Kulapavana

prana is the subtle cosmic energy which we also need, just as we need calories and vitamins

as I mentioned before, the numbers in Bhagavatam relate to the comparative elevation of particular planes of existence with respect to Garbodhaka ocean and each other. they are NOT linear distances between planets. linear distances between planets vary tremendously depending on their orbital movement.

*sigh* Moon is moon, and you can see it in the sky every night. Rahu is invisible and is usually located in the zone of shadow past the Moon.

from the physical perspective it is the unique wavelenghts of this light that help plants absorb prana

actually, it is more like unfolding a surface of a sphere onto a flat surface. when you are just walking on the Earth you CAN describe what you see as if the Earth was flat. it is called: a map /images/graemlins/wink.gif

these people (Darfur blacks) should be armed by other countries so they can defend themselves or die with dignity. making them into refugees solves nothing.

read about Bhu-mandala in Bhagavatam or better yet in Markandeya Purana. especially in MP the Bhu-mandala is clearly broken down to part accessible in our dimension and other parts. these other parts were formerly accessible to yogis from our dimension, and they were the ones providing descriptions of BM in the Vedas.

yes, Avinash, it is quite similar. The Moon plane of exitence is huge to it's inhabitants, but what we see here on our plane of existence is only a small, barren ball of rock.

***NASA landed on the "reflection" of the Moon plane of existence into our dimension.***

just as ghosts are mere shadows and reflections in our dimension (world) so are the higher worlds. Earth is a part of the gigantic Bhu-mandala, but in our dimension it is merely a planet. The same with Moon. in our dimension it is merely Earth's moon.

what is more: our dimension changes with time. the connections (passages) between different dimensions weaken with time, and in this Age they are pretty much all gone. The last "gates" to close were the gates to Naga-loka.

"Non-linear even within a given dimension"

that means no matter how fast and how long you travel within a given dimension you will NEVER reach the end of it and get out of the universe. thus, all distances given in the Vedas are just a matter of giving us some idea of proportions.

there is more to it, but I will leave it at that for now.

yes, I read his diaries regularly. I preached in Poland for many years in my youth /images/graemlins/smile.gif

thank you for posting this inspiring story. it made me cry too. I wish I had 1/100 of the devotional determination this sankirtan devotee has...

Source: news.independent.co.uk

Official: Coke Takes Over Parts of The Brain That Pepsi Can't Reach

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

17 October 2004

The mind-altering power of advertising has been demonstrated in a remarkable study of the way in which brand recognition affects the workings of the human brain.

A well-known label is so influential, say researchers, that it can alter consumers' perception of the product's taste. They believe the findings are particularly important given the role that sugared soft drinks have on the epidemic of childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes.

The experiment, a laboratory-controlled version of the famous Pepsi Challenge, revealed that flavour seems to be the last thing that consumers rely on in their preference for Pepsi or Coca-Cola.

When asked to taste blind, they showed no preference. However, when the participants were shown company logos before they drank, the Coke label, the more famous of the two, had a dramatic impact: three-quarters of the tasters declared they preferred Coke.

At the same time the researchers found that the Coke label stimulated a huge increase in activity in parts of the brain associated with cultural knowledge, memory and self-image - so much that the scientists could use brain scans to predict which soft drink an individual was likely to prefer. The Pepsi label produced no such increase.

It is believed to be the first time that brand marketing has been shown to have a direct effect on the brain's capacity to make a choice.

Although the finding seems calculated to delight the marketing industry, it suggests that a handful of iconic brands have a particular hold on the public mind. Coca-Cola is so firmly established that it changed our perception of Christmas by persuading us that Santa Claus wears red. This "tradition" is believed to be largely the result of decades of December advertising in which Santa sported the company's corporate colour.

The findings suggest there is no scientific basis for claims made during the Pepsi ad campaign in which testers purportedly chose Pepsi over Coke when they were not told what they were drinking. "We initially measured these behavioural preferences by administering double-blind taste tests," the researchers say in their study, published in the current issue of the journal Neuron. "We found that subjects split equally in their preference for Coke and Pepsi in the absence of brand information."

The scientists chose Pepsi and Coke because the two drinks are almost indistinguishable in colour and taste yet many people express a definite preference for one or the other soft drink. "Everybody's heard of Coke and Pepsi. They have messages and, in the case of Coke, those message have insinuated themselves in our nervous system," Dr P Read Montague, director of the Brown Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College in Houston, Texas, said. "There's a huge effect of the Coke label on brain activity related to the control of actions, the dredging up of memories and self-image. There is a response in the brain which leads to a behavioural effect."

