• To do research or not to do?
• Is it a Shakespearean twist of literature?
• Is it a game, the ropes of which can be learnt or taught, or is it an intrinsic gift, laced quite often than not with serendipity or empiricism or chance or all rolled into each other.?
• The vilest and most difficult of all muses / Sirens (lying well outside of the 5 I's, see ealier questions) for a researcher (not a scientist) is 'A' -- 'A' for applause.
• Do we seek applause or cheers or chest-thumping or mutual back-scratching or awards / prizes, Institutional ranking and altruistic flood of greenbacks or the black bottom-lines flooded for-profit Companies inudunted with burgeoning profits / stock options / insider trading, OR do we pray, incessantly, unheard, without rites or rituals, rules or regulations, sacred days or for veg--non--veg--vegan foods or fasting for a few hours curiously supplanting for prayers, for being rainbow people -- LGTQ+, MSM, continuously for a quiet progress for humankind--intercessionary prayer?
• Petitionary prayer that seeks profits for self is the worst- or lowest-form of prayer (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1967, Triad Grafton Books, U.K.), a never-ending self-gratification for health, wealth, and their poor-poor third but worst trend, the character.
• Beneath the neck, humans are fundamentally similar, yet we all strive to distinguish ourselves intellectually. We aim to achieve cerebral, visual, and physical feats that others cannot, through the most accessible means of statistically significant medical publications, various millennial trainings, and numerous other forms of prowess.
• Having experienced the narcissism of observing our own reflections in bodies of water, mirrors, and now cell phones, we have all become adept at self-admiration. This constant preening suggests that we each possess impeccable characters. Nevertheless, the hunger for 'character' remains subliminal or lampooned, never being fully understood by puny minds.
• Gain and loss are invariably connected. Self-love can obliterate the capacity to recognize and accept and defend-to-death self-generated and -inflicted errors or favored theory and therapy, especially in the context of RCCT and the use or misuse of placebo, as noted by Gupta (2010).

Who does not pray?

• Those who maintain post-publication silence for fear of castrating criticism. I
• I have 100s of such examples and will quote all (not dumb and mute, as silence or covert-coveted aggression in Politics)??
• The meditators???
• Only those born without ova and sperms and have no umbilicus or umbilical dependency on the mother-father duo do not need to pray -- or those generated not even out of thin air! Exactly, and only those, who need no oxygen or water or food to survive, can afford not to pray.
• But those agnostics, atheists, nihilists, and flat-Earthers who all gather to eat-and-drink, make-merry, and laugh-to-death convivially, always do merge prayerless into chemical ash when their time arises without warning or any celebratory toast.

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• Any need to pray for doing positive, productive research in natural or bio-sciences?
• To acknowledge error?? Tons of prayer, thousands and thousands of tons of prayer, as if weightless noiseless chant-less lyric-less motionless non-pretentious prayer might be weighed in nano-grams or even far-lesser unimaginable weights or remain weightless across countless Millennia and unmeasurable Time.
• Meditation, assimilation, a Fortress of Solitude, 1-3 brains working cohesively as one (Crick and Watson)--The Double-Helix) works the wonders, opens sesame the firmly locked impenetrable Doors of Perception with a peculiar effortless unending prayer.
• A great symphony was never written by a large Orchestra of 70-100 or more musicians, a great painting or celing never executed by more than 1-3 or more sculptors or artists (Mona Lisa, the Louvre) or a great sports game won by more than 1-3 key players, gifted with the unmanifest prayer with superlative execution of the brain-eye-hand--a simple round of ball (golf, football, soccer, ice-hockey, figure-skating, tennis, chess et. al.) all at the same time, while having already considered the next 10 parry-and-thrust advances of their opponents. The incomprehensible gift of today, the future, and of all TIME immemorial.
• The Taj Mahal of India and the Sphinxes / Ramesses Head / Mummification of bodies in Egypt, or the terra-cotta army / GREAT WALL of China are exceptions doing the same miserable below-neck non-intellectual manual work by starved / semi-starved part-or-fully clothed labourers timelessly, again and again, in a certain era or epoch with brute force, or flagellation but not excellence of intellect.
• Brute force -- mindless-data collection -- is not an exceptional exercise of the intellect.
• The combination of the brain, eye, and the hand executed by 1-3 artists / artistes,who stimulate and soothe and clamp the personal self-singeing over-exuberance of the other 1 or 2 or a larger group creates thre mind-force that creates originality.
• In the truest simile, scientists are artists working in true unadulerated fashion / vogue collaboration, either in isolation or in a close ego-less ego-free execution in the laboratory, understanding the phenomena as they evolve one-by-one in the scaffolding of enterprise, knitting the gestalt that is elusive to other apparently / seemingly / circularly and Brownian argumentative / tenure-holding equally competent researchers (non-scientists), with a non-stop prayer of supplication and a mind(s) of superlative exceptional grasp, contemplation, and comprehension -- the unteachable components of research
• Rarely, but not uncommonly, the Fortress of Solitude has but a single occupant, praying and working at the same time of very close / intimate amalgamated flow as the Cosmic Ink / Drive flows through the lifetime limitations of the arteries and veins, coursing the random waters of the oceans, 75% of Earth which constitutes the Planet, with their gratitude of tiny rivulets, brooks, and prayers flooding the World to its benefit, the legacy of a lifetime(s) (Gupta, 2019; 2023; 2024;2009)

