Split-brain Anand venkaTarAman talk

Source: YT

Slides: GD

[[0:06]] [Music] [[0:13]] [Applause]

[[0:18]] namaste everybody good evening good morning thank you guys for joining [[0:24]] and this is the topic of my talk - Split Brains, Julian Jaynes: Neuroscience in Indology - By Dr Anand Venkatraman. I will admit the primary focus is the need for neuroscience and Indology and [[0:36]] everything is going to center around that. okay [Music]

[[0:42]] That’s me and i’m a physician as ramji mentioned. [[0:48]] I’m a native of chennai. I did my mbbs at ames in new delhi i did a neurology residency at uab a [[0:54]] neuro critical care fellowship at harvard and the neuroendovascular surgery fellowship in south carolina at prisma. [[1:01]] I’m in practice in the united states and i have my email address and my twitter over there in case you guys would like [[1:08]] to reach out to me later.

And the target audience for this talk [[1:15]] before i get too far into it english educated indians - that’s the primary; Indologists (Indologist basically means [[1:22]] people who study india externally), [[1:28]] scholars academicians that kind of thing people who are spiritual but not [[1:33]] religious and scientists. I consider myself a scientist and i hope other scientists would find this [[1:40]] reasonable and simultaneously. this disclaimer this is not aimed at orthodox practicing [[1:47]] hindus because that would be like teaching birds how to fly as i mentioned earlier, [[1:53] ] - Like this is what nasi nicolas taleb says. Think of me as a commentator like [[2:00]] from the outside for a cricket match. The actual khilADis are the people who are in the sadhana streams themselves [[2:06]].

this is one way of looking at hinduism - not THE way. Again to go back to that point that ramji made [[2:13]] - please do not mistake this as my attempt to teach hindus what the religion is - by no [[2:19]] means. this is what it is it is - a partial view of hinduism [[2:24]] it is more you know looking at the history of things and looking at kind of how things evolved [[2:30]] and how they correlate to neuroscience there is a lot more in hinduism which is not going to be covered here [[2:36]] and and nothing here - i mean not everything here - is going to be scientifically provable a lot of it is conjecture. [[2:43]] i’m not the spokesman for any sampradaya. i do have gurus of my own - i have several people from whom i’ve learned a [[2:50]] lot of very wonderful things - but you know i don’t want to necessarily list them all out because i’ve not [[2:55]] really like broached these topics with them so i don’t necessarily know if i have their approval to kind of say that i know this [[3:02]] from their mouths. and of course the pics here are not mine these are all the things i scrounged [[3:08]] from various corners of the internet.

so let’s get right to the question of why i chose this topic my primary goal [[3:15]] is because i want to combat certain unstated assumptions about hinduism [[3:21]] today which is one that devatas are essentially like superheroes and mythical fairy tales [[3:28]], that the vedas are basically ramblings of barbarians from the whatever steppies or bronze age [[3:34]] and mandir’s are valuable primarily for you know their beauty and architecture [[3:39]], rituals tantra mantra these are basically things for superstitious backward and gullible people [[3:47]] and oftentimes even people who are fairly sympathetic to india and hinduism [[3:53]] resort to this atman brahman non-dualism wordplay which i think is right but at the same [[4:00]] time i also think most people use that as an easy way out rather than taking it as a stepping stone to [[4:06]] trying to understand more about what the entire tradition is ultimately. i think all of this stems [[4:13]] from what i would call buddhism envy where essentially people think that [[4:18]] hinduism is rightly interpreted as buddhism. basically they are jealous of [[4:24]] the simplicity easy transmissibility and clarity of [[4:29]] early buddhist kind of teachings and i will also go on to show you guys [[4:35]] how these beliefs actually have very bad very severe real world consequences [[4:41]], and i will try to kind of explain how we can counteract that.

mahAbhUtas

so let’s start with my first kind of [[4:48]] example of overlap right so all of us may have seen this this is the five great elements the pancha mahabhutas - [[4:55]] essentially akash vayu tejas jalan prithvi which loosely translated as space air fire [[5:03]] water and earth. right now in tamil nadu you have this pancha bhutasthala which is the five [[5:10]] great shiva temples one for each of these great elements. [[5:15]] but now you know most people who go through a science education you see this this is the periodic table of the elements right [[5:23]]. when you see this periodic table with so many elements and then you compare that to that prior kind of five element [[5:29]] classification you know the the natural tendency is to think that the pancha mahabhuta is [[5:35]] primitive and that this is now superseded by the periodic table right? [[5:41]] that is what - like you know - it seems like this is a sequential progression of human knowledge when initially you’re [[5:47]] kind of primitive and then you suddenly discover like 100 plus elements and now that’s kind of the new reality. [[5:53]] i suggest that there is an alternative explanation which is that the pancha mahabhutas and modern elements have no [[5:59]] connection whatsoever except the fact that people have translated mahabhutas into [[6:05]] elements and you know like that word happens to be the same thing that you know we use for mendeleev’s [[6:11]] elements.

so when we study the pancha mahabhutas it is important that we should go back [[6:17]] to this chart which is basically a depiction of the [[6:23]] arrangement or the evolution of the various tatwas in samkhya [[6:28]] and this has actually been adopted wholesale into multiple other traditions into vedanta into tantra. [[6:34]] kashmir shaivism kashmirism has like 36 elements they added a bunch of extra elements to the [[6:40]] 25 that are here.

But essentially what you need to focus [[6:45]] on here is that from pure consciousness is said to evolve prakriti then buddhis [[6:52]] and then the five elements are here earth water fire air space now usually people think that this refers to [[7:00]] some sort of physics concept and that’s how a lot of people treat [[7:05]] this kind of scheme.

what i would like to argue that [[7:11]] these mahabhutas are actually connected to the five senses as you can see here [[7:17]] right here in the bottom on the left side you see the five senses here in touching seeing smelling tasting and the [[7:22]] mahabhutas are here and therefore the connection is equivalently valid to [[7:28]] neuroscience in fact if you look at certain arrangements within vedanta and [[7:34]] tantric traditions you actually see this five is to five correlation between the [[7:40]] mahabhutas on the right side akash [[7:46]] which basically you could say subtle sensation [[7:51]] basically kind of speech touch form taste and smell and then the jnan indriya [[7:58]] which is the sensory organs hearing touching seeing tasting smelling and karma indriya which are like [[8:04]] five motor organs speaking grasping walking defecation and sexual - a little bit of ambiguity in these two last motor [[8:11]] organs sometimes sexual comes here and defecation comes here depending on the tradition.

so [[8:17]] i say - i venture to say - that the connecting science is important to be noted and the connecting science is this [[8:24]] kundalini yoga tantra aspect of hinduism which tries to [[8:29]] link the brain body and the external environment. as you guys know this is [[8:34]] like the seven chakra standard seven chakra system that is most popular in [[8:40]] many sadhana paths we have muladhara swazistan manipur and [[8:45]] arranged in a line kind of ascending from the bottom of the body to the top [[8:51]] right when you correlate this to those pancha mahabhutas [[8:57]] you also have a similar arrangement of the bhutas right so pritwi goes to muladhar, jala to swadhishtan, pages to [[9:04]] manipur, vayu to anahat and akash to vishuddha. there is various ways of [[9:12]] shall we say showing these correlations. people who are doing sadhana will often do this as [[9:17]] part of their bhUta-shuddhi and then from the bhutas of course based [[9:23]] on the table that i showed you earlier.

chakra and spinal nerves

you can correlate this to various motor functions right so - [[9:29]] defecation, sexual, walking, grasping and hearing or speech [[9:35]] to these five lower chakra sessions. the top two are left out of this. now when you look at this five-fold [[9:42]] hierarchical classification, i would say one thing stands out as being out of place [[9:48]] and that is walking. so sexual and defecation are down here makes absolute sense at least kind of [[9:54]] geographically - but walking you know the legs are at the bottom why should walking kind of be here [[10:01]] kind of in the middle of the body. makes no sense right? so i was mulling over this and then i [[10:07]] was thinking about the structure of the human nervous system so this is kind of a dissection model of the nervous system [[10:12]] which is - you know - the brain and spinal cord with all these various [[10:18]] nerves.

one thing you notice in this previous [[10:24]] slide is how the spinal cord seems to be structured in a very segmented way right there [[10:31]]. seems to be segments and at each level these nerves come out. and that is a reflection of [[10:39]] how the human body evolves in the embryological stage kind of the developmental history of the human being. [[10:46]] this is a very young human embryo you can see here. [[10:51]] there is these segments and this is actually something you see in a lot of species. it is just that in the [[10:59]] human being this thing goes away and you don’t see it externally anymore in some species such as the earthworm this [[11:05]] segmental body pattern is present even in the adult form. [[11:12]] in the human there is a persistence of this kind of the segmental origin, and [[11:17]] that is here in the kind of vertebral column and the spinal cord. so the bones of the vertebral column have the same [[11:24]] division as the nerves in the spinal cord so basically we call them cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacrum and coccyx. so [[11:32]] and similarly there is a division of the spinal cord itself cervical, thoracic, lumbar, coccyx. the most important thing from our [[11:38]] perspective today is to see the lumbar and the sacral segments basically the lumbar comes up [[11:45]] and the sacral comes down. so the sacral is basically the last part of the spinal cord and the spinal nerves okay. [[11:52]] so l one two three four five and then. (this) is the order of the nerves from [[11:57]] top to bottom when you study neurology. you kind of see [[12:03]] - you know - body maps such as this. this is a body map called the dermatome map. [[12:09]] dermatomes are basically which level of the body is supplied by which spinal nerve. [[12:16]] one thing you see here - very fascinating when you pay attention - the legs are in the bottom right. so you [[12:22]] would imagine that they should be supplied by the sacral spinal nerves because those are the bottom nerves [[12:28]] however what actually supplies the legs is the lumbar [[12:33]]. the sacral nerves actually supply the genitals and the anus [[12:38]]. this is zoomed in the lumbar nerves which actually arise higher up on the spinal cord go down to [[12:43]] the legs. sacral the lowest part of the spinal cord and the spinal nerves they supply the genitals and the anus [[12:52]]. this makes it a little bit more clear from the motor side which is the previously what i was showing. the sensory nerves this is the motor nerves [[13:00]] the lumbar area which is higher up supplies the nerves to the skeletal muscles of the legs [[13:06]]. the sacral area which is the lowest supplies the nerves to the bladder anus [[13:12]].

even though it is lower so when you have the point of view of a [[13:19]] human being - which is kind of limited and naive right - you think the legs are below the [[13:24]] genitals and the anus - legs are here, genitals and anus are here; however when you look at the body from [[13:31]] the point of view of nature - which is basically the point of view of the brain - the legs are actually above [[13:38]]. this is what is called a fetal pig dissection when you see animals like this. this [[13:45]] concept becomes very very clear the legs are here and then below that the [[13:50]] genitals and the anus. so my argument is through their yogic practices the hindus [[13:57]] were able to transcend the point of view of a limited human being when seen [[14:02]] through the lens of neuroscience and evolutionary biology.+++(5)+++ hindu ideas that seem previously random [[14:08]] such as like this organization of chakras and karmendryas are shown to have an underlying order [[14:16]]. so you know we were talking about fetus and you know infants and all that.

