1. Live Consciously
This requires us to be fully in the present moment. And for most, this takes a bit of practice, because many of us are conditioned to disown the here and now, to survive what we have thought that we cannot handle.
2. Accept Yourself
Yes. You have flaws and attributes. You also have the opportunity to enhance who you are, by accepting everything about yourself. In fact, the only way to enhance who you are is to accept yourself.
3. Take Responsibility for Your Experiences
Decide and affirm what I will and will not experience. This is quite liberating not only to myself, but also to my interlocutor.
4. Assert Who You Are
Honor what you think, feel, believe, need and want. Yes, for many readers this may be a challenge. But the results of accepting this challenge are wonderfully fulfilling.
An untrained ear may hear only “chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.” To a tiny black- capped chickadee, though, the call could be loosely translated as, “Yikes! Get a load of that pygmy-owl! I’ll need the whole flock to help drive it away!”
The chickadee’s familiar call, new research has concluded, varies with the size of a potential predator, influencing the number of recruits joining forces to mob it and send it packing.
NewsDay
Lucid dreaming is consciously perceiving and recognizing that one is in a dream while one is sleeping, sometimes leading to control over the “dreamscape”, or the faux-reality dream world within a dream. Stephen LaBerge, a published author and expert on the subject, has defined it as simply realizing that one is dreaming while in a dream. Other authorities contend that in order for the state of a dreaming person to be lucid, that person must have control over his or her dreamscape (because simply having the mental idea “I am lucid” could be a creation of the subconscious itself and not a real “rational” thought). Lucid dreamers, called oneironauts, report being able to freely remember the circumstances of waking life, think cogently, and act deliberately upon reflection, all while experiencing a dreamscape that seems vividly real.
2737 BC—Emperor Shen-Nung in China prescribes cannabis for beri-beri, constipation, ‘female weakness,’ gout, malaria, rheumatism and absentmindedness.
2000 BC—In Egypt, cannabis is used to treat sore eyes.
1400 BC—A Bronze Age drug trade supplied hashish and opium to ancient cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean as balm for the pain of childbirth and disease.
1000 BC—Cannabis use begins in India to overcome hunger and thirst by the religious mendicants.
1000 BC—Bhang, a cannabis preparation (a drink, generally mixed with milk) is used as an anesthetic and anti-phlegmatic in India.
200 BC—In ancient Greece, cannabis is used as a remedy for earache, edema, and inflammation.
200 AD—A Chinese physician, Hoa-Tho, prescribes cannabis as an analgesic in surgical procedures.
800 AD—Mohammed allows cannabis but forbids alcohol.
1000 AD—Moslems produce hashish as medicine.
1621—The medical book The Anatomy of Melancholy by English clergyman Robert Burton claims cannabis is a treatment for depression.
CBS
ABSTRACT: The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) has become the most publicly visible institution engaged in the debate on the paranormal. Initially CSICOP was primarily a scholarly body, but soon after its beginning it adopted a popular approach that fostered a more broadly based social movement. It actively promoted the formation of local societies with similar aims. Both CSICOP and the local groups have some distinguishing features. Prestigious scholars are affiliated with these organizations, a disproportionate number of magicians are involved, the groups are dominated by men, and many members hold religious views that are antagonistic to the paranormal. Despite the name of the organization, actual research is a very low priority of the Committee. In fact, CSICOP instituted a policy against doing research itself. CSICOP?s highest priority has been to influence the media. Its rhetoric and activities are designed to appeal to a broad audience rather than to scientists who investigate unusual or controversial phenomena. Recently, the Committee broadened its focus to include areas outside the paranormal.
Trickster
This essay by social philosopher Geoffrey Hill provides an in-depth, critical examination of the school of thought known as New Thought. This includes positive thinking, Christian Science, Religious Science, Mind Science, Science of Mind and the philosophies of Robert Schuller, Tony Robbins, the motivational industry, and the philosphy behind commercial materialism. According to Hill, it has much to do with our culture?s massive disease of selfishness and denial.
I think maybe I’ll join a cult, cut my balls off and kill myself with my beloved brethren as we await a spaceship to take us to paradise on the trail of a comet. Or, if I don’t want such a severe delusion, perhaps I’ll just do like the majority of persons in our culture, and join one of the most successful, but unrecognized cults ever invented: the very popular and rewarding cult of selfish, pathological denial and mass, delusional conformity.
