primate

But it does: (real) time doesn't seem to exist in dream-like states.

After the soul leaves the body, all personality (ego) should disappear. The soul then becomes consciously aware of its actual position: 'one with Brahman'. At this point, all individuality as we know it has disappeared. The individual Jiva, Soul or Atman returns to its source from which it will not return of its own volition. However, certain souls may return for reasons understood only by Narayana/Krishna.

A lucid dream is a dream in which the person is aware that they are dreaming while the dream is in progress, also known as a conscious dream. When the dreamer is lucid, they can actively participate in and often manipulate the imaginary experiences in the dream environment. Lucid dreams can be extremely real and vivid depending on a person's level of self-awareness during the lucid dream. A lucid dream can begin in one of two ways. A dream-initiated lucid dream (DILD) starts as a normal dream, and the dreamer eventually concludes that they are dreaming, while a wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD) occurs when the dreamer goes from a normal waking state directly into a dream state with no apparent lapse in consciousness. Lucid dreaming has been researched scientifically, and its existence is well established. There is a strong tendency to forget what one has dreamt. The ability to recall dreams is often described as the first step towards lucid dreaming. Better dream recall increases awareness of dreams in general; so any lucid dreams one has are also less likely to be forgotten entirely. There are key times at which this state is best entered; while success at normal bedtime after having been awake all day is very difficult, it is relatively easy after sleeping for 3–7 hours or in the afternoon during a nap. Techniques for inducing WILDs abound. Dreamers may count, envision themselves climbing or descending stairs, chant to themselves, control their breathing, count their breaths to keep their thoughts from drifting, concentrate on relaxing their body from their toes to their head, or allow images to flow through their "mind's eye" and envision themselves jumping into the image to maintain concentration and keep their mind awake, while still being calm enough to let their body sleep. Reality testing (or reality checking) is a common method used by people to determine whether or not they are dreaming. It involves performing an action with results that will be different if the tester is dreaming. By practicing these tests during waking life, one may eventually decide to perform such a test while dreaming, which may fail and let the dreamer realize that they are dreaming. Common reality tests include: - The pinch reality check: Pinch any part of your body and if you feel no pain (or if it feels "different" or "obstructed" compared to waking life) then it is a dream. - The nose reality check: Pinch your nose and if you are able to breathe without using your mouth, it is a dream. - Looking at one's digital watch (remembering the time), looking away, and looking back. As with text, the time will probably have changed randomly and radically at the second glance or contain strange letters and characters. (Analog watches do not usually change in dreams, while digital watches and clocks have great tendency to do so.) - Flipping a light switch. Light levels rarely change as a result of the switch flipping in dreams. - Looking into a mirror; in dreams, reflections from a mirror often appear to be blurred, distorted, incorrect, or frightening. - Looking at the ground beneath one's feet or at one's hands. If one does this within a dream the difference in appearance of the ground or one's hands from the normal waking state is often enough to alert the conscious to the dream state. - Pick up a book and look inside. Often, the pages will be blank, or change after the second look. - Look at your surroundings. If the placement of the buildings is different from what it ought to be, you are in a dream (for example, the Great Pyramids next to your house). Given the frequent bizarreness, illogic and dislocation of dreams, some researchers have questioned why dreamers are not lucid all of the time. How can our dreaming selves accept as real so many settings, images and events that in waking life, we assume, would immediately jolt us into disbelief? The answer to this has been approached in three categories of investigation. Depth psychology suggests that the unconscious “dream-work” is repressing or inhibiting critical evaluation of the dream in order to perform its salutary function. “Belief” in the dream symbols and experience is required for healing, personality integration or catharsis to take place. Lucidity can only arise if a person is relatively free of un-reconciled conflicts which form barriers. Physiology suggests that “seeing is believing” to the brain during any mental state. Even waking consciousness is liable to accept discontinuous or illogical experience as real if presented as such to the brain. Dream consciousness is similar to that of a hallucinating awake subject. Dream or hallucinatory images triggered by the brain stem are considered to be real, even if fantastic. The impulse to accept the evident is so strong the dreamer will often invent a memory or story to cover up an incongruous or unrealistic event in the dream. “That man has two heads!” is usually followed not with “I must be dreaming!” but with “Yes, I read in the paper about these famous Siamese twins.” Developmental psychology suggests that the dream world is not bizarre at all when viewed developmentally, since we were dreaming as children before we learned all of the physical and social laws that train the mind to a “reality.” Fluid imaginative constructions may have preceded the more rigid, logical waking rules and continue on as a normative lifeworld alongside the acquired, waking life world. Dreaming and waking consciousness differ only in their respective level of expectations, the waking “I” expecting a stricter set of “reality rules” as the child matures. The experience of “waking up” normally establishes the boundary between the two lifeworlds and cues the consciousness to adapt to waking “I” expectations. At times, however, this cue is false—a false awakening. Here the waking “I” (with its level of expectations) is activated even though the experience is still hallucinatory. Incongruous images or illogical events during this type of dream can result in lucidity as the dream is being judged by waking “standards.”

