Where religion is a few thousand years ahead of science

Study of brains on frankinsence shows that they stimulate ion channels related to the alleviation of depression and anxiety. While an athiest in mind, I still practice many religious habits and beliefs for the benefits they confer to my health and intelligence. It makes for interesting conversation among die-hard athiests who despise (and rightly so) the mass murder and folly committed by organized religion and its adherents.

Still, there is technology in these cultural constructs that is worth preserving. With this specific example of frankincense's effects on the brain, I'd be curious how the other perfumes that societies such as the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis (especially Aleister Crowley in Liber 777, Column XLII) had corresponded to psychological states about a century ago. Crowley listed olibanum on the sixth sephira, which appears similar to frankincense.

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Beghe exposes Scientology

Actor Jason Beghe disses the higher levels of Scientology as bogus. In an interview, he says he spent more than $50,000 to get to higher level, and in total spent up to a million dollars on attaining levels that are supposed to confer supernatural powers, such as ruling a small nation.

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Kundalini Awakening

Robert Morgen brought to my attention an Awakening program, which he describes as: "The Kundalini Awakening Program is an ongoing step by step program that teaches the concepts, meditations and skills to awaken the kundalini and manage the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual changes that can occur in ones life as a result."

I can attest that kundalini has cleansed and rejuvenated my glandular system, internal organs, and the pranayam (breathing exercises) is a wonderful and effective remedy to Los Angeles' smog. Furthermore, a few of my most inspired moments were during the practice of kundalini yoga. Around 2000, I started yoga to improve my meditation, and now I've gravitated toward kundalini as the most psychoactive of the yogas I've tried. It complements spiritual work.

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Absolutely brilliant

Forwarded from Michael Agustin, duelity.net

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Burning Man 2007

There were so many pieces, here are just a few of my favorites when I happened to have a camera on me, categorized by light and mood. Click on a picture you like to see a larger image.

• The art of fire
• Installations by night
• Mobile art by night
• Art by day
• Personal photos
• Other people's photos

The art of fire

Installations by night

Mobile art by night

Art by day

Personal photos

As in previous years, Burning Man was an amazing and quasi-spiritual experience. It was more crowded than previous years (over twice as crowded as 2000), and this attracted the more casual and mainstream members, thereby diminishing the spiritual and countercultural side. For that reason, I'm wavering on whether to go back; but on the other hand, I lose myself in it and I return more aware of what technology, comforts, and conventions of the civilized world that enrich my life and which crush my spirit. Since all time at Burning Man is immediate and voluntary, one's character can shed the parasitic entrapments of civilization and thereby recognize them upon reentry.

Other people's photos

Oil derrick

Cubetron

Temple

Inside the temple

Big rig jig

Double rainbow

Temple before the storm

Greetings from Black Rock

Live at the Thunderdome

Man burns

Red oil derrick

Show me the monkey

Homo Ouroborus

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Does psychiatry replace religion?

Setempber 2007 issue of Psychiatric Services stated that psychiatrists are least religious among physicians. Read the news. Is that due William James' influence through Varieties of Religious Experience? Or are the techniques and artifacts of psychiatry a substitute for religion?

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No, we are not living in a simulation

"Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" (by Nick Bostrom) is a fascinating article, which Gayle Dean brought to my attention. It is a bit bizarre to read right now, as my last few months have been spent programming simple simulations, so I'm well immersed in the notion of simulations.

It reminds me of several things:

• The supposition that there is a universe outside of the universe.
• The Matrix and the Animatrix (which feature this, more or less).
• Streams of consciousness while tripping in high school.

I was impressed by the attention to estimates at orders of magnitude. Since I know a little bit about computer science and their implications for simulations, I wish the author had brought up the analysis of algorithms. Computational power is of secondary importance to the efficiency of the algorithms being executed on those computers. His omission of the analysis of complexity, I believe, invalidates his estimates, not by a few orders of magnitude but potentially by as many orders of magnitude as his total estimate size (e.g., ~10^50 orders of magnitude).

I think the author, Nick Bostrom, missed one more significant facts that could be true:

• Substrate-independence is costly.
• Searching the space of possible simulations to find a valid simulation is prohibitively costly.
• The argument is a non-falsifiable hypothesis.
• The transhumans must possess relatively omnipotent processing power and relatively limited creativity.
• Even if true, the ethical impact to inhabitants of the simulation is negligible.

