This is your brain on religion

Want to build a better brain? Ramp up your spiritual practice, says Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Meditation and prayer can improve your physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being and may even slow the brain's aging process.

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The world is it's own magic.

La vie à la lumière du Bouddhisme

La lumière de la sagesse illumine l’univers tout entier, détruisant la nature aveugle innée de l’homme. L’espace vital du Bouddha s’unit et se fond à l’univers.
Le moi devient le cosmos, et en un bref instant le flux vital s’étend jusqu’à englober tout ce qui est passé et tout ce qui est avenir. La force vital du cosmos jaillit, dans chaque instant du présent, telle une gigantesque fontaine d’énergie. Dans la Bouddhéité, chaque moment présent renferme l’éternité, car l’ensemble de la force vitale du cosmos est comprimée en un simple moment d’existence. Une personne dans l’état de Bouddhéité est à peine consciente du passage du temps physique, parce que sa vie est épanouie et heureuse à chaque instant, comme si elle connaissait la joie de vivre pour l’éternité.
Cette impulsion ne trouvera sa pleine expression que si l’on suit la pratique exposée par Nichiren Daishonin, qui se fonde sur la compréhension de la nature du Bouddha dans tout être, et qui vise à accéder à l’unité avec la force vitale universelle. Dans la religion de Nichiren Daishonin, chaque personne peut devenir une réalisation complète de la Bouddhéité dans son propre être.
Daisaku Ikeda

enlightenment

An interesting idea from Philosopher AC Grayling

" I'm passionately in favour of legalising heroin and cocaine. But I despise people who depend on these things. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree. "

Your brain on religion

This is your brain on religion

Augustine on time (pardon the pun )

For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. Yet I say with confidence, that I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time. Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not; and the future is not as yet? But should the present be always present, and should it not pass into time past, time truly it could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present — if it be time — only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be — namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be?

–Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones lib xi, cap xiv, sec 17 (ca. 400 CE)