The Spirituality Engine

By Abhijit Naskar

Spirituality is the magical word that gives mankind a feeling of divine bliss. It’s a sensation that often surpasses all the regulations of conventional religious beliefs. Apparently the sensation of spirituality brings a kind of strength and confidence in human personality and also keeps one calm in times of distress. In modern times, many people consider themselves to be more spiritual than religious. But what does religion have to do with the transcendental world of spirituality? Which one of them came first? Why does spirituality have such a deep impact over the human species? How exactly we humans attained such a state where everything seems so very meaningful? And the most sensitive question is, was a divine intervention at all necessary for the seeds of spirituality to grow within the human mind? In this exhilarating journey of neurobiology, we find true biological answers to those questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neuro Cookies
• Release date: Dec 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781386302261

Book preview

The Spirituality Engine

Abhijit Naskar is a celebrated neuroscientist, who became a beloved author all over the world with his first book The Art of Neuroscience in Everything. The book hit the bestsellers list within a few months of publication and heralded the advent of a rejuvenating scientific philosophy of the human mind. The purpose of this philosophy was to enrich human life with scientific sweetness. This book is a sequel to his another international bestselling work The God Parasite: Revelation of Neuroscience.

Also by Abhijit Naskar

The Art of Neuroscience in Everything

Your Own Neuron: A Tour of Your Psychic Brain

The God Parasite: Revelation of Neuroscience

Love Sutra: The Neuroscientific Manual of Love

Neurosutra: The Abhijit Naskar Collection

Homo: A Brief History of Consciousness

Autobiography of God: Biopsy of A Cognitive Reality

Biopsy of Religions: Neuroanalysis towards Universal Tolerance

Prescription: Treating India’s Soul

What is Mind?

In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience

Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost

THE

SPIRITUALITY

ENGINE

ABHIJIT

NASKAR

The Spirituality Engine

Copyright © 2017 Abhijit Naskar

This is a work of non-fiction

First Published in United States of America, in 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Neuro Cookies Edition, 2017

Dedicated to all the peace-loving humans on planet earth.

And definitely not dedicated to the delusional and harmful religious fundamentalists.

The world is evolutionarily filled with various kinds of people. Some are religious, some are spiritual, some are atheists and so on. But none of them is as dangerous as a religious fundamentalist.

Religious fundamentalism is an ancient plague in modern times. I prescribe pre-frontal lobotomy to all the fundamentalists of the world. However, the best way to exterminate them from the society is to not engage with them in any manner.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: The Spirit Emerges

Chapter 2: The Roots of Spirituality

Chapter 3: The Spiritual Guidance Engine

Chapter 4: The Spiritual Immune System

Chapter 5: Extremism & Atheism

Bibliography

Preface

Why do we believe what we believe?

Why some of us are religious, some spiritual, some extremists, some agnostics and some atheists?

Why there is one elementary commonality among all religions, i.e. Spirituality?

What is it that makes various human beings perceive different things at different moral, logical and spiritual level?

Are we all merely smart biological devices with various operating platforms like iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and Blackberry?

What makes us so different in terms of beliefs and disbeliefs?

And the ultimate question is, does Spirituality have any divine element to it at all, or is it all very much biological?In that case, why do we even have this biological system of spirituality?

Does it have any significance in the human biology?

Spirituality is some magical twine that binds all the religions of the entire world together with the touch of blissful divinity. Even some people who don’t consider themselves to be so much religious, they often proclaim to be highly spiritual. That’s just a way of saying, I don’t give a damn about which God rules the universe. I just prefer to have the divine peace within me as a secular humanist.

Often the atheist part of the society claims that religion has killed more people throughout mankind history than wars. And to be honest, that is unfortunately true. The so called poppycock rules and rituals of religions often compel humans to fight with each other in a battle of proving one’s religious superiority to the other. So, technically the atheistic point of view ismostly correct about religion being the cause of countless homicides throughout history.

But, the common essence of all religions that is Spirituality functions within the human mind with or without the religious factors involved. Spirituality works as an engine within the human brain to inspire a human being in his all walks of life. Religious rituals and regulations are all manmade paths that are perceived to lead towards the Spiritual awakening. The mystical or spiritual experiences of the religious leaders of mankind history were the products of their atypical brain activity, as you might have read in my last book The God Parasite: Revelation of Neuroscience. The present book is a sequel to that book.

To quote from that book, The entire belief system on a Supreme Creator was created by primordial humans out of fear and ignorance, by means of illusions. Our primitive ancestors handed over their ideas of a supernatural sentient creator to us and as our brain size augmented over the period of evolution, we made the concept of God more sophisticated by means of our sophisticated hallucinations. Here these hallucinations of the spiritual giants were induced by either malfunction or over-excitement in specific regions of their brain. The blissful state they experienced are conceived to be the ultimate state of Spirituality.

Even though all the human perceptions of a Supreme Creator or God are based on fear, anxiety, illusions and neurological disorders, why are these beliefs still so crucial to humans that many are even prepared to kill or even die for them?The Gods we have perceived so far do not exist anywhere except within our head. The primordial humans feared any powerful manifestation of the