said that "forcing similar role identities" on both men and women "flies in the face of thousands of years in which mammals demonstrated a strong tendency for sexual division of labor. Since this division of labor is persistent from hunter-gatherer through agricultural and industrial societies, it suggests a genetic origin. We do not know when this trait evolved in human evolution or how resistant it is to the continuing and justified pressures for human rights."

"Resistant" was Darwin II, the neuroscientist, speaking. "Justified" was the PC Harvard liberal. He was not PC or liberal enough. Feminist protesters invaded a conference where Wilson was appearing, dumped a pitcher of ice water, cubes and all, over his head, and began chanting, "You're all wet! You're all wet!" The most prominent feminist in America, Gloria Steinem, went on television and, in an interview with John Stossel of ABC, insisted that studies of genetic differences between male and female nervous systems should cease forthwith.

But that turned out to be mild stuff in the current political panic over neuroscience. In February of 1992, Frederick K. Goodwin, a renowned psychiatrist, head of the federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, and a certified yokel in the field of public relations, made the mistake of describing, at a public meeting in Washington, the National Institute of Mental Health's ten-year-old Violence Initiative. This was an experimental program whose hypothesis was that, as among monkeys in the jungle--Goodwin was noted for his monkey studies--much of the criminal mayhem in the United States was caused by a relatively few young males who were genetically predisposed to it; who were hardwired for violent crime, in short. Out in the jungle, among mankind's closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees, it seemed that a handful of genetically twisted young males were the ones who committed practically all of the wanton murders of other males and the physical abuse of females. What if the same were true among human beings? What if, in any given community, it turned out to be a handful of young males with toxic DNA who were pushing statistics for violent crime up to such high levels? The Violence Initiative envisioned identifying these individuals in childhood, somehow, some way, someday, and treating them therapeutically with drugs. The notion that crime-ridden urban America was a "jungle," said Goodwin, was perhaps more than just a tired old metaphor.

That did it. That may have been the stupidest single word uttered by an American public official in the year 1992. The outcry was immediate. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative John Dingell of Michigan (who, it became obvious later, suffered from hydrophobia when it came to science projects) not only condemned Goodwin's remarks as racist but also delivered their scientific verdict: Research among primates "is a preposterous basis" for analyzing anything as complex as "the crime and violence that plagues our country today." (This came as surprising news to NASA scientists who had first trained and sent a chimpanzee called Ham up on top of a Redstone rocket into suborbital space flight and then trained and sent another one, called Enos, which is Greek for "man," up on an Atlas rocket and around the earth in orbital space flight and had thereby accurately and completely predicted the physical, psychological, and task-motor responses of the human astronauts, Alan Shepard and John Glenn, who repeated the chimpanzees' flights and tasks months later.) The Violence Initiative was compared to Nazi eugenic proposals for the extermination of undesirables. Dingell's Michigan colleague, Representative John Conyers, then chairman of the Government Operations Committee and senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, demanded Goodwin's resignation--and got it two days later, whereupon the government, with the Department of Health and Human Services now doing the talking, denied that the Violence Initiative had ever existed. It disappeared down the memory hole, to use Orwell's term.

A conference of criminologists and other academics interested in the neuroscientific studies done so far for the Violence Initiative--a conference underwritten in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health--had been scheduled for May of 1993 at the University of Maryland. Down went the conference, too; the NIH drowned it like a kitten. Last year, a University of Maryland legal scholar named David Wasserman tried to reassemble the troops on the QT, as it were, in a hall all but hidden from human purview in a hamlet called Queenstown in the foggy, boggy boondocks of Queen Annes County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The NIH, proving it was a hard learner, quietly provided $133,000 for the event but only after Wasserman promised to fireproof the proceedings by also inviting scholars who rejected the notion of a possible genetic genesis of crime and scheduling a cold-shower session dwelling on the evils of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. No use, boys! An army of protesters found the poor cringing devils anyway and stormed into the auditorium chanting, "Maryland conference, you can't hide--we know you're pushing genocide!" It took two hours for them to get bored enough to leave, and the conference ended in a complete muddle with the specially recruited fireproofing PC faction issuing a statement that said: "Scientists as well as historians and sociologists must not allow themselves to provide academic respectability for racist pseudoscience." Today, at the NIH, the term Violence Initiative is a synonym for taboo . The present moment resembles that moment in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church forbade the dissection of human bodies, for fear that what was discovered inside might cast doubt on the Christian doctrine that God created man in his own image.

