Random Nonsense

Just a loose thought here:

The world is such an unbelievable pile of nonsense that if I did not live here and see it everyday, day after day, that I could not possibly have believed it even if God herself would have whispered it to me. Holy Smoke!

What do I do now my Love?

Lover my friend - just take it one day at the time and smile for atleast two weeks in advance...

Excellent Idea Lover!

(Gerardus)

http://www.soulwise.net/

COSMIC SPHERES OF TIME

Be sure to check out Nobel Prize winner George Smoot's fascinating video presentation to get an idea of the level of intelligence necessary to create the cosmic computer we call a Universe. The cosmic planetarium is in essence a time machine comprised of higher dimensional life forms we call stars - some of which which are singing our song.

1) The Design of the Universe

"Astrophysicist George Smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos -- with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids -- got built this way."

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/george_smoot_on_the_design_of_the_universe.html

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2) The Milky-Way's Home in the Virgo Supercluster

http://www.miqel.com/space_photos_maps/galactic_info/position-of-milky-way-in-virgo-supercluster.html

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3) Our Existence

http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/13901/our_existence/

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4) A New Kind of Singing Star

"There are three new singing stars on the block, but you're unlikely to hear them on Radio 1. The musical talents of HD49933, HD181420 and HD181906, three nearby stars which are hotter and larger than our Sun, were discovered by a group of scientists."

http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/sep-dec08/stellarchoir/index.html

Your Gods Are Dividing You

What is happening in the world? You have a Christian God, Hindu Gods, Mohammedans with their particular conception of God - each little sect with their particular truth; and all these truths are becoming like so many diseases in the world, separating people. These truths, in the hands of the few, are becoming the means of exploitation. You go to each, one after the other, tasting them all, because you begin to lose all sense of discrimination, because you are suffering and you want a remedy, and you accept any remedy that is offered by any sect, whether Christian, Hindu, or any other sect. So, what is happening? Your gods are dividing you, your beliefs in God are dividing you and yet you talk about the brotherhood of man, unity in God, and at the same time deny the very thing that you want to find out, because you cling to these beliefs as the most potent means of destroying limitation, whereas they but intensify it. These things are so obvious.

JKRISHNAMURTI

(The Book of Life - December 15)