Substrate-independence is costly. The overhead required to engineer equivalent consciousness through virtual means of what could have been implemented directly via physical means is inefficient. For the quality of consciousness being striven for, optimizing the architecture of the substrate is of primary practical interest. For example, computers often operate on substrate-independence. Virtual machines construct computer architectures that only exist when the lower-level code is in operation. But these have an overhead, and can never compete with the run-time efficiency of their physical counterparts if the physical counterparts have equivalent processing power.

The implications of chaos theory on a simulation were not stated by the author. Weather simulators fail to provide even a good two-week forecast, let alone a thousand year forecast, because the level of granularity being simulated is not equal to the physical level. Even simulating events on the neural level leaves out the atomic events which comprise the neural level. Butterfly effects could arise which make the simulation substantially divergent.

A serious problem that the transhuman simulators will have is finding the actual starting conditions of the simulation. Without being precise, the simulation would not carry out according to history. Minute differences in starting conditions could mean the difference between life on Earth or not. Even if actually simulating an already correct model of humanity's universe were feasible, finding the right starting condition could imply executing the simulation several times until a good match was found. This match would be for the complexity of the simulation (say 10^50 per second), over the number of seconds needed to be simulated (say over a 1 million years, or about 10^14). That multiplies to 10^64. The proper configuration must be found, which would be a search of all possible universes, with each universe having a size of 10^64. That could be a search of 10^64 of 10^64, or 10^128. Now the problem is that we are above the number of molecule-seconds in the span of the universe. Even if a planet could perform 10^50 operations per second, it would take 10^50 planets 10^28 seconds (or longer than the expected life of the universe) to run the correct simulation at the level of human perception.

There is an oversight on the complexity of the algorithm required to simulation human perception. The lower bound could theoretically be 0, but practically, since data is rapidly changing on the scale of seconds, it wouldn't be less than the size of the data per second. But that's just the lower bound. The usual high estimates (not upper bounds) for computer simulations are exponential relationship to the size of the data. That could mean for example that the simulation of 10^50 bits of data requires 10^(10^50) computations. 10^(10^50) is not a number followed by 50 zeroes. It is a number followed by 10^50 zeroes!

Therefore, the universe in which this simulation occurs must be much much larger than the universe that we perceive. Thus, it would not be ancestors being simulated, but a much universe in this hyper universe.

Simulating the universe to a level of granularity that we experience requires a universe with googols upon googols of more processing space, processing power, and processing ingenuity than our universe. In essence, it supposes (from the point of view of the simulants) omniscience and omnipotence.

(There's a sardonic implication. There would need to be googols upon googols of spare time on their hands and very little creativity on the part of the simulation architects. Out of all the things they could come up with given omnipotence and omniscience, flaccid sacs of protoplasm were the height of their accomplishment? :)

Scientifically, there's a vacuous extravagance. This hypothesis provides no new predictions that can be measured from within the simulation. It complicates all reasoning about the simulation. So the hypothesis is a disadvantage to anyone who believes it. Anyone is better off ignoring the extra layer of abstraction.

Although Nick Bostrom supposes no ethical cost to the simulation, actually there is a vast question on ethics. The above computational estimates suppose costs that are higher than the known universe could have. The costs are beyond substantial. The ethical calculus to be performed is two-fold: If these resources are spent on the simulation, what is the ethical result. If the resources are not spent on the simulation, what is the most ethical alternative? Assuming that the simulation itself had no particular ethical harm to its inhabitants, the question becomes what good is the simulation. It would have to be sufficiently better than any other use of from 10^128 bits to 10^(10^50) bits of computation. It's hard for me to believe that such quantities, which may amount to the computational power of a googol human universes, would be best served in ancestor-simulation without there being a universe in which there is much more such processing power. So much so that this was negligible.

On morality, and the threat of punishment, some probability of punishment would have to be taken into account. Nick took into account one hypothetical probability of experience being in a simulation and at the subject of the simulators. But there is a cost for monitoring the simulation and assessing its inhabitants' behavior. If there are some ten billion (10,000,000,000) ethically-monitored inhabitants then the raw probability for individual assessment would either be low, or the analysis performed would be relatively cheap to perform. If it is not cheap to perform, and is an accurate assessment of moral behavior, through a complicated ethical or moral calculus, then the probability of it being performed would expected to be low given the number of agents available for review. It might be highest for agents whose decisions were creating the largest ethical difference, such as persons in power. But auditing these persons would not be as simple as forking their simulation data. The analysis itself would likely require an exponential asymptotic order of processing power compared to the data being analyzed, which makes auditing more expensive than running the simulation by many many more orders of magnitude.

