​I wouldn’t say science is wrong, it is a pathway to knowledge that has enabled achievements such as rockets to the moon and bridges across deep waters. I don’t think that science aims at happiness. It aims at understanding how things work in the physical universe.

Happiness has nothing to do with how many scientific achievements have been accomplished. Science has enabled us to bring enormous amounts of improvements to our physical comfort here on earth, but do you think anyone is any happier than ever before?

More people than ever are on anti-depressants and mood-altering substances. They are going on amazing vacations but have to take their tranquilizers and opioids with them.

I once stayed at a house by a beautiful lake, surrounded by trees and the peace of nature. When I went into the bathroom, I saw several bottles of Prozac on the counter. The owners had achieved great financial wealth and had lots of luxury around them, and still needed Prozac—and lots of it. When I looked in the medicine cabinet, there was Zanax, Halcion, and Atavan in this setting of total peace.

Science has created these drugs that attempt to counteract people’s severe unhappiness. But, we have found that eventually these drugs don’t work on their own. They need add-ons. And the add-ons need add-ons.
​
If you do not have peace within, it doesn’t matter how many honors or glories or prizes or acquisitions you have achieved—happiness is not possible. It doesn’t depend on anything exterior, such as achievements, which can be topped by someone else. It comes from understanding yourself as an Eternal Soul. Then it becomes even more than happiness, it becomes an underlying, indestructible joy.

Einstein once said,

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."

The truth is not something that you finally attain. It is a fluid and not etched in stone. That is why imagination can take you there faster than knowledge. We can all cite examples of something that was “known” by all and ends up being completely false. For centuries most people knew the earth was flat. As people began to circumnavigate the globe, they discovered it was round.

Knowledge helps to bring you to the physical truth about the planet when it is proven in a laboratory or by calculations and deductive reasoning. We found out that the earth was not the center of the universe. The laws of gravity gave us the knowledge behind the fact that we can’t jump off a roof and begin to fly.

We discovered that if we put our hand in a hot flame, we got burned. These are all things that are true about the physical universe. They are the known. They are discovered territory. There is no room for imagination: Will I get burned if I put my hand in the fire? Yes, you know you will get burned. Will I crash to the pavement if I jump off the penthouse roof? No doubt.

But if you want to find out the truth about who you are as a spiritual being, then knowledge of gravity, of your anatomy, of how your brain functions, or how we interact as social species is not enough. Knowledge of human history is not enough. You need the quality of imagination that can envision something that is beyond what your physical senses are presenting.
​
Imagination also leads to questions that Einstein used to ask himself, “What if?” What if time is a human invention and is relative to where you are in the universe? He dared to imagine far beyond the fixed laws of Newtonian physics. And because of this, he entered into the inner sanctum that is available to us all, once we break out of what is known and begin to explore the unknown.

What we call “reality” right now is not provable. Let’s say we want to examine the nature of the atoms that make up this reality. We need a scanning electron microscope, which in the process of shining its light on the particle and waves of the atom, actually changes the structure of the atom.

The atom, which is considered to be the building block of physical reality, is itself an unknown entity because it can be either a particle or a wave. And this wave or particle is only there by virtue of probability (according to Heisenberg’s Theory of Uncertainty). Furthermore, these particles and waves abide in relatively enormous empty space—comparable to the distance between the stars and celestial bodies of the universe.

When the scientist scans the atom and interacts with it by altering its form, the observer influences the observed. It then becomes subjective. This is why we cannot prove “reality.”

What we call reality is also a combination of our waking state and our physical senses. A cat or a bee sees reality in a completely different way. They may not see the colors we see but can see others in the infrared or ultraviolet range. They may not see the same shapes we see either, because all this is dependent on our human systems of perception and the structure of our eyes and optic nerve.

Yet, I can tell you that the chair I just stubbed my toe on is real. The pain is real. The blood is real. The anger and upset I feel is real. But where is all the pain and upset when I am asleep? It is only to my waking consciousness that the pain exists.
​
These are just a few reasons why we cannot objectively prove reality.

Raising the kundalini, and any form of deep meditation, has been shown by scientists to bring human brainwaves into that Alpha state. The minds of meditators and people who routinely visit their Higher Selves, have been studied for a long time now. Their brains are different, with a higher incidence of peace-inducing frequencies.