so when we are born we are kind of [[14:23]] born into this blooming buzzing confusion as they say [[14:28]]/ what we don’t realize often is that perception - meaning what we get in in [[14:34]] terms of useful information to our brains - is much more than merely sensation which [[14:40]] is just what perhaps the sense organs pick up the five sense inputs. you know may pick [[14:46]] up a fair amount of chaotic raw material but our brains are always making sense [[14:52]] of this chaos being embodied in a human body [[14:58]] influences how we make sense of this information and it is my understanding that the [[15:04]] hindus detected this phenomenon and built a lot of their practices around this phenomenon. [[15:11]]

vAstu - neurological perspective

let me give an example of where i think this may be of relevance. [[15:17]] many of you guys may have seen this sort of classification of the directions right [[15:23]] like the ashta-dik in the vedas in our temples - [[15:29]] you know the north east corner is supposed to be very good - the ishana mullah is what we call it in tamilnadu [[15:35]], east is supposed to be good whereas indra’s corner and you know southeast is also good agni [[15:41]], kind of the west is you know where all the relatively negative characters are saturn [[15:46]] rahu nirarity or lakshmi. now you might think why [[15:52]] did they come up with this particular arrangement and this is not like just limited to the [[15:58]] itself this similar arrangement of the directions classification with like kind of model. [[16:05]] shall we say or kind of qualitative emotional attachments has been carried over into [[16:11]] vastu as well. so this is like the vastu mandala - again the north east is the ishana mulai good, indra is good, agni is [[16:18]] good, then back here where niriti was this is a pitrus so we’re all relatively [[16:24]] negative elements - asur rogue. so - [[16:29]] why would they have come up with this particular arrangement of you know the northeast being good and you know the [[16:35]] south west being relatively bad? it’s all relative of course i’m not saying bad - bad like - of course everybody [[16:41]] rahu narety all have their own positive characteristics as well.[[16:47]] was this arrangement as random?

so while i was doing some reading i came [[16:52]] across this paper published in 1973 in nature where they looked at 1400 [[16:59]] portraits western portraits from the 16th to 20th centuries they found that there was a tendency to [[17:05]] paint portraits facing the viewers left so that the focus of interest would come [[17:11]] in the viewer’s left visual field. similarly another study found that [[17:16]] children often paint people facing towards the left again such that the focus comes [[17:23]] into the viewer’s left visual field. give you some examples of what that means just a few famous paintings like [[17:29]] you know - mona lisa - focus of interest seems to kind of lie somewhere here [[17:34]]. again focus of interest seems to lie somewhere here. again focus of interest seems to lie somewhere here. obviously we can find [[17:40]] counter examples as well - but this is just a few famous paintings i picked out. again [[17:46]] painting of napoleon focus of interest somewhere here kind of left and front. [[17:52]] when you kind of see that pattern and you also kind of look at the neuroscience literature you were struck [[17:57]] by certain things like for example this paper in 2015 left visual field attentional advantage [[18:03]] in judging simultaneity and temporal order. so if you were to judge simultaneously in [[18:10]] the and the time sequencing of various stimuli you do that better if the stimuli are in [[18:16]] the left visual field. similarly another paper right hemisphere superiority for executive control of [[18:22]] attention now this is coming back to that split brains that i referenced in the beginning of the talk [[18:28]] we have two hemispheres in our brain the left and the right and the way our nervous system is constructed is [[18:34]] that the left hemisphere pays attention to the right side of the world right hemisphere pays attention to the [[18:40]] left side of the world so when there is a right hemisphere superiority it basically means the left side of our [[18:46]] visual field is superior for these attentional processes [[18:53]] and kind of related to that is apparently when you go to sleep [[18:58]] you have a rightward shift in spatial attention which you know the corollary might be [[19:04]] when you are awake and alert you have a leftward shift in spatial attention so [[19:10]] something about the left side of the visual field the left side of the world in front seems to be privileged and important [[19:19]] how does that tie into this now that’s where you kind of think back as to how they [[19:25]] came up with this division and primarily this was a vedic division so your yajaman was right here and often you are [[19:32]] as a yajaman facing to the east east right so you are facing this way and so what is to the front and to the left is this [[19:39]] is the really positive corner where you’re supposed to keep all your gods is [[19:44]] exactly in the same spot where all the studies seem to suggest all the excellent attentional resources are and [[19:50]] presumably if the inverse of that geography is where you have the least spatial awareness and attention that [[19:58]] seems to be where all these relatively kind of relatively bad or negative elements are not negative [[20:05]] or bad these have their own positive correlates as i said but compared to this this is bad right [[20:11]] is this the true cause i don’t know but i just think it’s an interesting correlate which bears [[20:17]] further thinking.

Salience in sculpture

my kind of [[20:23]] position is that every aspect of hindu civilization was influenced by this brain centricity [[20:29]] and neuroscience can help answer many vexing questions in indology. again in [[20:35]] indolology not in hinduism. another example so indian art right so [[20:41]] why don’t we think why don’t we see it as very realistic and you know we’re building a lot of [[20:47]] these new temples like in ramjanmagumi and all that should we update our temples to have [[20:52]] like more realistic sculptures like you know here is this sculpture of yali [[20:57]] being built for some temple that’s under construction it’s kind of a lion like figure right [[21:02]] i compare that to a lion sculpture from somewhere in europe and i think this is like about 100 years [[21:08]] old now compared to this this sculpture is vastly superior in terms of its realism look at the lines look at the [[21:14]] clarity however when we think of it purely from a perspective of you know realism we [[21:21]] miss something that our brain is doing when we view such [[21:26]] images and culture which is called salience some aspects of our environment [[21:32]] stand out to us more than other aspects the brain picks and chooses the main features of the environment to focus [[21:39]] upon let me give you an example of what i mean here is like a photograph of a girl right you know the naive human [[21:45]] perspective maybe you know yeah we’re looking at all parts of this face with equal attention and all that however [[21:52]] within neuroscience there is a way to test which part of the picture your [[21:58]] brain is paying attention to and that’s called visual cards visual saccharides [[22:03]] basically means very tiny movements of your eyes that happen you know beyond your [[22:10]] conscious perception which shows where your brain is fixating and you know picking up information from so a machine [[22:16]] can record these visuals of cards and that kind of tells you where your brain focuses attention [[22:22]] when you look at the visual saccharide pick pattern for this painting for example or this photograph you notice [[22:28]] something very interesting which is that the primary target of the sacards are the eyes the nose and the [[22:34]] mouth right similarly another picture of another face eyes nose and mouth [[22:41]] now armed with that knowledge if we look at some of our sculptures [[22:46]] this is a beautiful narasimha murthy from hampi sadly [[22:52]] defiled by invaders several hundred years ago but still look at the you know the beauty of the sculpture what [[22:59]] are the features that are most exaggerated eyes nose and mouth which again [[23:06]] is this all just a coincidence maybe you can think that but i i am beginning to [[23:11]] think that this is just evidence that the ancient hindus perceived and picked up on how the brain [[23:18]] was functioning and created their art and sculptures with this in mind and it’s not this is not just a one-off [[23:26]] sculpture by any means like you know this is a devta murthy from one of our temples [[23:32]] again primary focus on eyes nose and mouth this is a famous swambhu ganpathi from [[23:38]] maharashtra and you know like they really you know let go of all the other [[23:43]] features focusing primarily on the nose and maybe a little bit of the mouth here and of course the most famous [[23:50]] example of this phenomenon is our beautiful jagannath [[23:55]] murthy from puri i

when you look at it from the perspective [[24:00]] that i just outlined it seems to make imminent sense but you know 150 years ago if you were like [[24:06]] a british colonial officer you would be excused for thinking this is just ridiculous and [[24:12]] primitive and in fact that’s what they did think it was so there was this book published called errors chains basically [[24:19]] kind of talking about all the kind of ridiculous and stupid pagan things that happen throughout the world so [[24:24]] here’s some very interesting descriptions juggernaut is a celebrated god he is [[24:31]] called the lord of the world his images are as ugly as can be conceived [[24:38]] the temple is dedicated to krishna or juggernaut sometimes written jagannath [[24:43]] and his companions siva and sathadra the idols of each are rude hideous [[24:49]] looking sculptured blocks of wood each about six feet high the representations of the human face in [[24:56]] these idols are hideous so again from a naive perspective you might be [[25:01]] excused for thinking that these are hideous but if you view it from the perspective of neuroscience you start to [[25:08]] make connections which previously were not there and of course the best perspective to view it would be [[25:13]] from the perspective of somebody who actually is a devotee of the temple and you know does those practices but again this is i’m talking as an external [[25:20]] observer when it comes to the concept of salience for non-verbal communication right so [[25:27]] that’s what we were talking about earlier

so there’s something called visual salience which is what are the things of the visual field that [[25:34]] your brain focuses on when trying to garner communicative information the face is [[25:42]] number one which is eyes mouth and you know emotional expression the second [[25:47]] aspect of the visual field for communication with other individuals is the hands [[25:52]] here was this fascinating study that people did on babies okay so from faces to hands changing visual [[25:59]] input in the first two years so i i believe if i remember correctly they attached like some video cameras to [[26:05]] babies or something and they looked at what kind of inputs their parents were giving them over the [[26:11]] course of the first two years early on much of the input was facial [[26:17]] like smiling kissing eyes that kind of thing as the babies grow a little bit older one and a half two years [[26:23]] a lot more of the communication started becoming through the hands so it could be like pointing or holding something in [[26:29]] the hand or clapping those kind of things now if you keep that in mind then [[26:36]] when you think of the dhyana slokas of most of our deities in you know various sadhana practices [[26:43]] look at this murthy for example i believe this is of a durga but you know people were not satisfied with just two [[26:48]] hands they gave 18 heads each hand has an ayuda an instrument [[26:53]] which kind of conveys a specific sense to the devotee [[26:59]]

mudras

and it’s not just in you know murti puja that this phenomenon is seen [[27:05]] it is very very prevalent in our classical dance it’s very very you know the mudras are very prevalent even in [[27:10]] our temple sculptures and of course in all kinds of yogic and tantric sadhana and even when you look at the hand [[27:17]] itself they seem to go to some lengths to accentuate the specific [[27:22]] salient features of the hand which perhaps are the fingertips and the palm [[27:27]] right you trace back into the brain like the sensory cortex of the brain [[27:34]] you look at how much territory is devoted to the face and the hands so this is the entirety of the sensory [[27:40]] cortex look at the disproportionate amount of processing power that’s dedicated to the [[27:46]] hands and the face which again seems to tally very closely with kind of the dhyanas lokas and the [[27:53]] murthys and how much attention we pay to the expressions and the [[27:59]] the ayudhas and the hand and the gestures of the of the deities [[28:04]] this is what is called a homunculus this is a sensory homunculus i believe kind of [[28:10]] a brain’s eye view of the body you might say which is what would the brain think the body [[28:16]] looks like if it went by the you know the amount of territory [[28:21]] dedicated to each part of the body oversized mouth and of course the eyes have their own separate [[28:27]] part of the cortex that’s why it’s not oversized here and hands so [[28:32]] all of that goes to say that being in a human body with a human brain [[28:37]] influences the kind of information that we pay attention to