It's official: Men really are the weaker sex

Evolution is being distorted by pollution, which damages genitals and the ability to father offspring, says new study. Geoffrey Lean reports
Sunday, 7 December 2008
Related Articles
Leading article: Decline of the real man is no joke
The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.
The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.
Backed by some of the world's leading scientists, who say that it "waves a red flag" for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for ministers. On Wednesday, Britain will lead opposition to proposed new European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have "gender-bending" effects.
It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.
"This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat," says Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wrote the report.
Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety information on 85 per cent of them.
Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.
The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than 250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.
It concludes: "Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment.
"Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans."
Fish, it says, are particularly affected by pollutants as they are immersed in them when they swim in contaminated water, taking them in not just in their food but through their gills and skin. They were among the first to show widespread gender-bending effects.
Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones – largely from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.
Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40 per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing lesser feminisation. A similar link between farming and sex changes in northern leopard frogs has been revealed by Canadian research, adding to suspicions that pesticides may be to blame.
Male alligators exposed to pesticides in Florida have suffered from lower testosterone and higher oestrogen levels, abnormal testes, smaller penises and reproductive failures. Male snapping turtles have been found with female characteristics in the same state and around the Great Lakes, where wildlife has been found to be contaminated with more than 400 different chemicals. Male herring gulls and peregrine falcons have produced the female protein used to make egg yolks, while bald eagles have had difficulty reproducing in areas highly contaminated with chemicals.
Scientists at Cardiff University have found that the brains of male starlings who ate worms contaminated by female hormones at a sewage works in south-west England were subtly changed so that they sang at greater length and with increased virtuosity.
Even more ominously for humanity, mammals have also been found to be widely affected.
Two-thirds of male Sitka black-tailed deer in Alaska have been found to have undescended testes and deformed antler growth, and roughly the same proportion of white-tailed deer in Montana were discovered to have genital abnormalities.
In South Africa, eland have been revealed to have damaged testicles while being contaminated by high levels of gender-bender chemicals, and striped mice from one polluted nature reserved were discovered to be producing no sperm at all.
At the other end of the world, hermaphrodite polar bears – with penises and vaginas – have been discovered and gender-benders have been found to reduce sperm counts and penis lengths in those that remained male. Many of the small, endangered populations of Florida panthers have been found to have abnormal sperm.
Other research has revealed otters from polluted areas with smaller testicles and mink exposed to PCBs with shorter penises. Beluga whales in Canada's St Lawrence estuary and killer whales off its north-west coast – two of the wildlife populations most contaminated by PCBs – are reproducing poorly, as are exposed porpoises, seals and dolphins.
Scientists warned yesterday that the mass of evidence added up to a grave warning for both wildlife and humans. Professor Charles Tyler, an expert on endocrine disrupters at the University of Exeter, says that the evidence in the report "set off alarm bells". Whole wildlife populations could be at risk, he said, because their gene pool would be reduced, making them less able to withstand disease and putting them at risk from hazards such as global warming.
Dr Pete Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, one of the world's foremost authorities on gender-bender chemicals, added: "We have thrown 100, 000 chemicals against a finely balanced hormone system, so it's not surprising that we are seeing some serious results. It is leading to the most rapid pace of evolution in the history of the world.
Professor Lou Gillette of Florida University, one of the most respected academics in the field, warned that the report waved "a large red flag" at humanity. He said: "If we are seeing problems in wildlife, we can be concerned that something similar is happening to a proportion of human males"
Indeed, new research at the University of Rochester in New York state shows that boys born to mothers with raised levels of phthalates were more likely to have smaller penises and undescended testicles. They also had a shorter distance between their anus and genitalia, a classic sign of feminisation. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.
Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.
And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years. (Hamsters produce nearly three times as much, at 160 million.) Professor Nil Basu of Michigan University says that this adds up to "pretty compelling evidence for effects in humans".
But Britain has long sought to water down EU attempts to control gender-bender chemicals and has been leading opposition to a new regulation that would ban pesticides shown to have endocrine-disrupting effects. Almost all the other European countries back it, but ministers – backed by their counterparts from Ireland and Romania – are intent on continuing their resistance at a crucial meeting on Wednesday. They say the regulation would cause a collapse of agriculture in the UK, but environmentalists retort that this is nonsense because the regulation has get-out clauses that could be used by British farmers.

The Holographic Universe - Beyond Matter

Love Is Dangerous

How can man live without love? We can only exist, and existence without love is control, confusion, and pain - and that is what most of us are creating. We organize for existence and we accept conflict as inevitable because our existence is a ceaseless demand for power. Surely, when we love, organization has its own place, its right place; but without love, organization becomes a nightmare, merely mechanical and efficient, like the army; but as modern society is based on mere efficiency, we have to have armies - and the purpose of an army is to create war. Even in so-called peace, the more intellectually efficient we are, the more ruthless, the more brutal, the more callous we become. That is why there is confusion in the world, why bureaucracy is more and more powerful, why more and more governments are becoming totalitarian. We submit to all this as being inevitable because we live in our brains and not in our hearts, and therefore love does not exist. Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind. A man who loves is dangerous, and we do not want to live dangerously; we want to live efficiently, we want to live merely in the framework of organization because we think organizations are going to bring order and peace in the world. Organizations have never brought order and peace. Only love, only goodwill, only mercy can bring order and peace, ultimately and therefore now.

JKRISHNAMURTI

(The Book of Life)

Prayer Is a Complex Affair

Like all deep human problems, prayer is a complex affair and not to be rushed at; it needs patience, careful and tolerant probing, and one cannot demand definite conclusions and decisions. Without understanding himself, he who prays may through his very prayer be led to self-delusion. We sometimes hear people say, and several have told me, that when they pray to what they call God for worldly things, their prayers are often granted. If they have faith, and depending upon the intensity of their prayer, what they seek - health, comfort, worldly possessions - they eventually get. If one indulges in petitionary prayer it brings its own reward, the thing asked for is often granted, and this further strengthens supplications. Then there is the prayer, not for things or for people, but to experience reality, God, which is also frequently answered; and there are still other forms of petitionary prayer, more subtle and devious, but nevertheless supplicating, begging and offering. All such prayers have their own reward, they bring their own experiences; but do they lead to the realization of the ultimate reality?

Are we not the result of the past, and are we not therefore related to the enormous reservoir of greed and hate, with their opposites? Surely, when we make an appeal, or offer a petitionary prayer, we are calling upon this reservoir of accumulated greed, and so on, which does bring its own reward, and has its price.... Does supplication to another, to something outside, bring about the understanding of truth?