I remember when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi introduced Transcendental Meditation back in the early 70’s. People felt the difference, as they got into their deeper states of relaxation and emotional freedom. Here is a quote from an article on Transcendental Meditation and Women:

"Brain Waves and Meditation
Neuroscientists have found that during TM practice, the brain produces high-power alpha waves. This distinct brain pattern corresponds to the state of relaxed inner wakefulness—serenity, expansion and bliss.

But that’s not all. The alpha waves become synchronous, rising and falling together. This coherence often spreads throughout the brain and is strongest in the pre-frontal cortex—the seat of your brain’s executive judgment."

Regardless of the path to these beneficial brain states, they have been proven under laboratory conditions to be effective and trustworthy. They impact the way we live in harmony with the world. Here is something from the Huffington Post:

“Research on meditation has also shown a wide range of psychological benefits. For example, a 2012 review of 163 studies that was published by the American Psychological Association concluded that Transcendental Meditation had relatively strong effects in reducing anxiety, negative emotions, trait anxiety and neuroticism while aiding learning, memory and self-realization.”
​
Kundalini has the same effects and impacts on the neuroplasticity of the brain and possibly even more. The brain is not a static blob of tissue. It is electric, magnetic, and it responds to our thinking patterns. When we raise the energy of the kundalini, it is like taking your brain through a brain-frequency power-wash.

People have been burning incense for religious worship purposes for many thousands of years. Egyptians were using it more than 2000 years before Jesus Christ appeared on earth. So many nations have used it specifically for religious purposes: To create a mood (aromatherapy), to purify the environment (burning sage), and to let people know they have entered the inner sanctum of their place of worship.

So many different cultures have used incense religiously since the Egyptians, there are too many to mention. But here are some of the highlights:

• Chinese Taoist temples: Large coils of incense were always burning to set the space apart from the hustle and bustle of daily life.
  
  
• Chinese Buddhist temples: The incense is used to burn a Buddhist monk or nun's scalp during ordination and the burning usually lasts for 5 minutes, produces 6 to 12 circular scars.
  
  
• Japanese Shinto temples: The incense is placed in horizontal piles and kept burning constantly, with the bottom layers staying unlit.
  
  

Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism have all used incense in their worship practices through the centuries. The Catholic church, especially, has “censers,” which are ornate receptacles for the incense to be flung around for maximum effect.
​
I haven’t delved into all the ways incense has been used in religious practice but it is fascinating to discover how pervasive the practice of lighting incense is in the world of religious worship.

Intuition is a big part of moral knowledge. We intuit, or feel deep down inside, that something isn’t right. It doesn’t feel good. For example, someone may not explicitly have told you that torturing a puppy is a bad thing to do. But if you have a heart and feelings, even if you are a little child, you will know that this is not a good thing to do. You intuitively feel for the puppy. You wouldn’t want that to happen to you.

We can also intuit that even though stealing is a bad thing, if our child is hungry and we are homeless and we see some food, the thought could cross our mind to steal it. We might even go ahead and grab that apple from the fruit stand for our child. We know it is immoral but we over-ride our intuition for the sake of survival. We know that the fruit stand owner worked hard to put his shop together and he may be facing hard times himself. Stealing from him does not feel good, even if our baby gets to eat something.

Problems arise in wartime, when people are commanded to kill and feel conflicted about it. Their intuition tells them one thing, that killing civilians and children is no way to live life—but they must, under severe consequences, go against their intuition.
​
Intuition is a valuable tool to navigate through the complexities of moral issues. Without it, we are left with a lifeless set of rules that most people will break anyway.

​Opinions, by their very definition, are subjective. They are based on how a person feels about something. These feelings may be conditioned by all kinds of factors: Parental teachings, society’s rules, our own ego and its need to be bolstered and protected, religious indoctrination, and the natural propensity to avoid pain and move towards pleasure.

Opinions are not meant to be based on fact. They are one person’s point of view. That is all. It is how they see the world. Someone can come up to you and tell you you’re amazing. That same day someone else comes up and scoffs at you. That is all their opinion. It is what they are going through at the time and it is not based on objective reality whatsoever.

