Anywhere But Here - Mark Pifer - Bog

------NEW REVISED EDITION AVAILABLE NOW------In almost all of the major religions, there is a person who came to some amazing realizations about their place in the universe. It usually followed some time alone in deep introspection and resulted in a message that they wanted to share with the world. It is highly improbable to believe that all of the beautiful sentiments found in the many religious/spiritual texts came from knowingly disingenuous sources. Clearly, those who were writing about the mystical/spiritual experiences that they felt firsthand and through which insights like "Do unto others as you would have done to yourself" came from experienced SOMETHING. Thousands of years worth of material has been written by many sources, many voices, and they have all been very similar: from Christianity's "Love thy neighbor as thyself" to Buddhism's "One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter" or Hinduism's "One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one's own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behavior is due to selfish desires" In those beautiful sentiments, we hear echoes of the same message, a message of unity with others, with the world, and the universe at large. And for those many thousands of years, the people who were the sources of these words had only the use of poetic metaphorical language to discuss their shifts of perception. And now, through Neuroscience, we have a clearer view of what it was they were pointing to with these beautiful sentiments.