Such omnipotent beings who were going to simulate a phenomenological universe of humanity would either have to give up precision, in which case there's little reason to suppose that the simulation bears relation to the original experience, or the omnipotent beings would have wasted significant resources; resources so significant as to be relatively infinite from our vantage point. A waste on such scale seems hard to account for as form of Intelligent Design, which this simulation argument is a variant of. It would at best be unintelligent or aimless, and infinitely more likely not to be a simulation at all but to be the real thing.

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Burning Man

David Kennerly, September, 2000

 

   Above, the gemmed azure is

      The naked splendour of Nuit;

   She bends in ecstacy to kiss

      The secret ardours of Hadit.

            Liber Al vel Legis, Ch. I. v. 14.

Prologue

Gray clouds hung in frayed hairs, fine enough to make out the strands.  It was a marvelous veil of rain in the still, clear distance.  Phantom electricity scratched the sky.

Hand

Satyrday night the Man stood some hundred feet away in the center of the circle, illuminated orange in anticipation.  He stood so still, a man knowing He is about to die. 

He grew fidgety.  His arms slowly moved away or toward his torso, catching the encircling cloud of humanity He was about to inhale.

We sat under the Army radar/air-surveillance camouflage canopy, erected by a pole, topped by a Grateful Dead Jolly Rogers flag, and the Greek letters of the Stanford co-op, XOX (Chi-Theta-Chi). It was a lull, the afternoon.  The miles-wide, 20,000 people deep party (formally known as Black Rock City) recharged its batteries in the sun.  Bored.

Luminous, monochrome flame-orange men hefted a small cauldron of molten yellow. They carried it to the wood frame of the lying-down obtuse angles of a minimalist icon of the Man.  He was some three men-long, lying down.  A band of shadow-orange onlookers sat and stood behind a thin orange band.  I removed the orange-tinted ski goggles, handed them back to Mike, and thanked him for the monochrome view. 

Sparks had flown from the ass of the huge, tall chimney in which iron ore churned. The sparks danced off the Mylar man that bled the orange-hot metal. 

We had gathered in anticipation, waiting the chill wind of the dark, dry playa by this outpost of heat.  Finally they tipped the molten java mug into His hand.  It filled less than a twentieth of the Man.  This would be a ceremony deep into the night.  We filled in Him in our imagination and left to finish our Thirstday night in dance, trance, and so on.

Without warning His fifteen-foot right arm erupted. Sparks, flames, white fairies leapt over his lattical biceps.  Surprised shadow dancers below looked up and hurried themselves to catch up to his imminent ejaculation. 

Torso

The white-hot leapt from His right arm to His chest.  He breathed a lungful of flame and expired dazzle into the night.  There was no stopping Him now.

Gray beige dust waves swept behind each wheel of the RV ahead as I drove into Black Rock City on Thirstday afternoon.  Flecks of dry, dry playa skin; that's the skin of the Man.

Signs marked the edge of the long, long driveway:

"To do something completely"

¡¦

"And leave no trace behind."

Fryday morning I joined the cracked, cracked, cracked pale playa to bake in the sun.  I performed the Diamond Sapphire, radiating light to all sentient beings.  The Man smiled.

Walking back, the gray dust blanket snuck in so thick I couldn't see ten feet in front of me; just the cracked skin of the playa below my own two feet.

Thirstday night, a gently yellowed Buddha sat in a meditative posture on the night playa.  Silhouettes of humans blocked only the base of the thrice-human height, yellow wood Buddha.

Walking closer, it broken into blocks. Its blocks broke into spines of encyclopedia, classics, and other old volumes.  The Buddha was made of books, and was turning its finger over a huge tome that was a collage of volumes.

A scraggly old man hunched in front of the book; "I spent a week designing this."

"Looks like work," a clean blonde Spectator on a bike said.  "I thought this was vacation."

"Nah," the scraggly beard said in a bad-toothed, white trash grin with a slight slur. "For vacation I'm going down to Monterey." He continued on about how he dumpster dove for the Reading Buddha.