So many opinions are taken to be facts and this causes a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world. This is especially true when someone tries to force their opinion on you, argues about it, and even strong-arms you into going along with it. It’s just their point of view for the moment and it is not based on any proof or anything concrete.
​
Peoples’ opinions can easily be changed. Objective facts don’t change. They are always true.

Up cannot exist without down. If I asked you to place all the furniture in the room “up” you would have to understand what down is to do it. It would all be up if there wasn’t a down.

As humans we see things as good and evil, up and down, wrong and right but in nature it is all part of an enormous simultaneous happening and there is no value judgment about it. As humans, too, we are taught to fight against the bad and defend the good. But if we didn’t know what the bad was, it would all be good.

When we see a gazelle being devoured by a lion, it depends who’s side we’re on as to whether it this has a down-side or and up-side. To the gazelle, if it could think the way humans do, it would have a definite down-side. To the hungry lioness who needs to feed her young, it has an up-side. Yet all that is really happening here is Nature naturing. It is huge forces of the Universe playing out its dance in a series of contrasts.

We still cling to the belief that the sun is rising (coming up) and setting (going down) even though we know that the globe is rotating in space in relation to the sun and there is no down or up about it. Its more like side by side. We add more moral judgments to this natural occurrence when we attribute sunup to hope, the dawning of a new day. And we mingle our fears with the totally natural phenomenon of sundown with death. So we continue to to say, “The sun went down” and “the sun came up.”
​
In nature upsides and downsides co-exist and you cannot have one without the other. People try to have trouble-free lives and strive to eradicate the downside. They think can achieve only the up-side through all kinds of disciplines and escape tactics. They don’t want the lion to eat the gazelle. They don’t want animals to eat each other. Nothing should ever die. Everything should live forever. They want to fix everything and make it all upside, without realizing that it already is beautiful and perfect just as it is.

That is how morality controls selfishness. It may not erase it but it controls it for the greater good.Selfishness is a hard-wired quality that comes from our lesser evolved natures. It comes from our drive to survive. When we are hungry and we see food, if we are selfish we grab it all for ourselves. We might hit somebody away, or even steal it from them. All this is OK in nature, as you can see from the behavior of the coyotes and jackals.

But even coyotes and jackals have moral behaviors that are enforced for the health of the pack. The Alpha male gets first choice of the kill or what gets stolen. The Omega female gets the last choice. This all seems so cruel and selfish but it has evolved for the efficient management of the pack and its overall survival. Each animal knows exactly what is permitted of him or her and there are severe consequences if they are clueless.

In human society, morality, is defined as principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. We teach this behavior to our children so we can all get along and live together comfortably. You might say that morality enables society to run effectively and ensures the individual’s survival in the long run.

One of the most fundamental principles of morality is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If you treat people in an open-hearted and giving way, they will be more inclined to show love to you too. This makes for a happy experience for everyone involved.
​
If you want to grab up all the toys for yourself and steal from others, most societies don’t condone it. They will even punish it. So people who selfishly try to snatch everything for themselves are put in check by their family, their society, and the world at large. That is how morality controls selfishness. It may not erase it but it controls it for the greater good.

​If you define morality as principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior, then teaching has a higher moral value because it works better. Teaching is more effective than preaching in demonstrating what these ethics are. And the best way to teach is by example.

People preach all day long and are complete hypocrites. They say one thing and then do another. Also, preaching means that you are talking at someone. Teaching means you are interacting with someone.

When you get someone to agree with you about a subject, they have bought into it. They are more likely to behave accordingly. If you preach at them and they have not bought into what you are saying, you have become, as the Paul says in the New Testament: “As sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” It’s all noise with nothing real behind it.

We have seen the evangelical preachers crash and burn after they have preached hellfire for people’s sins and turn around and do the very thing they preach against. Preachers such as Jerry Fallwell and Jim Bakker were brought out in the light of the public eye and their hollow words showed them to be con artists. They preached but what did they teach?

Teaching is an unselfish act that bears in mind the good and gaining of the student. Preaching is about telling people what to do and can come from the egotism of the preacher. David Koresh held his congregation captive for hours, sometimes days, listening to his end-of-the-world fearsome sermons. He declared himself to be God. And as such, he knew better than anyone else.
​
A true teacher gives students room to discover things on their own. Their actions are based, not on what they have been told, but what they agree to be right within their own minds and hearts.