Even more radio-active is the matter of intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. Privately--not many care to speak out--the vast majority of neuroscientists believe the genetic component of an individual's intelligence is remarkably high. Your intelligence can be improved upon, by skilled and devoted mentors, or it can be held back by a poor upbringing--i.e., the negative can be well developed or poorly developed--but your genes are what really make the difference. The recent ruckus over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve is probably just the beginning of the bitterness the subject is going to create.

Not long ago, according to two neuroscientists I interviewed, a firm called Neurometrics sought out investors and tried to market an amazing but simple invention known as the IQ Cap. The idea was to provide a way of testing intelligence that would be free of "cultural bias," one that would not force anyone to deal with words or concepts that might be familiar to people from one culture but not to people from another. The IQ Cap recorded only brain waves; and a computer, not a potentially biased human test-giver, analyzed the results. It was based on the work of neuroscientists such as E. Roy John, who is now one of the major pioneers of electroencephalographic brain imaging; Duilio Giannitrapani, author of The Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions ; and David Robinson, author of The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Personality Assessment: Toward a Biologically Based Theory of Intelligence and Cognition and many other monographs famous among neuroscientists. I spoke to one researcher who had devised an IQ Cap himself by replicating an experiment described by Giannitrapani in The Electrophysiology of Intellectual Functions. It was not a complicated process. You attached sixteen electrodes to the scalp of the person you wanted to test. You had to muss up his hair a little, but you didn't have to cut it, much less shave it. Then you had him stare at a marker on a blank wall. This particular researcher used a raspberry- red thumbtack. Then you pushed a toggle switch. In sixteen seconds the Cap's computer box gave you an accurate prediction (within one-half of a standard deviation) of what the subject would score on all eleven subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or, in the case of children, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--all from sixteen seconds' worth of brain waves. There was nothing culturally biased about the test whatsoever. What could be cultural about staring at a thumbtack on a wall? The savings in time and money were breathtaking. The conventional IQ test took two hours to complete; and the overhead, in terms of paying test-givers, test-scorers, test-preparers, and the rent, was $100 an hour at the very least. The IQ Cap required about fifteen minutes and sixteen seconds--it took about fifteen minutes to put the electrodes on the scalp--and about a tenth of a penny's worth of electricity. Neurometrics's investors were rubbing their hands and licking their chops. They were about to make a killing.

In fact-- nobody wanted their damnable IQ Cap!

It wasn't simply that no one believed you could derive IQ scores from brainwaves--it was that nobody wanted to believe it could be done. Nobody wanted to believe that human brainpower is... that hardwired . Nobody wanted to learn in a flash that... the genetic fix is in . Nobody wanted to learn that he was... a hardwired genetic mediocrity ...and that the best he could hope for in this Trough of Mortal Error was to live out his mediocre life as a stress-free dim bulb. Barry Sterman of UCLA, chief scientist for a firm called Cognitive Neurometrics, who has devised his own brain-wave technology for market research and focus groups, regards brain-wave IQ testing as possible--but in the current atmosphere you "wouldn't have a ... chance of getting a grant" to develop it.

Here we begin to sense the chill that emanates from the hottest field in the academic world. The unspoken and largely unconscious premise of the wrangling over neuroscience's strategic high ground is: We now live in an age in which science is a court from which there is no appeal. And the issue this time around, at the end of the twentieth century, is not the evolution of the species, which can seem a remote business, but the nature of our own precious inner selves.

The elders of the field, such as Wilson, are well aware of all this and are cautious, or cautious compared to the new generation. Wilson still holds out the possibility--I think he doubts it, but he still holds out the possibility--that at some point in evolutionary history, culture began to influence the development of the human brain in ways that cannot be explained by strict Darwinian theory. But the new generation of neuroscientists are not cautious for a second. In private conversations, the bull sessions, as it were, that create the mental atmosphere of any hot new science--and I love talking to these people--they express an uncompromising determinism.

