Man the Known and Man the Unknown

By Swami Ranganathananda

The study of man is a fascinating subject. There is a growing interest worldwide to understand what really constitutes a human being. With new and fresh researches made in the field of medicine and neurology people want to know more and more of how these can be related to the concept of a human being as given in the Upanishads and other spiritual classics. This ever-growing and ever-widening area of study is the subject matter of this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312161177

Book preview

Man

MAN THE KNOWN

AND

MAN THE UNKNOWN

Introduction

Dr. Alexis Carroll, a famous American doctor, towards the end of the last century wrote a book with this very title. He titled it Man the Unknown. Towards the end of the last century, this question had started agitating the scientific community: ‘Is man only what we see about him, estimate about him with our sense organs? Has he a depth, a higher dimension?’ That is the subject Dr. Carroll handles in that great book. And since that time many scientists have tried to look into this subject and contribute their insights.

Today the whole of neurology including the science of the brain is engaged in this wonderful task—investigating into the true nature of man through the study of this body and its various functions. Behind this study of physiology is anatomy. But the most important study is the nervous system and the brain. All over the world today, great neuro-surgeons and neurologists are engaged in this quest for man the unknown. Man the known is not a difficult subject for any scientist today. We have studied every square centimetre of this human body and the nerves, including the stuff of the brain, but what do all these reveal? Is there a profound dimension behind these dimensions which is yet to reveal to us, beyond our senses? This is the crucial subject investigated by our scientists today and many books are coming out. In one such study we find this beautiful suggestion arising from experiment, that behind the brain there is a subtle reality which you call the ‘mind.’

Beyond Human Brain

This is the conclusion of one of the great neurologists, Wilder Penfield of Montreal Neurological Institute, who died in 1976. He was an outstanding neurologist. Wilder Penfield did experiments in his own laboratory in Montreal and he has written a book on man’s nature, The Mystery of the Mind. And these experiments are unique. Formerly, they studied man from the outside. That is how we have got physiology, anatomy, etc. All the medical education is started with a dead body where we study man as an object. That study is carried into this deeper, subtler field of neurology where the nerves we can see but the action of the nerves, the energy coursing through the nerves are not perceived and still more, how the brain handles, organizes, perceives the world and how one perceives oneself. It is still subtler. Here research is concerned with new methods and in that Montreal Institute this method was something unique—the patient whose brain is being studied is awake and