Embodied cognition

and that has actually been a realization [[28:46]] that western science has come to only in the past few decades. there is this entire research program [[28:52]] now called embodied cognition which is a challenge to the prior kind of paradigm [[28:58]] that people had in cognitive science which was that the brain is a computer [[29:03]] for example there was this paper which says embodied theories are increasingly challenging traditional views of [[29:09]] cognition by arguing that conceptual representations that constitute our knowledge [[29:15]] are grounded in sensory and motor experiences and are processed at the sensory motor [[29:22]] level rather than being represented and processed abstractly in an a modal [[29:28]] conceptual system so again your brain is not really like a computer [[29:33]] there is something very unique about the fact that your brain is a human brain living within a human body

Importance in interpretation

[[29:39]] so what does that mean when you’re trying to interpret a hindu text or a symbol not everything can be taken at face [[29:46]] value that means you just translated machine like one is to one you will lose a lot of the meaning because a machine [[29:52]] does not have a human body embodiment in a human form is indispensable for a true understanding of what these [[29:58]] people were talking about here is you know for example an example of this [[30:04]] machine like translation right ralph griffith translated the rigveda and this has become the source of a lot [[30:11]] of indological research since then and if you go [[30:16]] taking that kind of the perspective of a machine like translation you may land [[30:22]] up somewhere here where this famous indologist fritz stahl who you know overall seems to [[30:29]] have been fairly sympathetic to india not like an anti-hindu or anti-india person by any means but he says “ritual [[30:35]] and mantras are basically rules without meaning they’re just there and there’s no kind of deeper meaning to any of them” [[30:41]] however when the hindus and the buddhists and the other indian people themselves analyzed it they knew that they were not [[30:49]] rules without meaning.

mantra-sounds

okay so look at for example the spread of buddhism right like we spread from all [[30:56]] over all over asia essentially from a starting point in [[31:01]] up and bihar a lot of things were translated when buddhism was transmitted [[31:08]] the story of the buddha was translated the life story the jataka tales were translated [[31:15]] one thing which was not translated was the sanskrit mantras because they realized that the sound [[31:22]] sequence itself was important and you can’t just translate it because [[31:29]] that way you’ll only get the literal meaning you lose the sound sequence [[31:34]] the same reason why the tamil script had like new alphabets created as and when like you know they had to [[31:40]] incorporate sanskrit mantras into their religious practices and this is also why [[31:47]] the tibetans in japanese use sanskrit mantras even to this day they mispronounce it slightly but [[31:53]] by and large the sound structure is preserved even though everything else is translated into their local language [[32:00]] everything else buddhist is translated into their local language essentially.

[[32:06]] so our kind of hindu understanding of language always knew that there were [[32:12]] multiple layers at which the language had meaning the most subtle kind of otherworldly [[32:18]] layer was called para which is essentially beyond our ability to investigate then came this [[32:25]] stage called pasyanti where it was mostly visualizations colors [[32:30]] but no words yet then there was a stage called madhyama which was [[32:35]] essentially midway between this visualization stage and the outer spoken stage [[32:40]] and then only the final outer form was what we call the vaikari or the [[32:46]] world or the gross form of the speech. here i’ve given the example of [[32:52]] the mahamrityanjay mantra right now neuroscience has also confirmed [[32:59]] that we can break down the stages of speech production and [[33:06]] they are not kind of they are not things that happen just say in just one [[33:11]] millisecond interestingly like when you give somebody a picture and ask them to name [[33:17]] it there seems to be a similar sequence of processing [[33:22]] first stage seems to be some visual encoding and conceptualization which is pre-verbal [[33:27]] then you start picking the semantics which maybe the name then you start making the syntax which [[33:34]] is the organization and then you do the phonology which is the actual [[33:39]] specific selection of the phonemes and then only finally comes the articulation which is actually speaking [[33:45]] it out so whether this is the exact same as this four-fold classification of speech that we have in hinduism hard to say but [[33:52]] at least it’s interesting to note that there are parallels that are happening [[33:58]] in the neuroscience arena to these ideas which were embedded within the hindu system from a very [[34:04]] early time

so when you literally translate something like mohammed what do you get you get we sacrifice to [[34:11]] trimbaka the fragrant increaser of prosperity like a cucumber from its stem might i be [[34:17]] freed from death not from deathlessness now you know it has a lot of meaning rohit arya [[34:25]] guruji has a very good talk on youtube about this explaining the muhammad india and there is like a lot [[34:31]] of meaning in the in the literal translation itself [[34:36]] however when you translate it into english you’re losing all those three prior stages [[34:41]] and i think that is why the reason that sanskrit has synonyms for each word like so many [[34:48]] synonyms for example i believe in the amer kosha there is like 30 or 40 synonyms for agni why would you need so [[34:55]] many synonyms for one word perhaps because if you had to fashion something into a mantra you needed to have the [[35:02]] best suited word which conveyed a meaning but also had a correct number of phonemes and [[35:09]] syllables and was the right length right there is an entire science that is [[35:15]] devoted to this kind of linguistic concept we think in india like you know [[35:20]] panini and all we think they were shall we say doing linguistics i think that is a very [[35:27]] limited way of kind of really understanding what they were doing.

mAtRka-s

for example i happen to get a copy of [[35:33]] this book called the matrika chakra viveka translated by this wonderful young [[35:38]] scholar giriratnam mishra i believe he’s in banaras [[35:43]] what this does is explain the connections between the matrika chakra [[35:48]] and various mental states what is the matrika chakra it is this thing basically the [[35:56]] arrangement of the 51 alphabets of sanskrit the basically the four names [[36:02]] and they’re called matrikas because matrika obviously mothers through these 51 alphabets they give [[36:09]] birth to the entirety of language and thus to everything else in our kind of our conceptual day-to-day world [[36:16]] it’s a very dense and difficult book but you know so but it’s interesting that people have [[36:22]] delved into this in extraordinary detail. i also had the [[36:27]] privilege of meeting swami nadananda who published a similar book [[36:34]] called secrets of the matruka yantras okay so basically he would give [[36:41]] geometrical shapes that he perceived during meditation that correlate to each of these 51 [[36:49]] akshara bijaksharas so like come come so basically each of the 51 aksharas is [[36:55]] trans is transformed into a bija mantra by adding the am to it [[37:00]] like and for each of them he could perceive this kind of geometrical correlate he [[37:07]] says the [Music] sound per se is what may be called the [[37:12]] vicary or the outermost concrete manifestation this is the circle manifestation and [[37:19]]

Manipulating our brain

then there is something which is even more subtle so there are various layers of meaning carried even in something as [[37:26]] simple and basic as a phoneme so all of this goes to say the mantra [[37:33]] shastra which is just like one of the extraordinary edifice of you know disciplines within hinduism it is a [[37:39]] thorough reverse engineering of human language it is meant for systematic manipulation [[37:46]] of the brain a reverse directional manipulation of yourself rather than merely manipulating other [[37:52]] people which is you know with regular language you may manipulate other people with the mantra you are able to manipulate your own brain [[38:00]] and all of this is not to say that non-sanskrit mantra texts don’t exist of course they exist [[38:06]] for example there is like shabar mantras and various you know local tongues.

Engineering mantras

but they need to be created by people [[38:12]] with that level of internal perceptiveness who can fashion the phonemes into something useful meaningful and safe [[38:19]] because you do something half hazard with these kind of mantras there’s a good chance that you [[38:25]] may give yourself schizophrenia right because you’re messing around with brain circuits at least that’s what i think

Revelation

[[38:31]] the other way to you know get these mantras would be to grasp it in entirety as a revelation from a higher plane [[38:38]] this may sound very airy fairy and you know kind of magical but it’s not magical because remember the story of [[38:44]] srinivasa ramanujan he got fully formed mathematical equations [[38:49]] in his dreams which means you know the dreams are not giving you kind of garbled nonsense they are giving you [[38:56]] sometimes they give you like really fully formed information which your conscious self may not actually be able [[39:02]] to articulate and explain why and how they came about similarly i would imagine maybe that’s how many [[39:08]] rishis were able to perceive mantras fully formed and maybe they did not even have to construct it step by step [[39:14]] regular speech

Reception ability changes

so one thing you might you know [[39:20]] ask and which i think is a very valid question is why do these mantras seem to have been [[39:26]] created so much more easily in the past right i saw this thread on twitter by a very [[39:32]] good account on indian history you guys should follow it if you’re not already acharya yaska yaska you know a great [[39:40]] thinker who preceded panini says in the nurukta that the vedic [[39:45]] rishis had perceptive knowledge of dharma it means they could see dharma [[39:51]] the rishis handed down from memory the hymns to their descendants who lost this [[39:57]] abilities to see dharma these descendants of the sages who were [[40:03]] already declining in their powers and already did not have a direct perception of dharma [[40:09]] they compiled the grantas the vedas and the vedangas for teaching those who [[40:14]] would come even after them and this is basically a translation from [[40:19]] two verses in the nirupta to explain this phenomenon is where [[40:26]] i feel that we should consider the possibility that the history of hinduism was influenced by brain changes [[40:34]] this may explain some mysteries within endology may maybe in ancient times our brain wiring was different and people could [[40:40]] instinctively grasp the meaning of a mantra and a yagna and now for some reason that lens is [[40:46]] clouded

Bicamerality

Split brain book intro

and here is where i bring in this book [[40:52]] that i had referenced in the title by this brilliant thinker named julian [[40:57]] janes unfortunately he’s deceased now but truly an original thinker a psychologist [[41:02]] at princeton and an expert in animal behavior this was the only book he published [[41:08]] called the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind so this was his life’s work [[41:16]] it’s difficult for me to kind of explain to you how important and how revolutionary this book was [[41:24]] so let me just quote from reviews of his book by some esteemed [[41:31]] people so one person called it quite possibly a book of the century and this was douglas [[41:36]] adams author of the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy a very famous book another one called it it is one of those [[41:42]] books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consumer genius nothing in [[41:48]] between and this was richard dawkins author of the god delusion [[41:54]] some of jane’s original ideas may be the most important of our generation this was by a professor of neuroscience [[42:03]] explanations that could initiate the next change in paradigm for human thought [[42:08]] this was by another professor of neuroscience and finally my favorite review was this one [[42:13]] having just finished the origin of consciousness i myself feel something like keith’s cortez staring at the [[42:20]] pacific this is a reference to a famous poem where you know cortez crosses south america [[42:26]] and then he’s staring at the pacific and he’s just like surprised at what’s going on right so or at least like the early reviewers [[42:32]] of darwin or freud i’m not quite sure what to make of this new territory [[42:38]] but its expanse lies before me i am startled by its power and i think this really captures my [[42:44]] response to reading this book a few years ago

