Sunday, January 6, 2008

My trip to exhibition 'Body World'

I went to the exhibition Body World - 2 in San Jose tech museum on 05, Jan, 2008- and it was a great experience. Some people get enchanted to see the beauty which lies inside the complicated human body, and some realize how mortal our body is, and ponder over the relation between the soul and the body, and how body get evolved so complicated.

What does exhibition show:
The exhibition show the real internal organs of humans, and also some animals like horse. The following things were shown in the exhibition:

1. Bones: The whole skeleton was displayed which showed around 200 bones in human body and around 100 joints. Hands, knee joints, joints in legs were showen separately for a better insight.

2. Muscular system: Triceps, biceps, shoulder muscles and other muscles were shown.

3. Internal organs: Internal organs like kidney, stomach, small intestine, heart, spleen, liver, big intestine, kidney etc were shown. For a better understanding, they cut across organs to display the internals. For example to show the internal large surface area of small intestine, they cut it open and displayed.

4. Diseased organs: They displayed- a smokers lung which looked black. Also many organs infected with tumour etc were displayed.

5. Nervous system: The nerves were shown, which run from brain to almost every part of body. Interestingly, heart has its own little nervous system.

6. Internal Systems: There were separate bodies and organs displayed to explain digestion, urine and other systems.

How did the displayed human bodies come from:
The human bodies were made from a Plastination process, which is developed by Gunther von Hagens. . The Plastinization is explained at http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/plastination/method_plastination.html.



What I learnt from the exhibition:

I essentially started appreciating the complexity of human body. With this appreciation, came the following learnings:

Relation between body and soul: The story of a body starts when a soul enters a new little body, and later body gets developed in a big complicated system. The question arises- how body gets developed in such a complicated system of multiple organs functioning together. The code for the body seems to be the DNA, as scientists find. And religion says- it is karma. There has to be reconcilation here in these two point of views. One case may be - The karma dictates which parent should one take birth with- and that recoinciles karma and DNA. DNA is at the level of 1/(10 power -10), which is actually far bigger than karma particles. So it seems karma lies at the core which dictates, which parent to chose, and once the parents are chosen, how its DNA would be different than the parents. (I will update this once I have more knowledge on DNA.)

Karma are more complicated than the body: Body is what we see from outside, and it internally has a very complicated system. And the code of this complicated system lies in Karma. And actually karma's job is not to just form the body, but actually it is responsible for lot more things than just the body. Karma influences our relationship with people around, our finances, job, our intelligence, our emotions in general, our accidents in life, our good times and bad times in life, our age, our reputation in society and friends, our interest toward religion and lot many things. There Karma has lot more information, and part of it is encoding for the body.

What lies behind karma: Behind Karma lies emotions- the emotions to have something, to not have something. In other words- to hate, anger, greed, deceipt, attraction, laughter, jealousy etc. The emotions has multiple types, and one keeps doing it continuosly, and continously bringing more karma, and also changing the exisited bound karma.

Body changes as Karma changes (partial statement): Body forms with the influence of Karma, however we should not think that karma stops its role, once the body is formed. The karma still influences and bring changes to its body. For example, we can see - when someone starts worshipping God, his health starts getting better. This comes from making karma better, which brings changes in body. However there can be changes to some extent- it definitely can not cure amputed hands.

Karma changes as emotion changes: As body changes, our karma also changes. It brings difference to karma getting influxed, and also to the bound karma.

All above process seems so strange and weird, but its true.

Another angle: Structure inside the plants(onion), and other animals: Though the exhibition shows the internal of human body after plastinizationm, which takes a whole lot of dedicated research and many research man years for such a dedication. However there are many living beings we can see without that process. For example- plants - we can see it inside. How onions, cucumber, cashew nuts and other plants look from inside. The have also a structure inside, which agains stems from DNA, karma, and links to their emotions in previous births. In contrast to human, they have different color, smell etc.

2 comments:

Parag Shah said...

Good recap of the body world! I will add my comments later.

Parag Shah said...

Science may think that brain has capability of knowing 5 sense and thoughts related information. However, that is not true per Jainism. The soul has capabilility to know things and mind is a medium. In an analogy, eye has capability to see and spectacle is a medium. Atma and mind works in that fashion. Is there a way to prove it?

मैं किसी को छूता ही नहीं

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