Simply looking at a person's brain scan, the scientists were able to predict which soft drink the individual concerned was likely to prefer. "We were stunned by how easy this was," Dr Montague said. The ventral putamen, which is involved in reward-related learning, was active when people drink Coke or Pepsi. This is expected as the brain treats the pleasant taste of sugared water as a reward.

However, the scans also showed that the hippocampus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain involved in recalling emotions and cultural memories, were involved when the volunteers were exposed to the Coke brand. The Pepsi brand, meanwhile, had virtually no effect.

Dr Montague said that the work can help to understand why people form eating or drinking habits that may not be good for their health.

"We are not trying to figure out how to market something better. We want to be able to better understand how brains work so that we can cure more neurological disorders."

the key to understanding Vedic cosmology is the understanding of SPACE. unless you truly comprehend the Vedic concept of space you will be forever confused.

according to the Vedas space is:

1. Multidimensional

2. Non-linear even within a given dimension.

the measurements given in Bhagavata ot Markandeya Puranas are just to provide us with a sense of scale. these measurements mostly relate to the comparative elvation of the planes of existence (above the Garbodhaka Ocean and between each other)

as to the Moon landing:

NASA landed on the "reflection" of the Moon plane of existence into our dimension.

Because US industrial military complex created him, trained him and equipped him, in order to provide them with:

MANY, MANY YEARS OF PROFITABLE BUSINESS

yes prabhu, it was me you heard there. I enjoyed Maharaja's visit immensly. it was the first time I have seen him in person, altough I have been reading his works for years.

US invaded Iraq to prevent WMD's from getting into wrong hands? LOL! The only thing they wanted to keep from getting into wrong hands was the OIL. read this article:

VIENNA (Reuters) - The mysterious removal of Iraq's mothballed nuclear facilities continued long after the U.S.-led invasion and was carried out by people with access to heavy machinery and demolition equipment, diplomats said on Thursday.

The United Nations nuclear watchdog told the Security Council this week that equipment and materials that could be used to make atomic weapons had been vanishing from Iraq without either Baghdad or Washington noticing.

"This process carried on at least through 2003 ... and probably into 2004, at least in early 2004," said a Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitored Iraq's nuclear sites before last year's war.

That contrasted with statements by Western and Iraqi officials, who have played down the disappearance of the equipment. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said on Tuesday he believed most of the removals took place in the chaos shortly after the March 2003 invasion.

The United States and Britain said they invaded to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. Both countries now admit toppled ruler Saddam Hussein had no such weapons.

Several diplomats close to the IAEA said the disappearance of the nuclear items was not the result of haphazard looting.

They said the removal of the dual-use equipment -- which before the war was tagged and closely monitored by the IAEA to ensure it was not being used in a weapons programme -- was planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing.

"We're talking about dozens of sites being dismantled," a diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "Large numbers of buildings taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you'd do overnight." ...

reading our thoughts?

Source: www.nature.com

Published online: 13 October 2004;

Paralysed Man Sends E-mail By Thought

Roxanne Khamsi

Brain chip reads mind by tapping straight into neurons.

An pill-sized brain chip has allowed a quadriplegic man to check e-mail and play computer games using his thoughts. The device can tap into a hundred neurons at a time, and is the most sophisticated such implant tested in humans so far.

Many paralysed people control computers with their eyes or tongue. But muscle function limits these techniques, and they require a lot of training. For over a decade researchers have been trying to find a way to tap directly into thoughts.

In June 2004, surgeons implanted a device containing 100 electrodes into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic. The device, called the BrainGate, was developed by the company Cyberkinetics, based in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Each electrode taps into a neuron in the patient's brain.

The BrainGate allowed the patient to control a computer or television using his mind, even when doing other things at the same time. Researchers report for example that he could control his television while talking and moving his head.

The team now plans to implant devices into four more patients.

Brain waves

The tiny sensor consists of an array of 100 electrodes to capture signals from the brain.

Rival teams are building devices to read brain activity without touching neurons. Neural Signals, based in Atlanta, has patented a conductive skull screw that sits outside the brain, just under the skull. Other researchers are developing non-invasive technologies, for example using an electroencephalogram to read a patient's thoughts.

But BrainGate's creators argue that such techniques only give a general picture of brain activity, and that the more direct approach allows more numerous and more specific signals to be translated. "This array has 100 electrodes, so one can theoretically tap into 100 neurons," says Jon Mukand, an investigator on the team based at the Sargent Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island.

This makes the technology faster and more flexible, he argues. "It's far more versatile when one can get a larger number of neurons."