They start with the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy, Descartes's "Cogito ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am," which they regard as the essence of "dualism," the old-fashioned notion that the mind is something distinct from its mechanism, the brain and the body. (I will get to the second most famous statement in a moment.) This is also known as the "ghost in the machine" fallacy, the quaint belief that there is a ghostly "self" somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations. Neuroscientists involved in three-dimensional electroencephalography will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self-consciousness ( Cogito ergo sum ) is located. This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further. Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system--and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth--what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What "ghost," what "mind," what "self," what "soul," what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you? I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the course of any human being's life moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea. I doubt that any Calvinist of the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States at the end of the twentieth.

Since the late 1970s, in the Age of Wilson, college students have been heading into neuroscience in job lots. The Society for Neuroscience was founded in 1970 with 1,100 members. Today, one generation later, its membership exceeds 26,000. The Society's latest convention, in San Diego, drew 23,052 souls, making it one of the biggest professional conventions in the country. In the venerable field of academic philosophy, young faculty members are jumping ship in embarrassing numbers and shifting into neuroscience. They are heading for the laboratories. Why wrestle with Kant's God, Freedom, and Immortality when it is only a matter of time before neuroscience, probably through brain imaging, reveals the actual physical mechanism that sends these mental constructs, these illusions, synapsing up into the Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain?

Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's "God is dead." The year was 1882. (The book was Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft [ The Gay Science].) Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."

Nietzsche's view of guilt, incidentally, is also that of neuro-scientists a century later. They regard guilt as one of those tendencies imprinted in the brain at birth. In some people the genetic work is not complete, and they engage in criminal behavior without a twinge of remorse--thereby intriguing criminologists, who then want to create Violence Initiatives and hold conferences on the subject.

Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power ). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."

Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far-fetched as "the total eclipse of all values"? Because of man's track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far-fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?

A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way. But what if, as seems likely, the greatest marvel of modern science turns out to be brain imaging? And what if, ten years from now, brain imaging has proved, beyond any doubt, that not only Edward O. Wilson but also the young generation are, in fact, correct?

The elders, such as Wilson himself and Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life , and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker , insist that there is nothing to fear from the truth, from the ultimate extension of Darwin's dangerous idea. They present elegant arguments as to why neuroscience should in no way diminish the richness of life, the magic of art, or the righteousness of political causes, including, if one need edit, political correctness at Harvard or Tufts, where Dennett is Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, or Oxford, where Dawkins is something called Professor of Public Understanding of Science. (Dennett and Dawkins, every bit as much as Wilson, are earnestly, feverishly, politically correct.) Despite their best efforts, however, neuroscience is not rippling out into the public on waves of scholarly reassurance. But rippling out it is, rapidly. The conclusion people out beyond the laboratory walls are drawing is: The fix is in! We're all hardwired! That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong!

This sudden switch from a belief in Nurture, in the form of social conditioning, to Nature, in the form of genetics and brain physiology, is the great intellectual event, to borrow Nietzsche's term, of the late twentieth century. Up to now the two most influential ideas of the century have been Marxism and Freudianism. Both were founded upon the premise that human beings and their "ideals"--Marx and Freud knew about quotation marks, too--are completely molded by their environment. To Marx, the crucial environment was one's social class; "ideals" and "faiths" were notions foisted by the upper orders upon the lower as instruments of social control. To Freud, the crucial environment was the Oedipal drama, the unconscious sexual plot that was played out in the family early in a child's existence. The "ideals" and "faiths" you prize so much are merely the parlor furniture you feature for receiving your guests, said Freud; I will show you the cellar, the furnace, the pipes, the sexual steam that actually runs the house. By the mid-1950s even anti-Marxists and anti-Freudians had come to assume the centrality of class domination and Oedipally conditioned sexual drives. On top of this came Pavlov, with his "stimulus-response bonds," and B. F. Skinner, with his "operant conditioning," turning the supremacy of conditioning into something approaching a precise form of engineering.

So how did this brilliant intellectual fashion come to so screeching and ignominious an end?

