Joy in Life and its effect on Brain Centre

Joy in Life and its effect on Brain Centre

Our brain is having billions of cells cramped together in a small space in our head. But the cells do not touch each other physically. There is a gap between each cell. This gap is called as synapse. The cells are having hair like filaments by which they touch the hairlike filaments of other cells. These hairlike filaments are called dendrites. The dendrites vary from person to person, from cell to cell. They may be 50 in some cases whereas in some other cased they may be 1000. They are not fixed. And through these dendrited they are able to communicate. The scientists have not been able to ascertain as to why some neurons that is brain cells have 50 dendrites for sending messages – that is communicating with other cells while some other neurons have 10,000 dendrites. Scientists are still investigating as to why it is so. They have got one very interesting finding and which is of particular interest to us in Sri Anand Yoga. And that is thay have observed people who are mentally active – old people who are mentally active – they are actually growing new dendrites all the time. This was finding by Marian Diamond at Barkley, who had done experiments on rats and he had shown that the brains of rats grew or shrank according to the environment in which they were there. Rats which were confined to the small cages and had no social interaction, there was no fun in life as compared to the other rats – their brain, i.e. their cortexes show shrinking and they had lot of loss of dendrites. On the other hand, rats which were put back with their friends, in their society and given lot of stimulation – their brains expanded and grew more dendrites. So this gave physiological explanation as to why lonely or isolated old people are much more likely to get confused, disoriented and seem to living in void than other old people who are actively involved with family and friends.

There is one other interesting angle to this aspect. One is tempted to conclude that having more dendrited means having more developed brain. But it is not so. Very very curious and interesting observation and which in Sri Anand Yoga we are very much interested is that the babies – small babies are born with many more dendrites than their grown adults. So this is very curious. When we say that the old people get mentally active, they grow more dendrites – but babies are already having far more dendrites than the grown up people. And as they mature their dendrites fall away – their dendrites become less and less. So maturing means the lowering of the count of number of dendrites which the baby is having. Ultimately it settles to the level whereby it had whatever its needs are – in other words how much a human person is using his brain. Whatever use is there  of a person for his brain that much dendrites he will be having. We can not put any mathematical equation for this but this has been ascertained that baby is having more dendrites and it goes down and it settles as per the use of the brain and along with this we have to see that the old brains – brains of older people – they are capable of growing more dendrites as their social interaction increases.

Now why the dendrites on the brain cell of the babies are more and it goes down ? This can be compared to an experiment which we can do anywhere. Put a ball and bounce it on the floor. When we bounce it on the floor, it bounces back to almost the same height to which we bounced it. and slowly it goes on bouncing bouncing bouncing on the floor and with every bounce its height goes down down down untill  at the end of say 9^th bounces it goes flat on the floor. This is like in the case of the babies. Initially we are energetic, we are active – babies want to ask so many questions, they are active, they are joyful, they are playful, they want to enjoy life – but then we put restrictions on them, we try to discipline them, we try to culture them, we try to train them in our own way. With the result we put restrictions, we tell them don’t do this, don’t do that, do this, do that – thereby killing their spontaneity of a child. And this results in a lessening of  dendrites. If we are able to bring up a child, not putting lot of restrictions on him and grooming it carefully, nurturing it with love then we will be able to keep the dendrites count at very high level. This is supported by the scientific finding. I do not know if anybody has done this experiment, but scientists have known that babies are having more dendrites and the dendrite count goes down as they grow adult.

There is a common understanding or common perception amongst scientists that our brain lose around a million neurons i.e. brain cells every year. As we grow older, the brain starts shrinking. But this is not provable because nobody can count the brain cells of a living brain. They can only have a deductive logic by having the brain weighed of a dead person and then draw conclusions out of that. But this is in doubt. It is very much in doubt whether we are really losing a million neurons every year without any replacement. We may be losong but there are replacements. Mr Robert Terry, a neuroscientist at te University of California at Santiago. He had some interesting finding in this respect. What he has observed is that there is no significant decline in neuron density in very three important areas of the brain – what he has said is that the number of large neurons does decrease but that is offset by the increase in smaller neurons. And large neurons also appear not to be dyeing but shrinking. There can not be any conclusive proof because of the limitations in doing experiments on living brain cells. But this is very interesting finding. Other neuroscientist Samuel Weiss and Brian Reynold of the University of Calgerry in Albetta – they have done experiment on brain and they have found that they can stimulate dormant brain cell to active life. What they have done  - they have cultivated mouse neurons in the laboratory and gave them a chemical called Epidermal Growth Factor causing the immature inactive brain cells to divide and form mature ones. And human brain is almost certainly storing such dormant cells for use as a replacement reserve. What we say is that we are having lot of dormant cells because of non use. We do not use full capacity of brain. We do not live our life to a full extent. That is why we are having these dormant cells. And it is possible to bring these dormant cells into life. What the scientists have done chemically we can do it without chemicals.

