Key To Success

Explore Your Potential

2007-01-16T11:02:00.000-08:00

Your potential is not quite a thing, yet more than an idea. It awaits in a twilight zone between idea and reality, where all things are possible but none are actual.

It took 15 billion years of evolution for you to be where you are now: a conscious being capable of self-consciousness. It is from the depths of this interior awareness that you can shape your destiny. With imagination alone, you can shape what has never been before. An act of imagination is the seeding of an idea that will bear fruit in a time that has not yet appeared.

This specific form of imagination is what you can call visionary thinking.

When your heart and mind can look into the past, into your reserve of memory, select its most choice ideas from it and project it into the future, then you have begun the journey of exploring your potential.

Will you be rich or poor, well-educated or ignorant, loved or abandoned, alive with a new intensity and purpose or merely drifting upon the tide of circumstances, depends not on the movement of the stars nor on the opinions of those who hold you dear, but on one thing alone: your inner clarity about who you are and what you want your life to mean, both to yourself and all those who will come to know you.

All men and women dream but only some have the courage of their convictions. Most through default float upon the sea of mediocrity, responding to biological and social needs but creating nothing new, ennobling, or in some measure liberating.

Many, unfortunately, are capable of going through their days without entertaining a single original idea, content with acquiescing to the propaganda of vested interests. A few, however, think about their potential and what they can do to explore and expand it. These are the ones who push the race forward, stretching the limits of consciousness further into the realm of new possibilities.

You cannot succeed in anything alone. Your success is a wave that carries others, inviting them to examine their own potentiality. You vibrate at a higher frequency when you choose excellence; you influence others with your presence alone.

The urge to be more than you are right now, to express a nobler speech, a finer mind, a more uplifting outlook, a larger reach of resources is the urge of life itself to explore its dimensions.

The idea of entelechy, a motivation for self-determination and directing inner strength for more life, growth, and capacity is an idea that arises from Aristotelian philosophy.

A human being is in a perpetual dynamic tension between potentia and actus. In other words, a quest to translate a potentiality into an actuality. Potentia is determinable. Actus is determined. These terms should not be confused with the ideas of physics which refer to the capacity for change through work from one state to another. With a human being, the urge to translate potentiality into actuality is intrinsic. With material objects, an external force is extrinsic, some outer force is making the conversion from one state to the next.

The ultimate goal of self-determination is happiness. For as a sentient creature evolves, it increases its power, secures its survival, and experiences the happiness of a broader and fuller expression of itself.

Another way of looking at it is to say that all human misery is due to some level of frustrated potential. At times, this frustration is felt so acutely as to result in self-destruction, either through suicide or self-degradation.

A human being is rooted in teleology. The human psyche hungers for design, and it will do almost anything to satisfy the quest for meaning.

The best and most satisfying lives are those where meaning is found and where a conscious and deliberate movement is made from potentiality into actuality. Ultimately, the conversion is one through the medium of intelligence, from the creative intelligence of envisioning to the practical intelligence of bringing about and maintaining a higher order of adaptation. As intelligence and adaptation increases, so, too, does happiness, which is a symptom of increasing power as the means of survival are ensured. As Spinoza once said, "Happiness is power increasing."

Happiness, like life itself, is never a final state, but an evolving one. You can be happy now and as you increase your power in the world, converting more potential into actuality, your happiness will also correspondingly increase. The highest state of happiness, of course, is self-realization, when you transcend the limitation of the idea of a singular ego battling a hostile world intent on its destruction and embrace the idea of being unified with all sentient life everywhere. Mystics have reported this state of oceanic consciousness as blissful.

As the cosmic conspiracy unfolds, life becomes more complex, more engaging, and ultimately more fulfilling. Our task is to engage the great game of life and ride the beam of evolutionary advancement of consciousness itself.
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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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How Reliable Is The Law Of Attraction?

2007-01-15T09:30:00.000-08:00

If thoughts are things, then those who are familiar with the Law of Attraction should be living the life of their dreams.

While a few may attain this enviable state, the majority do not rise to that level.

Is it the Law of Attraction that is at fault or the person who uses it? Does it work for some and not for others? Does it work some of the time and not at other times?

It is my contention, both from my study of it and from my many years of experience with it, that the Law of Attraction is as reliable as the Law of Gravity; if applied correctly, it works with unfailing exactitude. I also hold that anybody who studies it and applies it will come to the same conclusion.

"Ask and you shall receive; seek and you shall find; knock and the door shall be opened unto you."

Those are the truest words ever spoken. They not only come from an expert source, who repeatedly demonstrated it, but they can also be proved through your own experience. These are not idle words, philosophical opinions, or rhetorical exhortations; they are words that stand up to the test of observation and experience.

There is no need to rely on authority, even if it happens to be the highest known to the human race. Experiment will definitely prove its value.

The problem of insufficiency then has to do with the practitioner.

Everything that you desire can be yours with the Law of Attraction. If most people appear not to be living in abundance it is due to either not knowing about it or dismissing it as a serious idea.

If this is the great secret of life, now openly revealed by many teachers, why is success with it not apparent everywhere?

Assuming that you know about the Law of Attraction, what is preventing you from living the full expression of it?

In reflecting on this subject, I have isolated three possible factors:

1. Improper application.

Ask for something, then let it go with the full expectation that it will show up. That is the entire principle right there. However, when you fail to ask properly, being vague in your asking, or if you fail to let go, clinging to the idea, then you have not fully exercised the law.

Another way of improperly asking is to merely ask using words devoid of positive, expectant feelings. Your feelings are the vibrational signature that sets the law in motion.

2. Fear of failure.

People are afraid to get what they want. They are afraid of being disappointed and not getting it. They feel unworthy of asking. And they are even afraid of what will happen if they do get it. These fears and others are disguised as doubts, rationalizations, and anxiety. Unless there is a complete lack of resistance to getting what you want it will not show up.

3. Unclear vision.

People are not clear what they want. Unless there is a clear vision and a strong sense of what it means to you, things will not show up.

4. Reluctance to pay attention to intuition.

Sometimes your answer comes as an idea. This idea is subtle. If you do not pay attention to your subtle faculties and develop it, the answer to your problem may very well have shown up but you did not notice it.

5. Reluctance to act.

Sometimes by acting you speed up everything. The action to take is the action before you. Even if action is not necessary, as the answer may come from a person or event that has to show up in your experience, action reinforces the energy that you have sent out. It is making a statement that you are in earnest. The use of feet and hands has an amazing way of putting you in the right place at the right time. The Master Practitioner may not need to act, but at an earlier development stage, it does speed up results.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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The World As Experience And Idea

2007-01-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

The world is an illusion. This is a view held by Vedanta, Sikhism, Buddhism, Plato, Arthur Schopenhauer, Christian Science, and A Course In Miracles.

Contradicting this view is your own sense experience of realness, the constancy of stimulus, the enduring nature of time and events.

Which view is correct? The idea of the illusion or your experience of the realness?

This answer proposes an objective observer, one who is not part of the system that is being observed. Newton held that time is absolute. Einstein held that it is relative to the observer. Perhaps that same paradigm shift can be applied to answering the question of what is real and what is not.

Those who propose that the world is an illusion are correct.

Those who propose that the world is real are also correct.

The idea that the world is an illusion can be argued in the following way.

1. You do not see the world as it is.

You see the world as you are.

This happens in two ways:

One, you can never escape your subjectivity. You may claim that the world is objective, but this is a claim made from the subjective state. Hence, if you were to lose your mind, you would also lose the world. Without an observer, there is no world. With your disappearance, the universe disappears. Does it exist despite you? If you are not there to ask or hear the answer to the question, it has no meaning.

Two, the world that you see is a direct result of your experiences in it. A rock is not just a rock; it is also your memory of all rocks seen by you. When what you see is more complex and engaging, you experience more emotions, sensations, and ideas about it. Thus, you never really see anything as it is. You only see it through the lens of your own thoughts about it.

2. All forms will pass away.

Entropy is built into the system. Nothing can escape this iron law of nature. Neither beauty nor truth, wealth nor power, genius nor intent ever last. Death and decay is the lot of everything, from atoms to stars, from our own sun to the universe itself. However, this collapse is a dissipation of energy, not an absence of it. According to the law of conservation of energy, which has never been refuted, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. What dies, then, is the form of things, the structure the energy was supporting.

3. The microscopic.

On the level of atoms, a vast space exists between the electrons and the nucleus, and even the subatomic particles are not solid bits of matter but transient energy forms that appear and disappear and reappear again. It is mainly empty space.

4. The macroscopic.

On the level of the cosmos, a vast space exists between stars and moons and planets, gas clouds and nebulas and galaxies. The universe, too, is mainly empty space.

5. The field of all possibilities.

On the level of the consciousness that organizes all things, this world is only another possibility out of an infinite choice. How many worlds with sentient beings exist? Is our universe only an electron in a cosmic atom? Given a field of infinite choices, how much weight does one choice hold?

The idea that the world is real can be argued in the following way.

1. What you are experiencing is real to you.

When you think of the world as an illusion, a sense of despair arises because it slights the beauty of your realness. It is pleasurable to touch and hold, to see and hear, to act and change things. It is ennobling to see the vast sky above your head and feel the wind in your hair and hear the squawk of a passing bird. It means much for us to be here and to be alive in this moment.

Neither science nor philosophy can deny the realness of your experience.

And in this context, even your dreams are real enough, because while you are in them, your entire experience is authentic enough for you. If you are being chased by a lion in your dream, it will feel as real to you as if you were being chased by one in the waking state.