(Files to be added later, the gist remaining completely and absolutely unchanged following 50 years of Meditation in my own Fortress of Body-Mind Solitude, independent and completely unsupported by funds / Institutions / Industry, and, with the unimageable excess of fuel-of-vitriolic derision and ridicule by most of my peers that supercharged my solo efforts , including Editors and their Teams right at the front desk from The Lancet, to NEJM, JAMA, J Neurophysiology, Neurology, Brain & Eye, JNN, BMJ, Neuro-Ophthalmology, and many more that could fill paragraphs and page in preparation), engraving a permanent Legacy to Humankind for all Millennia to come and go.

It is the forefront of pre-publishing that finally broke the back and the dam of obstinate resistance of Editors, primed primarily to keep-egg-off-the-face of Eminence in Ophthalmology, Neuroscience, Neuroendocrinology, Cardiology, Pulmonary Medicine, Carotid Circulations, and many more disciplines along with Covid-19, febrile headache, cough-induced primary headaches with ocular compression maneuver, ANS (ANS STORM), dysfunctional / dystopic hyper-split nosologic classification of primary headaches (2018,Cehalalagia), and creation of the pre-prodromal / preprominotory phase of migraine, with one continous pathophsiology concept abolishing the pathogenetic role of the brain with exclusive pathophysiologic predominance of the first division of the trigeminal nerve (V1) eye, foolish and vacuous RCCT and empiricism / serendipity in therapy, and the correct interpretation of non-homonymous scintillating scotoma (unchallenged since 2006) besides much much more as well as the FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF PATHOLOGY OF MIGRAINE, paving the path of a seismic, tectonic break-through ground-breaking in the discipline with nothing left swept-under-the-carpet, from redwine / alcohol to CGRP.

Most days and all nights of my life have been swallowed by migraine.

I remain indebted to the discipline to grant me an insight and an extremely hostile rivalrous and jealous peer-review-Editorial system in the last 3 decades.

After all, everyone knows about migraine, the poverbial 7 blind-men-and-the-Elephant. Then there are true gems like Hippocrates, Rudyard Kipling, and many other dismissed assets / ego-driven individuals in the last 1-2 Centuries / Millennia.

In these steps to excellence and exceptional superlative outcome beyond the herd and contemporaries (past or future or both), an indelible mark in History will be laid, there can / will be no jostling, all will find equitable mention, without undue favor or critique, with a balance on the tip of a pin without a breeze, simply towards the ultimate exit from this quagmire, labyrinth, and quicksand of human intellect.

John Rothrock and Lionel Opie are the only remaining Editors of note, besides Welch, Lance, and Blau--so the History of Migraine will tell, with 20/20 hindsight.

31-May-2024

New Delhi

ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6770-5916