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Neuroscience & Karma
major continuing danger to all individual human beings and to mankind. Wars continue to be as prevalent as ever and military leaders are at belm of affairs in many nations.
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Can we find an explanation for the marked tendency of humans to form groups that fight each other? Is warfare the result of aggressiveness of individuals? "War" wrote Rousseau "is not a relation between man and man but between state and state. Each state can have for enemies only other states ad not men". It is difficult to imagine that heterogeneous groups can possibly remain in perfect equilibrium without antagonism. The question, before us, is how conflict could be made limited and contained? We have ample information to help us to control the dangerous capacities for violence. Protective and defensive mechanisms possessed by us are to be seen as having the positive survival values and not identified with aggression and attack. Surely such a view is more sensible.
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The Chemistry of aggression/violence gives us a very important clue for controlling aggressive behavior in general and violence in particular. We know that serotonin is secreted within the brain, possibly by pineal body and through a proper technique of meditation, people may be trained to increase its proportion in blood circulation. The secretion of adrenalin and noradrenalin by the adrenal gland can be increased or inhibited by changes in the amount of ACTH released by pituitary under the influence of ACTH-releasing factors from hypothalamus. Both pituitary and pineal are found to be amenable to the conditions produced by meditational practices.