2. Who you are is important to you.

Your life is important. You desire to be more than you currently are because you can feel the vast throb of life within you expanding ever forward to know more, experience more, and touch a fullness not yet known.

Your past is not just useless memory but a scrapbook of struggle and change, triumph and adversity, risk and new learning. Your present is the vividness of your current experience. Your future is your promise, to yourself and to the world.

Reality, then, is not fixed. It is an interpretation of consciousness and how it is interpreted depends on the inner and outer experiences of the observer. The world you live in is real enough to you as you live it. If this world is an illusion, does it mean that there is a really real world, as Plato conjectured. Probably not. If this world is an illusion, then so, too, are all worlds. And if this world is real, so, too, are all worlds.

Appreciating the miracle of having a consciousness to live in a world may be all we need to know to live happy, fulfilling lives, whether in this world or in other worlds which we will transition into after this one.

Consciousness, like the law of conservation of energy, can neither be created nor destroyed. Where you find consciousness, you will also find energy structured into the form of a world. And since consciousness never dies but appears to only grow increasingly more refined and sophisticated, worlds, too, probably evolve along similar lines. Are these worlds illusory or real? They are real enough to those who live in them.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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How Can You Tell If Something Is Nonsense?

2007-01-13T09:42:00.000-08:00

How do we move beyond our prejudices to distinguish what is sensible and what is nonsensical?

When Albert Einstein created the Special and General Theory of Relativity, initially it seemed like nonsense, because nobody had ever thought of things like that before, but both the logical consistency of his arguments and the proof that was later found made them sensible theories.

Understanding the difference between sense and nonsense is vital to your well-being. Unless you can draw some clear understanding of something, you will be confused, and when you are confused, you cannot orient yourself to the world you live in.

Something makes sense when it aligns with an organ of perception: you can see it, hear it, or feel it.

However, this is not always an accurate measure of what is sensible. A mirage appears to be water until you get close to it and realize that you experienced an optical illusion. A hallucinogenic drug creates unusual experiences, until the drug wears off and you revise your opinion.

Sense, however, did prevail. You revisited the experience, perceived anew, and revised your opinion on what it meant.

So far, living on the level of the concrete and experiential, it appears rather clear the difference between sense and nonsense. The mirage was seen as nonsense after you got close to it. The unicorn was seen as nonsense when you recovered from the hallucinogenic drug and saw that you were looking at a plain horse.

But as consciousness advances, it has to embrace abstractions. An abstraction is best described as a statistical generalization. As a child, when you saw your first dog and then other dogs similar to it, but not like it, you created a generalization called dogs. Through a survey of many dogs, you were finally able to see that both a Chihuahua and a German Shepherd are both dogs.

In Quantum physics, you can't really see subatomic particles, but you can infer their nature and their properties through the statistics of mathematics and the impressions of white dots and streaks they leave on a photographic plate. Thus, you can distinguish between an electron and a positron. You can also tell when a complex interaction takes place. For example, through a sophisticated instruments of observation and interpretation, you know when a negative pi meson collides with a proton. You then observe how the two particles annihilate each other, creating a lambda particle and a neutral K meson. Further observation informs you how these unstable particles live for only a billionth of a second. Now the neutral K meson decays into a positive pi meson and a negative pi meson, while the lambda particle decays into the original two particles, a negative pi meson and a proton.

Now, although this entire description is beyond the senses, it is not nonsense. This is because observation took place. This was done through mathematical descriptions and the use of highly sophisticated measuring devices. You may not have been able to "see" in a literal sense, but various instruments did that for you and your task was to interpret what they were telling you based on past knowledge.

In the realm of the abstract, unless you can test the idea in some way, it has a high tendency to be nonsense. In fact, the more removed it is from sense experience and the less testable it is, the more nonsensical it is likely to be.

It may be well-argued nonsense, but that does not make it sensible.

Something is considered sensible if you can arrive at it through induction or deduction.

Induction is working your way up from particulars to a general idea. For example, all dogs are dogs, regardless of size and predisposition. You arrive at that by examining a number of different dogs and pooling a list of characteristics. You know the difference between dogs and cats, because while both are four-legged, hairy, and have whiskers, they also have other characteristics which distinguish them from each other.

Deduction is working your way up from a general idea to a particular one. This is basically breaking down something into smaller and smaller units. You know, for example, that plants originate from seeds, by observing the nature of plants, both in their dead form, through dissection, and in their live form, by observing their growth and decay.

Nonsense comes in when we have to rely on authority. When things are believed not because some evidence was gathered about it, but because someone in authority said it was true.

Human beings love stories, and the more unusual and compelling the story, the more they are likely to believe it.

One example is channeling. People claim to be channeling all sorts of entities, from God to spirit guides to ascended masters, or even whole teams of enlightened beings. The mediums appear to change personalities, taking on unusual vocal intonations, unfamiliar gestures, and speaking words of surprising wisdom. If you hook them up to various instruments, they may even show physiological changes.

Is this nonsense?

It is an appeal to a higher authority, in this case someone from outside the system, talking from the other side, who appears to be giving us clear directions. In addition, our scientific instruments may even indicate that a change has indeed taken place.

On the other hand, you can get the same results if you use the hypothesis that a multiple personality phenomena is in effect. It has been shown over and over again that in disassociation, the new personality has unique traits, including more intelligence.

Thus, someone who claims to be a medium can be (a) a fake; (b) a multiple personality; or (c) genuine.

In trying to sort out sense from nonsense, you can discern what is true from what is false not on the basis of the reasonableness of their statements, but through putting to the test some of the things that they are saying.

A perfect example is Edgar Cayce. After he went into a trance state and started dictating healing formulas, he uttered unusual remedies. These were surprising because they were (a) outside known medical treatments and (b) highly effective. In this case, despite the highly unusual nature of the entire phenomenon, it is possible to rule out fakery and a multiple personality disorder, simply because he arrived at answers that were not in general circulation. There is no way to prove this to be nonsense; hence, based on available evidence, the best hypothesis is accepting him as he claimed to be.

In religion, occultism, philosophy and politics, the abstractions, unless they can be proven through evidence, should not be taken at face value. They tend to be nonsense. They are not accepted as this, however, because of the credible way that they are presented.

Most human misery, as far as I can tell, is following a well-reasoned line of thought from authority. When you think from your emotions, rather than from induction or deduction, and when you rely on authority, rather than evidence, then nonsense may very well have replaced a sensible way of thinking.

The most dangerous nonsense is that which is subtle. In the case of something bizarre, like the Edgar Cayce story, at first blush it does appear to be nonsense, but upon closer examination, it is not possible to cling to that verdict. On the other hand, when a politician says something there is a tendency to believe, although a closer examination will reveal no substantial evidence of the proof of his or her statements.

Thus, the element of sensationalism or the lack of it, is not a proper criteria to distinguish between sense and nonsense. Something may be hyped up and still be true. Something may be toned down and appear reasonable and still be false.

Insanity is not easy to perceive. Some of the brightest people have fallen into it. Apart from organic damage to the brain and the sense organs, insanity is the inability to distinguish between sense and nonsense. The rise and power of the Nazi party could be considered an outbreak of pervasive social insanity.

The scientific method of observation and experimentation is the highest form of reason invented. All other forms of reason may be entertaining, but they do not warrant the stamp of truth. True reason is the ability to sort out sense from nonsense on the basis of logical consistency and evidence.

Without the Age of Reason, the era we live in today, of marvelous scientific advancement could not have been possible. Prior to that time, humankind thought about things in an emotional, often nonsensical way.

Reason is not something relegated to the province of the scientist or the philosopher. It is something that we all need to live fulfilling lives. And the most reasonable form of reason is one that distinguishes sense from nonsense on the basis of careful inquiry, patient observation, and the accumulation of evidence.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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How To Enjoy More Of Your Life

2007-01-11T19:41:00.000-08:00

If your life were a movie, how would you go about changing it, making the plot more amenable to your interests and pleasures? At first this may seem like a hopeless quest, but when you look behind the scenes, you will see a simple and elegant answer.

In a regular movie, you sit in a seat away from the unfolding drama, and you can always look away or even leave if you are bored or angry.

In your life, you are in the movie, and it takes a momentum of its own, where all the other actors work to create some kind of reaction within you. Your life is like a total immersion movie.

While you may often feel that the way the entire story line is unfolding is not what you want at all, a little insight will show you that not only are you the main actor, but also the producer. In fact, you also finance it. The quality of the scenes depends on your budget and how you manage it.

In other words, your experiences are both a projection of your mind and an interpretation of your mind.

In this movie, most actors have forgotten that they are in a virtual movie because they can never leave or take a break from it. This results in some really superb acting, and everybody appears to be very serious about what they say and do, even if, as often happens, the scene is quite comical.

However, at times, you and others weary of the intensity and try to break away from a scene by moving to a new town, divorcing your spouse, avoiding your friends, wrecking revenge on your enemies, or getting drunk, taking drugs, sleeping a lot, or making yourself sick.

These strategies of escapism seldom work, because before you know it, you're back where you started, finding yourself still stuck with all the wrong people in all the wrong places. No matter how hard you try to get away from it all, it happens all over again. The scene may have shifted and the faces changed but you find that after the novelty has worn off you're actually faithfully reenacting exactly the same plot.

After less than a decade on this planet, it gets very confusing what you are making happen and what appears to be happening to you. The momentum of each shifting scene and the impact of each new actor on it may even make you wonder if you have not been entirely swallowed up by the movie and have no real say on what happens next. Sometimes you even beg the invisible producer to give you a break.

