The rose is a perennial flower shrub or vine that contains over 100 species and comes in a variety of colors. The species form a group of erect shrubs and climbing or trailing plants, with stems that are often armed with sharp prickles. It is a common error to refer to roses as having thorns. Thorns are modified branches or stems, whereas these sharp protrusions on a rose are modified epidermal tissue. Most are native to Asia, with smaller numbers of species native to Europe, North America, and northwest Africa.

Attar of rose is the steam-extracted essential oil from rose flowers that has been used in perfumes for centuries. Rose water, made from the rose oil, is widely used in Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. The French are known for their rose syrup, most commonly made from an extract of rose petals. In the United States, this French rose syrup is used to make rose scones.

Rose hips are occasionally made into jam, jelly, and marmalade, or are brewed for tea, primarily for their high Vitamin C content. They are also pressed and filtered to make rose hip syrup. Rose hips are also used to produce Rose hip seed oil, which is used in skin products and some makeup products.
 
It has always been valued for its beauty and has a long history of symbolism. The ancient Greeks and Romans identified the rose with their goddesses of love referred to as Aphrodite and Venus. In Rome a wild rose would be placed on the door of a room where secret or confidential matters were discussed. A bouquet of red roses is often used to show love. It is used as a Valentine’s Day gift in many countries.

A red rose, often held in a hand, is a symbol of socialism or social democracy. It is used as a symbol by British, Irish, French, and other European labour, socialist or social democratic parties. This originated when the red rose was used as a badge by marchers in the May 1968 street protests in Paris. The White Rose was a World War II non violent resistance group in Germany.

Regeneration is the process an organism undertakes when a lost or damaged part regrows so the original function is restored. It is inversely related to complexity, where the more complex an animal is the less regeneration it is capable of. Whereas newts, for example, can regenerate severed limbs, mammals cannot. Limb regeneration in newts occurs in two major steps, first de-differentiation of adult cells into a stem cell state similar to embryonic cells and second, development of these cells into new tissue more or less the same way it developed the first time.

Studies in the 1970s showed that children up to the age of 10 or so who lose fingertips in accidents can regrow the tip of the digit within a month provided their wounds are not sealed up with flaps of skin, the usual treatment in such emergencies. They normally won’t have a finger print, and if there is any piece of the finger nail left it will grow back as well, usually in a square shape rather than round.

In August 2005, Lee Spievack, then in his early sixties, accidentally sliced off the tip of his right middle finger just above the first phalanx. His brother, Dr. Alan Spievack, was researching regeneration and provided him with a powdered extracellular matrix. Mr. Spievack covered the wound with the powder, and the tip of his finger re-grew in four weeks. The news was released in 2007. Mr. Spievack is the first documented case of an adult human regenerating fingertips.

The human liver is one of the few glands in the body that has the ability to regenerate from as little as 25% of its tissue. This is largely due to the unipotency of hepatocytes. Resection of liver can induce the proliferation of the remained hepatocytes until the lost mass is restored, where the intensity of the liver’s response is directly proportional to the mass resected. For almost 80 years surgical resection of the liver in rodents has been a very useful model to the study of cell proliferation.

The third eye is a mystical and esoteric concept referring in part to the brow chakra in certain Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. It is also spoken of as the gate that leads within to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness.

In New Age spirituality, the third eye may alternately symbolize a state of enlightenment or the evocation of mental images having deeply personal spiritual or psychological significance. The third eye is often associated with visions, clairvoyance, precognition, and out-of-body experiences.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, the third eye is a symbol of enlightenment. In the Indian tradition, it is referred to as the gyananakashu, the eye of knowledge, which is the seat of the ‘teacher inside’ or antar-guru. The third eye is commonly denoted in Indian and East Asian iconography with a dot or mark on the forehead of deities or enlightened beings, such as Shiva, the Buddha, or any number of yogis, sages and bodhisattvas. This symbol is called the “Eye of Wisdom”, or, in Buddhism, the urna. In Hinduism, it is believed that the opening of Shiva’s third eye causes the eventual destruction of the physical universe.

According to Max Heindel’s Rosicrucian writings, the third eye is localized in the pituitary body and the pineal gland. It was said that in the far past, when man was in touch with the inner worlds, these organs were his means of ingress thereto, and they will again serve that purpose at a later stage. According to this view, they were connected with the involuntary or sympathetic nervous system, and to regain contact with the inner worlds it is necessary to establish the connection of the pineal gland and the pituitary body with the cerebrospinal nervous system. It was said that when that is accomplished, man will again possess the faculty of perception in the higher worlds, but on a grander scale than it was in the distant past, because it will be in connection with the voluntary nervous system and therefore under the control of his will.

Some writers and researchers, including H. P. Blavatsky and Rick Strassman, have suggested that the third eye is in fact the partially dormant pineal gland, which resides between the two hemispheres of the brain. The pineal gland is said to secrete dimethyltryptamine, which induces dreams, near-death experiences, meditation, or hallucinations. Various types of lower vertebrates, such as reptiles and amphibians, can actually sense light via a third parietal eye, a structure associated with the pineal gland, which serves to regulate their circadian rhythms.

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body. The mind-body problem, or the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.

Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind-body problem. Dualism is the position that mind and body are in some way separate from each other. It can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle, and the Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century. Substance dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas Property dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.

Many modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, particularly in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences. Other philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position which challenges the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct.

Reductive physicalists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states. Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the brain is all there is to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science. Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues. However, they are far from having been resolved, and modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities and the intentionality of mental states and properties can be explained in naturalistic terms.