The demise of Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium. In 1949 an Australian psychiatrist, John Cade, gave five days of lithium therapy--for entirely the wrong reasons--to a fifty-one-year-old mental patient who was so manic-depressive, so hyperactive, unintelligible, and uncontrollable, he had been kept locked up in asylums for twenty years. By the sixth day, thanks to the lithium buildup in his blood, he was a normal human being. Three months later he was released and lived happily ever after in his own home. This was a man who had been locked up and subjected to two decades of Freudian logorrhea to no avail whatsoever. Over the next twenty years antidepressant and tranquilizing drugs completely replaced Freudian talk-talk as treatment for serious mental disturbances. By the mid-1980s, neuroscientists looked upon Freudian psychiatry as a quaint relic based largely upon superstition (such as dream analysis -- dream analysis!), like phrenology or mesmerism. In fact, among neuroscientists, phrenology now has a higher reputation than Freudian psychiatry, since phrenology was in a certain crude way a precursor of electroencephalography. Freudian psychiatrists are now regarded as old crocks with sham medical degrees, as ears with wire hairs sprouting out of them that people with more money than sense can hire to talk into.

Marxism was finished off even more suddenly--in a single year, 1973--with the smuggling out of the Soviet Union and the publication in France of the first of the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago . Other writers, notably the British historian Robert Conquest, had already exposed the Soviet Union's vast network of concentration camps, but their work was based largely on the testimony of refugees, and refugees were routinely discounted as biased and bitter observers. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, was a Soviet citizen, still living on Soviet soil, a zek himself for eleven years, zek being Russian slang for concentration camp prisoner. His credibility had been vouched for by none other than Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1962 had permitted the publication of Solzhenitsyn's novella of the gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , as a means of cutting down to size the daunting shadow of his predecessor Stalin. "Yes," Khrushchev had said in effect, "what this man Solzhenitsyn has to say is true. Such were Stalin's crimes." Solzhenitsyn's brief fictional description of the Soviet slave labor system was damaging enough. But The Gulag Archipelago , a two-thousand-page, densely detailed, nonfiction account of the Soviet Communist Party's systematic extermination of its enemies, real and imagined, of its own countrymen, by the tens of millions through an enormous, methodical, bureaucratically controlled "human sewage disposal system," as Solzhenitsyn called it-- The Gulag Archipelago was devastating. After all, this was a century in which there was no longer any possible ideological detour around the concentration camp. Among European intellectuals, even French intellectuals, Marxism collapsed as a spiritual force immediately. Ironically, it survived longer in the United States before suffering a final, merciful coup de gr ce on November 9, 1989, with the breaching of the Berlin Wall, which signaled in an unmistakable fashion what a debacle the Soviets' seventy-two-year field experiment in socialism had been. (Marxism still hangs on, barely, acrobatically, in American universities in a Mannerist form known as Deconstruction, a literary doctrine that depicts language itself as an insidious tool used by The Powers That Be to deceive the proles and peasants.)

Freudianism and Marxism--and with them, the entire belief in social conditioning--were demolished so swiftly, so suddenly, that neuroscience has surged in, as if into an intellectual vacuum. Nor do you have to be a scientist to detect the rush.

Anyone with a child in school knows the signs all too well. I have children in school, and I am intrigued by the faith parents now invest--the craze began about 1990--in psychologists who diagnose their children as suffering from a defect known as attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this "disorder" is an actual, physical, neurological condition or not, but neither does anybody else in this early stage of neuroscience. The symptoms of this supposed malady are always the same. The child, or, rather, the boy--forty-nine out of fifty cases are boys--fidgets around in school, slides off his chair, doesn't pay attention, distracts his classmates during class, and performs poorly. In an earlier era he would have been pressured to pay attention, work harder, show some self-discipline. To parents caught up in the new intellectual climate of the 1990s, that approach seems cruel, because my little boy's problem is... he's wired wrong! The poor little tyke --the fix has been in since birth! Invariably the parents complain, "All he wants to do is sit in front of the television set and watch cartoons and play Sega Genesis." For how long? "How long? For hours at a time." Hours at a time; as even any young neuroscientist will tell you, that boy may have a problem, but it is not an attention deficit.

