Cosmic Force Research Articles

Benefits and Mode of Action of Various Hasta Mudra

Introduction: In this modern era, our lifestyle is changed and become sedentary. Lack of physical exercise, faulty dietary habits, increased stress, and environment changes lead to many diseases. Everybody is fed up by taking so many medicines. Hence, people are showing interest in drugless therapies. Practicing Hasta mudra is totally drugless and cost less. Aim: The aim of this article is to describe the preventive and curative benefits of Various Hasta Mudra and to explain the mode of action of Various Hasta Mudra. Materials and Methods: Various benefits and modes of action of Hasta Mudra have been explained on the basis of classical texts and literature. Results: With regular practice of Hasta mudra, various diseases can be prevented and cured. Discussion: Mudra should be performed for at least 45 min in a day. Conclusion: Hasta Mudra is helpful in Mudhra therapy can control stress, depression, anxiety, fear and promotion of mental health and happiness prevention and cure of many diseases. in Mudra.[3] In Shiva Samhita, it is mentioned that just by practicing The word mudra is a Sanskrit word which has the meaning “gesture” or “attitude.” Mudra can be described as emotional, psychic, devotional, and esthetic gestures or attitudes. Mudra are attitudes of energy flow, which help in linking person’s pranic force with universal or cosmic force.[1] The literal meaning of mudra is the expression of internal feelings by way of different postures of fingers, palms, hands feet, and or body. This is an integral part of yoga and a scientific knowledge of spirituality and physical well. There are different types of Mudra, but in this article, we are discussing only about Hasta Mudra. By doing Hasta mudra, subtle hand and finger movements make important connections in the nervous system and stimulate specific energy pathways. In Hatha Yoga, there are 10 mudra which are mentioned as Jaramarananashaka.[2] In Gheranda Samhita, there are 25 Mudra and according to it, various eye and body positions (Asana) and Locks (Bandha) are also included

Aristotle and the Ends of Eros, or Aristotle’s Erotic Sublime?

Abstract While Eros has a central philosophical function in the dialogues of Plato, it all but disappears as a philosophical term in the thought of Aristotle, and is replaced by the more rational and reciprocal relation of friendship, φιλία. This essay asks what becomes of Eros in Aristotle’s thinking, whether as deity, natural or cosmic force, or mode of human relation. Drawing on the ancient epithet of Eros, Ἔρως λυσιµελής, unbinder of limbs, Aristotle’s usages of both ἔρως and λύσις (loosening, unbinding), respectively are traced in their ambivalence for his fundamentally organismic philosophy, insofar as they disturb the organism’s ontological integrity. With the assistance of Kristeva’s notion of the abject, it is argued that while Aristotle’s overt stance is a polemic against eros, his principal metaphysical innovations – the recasting of ἀρχή as divine τέλος, and the separation of material and moving causes – are solutions (λύσεις) to aporias that may involve a traversal of the sublime that is also irreducibly corporeal and erotic.

Mystery upon Mystery: Wang Bi on the Meaning of Xuan 玄

Abstract: Xuan 玄 (mystery, dark) was ascribed critical philosophic importance by many thinkers of the tradition known as xuanxue 玄學 (Scholarly Exploration of the Dark, Neo-Daoism), principal among whom was Wang Bi. Through systematic analyses of the Laozi , he attempted to explore not only how "nonbeing" ( wu 無) is the cosmic force guiding phenomenal existence, but also how xuan and dao 道 are paired, complementary aspects of the "means-by-which-things-are-so" ( suoyi 所以). This article examines xuan from the perspective of Wang Bi and, through a close reading of his commentaries, finds that it signifies that which is holistically unknowable and ineffable, an indiscernible oneness where one can resonate with all things. This is premised on the "necessary" unspecificity of the "One" ( yi 一) and is reflected in his philosophy of language. By exploring xuan in its philosophical, philological, and semantic context, it becomes apparent that it is more complex than previously thought.