The man with the squeaky rat but no voice whispered into my ear, "I lost my voice."  I nodded.  "I built this," he continued. "I wired this and built it."

I was impressed.  The forty-foot iron hemisphere of the Thunderdome held great ropes, speakers, and our singular attention.  It focused our eyes at the center.  Two women collided and brutally swung at each other with thick, padded swords. 

The music repeated the name in neon, "¡¦ Thunderdome¡¦" The arena master held a death's head staff, wore black wings, black flowing things, and skated the dry playa on all-terrain wheels of roller skates.  The priest of death's voice boomed in modulation between the heart-racing techno music.  I clung to the dome and watched him as much as the combatants.  He swung his staff to level toward the winner.

The estranged engineer combed his remaining hair with a fork.  The MC frowned and looked at his list.  'Cisco, as the MC had shortened his name to, asked, "Hey," and held out two Samuel Adams.  "That's better," the MC said.  'Cisco had insulted him with a bribe of two Coronas, then a scarf, and drunk-hick threat before.

"You better party with me," said 'Cisco to me through his beery eyes.  He had expedited the fight.  I didn't like 'Cisco.  I had no plans of playing with him further than our fight.  I waited out the end of the night.  "This is the last fight.  Make it good," the MC shouted above the crowd and techno.

Smack. That contact's not going to stay in.  'Cisco swung like it was baseball season.  No art, no style.  He won. 

In the dead of Satyrday night in a recessed white screen, someone killed Kenny.  Kenny floated up toward radiant, breast-bared women on white clouds. 

ACCESS DENIED

Kenny fell into flaming, White Zombie, hell.

After Thunderdome, I sought the faint horizon of lights.  There, a blue one, the tower Richard had noted earlier.  I shuffled back the mile-long trek, from 8:30 Street and Head Space to 4:30 Street and Avenue of the Heart: home of XOX, water, tent, and olive drab sleeping bag. 

I had swung, jumped, whirled, and fought vibrantly, unconscious of my physical limits.  Every step in half a blur, shallow breath, and slight sting of scraped skin reminded me.  Zombies move with more vitality.  I drug myself home.

Flaming "instant replay" of Burning Man covered the screen late Satyrday night.  Burning, on the flat screen, looks like an execution, not a ritual.

Legs

The wild, brilliant fire spread from His torso to His legs. Explosions, eruptions, "a shitload of pyrotechnics," the chunky Black Rock Ranger had said.

"Invoke me under my stars!" I had recited Fryday in the Diamond Sapphire chant of Liber Al vel Legis.

I hadn't wanted to sit.  I had sought out the drumming for the purpose of dance.  I danced at the edge of the human cloud encircling the Man on His last stand, Satyrday night.  After the chunky Black Rock ranger made me sit, I still bobbed to the drumming two men down.  The music moved me.  The music moved a dancing Black Rock Ranger.

A woman sitting on a man in a wheelchair (both able to walk) insulted the crowd, but accurately, "Look at them.  It's like a rock concert." She motioned to their silly glow-things, stance and otherwise cultural grasp of the situation.

The soulful Brother to my left heard this and responded in song.  He sung of angels, he sung of soul, he sung of the roots of rock n' roll.  I was impressed, bemused, and annoyed, altogether, with either the left or right or middle. 

But, music.

Illuminaughty's mediatronic eye entranced my dancing bones through the dark of Fryday night.  Matt said the next day, "I think I saw you there at 5 a.m."  That couldn't be right, not that late.  No, the X had no effect. 

But dance.  Dance to songs without end or pauses, only slow waves of preparation for the crashing trance tempo, the sea of variety of people. People who knew nothing of raves, people breast-fed on raves, people hungry for people, and people hungry for trance.  "Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you," Liber Al vel Legis chanted.

"Not only does he take out his opponent," the sidelined old, armchair sensei said, "but he takes out the opponent's pillar."  I smiled and took my pillar again.  "It's all about balance."

The large and small fell to their own clumsiness.  The big boy who had felt proud at pounding his pugel to imbalance his smaller friends fell to me, a little, unassuming figure.

The padded pugels swung. The pillar dwellers collapsed eventually all.  The padded pugels swung and smacked without harm.

