//////////////////////Chapter VIII: The Yoga of the Indestructible BrahmanSRI BHAGAVAAN UVAACHA: VIII.3. AKSHARAM BRAHMA PARAMAM SWABHAAVO'DHYAATMAMUCHYATE; BHOOTABHAAVODBHAVAKARO VISARGAH KARMASAMJNITAH. The Blessed Lord(Krishna) said(to Arjuna): Brahman is the Imperishable, the Supreme; His essential nature is called Self-knowledge; the offering (to the gods) which causes existence and manifestation of beings and which also sustains them is called action. VIII.4. ADHIBHOOTAM KSHARO BHAAVAH PURUSHASHCHAADHIDAIVATAM; ADHIYAJNO'HAMEVAATRA DEHE DEHABHRITAAM VARA. Adhibhuta (knowledge of the elements) pertains to My perishable Nature, and the Purusha or soul is the Adhidaiva; I alone am the Adhiyajna here in this body, O best among the embodied (men)!
/////////////////////ob=Why That Song's Stuck in Your Head
Posted: 24 Dec 2007 07:00 AM CST
"Why do those holiday tunes get stuck in your head so much?" I was invited to pose this question to Dr. Robert Zatorre, Co-Director of the BRAMS: Brain Music and Sound lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. Dr. Zatorre is a leading expert in neuroscience research on the biological basis of music; if anyone is able to explain why Jingle Bell Rock is haunting me, it's him.
Commonly known as earworms, some songs repeat in our mind. They are "typically annoying," said Dr. Zatorre. We often can't control it, the sounds won't go away, and they loop, repeating a refrain or short segment of music. I asked if earworms are related to symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and he said they are "maybe a mild form of obsessive thoughts" since they are intrusive, but everyone experiences them.
The auditory cortex is extremely efficient, he explained. In neuroimaging studies (like this one) he discovered that the same regions of the brain are active when you experience external sound as in imagining music. He theorizes that with intrusive imagined music, the auditory cortex is hyper-excited and "goes off on its own."
I asked why it's so easy to remember a song even we haven't heard it for a long time: it's the way it's encoded, and the context. "We know from psychology experiments that the more information, the more it sticks around," he said.
In pre-literate cultures, bards shared knowledge through songs, which may have been an evolutionary advantage (despite Stephen Pinker's claim that music is "auditory cheesecake" - in a 2007 Science article Zatorre was quoted as saying, "Pinker has served as a useful foil" for music biology researchers). He explained that trying to remember a list of 12 words on their own is difficult, but if he put them into a weird story then set it to music they're far easier to recall. It links one piece of information to another. As well, lyrics are easier to remember than regular speech because they are more poetic and rhythmic. He said that "may be the reason songs get stuck in your head: they are hard to forget, and also hard to suppress."
But if you don't want to think about Rudolph's shiny nose, "dashing through the snow" or you can't get Kylie Minogue's voice out of your head, Dr. Zatorre offers some advice. Substitute another song, but don't just listen to it, "active engage in other musical activity. It's much better to sing or play an instrument, since it's using more of that circuitry." Even with mashups and multitasking, you can't have more than one earworm in your mind simultaneously.
Still, beware Frosty the Snowman - he'll be back again one day.Read the comments on this post...
/////////////////////QUESTION: Why do men's clothes have buttons on the right while women's clothes have buttons on the left?ANSWER: When buttons were invented, they were very expensive and worn primarily by the rich. Because wealthy women were dressed by maids, dressmakers put the buttons on the maid's right. Since most people are right-handed, it is easier to push the left. And that's where women's buttons have remained since.QUESTION: Why are people in the public eye said to be "in the limelight"?ANSWER: Invented in 1825, limelight was used in lighthouses and stage lighting by burning a cylinder of lime which produced a brilliant light. In the theater, performers on stage "in the limelight" were seen by the audience to be the center of attention.QUESTION: Why do ships and aircraft in trouble use "mayday" as their call for help?ANSWER: This comes from the French word m'aidez -meaning "help me" -- and is pronounced "mayday,"
//////////////////////SSN FALL=PAY FALL
////////////////Keep Portion Sizes in Check at Parties
It's not as difficult as you might think to keep an eye on portion sizes when you're faced with the spread at holiday parties. In fact, by using a rule of thumb (or hand!) you can actually use your fingers and hand to measure standard serving sizes!
Yep, you've got a measuring cup right there at the end of your arm... and a spoon on your finger!
Fist = 1 cup, such as fruit or 1 medium whole, raw fruit
Half of Fist = 1/2 cup, such as a serving of rice or pasta
Both Thumbs = 1 ounce, such as a serving of cheese or meat
Tip of Thumb = Approximately 1 teaspoon
One Cupped Hand = 1 or 2 ounces of dry goods (nuts, cereal, pretzels)
Photo: Clipart.com
/////////////////DEAD SOULS=NIKOLAI GOGOL
The story follows the exploits of Chichikov, a young gentleman of middling social class and position. Chichikov arrives in a small town and quickly tries to make a good name for himself by impressing the many petty officials of the town. Despite his limited funds, he spends extravagantly on the premise that a great show of wealth and power at the start will gain him the connections he needs to live easily in the future. He also hopes to befriend the town so that he can more easily carry out his bizarre and mysterious plan to acquire "dead souls."