Bicameral stage

so jane’s fundamental kind of issue that [[42:53]] he’s addressing in this book is that babies and animals seem kind of like automatons right like they seem like i [[42:59]] have a very fixed and clear cut in and out you give them food they feel happy you give them you know punishment they’re sad they go [[43:06]] to sleep they wake up however you know in the historical record there seems to [[43:12]] appear this fully formed thought and then there’s word-based reasoning so the question is how did this happen it seems [[43:18]] almost magical jane’s assertion was that there were intermediary stages [[43:26]] the transition from this automata to full self-consciousness happened [[43:31]] gradually he says this distinction is most pronounced when a complex novel and [[43:38]] stressful situation arises because in your day-to-day life you may not [[43:43]] experience such you know stressful situations so you can get by being pretty much an automaton like for [[43:49]] example when you’re driving a car but if something really new and novel comes which you have not experienced [[43:55]] before you need to have some other means of dealing with that so according to james [[44:00]] the first stage his prehistoric bronze age and before [[44:05]] he says humans at this point were not truly self-conscious which means they lacked a unified and [[44:12]] narrative sense of me there was no such thing as reasoning out [[44:17]] an answer the way we do it if you know we’re presented with a novel situation we kind of think in our heads what could be what could be [[44:24]] he says they did not have any such thing as an introspectible thoughts which they could hold in their minds and kind of think one way or the other [[44:32]] he says basically at that stage people were what he called bicameral and that [[44:38]] essentially refers to the left and right hemispheres of the brain he says they were kind of independent almost whenever [[44:44]] a tough decision was to be made he said the right brain would produce voices not externally spoken voices but [[44:50]] kind of inside the left brain would hear them and interpret them these were thought of as voices of gods [[44:57]] and they were thought of as coming from outside the person he gives the example of [[45:03]] ashilis the great hero in the greek epic iliad he says every time he was in stress or [[45:08]] in a new situation a god would come out of nowhere and then they would speak a command and then [[45:13]] achilles would follow it and that would resolve the novel situation he would just follow orders that he had been given [[45:22]]

Body-based bicamerality

now jane says there was an intermediate stage after this bicameral stage [[45:30]] where the people recognize that some thoughts were not external gods but they were experienced as bodily [[45:36]] sensations this sounds very weird let me explain it in a little bit [[45:41]] more detail they consulted their own body parts when making tough decisions he says the [[45:48]] second greek epic the greeks also had two major epics the odyssey depicts this stage [[45:54]] he gives certain examples of terms in terms of terms that are used in the odyssey in reference to kind of [[46:01]] emotional functions being mapped onto the body one of them was tumus [[46:06]] which refers to the sensation of warmth that comes from dilating blood vessels when you’re angry or you know [[46:13]] aggressive about something freni which refers to changes in breathing [[46:19]] and crady which refers to the pounding heartbeat which happens perhaps in excessive sympathetic activation [[46:26]] interestingly if you’re in the medical field you’ll realize that some of these words are actually still prevalent frenet we use it in the [[46:33]] sense of phrenic nerve which is the nerve that controls a diaphragm muscle and thus breathing cradi is probably the origin of the word [[46:40]] cardio and cardiology and overall this body part thing sounds [[46:46]] kind of crazy but i have suspicion that this intermediary stage persists in our [[46:52]] modern languages for example when we say things like i have a gut feeling or in hindi we may have like guddach [[46:59]] or something or my heart swells with pride or somebody is a jiggly or like you know it really doesn’t make any [[47:04]] sense to us from a modern perspective but perhaps at that stage you could actually trace certain emotional [[47:10]] responses being affiliated with certain bodily areas and changes there

Full narrative self-consciousness

and of course the final [[47:17]] stage three of consciousness evolution in terms of jane’s model [[47:22]] was full narrative self-consciousness where all our mental processes whether [[47:28]] the so-called voices of the gods whether the bodily functions all of these are rolled into a unified narrative me [[47:35]] you have a myself which becomes the center of all your narratives that your brain spins like this is happening to me [[47:41]] this is i where i am going this is where i was where i will be this allows the person to then start [[47:48]] reminiscing about the past this allows the person to imagine a future [[47:53]] and make complex plans so corollary being that jane’s thought [[47:58]] that when you didn’t have this stage of stage three consciousness you couldn’t do all these things when you were in the [[48:04]] prehistoric period he also says this was the stage when certain things like this emerged treachery [[48:10]] cruelty and sexual fantasies there’s all of these essentially you need to have that [[48:15]] unified narrative me before these emotions can make an appearance [[48:21]]

Hindu attention to Jaynes

[Music] when i read this book and in the years since i have thought about how there are [[48:29]] suggestive parallels from within hindu history which unfortunately is completely neglected in jane’s work and [[48:35]] in many of the commentaries that have been written since the only person [[48:41]] whom i’ve seen who have actually written on possible connections is the [[48:46]] brilliant arvind and neela condon who is also listening in on this conversation in an article maybe 10 [[48:53]] or 15 years ago in swarajya

In Hindu texts and experiences

Relationship with Gods

so i happened to hear this excellent [[48:59]] lecture by sucheta paranzape at the bandarkar oriental research institute where she talked about the vedic [[49:06]] the vedic view of the world essentially so she quotes in this just see how the rishi [[49:12]] feels on a familiar footing with the god agni he is so frank with him [[49:19]] i am giving you arches what are you giving me this is what the rishi asks agni the way they talk to the gods shows that [[49:26]] they are very close to each other there is not only friendship but also beginnings of bhakti [[49:34]] same time while the vedas were perhaps being discussed and composed in the mediterranean [[49:41]] a very interesting description of the relationship between man and god [[49:46]] by this very nice technology writer named kevin simler while commenting on julian james [[49:53]] from private letters to the most public steels all portray an intimate visceral [[49:59]] real relationship between gods and humans this was like you know bronze age mediterranean kind of babylon sumer and [[50:05]] all that the texts are so consistent on the reality of the gods and so casual about [[50:11]] them in ways that shocked the modern sensibility [Music] today our god is abstract distant [[50:19]] formless and silent in other words merely conceptual [[50:24]] this is what happens when a god becomes neurologically weak and paradoxically this is exactly what [[50:31]] allows him to be portrayed as omnipotent omniscient etc [[50:36]] a very fascinating parallel between how suchaitaji portrays the vedic peoples the rishi’s [[50:43]] relationship with gods and what the mediterranean people had with their gods

[[50:49]] similarly another commentator on jain said this we think of prayer as an inseparable part of religion [[50:56]] james argues very persuasively that it is on the contrary a late development [[51:01]] a result of receding gods prayer is very different from mantra [[51:07]] prayer is you are beseeching or begging a god essentially right [[51:13]] so and that sounds very similar at least to my limited understanding of [[51:20]] the nature of the man god relationship in the purva memsa and the karma kanda of the vedic [[51:28]] era versus the stutis totras bajan and kirtan of the more medieval and modern [[51:33]] era there seems to be a relatively shall [[51:39]] we say an equal relationship maybe not be equal but at least it seems like [[51:45]] when you do something you get expect a certain response from that whereas in the later bhakti period it [[51:51]] almost feels like the devda is a very powerful but somewhat higher and [[51:57]] remote entity and only a very few blessed people such as chaitanya mahaprabhu [[52:04]] have that ability to communicate with the deva and even in this painting kind of metaphorically the [[52:10]] jaganaji is elevated high above and people are kind of looking up and hoping [[52:15]] for his blessing

rAmAyaNa vs mahAbhArata

a similar parallels between jane’s ideas when we [[52:22]] compare the ramayana versus the mahabharata now we know the ramayana is older [[52:27]] that is what the tradition says the brilliant blogger manusa tarangini had also put [[52:33]] out excellent detailed posts on why he you know explaining why the ramayana is clearly [[52:40]] older even though apparently certain indologists have suspected that the mahabharata may be older but you know the truth is ramayana is older [[52:47]] now the ramayana characters motivations seem very straightforward characters also seem very black and [[52:53]] white like good and bad mahabharata of course like we all know there are much more shades of grey and [[52:59]] you know there’s of course reasons that the tradition itself attributes to why this is the case you know like the ramayan you’re [[53:06]] ideally supposed to read it within the house and you know like mahabharata ideally don’t treat it within the house and you know ramen is [[53:12]] supposed to be good examples mahabharata you know you have a lot of negative examples as well [[53:18]] still there seems to be the stark distinction between kind of the mindset of people in the [[53:23]] ramayana versus the mahabharata

Deception

for example treachery and deception right there seems to be much more deceit [[53:30]] and treachery in the mahabharat for example the story of this lack palace the story of ashwathama is dead when [[53:37]] killing dronacharya was there as much lying in the vedas and ramayana i’m not an expert in the vedic [[53:44]] text or the ramayana or mahabharata so i’m open to having people who do have that expertise tell me one way or the [[53:50]] other this is something just i thought as food for thought as you know just somebody was brought up [[53:56]] culturally in the hindu milieu i i didn’t feel that there was as much examples of lies in the vedas [[54:03]] this also ties into jane’s explanation of this famous trojan horror story right this [[54:10]] shows up in the second epic which is the the odyssey he says the reason this has [[54:16]] become such a celebrated tale is perhaps because this level of treachery where you put your soldiers inside this horse [[54:23]] which is a gift and you’re giving it to your enemies and then they jump out and kill everybody on the other side was [[54:28]] perhaps very novel at that time people hadn’t thought of such things and that’s why it was so celebrated we you know judging from our modern [[54:35]] vantage point you know we don’t seem to be very impressed by such innovations but perhaps at that time it really was like a big leap forward in [[54:42]] military strategy

Regret and moral quandaries

similarly when we look at moral quandaries right like um [[54:48]] there is this famous story of sage vajashrava’s with his son nachi keta and [[54:53]] yama it’s there in rugby that is there in taitheriya brahmana and most famous in the qatar nation where he gives [[55:00]] his son to yama and then nachi keta asks yama you know various questions and all that similar story is there about harish [[55:08]] chandra and his son rohit whom he gives to varuna in the ayat raya brahmana [[55:14]] but in neither of these stories there seems to be a very pronounced evidence of remorse or guilt on the part [[55:20]] of the fathers there may be some but not as strong as you might expect when you know you’re considering that you’re [[55:26]] giving your your son away basically to die and of course the most famous [[55:31]] evidence of remorse to me or guilt comes in a much later period of course the [[55:37]] mahabharata and the gita so this is of course the famous geetopadesh scene [[55:44]] this is a painting by an italian painter i believe it’s a magnificent painting and i think [[55:50]] the most striking aspect of this painting is this expression that you see on arjuna’s face [[55:55]] just sheer horror at what he’s about to do he’s not even done it yet but just [[56:01]] envisioning what is going to happen that is going to kill all these relatives he is even though they are like you know [[56:07]] objectively on the side of bad he still has so much kind of moral doubts about it [[56:14]] this seems to me to kind of parallel something that [[56:21]] was said about the iliad i’m not sure if you guys can see this while there is much slaughter in the [[56:26]] iliad there is very little cruelty meaning it’s not that there was no killing of course there was but that [[56:34]] pleasure arising out of killing seems to have not been at least it doesn’t seem to have been described in the iliad [[56:42]] and to me that also brought to mind kind of the rama and mahabharata contrast like this is the lanka the hand [[56:48]] like entirety of lanka burnt but i don’t remember that the sundar khan had you know like too much [[56:55]] shall we say regret or sadness about the damage caused [[57:00]] or even that hanumanji had any necessarily cruel intentions while doing it it was just like a simple act of war [[57:07]] compare that to the mahabharata where bhima you know craves to break the thai of the [[57:14]] ryogana because he say you know the thai is where he made draupadi sit so you [[57:20]] know seeking revenge similarly bhima tears the chest of dushasan to drink his blood [[57:27]] all this you know extraordinary lust for blood and cruelty seems more typical of these [[57:34]] later texts than it does of the vedas and the ramayana itself [[57:39]]