JKRISHNAMURTI

(The Book of Life - December 10)

Begin Here

A religious man does not seek God. The religious man is concerned with the transformation of society, which is himself. The religious man is not the man that does innumerable rituals, follows traditions, lives in a dead, past culture, explaining endlessly the Gita or the Bible, endlessly chanting, or taking sannyasa - that is not a religious man; such a man is escaping from facts. The religious man is concerned totally and completely with the understanding of society, which is himself. He is not separate from society. Bringing about in himself a complete, total mutation means complete cessation of greed, envy, ambition; and therefore he is not dependent on circumstances, though he is the result of circumstance - the food he eats, the books he reads, the cinemas he goes to, the religious dogmas, beliefs, rituals, and all that business. He is responsible, and therefore the religious man must understand himself, who is the product of society that he himself has created. Therefore, to find reality he must begin here, not in a temple, not in an image - whether the image is graven by the hand or by the mind. Otherwise, how can he find something totally new, a new state?

JKRISHNAMURTI

(The Book of Life - December 8)

A Psychological Revolution

Is it possible for the thinker and the thought, for the observer and the observed, to be one? You will never find out if you merely glance at this problem and superficially ask me to explain what I mean by this or that. Surely, this is your problem, it is not my problem only; you are not here to find out how I look at this problem or the problems of the world. This constant battle within, which is so destructive, so deteriorating; it is your problem, is it not? And it is also your problem how to bring about a radical change in yourself and not be satisfied with superficial revolutions in politics, in economics, in different bureaucracies. You are not trying to understand me or the way I look at life. You are trying to understand yourself, and these are your problems which you have to face; and by considering them together, which is what we are doing in these talks, we can perhaps help each other to look at them more clearly, see them more distinctly. But to see clearly merely at the verbal level is not enough. That does not bring about a creative psychological change. We must go beyond the words, beyond all symbols and their sensations;

We must put aside all these things and come to the central issue; how to dissolve the "me," which is time-binding, in which there is no love, no compassion. It is possible to go beyond only when the mind does not separate itself as the thinker and the thought. When the thinker and the thought are one, only then is there silence, the silence in which there is no image-making or waiting for further experience. In that silence there is no experiencer who is experiencing, and only then is there a psychological revolution that is creative.

JKRISHNAMURTI

(The Book of Life - October 31)

The Old Brain, Our Animalistic Brain

I think it is important to understand the operation, the functioning, the activity of the old brain. When the new brain operates, the old brain cannot possibly understand the new brain. It is only when the old brain, which is our conditioned brain, our animalistic brain, the brain that has been cultivated through centuries of time, which is everlastingly seeking its own security, its own comfort; it is only when that old brain is quiet that you will see that there is a different kind of movement altogether, and it is this movement that is going to bring clarity. It is this movement that is clarity itself. To understand, you must understand the old brain, be aware of it, know all its movements, its activities, its demands, its pursuits, and that is why meditation is very important. I do not mean the absurd, systematized cultivation of a certain habit of thought, and the rest of it; that's all too immature and childish. By meditation I mean to understand the operations of the old brain, to watch it, to know how it reacts, what its responses are, its tendencies, its demands, its aggressive pursuit; to know the whole of that, the unconscious as well as the conscious part of it. When you know it, when there is an awareness of it, without controlling it, without directing it, without saying, 'This is good; this is bad; I'll keep this; I won't keep that,'; when you see the total movement of the old mind, when you see it totally, then it becomes quiet.

JKRISHNAMURTI

(The Book of Life - October 16)

Best Summaries of World Politics

The first summary is the only one compiled by WantToKnow.info. This thought-provoking essay titled "Building a Brighter Future" summarizes what is currently happening in the world and gives empowering suggestions on what we can do about it. At only two pages, you will likely find this short essay well worth your time.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/brighterfuture - Building a Brighter Future (2 pg.)

An excellent, eight-page summary by a deep insider explains how global economics are manipulated to keep the money flowing into the pockets of the wealthy elite of the world. John Perkins worked for 10 years as an economic hit man selling huge international loans and promoting misleading economic forecasts to keep money flowing from poorer nations to the wealthiest multinational corporations. This highly insightful summary explains a key aspect of how money is manipulated behind the scenes and why so few are aware of it.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/johnperkinseconomichitman - Insider on global manipulations (8 pg.)

