ANNOUNCEMENTS
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1. [See the offer in gold text following this post for details on how you can watch a retreat on video which includes a detailed discussion of all seven of the steps on the path as used by Maharaj]
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THE PHYSIOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF STRESS AND THE CALL BY THOSE CONSEQUENCES FOR REALIZATION AND A NISARGAN PERSPECTIVE
[The documentary then moves back to Sapolsky on the savannah with another pointer from the narrator:]
Narrator: “As in previous seasons, Robert measures how individuals at every level of the baboon hierarchy react to and recover from stress.”
Sapolsky: “So what we’re doing, we’re now going to challenge the system with increasing doses of epinephrine.”
Narrator: “The baboon’s response is immediately picked up in its blood - vital signs that can be deep frozen in perpetuity.”
Sapolsky: “It’s this storehouse of potential knowledge, and I’ve got thirty years of those blood samples frozen away at this point because you never know when some new hormone or some new something or other pops up.”
Narrator: “Anticipating the long reach of stress is a recent idea, for when Robert was young, scientists believed stress was the cause of only one major problem: peptic ulcers, eating away at the walls of the stomach.”
Sapolsky: “Thirty years ago, what’s the disease that comes to everybody’s mind when you mention stress? Stress and ulcers, stress and ulcers. This was the first stress-related disease discovered, in fact, seventy years ago.”
Narrator: “The connection between stress and ulcers was mainstream medical gospel until the late 1980s. Then Australian researchers identified bacteria as the major cause of ulcers.”
Sapolsky: “That overthrew the entire field. It’s got nothing to do with stress. It’s a bacterial disorder.”
Narrator: “So no longer would the solution be stress management. Now it could be something as simple as a pill. It was a major breakthrough. Stress didn’t cause ulcers. Case closed.
But a few years later the research took a new twist. Scientists discovered that this ulcer-causing bacteria wasn’t unique. In fact, as much as two-thirds of the world’s population has it. So why do only a fraction of these people develop ulcers?
Research revealed that, when stressed, the body begins shutting down all non-essential systems, including the immune system. And it became clear that if you shut down the immune system, stomach bacteria can run amok.
Sapolsky: “Because what the stress does is wipe out the ability of your body to begin to repair your stomach walls when they start rotting away from this bacteria.”
Narrator: “So stress can cause ulcers by disrupting our body’s ability to heal itself. If stress can undermine the immune system, what other havoc can it wreak? One answer comes from a colony of captive macaque monkeys near Winston-Salem, North Carolina.”
Carol Shively [a researcher there]: “People think of stress as something that keeps them up at night or something that makes them yell at their kids. But when you ask me what stress is, I say, “Look at it. It’s this huge plaque in this artery.”
Narrator: “Carol Shively has been studying the arteries of macaques. Like baboons and British civil servants, these primates organize themselves into distinctly hierarchical groups and subject each other to social stress.
Stress hormones can trigger an intense negative cardiovascular response - a pounding heart and increased blood pressure. So if stress follows rank, would the cardiovascular system of a high-ranking macaque - call him “a Primate CEO” - be different from his subordinates?
When Shively looked at the arteries of a dominant monkey - one with little history of stress - its arteries were clean. But a subordinate monkey’s arteries told a grim tale.”
Shively: “A subordinate artery has lots more atherosclerosis built up inside it than a dominant artery has.”
Narrator: “Stress and the resulting flood of hormones had increased blood pressure, damaged artery walls, and made them repositories for plaque.”
Shively: “So now when you feel threatened, your arteries don’t expand and your heart muscle doesn’t get more blood. That can lead to a heart attack. This is not an abstract concept; it’s not something that maybe someday you should do something about. You need to attend to it today because it’s affecting the way your body functions, and stress today will affect your health tomorrow and for years to come.”
Narrator: “Social and psychological stress - whether macaque, human or baboon - can clog our arteries, restrict blood flow, and jeopardize the health of our heart. And that’s just the beginning of stress’s deadly curse. Robert’s early research demonstrated that stress works on us in an even more frightening way.”
Sapolsky: “Well, back when I was starting in this business, what I wound up focusing on was what seemed an utterly implausible idea at the time, which was chronic stress and chronic exposure to glucocorticoids could do something as unsubtle and grotesque as kill some of your brain cells.”
Narrator: “As a Ph.D. candidate at Rockefeller University in the early 1980s, Sapolsky collaborated with his mentor, Dr. Bruce McEwen, to follow the path of stress into the brain.
“They subjected lab rats to chronic stress and then examined their brain cells. The team made an astonishing find. They found that while the cells of normal rat brains have extensive branches, stressed rats’ brain cells were dramatically smaller.”
Sapolsky: “And what was most interesting in many ways was the part of the brain where this was happening, the hippocampus. You take Intro Neurobiology and what you learn is the hippocampus affects learning and memory.”
Narrator: “Stress in these rats shrank the part of their brain responsible for memory.”
[A
NON-DUAL NOTE AND REVIEW: Stress is universal. All members of all species
experience it, some more than others. The ones who experience stress and its
consequences the most are those at the lower end of hierarchies.
All members of all species that suffer from stress – with one exception – are suffering from legitimate, real stress that is brought on by an actual, physiological threat. With them, it all begins externally with a threat of being caught and killed and eaten. The exception? Humans.
Humans today are suffering from stress that is brought on by a psychological threat – a threat that is imagined to be real by an assumed ego-state but that is most unreal. With humans, it all begins internally when one or more ego-states - which are total mirages - feel threatened but, nevertheless, trigger the same kind of response that is experienced by a zebra on the savannah that is running for its life from an attacker.
All species, except humans, stress with legitimate cause. Humans stress with no real, legitimate cause. And not only do humans stress over imagined threats to their false identities at any given moment but they also stress over the possibility of dreamed up threats in the future, a concept that no other species has. If a zebra could talk, it would ask: “The future? What the heck are you talking about . . . the future?”
What - other than a human who have been totally fooled - would stress over “eternal reward vs. eternal punishment in the future”? Or over “reincarnation” and “multiple births and lives and deaths and rebirths to be endured in the future”? Or stress over “how to escape those cycles and be ‘blown out’ in order to attain Nirvana in the future”?
Yet such stress is common nowadays because humans have been completely fooled and have thus disintegrated into a bizarre psychic state that allows them to experience something no other concept-free species can possibility experience, namely, “dread.”
Only humans dread. No other species suffers from what I call “anticipatory-based stress.” Insane enough to experience stress induced by a “psychological state,” as Sapolsky points out, but most humans also experience stress generated by concern over imagined, future threats.]
To be continued.
Please enter into the silence of contemplation.
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THE EXPLANATION
Yeshu'a (Jesus) and Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis were spot on:
"No one shall ever see 'the kingdom of heaven.' It is within"
and
"Heaven and earth shall fade away."
and
"Heaven and hell are not geographic places
"There is no hell."
teachings which become a part of the Papal Magisterium.