Dreaming

similarly the prevalence of dreaming now you know before buddha’s birth the story [[57:46]] goes that his mother had a dream of a white elephant before mahavira’s birth also they say his mother had a dream [[57:53]] but it seems like dreams are rarely discussed in the rig way now that doesn’t mean that you know just because it’s not discussed in the rig way [[57:59]] doesn’t mean it wasn’t there you know like there’s a lot of things which you know are not discussed in the rig with but obviously they were still there um [[58:06]] but they seem to be discussed more in the atharva with which came later and is much more common in the upanishads um [[58:14]] now of course the mandu kyopanisha and things like that they’re like you know they spent so much time discussing the [[58:20]] dream state and all that now it’s not to say that people did not have dreams in the regulating stage of course they did [[58:26]] even animals have dreams we can see that what i suspect is perhaps [[58:32]] because they did not do that time traveling or reminiscing perhaps they did not [[58:38]] think it worth discussing in the once they had woken up you know maybe [[58:43]] they didn’t talk about them afterwards i’m not sure why but at least it seems like an interesting distinction [[58:48]] the amount of importance given to dreams in the later hindu and buddhist texts versus the vedas [[58:54]] time

Summary

so kind of to summarize jane’s timeline right from his kind of point of view [[59:00]] from the prehistoric to the bronze age he says people were bicameral that’s the term he [[59:07]] uses i’m not necessarily saying that this was absolutely correct but he basically means that they basically [[59:13]] had no continuous sense of myself then later in age and onwards they had this full narrative self-consciousness [[59:20]] the features of this early stage they were able to hear the gods frequently there was no such thing as [[59:27]] treachery there was fear but they did not have anxiety because they weren’t time traveling into the future there was [[59:32]] pain but there was no regret because they were not time traveling into the past they did not have long term plans so [[59:38]] they did not have any worries essential you know it was a kind of a hakuna matata life if you you know if i want to [[59:43]] put it that way may not be a very respectable way to put it though but when you came to this full narrative [[59:50]] self-consciousness stage the gods became increasingly harder to reach [[59:55]] treachery and deception made their appearance you had fear still but now you also had [[1:00:01]] future anxiety like a low grade anxiety you had pain still but now you also had [[1:00:06]] regrets about what you may have done in the past and you know missing what you had experienced in the past and along with that came worries and [[1:00:13]] came planning and all that now you know like it does seem intriguing that this [[1:00:19]] description from jane’s also does seem to parallel the descriptions within our traditions of [[1:00:25]] how people wear in the satya yoga and the kali yuga is this related i don’t know but it’s an [[1:00:31]] interesting parallel

Alterations

nonetheless now i am not [[1:00:37]] going to say that i accept james’s ideas wholesale i think he was a brilliant and revolutionary thinker but there are a [[1:00:43]] lot of things which he may not have you know kind of known completely and perhaps that was because he did not have access to [[1:00:50]] hindu ideas in that much detail

Consciousness vs Identity

first of all he’s not talking about consciousness you know when we talk [[1:00:56]] consciousness it means like something very different from the term that james used at him when we say consciousness at [[1:01:02]] least on the hindu side we mean atman or purusha right but what jane’s actually is talking [[1:01:07]] about is something like this which you have in samkhya and then that kind of translated into vedanta kashmir [[1:01:14]] savasanam tantra and i suspect that for some reason this ankar tatwa may have hardened over time [[1:01:22]] clouding our perception of reality as it is of course is kind of loosely translated [[1:01:28]] as ego or highness or you know the eye doer going back to this slide that i showed [[1:01:35]] you guys the kind of the evolutes of purusha and rakati so this is from samkhya of course in [[1:01:42]] kashmir shaivism they add several more layer of entities behind this [[1:01:47]] so from prakriti unmanifest primordial matter comes buddhi which is the higher intellect [[1:01:54]] and then comes the ahamkar which is the ego which allows self-identity [[1:01:59]]

Gods are not hallucinations

the other modification that i would make of jane’s jain seems to think that the voices of [[1:02:05]] gods were random hallucinations but that doesn’t explain a lot of things. first of all it doesn’t explain how [[1:02:10]] similar gods seem to arise in completely different civilizations it doesn’t explain how ancient societies got [[1:02:16]] anything done if each of them were kind of randomly hallucinating multiple gods [[1:02:21]] i think a far more parsimonious explanation is that the devatas do exist um [[1:02:27]] but when i say exist that’s a very kind of a complex and difficult to [[1:02:32]] understand word i don’t mean it in the same sense that an apple exists i’m not going to get into this [[1:02:38]] topic in this talk because it is very complicated and to be very honest i don’t think i’m qualified to [[1:02:45]] answer it either however i would direct you to [[1:02:51]] rajashi nandi shankar bharadwaj khandawali ashi’s dalaila they have all given some except [[1:02:57]] exceptionally good talks on this topic rajashi and ashish dalaillah also have very good [[1:03:04]] books that deal with this and again i believe i mentioned the [[1:03:09]] brilliant mAnasatarangiNI before he has a couple of twitter threads which also describe [[1:03:15]] kind of you know his position on this it’s a very complex and subtle issue which ideally you should listen to from [[1:03:22]] people like this who are you know shall we say much smarter than me and also a much more perceptive [[1:03:28]] of kind of reality as it is

Ability to grasp the universe

but i would like to kind of you know [[1:03:35]] give this statement to kind of tell you what i mean which is by a very famous biologist [[1:03:41]] the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but it’s queer than we can suppose [[1:03:48]] so what it means just because you’re a human being [[1:03:54]] doesn’t mean you have the intellectual tools necessary to understand [[1:03:59]] reality as it is you know hindus in conjunction with you know [[1:04:05]] darwinian theory everybody we all believe that you know we are part of the natural world so we are products of [[1:04:11]] evolutionary processes you know we don’t expect that a dog can understand all the secrets of the [[1:04:17]] universe so you know as a corollary there is no reason to suspect that a human being also can understand all the secrets of [[1:04:23]] the universe. so be prepared for the existence of a much stranger and much weirder [[1:04:30]] universe with the existence of very counter-intuitive things than you are brought to expect by your [[1:04:37]] education.

deva manifestations

these devdas you know which as i ex [[1:04:43]] as i said i do think they exist they can manifest to our limited awareness the specific form taken by the dev term [[1:04:51]] and manifesting to us is conditioned and the conditioning can be culture you know our region our experiences [[1:04:58]] and possibly even by biology for example this is just like one mapping of the various forms [[1:05:05]] of one devta which is saraswati right this is the tamil manifestation of saraswati this is the bengali saraswati [[1:05:12]] this is the japanese saraswati this is a karnataka saraswati from them i think hoysala period or something [[1:05:18]] this is a indonesian saraswati and i think the indonesian embassy in the u.s and i think this is a cambodian [[1:05:24]] saraswati all slightly different um [[1:05:29]] but distinct enough that i think i would be justified in saying that [[1:05:35]] if the same devta manifests in such different ways to you know different cultures at [[1:05:40]] different times then you know it’s entirely possible that you know they’ve done manifests in a completely different way to different [[1:05:47]] species perhaps like you know why should we say that human beings alone can perceive that [[1:05:53]] they’ve tasked for you know they may be perhaps even perceivable by dolphins and other such intelligent species but in a [[1:06:00]] very kind of different way than we are used to so again this is just my conjecture and hypothesis which [[1:06:06]] you know may or may not be correct but i think this is one way to kind of think about the [[1:06:12]] existence of these entities

Evolution and progress

the other thing that i think jane’s suffered from is that his value system [[1:06:19]] was a little bit biased by his western milieu jane’s i think subtly portrays this myself [[1:06:26]] consciousness as kind of newer and better and smarter than the prior bicameral stage [[1:06:33]] but i would say a lot of modern neuroscience as well as ancient investigations suggest that this my self-consciousness [[1:06:39]] this ahamkar essentially is an illusion. it is a useful fiction [[1:06:44]] it’s very helpful because it helps us make complex decision it helps us outwit our rivals it helps us organize armies [[1:06:51]] and all that but it does mask the deeper reality of nature. [[1:06:57]] so jane’s is kind of worldview perhaps went by this kind of evolutionary [[1:07:03]] step-wise progression from kind of ape-like to kind of modern right

but evolution does not always proceed [[1:07:09]] like that in a linear fashion towards greater optimization at all levels [[1:07:15]] sometimes you know evolution goes into this where you know i don’t think anybody’s going to argue that this stage is better than this stage but evolution [[1:07:21]] optimizes for certain things and while optimizing for one thing you may lose out on a lot of other things.