Brain has its own natural mechanism for activating itself in old age. It is very interesting to know that after you pass the age of 80, new dendrites grow longer and sprout more new branches. It is very interesting. It becomes more and more complex after they pass 80. So as neurons shrink, they create new synapses which in turn stimulates more endocrenical activity in the brain. There is a protein called Nerve Growth Factor (NGF). This is natural substance and this natural substance stimulate the growth and repair of a brain cell. At John Hopkins Laboratory this NGF experiment was done and it was shown that NGF prevented the degenaration of old neurons in rats and monkeys when this was injected into the brain of old rats. This improved to a very significant extent the spatial memory – i.e. memory related to the space.

The study was conducted at this university it was a very long term study and it was found out that there was no general decline in intelligence amongst old people unless they are suffering from high blood pressure. Till the age of 120 – which is our natural biological age – if we do not fall sick, we will live upto the age of 120. And scientists have more or less concluded that sickness, not the ageing process itself is to create decline in mental functioning.

Art of Positive Dieing and Rebirth

The Art of Positive Dieing and Rebirth Shrikant Soman

Human being is expert in playing mental games. Right from early childhood, we keep on playing variety of games on continuous basis. Every pursuit is taken like a challenge, a win-lose situation. As the age advances, we go on playing more and more complex games. These games are not just ‘intellectual manoeuvres’ like that of the game of chess. The are full of emotional dramas. It is said that ‘we think that is why we are’. I would like to say ‘We play games, that is the way we know that we exist’. If we stop playing games, we feel insecure. Our very existence as we know it gets threatened. Playing games makes us in the midst of ‘activity’ and therefore ‘existence’ – or so we think.

These games can be benign or harmful. I am not using the word ‘game’ in a derisive manner. It just signifies that
1 We must win in the process
2 There has to be some excitement
3 There are more than one player
4 There has to be some emotional produce out of the play.

This is not bad by itself. The world was created in a play or ‘leela’ of the Supreme Creator. Playing games is the very essence of learning the lessons of life and enjoying our existence in this birth. The problem starts when we get so much absorbed in the game that we tend to ‘forget’ that after all it is only a game and a small projection of our life. We start thinking that it is our whole life itself. We tend to lose our independent ‘soul awareness’ and take the game situation as the sole reality- our whole existence.

This is the cause of our anxiety and tension-filled life.

In order to get us out of this self-made set of illusory snares, we need to find some radical solutions. The conventional wisdom has advised us believe that this world is a Maya – Illusion – false. This samsara is the cause of our misery. We need to abandon the desire of this samsara and get free. However, this solution does not work. This is like killing the patient is we are not able to cure him. The knot of samsara is not released. It is only cut. This gives the scope for new knots being formed again and again.

Instead of quitting the game, we need to play it from different perspective. This will help us to release the knot as well as prevent the new knots getting formed. And here we are helped by the ‘Art of Positive Dieing and Rebirth’.
Dieing implies total abandonment of our existing possessions – including intangible assets of our emotional network with situations, people and incidences and getting into different world altogether. Generally the dieing process is feared upon by the human being. It is the most dreadful eventuality of our life. Instead of decently and gently getting into the car of life transition, we are literally ‘dragged’ inside it in a very rude and crude manner by the hand of ‘Yama’ the lord of death.

Positive dieing implies getting into the car voluntarily, decently, gentlemanly and ‘in style’. We do not have to be ‘dragged’ inside. We step in a Royal Way. We do not consider death as something sorrowful, miserable, painful etc. We consider death as our life transforming experience. This is the art of positive dieing.

Rebirth implies getting born again to start afresh our life games. We ‘reset’ the ‘score card’ of our life to ‘zero’. This give us chance to chalk our fresh strategies, gather new resources to win the game.

Now here come an important point. I am not talking here of ‘once in a lifetime’ experience of death. In that sense we die only once – or rather we get a ‘chance’ to die only once in our lifetime. Our token of life is wasted when we use it just for once in the slotting machine of our games. We do not get a second chance.