Evil in Human Nature – Bogusław Wolniewicz on the Root of Evil

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct Boguslaw Wolniewicz’s position on evil and its source. In pointing to the origins of evil, Wolniewicz refers to a very old concept of the devil. Namely, some cosmic force of unknown genesis that acts in man and through man. In philosopher’s opinion, human nature has an inner inclination to do evil. He therefore acknowledges the existence of evil in an anthropological dimension – as an innate and permanent human tendency to behave wrongly in a moral sense.

Human Body and its Relation with Planets Siddha Perspective

Siddha system is the foremost traditional system, which was introduced by ancient Siddhar’s. According to Siddhar’s, nature is man, man is nature. Man is said to be microcosm and universe is macrocosm. The universe is made up of five elements namely Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Space. Our body is also made up of five elements (Panchaboothas), three vital humors known as Vatham (air, space), Pitham (fire), Kabam (Earth, water), seven physical constituents are Saram (nourishing fluid), Senneer (blood), Oonn (muscles), Kozhuppu (adipose tissue), Enbu (bone), Moolai (bone marrow), Sukkilam/Suronitham (sperm/ovum) respectively. The universe has stars and planets. Each planet has an influence that reflects in our bodies. Thoughts were controlled by cosmic force in the universe. Nine planets in the universe correlate with the organs in the body Sun-Heart, Moon-Brain, Mercury-Lungs, Jupiter-Liver, Saturn-Spleen, Mars-Gall Bladder. This article explains how the planets have a connection with our human body.

Pluralities of Power in Indonesia’s Intellectual Property Law, Regional Arts and Religious Freedom Debates

ABSTRACT This article re-analyses historical Southeast Asian power concepts and practices to interpret contrasting positions on two contemporary Indonesian legal debates. The first debate concerns the use of intellectual property models to regulate regional arts or ‘traditional cultural expressions’. The second debate concerns a 2017 constitutional court ruling that advocates citizenship parity for ‘belief practitioners’, meaning those who maintain ancestral or non-orthodox practices and do not list one of Indonesia’s six official religions on their identity cards. I argue that contrasting positions on the laws held by state and clerical authorities versus regional practitioners are better explained by reference to distinctively Southeast Asian ideas about unilateral versus decentralised ‘power’ than by standard globalisation, human rights, or modern state versus indigenous resistance explanations. Disentangling two features of Benedict Anderson’s classic model of Javanese power, fluid cosmic force and the concentration of ‘oneness’ by rulers, illuminates how the Indonesian minority and majoritarian legal perspectives fit within a common repertoire of regional power concepts. Framing religion, tradition, arts and law as prescriptive and normative rather than analytic categories, the article draws on historical and comparative Southeast Asian evidence to delineate tensions among differently positioned groups grounded in diverse modalities of power, ancestral authority and customary institutions, even as some now selectively adopt imported legal rights-based and heritage preservation discourses.

Daemons in the pocket: Contract, commodities and witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay

New England in 1692 was a community grappling with the cosmic meaning of capitalism in an age during which the market came to define life in the Atlantic world. Binding contracts, mobile capital and commodity exchange offered both philosophical proof and significant peril for a community rooted in a firm belief in the sacredness of contract covenants and in the reality of spectral forces intervening into the material world. As a result, the legal documents produced during the bloody witchcraft crisis that swept Massachusetts in those terrible years articulate a widespread anxiety about the potentially accursed nature of commodities that travel through and index social connections, the morally ambiguous incursions of invisible economic forces into everyday life, the compelling experience of contracts given divine or diabolical aegis and the cultural syncretism of a constellated culture bound together through market interrelations. As tales of witchcraft have taken root firmly as American narrative touchstones, those anxieties have remained central to representations of the witch trials in popular imagination. The novels, plays and films that return to the crisis’ collection of legal documents, economic contracts and oral performances, position contested issues of obliterative commodification, troubled economic social contact and cultural and racial insecurity at the heart of American folklore. This reading re-centres both primary sources and subsequent popular depictions of the witch crisis around the stories told through contracts and around the commodities and commodity exchanges that remained persistent features of Massachusetts Bay’s imbricated modes of storytelling. It reads these documents as evidence for the emergence of Atlantic market capitalism as a cosmic force, an obscure but interventionist God made powerful through market logic, and it argues that this force continues to define America’s central bloody myth of self.