Illusory ahankAra and split-brain experiments

so [[1:07:29]] and i think the kind of the fakeness and the illusory [[1:07:34]] nature of this narrative unified sense of myself the fact that it’s so illusory is [[1:07:41]] brought out very well by these split brain experiments these experiments won the nobel prize [[1:07:48]] in 1981 so basically they were studying patients who had the [[1:07:54]] left and the right hemispheres of the brain surgically disconnected right [[1:07:59]] so i’ve told you before the left hemisphere controls the right side of the world pays attention to the right side of the world and also controls the [[1:08:06]] right hand the right hemisphere controls the left side of the world and also controls the [[1:08:12]] left hand there is also a further lateralization which is that the left hemisphere is [[1:08:19]] where language exists so speech is localized to the left hemisphere okay so [[1:08:25]] in these experiments what they did was they took these people who had had like the surgical hemisphere disconnection [[1:08:33]] they would give them signals in their visual field like this one would be a circle one would be a [[1:08:39]] square the circle on the left side square on the right side so now the circle is being shown to the right hemisphere basically because it’s on the [[1:08:45]] left visual field the square is being shown to the left hemisphere because it’s in the right visual field [[1:08:50]] when they asked this person are these two objects the same he would say i don’t know why is that because the left [[1:08:57]] and right hemispheres have been disconnected they are no longer able to share information so they can’t compare however [[1:09:03]] language resides on the left alone like i said when you ask is an object present [[1:09:08]] and you only show an object in the left visual field meaning this is being shown to the right hemisphere [[1:09:15]] the person says no because language is on the left the object is being seen by the right so the [[1:09:22]] person says no however when you ask him to like give a hand [[1:09:27]] signal maybe tap a button when he sees an object his left hand actually does tap yes because left hand [[1:09:35]] controlled by the right hemisphere right hemisphere is actually seeing the object and you know the vice versa when you [[1:09:41]] present the object to the right visual field you ask him is an object present he actually says yes because the left [[1:09:46]] hemisphere is paying attention to it it’s on the right side and the left hemisphere controls the right hand so the right hand says yes [[1:09:53]] but the left hand says no

so this is very like spooky and counterintuitive to what our normal kind [[1:09:58]] of folk understanding of human beings is that we you know we think there is like one person living [[1:10:04]] inside our brain who kind of has unfiltered unqualified access to [[1:10:09]] everything around us and we have a very clear story of who we are and how we [[1:10:15]] relate to our environment there is actually a newer study which says that [[1:10:20]] some of these findings in the split bin experiment were not completely replicable but i think in the grand [[1:10:26]] scheme of thing the kind of the fundamental point still stands which is that [[1:10:31]] there is no reason to think that we have this privileged understanding of everything that is going on around us it [[1:10:39]] is a myth a folk psychology which modern science has conclusively shown to [[1:10:45]] be false

Hindu approaches to destroying narrative self

apart from modern science of course hindus have always recognized the fakeness of this limited myselfness [[1:10:54]] all of hindu and buddhist religious practice was meant to go beyond this limited myself this ahankar [[1:11:00]] accretion to transcend and destroy that and not to feed its delusions so like we [[1:11:06]] had various practices and these are all different approaches to destroying this limited narrative self [[1:11:12]]

like so in my hypothetical timeline - which you know like a very personal hypothesis - which you know is [[1:11:18]] entirely right or wrong. people greater expertise may let me know.

• so in the bronze age the vedas and the [[1:11:24]] rituals made complete sense without effort to a lot of people. a lot of rishis were there [[1:11:30]] then.
• there was a gradual increase in the zhankar tatwa which clouded our perceptibility so then the vedic mantras [[1:11:36]] and yagyas are no longer making sense. so at this point we came up with the upaniShats. buddhism was a product of the [[1:11:43]] stage. the various darshanas of philosophy.
• then even more increase of [[1:11:49]] and again even these upanishads and darshanas are no longer making sense. and then at that point [[1:11:55]] you know the popularity of tantra temples agamas and bhakti became more. [[1:12:00]]

and of course within the same society different people can have different stages of this [[1:12:06]] evolution and that is why so many different paths exist for various different people right [[1:12:12]] in the same society at the same time. and so seeing that way these temples the [[1:12:18]] mandir the mantras the mudras and yantras they are all technologies they are technologies to bypass the narrative [[1:12:24]] self. the technology is to access devtas and spiritual processes their effectiveness depends upon your [[1:12:31]] mental architecture so you can shape your mental architecture to a way that these things start to show more impact [[1:12:39]] and these technologies work at different planes - one of which is the neuroscience plane, which we could potentially investigate with the tools that we have [[1:12:47]]

Understanding Hindu technology

so far from being the primitive aspects of hinduism we think oh mandir you know [[1:12:52]] or mantra or backward and all that these are actually the most complex the most subtle and most sophisticated [[1:12:59]] elements within the entire hindu edifice. sometimes when you see a temple you may [[1:13:05]] even kind of be at least able to grasp what it is in one go even though you may not know the [[1:13:11]] entirety of what it is meant for this is a lakshman temple in khajuraho sometimes you know you you completely [[1:13:18]] cannot make sense of it because it may not even be in a human scale like this is [[1:13:23]] borobudur in indonesia kind of a mahayana kind of tantric buddhist [[1:13:30]] architecture from i guess more than a thousand years ago when you look at it it just looks like some random kind of [[1:13:36]] stupa type thing and you know nothing very remarkable about it honestly so you go a little bit further away you [[1:13:42]] know look so it’s a little bit more interesting you know look further away yeah it’s like really big and imposing but what’s the point of all that when [[1:13:48]] you look at it from the sky like from a drone or something then you realize like oh there’s like you know some sort of really complicated pattern that was [[1:13:55]] being followed by the people who are building this this was basically manifestation in [[1:14:01]] stone of a mandala so until you know how to use this mandala or yantra [[1:14:07]] you know mandala puja and all requires meditating like at the outer layer then [[1:14:13]] you go inside then you go inside then you go inside and then you you know you meditate on something here and then you [[1:14:19]] come outside until you understand this you will make no sense of that borobudur structure [[1:14:25]]

and to understand this doesn’t mean to understand this in a textbook way. you actually need to have [[1:14:31]] the ability to you know kind of actually draw the shakti that is embedded in this so to speak so [[1:14:37]] you need to have fashioned your cognitive apparatus to that level of subtlety and fineness that these things [[1:14:44]] actually start making sense to you so these extraordinarily advanced technologies unfortunately are no longer [[1:14:52]] widely understood

Teachers as Georgia guides

and i think a parallel to that is basically something that i saw [[1:14:58]] recently which is a there is a monument in the united states in the state of georgia called the georgia guide stones [[1:15:05]] which gives instructions in eight languages on how to rebuild society after an apocalyptic event [[1:15:12]] meaning like you know all your high technology internet and all that is destroyed it also functions as a compass [[1:15:17]] calendar and a clock now i suspect that modern hindus are essentially [[1:15:25]] in a similar state kind of survivors of a thousand-year civilizational collapse [[1:15:31]] where the majority of our people no longer know what sense to make of many of these [[1:15:36]] really complicated technologies that have been left to us from the past. our equivalent of the georgia guide [[1:15:43]] stones are our teachers our sampradayas [[1:15:48]] in whom this information is encoded it’s not that these people are [[1:15:57]] are scholars or teachers these people the information is carried within them [[1:16:03]] in you know in in a kind of an embodied way. so [[1:16:09]] i almost think of these people as much more akin to wizards or magicians or sorcerers [[1:16:16]] because through these practices they have changed their thinking apparatus to a position where they [[1:16:23]] perceive the universe completely different from the way a normal person does [[1:16:28]] and this is the case for you know highly orthodox [[1:16:34]] kind of the elite teachers such as shankaracharyas but also of [[1:16:41]] various other sampradayas which you know preserve the same extraordinary [[1:16:48]] technological complexity however you know in modern india [[1:16:53]] at least some people would respect kind of traditions like that of the shankaracharya but like a lot more people [[1:16:59]] completely disdain these people because you know they say oh these sadhus are just walking around naked they’re just [[1:17:04]] like crazy which is completely not the case when you see it through the right lens you realize um [[1:17:10]] what they have been protecting and preserving for you know several generations [[1:17:17]]

Newton the magician

also it is not necessarily the case that these are all [[1:17:23]] useless pieces of information for a modern person or that these technologies and [[1:17:31]] ideas are only for religious use. let me give you um [[1:17:36]] a kind of a description of a great person from europe his deepest instincts were occult [[1:17:44]] esoteric and semantic he was not the first of the age of reason [[1:17:50]] he was the last of the magicians the last of the babylonians and the [[1:17:55]] sumerians who was they who was this person that this description was about this was about [[1:18:01]] isaac newton and you know he actually has a book written about him called the last sorcerer because he really was this [[1:18:09]] people like davinci you know spinoza all of these were the [[1:18:14]] recruit essence or the re-emergence of a very ancient way of looking at the world [[1:18:20]] which to some people may have appeared almost magical [[1:18:25]] but arthur c clarke the famous science fiction writer once said [[1:18:31]] any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

so that’s why i mean i am a scientist [[1:18:38]] and i you know i i i would prefer not to believe in the [[1:18:43]] existence of magic and i i would like to see this all as as predictable consequences flowing from [[1:18:51]] grasping of very subtle aspects of reality [[1:18:56]] and it is not necessarily the case that these subtle aspects of reality are relevant [[1:19:02]] only for spirituality

Hot new frontier

this is actually the um the hot new frontier and technology [[1:19:10]] as well virtual reality and embodied cognition there is a recent grant from the u.s [[1:19:16]] national science foundation for an ethnography of a brain interface device meaning what does it feel like [[1:19:23]] from the inside to have a brain computer interface implanted into your head [[1:19:28]] - how does that change how you know you feel yourself stanford released some new benchmarks [[1:19:33]] for embodied artificial intelligence embodied cognitive robotics which kind [[1:19:39]] of you know relates to those robots. you guys may have seen recently where they’re like doing this dancing and running across [[1:19:46]] like a dog and all that and the learning of sensory motor schemes and even in medicine [[1:19:52]] virtual reality as an embodied tool to enhance episodic memory in the elderly so again a paper that was published [[1:19:59]]

Q&A

that was a really great talk really pleased to see especially like [[1:20:06]] i’ve been reading julian james and investigating these areas for quite quite a long time [[1:20:11]] and i’m very very happy to see this gap being addressed which is [[1:20:17]] connecting the indian civilization you know in particular all [[1:20:22]] these philosophies and conceptual ideas and things like that from the indian side of things [[1:20:29]] to that to that kind of framework and see how how that kind of matches up i i would [[1:20:36]] first just comment and say that you know i have a lot of disagreement with some of [[1:20:41]] your assessments of what james exactly said but leaving that aside i also [[1:20:48]] sense a hint of like nostalgia or something especially when you call it technology [[1:20:54]] or the the power of mantras and all those kind of things and just you know since we’re talking [[1:21:00]] about james here i just like to ask my question if it is the case that mantras [[1:21:06]] specific phonemes and specific sequences words and so on so so forth can [[1:21:12]] have effects on brain circuitry now just taking that statement on its own connecting that with julian jades [[1:21:20]] who basically came up with an idea that the mental architecture was different [[1:21:25]] about 5000 years ago than what it is today and from that perspective do you really [[1:21:32]] suppose that these mantras have the same power as they did thousands of years ago [[1:21:40]] because the mental architecture of people have changed it may have been the case that two [[1:21:45]] thousand years or three thousand years back these mantras could have had an effect on the psychology of the [[1:21:53]] people but today it is no longer the case thank you [[1:21:58]]