Smack, plink, clink, and clank. Blink.  Metallic percussion somewhere in a wasteland between symphony and cacophony reflected off the dust itself.  The sound came from everywhere.  At a large jalopy of some metal Azathoth, a crowd of scrubbing humans plinked, clinked, clanked.

Blink. Reviving ritual.

Wild things sputtered upward, and exploded in white wheel spokes radiating and rotating toward our eyes, far more effective than the tunnel of lights with iridescent glasses on and acid, herb, and/or X in me.  Brilliant, larger than life bacterial suicides of light lived. 

Blink.  Reviving ritual.

Ziggurat

At the base of the ziggurat, a naked body streaked into the blaze. Was he there before me?  He descended he steps, his cheeks dancing to life. Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Rangers surrounded him and took him away. 

Fire dancers appeared all about.  Trails of fire followed them.  I recognized a few from Head Space the nights before.  They'd arced and twirled hot light throughout the night, creating smoky clouds of spectators.

The soulful Brother to my left sung:

      "We're gonna

      burn this

      mutha down.

      We're gonna

      raze this lattice

      to the top."

Huffs of fireball, the size of small houses puffed upward, lightly baking us all in swiftly rising dough of orange-black flame. 

The Man wobbled. On instant replay, later that night the Black Rock Ranger firefighters would place their feet on the cables, rocking the Man (I presume), toward a gentle grave.

The first eve there, Thirstday, above the faded mountains, rose-bounded gray clouds clutched the sky.  Puffy patches powerfully clung to the last light, squeezing the heart until it was rose.  Holy, beautiful.

Sunday, I would wake with dawn and adored Her.  Golden lipped clouds kissing the cold, faded mountains over the ring-city of nylon tents, aluminum RVs, and weird wanderers.

Fryday, I walked beyond what would be the head of the mile-long "Beaming Man" created by laser and New Age myth.  On the fractally cracked playa I performed the Diamond Sapphire.  Holy.  The Man to my South, the cold desert to my North, and the Sun to the East.  Brilliant light flowing in and to all the ravers, to the dancers whose music was uninterrupted (Did the DJs sleep in shifts?).

Head

The Man's diamondoid head never caught fire, even as it fell backwards.  It nearly crashed into the crowd.  A few remaining fireworks shot obliquely instead of upward.  Did anyone die?  The Black Rock Rangers were amazingly calm and civil.

The crowd lumbered forward, zombies toward His brain.  I stayed back, within my own.

Satyrday, Richard Pocklington asked me, "So what is this?" as we walked in the twilight toward the blue and red neon Man in the center of the playa civilization.

Flash.  The heat and cracked playa Diamond Sapphire revelation refilled me.  Words spewed unfettered, "Hadit and Nuit. Hadit is the Man, and Nuit is the sky above."

"So Hadit dies for Nuit?"

"Hadit is transformed.  Hadit is the brink of a new aeon.  It is the spark of change.  Nuit is the all-accepting night. ¡¦" 

We went on.

Richard asked a Ranger several questions after she had said, "You'll have to sit down." 

She explained, "If you're standing you will have less space."  She didn't overtly explain our death. 

"You'll get hurt."

"Is this a request or an order?" Richard asked.  I internally echoed Richard's thought, What was the social order of the Ritual of the Man?

It went on.  I danced and then sat to the source of music: drummers.

Velvet lightning; Electric sparks on a synapse wider than a man is long.  The lightning danced and swayed to supernatural forces between a shimmering bar and giant metal mushroom.

Will Wright designed a household simulation game, The Sims, with the intelligence in the objects and not in the characters.  The refrigerator tells the hungry Sim how to eat.  The TV tells the bored Sim how to lounge.  The shower tells the Sim how to bathe when dirty. 

Each Sim uses each object, when that is their state of need, the same.  Some variables of Sim state and the broadcast strength of the item determine. 

The lightning generator tells the Spectator how to ogle. The vulgar Canadian Beaver eating contest at Club Seal tells the crowd how to form.  The music, how to dance.

"Damn you, Will," I thought while I walked toward the Thunderdome, being drawn toward the Lightning, the Head car, the Reading Buddha, the metal cacophony, and half-dozen other sources of party.

Neil Stephenson ritualized the concept as the me in Snowcrash.  The Sumerian term, "me," was a set of instructions.  How and when to plant the crops, and so on.  The priest, the Enki, operated the me.  I lumbered toward the Thunderdome, whereat the Death's headed-staff of the arena host commanded the harnessed brutality of the spectacle. 