Athanasius Kircher and Terrestrial Magnetism: The Magnetic Map

Athanasius Kircher paid special attention to magnetism, more specifically terrestrial one, in his work Magnes sive de arte magnetica. Other Jesuits of his time, such as Garzoni and Cabeo, also wrote on this subject. Kircher studied in particular magnetic declination and its possible use to determine geographical longitudes. At his time, this was an important subject for long sea journeys. First, he collected a large number of observations of magnetic declination from different sources in three tables and two lists with a total of 518 values, among them forty-three made by Jesuits. Kircher proposed that a magnetic map could be made based on these observations, but he did not do it. From Kircher’s observations a map of magnetic declination has been drawn and it is presented here. Kircher discussed the causes of declination and presented a model for the origin of the magnetic field of the Earth, which differed from that proposed by Gilbert. Kircher finally considered magnetism as a cosmic force with its origin in God.

Science, God, and the cosmos: Science both erodes (via logic) and promotes (via awe) belief in God

Science and analytical thinking have been linked with atheism. We propose dual pathways whereby scientific engagement may have paradoxical effects on belief in God. Logical aspects of science, associated with analytical thinking, are associated with unbelief. However, people can also be awed by scientific information, and awe is associated with feelings of self-transcendence and belief in a mystical God. An exploratory study (supplemental material; N = 322) and Study 1 (N = 490) demonstrated that people interested in science often hold abstract (but not personal) representations of God. This effect was mediated by a predisposition to feel awe. In Studies 2 and 3 (combined N = 570), people experimentally exposed to awe-inspiring scientific content were more likely than control participants to endorse abstract God representations. These findings suggest that scientific engagement does not always erode belief in God. Instead, science-inspired awe can increase representations of God as a mystical cosmic force or as being beyond imagination.

SBNR Identity: The Role of Impersonal God Representations, Individualistic Spirituality, and Dissimilarity With Religious Groups

ABSTRACTWe conducted two studies investigating the extent to which self-identification as Spiritual but not Religious (SBNR) was associated with (H1) the development of idiosyncratic religious beliefs and exposure to religious diversity and/or (H2) negative attitudes toward organized religion and being hurt by members of a religious group. In Study 1, SBNRs scored higher than religious and nonreligious participants on belief in God as an impersonal cosmic force (but not as a personal being) and individualistic spirituality. Although SBNRs had positive attitudes toward religion, they were less positive than those identifying as religious. Exposure to religious diversity and hurt by religious groups were not significant predictors of SBNR. We replicated these results in Study 2 using a multi-item measure of God representations and also found that SBNRs’ attitudes toward religion were predicted by a perceived dissimilarity with religious groups over and above individualism, secular group participation, perceptions of Christianity as too structured, and liberalism.

U.S. Citizens’ Representations of God and Support for Sustainability Policies

This study proposes that certain religious and spiritual beliefs—specifically, representations of God—play an indirect but influential role in cognitive processing of (1) sustainability behaviors, (2) the importance of proenvironmental policies, and (3) their willingness to vote for proenvironmental policies. Across three studies, this research investigates the role of three representations of God: (1) God as an authoritarian personified being, (2) God as a benevolent personified being, and (3) God as a mystical cosmic force. The results of Study 1 suggest that attitude toward nature mediates the relationship between these representations of God and three sustainability behaviors. Similarly, the results of Study 2 suggest that attitude toward nature mediates the relationship between these representations of God and the importance of proenvironmental policies. In addition, the authors find self-transcendence to be an antecedent of belief in a mystical representation of God. Study 3 includes awe as an antecedent of self-transcendence and generally replicates the findings from Study 2 regarding the role of the representations of God in people's cognitive processing of their willingness to vote for proenvironmental policies.