Chichikov and Nozdryov.
The government would tax the landowners on a regular basis, with the assessment based on how many serfs (or "souls") the landowner had on their records at the time of the collection. These records were determined by census, but censuses in this period were infrequent, far less so than the tax collection, so landowners would often find themselves in the position of paying taxes on serfs that were no longer living, yet were registered on the census to them, thus they were paying on "dead souls." It is these dead souls, manifested as property, that Chichikov seeks to purchase from people in the villages he visits; he merely tells the prospective sellers that he has a use for them, and that the sellers would be better off anyway, since selling them would relieve the present owners of a needless tax burden.
Although the townspeople Chichikov comes across are gross caricatures, they are not flat stereotypes by any means. Instead, each is neurotically individual, combining the official failings that Gogol typically satirizes (greed, corruption, paranoia) with a curious set of personal quirks. Furthermore, everything in the house seems to mirror the character of its owner: for instance, every piece of furniture in the house of Sobakevich is described as a miniature version of its owner.
Chichikov's macabre mission to acquire "dead souls" is actually just another complicated scheme to inflate his social standing (essentially a 19th century Russian version of the ever popular "get rich quick" scheme). He hopes to collect the legal ownership rights to dead serfs as a way of inflating his apparent wealth and power. Once he acquires enough dead souls, he will retire to a large farm and take out an enormous loan against them, finally acquiring the great wealth he desires.
Setting off for the surrounding estates, Chichikov at first assumes that the ignorant provincials will be more than eager to give their dead souls up in exchange for a token payment. The task of collecting the rights to dead people proves difficult, however, due to the persistent greed, suspicion, and general distrust of the landowners. He still manages to acquire some 400 souls, and returns to the town to have the transactions recorded legally.
Back in the town, Chichikov continues to be treated like a prince amongst the petty officials, and a celebration is thrown in honour of his purchases. Very suddenly however, rumours flare up that the serfs he bought are all dead, and that he was planning on eloping with the Governor's daughter. In the confusion that ensues, the backwardness of the irrational, gossip-hungry townspeople is most delicately conveyed. Absurd suggestions come to light, such as the possibility that Chichikov is Napoleon in disguise or the notorious and retired 'Captain Kopeikin,' who had lost an arm and a leg during a war. The now disgraced traveller is immediately ostracized from the company he had been enjoying and has no choice but to flee the town in disgrace.
///////////////////Even renowned atheist Sam Harris, the best-selling author of The End of Faith and the follow-up Letter to a Christian Nation, said belief is the "hinge upon which so much of human activity and human nature swings."
"You are to an extraordinary degree guided by, or misguided by, what you believe," Mr. Harris said. "If you're a racist, that is a result of what you believe about race. If you're a jihadist, that is built on what you believe about the Koran and supremacy of Islam. So belief is doing most of the work humans do. And it's an engine of conflict and reconciliation, so it really matters what people believe."
Of all the beliefs across time, there is none so seemingly extraordinary as belief in the Virgin Birth. Yet for hundreds of millions of people over the past 2,000 years it is the central idea on which everything else stands: God entered into humanity through the womb of the Virgin Mary to create a man who was also God. Without it, Jesus is just a Jewish prophet from Roman-occupied Palestine who had a few nice things to say. Without it, there is no calming of the seas or feeding the 5,000 with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. And there is no resurrection from the dead and there is no Christianity.
"This is simply the thing that happened," said Archbishop Collins.
The Catholic writer Romano Guardini called it the point "where the mind has stopped short at some intellectual impasse." And that point, he wrote, is "this journey of God from the everlasting into the transitory, this stride across the border into history ... something no human intellect can altogether grasp."
So why bother to grasp it if it is beyond human reason? What possible good can it do to believe in this miracle, let alone in any other religious belief? It is a question asked by secular societies that more and more see religion as divisive, superstitious and an elaborate but irrational story for children.
To Prof. Peterson, though, belief is not optional. And regardless of the specific belief, he maintains it is as necessary as air and water.
At its most basic level, belief acts like a set of headlights to guide us through a foggy universe that "is far more complicated than we are smart." So belief is eradicable, he said, because there will never be a time when we know everything.
"Ignorance is a condition of human existence and belief is a necessary means of coping with ignorance," he said. "The assumptions we make about the world directly regulate our emotions and they provide hope and inhibit anxiety."
But at a deeper level, belief represents patterns of a deeper reality that go beyond the physical world. They function like mathematical formulas that seem abstract but actually define an underlying physical reality.
"Our religious sense is grounded in biology," said Prof. Peterson. "It's not a simple cultural overlay. Religious belief and ritual are universal. It's as specifically human as language.
"What's repeated in profound systems of belief are the patterns of life. That's why they're so memorable," he said. "There is something about them that contains the essence of life. These stories can't be forgotten. That's why they last thousands of years."
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