But Stephen Roberts, an engineer at Oxford University, UK, who has worked on brain-computer interfaces, says the field is still waiting for a breakthrough. "We have to make something that works robustly and without a lot of patient training," he says. "Most of these devices work well on a small subset of patients, but there's a long way to go before getting them to work for the general population."

I would dare to say that all these climate changes indicate the coming of Golden Age of Lord Chaitanya! /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Published: September 25, 2004 Author: Robert Davison Wolf

National Geographic Magazine has decided to weigh in on the side of global warming. They conclude that the danger not only exists, but that man is a significant contributor.

The Magazine noted for its fluffy, mostly vacuous articles on natural science and archeology and famous with young boys for its pictures of topless natives, has for over one hundred years assiduously avoided political causes--but like another grand old lady, The New York Times, it may now have abandoned that objectivity.

The story is told with the vanity typical of the scientific community which places too great an emphasis on man’s capacity for shaping the environment perpetuating the hubris that nature could not prevail against man’s determination to “save the planet”.

It is self-evident, even to the vast right wing conspiracy, that mankind should not trash the planet. What isn’t clear to any, except the irrational, is why we should accept the Kyoto approach asking industrial nations to forgo the benefits of civilization to emulate the lifestyles of the 3rd world. What is most annoying is the malice of forethought that ignores two very significant ‘natural’ climatic events in this millennium.

According to authors Hubert Lamb and Le Roy Ladurie, between the 10th and 14th centuries AD, Earth's average global temperature was much warmer than it is today. This Medieval Warm Period is deduced from historical weather records and proxy climate data from England and Northern Europe.

The warmer conditions associated with this interval of time are known to have had a largely beneficial impact on Earth's plant and animal life. In fact, the environmental conditions of this time period have been determined to have been so favorable that it is often referred to as the Little Climatic Optimum. This is the period that corresponds to the Norse colonies in Greenland and Vinland that have so confounded historians.

In Europe, temperatures reached some of the warmest levels of the last 4,000 years, allowing enough grapes to be successfully grown in England to sustain an indigenous wine industry. Contemporaneously, horticulturists in China extended their cultivation of citrus trees and perennial herbs further and further northward, resulting in an expansion of their ranges that reached its maximum extent in the 13th century. From examining the climatic conditions required to grow these species successfully, it has been estimated that annual mean temperatures in the region must have been about 1.0 °C higher than at present, with extreme January minimum temperatures fully 3.5 °C warmer than they are today.

In North America, tree-ring chronologies from the southern Canadian Rockies have provided evidence for higher tree lines and wider ring-widths between 950 and 1100 AD, suggesting warmer temperatures and more favorable growing conditions. Similar results have been derived from tree-ring analyses of bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of California, where much greater growth was recorded in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Simultaneous increases in precipitation were additionally found to have occurred in monsoonal locations of the United States desert southwest, where there are indications of increased lake levels from AD 700-1350. Other data document vast glacial retreats during the Medieval Warm Period in parts of South America, Scandinavia, New Zealand and Alaska; and ocean-bed cores suggest global sea surface temperatures were warmer then as well. The Arctic ice pack substantially retreated allowing the settlement of both Iceland and Greenland; while alpine passes normally blocked with snow and ice became traversable, opening trade routes between Italy and Germany.

Contemporaneously, on the northern Colorado Plateau in America, the Anasazi Indian civilization reached its climax, as warmer temperatures and better soil moisture conditions allowed them to farm a region twice as large as is presently possible.

To confuse the Climatic issue further, there was a second event in which Western Europe experienced a general cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460 and a very cold climate between 1560 and 1850. The colder weather increased glaciation and storms had a devastating affect on those that lived near glaciers or the sea. For more, go to: http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/clim_hist_1thousand.htm

Scott A. Mandia, Assoc. Professor of Physical Sciences at SUNY Suffolk again relies heavily on Lamb and Ladurie in describing the opposite climatic events in the 14th through the 18th centuries.

Lamb (1966) points out that in the warmest times of the last 1000 years, southern England had the climate that Normandy, France has now. The difference between the two locations is about 350 miles. In other terms that means the growing season changed by 15 to 20 percent between the warmest and coldest times of the millennium. That is enough to affect almost any type of food production, especially crops highly adapted to use the full-season warm climatic periods. During the coldest times, England's growing season was shortened by one to two months compared to present day values. The availability of varieties of seed today that can withstand extreme cold or warmth, wetness or dryness, was not available in the past. Therefore, climate changes had a much greater impact in the past. The culmination in the year 1816 - "the year without a summer."