Something besides monotheism: Sociotheological boundary work among the spiritual, but not religious

The expression “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) has gained considerable traction among sociologists of religion and culture, media outlets, and the broader public in recent years. Though the expression itself has achieved wide appeal, few studies have explored what SBNRs believe about God, religion, or spirituality. This paper uses survey data from Wave IV of the Baylor Religion Survey (2014) and draws from the theory of “cultural omnivorousness” to show that SBNRs have significant sociotheological differences when compared to those who are both religious and spiritual (RAS). The expression “spiritual, but not religious” is more than a manifestation of religious deinstitutionalization or “believing without belonging.” Rather, being “spiritual, but not religious” involves sociotheological boundary work that distinguishes SBNRs from traditional monotheists. When compared to RAS respondents, SBNRs are more likely to view God as a higher power or cosmic force instead of a personal being and are more likely to adopt an individualistic ethic as opposed to finding moral authority in God or Scripture. By examining the historical context and sociotheological characteristics of SBNRs, this paper locates a boundary between SBNRs and RAS monotheists and offers theoretical reasons why SBNRs engage in sociotheological boundary work.

The Global Ethics of Emotions – What Ancient Chinese Philosophies Can Teach Us

AbstractThis article explores what ancient Chinese philosophies can teach us about understanding emotions and relating to them. It posits that emotions are fundamental and connected to everything in the universe, that much of their value lies in their sincerity, that they need to be cultivated to avoid excess and imbalance, and that, like everything else, they are permeated by a cosmic force that is at once transcendent and immanent.

Mythoform and the Misovire Consciousness: A Gender Conceptual Renewal Strategy in Werewere Liking’s It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral

This paper underscores the need for new plausible myths that redefine gender relations in an attempt to revalue female assertion, ethical values, and human development. This creative process presents a different perspective from the views of some feminist theorists who have seen myth as a regressive and oppressive structure. The focus, in this paper, is to illustrate how in her chant-novel It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral Liking appropriates the productive force of myths through the misovire consciousness and ritual structure for her gender politics and for promoting ethical values and the culture of human development. In this regard, she decodes existing negative myths and reconstructs new gender myths that redefine gender relations, celebrate what she calls women’s “cosmic force” and through ritual cleansing, reinvents a new language of beauty and a new race of Jasper and Coral. Thus, guided by the tenets of deconstruction and the gender relations frameworks, this paper defends the thesis that Liking’s chant-novel through myth invention and revision combines and fuses traditional and modern aesthetics, thematic and structural elements that she uses to deconstruct social and gender relations. The contention is that in negotiating plausible gender relations for men and women in Africa, Liking’s story and structure incorporate the cleansing, cathartic effect of Bassa ritual performance into the narrative.

English

In many theories of gravity, the cause of gravity is neither mentioned nor clarified yet. Dark energy, which makes the universe accelerate and push all matters in the universe apart, has repulsive power. Every matter in space is equally pressured by this repulsive force from all directions. It is assumed that this force comes from infinity in space. However, if matters exist nearby, the matters shield each other from the repulsive force; and thus, the repulsive force acting on the matter is not isotropic anymore. When two nearby bodies are applied with this shielding effect, they are pushed toward each other; and the theoretically derived net pushing force on each body is mathematically equivalent to the Newton’s attractive gravitational force. This result shows that the gravity may come from dark energy. Key words: Dark energy, gravity, cosmic repulsive force, shielding effect, expanding universe.