If we assume that ultimately everything is one absolute unitary whole or consciousness (Advaita), then how could there be a (non-illusory) center of the universe?

You are probably right..

I hope he did not achieve liberation and that he is still 'here', as a reincarnated soul.

The real answer may be: Advaita/monism. Everything is one..

I had to look it up : Noosphere literally means: 'the sphere of thought'. In the original theory of Vladimir Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky's noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements. For French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , the noosphere is best described as a sort of 'collective consciousness' of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds as growing awareness and the evolution of consciousness towards the Omega Point: a maximum level of complexity and consciousness into which the universe appears to be evolving. In his controversial 1994 book The Physics of Immortality,Frank Jennings Tipler III expands Teilhard's notion of the Omega Point. He claims to provide a mechanism for immortality and the resurrection of the dead consistent with the known laws of physics, in the form of a computer intelligence which he terms the Omega Point and which he identifies with God. The line of argument is that the evolution of intelligent species will enable scientific progress to grow exponentially, eventually enabling control over the universe even on the largest possible scale. Tipler predicts that this process will culminate with an all-powerful intelligence whose computing speed and information storage will grow exponentially at a rate exceeding the collapse of the universe, thus providing infinite "experiential time" which will be used to run computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived in the history of our universe. This virtual reality emulation is what Tipler means by "the resurrection of the dead." In more recent works, Tipler says that the existence of the Omega Point is required to avoid the violation of the known laws of physics. One of the original aspects of the noosphere concept deals with evolution. Henri Bergson (1907) was one of the first to propose that evolution is 'creative' and cannot necessarily be explained solely by Darwinian natural selection. L'évolution créatrice is upheld, according to Bergson, by a constant vital force that animates life and fundamentally connects mind and body, an idea opposing the dualism of René Descartes. In 1923, C. Lloyd Morgan took this work further, elaborating on an 'emergent evolution' that could explain increasing complexity (including the evolution of mind). Morgan found that many of the most interesting changes in living things have been largely discontinuous with past evolution, and therefore did not necessarily take place through a gradual process of natural selection. Rather, evolution experiences jumps in complexity (such as the emergence of a self-reflective universe, or noosphere). Finally, the complexification of human cultures, particularly language, facilitated a quickening of evolution in which cultural evolution occurs more rapidly than biological evolution. Recent understanding of human ecosystems and of human impact on the biosphere have led to a link between the notion of sustainability with the "co-evolution" and harmonization of cultural and biological evolution. The resulting political system has been referred to as a noocracy. (from Wikipedia)

Endorphins are endogenous opioid polypeptide compounds which are produced by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus in vertebrates during strenuous exercise, excitement, and climax, and they resemble opiates in their abilities to produce analgesia and a sense of well-being. (from Wikipedia)

How can something that "holds great spritual value" be non addictive?

According to Einstein, time is like space. So what we perceive as ‘time’ may be only our brain’s interpretation of a 4th spatial dimension of reality. Imagine that everything that existed in the past and everything that will exist in the future, is in fact simultaneously present in a 4 dimensional space without time. Such a 4 dimensional spatial reality may be so vast that we can only consciously perceive tiny parts of it at once when we 'travel' through it. Hence, the construct/perception of time..

Just like the earth’s weather, human society is a global 'chaotic system'. The dynamics of a growing population and resulting political conflicts and wars, intimately coupled with economic mechanisms such as global trade and industry, can be shown to behave chaotically. Both economic – and meteorological models share a fundamental limit to their predictive power: chaos. Good theorizing about such systems is all about avoiding assumptions. A minute change in what is posited, may greatly affect the ultimate conclusion of your theory. In general, conspiracy theories seem to rely on assumptions that are solely based on observed concurrences of specific events, or observed patterned sequences of events. There isn’t any fundament of proven relevant facts, and the conclusions are (of course) always speculative, i.e., not purely based on proven knowledge. In the context of chaos this means that the conclusions can be very wrong. Moreover, any chaotic system displays a characteristic autonomous intrinsic order, which can be perceived by us in principle. In the case of chaotic human society, such regular systematic behavior can easily be misinterpreted as 'a global conspiracy’.

Simply prove it.

Continuous cosmic ray impacts transform nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere into carbon-14 atoms. Carbon-14 is an unstable variant of carbon, which will radioactively decay back into nitrogen with a half-life of 5730 years. In the mean time, carbon-14 reacts with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce carbon dioxide, just like (normal) stable carbon-12 and carbon-13. Plants take up atmospheric carbon dioxide by photosynthesis, and plants are ingested by animals. So every living thing is constantly exchanging carbon-14, 13 and 12 with its environment as long as it lives. Once it dies, however, this exchange stops, and the amount of carbon-14 gradually decreases through radioactive beta decay. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 (relative to stable carbon-12 and carbon-13) in organic materials, the age of the materials can be estimated. This method of dating (nothing to do with girlfriends) can be used up to an age of about 60,000 years. The amount of carbon-14 in older organic material is too small to reliably estimate the age of the materials. The accuracy of carbon-14 dating also dependents on the assumption that the amount of cosmic ray impacts in the atmosphere has been constant over time. It has been shown, however, that the concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere varies with time as well as with locality, indicating that the amount of cosmic ray impacts is in fact not constant. So, carbon-14 dating is not a reliable dating method, and it is obviously completely useless for determining whether dinosaurs and men lived at the same time. But it can be used to determine that certain (anatomically modern) human remains, that are proclaimed to be millions of years old, are in fact less than 60,000 years old, and therefore they can’t be the remains of anatomically modern humans that lived at the same time as dinosaurs, whose (fossilized) remains are most certainly much older than 60,000 years. What's carbon-18 dating?