We seem shocked when thirty nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult kill themselves due to a destructive group delusion. We are likewise appalled that millions could follow a psychotic madman like Hitler into a bizarre march toward mass destruction. Yet, we don’t stop to realize that the insanity of such religious and political cults is merely an extreme extension of what the majority of us do in our own respective group delusions. The difference between these extreme mind-control groups and the conformity of the majority is only a matter of degree.
PacificNet
As a spiritual philosophy, positive thinking is a distinctly American phenomenon – can one imagine such an approach to life taking root, say, in the former Soviet republics? And it is perhaps more innate to American religious impulses than the punitive doctrine heard from many quarters of fundamentalism. But does it have a convincing place in the world today – that is, in a shrinking world in which the effects of wars and tsunamis can make its claims seem cruelly na?ve at times?
By the early twentieth century, positive thought gained expression through a wide array of ministers and spiritual thinkers, who used Scripture and personal anecdote to extol its creative power. The mid-century metaphysician Neville Goddard captured the movement’s soaring optimism: “It is not what you want that you attract; you attract what you believe to be true.”
From Sub Rosa
More on positive thought: BELIEVE, The power of positive thinking, Beyond New Age Thinking: An Appreciation and Critique, The Triumph of Positive Thinking, Positive Thinking: Limits and Possibilities, A Realist’s Guide to Positive Thinking,and The Placebo Effect.
The brains of players of violent video games react as if the violence were real, a study has suggested.
It found that as violence became imminent, the cognitive parts of the brain became active and that during a fight, emotional parts of the brain were shut down.
It suggests that video games are training the brain to react with this pattern.
NYTimes
In an idea straight out of science fiction, robots could soon begin patrolling Japanese offices, shopping malls and banks to keep them safe from intruders. Equipped with a camera and sensors, the “Guardrobo D1,” developed by Japanese security firm Sohgo Security Services Co., is designed to patrol along pre-programmed paths and keep an eye out for signs of trouble.
The 109-cm tall robot will alert human guards via radio and by sending camera footage if it detects intruders, fires, or even water leaks.
Routers
Senate Republicans are calling on the Bush administration to reassess U.S. financial support for the International Committee of the Red Cross, charging that the group is using American funds to lobby against U.S. interests.
The Senate Republican Policy Committee, which advances the views of the Republican Senate majority, said in a report that the international humanitarian organization had “lost its way” and veered from the impartiality on which its reputation was based. The Republican policy group titled its report: “Are American Interests Being Disserved by the International Committee of the Red Cross?”
UnknownNews
Kibbutz Ketura, Israel - It has five leaves, stands 14 inches high and is nicknamed Methuselah. It looks like an ordinary date palm seedling, but for UCLA educated botanist Elaine Solowey, it is a piece of history brought back to life.
Planted on Jan. 25, the seedling growing in the black pot in Solowey’s nursery on this kibbutz in Israel’s Arava desert is 2,000 years old—more than twice as old as the 900-year-old biblical character who lent his name to the young tree. It is the oldest seed ever known to produce a viable young tree.
SFGate
The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.
The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.
Washington Post
All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less.
Despite the great varieties of programs available, most of us have a limited set of programs. Some of these are built in. In the simpler forms of life the programs were mostly built in from genetic codes to fully formed adultly reproducing organisms. The patterns of function, of actionreaction were determined by necessities of survival, of adaptation to slow environmental changes and of passing on the code to descendants.
Eventually the cerebral cortex appeared as an expanding new highlevel computer controlling the structurally lower levels of the nervous system, the lower builtin programs. For the first time learning and its faster adaptation to a rapidly changing environment began to appear. Further, as this new cortex expanded over several millions of years, a critical size cortex was reached. At this level of structure, a new capability emerged: learning to learn.
Good friends beat close family for helping people live longer, according to a new study.
The findings are based on data from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ALSA), which began in 1992 in Adelaide, South Australia.
ALSA addresses the impact of economic, social, behavioral and environmental factors on the health of people 70 and up.
Nearly 1,500 people participated in the study and provided information on their direct and phone contact with social networks including children, relatives and friends.
Over 10 years, it was found that close contact with children and relatives had little influence on survival rates.
A strong network of friends and confidants, however, significantly improved survival. People with a strong network lived longer than people with few friends.
BetterHumans
This American government ? what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?
...All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ‘75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.
Consitution.org
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