A siren had played in the distance, like a few decades old US police siren.  I happened to see the head it came from.  A light decorated frame of a head encased a custom steel go-cart.  The bearded driver sent it into tight circle backwards.  The lips, eyes and rest spun round, round.  Dizzy, and altogether designed for acid-licked spectators, I was sure.  Amused, walkers watched. 

"Church of the Electron" read the black-marker across the horizontal beam of the crucifix. Keyboards for horizontal beam; egg timer for a head; poles for skinny arms; burnt and abused circuit board garnish.   TV with outstretched arms and stilt legs screamed worshipfully toward his sacrificial savior. 

The zombies gathered around the fallen Man, and breathed in the flame. The azure-lidded night bent upon them.

"The Manifestation of Nuit is at an end."

Epilogue

I napped at Tahoe's lapping shore, on a gray log, by the glittering blue water below the watercolor blue-wash backdrop speckled chill white.  Clouds basked their bellies in passing over the expanse.  Boats lazily swayed in their dock.  Wild blue and red berries, and persimmon orange weeds adored the back lot slope ending at a stump of a log and my sleeping, faintly dreaming head.

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Mixing the Middle Pillar and Kundalini Yoga

As a casual practioner of Western ceremonial magick and Kundalini yoga, I stumbled upon a synthesis of the Middle Pillar Ritual and a kundalini meditation that Steve Valdean taught us at Soma Yoga.

While vacationing at Arches National Park in Utah over the 4th of July weekend, I meditated for thirty minutes under the twisting branches of a gnarly tree. Its trunk sprawled above me, and offered a solid shade.

I began breathing with mindfulness (sati), and then applied the Kundalini chant the mantra "sa-ta-na-ma, wa-he-gu-ru," synchronized with breath, four inhales, four silent repetitions, and four exhales, four silent repetitions. Steve had taught me this breath rhythm in kundalini yoga. Although the words have significance (satnam waheguru), I did not focus on their meanings.

Instead, I augmented this rhythm by stressing one syllable with each breath and visualizing a chakra glowing with energy. It started with a variant of the middle pillar (5th, 4th, 3rd, 1st), then became (5th, 4th, 3rd, 1st).

      Syllable                          Chakra
        sa                                1st
        ta                                3rd
        na                                4th
        ma                                5th
        wa                                5th
        he                                4th
        gu                                3rd
        ru                                1st

during the silent repetitions that syllable whose count matches the count of the repetition is stressed and the visualized chakra is most brilliant. breath:

        sa                ta                na                ma
        1st               3rd               4th               5th

visualization while in-held (capitalization denotes the stressed syllable and chakra):

        SA                ta                na                ma
        sa                TA                na                ma
        sa                ta                NA                ma
        sa                ta                na                MA

exhale breath on each count:

        wa                he                gu                ru
        5th               4th               3rd               1st

visualization while ex-held (capitalization denotes the stressed syllable and chakra):

        WA                he                gu                ru
        wa                HE                gu                ru
        wa                he                GU                ru
        wa                he                gu                RU

I found it difficult to maintain the rhythm and by the end wanted to quit. But I also felt the exercise on my mind, body, and spirit.

I wondered, at one moment, whether visualization of a chakra affected the mind in a similar way that covert rehearsal affects the mind. Covert rehearsal is mental practice, such as of a skill (a fencing lunge), a memory (reciting a line), or any other behavior. covert rehearsal is an effective exercise.

Is spiritual practice of visualizing a chakra related to covert rehearsal? With each chakra in order, 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th, does the preceding meditation rehearse security, will, compassion, and communication?

Originally, I meditated using the 1st chakra. Later, I adapted a version that replaced the 1st with the 2nd. I suspect many combinations of chakras are useful, depending on which centers one wants to energize. What is particularly nice about 3rd, 4th, and 5th, is that is easy to associate the breath with each chakra, since breath physically moves these chakras.

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Glossolalia

Speaking in tongues may have a neurological basis that suggests a loss of conscious control. Athiests that dismiss religions as superstitious, ought to consider that even if the beliefs are outdated, the techniques employed by a religion may still have modern application. Read the article: Scientists analyze Pentecostals' brainwaves

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