What is particularly irksome is the lack of any really good answers on how to solve any problem, even the simplest ones. And after awhile, this can drive you nuts. You find that you either get no straight answers to your questions or so many that you can't figure out which one is the right one. You, then, make a decision based on desperation and end up with the plot getting increasingly thick and foreboding.

In this movie analogy, is there any chance that you can redo everything and have a shot at living a fulfilling life, where love, money, hope, and moments of pure abandon are possible?

The answer, surprisingly is "yes." In fact, a resounding "yes!" It is surprising because not many people talk about how to get out of the actor role and slip behind the scenes and make some necessary adjustments.

The way you do this is to slip into the projection room. This place is in your own mind.

Inside this room, you will find a white light that is projecting all your experiences onto the screen.

This white light is consciousness. This white light appears to dutifully project all the images that you are holding in front of it.

You can't really do much with the white light but you can change the images, and when you do, your entire movie show changes as well. How it changes depends on the new images you select.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Brave New World

2007-01-10T18:11:00.000-08:00

O' Brave new world, That has such creatures in't
(Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest.)

Sometimes the best way to look ahead is to look behind. Where is humanity heading? Will it survive or will it die out? Our problems are not small ones.

Briefly, at a population growth of 1.9 percent a year, the population doubles every forty years. This means that at the end of this century it will be around 48 billion. By the year 2600, there will only be standing room.

In addition, when you realize that worldwide energy consumption is rising, things are getting red-hot. In 1900, we consumed around 1 billion tons of BCU, where 1 ton of a Bituminous Coal Unit is equal to 8.13 MW-hr. In 2000, a hundred years later it was past 12 billions BCU. Again, using 2600 as a benchmark, the physical earth will literally be glowing.

Of course, these are just two problems. Many others exist. The monetary system is designed to create insufficiency and indebtedness; nuclear technology is proliferating; bacteria are adapting to antibiotics and becoming deadly; food is creating a malnourished population; and disease and starvation in the third world countries continues unabated.

In order to overcome these problems, we need to evolve even further, eventually becoming an ocean-dwelling and star-navigating species. For this to happen, we need to become less superstitious, more intelligent, and increasingly more cooperative, not with the self-serving agendas of those who control governments and corporations, but with the idea that we are all in this mess together.

Can we do it? Can we evolve, pull together, and change the world? Because if we can't, it is over. This is not rhetoric. When we review our
current global situation, you will see that this is not an overstatement.

In order to understand our situation better, briefly looking back over the past 1000 years, let us see how we got where we are today.

In the 11th century, trading and learning expanded with Islam, Confucianism, and Hinduism as champions of subtle thoughts and cosmic philosophies.

China was the most technologically advanced civilization in the world. It had already invented the printing block, paper money, kites, gunpowder, the compass, a water clock and an earthquake detector.

Islam, less than 400 years old, flourished as an intellectual force, and as the travelers bartered in distant lands they shared knowledge. Islamic scholars carefully preserved the knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome by rewriting the manuscripts of those earlier cultures. Besides its reputation as a center of learning, Cordoba, in Southern Spain, was also renowned for it's architecture.

India, like China, was a vast civilization and steeped in knowledge of spiritual things and an elementary science. It was the only country China respected.

But not all cultures craved knowledge.

Japan was an insular culture; its elaborate court culture separated it from the peasantry.

Christianity was at war with itself: the impoverished and plain Western Catholic Church looked to Rome, while the wealthy and ornate Eastern Orthodox Church to Constantinople. In 1054, the Pope excommunicated the Eastern Church.

In the 12th century, ambitious building began.

In the southwest of North America, Pueblo Bonito, a monumental city, fashioned out of wood and clay arose from out of the desert.

In Northern Europe, Gothic cathedrals, glorified God with stain-glassed windows of exquisite colors and poignant Christian themes, and gold ornaments of intricate design lit up the altars.

In Ethiopia, King Lalebelia claimed to have received a vision of the churches in heaven and ordered his stone masons to fashion beautiful churches out of the depths of the unyielding rocks.

In Italy, cities declared themselves republics, banished Emperors, overlords, and popes, gave themselves charters, and established their own rights.

Not everyone followed the desire to build. Nomadic tribes flourished by hunting, gathering, and honoring the land. In Australia, for example, the aborigines, thought nature their cathedrals and their wanderings were their pilgrimages. They disdained artistic immortality and often even covered their intricate artwork with dust before they moved on. They spoke of the Dreamtime and considered human life a restless adventure.

In the 13th century, terror prevailed then transmuted into a new order.

Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde of one million strong swept across the wide sweeping grasslands of Asia, striking terror everywhere they went. Psychological warfare, where spies in enemy cities spread rumors of his ruthlessness, was reinforced by carnage. In Western Europe, the devastation was described by monks as a swarm of blood-thirsty locusts pillaging all human civilization.

The Mongols imposed peace on their captured territories and made safe the trade routes all over Asia. Prior to their invasion, roving bands of thugs had made it highly dangerous for merchants to travel. Now the corridor between Europe and the Orient was open and trade and an exchange of knowledge became possible.

Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, conquered the whole of China, and his pleasure dome in Xanadu was described by Marco Polo as the greatest palace ever known. Kublai Khan made the Chinese feel like slaves in their own country and controlled them through propaganda and rumors of magic. After his warships sent to conquer Japan were destroyed by a typhoon, the myth of Mongol invincibility in Asia was shattered. In that same year, his favorite wife died (he had four wives), and to drown his sorrows, he spent the rest of his life in a drunken stupor. Self-serving Chinese governors then ran the kingdom.

The Mongol advance West was halted by the Mamelukes, a Muslim dynasty of former slaves who had toppled the previous sultan. They followed a Spartan-like discipline of raising their children to master all the arts of warfare. They not only stopped the Mongol invasion but completely defeated all its ambitions to conquer the West. The Mamelukes not only preserved Islam from the Mongol terror but made Cairo one of the greatest cities in the world, known for its learning and its architectural beauty.

In Northern Europe, Venice prospered as goods and ideas from the Orient to Europe passed through their hands. Science and technology now began to flourish in Europe and fostered learned men like the monk Roger Bacon, who not only invented the science of optics but also foretold of the coming of mechanical ships, helicopters, and aircrafts.

In the 14th century, the reign of death held the bulk of humanity in its grip.

Cairo, thought by those who beheld it to be the most magnificent city in the world, without equal in beauty and splendor, greater than London or Paris, crumbled under the reign of the Black Death. 20,000 people died a day. The city was to never regain its greatness.

Sweeping from Asia to North Africa and then on to Europe, the Black Death caused such devastation that it was believed to be the end of the world. All kinds of magical concoctions were tried everywhere. Europeans massacred Jews and heretics then turned on themselves. They flogged each other mercilessly as penance, but it did not stop the ruthless plague.

Beyond the reach of the Black Death was the kingdom of Mali in West Africa. It flourished, trading gold and salt. It was a kingdom where gold was found in abundance. Islamic learning spread. Great Mosques were built.

In Central Europe, Timur, a Turk born near Samarqand, rose from a sheep and horse rustler to become a new terror, one that rivaled that of Genghis Khan. Ironically, this savage man, to whom human slaughter was a way of life, was also extremely pious and gave the world some of its most spectacular Islamic architecture.

Using the monsoon winds, seaborne trade flourished, and in East Java, the kingdom of Majaphit, under its ruler Hayan Wuruk, became exceedingly wealthy.

As the century came to a close, Europe again faced a natural disaster, but this time it was not pestilence but bad weather. An ice age created terrible famine and as the lords worked the surviving serfs into exhaustion, they rose in rebellion. Peasant armies demanded greater equality between the people and their rulers.

In the 15th century, new worlds were discovered as sea navigation inflamed the imagination.

A curious lesson about the implications of appreciating and withdrawing from curiosity occurred between 1405 and 1433, when the Ming government, under the foresighted Yongle Emperor decided to establish a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean basin. He assigned Zheng He 317 ships, with 28,000 armed troops. This expedition awed the people of the coastlines, who were amazed by the nine-masted ships. These were the biggest ships ever known in the world, with a technology about 500 years ahead of its time. But after 30 years, Ming bureaucrats, believing that China had nothing to learn from barbarian kings, "who should be treated like harmless seagulls," put an abrupt end to this voyage of exploration. Compounding this error of not expanding learning, they decided to also destroy what they had learned. The records of the greatest expedition in the history of China were burned and the magnificent ships rotted in the harbors. Even the technology on how to build these ships was forgotten. China would, in later centuries, be outstripped by younger, more robust nations, who would master the oceans and humiliate China in war and seize its vital ports.

In Northern Italy, the Medici prince, Lorenzo the Magnificent, bankrolled a new era of artistic creativity, whose like would never ever be seen again. It was called the Renaissance. Bankers and merchants nurtured painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture by lavishly paying artists. Multi-talented men, like Leonardo Da Vinci and
Michelangelo, amongst others, created classical works modeled on the golden years of ancient Greece and Rome.

In what is now Mexico City, arose Tenochtitlan, an Aztec capitol grander than any European city. Built on marshland in Lake Texcoco, it was an empire built on blood, those of the victims of their wars and those of their human sacrifices to appease their gods. The nobility dined on chocolate, mixing the cocoa beans with honey and nuts.

The Byzantine empire, now weak, fell to the assault of the Mehmed, a 21 year old prince, who conquered Constantinople. After the butchery of priests, women, and children who sought refuge in the church, he made the city the seat of the Ottoman empire, which was to spread its tentacles over vast regions. His palace had a harem of 2,000 women, a stable for 4,000 horses, 10 mosques, 14 baths, two hospitals, and kitchens that could feed up to 10,000 people.