Nevertheless, all across America we have the spectacle of an entire generation of little boys, by the tens of thousands, being dosed up on ADD's magic bullet of choice, Ritalin, the CIBA-Geneva Corporation's brand name for the stimulant methylphenidate. I first encountered Ritalin in 1966 when I was in San Francisco doing research for a book on the or hippie movement. A certain species of the genus hippie was known as the Speed Freak, and a certain strain of Speed Freak was known as the Ritalin Head. The Ritalin Heads loved Ritalin. You'd see them in the throes of absolute Ritalin raptures...Not a wiggle, not a peep...They would sit engrossed in anything at all...a manhole cover, their own palm wrinkles...indefinitely...through shoulda-been mealtime after mealtime...through raging insomnias...Pure methyl-phenidate nirvana...From 1990 to 1995, CIBA-Geneva's sales of Ritalin rose 600 percent; and not because of the appetites of subsets of the species Speed Freak in San Francisco, either. It was because an entire generation of American boys, from the best private schools of the Northeast to the worst sludge-trap public schools of Los Angeles and San Diego, was now strung out on methylphenidate, diligently doled out to them every day by their connection, the school nurse. America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! It never lets you down!

Meantime, the notion of a self--a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior--a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds--this old-fashioned notion (what's a boot strap, for God's sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away...slipping away...The peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless cypher into a giant among men, a faith that ran from Emerson ("Self-Reliance") to Horatio Alger's Luck and Pluck stories to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking to Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World --that faith is now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary in 1882. It lives on today only in the decrepit form of the "motivational talk," as lecture agents refer to it, given by retired football stars such as Fran Tarkenton to audiences of businessmen, most of them woulda-been athletes (like the author of this article), about how life is like a football game. "It's late in the fourth period and you're down by thirteen points and the Cowboys got you hemmed in on your own one-yard line and it's third and twenty-three. Whaddaya do?..."

Sorry, Fran, but it's third and twenty-three and the genetic fix is in, and the new message is now being pumped out into the popular press and onto television at a stupefying rate. Who are the pumps? They are a new breed who call themselves "evolutionary psychologists." You can be sure that twenty years ago the same people would have been calling themselves Freudian; but today they are genetic determinists, and the press has a voracious appetite for whatever they come up with.

The most popular study currently--it is still being featured on television news shows, months later--is David Lykken and Auke Tellegen's study at the University of Minnesota of two thousand twins that shows, according to these two evolutionary psychologists, that an individual's happiness is largely genetic. Some people are hardwired to be happy and some are not. Success (or failure) in matters of love, money, reputation, or power is transient stuff; you soon settle back down (or up) to the level of happiness you were born with genetically. Three months ago Fortune devoted a long takeout, elaborately illustrated, of a study by evolutionary psychologists at Britain's University of Saint Andrews showing that you judge the facial beauty or handsomeness of people you meet not by any social standards of the age you live in but by criteria hardwired in your brain from the moment you were born. Or, to put it another way, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but embedded in his genes. In fact, today, in the year 1996, barely three years before the end of the millennium, if your appetite for newspapers, magazines, and television is big enough, you will quickly get the impression that there is nothing in your life, including the fat content of your body, that is not genetically predetermined. If I may mention just a few things the evolutionary psychologists have illuminated for me over the past two months:

The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous, i.e., unfaithful to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the picture soon enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do it!) Women lust after male celebrities, because they are genetically hardwired to sense that alpha males will take better care of their offspring. (I'm just a lifeguard in the gene pool, honey.) Teenage girls are genetically hardwired to be promiscuous and are as helpless to stop themselves as dogs in the park. (The school provides the condoms.) Most murders are the result of genetically hardwired compulsions. (Convicts can read, too, and they report to the prison psychiatrist: "Something came over me...and then the knife went in.")

Where does that leave self-control? Where, indeed, if people believe this ghostly self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for all?