E. E. Cummings's <em>Tom: A Ballet</em> and Uncle Tom's Doll-Dance of Modernism

This essay analyzes Cummings's rarely-studied, never-performed ballet based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin . Through close reading and a historical contextualization of the ballet's commission and subsequent failures of collaboration, the essay explores the various ways that modernist notions of the primitive and the automaton imbue the ballet and its implied relationship of influence between Cummings and Stowe. Throughout this discussion, the essay attempts to resist the predictable binary that yokes sentimentalism and the avant-garde in a state of irreconcilable enmity, or which pits Stowe, sentimentalism's apotheosis, against the more ambivalent, modernist aesthetics of Cummings. Rather, the essay shows how the ballet scenario relies upon tensions of literary sensibility, perhaps playfully. The essay begins with an examination of Cummings's verbal representation of the ballet's anticipated dances. By emphasizing his own linguistic mastery in the scenario's descriptions of these dances, which are more like poems than performances, Cummings rejects Kleist's famous thesis that the apex of puppetry is achieved only when the puppeteer surrenders his skill to the unseen gravity that moves his puppets. Later sections of the essay show how the doll motif also obscures Cummings's historicism, in true Kleistean fashion, relegating all such commentary on slavery and whatever reflections about it the modern viewer may be induced to have to an unknowable, unseen gravity—the cosmic force of comic resemblance.

L'incomprensione tra gli amanti nel poema Khosrow e Širin di Neúàmi

The poem Khosrow va Sirin by Neuami(12th century) tells the tale of the love between the Sasanian sovereign Khosrow II Parviz (590-628 A. D.) and the beautiful Sirin. It is a difficult amorous relationship in which, although the protagonists do nothing but talk, they do not understand each other. In the story the friction between the two lovers surfaces from the very beginning: Khosrow desires Sirin, and Sirin’s desire is equally strong; she concedes favours but then pulls back, thus increasing the young prince’s desire. The problem is heightened by their two different concepts of love: Khosrow represents the voice of nature, of carpe diem (or rather carpe florem); Sirin, on the other hand, represents the voice of wisdom and reason. Before giving herself to him, only after the celebration of a lawful wedding, she wants Khosrow to regain his kingdom, which is threatened by a usurper. Khosrow flees to Byzantium where he marries – for purely political motives – Maryam, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor, and with the help of the latter wins back his kingdom. But even after the death of Maryam, when Sirin expects to be called to court and married with all due ceremony, Khosrow tries to possess Sirin outside the bonds of marriage. The problem of a lawful wedding is a crucial point in the plot of the poem. Khosrow’s constant efforts to elude marriage to Sirin are due to interference of the historical sources. Indeed Sirin too is a historic character: she was Khosrow’s influential Christian wife. In NeUAmi’s poem, Sirin’s Christian faith is concealed; but Khosrow’s resistance to marriage with her is probably an echo of the opposition that their union encountered in court circles and among the artistocracy, since Sirin was a woman of humble origins, as well as being Christian. The way she defends her reputation and her good name can be seen as a reaction against the bad light in which she was portrayed in the historical sources. Neuami has skilfully made use of these sources in order to voice his concept of love, of passionate love, as a source of suffering and incomprehension between lovers but also as a cosmic force which permeates every aspect of life, and the most important experience in the poet’s life. At the same time he gives a thorough psychological analysis of the characters, unimaginable for those times.

Can Martyrdom Survive Secularization?