This century, however, was that of the great explorers of the oceans. Vasco de Gama found the Indian Ocean and Christopher Columbus the Atlantic and the lands of America.

In the 16th century, the trend for conquest continued, including the ambitious conquests of religions for men's souls.

A Spanish missionary, Diego de Landa, stationed in Yucatan, converted thousands of Mayans to Christianity and tortured them mercilessly when he discovered that they secretly honored their sacred idols.

In Russia, Ivan the Terrible, extended Muscovite rule from the Baltic to Siberia, ruthlessly crushing all opposition.

In Japan, Hideyoshi, a peasant soldier who rose to a high rank, conquered all the warlords and then dreamed of conquering the world. He created a Japanese navy, and it sailed to Korea. The Koreans, however, squashed his dreams of world dominion by defeating his navy at sea with a secret weapon, ships with dragon heads carved on the prows that breathed out cannon fire. Japan closed its doors to the world and concerned itself with palace intrigues.

In northern India, Akhbar conquered the land and created the Moghul empire. India, in turn, conquered him, seducing him with its exotic culture and diverse religions. Although a Muslim, he created a philosophic blend of the prevailing religions, seeking the truth of the meaning of life through synthesis.

In Europe, a different type of fascination prevailed, one with the oddities of nature collected from all corners of the world by explorers. "Museums of the Universe" were created in rooms full of cabinets. These Cabinets of Curiosities contained weird objects. The most famous collector may have been Emperor Rudolf II of Prague. His collection included a lock of hair from Petrus Gonsalvus, the Hairy Man of Tenerife, and fossils and souvenirs of exotic animals.

In the 17th century, science emerged dramatically and forever changed the fate of humanity, transforming it from superstition to a reason informed by observation and experimentation.

The towering figure of this era was Isaac Newton, who sought to prove the existence of God through cataloging all the rules that governed an ordered universe, from the way an apple fell to the ground to the way a moon navigated the earth in a steady orbit.

Social experimentation also occurred as a colony in Jamestown, Virginia, was established. It would have perished except for the discovery of the marketability of tobacco, a weed used by the Indians. Running out of labor, because of how many settlers died from disease and starvation, slavery proved a means of servicing the new colonies.

Captured in North Africa, slaves were shipped and sold in the Americas, both North and South, and the agricultural products of their labor was shipped to Europe and sold. The money was then used for more expeditions to Africa.

The largest number of slaves were taken to Brazil to cultivate sugar plantations. Their lives were short and brutal, and those that survived the crossing usually died in the first ten years. Slaves who tried to run away were whipped, sliced with knives, and salt, vinegar, and urine was rubbed into their wounds.

While Europe and America prospered, Africa was never to recover.

In Europe, the Netherlands, referred to derisively as "the buttock of the world" by visitors because of its marshland, discovered a way to prosper.
The Dutch found a unique trading advantage by sailing around the whole of Africa and onto the spice islands, taking advantage of the seasonal winds. The South East Asian spice trade conducted by the Dutch East India Company transformed Amsterdam into a rich and artistic city. Women entered business, great painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer were commissioned with the emerging middle class, and merchants lived in grand homes. The Dutch became so wealthy that they slipped into the decadence of conspicuous consumption, trading houses, gold, silver, and other riches for tulips from the Orient.

European science expanded so rapidly that they outstripped Arabic and Chinese eminence in knowledge, and visiting Jesuits proved to the Chinese Emperor that their science could predict planting and harvesting seasons better than that of the Chinese scholars, thus saving China from the famines and national disasters that arose from miscalculations of when the seasons changed.

In the 18th century, revolution and colonialism changed the world forever.

In Europe, science continued to expand, reason overthrew privilege, and religion retreated. After the great earthquake of Lisbon, which leveled the city, two opposing views emerged. The religious view held that this was the wrath of God. The rational view held that man wove his own destiny and needed to control the whims of nature.

Lisbon was rebuilt, but as a testimony to the ideas of the enlightenment. The new streets were geometrically straight and the architecture praised the ideas of balance and symmetry.

The encyclopedia was created to describe the world in a reasonable way, and the catholic church threatened to excommunicate anyone who did not give a copy to their local priest to burn.

Reason itself became a religion in an effort to overthrow the fears and superstitions raised by centuries of religious belief and control. During the French Revolution, the argument that reason outweighed privilege in a just society resulted in a hysteria of Guillotine executions. Just as reason overthrew religiosity, it too was overthrown by an unstoppable rage by the downtrodden masses, manipulated by blood-crazed politicians.

The idea of freedom from rank and privilege, from class structures, caught on in North America, but here reason did not turn to savagery, instead it resulted in freedom, as the settlers overthrew the yoke of the English crown. A new promise was born in the world, the idea that men could enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Yet, not the entire world, was becoming free, India lost it and was enslaved by colonialism. India, rich in natural resources and a manufacturing giant, exporting cotton, tea, and silk attracted the attention of Britain. Imperialism began by taking advantage of the political dissent of rival Indian kingdoms. Only Tipu Sultan of Mysore successfully fought the British off, but they eventually gained the upper hand and demanded the ransom of his two sons. After he had paid the exorbitant ransom amount, they attacked his fortress, killed him in battle, and ransacked the country, looting it and controlling its natural resources.

Just as Africa was never to recover after the slave trade had bled off its population, so too, India, too, was to never prosper again. Her riches were drained westward.

China prospered, colonizing territories to the north and west and rebuilt its agricultural basis with the new labor force of the conquered people. They also became a manufacturing giant, making a fortune by selling tea and porcelain pots and dishes, called China, to the West. British envoys asked the Emperor if the payment could be made in goods instead of money. Although, the Emperor did not desire any Western goods, he allowed foreign trading houses to be set up in China. In the next century, this rash generosity would lead to the fall of China.

In the 19th century, the era of the machine began.

The steam engine transformed the world. Ships no longer had to be powered by sails, and emigration to the New World, North America, rose to the level of millions. The Indians of the plains were overwhelmed, not only by the population invasion, but also by the railways built by Chinese and Irish workers, and the power of the Winchester rifle.
The buffalo population was reduced from 60 million to less than a 1,000 and their way of life was reduced forever. Buffalo Bill created his famous wild west shows, and Indians were transported back to Europe where they enacted the battles of their defeat for the entertainment of Europeans.

Thomas Cook, a British itinerant preacher, created the first multinational company, a tourist business, transporting people through railways and steamships, and tourists explored the newly opened up world, vacationing in exotic locations.

Charles Darwin reluctantly published his book The Origin of Species after he found that another naturalist had discovered the same thing that he did. He had kept the information to himself on how species evolved for 20 years. Now his book shook the religious order.
Europeans had believed that God had made the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th; Darwin showed that not only were they ancient creatures but also related to apes. He was mercilessly lampooned in the popular press, with cartoons depicting his head and posture as ape-like.

But the imperialists hijacked his ideas, invented the idea of Social Darwinism, and colonized Africa, dividing it amongst themselves. The Africans, like the American Indians in North America, were ruthlessly gunned down and subjugated.

China, still the most powerful country in the world, was in for a rude shock. Britain had an unfavorable balance of trade with China, importing silk, porcelain, and tea. China prospered in a magnificent way. Then the British found that the Chinese people liked the opium that they brought over from India. British traders penetrated the water ways of China and sold their opium. Alarmed by an increasingly drug-induced population, where people could be seen lying in the open streets and market places in a stupor, the emperor appointed a high official to stop this trade. After an appeal to Queen Victoria was ignored, the opium from British vessels were seized and destroyed. In retaliation, the British navy invaded China. Britain with its superior technology and weapons won and China was made to pay for the war the British started and five of their chief ports were seized.

Industrialization spread from Europe to the USA to Japan and had powerful social consequences. A new working class emerged, people who slaved over the tireless machines; the damp and filth of their working conditions led to disease. A new struggle began for decent working conditions.

The camera was invented and captured the images of a world that had been completely transformed by the machine.

Toward the close of the century, the first movie was made. It showed a train pulling up to a station and people milling around it. A fitting image to represent the dawning of a new age, the age of the machine forged from the fire and steam of the industrial revolution.

In the 20th century, the world reinvented itself in a way that had no precedent in earlier centuries. It even made the remarkable previous century pale in comparison.

The journey of the exploration of inner space began in the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud explored the unconscious, linked neurosis to the sex drive, and sought to heal the past by examining it in the present. Initially shocked by his ideas, those who read and understood him then spread a new burst of awareness.

In the famous painting, The Scream, Edvard Munch, a Norwegian artist who followed the tradition of French Impressionism, epitomized the anxiety and terror of the human psyche, the grief that arose from recognizing the personal and collective pain in the unconscious mind.

Pablo Picasso's Cubism and Salvador Dali's Surrealism created more waves of awareness about the anguish of the individual soul tormented by the traumas of life, and this imagery of suppressed emotional pain spread even faster through the medium of surrealistic films.

But while a small proportion of artists were making public the existential angst of humanity, other great minds were marveling at the mystery of the universe. Albert Einstein declared that energy and matter could be exchanged, x-rays showed the insides of a living human being, and microscopes and telescopes started to reveal the world of the very small and the very large. In addition, amongst numerous other wonders, science developed contraceptives, giving couples the chance to experience intimacy without the need to raise a new family.

Human genius was on the rise everywhere. Startling discoveries were being made in the sciences that were radically transforming the very essence of human understanding and the way society functioned. But the most startling of them all, was the power of the atom. By isolating the atom and smashing it, an enormous power of unimaginable magnitude was to cast a shadow on the world for the rest of the century.