i think that’s an excellent question rajiv thank you thank you for [[1:22:03]] the positive assessment so actually i think you’re absolutely right so you are exactly correct that [[1:22:10]] the mantras composed thousands of years ago probably do not have the same effect [[1:22:17]] and i think that goes hand in hand with that assessment from yaska in the nurukta [[1:22:22]] that i showed you which which is that people are no longer able to perceive the mantras directly and if [[1:22:28]] you look at the evolution of mantras there is actually been a very [[1:22:34]] marked change from the rigveda which is a completely mantra text [[1:22:40]] to the modern well relatively medieval to modern period which is the tantric [[1:22:46]] mantras the rig vedic mantras are you know are kind of longer they are supposed to be much more [[1:22:53]] important in terms of the singing and the intonation and all that that is why kind of this so much emphasis on [[1:23:00]] fidelity and oral transmission and that is why you know you don’t want to write it down they always said don’t write it [[1:23:05]] down it makes no sense and whereas the tantric mantras there is no [[1:23:10]] there is usually no such shall we say problem with speech [[1:23:16]] primarily i mean with writing and a lot of times the tantric mantras are meant [[1:23:21]] for repetition and a lot more use of bijaksharas in the [[1:23:27]] tantric mantras so vedic mantras are a lot more semantic which is mean like they [[1:23:33]] make sense when you translate them they may not make complete sense but like you know you [[1:23:38]] translate them you feel that there’s at least something language like you’re saying something here going there just that oftentimes this tantric mantras are [[1:23:45]] just like a bunch of sounds which carry no meaning not nearly not merely in translation but [[1:23:51]] actually they carry no meaning in sanskrit itself they are just sounds like just like om is a bija like that there are like a bunch of other bija [[1:23:57]] mantras so and the tantric mantras are a lot more like this they have a lot more of these bijas [[1:24:02]] and they are also very emphasis is on repetition like lacks and [[1:24:08]] lacks of time so for a typically for a pursuana of a mantra they say you must do as many lacks of times as there are [[1:24:16]] syllables in that mantra so if your mantra has five syllables you’re supposed to do five lakhs but then they [[1:24:21]] say in kalyuga you need to do like three times so 15 lakhs whatever whereas you know if you read like various mantras [[1:24:28]] from the big veda or whatever you’re not necessarily you’re using that as part of your yakya you’re not necessarily sitting there repeating it over and over [[1:24:34]] in your head so absolutely i think there has been a change in the cognitive architecture [[1:24:39]] and the mantra shastra has been progressively evolving along with that [[1:24:45]] i would say perhaps maybe thousand years ago the evolution kind of stopped maybe because you know we no longer [[1:24:52]] had that network of you know like intellectuals to actually carry forward [[1:24:58]] this sort of stuff so maybe for the last thousand years most of it has been primarily retention and [[1:25:03]] you know preservation rather than actually doing anything like kind of a novel

which principle of [[1:25:09]] tantra do you think can be scientifically validated

so here i come from the [[1:25:16]] neuroscience perspective so in my opinion [[1:25:21]] there is already some scientific validation in things like studies that are done on transcendental [[1:25:26]] meditation for example congenital meditation is basically a mantra meditation you take a mantra you chant it 20 minutes in the morning 20 minutes [[1:25:32]] in the evening even with that with like enough sustained practice there is evidence to show that [[1:25:38]] structural as well as functional changes in the nervous system can be detected with eeg mri and all that [[1:25:45]] and of course you know this is i’m talking about truly neurological changes like beyond that there’s always much [[1:25:51]] more evidence that you know it leads to changes in stress and blood pressure and personality and all that but from a [[1:25:58]] neurologist perspective there’s already evidence to show that this can be these mantras exert an impact on [[1:26:05]] structure and function of the nervous system in terms of going forward and kind of [[1:26:11]] increasing the resolution at which these things are studied i think that [[1:26:16]] will require shall we say a lot more [Music] [[1:26:22]] resolution on the side of the neuroscientific techniques that we use to study the brain [[1:26:27]] right now our study of the brain with the tools that we have is maybe similar to looking out at the [[1:26:34]] night sky using a magnifying glass you know like it’s not that you won’t see anything you do see a lot of things [[1:26:39]] but it’s not really the best tool even a telescope is only like a slight improvement but like there are so many [[1:26:45]] details that are missed out when you’re just looking at something from the outside so i think [[1:26:52]] mantras i think right now the easiest way to see their effect would be [[1:26:58]] have studies on people who you know have done pursuant of various mantras maybe 15 10 [[1:27:04]] you know whatever 10 lakh 15 lakh times of a simple mantra and see what changes you can see in their brain [[1:27:09]] ideally the best case would be if you can compare that before and after they start their process of the poorest china [[1:27:16]] and of course there are a lot more kind of shall we say esoteric aspects of the [[1:27:21]] mantra shastra which i’m not getting into because i don’t know that it is [[1:27:26]] of relevance to scientists at this point such as you know shakthipath and like [[1:27:33]] you know kind of essentially giving [[1:27:38]] the guru giving the sisya kind of a head start on the utility or the power of that mantra merely by [[1:27:44]] touching i mean there’s a lot of shall we say anecdotal reports of this having [[1:27:49]] happened and you know honestly i can say that i experienced something like that once in the past myself but as a [[1:27:55]] scientist i have no real way of explaining how so i i would prefer to just leave it off the table in terms of scientific study for the moment [[1:28:02]]

shikha has asked

what is the role of the ether akash element in neuroscience [[1:28:08]] which cannot be measured scientifically because this akash tatwa helps us to [[1:28:14]] connect to ourselves

that’s a very good question a very complex question i don’t know if i have the [[1:28:20]] answers to it right now but let me say something that um [[1:28:26]] i’ve kind of understood from various sources one of them was this brilliant young [[1:28:32]] writer on facebook named ramachandra rodham who basically mentioned that the mantra [[1:28:38]] essentially works at the akasha stage so like there’s these five tatwas like and [[1:28:46]] then like they’re arranged in their order along with the five chakras and all that so the mantra once you go beyond the [[1:28:53]] like the spoken stage when you go into like a silent repetition in your head [[1:28:58]] at that level it is impacting on the akasha stage which as you mentioned it connects us to the [[1:29:06]] deeper structures within and it is considered considered the most subtle of the five [[1:29:12]] gross elements right so and one of the interesting things which ashi’s dalaila had written in his book [[1:29:19]] or maybe he said it in his talk is that akasha rather than being understood as [[1:29:26]] space is perhaps better understood as [[1:29:32]] relationships between entities one of the very fascinating things that [[1:29:38]] julian james wrote in his book which other people are also now getting around to again a marker of how brilliant the [[1:29:44]] man really was deals with spatial [[1:29:49]] spatialization of thought he says our thoughts are fundamentally spatial [[1:29:57]] and spatial metaphors are essential for all kinds of thought especially for [[1:30:04]] entities which we cannot process through the other sense organs he gives the basic example of time [[1:30:11]] and this has been kind of discussed by various scientists and psychologists as well [[1:30:16]] there is no way that a human being can think of time without [[1:30:22]] converting it into a spatial metaphor meaning you [[1:30:27]] think of before and after as before it’s left and after is right maybe or before is behind and after is in front or [[1:30:34]] future is in front because you don’t have a sense organ that deals with the [[1:30:40]] physical property known as time so he says the spatialization is an [[1:30:47]] intrinsic and very fundamental feature of what he’s you know talks about as [[1:30:53]] consciousness which is like the narrative consciousness and i think based on ashi’s dalaillah’s [[1:30:59]] insights spatialization refers to kind of putting it in [[1:31:05]] a way that your brain can process one item versus the other item and that is [[1:31:10]] what probably at least in my view perhaps what the akasha tatwa is [[1:31:17]] why is that connected to speech i think this is a very interesting [[1:31:22]] question and i think perhaps the answer lies in why [[1:31:28]] the words used for the tanmatras and the nyanindriyas was [[1:31:36]] shabda and not you know like nad or you know like it [[1:31:43]] was specifically focused on the speaking aspect [[1:31:48]] meaning like a linguistic kind of flavor of the speech sound rather than [[1:31:54]] just like like you know or you know hearing sounds that from a drum or a musical instrument [[1:31:59]] or something because that also has heard but it somehow that aspect that akash aspect come to correlate with the [[1:32:04]] linguistic aspect of the spoken word and that may have something to do with um [[1:32:11]] language ultimately in your brain is processed in a hierarchical [[1:32:17]] almost a spatial sense if you read like the work of noam chomsky stephen pinker and all that [[1:32:23]] they describe at the fundamental level something called a you know like a [[1:32:28]] generative grammar universal grammar where basically the word that you’re using for an object is [[1:32:34]] something but the at the deeper level is the relationship between those words verb noun order and all that and the [[1:32:40]] hierarchical level at which you’re understanding that and perhaps that is what the akasha tatwa relates to and [[1:32:48]] that also correlates to the way your brain [[1:32:54]] starts processing almost all information by converting it into metaphors or spatial metaphors [[1:33:01]] there’s a very complex answer and i’m actually working on a paper on that topic i hope to get it out but i guess [[1:33:07]] it needs to make sense to myself before i can actually help to make it made sense to other people um [[1:33:13]]

and then aravindanji has said

again ram swarup came up with a very holistic and perhaps even better [[1:33:19]] way of looking at cultural evolution we need to look at this contribution which actually gets a validation from independent validation from james

yes [[1:33:25]] absolutely i have actually read ram swarup ji’s book i think which [[1:33:30]] which you may be referring to of course he’s a brilliant and wide-ranging thinker and [[1:33:36]] you know truly important that his work gets much more [[1:33:43]] much more recognition

one the important aspect of vedic literature is that vedic we seem to [[1:33:49]] realized that the gods are part of the being and not external

yes

and yogi seal of bronze age harappa again suggests [[1:33:54]] that this bicameral background is more of a bicameral integration and that kind of differentiates this tradition from [[1:34:00]] many others of that contemporary period

that’s a very very interesting point and i have to say [[1:34:05]] you know it’s entirely possible that there was recognition of the need of this [[1:34:11]] integration very early on in india and perhaps perhaps that is why uniquely in india um [[1:34:19]] this attempt was made to break through the conditioning and go back to that [[1:34:25]] original state and perhaps that’s why in the other societies it seemed like almost a very simple walk over or take [[1:34:32]] over from the quest mark bicameral stage to the modern way of being and perhaps in india [[1:34:38]] that need for integration and kind of a holistic approach was recognized very very early on [[1:34:45]] and and that is why throughout the tradition there has been this [[1:34:50]] effort to make sure that we don’t lose that but at the same time not assuming the benefits that [[1:34:58]] are brought by you know so-called full narrative consciousness so [[1:35:04]] and i confess that you know this is a very gross correlation between jane’s work [[1:35:10]] and like hindu ideas rajiv sebastian himself also mentioned that he has critiques of my [[1:35:16]] understanding of james it’s entirely possible there’s a lot more works on jane’s which i hope to read [[1:35:22]] in fact one of the people on this call brian mcvey has written some excellent books and marcel hugesten whom i also [[1:35:29]] see here has written some excellent books i’ve read i think a couple of marcel’s books i’ve ordered some of brian’s and marcel’s [[1:35:37]] i hope to get a deeper understanding of what jane’s [[1:35:42]] thought and simultaneously by exploring ram swaroop and other thinkers perhaps [[1:35:50]] we’ll come to a more cohesive and [[1:35:55]] true convergence

shikha says

what is your [[1:36:01]] opinion on shamans who use drums animal horns and other objects to get connected with spirits and supernatural powers um [[1:36:09]]