Basically the earth is as old as the universe itself (about 13.7 billion years)..

The universe seems to be about 13.7 billion years old, and the age of the earth is about 4.5 billion years. Earth was formed from space debris attracted by a black hole that resulted from the collapse of a large star (supernova). This black hole is now the centre of our galaxy (the Milky Way). It attracted/attracts all matter that formed/forms our own solar system, along with hundreds of millions of other solar systems within our galaxy. The early formation of the earth was quite chaotic. By coincidence a lump of matter had formed orbiting our sun, which was large enough to capture enough debris (dust, asteroids, etc.) in its gravitational field to become a planet. Initially, planet Earth was very hot as a result of the energy of the impacting debris. But gradually debris locally run out and the earth cooled. First life may have appeared as early as 4.0 billion years ago. So, I would say 'it took Lord Brahma' about 0.5 billion years 'to create the earth'.

Exactly. The Purana authors obviously didn’t know about evolution theory. But somehow they may have been aware of the fact that life began on earth 2 billion years ago. Without a theory of evolution, however, they had to assume that human life began 2 billion years ago. Their source of information apparently didn’t ‘explain’ all the specifics in terms of genetics and early microbial life that gradually evolved into human life over a period of 2 billion years. Or maybe it did explain all this, but the authors didn’t understand it.

There is not a single piece of hard evidence for the thesis that anatomically modern humans lived in ancient times, say millions or even billions of years ago. And Carbon 14 tests of bones that were supposedly found in such ancient geological strata, consistently come up with much younger dates. Moreover, the most compelling very hard evidence in favor of standard evolution theory is that we share 99% of our genetic makeup with Chimpanzees. Bhagavata Purana states that humans have lived on earth for a period of time called the Day of Brahma (i.e., 4.32 billion years, or a thousand yuga cycles, where each yuga cycle lasts 12,000 years of the gods and each year of the gods equals 360 earth years). Could it be that this mustn't be taken literally? Scripture may then simply refer to our ancient evolutionary lineage, starting with our microbial ancestors that lived a few billion years ago.

The oldest fossil remains of upright walking (bipedal) hominoids are about 4 million years old (Australopithecus afarensis). The earliest remains of modern humans (homo sapiens) are 195,000 years old. The entire human population appears to have been nearly wiped out about 70,000 years ago, apparently as the result of a super volcanic event that triggered a volcanic winter. The number of humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again. Dinosaurs lived hundreds of millions of years ago and became completely extinct about 66 million years ago, long before the first hominoids appeared.

That sounds more like good old survival of the fittest. And, indeed, without our current global infra-structure in place, it seems impossible to maintain a worldwide population of 5 billion+. We may die like rats. However, those who survive will be extremely ‘fit’, which most likely will not be in the best interest of any globalist elite still alive that orchestrated it all. Anyway, you seem convinced that something like this is going on. I don’t know much about Alex Jones and others like him. They appear to present the most ‘insane’ economic scenario imaginable, with planned manipulations and conspiracies starting long before the first world war. Generally people and organizations don’t have such long term goals, but who knows. I guess, however, that this is just the blackest possible version of modern history and I don't take it seriously right now..

Crossbreeding gorillas and humans won't work So what exactly is meant by ‘eugenics’? Does it mean the application of Mendel’s laws to the inheritance of human traits through selective breading and/or selective killing? Or does it mean some form of (Lamarckian) gene manipulation (such as ‘gene therapy’, i.e., the insertion of genes into an individual's cells and tissues in order to change its organism and possibly its offspring)? Personally I’m not convinced at all that eugenetic manipulation via this last route is possible. And I’m quite sure that our human genetic makeup cannot be manipulated directly in any useful way because of the sheer complexity of the process of ‘gene expression’ that drives human embryonic development and growth (which is after all the product of 4 billion years of biological evolution). Perhaps medical treatment of some genetic diseases that are coded by a single defective gene may ultimately be possible. But most human traits are encoded in the genome by many genes that interact in a highly complex manner. And yes, Krishna must be the ultimate controller..

Ah, well, that’s settled then..

Please explain.. I don't understand..

Hmm.., you really think so? And isn't that just evolution 'at work'? Anyway, I guarantee that overall genetics (DNA; live; the origin of species; etc.) is far too complex for us (humans) to control. So, don't worry about it..

Yes, I think I really do believe that. And/but what we need is some form of global education about this.