Before the nuclear shadow fell on humankind, total war had already been invented by the industrial age during the first world war.

The first world war escalated human territoriality and aggression to an industrial scale. The mechanical energy that had been used to transform humanity from an agrarian and localized population to an industrialized and globally expanding population was now used for wholesale slaughter. Man became the victim of his own machines. Armaments could be manufactured on a large and rapid scale. The lethal invention of the gun now became the even deadlier machine gun; in the few seconds it took to kill one man, now a dozen could be killed.

But this was only the beginning of mass-scale suffering because never in the history of humankind had evil men had the means to exploit and destroy so many people so efficiently.

Joseph Stalin initiated the collective farms of communism. Under his interpretation of the ideology of communism, 22 million people died in the labor camps of his slave empire.

The Japanese invaded China in 1937 and slaughtered 60 million Chinese.

Adolph Hitler promised the German people the restoration of their honor and self-respect after the humiliation of Germany's earlier defeat and the penalty imposed upon them by their victorious enemies. Nazi Germany slaughtered another 50 million. 27 million of these were Soviet citizens. Six million were European Jews. They were systematically captured, stripped of all human dignity and murdered with ruthless efficiency.

Yet the havoc that was unleashed by the machinery of the industrial age was only the beginning of the flagrant abuse of raw power.

After the first atomic bomb was tested in Los Alamos, the chief scientist Robert Oppenheimer quoted a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita, "Now I have become death and the destroyer of worlds." The scientists were shocked at what they had discovered. America introduced an unfathomable nightmare: the potential to destroy every living creature on earth.

The second world war had leveled down many previously flourishing cities through continuous bombing over months like Rotterdam, Dresden, and Tokyo, but when the atomic bomb was dropped by America on Japan, two whole cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled in seconds.

Despite the overwhelming violence of these horrors, human cruelty continued unabated on a scale that had never ever before been witnessed in History.

Mao-tse Tung promising the Chinese people "a great leap forward," publicly humiliated landowners, initiated widescale persecution and torture on anyone who disagreed with him and gave the land to the peasants. These peasants overworked the soil, creating a famine of immense proportions and 30 million Chinese starved to death.

In Cambodia, Pol Pot, waged a war on his own people and one out of three Cambodians was murdered.

In Cambodia, Viet Nam, Rwanda, and Kosovo the bloodbath was relentless.

War had become remote, precise, and deadly. Human beings had become the cruelest and most savage creatures ever to have walked upon the earth. Even the Dinosaurs that once roamed the earth in the distant past did not have the same vicious intensity. They killed to survive, but human beings killed because of wounded pride. Intelligence enlisted to satisfy dark human drives created unspeakable suffering.

Yet somehow, remarkably, humanity, despite its new penchant for efficient slaughter, as a whole, still continued to progress.

Around 1950, America's statue of liberty became a symbol of hope for immigrants from around the world. With their zestful energy they infused renewed life into the country. Some of these immigrants were the greatest scientists in the world, including Albert Einstein; others transformed the New World through backbreaking labor. The result of this influx of brilliance and massive effort transformed the United States into a formidable economic and military power. To the rest of the world, exhausted and depleted by the aftermath of war, everything appeared bigger and better in America. It boasted taller buildings, bigger cars, a vast network of roads and railways, and a love for innovation and technology. America became the new hope, its vision of a promising new humanity dominating the rest of the world.

However a migrational shift existed across the whole world. Those who could not travel abroad moved in large numbers from the country to the city. Calcutta became overwhelmed with a population of 10 million people; Tokyo swelled as millions of country people became urban dwellers; and in the 18,000 square miles of Mexico city, an urban sprawl spread.

All over the world, in rich and poor countries, cities became highly attractive: a place for greater wealth, broader freedom, and more excitement. Running out of room, cities began to grow upwards, becoming vertical, climate-controlled, and neon-lit. Their growth was due to a flight from the poverty experienced in the countryside and the lure of the promise of living in a consumer paradise. Shanty towns became common place around the fringes of many cities in the developing world, and the gap between the rich and the poor widened, with women becoming the poorest of the world's citizens.

Europe having exhausted its resources and population in colonization and total war now experienced an influx of the people whom they had subjugated. In the spread of imperialism, ties had been made with the conquered people. For example, Asians from India, Pakistan, East Africa, and Trinidad made England their new home. In Wembley, North London, the local Hindu people imported a magnificent temple, stone by precious stone, from their native country.

In the United States, too, migration continued, not only from overseas and from the country to the city, but also from its borders. Los Angeles has the largest Mexican population outside Mexico city. Preserving their cultural traditions, the growing Hispanic population is slowly changing the European mix of America into a Latino one.

After its victory in the Second World War, the United States became the strongest economy on the earth. Besides the influx of new ideas and labor from immigrants, the emphasis on science and technology created a revolution in telecommunications. Radio, television, Hollywood movies, satellites, and advertising from America influenced the rest of the world. American celebrities became popular everywhere, from the songs of Elvis Presley to the fights of Muhammad Ali. A celebrity in America usually became an international celebrity. Towards the last decade of the century, America initiated the network of computers that we now know as the world wide web.

Communications created the first sense of a global community. Everyone was able to see everyone else and share common human interests and values. 200 million people watched the wedding of Princess Diana and a little over two billion watched her funeral. During the final World Cup Soccer match in 1998, 2 billion people watched it on television. With the advent of the mobile telephone, anybody on any street in the world could talk to anyone else anywhere on the planet.

Besides the thrill of watching each other, the human race also had a chance to watch itself. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the lunar expeditions was not pictures of a dead moon but the pictures of a living planet. Humanity began to see itself for the first time as a single species, rather than a collection of warring factions. From space, the planet looked like a big, blue marble floating in inky darkness. People noticed more ocean than land, the absence of any political borders, and the possibility of multinational friendships and the sharing of common experiences. Besides seeing itself, humanity also vicariously experienced the thrill of watching their home planet as a whole. Listening in to the astronauts live broadcast, they shared in their sense of awe.

While the balance of power shifted from Europe to North America, it then slowly began to shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific Rim. American supremacy was being challenged by the countries of the East.

One thousand years ago, Japan was isolated; in the 20th Century it started becoming an economic super-power.

Similarly, other "tiger economies" also erupted around the Pacific, with Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore creating cities that rivaled the cosmopolitan grandeur of North America. In Singapore, for example, the island has become a metropolis whose breathtaking skyline is only rivaled by that of Shanghai.

One thousand years ago, the silk roads to China led to the most refined civilization on earth. China had already invented printing, paper currency, the compass, the water clock and gunpowder. In the 21st Century, it is poised to become the new global super-power, because of huge foreign investments, particularly from Chinese living overseas, as well as the money generated by its population of one billion people.

The greatest dilemma of the future is not our powerlessness, but our power, and not our stupidity, but our immense intelligence.

We have used industrial and nuclear power to create the terror that made the terror of Genghis Khan, Timor, and other megalomaniacs of previous centuries look like amateurs.

We have also built up cities, explored space and our own minds and hearts, migrated closer to each other, and shared technology and communication.

In our most glorious century, we have known both the agony of wide scale destruction and the joy of rebirth.

We have seen what we all look like and shared our fondest cultural snapshots with each other.

It seems that in the last century of the last millennium everything changed for humanity.

Sigmund Freud exposed our dark human instincts. Evil men dominated whole nations and slaughtered millions. Conquering people began to coexist with those that they had once subjugated. Economic power shifted from one part of the globe to another. And the rate of knowledge expanded at a bewildering pace. Never before had humankind experienced so much, learned so much, and been exposed to so much raw power that it had learned to harness from nature.

In this new century we find ourselves experiencing an expansion of the cultural and global patterns we created earlier, and our greatest strength, our raw power and unsurpassed intelligence, can also turn out be our demise as a planet.

Through the past 1,000 years, humanity has suffered immensely through widespread pestilence, freakish changes in weather, wholesale slaughter instigated by ambitious men, and political and economic oppression. Much of our history has been founded on death and destruction, rape, humiliation, and torture. Human beings repeatedly proved themselves more cruel and savage than any other animal on the planet. This trend still continues in war regions around the globe.

Humanity has survived despite the disasters of the past. But now things must change because another epidemic, another change in weather, or another war is enough to end it all because the world is much more populated and much more closely knit.

Now in the 21st century, we see that in order to evolve we have to give up religious intolerance, territorial aggression, and the lust for power and dominion. The barbaric element in human nature has to die out. The combination of megalomaniacs as well as the sheep-like obedience of the masses created unspeakable misery. Ironically, many of these megalomaniacs are worshipped as heroes in their countries to this day, from Genghis Khan of the Mongols all the way to Hideyoshi of Japan. Perceived as "strong men" their atrocities and cruelties forgotten, they are celebrated in songs, dramas, and ceremonial rituals. Many of them were extremely pious men, like Timor or Mehmed the Conqueror, who built mosques with the same fervor with which they slaughtered and tortured their enemies.

If humanity has made it through all the centuries, it has not been because of its heroes, who followed a pattern of brutal conquest followed by eras of law-giving to preserve their gains, but despite them. It is the saints and the thinkers who allowed knowledge to be preserved and transmitted until it has expanded to be what it is today.

We must cultivate the virtues of curiosity, intelligence, and consideration. None of this is new. It has been preached by avatars, prophets, philosophers and scholars for centuries.

As the communication tools of technology become more sophisticated across the globe so does the grasp and power of big government and corporations, leading to the possibility of a new serfdom.