I am talking here of applying this ‘positive dieing’ technique to our everyday living experience. Let us see how to apply this technique of ‘positive dieing’. I need to stress that we are not killing our desire to play games. Playing games is essential to life. We are only taking out the ‘anxiety’ from the process of playing games and make it truly an enjoyable activity. This we do by applying a ‘fuse’ in our ‘emotional circuitry’ and increasing our ‘attentive responsive’ behaviour when this fuse ‘blows out’. The purpose of fuse is cut off the power supply when the voltage increases beyond the capacity of the wires to sustain. The advantage of electrical fuse is that it ‘cuts off’ the power supply and avoids the possibility of the wires getting burned out. In the similar fashion, we apply this ‘fuse’ technique to our emotional circuitry. In the process of any of our life activity, if we start getting anxious about any possible outcome of our action, our fuse should blow off. It means that it gives us an indicator that the ‘voltage’ of our emotional charge is increasing to a dangerous level. With the aid of our ‘attentive responsive’ behaviour, we take a ‘hard look’ at our life situation and decide to apply the next process sequence of ‘positive dieing’. We give up all our ‘emotional’ expectations from the game. We do NOT give up our intellectual expectations. We still continue to play game. We still continue to play the game to win. However, the emotional ‘high voltage’ is now reduced with the application of the technique of ‘positive dieing’.

How this is exactly done ? In the first place we should be watchful about our inner emotional activities. Any first signs of anxiety over any matter is a red signal for us to get into the mode of ‘positive dieing’. When we get this red signal, we put into action our second army of soldiers. The purpose of these soldiers is to ‘shoot at sight’ any enemy movement. What is this enemy movement ? It is the ‘emotional hook-up’ in our mind for the ‘winning’ post of the game. We get obsessively ‘hooked’ to the winning post. This creates the anxiety. We feel that if we do not achieve the desired result out of our activity, we suffer a very heavy loss causing pain. The probability of this eventuality is the cause of our anxiety. Note that the source of anxiety is in the ‘probability’ of our losing the game and NOT in the actual incidence of the losing. When we put into action our second level of defence, we do the act of ‘positive dieing’. Instead of indulging the mental acrobat of ‘probability’ calculations, we actually imagine that the ‘worst’ case scenario – that is we losing the game- has actually happened. It is no more a probability. This is the process of dieing. We die in this particular game. We voluntarily die. We positively die. We are not dragged into the car but we get in ourselves, very gently, decently and gentlemanly. We imagine that we have lost the game, though all this while we should continue playing it intellectually to the best of our capabilities, but without any emotional drama. This is because we have now decided to ‘die’ in this game. It effectively means that after having stopped the mental activity of ‘probability calculation’ of our losing the game, we ‘reset’ our emotional contents in the game. We become like a clean slate emotionally. This is NOT taken as a sad thing – like the one we do when we die form this life at a final stage. Our technique is that of ‘positive dieing’ and not ‘traumatic negative dyeing’. We do not feel sad when we do the act of ‘resetting’ our emotional drama in the game.

To put it different way, when we start feeling anxious over any activity, we get alert and ‘empty’ out our negative emotions. Take an example of catching a next connecting flight. If you are coming from New York to Mumbai via Paris after changing the aircraft and the flight at Paris. If your plane gets delayed at New York putting you at the risk of losing on the connecting flight from Paris. This is a bothersome and annoying situation. It is surely a cause of anxiety. There is very little you can do to influence the positive outcome. It is beyond your capacity to do anything. But you still do the best thing available to you. You start getting anxious. You start getting worried. This is certainly in your hand – to worry. And you do it to the best of your ability. You start worrying. In our newly learned technique, we immediately get alerted the moment we are getting anxious about this eventuality. Then we apply the technique of ‘positive dyeing’. We still continue to wait for the aircraft at New York. However, we mentally decide that even if the worst scenario happens, we can do nothing about it to prevent it from happening. Therefore, we decide to ‘stop worrying’ and ‘stop getting anxious’ about it. We do the art of positive dyeing in this game.

What is the rebirth ? We reset the our score card to zero and start enjoying the game with full zeal and enthusiasm. This is the process of rebirth. In our above example of air journey, after having decided to accept the likely eventuality of missing the flight, we start giving attention to our surroundings, the interesting events happening around us, we start enjoying our waiting period at the airport. We find out some interesting and enjoying thing to do while we are waiting. This may even give us some bright idea about some brilliant solution to our problems. When we are in our best of the moods, the solutions to our problems appear more effortlessly. Even if this does not happen, we still enjoy our every moment in this ‘waiting period’. This is the rebirth.

We need to apply this technique of the ‘art of positive dieing and rebirth’ in all of our life situations which start giving us the ‘anxiety’. Actually we need to apply this technique every day, several times every day. We are continuously ‘dyeing’ and ‘re-birthing’.