i honestly don’t know i’m sure there must be perhaps [[1:36:15]] it works easier if you know they have not been [[1:36:20]] exposed to this narrative self mentality for a very long time perhaps you know so like i [[1:36:27]] showed you that picture of shankaracharya followed by the picture of what i presume is [[1:36:33]] there are various levels at which people have [[1:36:39]] kind of combated the tendency of the narrative self to kind of take over all processing [[1:36:47]] and each of them is worthy of study and an investigation so i wouldn’t i would never dismiss [[1:36:54]] a shaman as a kind of like some sort of tribal primitive who um [[1:37:00]] you know is doing some stupid stuff it’s entirely possible that they have come to the realization that [[1:37:06]] that helps people in their cohort to get to that point [[1:37:12]] so we need to approach those traditions with an open mind and you know like let go of [[1:37:18]] this kind of this linear unilateral view that there is a [[1:37:24]] sequential progression of humanity from stupid and primitive and backward to kind of elite [[1:37:30]] and kind of you know very modern and rational and [[1:37:36]]

was actually an interesting paper which i actually read recently which kind of speaks to this [[1:37:42]] somebody in japan had found that children at all ages [[1:37:49]] prefer paintings that are done by other children two paintings that are done by adults [[1:37:57]] which i thought was very fascinating a naive view might be that [[1:38:03]] you know everybody wants to paint like a great adult painter children are simply [[1:38:09]] don’t have the motor skill to achieve that yet but if that study is to be replicated [[1:38:15]] that would show that children are painting things which [[1:38:20]] perhaps kind of come in sync with their perceptual apparatus and their processing apparatus [[1:38:26]] and they like things that other children paint and then so children are a kind of [[1:38:32]] a state of being in themselves similarly you can say like you know a hunter gatherer tribe or something is a state [[1:38:38]] of humanity in themselves they are not one in a in a great chain of development towards [[1:38:44]] you know like silicon valley or something like that um so i think that would kind of be [[1:38:49]] my opinion on the shaman issue

saurabh srivastava another good friend of mine who’s doing some very exciting [[1:38:55]] work on yoga in the united states

research on telomeres that proxy a [[1:39:01]] person’s age and impact of meditation and mantras on it

absolutely there are [[1:39:08]] research studies on various aspects of physical health like telomeres petrol aging of course [[1:39:16]] and from yoga and mantras and [[1:39:22]] like i said stress markers that kind of thing and that’s actually fairly well established i didn’t go into that [[1:39:28]] because honestly that is so well established that i think there is nothing new [[1:39:33]] that i can say on that topic i actually did give a topic on a talk on some of these topics [[1:39:39]] at sangam foundation like two or three years ago and saurabh is actually working at [[1:39:44]] some at some of the cutting edge of this sort of work so he is the person to um [[1:39:50]] contact if you guys want to know more about the true bodily [[1:39:57]] markers and the stress markers that are influenced by meditation and mantras and yoga [[1:40:04]]

aravindan says um [[1:40:10]]

apart from the social dimensions in terms of the way gods and goddesses were interacting don’t you think in that [[1:40:15]] aspect at least mahabharata seems more in bicameral phase than ramayana

possibly arimindanji i’m not [[1:40:23]] i mean it’s entirely possible these are layered texts as um [[1:40:28]] as many people have pointed out you know like within the tradition perhaps we may have this [[1:40:34]] kind of desire to think that these texts appeared fully formed from [[1:40:40]] you know from the time they were created like they were just like in the state but you know honestly [[1:40:48]] from the evidence of various sources it does appear that there is a core and [[1:40:53]] then there are like accretions on it possibly that the jaya which is like [[1:40:59]] that core aspect of the mahabharata may have been composed at an even earlier [[1:41:04]] even more bicameral face than the ramayana was entirely possible as i mentioned i think [[1:41:10]] i’m you know i am by no means an expert in vedas or ramayana or mahabharata and there are lots of people [[1:41:16]] whom indus university itself has spoken to who have much deeper [[1:41:22]] scholarship on these topics so this was honestly this was just like to some extent a stream of consciousness [[1:41:28]] thought where i hope other people will who have the necessary expertise will kind of you know look into this and [[1:41:34]] consider whether this is a possibility of kind of arranging the chronology of our past [[1:41:40]]

koshal says

good point resolution is a huge imitation and i hope it gets resolved in the future absolutely i [[1:41:46]] think kushal is making the exact right point that resolution of our technology

so [[1:41:52]] the corollary to that resolution point is that suppose you do a mantra practice and [[1:41:58]] your mri study shows no impact what does that mean does that mean the mantra is fake i would say there is [[1:42:06]] no reason to think that because the mri studies is one tool [[1:42:12]] is that tool the right tool is that tool actually capturing everything that you know the mantra is doing no like [[1:42:18]] it’s all you can say if an mri study or an eeg study or whatever is negative [[1:42:24]] after whatever three years of a mantra practice or a yoga practice for example is that it does not change the parameters that [[1:42:31]] we were testing now are there other parameters that are being influenced maybe you know i can’t say one way or the [[1:42:37]] other so to that extent that is why i keep emphasizing the real way to um [[1:42:44]] [Music] to get a honest opinion of these practices is to join a sampradaya find a [[1:42:51]] guru and get initiation from them because these are traditions who have [[1:42:56]] you know noted the working of these practices over several generations spanning thousands of years so they know [[1:43:03]] things which may not necessarily be easy for modern science to capture [[1:43:08]] because modern science is in a process of learning it is especially when it comes to neuroscience it is in a it [[1:43:13]] is in a kindergarten stage of understanding so there is a lot more that needs to be found out so we [[1:43:19]] should not rush to make any hasty judgments about oh this practice makes this change in mri therefore it is a [[1:43:24]] better practice by no means should we say that

shikha rai says

what is the role of natural calamities [[1:43:30]] or outer challenges that societies have faced throughout the different spatial [[1:43:35]] temporal context how we can change the changes in neurological contract

that is a very good question so she basically [[1:43:41]] is asking was there any role for natural calamities and outer challenges [[1:43:48]] in changes in how our neurology evolved i want to say at some point julian janes [[1:43:55]] i think one of the explanations he gave was maybe some sort of catastrophe led to the [[1:44:02]] collapse of bicamerality and whether the catastrophe was the explosion of some sort of volcano which [[1:44:09]] led to civilizational collapse was it invasions which also seemed to happen [[1:44:15]] around the same time which led to this is a collapse of all these complex civilizations and [[1:44:22]] he does for example say that you know his kind of whole thing is that all the people in a city are kind of bicameral [[1:44:28]] in a certain way they’re kind of focusing on a certain god or the center of the city and then when somebody [[1:44:34]] comes and invades that city they lose that bicamerality which you know if you kind of see that in in kind of [[1:44:41]] contrast with what is the actuality of hindu cities like srirangam where you know like the god is actually in the [[1:44:47]] center of the city and people are still like doing the same rituals that they did like similar rituals that they [[1:44:52]] did in like babylon and all that three thousand four thousand years ago i don’t know that you know [[1:44:58]] an invasion or destruction of specific temples within the city of shirangam i hope that never happens but in case that [[1:45:04]] were to happen i don’t know that that would necessarily change the mentality of [[1:45:09]] the the panditis and pujaris who are living there so i’m sure there may be some role [[1:45:16]] for various natural calamities or invasions but again at this point it’s all [[1:45:21]] conjecture but some people do suggest that this modern mindset which you know like [[1:45:29]] this kind of the narrative self is kind of a sticky entity in the sense that if you have [[1:45:34]] like two three bicameralish people of the old kind of mindset and you bring them in contact with some modern people [[1:45:41]] through some kind of diffusion process they lose their bicamerality and become [[1:45:49]] converted into that modern mindset how this happens of course i don’t know but [[1:45:54]] that makes a very interesting [[1:45:59]] hypothesis as to does it mean to preserve some degree of this bicamerality would we need to [[1:46:06]] isolate the people who in whom it is expressed and maybe catch them at a very early age [[1:46:13]] and keep them separate from kind of this and the arm ahmadi society [[1:46:19]] which you know seems to bear some parallels in how the shankaracharyas are selected from [[1:46:24]] very young age and kept in seclusion and also seems to bear certain parallels to [[1:46:30]] apparently how like the japanese emperor used to be treated and maybe how [[1:46:35]] the that kumari in nepal used to be treated so i don’t know there’s [[1:46:42]] there’s some topics of interest to be explored in terms of what causes the change from [[1:46:47]] bicamerality to the modern narrative consciousness is it just increasing complexity in society or something else [[1:46:53]]

shikha - one last question what are your opinion in khajuraho temples that have so-called erotic sculptures how one can process these images at the neurological [[1:47:00]] level

it’s a very good question i don’t know honestly i’m sure see [[1:47:07]] basically the fact that this entire philosophical period was so [[1:47:13]] rich and so intellectual means that they were not going to the extent of constructing [[1:47:20]] some temple with all these sculptures you know just for entertainment or pornographic value [[1:47:26]] there’s something in there now what it is i don’t know like you know maybe if you ask somebody like [[1:47:32]] some sad guru or you know like somebody who who really knows all these things they may be able to [[1:47:38]] perhaps walk you through it or perhaps even they cannot tell it to you in language maybe you know it’s something that they you know your internal state [[1:47:45]] needs to fractify to that level in order to be able to kind of process that um [[1:47:51]] so i think all we can do at this point is [[1:47:57]] just don’t you know demolish or cover up those temples thinking that it’s obscene [[1:48:02]] leave it at least for now just leave it as an artistic interest if there are people [[1:48:09]] who can tell us what the technological inner yogic meaning of all that was that’s wonderful if not [[1:48:14]] let’s just leave it alone until somebody comes in the future who can kind of re [[1:48:19]] kind of re-re-enchant all that for us

ramji says [[1:48:24]] thank you for the questions. navanidan my friend from chennai very smart guy

how would we establish giants as [[1:48:30]] established nepalese and the cognitive transitions that led us to modernity it seems speculative although interesting [[1:48:36]] and difficult to verify

i think that is a fair [[1:48:42]] a fair assessment a lot of the work on james has actually addressed this particular [[1:48:47]] challenge they have you know looked at some hunter gatherers and you know that sort of thing and i think a lot of [[1:48:53]] that is it’s along the lines of [[1:48:58]] to some extent along the lines of you know like darwinian biology and all that right like you can’t really like see that biology evolution happening but [[1:49:04]] it’s a kind of a story that you piece together and perhaps you can make some predictions off of it [[1:49:11]] and you can you know if those predictions especially if they can be verified in people whom [[1:49:17]] we suspect are kind of quasi bicameral like a very advanced sadhaka or [[1:49:24]] you know perhaps some shaman in a tribe somewhere in an uncontacted tribe perhaps we can [[1:49:30]] say that these predictions we made based on james’s theory seem to be bearing out on the study that these people on whom [[1:49:38]] we conducted you know whom we predicted they probably are still kind of quasi-bicameral [Applause]