Eventually our problems will be too big for any one government to handle and a world government will evolve, but will it be a totalitarian government, where all citizens are electronically tagged and controlled with ruthless efficiency, an Orwellian nightmare, or will it be more like Athens, where genius and creativity birthed whole new visions of what was possible.

In a nutshell, a whole new design is in the making and each of us can play a small role in making a difference to the welfare of the whole of humanity.

A brave new world awaits us and each of us most do our part to birth it. Generations yet unborn depend on it. Unless humanity evolves to become more intelligent and peace-loving, we will not survive past this century. The next 100 years will be ones of pivotal change. Will it be change for good or ill? As the forces of change accelerate, we will experience a psychedelic pandemonium, which if left unchecked will create hellish conditions for all, unless we take the time now to perceive the subtle order that arises from wisdom and kindness.

If human history were a game of chess, the last 1,000 years could be considered the middle game, and the present time we are moving into is the end game. If human decency prevails, we have a chance to win. Looking at our past, we see our savagery and stupidity far outweighed the glimmer of intelligence and humanitarianism. Perhaps, it can change.

A brave new world awaits those who will rise to be intelligent enough to work its transformation. This intelligence will not be only of the mind, but of the heart as well, an intelligence of compassion.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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The Greatest Invention In History

2007-01-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

Before we get to what is the greatest invention in the history of the world, we should visit Germany in 1447. In that time, a goldsmith and printer, Johannes Gutenberg, created the Gutenberg printing press. This technology spread like wildfire throughout Europe and then on to the rest of the world.

The impact of it is comparable to the invention of the alphabet and the development of writing.

Prior to the printing of books on a massive scale, books were painstakingly copied. This resulted in both fewer books and also more inaccurate books, because the copying of the original changed from one version to the next. In addition, since in Europe, Latin was the language of scholars, only a small population could even read them. When books were printed, popular European vernaculars were used to communicate to a wider audience.

Our next evolutionary leap was creating a medium of instant publication and a worldwide audience. This is the World Wide Web.

It may be as significant a leap in the consciousness of humankind as was Albert Einstein's revolutionary reinterpretation of the Universe. Despite the brilliance of Isaac Newton's work, the new theory of the Universe changed the consciousness of humankind forever.

The World Wide Web may very well be the greatest invention in history. Tim Berners-Lee has invented something that reminds one of a multifaceted diamond. When you look at each face, you discover a new reality.

One face of the World Wide Web is like The Glass Bead Game.

In his Nobel Prize winning novel, Magister Ludi, The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse defined the nature of knowledge and intelligence in a beautiful metaphor. He described it as a game where pieces were played on a board.

"The Glass Bead Game is a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture. All the insights, noble thoughts and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concept and converted into intellectual values, the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on an organ."

Like the Glass Bead Game, the World Wide Web ranges over the entire intellectual cosmos.

Another face of the World Wide Web is like the marketplace of Ancient Athens. Here democracy evolved in its purest state. People talked to each other, shared information, challenged points-of-view, and understood each other. This informal gathering of thinkers birthed one of the most significant early cultures of the Western World.

Because there are so many contributors to the World Wide Web, neither governments nor corporations nor media organizations have much control over it. Blogging, especially, has evolved to a place where absolute candor is possible. In addition, writers are free to wax eloquent in their pdf or exe files without waiting for somebody to approve the marketability of their ideas. Discussion groups for everything under the sun exist. Then there are the social networking websites, like You Tube and others, where all kinds of opinions are expressed through videos. Never in the history of humanity has it been possible for the common man or woman to speak their mind to so many people in complete freedom.

Another face of the World Wide Web is like The Great Books of the Western World series.

The quintessence of the value of that series has been captured by the original associate editor, the late Mortimer Adler.

He said that to read them was to be involved in a great conversation because it was like "authors sitting around a table in the same room--totally oblivious to the circumstances of their own time, place and diversity of tongues--confronting each other in agreement, disagreement or otherwise differing about what they have to say on the subject. The sessions of the conference thus imagined would take many days, months, perhaps even years, for it would cover the whole range of ideas and issues that are the objects and concerns of human understanding, always and everywhere."

As you surf from one website to another, from one discussion board to another, or as you communicate instantly by email, is this not like a great conversation that informs your mind and feeds your soul?

Finally, another face of the World Wide Web is like A Global Brain.

Philosophers from Plato to Aristotle, from Thomas Aquinas to Herbert Spencer have always considered knowledge to be a unity, where everything is potentially connectable to everything else. The human brain is a powerhouse of networks of infinite complexity, where every neuron has the potentiality to connect with every other. Similarly, knowledge itself, as described by writer James Burke, is "a gigantic and ever-growing sphere in space and time, made up of millions of interconnecting, crisscrossing pathways."

Knowledge has never been so linked together as it is now on the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web is growing organically, like a great shout of unity across the world. Perhaps each day, we who use it, are reinventing the freedom of speech that once existed in ancient Athens, a freedom which will lead to a whole new world of creativity for everyone.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Do You Get Dumber As You Grow Older?

2007-01-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

You have brains enough to run a galaxy. What are you doing with it?

If you were to count all the synapses in your brain, pointed out Nobel-prizing winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, it would take more than 32 million years.

The number of possible neuronal circuits in your brain is even more astonishing:
10 followed by 1,000,000 zeros.

To put this into context, the number of particles in the known universe is 10 followed by 79 zeros.

Ironically, despite this enormous potential, many people not only discount the power of their brain, but they fail to keep it in shape.

The myth that the amount of intelligence you have developed as an adult is somehow fixed has long been discounted in science. Research now shows that the brain is plastic.
Just as when you exercise, you develop more muscle fibers, so, too, when you use your brain more, you develop more neuronal circuits.

When you learn something new, your brain changes. New connections are formed. As you learn more and more about a subject, the thicker these connections, until you have a trunk line and some level of mastery on that subject. However, when you discontinue learning about that subject, those connections atrophy.

This is why an adult may know a lot less about a certain subject than someone in High School, even if they had studied the same thing. The brain of the High School student is developing connections, while the adult brain is atrophying them.

Physical fitness is something you notice right away. You know when you are out of shape. You can see it, feel it, sensate it. With the brain, it is more subtle. You have a tendency to forget more often. You are only interested in simple books and programs because you find comprehension a challenge. You think learning new things is boring. All these are symptoms of an out-of-shape brain.

It is not necessary to be older either to have an out-of-shape brain. Many people in their twenties, fed on a diet of superficial conversations, undemanding media exposure, and a disdain for any intellectual pursuit, show all the symptoms of inefficient brain functioning.

Age is often used as an excuse to neglect your brain. Again, another myth is responsible for it. The myth is that your brain is in a gradual state of atrophy. Your brain cells like your physical cells are aging rapidly. Actually, even if this were true, there is such an abundance of brain cells that it should not even make any noticeable difference.

The brain is plastic and it grows with use. The older you are, the more chances are that you have built a significant neuronet of ideas. It is actually possible to grow smarter as you grow older because you have more associations built up in your brain and therefore it is easier to grasp something. You don't have to start from scratch. You have internal references in place already.

Even after a neuronet on any subject has atrophied due to neglect, it can quickly be restored. Just as muscle-memory allows an out-of-shape athlete to get back into shape with exercise, so too does restudying your favorite subject quickly make you an expert at it again.

The most powerful youthing formula is doing mental exercises. Studies have shown that those seniors who play chess, card games, solve puzzles, or pursue an interesting hobby, not only have a great attitude, but they are also biologically younger than others of the same chronological age.

The idea that you get dumber as you grow older, it is just not true. Those who are considered "knowledge workers" are as sharp in their older years, then when they were younger. Einstein, for example, was still working out problems in Physics on the day he died.

In some older cultures, wise men are portrayed as old. They are imagined with long white hair and long white beards. In those cultures they understand that an older person has had more time to learn more things.

In Western cultures, older people are portrayed as senile. They are tolerated, rather than respected. This new archetype is a destructive one. Those who embrace it, even unconsciously, come to live it out.

Senility is a condition of atrophy due to brain neglect. This neglect eventually results in some form of physical manifestation, a variety of organic damage and dementia.

Senility is not a symptom of old age, but a symptom of prolonged neglect.

Getting your brain in shape is a lot easier and faster than getting your body in shape. Your brain does not tire and it grows fitter faster.

It is not possible to lead a full, significant, and happy life if you are in poor mental shape.
The good news is that all it takes to become an interesting, vibrant, and progressive person is to start to exercise your brain.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Are You Asleep?

2007-01-05T05:19:00.000-08:00

People are often accused of being asleep. This assertion is made by people who believe that they are awake.

Is this just a metaphor used to launch a pejorative statement?

Or is it, like the difference between waking hours and sleeping hours, a condition where awareness is partially or completely absent?

Actually, it appears to be more than a metaphor and also a part of the human condition to be asleep.

Here are five ways we are all asleep.

One, we fail to notice things.

Due to the way our brains work, our minds can only notice a few possibilities out of an infinite sea. There are many reasons for this phenomena. Despite having 15 billion brain cells, the bulk of these are used for unconscious processes.

Brain lateralization is one reason, for example.

The left brain sees things differently from the right brain. And most people favor one over the other due to cultural bias.

The left brain focuses on language, mathematics, logic, numbers, sequence, linearity, and analysis.

The right brain focuses on forms and patterns, spatial manipulation, rhythm, musical appreciation, imagination, and daydreaming.

Those who do use both sides, communicating ideas between the corpus callosum, are those who have adopted special measures to override the cultural bias, like meditation, to create whole brain thinking.