The next summary is incredibly valuable for providing clear descriptions of the larger context within which all of the behind the scenes manipulation of world politics are taking place. This very well written paper also provides excellent suggestions on what we can do to bring about positive change. It will almost certainly help to expand your awareness of what is happening in our world.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/totalcontrol - Blueprint for Total Control (22 pg.)

Carroll Quigley was one of the most prominent historians of the twentieth century. This brilliant scholar taught at Harvard and Yale before taking a history professorship at Georgetown University for over three decades. He also lectured at prominent think tanks and military schools throughout the United States. His life's work, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, is one of the few history books to openly discuss the critical and ultra-powerful role of the world's top bankers in the development of history in the Western world. He reveals that "the powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole." The links below provide fascinating 10-page and 40-page summaries of excerpts from Professor Quigley's 1,300 page landmark work on world history.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/articles/tragedy_hope_banking_money... - Tragedy and Hope (10 pg.)http://www.WantToKnow.info/articles/quigley_carroll.tragedy_hope... - Tragedy and Hope (40 pg.)

Another eye-opening summary is by the now deceased Dr. Peter Beter, who worked for many years in the top echelons of global finance. Meeting with key banking, political, and financial leaders around the world, Dr. Beter came to understand major secrets being carefully and cleverly hidden from the people of the world—secrets which play a decisive role in the development of world affairs. After leaving the world of high finance, he dedicated himself to revealing these important secrets and empowering people to take action to change this corrupt system. Though this summary was written in 1983 and is not easily verifiable, the information can still be highly useful in understanding the power struggles going on today between factions of the global elite.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/behindthescenes - Summary of Dr. Peter Beter's Audio Letters (20 pg.)

A seven-page essay by the founder of WantToKnow.info provides deep speculation on the UFO presence on our planet and its implications. Though this is a speculative essay in which the sources provided are not as reliable as those usually used on the website, plentiful links are provided to explore some of the fascinating theories proposed. Don't miss this inspiring essay which calls on each of us to join in transforming our beautiful planet.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/meaningoflifebigpicture - Speculation by WantToKnow Founder (7 pg.)

The final incisive essay focuses on the hierarchical system which distracts us from accessing our own inner wisdom and understanding. Written from an incredibly broad, universal perspective, this essay unravels the intricacies of the power structures which allow for mass control, yet also provides excellent ideas on how to gain personal control of your own life and how to assist in positive transformation of both your life and our world. The first link below is a concise, two-page summary of the full, ten-page essay available at the second link.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/divinewisdomunderstanding - Shifting Paradigms (2 pg.)http://www.WantToKnow.info/consciousnessparadigms - Shifting Paradigms (10 pg.)

The Flash of Understanding

I do not know if you have noticed that there is understanding when the mind is very quiet, even for a second; there is the flash of understanding when the verbalization of thought is not. Just experiment with it and you will see for yourself that you have the flash of understanding, that extraordinary rapidity of insight, when the mind is very still, when thought is absent, when the mind is not burdened with its own noise. So, the understanding of anything - of a modern picture, of a child, of your wife, of your neighbor, or the understanding of truth, which is in all things - can only come when the mind is very still. But such stillness cannot be cultivated because if you cultivate a still mind, it is not a still mind, it is a dead mind.

The more you are interested in something, the more your intention to understand, the more simple, clear, free the mind is. Then verbalization ceases. After all, thought is word, and it is the word that interferes. It is the screen of words, which is memory, that intervenes between the challenge and the response. It is the word that is responding to the challenge, which we call intellection. So, the mind that is chattering, that is verbalizing, cannot understand truth - truth in relationship, not an abstract truth. There is no abstract truth. But truth is very subtle…. Like a thief in the night, it comes darkly, not when you are prepared to receive it.

