Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
(The following Urantia Book section is a discussion of our two-brain types, and aligns well with this article. ed.)
My friends made a big fuss when their Mom predicted her death. Well, it’s not everyday Mom says she is going to die. Their Mom did succumb to lung cancer later that day. We sat and they talked about what a great person she was and reminisced on old times long gone. But they kept coming back to Mom’s recent prediction. They found great meaning in this event. Much of it seems to have come from their faith in Mom’s organizational abilities. Planning her end was consistent with the way she lived her life. Thus in their minds the prediction was an extension of who she was and not some random expressed thought that just happened to come true.
The faith of many in God is also connected to this process of finding meaning in the seemingly random events of life. The current emotional explosion in Muslim dominated countries reflects this search for meaning through the connection of theology and random events. The Danish consulate in Lebanon was burned to the ground by a mob because of a cartoon in a Danish newspaper. There doesn’t seem to be a way of rationalizing this event. There is no obvious connection between the newspaper and the government of Denmark. There is no obvious connection between a worldwide religious movement and some guy doodling on a piece of paper. And yet the protestors define the meaning of the event as being an “insult to our faith”. Despite the difficulty in rationalizing violence as a religious faith response, the protestors put all of the pieces together and went on the attack. The problem is that many faith responses – and this one in particular – appear to be functioning outside of the bounds of reason.
The Urantia Book says that religion is “wholly rational insight which originates in man’s mind-experience” (1105.2). When the book speaks of insight it is talking about that learning which comes from the spiritual forces which are influencing us to be more Godlike. When the book speaks of rationality it is talking about the reasoning abilities inherent within the human mind. In other words – true religious experience involves both spiritual guidance and human reasoning. The book says that religion is reasonable, rational and logical. It also says that even though spiritual truth is beyond reason, reason is an important part of our growing experience of God’s presence. And so, religious concepts should always be able to withstand the scrutiny of human reason. God wants us to use our minds as well as our hearts when developing the highest human concepts of our Father in Heaven.
The continuing world-wide violence in the name of religion shows that our world needs to reject religious ideas which do not stand up to reasonable examination. The search for meaning cannot be held hostage by the mixing of random events with age old traditions. Too many people are locked into belief systems which make no logical sense in our quickly advancing world culture. The ideas of The Urantia Book, which I believe are the most reasonable and logical of any and all religious concepts to date, need to be promoted to the fullest extent. It isn’t enough to urge someone to read the book. The concepts within the book need to be promoted as much as the book itself. Unquestioned belief systems need to be replaced by the reasonable concepts that were given to us through revealed truth. It is these truth concepts stimulating the inherent logic of our minds in concert with the always present spiritual forces that will move the search for meaning ever higher.
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The best pair of eyes on Earth are now wide open. The Large Binocular Telescope sits in a 17-story building atop an Arizona mountain.
LBT, as it's known for short, can probe deeper into the cosmos than any other instrument. The 580-ton telescope is twice as big as the next-largest telescope on Earth, and it has 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. The LBT cannot see farther than Hubble, but the images it sends back are much sharper and of a much wider field than the space telescope.
In the control room, Richard Pogge, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, types in coordinates for this night's viewing. He and a half-dozen others sit in a room filled with computer screens.
There's a universe to look at, but time is limited, so scientists submit proposals for observation. One of the first for tonight: the Kuiper Belt, which lies on the edge of the solar system, about 2.7 billion miles from Earth.
How small? Well, Pluto is roughly 1,200 miles wide. The LBT can see ice balls in the same region that are one or two miles wide. The cameras take an exposure – which lasts five minutes — and then the image is revealed on a computer screen. It looks like a field of stars. But take the same picture six nights in a row and — if you know what you're looking for — you can see the ice balls moving.
And with the data this telescope gathers, Pogge says you can see a lot more, including how far are away an object is, what it is made of, what its mass is and how fast it's moving away from us.
Answering Questions About the Universe
Notre Dame professor Peter Garnevich helps focus the LBT on another object, which is no small task given the instrument's complexity. Garnevich is interested in a supernova that exploded a few nights earlier.
"The star just happened to die and its jet was pointed at us and we can see it most of the way across the universe," says Garnevich.
The screen shows a large mass with a plume coming from it. Garnevich wants to learn how energy from the dying star decays over time. By looking at objects like this — halfway across the universe and back in time — these astronomers hope the LBT will answer some fundamental questions.
Pogge lists some of those questions: "Where do we come from, how did we get here, where are we going? Astronomy's one of the few ways we can answer that."
Over the next few years, many more devices will be added to the LBT to enhance its capabilities. That should be enough to keep astronomers happy at night for decades.
Xerpi