Two, in a literal sense, the world is not what it appears to be. We appear to live in a world of spaces and objects, but actually this is an illusion created by the brain and the sense organs.

The smallest thing that we can see is made up of atoms. To see the atoms in a tennis ball, we would have to blow it up to the size of the earth. The atoms in it would then be the size of grapes.

If you were to now blow up an atom to see it more clearly, you would have to make it the size of a 14 story building. The largest part in the atom, the nucleus, would be the size of a grain of salt. However, since this is 2,000 times bigger than an electron, these would be the size of dust particles.

The real world is mainly empty space, punctuated by bits of matter, whose real nature are not hard bits of something but patterns of vibrations.

Three, we think of many things throughout the day, but most of this thinking is done in imaginary time. Imaginary time is the past, where things, events, people, and places have ceased to be. Sometimes they have passed away from our sense perceptions. Sometimes they may not exist at all. When we project the memory of the past into the future, we spend time in an imagined state where things will be different for us.

The only real time is now. The only real place is here. However, are awareness is seldom on the here and now. While maintaining enough of our consciousness to be rooted and functioning in the present, we frequently drift of into imaginary time.

The only difference between day dreaming and night dreaming is the intensity of our inner images. During the day, we are partially aware that we are not in imaginary time, and our experiences have a certain order to them. During the night, or when we are asleep in bed, we are completely aware of only imaginary time and our experiences have no clear logic, and one experience can transform into another within seconds and without an explanation.

A fourth way, we are asleep is because we think that our consciousness is our own. This may not be true. Our thoughts are only borrowed from the general thoughts of all humankind. Further, we may all share in a collective unconscious. Thus, all our thoughts are only variations on the theme promoted by our environment and our cultural conditioning on what things mean.

Finally, a fifth way we are asleep is that we assume that there are only four dimensions to reality, the three of space and the one of time. But both mystics and physicists often speak of the possibility of other dimensions

If we are all asleep, then, is an enlightened person awake?

Only in a relative sense. They know they are dreaming, while everyone else is convinced that their dream is real. In a way, an enlightened person, is like a lucid dreamer, while others are convinced that all this sound and fury called life means something and that the hour we strut upon the stage is of some great significance.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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How To Create A Golden Age

2007-01-02T09:58:00.000-08:00

The entire universe is measured out by an intelligent process. It is an ultra rational scheme. From the singularity that shaped the world that we now know to the final collapse of all galaxies under their own gravitational weight, this intelligence is at work.

While the universe is energy, it is organized energy, and it is this capacity to organize that we call intelligence.

This intelligence extends from the orbit around a nucleus to the orbit around a planet. It whispers into birth the growth of a blade of grass with as much ease as it fashions the borders of the Milky Way. Nothing is beyond its ken. Without it, nothing can be. With it, everything is.

The universe is a grand design. The designing force that shapes it, the abstract intelligence that fashions its infinite structures, the animation that makes life possible is what human beings call divinity.

The nature of this divinity is not known, despite the eons of literature about it. Most literature has defined it as an anthropomorphic principle and some have defined it as an incomprehensible abstraction. Ultimately, the only thing these ideas define is their authors. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao that is.

Nevertheless, however, we conceive of divinity, it would not be unreasonable to assert that as human beings we appear to be both shareholders of the design and the designer. We are shareholders in the design because we are as embodied as any other creature on this planet and our elements are the same elements as the earth. We are shareholders in the designer because like it, we are intelligent, capable of organizing nature into new forms, transforming sand into a glass or a microchip, or a roving band of Neanderthals into a civilization-creating species of homo sapiens.

Despite the intelligence that organizes energy, an interesting illusion exists: that the subset intelligence is independent of the universal intelligence. This is an illusion because without the universal, the subset has no ground of being. It is a pervasive illusion, and may be better called a hallucination.

This hallucination exists despite the obvious symbiotic network of relationships identified by biologists, despite the probing of physicists that show that all particles are in instantaneous communication, and despite the experience that survival is not possible without cooperation. Yes, despite nothing but evidence of the unified nature of all things, animate and inanimate, microcosmic and macrocosmic, human beings persist in the notion of separation.

This idea is the source of all grief. Yet, like a hallucination, no argument can dispense with it. We believe in what we see even when it is not there. Ultimately, it may even be considered a form of insanity, an insistence in mistaking the imaginary for the real.

However, the universe is a self-regulating organism.

The instrument of this regulation is so disarmingly simple that it is often overlooked.

It is simply this:

What you do unto others is what you do unto yourself.

Here is what it means:

A malicious thought, one designed to hurt another creature, is your own nemesis. Similarly, a benevolent thought, is your own blessing.

In the moral universe, it is as irrefutable as the law in the physical universe that states that light is the absolute speed limit.

In this sense, it is a constant. It keeps the balance of all things and to deny it is to suffer the consequences of that ignorance.

This simple formula regulates all things. It is an absolute law. And it is an obvious one.

A single moment of reflection about your own or cultural history will reveal evidence for it.

Yet despite this self-regulating constant, only the wise notice it and align with it. Since these are few in numbers, an insane world of human affairs exists, where those who lust for power and control over others do not see that as they smite their enemies, as they abuse their victims, and as they violate the dignity of those who are perceived to be somehow different and inferior, they place a curse on their own heads.

It is the denial of this self-regulating constant that allows infamy and injustice to perpetuate itself eon after eon.

The only way the ills of this world will reverse themselves is to use the constant in a way to perpetuate the greatest good for the greatest number. Individually, this is experienced as an abundant life, where all the riches of experience appear to miraculously shower themselves upon you. Culturally, this is experienced as a renaissance, a golden age, a time when happiness is not an idea but an experience.

Why does this constant appear invisible when its dynamics are everywhere?

Perhaps it's simplicity makes it complex. Those who inflict their own pain upon others are diligent in the pursuit of their own destruction. Pushed to an extreme rebellion against it, the race of humankind will destroy itself. Yet the opposite is equally possible. Intelligence might prevail, the constant will be noticed, and like a flower blossoming, the self-corrective measure will be embraced, adopted, and make manifest a pleasant world to live in.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Awareness As A Portal To Flow

2006-12-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

Awareness can be seen as a methodology, a plan for personal and professional achievement. It is a way to manage change.

Awareness arises when doing requires learning. In sports, for example. As you play your sport, you are not only acting it but learning about how to act. The more fluid
your actions, the more well-rehearsed your form, the better you will play it.

The absence of awareness is an ungraceful dance between experiencing yourself as both a subject and an object. This method makes skill enhancement a challenge. The challenge arises not because you are self-conscious, but because your self-consciousness makes you self-critical. What makes things even more confusing is having an observer add to your own inner dialogue with comments.

The result of all this criticism is not an improved performance, but a worse one.

Unfortunately, this is the way most people learn new skills. They fumble rather than flow. And the more they learn about how it should be done, the more even the fundamentals escape them.

Somehow, despite all of this, people do learn skills, and sometimes become very good
at something that they once used to be excruciatingly bad at. On the other hand, a lot of people settle for mediocrity or give up altogether.

Introduce awareness into this process of learning, as a substitute for self-criticism, and all the dynamics shift. What was painful becomes pleasurable; what was embarrassing becomes amusing; what was serious becomes playful; and what was rigid and stiff becomes pliable and creative.

Awareness is noticing, and not trying to fix something; it is getting into the feeling and the sensation of something with detachment. Balance, enjoyment, learning, and performance improvement happen by themselves.

The reason for the shift is because the attention is taken from the left hemisphere, which is verbally-oriented, to the right hemisphere, which can perceive patterns much more acutely.

Another way of looking at it is a transference of a critical inner parent to a playful inner child. A parent tends to correct. A child tends to explore.

While awareness, the cultivation of silent attention, is highly useful as a learning strategy for physical events from learning how to play an instrument to playing a sport, it can be used, equally well, for any skill, even mathematics, or art, or the ability to make a speech.

When you are doing something and just can't seem to get it, it is because, in a sense, you are not really in your body, but outside it, feeling disassociated. You are not focusing on what is happening, what an experience feels like. Instead you are focusing on ideas of what should be happening and you are looking at yourself in an unsympathetic way.

The emphasis on what you should do, ought to do, and eventually must do, is, to say the least, unnerving. Your expectation means you are in an imagined future time and the contradiction between where you are and where you want to be throws you off balance. In other words, neither your mind nor your body is processing the existing information. Rather, it is lost in a confused fantasy of future dexterity.

Awareness helps you to hone in on the desired pattern. It is motivation in motion.

One possible reason why the obvious idea of awareness may appear insightful is that awareness asks you to embrace the unknown and make it your ally. It asks you to be vulnerable. It seeks the wisdom of insecurity. Ironically, as you explore this possibility, you find it truly liberating.

Criticism, on the other hand, enforces the known. It is the struggle to embody the known and established theory of how something should be done. In other words, it makes the learning process a lot harder.

Profound learning happens when you learn through yourself.

Generally people are so disconnected from themselves that this feels weird.

The real gift of using awareness as a learning strategy is not learning more faster, but learning how to dance with the movement, falling into its flow, experiencing its inner dynamics and unifying with it completely. It is having a time out of time experience.

Sometimes, it is when you don't try hard that you succeed more easily.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Thinking Made Easy

2006-12-29T22:42:00.000-08:00

Dr. Seuss created a funny little story about Mrs. McCave. She had 23 sons and she named them all Dave. Now when you ask, "Who Is Dave?" The question, under
normal circumstances, would lead to a normal answer. But if you were to ask her, it
would be baffling.