JKRISHNAMURTI

(Book of Life - September 6th)

Keep discontent alive

Is not discontent essential in our life, to any question, to any inquiry, to probing, to finding out what is the real, what is Truth, what is essential in life? I may have this flaming discontent in college; and then I get a good job and this discontent vanishes. I am satisfied, I struggle to maintain my family, I have to earn a livelihood and so my discontent is calmed, destroyed, and I become a mediocre entity satisfied with things of life, and I am not discontent. But the flame has to be maintained from the beginning to the end, so that there is true inquiry, true probing into the problem of what discontent is. Because the mind seeks very easily a drug to make it content with virtues, with qualities, with ideas, with actions, it establishes a routine and gets caught up in it. We are quite familiar with that, but our problem is not how to calm discontent, but how to keep it smoldering, alive, vital. All our religious books, all our gurus, all political systems pacify the mind, quieten the mind, influence the mind to subside, to put aside discontent and wallow in some form of contentment.…Is it not essential to be discontented in order to find what is true?

JKRISHNAMURTI

(Book of Life - August 30th)

Magic for Muggles by J.K. Rowling

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books.
This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.
 
There in my little office, I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without a trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
 
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
 
As long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and a researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
 
Every day of my working week in my early 20s, I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
 
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
 
Amnesty mobilizes thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
 
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.
 
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize.
 
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know.
 
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
 
What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy.
 
One of the many things I learned studying classics at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: "What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality."
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.
 
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better.
 
We do not need magic to change the world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: We have the power to imagine better.
 
J.K. Rowling is the author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series. Her essay is excerpted from her commencement address delivered at Harvard University on June 5, 2008. Copyright J.K. Rowling. See it on the Greater Good website at http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2008summer/Rowling149.html. To subscribe to Greater Good magazine, visit http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/subscribe.html. For more on the excellent work of Amnesty International, see http://www.amnesty.org
See our collection of inspirational resources at http://www.WantToKnow.info/inspirational
Explore these empowering websites coordinated by the nonprofit PEERS network:http://www.momentoflove.org - Every person in the world has a hearthttp://www.WantToKnow.info - Reliable, verifiable information on major cover-upshttp://www.inspiringcommunity.org - Building a Global Community for Allhttp://www.weboflove.org - Strengthening the Web of Love that interconnects us allhttp://www.transformationteam.net - The Transformation Team: Conscious community in action Educational websites promoting transformation through information and inspiration
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Illusion and Reality 2012 (Part 1 of 2)

Illusion and Reality 2012 (Part 2 of 2)

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE

"Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality."

-- Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe

Michael Talbot is a brilliant researcher who authored a number of thought-provoking books depicting a theoretical model of reality that suggests the physical universe is akin to a giant hologram. In his highly regarded book The Holographic Universe, Talbot bases much of his fascinating writing on the work of two esteemed professors, University of London's quantum physicist David Bohm and Stanford University's neurosurgeon Karl Pribram. This is one of the most amazing, inspiring books I've ever read. Chapter four even gives a scientific basis for miracles with incredible, documented examples. Below is an essay by Talbot summarizing his mind-expanding concepts.
With very best wishes,Fred Burks for the inspiring and educational PEERS websites Former language interpreter for Presidents Bush and Clinton

The Universe as a Hologram

By Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe
Does Objective Reality Exist?
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.
The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings suggest that objective reality may not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
How Does a Hologram Work?
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.
When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.
A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness may be an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.
As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different.
But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.
The Interconnected Nature of the Universe
Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe may be infinitely interconnected.
The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain may be connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. From this vantage point, everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.
At its deeper level, reality may be a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools, it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".
The Holographic Mind
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was not able to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.
Then in the 1960s, Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for.
Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica).
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage -- simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.
Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that many pieces of information seem instantly cross-correlated with other pieces of information -- another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, the mind is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.
Holographic Evidence
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism. [listen to samples here and here - earphones needed]
Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.
Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.
But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?
Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, a kind of superficial illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too may be more a sensory illusion than objective reality.
We may actually be "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.
The Holographic Paradigm
This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others.
A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.
In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.
With this model, it is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point, and to understand a number of other unsolved puzzles in psychology.
In particular, psychiatric researcher Dr. Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the use of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the sexually arousing portion of the male of the species' anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.
What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.
The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called transpersonal psychology devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.
Connecting Hard Science With the Holographic Paradigm
The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows.
What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body. Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images can ultimately be as real as "reality".
Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his intriguing book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.
Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.
Limitless Implications
If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.
What we perceive as reality may be but a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.
Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists.
And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

For lots more fascinating material along these lines, don't miss Michael Talbot's highly engaging book The Holographic Universe.
See our collection of inspiring resources at http://www.weboflove.org/inspiringresources

REAL IS WHAT YOU ARE

People always asked Jesus why, as the son of God, he couldn't rule and bring eternal happiness by making the earth a paradise. Why didn't he have the omnipotence of God?

