BGITA

Reading the Bhagavad Gita opened to me a world I had never thought could exist. How many wonderful things I found therein! Many were amazing, not the least being the statement: “When the whole country is flooded, the reservoir becomes superfluous. So, to the illumined seer, the Vedas are all superfluous.” (Bhagavad Gita 2:46) Here was a scripture that told me I should go beyond it and know for myself–and showed me the way to do that! Sri Ramakrishna often used the simile of a letter. Once you read it and know what it says, what more need do you have for it?
The self cannot be known through scriptural study, for Krishna tells us that “he who even wishes to know of yoga transcends the Vedic rites.” (Bhagavad Gita 6:44) Books are nothing more than paper and ink. Obsession with them is detrimental, proving the truth of the statement that: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” (II Corinthians 3:6) We must get behind the words of even illumined masters and tap the Source of those words.
Sri Ramakrishna frequently pointed out that almanacs predict rainfall, but you cannot get a drop by squeezing them, however hard. In the same way, intense study of scriptures cannot give a drop of spiritual life, for no book can reveal That which lies beyond all we think or know. (“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8, 9))

///////////////////READING=In the latest study, the researchers sought to determine the limits of the ventral system. They asked 12 adult participants to read words of different lengths that were either intact or degraded (transformed) in one of three ways: they were rotated up to 90 degrees in either direction; extended visually in length, with up to three spaces between letters; or shifted into the far right or left visual field. As one might expect, the more degraded the visual representation of these words, the longer it took to comprehend them. Furthermore, reading time was related to the length of the words only when they were very degraded, suggesting that degraded words were being consciously deciphered. So far, so predictable. Results from functional MRI scans, however, provided far more interesting insights. Although intact or slightly degraded words activated the VWFA and the ventral route, text that was highly degraded activated another area often described as part of the dorsal route. This route has been linked to letter-by-letter processing especially in children who are learning to read.
The brain never ceases to impress me. It's easy to forget that reading - this ability to make sense of abstract symbols - is a purely cultural invention. Back in the Pleistocene, when natural selection was engineering the human brain, it never imagined that we'd get so obsessed with written language. And yet, thanks to the wonders of cortical plasticity, the mind has managed to internalize the skill, so that we can read this sentence without even thinking about it. It's as if your computer sprouted new microchips depending on how you used it.

///////////////////