Lacey Baldwin Smith Can Martyrdom Survive Secularization? THE ADVENT OF THE SU IC ID E BOMBER AS A GLOBAL PH ENO M ENON during the past decade and a half has vastly increased our interest in but only marginally improved our understanding of martyrdom. The word remains as mysterious, hard to define, and highly explosive as ever. Modem scholars much prefer the term “self-sacrifice” to martyr­ dom largely because it reveals the complexities of the subject: to what extent does the self gain by the act of sacrifice and is the sacrifice indi­ vidualistic or communal and its motivation economic, political, reli­ gious, or social? Martyrdom, in contrast, is, in its strictest sense, the witnessing unto death of divine truth. Self-sacrifice may be a better analytical tool for the study of martyr­ dom but it places the focus more on the actors, the martyrs themselves, their motives and personalities, and less on the society that defines and awards the title of martyr. Martyrdom is as much a reward granted by the community as it is a display of courage and endurance achieved by the individual in the face of torture and execution. As Saint Augustine often said, “it is not the penaltywhich makes a martyrbut the cause” (Augustine, 1953: 35). Since this article is a historical survey of how the willingness to die for a cause has over the centuries tended to lose its religious orientation and increase its political potency, thereby muddying both its meaning and function, it seems best to stick to the historic term “martyr,” stemming from the Greek word “witness,” if only because it connotes—better than self-sacrifice—the interplay between those who make the sacrifice and the society that establishes the cause and that accords them their name. social research Vo! 75 : No 2 : Summer 2008 435 All societies have their martyrs, those semi-legendary spiritual heroes whose style of death embodies the values most dear to the soci­ eties they represent. Those values were expressed in religious terms because originally all authority was seen as stemming from the divine and the welfare of the state was closely allied to the welfare of the gods. For most of the Western world the early Christian martyrs remain the historic prototype for all who would make “death count for life” (Erikson, 1969: 197). The blood of the early Christian martyrs was far more than the seed of the Christian church; it was the stuff from which myths and fantasies were spun. Medieval Europe regarded “stern saints and tortured martyrs” as far more meaningful role models than mili­ tant barons and armored knights because a martyr’s exquisite suffering and death made, as Saint Cyprian asserted, “life more complete” and led to glory and life eternal (Cyprian, 1869: 235). The early Christians derived both their use and theory of martyr­ dom from the story of the death of Socrates and the Judaic legends of Eleazar and the Maccabean brothers. The crucifixion was ever before their eyes and they sought to emulate in their own deaths the agony of the dying Christ upon the cross. Saint Cyprian was explicit: the martyr in his prolonged torture and death stood “immovable, the stronger for his suffering,” resolved that in the “brutality of the executioner Christ Himself is suffering more in proportion to what he suffers” (Cyprian, 1869: 233). The early Christians viewed themselves as warriors in the endless battle between good and evil, a battle in which the devil did not limit himselfto the pollution and corruption of tyrants and human institutions but was working from within, seeking to defile the immor­ tal souls of men and women. They sought to nourish and advertise a new concept of the divine, one that had nothing to do with a pantheon of earth- and ocean-bound gods or household deities but with a cosmic force, a tiny spark of which was implanted in each human soul. Christians battled not with Rome; in their eyes they remained loyal citizens of the empire. Nor were they defending a militant church that demanded absolute and unconditional allegiance; no such institu­ tion had as yet taken shape. Instead, their agony was a demonstration 436...

“Berkeley School” Genius: Musings on a Feng-shui Perspective

Exotic feng-shui practices are an increasingly popular form of applied geography in Anglo-America today. Hardly scientific, feng-shui is, however, systematic, complex, and profound in the context of its own cosmology and symbolism. In this article, I muse on the provenance of “Berkeley School” genius at the UC Berkeley site in relation to its “power of place,” using a simplified feng-shui model. My examples introduce and elaborate on the propitious synchronicities found at the site perhaps responsible for the flowering of three prestigious “Berkeley Schools” of creative endeavor following WWI: Carl Sauer’s Berkeley School of Cultural Geography; Alfred Kroeber’s Berkeley School of Cultural Anthropology; and John Haley’s Berkeley School of American Scene Landscape Painting. I muse over some auspicious peculiarities in the common ground at the UC Berkeley site from which these three landscape schools emerge. A general feng-shui cosmological model describes how creative arrays of primal natural forces might converge at the campus site, creating a cosmic force field that generates and shapes the successful thoughts, visions, and creative output of certain of the site’s inhabitants. The founding fathers of these three Berkeley Schools, although unbeknownst to them, are perhaps beneficiaries of UC Berkeley’s excellent feng-shui site. The model provides a provocative alternative understanding of forces responsible for the longevity and continuing vitality of the “Berkeley School” tradition of cultural geography.

Harvey Cushing -- a standard worth striving for

Harvey Cushing: a life in surgery Michael Bliss Toronto: University of Toronto Press; 2005 593 pp $50 (cloth) ISBN 0-H020-H950-X In the first three decades of the 1900s, Harvey Cushing (1869–1939) was a cosmic force in the special field of neurological surgery and a commanding figure in American