He answered, "Let the dead bury the dead."

This means that the world is dead. Who cares what it looks like? Let the dead be busy with the dead. The world is nothing but a phenomenon, an idea you have that's no more alive than a dream or a nightmare, which seems real only so long as no one pinches your toe. Then you realize, "This terrible persecutor or this infinite chasm into which I just fell screaming isn't real at all." No, it wasn't real and it isn't real. Real is what you are, and it's happiness doesn't depend on a dream.

Karl Renz

(The Myth of Enlightenment p.171)

THE MYSTICALLY SYMBOLIC ILLUMINATI

1) The Illuminati Monuments of Paris Exposed!

"Initially the thought of a Ferris wheel being an illuminati created symbolic monument is a tad weird and hard to explain and obviously open to ridicule. To claim that a Ferris Wheel is also used as a portable 'spiritual energy extractor' that can literally turn an area into a Sun Temple and is purposely placed on energy lines around the world for use in Sun rebirth rituals is even harder."

http://matthew-delooze.blogspot.com/search?q=2005+lights

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2) Masonic Manhattan Edition

"The Big Kahuna of ancient astronaut theory is a good place to start making our way back to the real world. The placement is a bit off with the pyramids here, but we see the phallic rocket and the womb-like spacecraft just below it, indicating a technical kind of insemination. This is essentially the same symbolism as the obelisk and the dome."

http://secretsun.blogspot.com/2008/05/astronaut-theology-masonic-manhattan.html

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3) Heavenly Insemination

"We have the Stargate itself, which is pictured as a phallic beam composed of a viscous fluid not entirely unlike male ejaculate. This could very well be interpreted as a more radical form of Panspermia. In this case, it's higher intelligence that is being seeded, not biological life."

http://secretsun.blogspot.com/2008/05/astronaut-theology-heavenly.html

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4) Masquerade Infernale, The Hanged Man, and The Loom of Fate

"The occult or hidden hand is dark in that it is mysterious to you. It is a vast chasm of knowledge withheld. Given to you in slices. Incomplete pieces of an ever growing puzzle."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJl8_O4pGhA

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5) World Trade Galactic Centre

"The period is suggested as beginning with 911, representing Gemini, through the Twin Towers and ending with Galactic Alignment during the 2012 Maya Mega Ritual, located in the sky by the arrow of Sagittarius and the Tail of Scorpio (the Twin Guardians of GC)." http://rundonotwalk.blogspot.com/2008/07/world-trade-galactic-centre.html

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6) Illuminati Genealogy

Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD09cSvR64Q&feature=related

Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LraLgAtAmVM&feature=related

Part Three: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GKYaRRHBDc&feature=related

Part Four: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D96BTBFkHCM&feature=related

Part Five: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdtLUNKz3Ms&feature=related

Part Six: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4gv3J_vQBg

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www.pagenews.info

CROP CIRCLE 08-08-08

Synchronicity appears in a Fields of Wiltshire
On the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year of the twenty first century the number eight appears in one of the fields of Wiltshire.
The number eight is a very meaningful number to the Chinese as it is also to many religions of the world.
The sheer scale of this formation is a wonder to behold. Many people were walking among its many circles in awe and wonder.

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2008/080808/080808.html

Understand The Actual

It is really not complex. You see, we don't start with the actual, with the fact, with what we are thinking, doing, desiring; we start with assumptions, or with ideals, which are not actualities, and so we are led astray. To start with facts, and not with assumptions, we need close attention; and every form of thinking not originating from the actual is a distraction. That's why it is so important to understand what is actually taking place both within and around one.

…If you are a Christian, your visions follow a certain pattern; if you are a Hindu, a Buddhist, or a Muslim, they follow a different pattern. You see Christ or Krishna, according to your conditioning; your education, the culture in which you have been brought up, determines your visions. Which is the actuality: the vision, or the mind which has been shaped in a certain mold? The vision is the projection of the particular tradition which happens to form the background of the mind. This conditioning, not the vision which it projects, is the actuality, the fact. To understand the fact is simple; but it is made difficult by our likes and dislikes, by our condemnation of the fact, by the opinions or judgments we have about the fact. To be free of these various forms of evaluation is to understand the actual, the what is.

JKRISHNAMURTI

(Book of Life - August 8th)