One of the worst famines in the seventeenth century occurred in France due to the failed harvest of 1693. Millions of people in France and surrounding countries were killed. The effect of this little ice age on Swiss farms was also severe. Due to the cooler climate, snow covered the ground deep into spring, and a parasite, known as Fusarium nivale, which thrives under snow cover, devastated crops. Additionally, due to the increased number of days of snow cover, the stocks of hay for the animals ran out so livestock were fed on straw and pine branches. Many cows had to be slaughtered.

In Norway, many farms located at higher latitudes were abandoned for better land in the valleys. By 1387, production and tax yields were between 12 percent and 70 percent of what they had been around 1300. In the 1460's it was being recognized that this change was permanent. As late as the year 1665, the total Norwegian grain harvest is reported to have been only 67 - 70 percent of what it had been about the year 1300 (Lamb, 1995.)

Ladurie (1971) notes that there were many "bad years" for wine during this period in France and surrounding countries due to very late harvests and very wet summers. The cultivation of grapes was extensive throughout the southern portion of England from about 1100-1300. This area is about 300 miles farther north than the areas in France and Germany that grow grapes today. Grapes were also grown in northern France and Germany at that time, areas that even today do not sustain commercial vineyards.

In fact, Lamb (1995) suggests that during that period the amount of wine produced in England was substantial enough to provide significant economic competition with the producers in France. With the coming cooler climate in the 1400's, temperatures became too cold for grape production and the vineyards in southern England ceased to exist and do not exist even today.

The study of the tree populations in forests of Southern Ontario by Campbell and McAndrews (1993) shows that after the year 1400, beech trees, the formerly dominant warmth-loving species, were replaced first by oak and subsequently by pine. Further, the forest under study appears to have remained in disequilbrium with the prevailing climate of today--suggesting that tree population distribution takes hundreds of years to recover from major climate changes.

The cooler climate during this time had a huge impact on the health of Europeans. As mentioned earlier, dearth and famine killed millions and poor nutrition decimated colonies of Vikings in Greenland, Vinland and Iceland.

In 1595, glacial advances at Gietroz (Switzerland) dammed the Dranse River and flooded Bagne resulting in 70 deaths. Between 1600-10: Advances by the Chamonix (France) glaciers caused massive floods which destroyed three villages and severely damaged a fourth. One village had stood since the 1200's. 1670-80 recorded the maximum historical advances by glaciers in eastern Alps. There was a noticeable decline of human population in the areas close to these glaciers, whereas population elsewhere in Europe had risen. Between 1695-1709 Icelandic glaciers advanced dramatically destroying farms. A glacier in Norway advanced at a rate of 100 meters per year from1710 to 1735—and from 1748 to 1750 Norwegian glaciers achieved their historical maximum positions. For more go to: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html

In light of these events, it is hard to mourn the retreat of today’s glaciers. Until science can explain these dramatic anomalies, who could reasonably put stock in the current, petty statistics involving fractions of degrees tormented into significance by flawed computer models--especially when just a short 30 years ago, these same sources were warning of an impending ice age.

©ROBERT DAVISON WOLF. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Source: Technology Review

Published: October 15, 2004 Author: Richard Muller

A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isn’t. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the “hockey stick,” the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues.

This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.

But now a shock: independent Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick.

In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasn’t so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker.

This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not.

To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends.

This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place.

In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance.

In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for the global climate data that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980.

But the computer program Mann used did not do that.

Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval.

This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA.

PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)

The net result: the “principal component” will have a hockey stick shape even if most of the data do not.

"I'm just wondering how long it will take them to start mandatory implantations at birth"

these chips can be implanted without your knowledge. the existing pneumatic implanting equipment causes minimal sensation, less than a mosquito bite. these chips are already in use here and in europe. US special ops soldiers get implants that allows their location be monitored via a satelite.

by "receiving the Vedas" I mean their origin, not realization of meaning.

I hope that clears it up, and I do agree with your statement above regarding the essence of the transfer of knowledge between guru and disciple.

there is a huge difference between receiving personal inspiration or even divine vision of transcendental pastimes through Lord in the Heart and receiving Vedas in the same manner. It is simply not done that way. The Urantia books effectively claim to be on the level of the Vedas, yet their origin is very dubious. A skilled writer and philosopher (on gross or subtle level) could have easily made such a presentation, motivated by any of the obvious reasons, including a desire to help others.

Yet, if this book truly inspires you in your spiritual life - it certainly is valuable, even if it is just fiction. However, I would NOT put it in the same category as the Vedas.