So far, neuroscientific theory is based largely on indirect evidence, from studies of animals or of how a normal brain changes when it is invaded (by accidents, disease, radical surgery, or experimental needles). Darwin II himself, Edward O. Wilson, has only limited direct knowledge of the human brain. He is a zoologist, not a neurologist, and his theories are extrapolations from the exhaustive work he has done in his specialty, the study of insects. The French surgeon Paul Broca discovered Broca's area, one of the two speech centers of the left hemisphere of the brain, only after one of his patients suffered a stroke. Even the PET scan and the PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe are technically medical invasions, since they require the injection of chemicals or viruses into the body. But they offer glimpses of what the noninvasive imaging of the future will probably look like. A neuroradiologist can read a list of topics out loud to a person being given a PET scan, topics pertaining to sports, music, business, history, whatever, and when he finally hits one the person is interested in, a particular area of the cerebral cortex actually lights up on the screen. Eventually, as brain imaging is refined, the picture may become as clear and complete as those see-through exhibitions, at auto shows, of the inner workings of the internal combustion engine. At that point it may become obvious to everyone that all we are looking at is a piece of machinery, an analog chemical computer, that processes information from the environment. "All," since you can look and look and you will not find any ghostly self inside, or any mind, or any soul.

Thereupon, in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: "The self is dead"--except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche I, he will probably say: "The soul is dead." He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: "The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists." Unless the assurances of the Wilsons and the Dennetts and the Dawkinses also start rippling out, the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase "the total eclipse of all values" seem tame.

If I were a college student today, I don't think I could resist going into neuroscience. Here we have the two most fascinating riddles of the twenty-first century: the riddle of the human mind and the riddle of what happens to the human mind when it comes to know itself absolutely. In any case, we live in an age in which it is impossible and pointless to avert your eyes from the truth.

Ironically, said Nietzsche, this unflinching eye for truth, this zest for skepticism, is the legacy of Christianity (for complicated reasons that needn't detain us here). Then he added one final and perhaps ultimate piece of irony in a fragmentary passage in a notebook shortly before he lost his mind (to the late-nineteenth-century's great venereal scourge, syphilis). He predicted that eventually modern science would turn its juggernaut of skepticism upon itself, question the validity of its own foundations, tear them apart, and self-destruct. I thought about that in the summer of 1994 when a group of mathematicians and computer scientists held a conference at the Santa Fe Institute on "Limits to Scientific Knowledge." The consensus was that since the human mind is, after all, an entirely physical apparatus, a form of computer, the product of a particular genetic history, it is finite in its capabilities. Being finite, hardwired, it will probably never have the power to comprehend human existence in any complete way. It would be as if a group of dogs were to call a conference to try to understand The Dog. They could try as hard as they wanted, but they wouldn't get very far. Dogs can communicate only about forty notions, all of them primitive, and they can't record anything. The project would be doomed from the start. The human brain is far superior to the dog's, but it is limited nonetheless. So any hope of human beings arriving at some final, complete, self-enclosed theory of human existence is doomed, too.

This, science's Ultimate Skepticism, has been spreading ever since then. Over the past two years even Darwinism, a sacred tenet among American scientists for the past seventy years, has been beset by...doubts. Scientists--not religiosi--notably the mathematician David Berlinski ("The Deniable Darwin," Commentary , June 1996) and the biochemist Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box , 1996), have begun attacking Darwinism as a mere theory, not a scientific discovery, a theory woefully unsupported by fossil evidence and featuring, at the core of its logic, sheer mush. (Dennett and Dawkins, for whom Darwin is the Only Begotten, the Messiah, are already screaming. They're beside themselves, utterly apoplectic. Wilson, the giant, keeping his cool, has remained above the battle.) By 1990 the physicist Petr Beckmann of the University of Colorado had already begun going after Einstein. He greatly admired Einstein for his famous equation of matter and energy, E=mc2 , but called his theory of relativity mostly absurd and grotesquely untestable. Beckmann died in 1993. His Fool Killer's cudgel has been taken up by Howard Hayden of the University of Connecticut, who has many admirers among the upcoming generation of Ultimately Skeptical young physicists. The scorn the new breed heaps upon quantum mechanics ("has no real-world applications"..."depends entirely on fairies sprinkling goofball equations in your eyes"), Unified Field Theory ("Nobel worm bait"), and the Big Bang Theory ("creationism for nerds") has become withering. If only Nietzsche were alive! He would have relished every minute of it!

Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: "When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other."

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God.





Tom Wolfe has chronicled American popular culture for more than three decades. His best-selling books include The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. His new novel, due next year, is set in Georgia.