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Spirit And Body
The moral spirit of the soldiers during the battle is no less important than their weaponry and tactical preparation. Panic fear can break the heart, and a weak will leads to death long before all the chances of survival have been exhausted. Extreme horror can paralyze a person, deprive him of the gift of speech and even stop the heart. There are cases when, after earthquakes, dead bodies of men and women were found, which had no external injuries.
Another example of the power of the spirit over the body are such phenomena as self-hypnosis, hypnosis, dreams, unconscious impulses and desires. Being immersed in the unconscious state through hypnosis or auto-suggestion, a person changes his physiological responses to external stimuli. So, there are cases when hypnosis was instilled with insensitivity to pain and burns. The touch to the body of a simple pencil left a crimson trace and caused pain.
Influencing the psyche can bring it to such a degree of tension that it will certainly adversely affect both the person as a whole and health. A patient with hysteria, although the organs of his body are not damaged, may suffer paralysis of limbs, lameness, deafness, blindness. Externally, a healthy person can gradually fade away if he is told that he is mortally sick and will soon die.
Another surprising fact is the interaction of spirit and body is the emergence of stigmata on the body of religious fanatics. Stigmata are wounds on the arms and legs, which in their arrangement correspond to the wounds on the body of Jesus Christ. These signs of divine mercy are "elected" after long and stubborn reflections on the sufferings of Christ, which caused them a strong desire to repeat them themselves.
Stigmas have been noted for a lot of church ascetics and saints in various periods of the history of Christianity, as many legends have preserved. Since the XII century to the present day, more than 300 such cases have been recorded. For example, at the end of the last century, the Belgian girl Louise Lato was famous for her bleeding wounds on her hands and feet on a passionate Friday . And at the end of the 20th century, the wounds of "Jesus Christ" on Easter began to appear at the Bavarian peasant Teresa Neiman. Surveys showed that the temporary origin of these wounds really coincides with the beginning of Easter. Names at this point they begin to bleed. But the most surprising thing was that they were not inflamed or festered, but the blood flowed from them spontaneously. After a week they heal without leaving scars.
Stigma occurs not only among religiously minded people. There are cases when a passionate experience of someone's physical pain, was the cause of stigma on the body. So, for example, the girl who was present at the punishment of her brother with whips, so empathized with him during the execution that her back was covered with bleeding scars. In M.Gorky's book "The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin" there is an episode when a husband strikes his wife with a knife in the liver. The imagination of the writer was so captured by this scene that he fell into a faint condition, and then on his body in the region of the liver, where the unfortunate woman was struck, found a bright crimson band. In exactly the same way, Balzac, when drawing a battle, heard the groans of the wounded, and Flaubert, in describing the scene of Bovary's poisoning, sensed the taste of arsenic in his mouth.
All these phenomena are well known in medical practice and are evidence of a two-way connection between consciousness and body. However, some dualists tend to use this bidirectionality as an argument in favor of the ability of consciousness to conduct their own "politics", even against the dictates of the body. M. Gandhi conducted experiments in the sexual sphere, trying to prove the ability of consciousness to control the carnal life. He deliberately surrounded himself with young women, in order to train his will and prove freedom from sexual drives. He allowed them to touch him, to behave freely and at ease in his society.
Sometimes he went further in his experiments and went to bed together with one of his young followers. Although they were both naked, they did not touch each other. Gandhi assured us that while he was sitting next to a naked female body, he experienced only fraternal feelings, and he did not have a desire to get into sexual contact. Thus, the spirit is able to subordinate to itself bodily aspirations and influence physiological processes.
In this connection, the proponents of the concept of "immateriality of consciousness" ask the question to physiologists: "How, show us, can consciousness be generated by the brain like bile, for example, the liver?" In their opinion, it is completely wrong to call consciousness a property of the brain. In the material world, any object has properties: color, odor, shape. Meanwhile, our thoughts have no color, no shape, no smell. Thoughts can not be touched, one can not feel their weight or smell. The thinking itself, according to A. Men, "is impossible at all desire to take in hands" or to register its contents with the help of some device. For example, using an electroencephalogram, it is possible to record electrical vibrations produced by the brain. However, with its help it is impossible to discern the "flash of consciousness".
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