Similarly, if you ask "what is thinking?" you tend to baffle your listener.

This is because there is no singular way of thinking.

It has even been said that you can make people do almost anything, except think.

While this is supposed to be funny. It is also sad, in a way.

Because thinking is essential to evolution. Both your own and that of humanity as a whole.

It is also ironic, because all we appear to do all day is think.

Yet can this ceaseless stream of thoughts really be classified as thinking? After all, it seldom results in new ideas, new solutions, or a new way to grow.

From this we can assume that thinking is more than stream-of-consciousness thinking.

It is, in fact, a discipline.

Thinking is a strategic game. Most people try to think through things without a strategy.
This results in a completely muddled thought process. And it is this that makes thinking difficult, frustrating, and something most people avoid.

However, once you introduce strategy into your thinking, it actually becomes enjoyable, the frustration disappears, and surprising and often paradigm-shattering answers appear.

Here are the two most famous ways of thinking.

The first is visual thinking. This method was named Gedanken, which is the German word for thought. But really, the translation is more a thought experiment. In other words, imagine a scenario which examines a question.

Einstein was a champion at this way of thinking, although he did not invent it. By imagining riding on a beam of light, he got rid of the idea of an ether and created the Special Theory of Relativity.

Similarly, Nikola Tesla said that he could run a machine in his mind to see if it worked properly.

This method is powerful because it occurs at the alpha or theta level of consciousness.

Alpha waves (8 - 12 Hz) are seen when we are both alert and relaxed. These waves decrease with physical activity. Theta Waves are 4 - 8 Hz . We see these brain waves when we are falling asleep or just waking up and during the early stages of sleep.

Another method was that of Socrates, who would ask questions, get an answer, and turn that answer into a new question. In other words, he would create a chain reaction, and be
able to probe deep into moral and philosophical concepts. This method revolutionized the soldier-farmer culture of Athens to become one of the most brilliant cultures per population number in the history of the world.

This thinking, I believe, functioned at the gamma level (26-80 Hz), the brain waves associated with higher level thinking, problem solving, and interpretive consciousness.

Incidentally, the reason why stream-of-consciousness thinking does not result in much originality, is because it is usually at beta waves, (12-26 Hz) which is a high stress or anxious type of thinking and because it is unsystematic. Basically, your thoughts run around in loops.

Ironically, one of the reasons for a decline in thinking, is modern education, with it's emphasis on knowledge gathering, rather than interpretive thought. It is the result of an industrial age mentality, large numbers of people are taught the same thing similar to a factory that makes a large number of the same products. By stripping away individuality, it also does away with originality.

In education, today, with the emphasis on didactic teaching, thinking, in the sense of original and creative discovery, does not happen much. Usually, a teacher talks and a student listens and follows a reading assignment. The only feedback required of the student is to repeat back the ideas at some future time, and usually under conditions of a lot of fear and tension.

Because of the relative passivity of the student using this method, little is reflected upon and what has been memorized also soon fades away.

Besides the visual thinking method of artists and scientists and the questioning method of philosophers, another strategy of thinking has emerged, which, for want of a better name,
we will call creative thinking.

There are numerous methods of creative thinking, from brainstorming to lateral thinking to mind-mapping.

Here is one method that might prove helpful to you. This method is particularly good for completely baffling practical problems, in particular business or personal problems.

1. Write down everything about a difficult problem that bothers you. Blow off steam.

2. Write down all possible solutions. Do this until you feel you have exhausted every possible answer. The answers do not have to be original, just any answer. Also, don't repeat an answer.

3. Do something completely unrelated.

4. Out of the blue, you will suddenly know the best answers from step 2 or you may even come up with something new.

The reason this method works is because it causes a break in neuronal habituation. Initially, in step one, you exhaust all aspects of your stuck state. Then in step two, you exhaust all known or possible answers. In step three, you let your subconscious mind do all the work. Finally, in step four, it gives you an answer.

The reason thinking is important is that it helps you to transcend levels of difficulties and evolve as a human being much faster. If the thinking is original enough, it can even evolve a whole culture or humanity as a whole.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Techniques For Accelerating Personal Growth

2006-12-28T17:16:00.000-08:00

The most fascinating theme in any movie is the transformation of the main character, who evolves from a lower state of awareness to a higher one. Although this theme is repeated with minor variations in one movie after another, people do not tire of it because it represents their own story.

The meaning of life may itself be entirely about personal growth. Enlightenment is the final vision, where you see everything in a whole new light, with the universe and your neighbors as part of a massive conspiracy of beauty, elegance, love, and wisdom.

Personal growth happens by default.

Life itself forces it to happen.

The more stimulating the environment, the more it challenges you to accelerate your personal growth.

Personal growth can be defined as the evolution of awareness, a journey from a narrow, dysfunction perspective to a broader, functional one. It is an expansion of perception.

The reason why it can be thought of as an evolutionary force is because it is the result of adaptation to a stressor. All problems are due to an error in perception; a challenge is posed by the environment for you to adapt or suffer the consequences of failure.

For example, a poor state of health is due to a physical challenge, a rocky relationship is due to an interaction challenge, and a scarcity of finances is due to an economic challenge.
The reason it is a challenge is because it threatens your sense of well-being, and failure to
respond in a more adaptive way is to experience the collapse of what you need.

In a nutshell, personal growth happens when your inner map of how the world works is incorrect. You discover that your perception is inaccurate because your experience is misaligned with your desire.

What is needed is more information, an upgrade of your inner map. New streets need to be drawn in, new paths need to be discovered.

Every problem is an evolutionary taunt.

For example, if you are being financially challenged, what is needed is a new model on how to earn more and manage your money better. A bill that you do not have the means to pay is a financial challenge.

Adaptation occurs when new information is learned. This information changes the structure of the challenge. The result of your mental upgrade about what works now
becomes your new model. Using the money example, new information may come in the form of learning how to make more money. This information is then available for you to respond to the world in a more functional way.

Life is constantly posing challenges like this and we are constantly learning how to adapt to these pressures. Each successfully resolved challenge is soon followed by another challenge at the next level. Each unsuccessfully resolved challenge results in your staying at your current level. It's called "feeling stuck" or "in a rut."

This is the process of personal growth.

The growth proceeds along two trajectories: vertical and horizontal.

Vertical growth is learning something new and the new knowledge then fashions a new reality. Our college years, with its academic challenges, is probably the time of the most accelerated personal growth. Similarly, starting a new business or raising a new family are all vertical growth experiences.

Horizontal growth is integrating this new information. You are adjusting to the changes stimulated by vertical growth.

Furthermore, this growth also advances on three levels: ego-centric, ethno-centric, and world-centric. Each is a developmental stage.

In the ego-centric stage, your focus is on improving your own personal experience. In the ethno-centric stage, your focus is on improving your group. This could be an ethnic group, a religious group, or a national group; in other words, any particular tribe that makes you feel that you are one of its members. In the world-centric stage, your focus is on improving things for everyone.

Each stage is not necessarily clearly delineated. The higher stage may incorporate some features of the lower stage. In addition, each stage is broken up into further developmental stages.

The more challenges you overcome, the more you evolve to inhabit a higher stage. In addition, each stage has sub-stages which have to be transcended.

Factoring in the idea of incarnation, most people may spend their whole life in only one sub-stage or may move through several sub-stages but not leave their main stage. Other people may evolve from one stage to another. A few, rare individuals move through all the stages. Those who hit the final sub-stage of the final stage are considered enlightened and do not need to stay on the karmic wheel.

These growth stages also apply to cultures and civilizations.

While growth happens by default; it can also be engineered, or artificially stimulated.

This process is called learning.

Throughout history, those who choose to be self-evolving, do it using two specific methods.

One is using the imagistic aspect of mind and the other is through the linguistic aspect of mind. One can, of course, use both aspects of mind. Usually, however, most people have a predominant and favorite method. It is similar to how most people make one hand more dominant than the other, while only a few are ambidextrous.

Using the imagistic method, or visual thinking, remarkable progress can be made.
Those with a scientific bent appear to favor this method. Kekule dropped off to sleep by a fireplace, had a dream about a snake swallowing its own tail, and developed the basis of all organic chemistry, the benzene ring. Einstein precipitated the biggest leap in Science since Newton by day dreaming about a train ride on a beam of light.

In terms of the Jungian model of the mind: this would incorporate intellect, intuition, feeling, and sensation. For example, Kekule had a dream, which includes intuition, emotion and a tactile sense. Upon awakening, he then used intellect to define the benzene ring.

This method of visual thinking is as powerful as the transition between Roman numerals and Arabic numerals. Using Roman numerals, for example, the mathematics needed to create String theory in Physics would have been impossible. Since, to date, String theory is neither empirical nor observable, it could not exist without mathematics. Considering that this may very well end up being a complete theory of everything, you will appreciate the value of the use of Arabic numerals.

Another method is the Socratic Method, which is about 2,300 years old.

The Socratic method is essentially asking and answering questions. Questions probe consciousness and stimulate a search for answers.

This method is not to be confused with the didactic teaching that is referred to as modern education.

The Socratic method was used during the era of Classical Greece and the Renaissance, two epochs that produced more highly intelligent people than has ever been known.

The reason these two methods are so powerful is because they disrupt "neuronal habituation" the phenomenon that with a constant signal, nerves and brain fall sleep.
Changing the stimulation causes the brain to start working in a new and unusual way.

Ironically, our current educational methods across the globe stimulate only a limited amount of personal growth because they result in the stabilization of signals, creating
neuronal habitation. Subjectively, people claim to fall asleep or drift into a day dream during a class session. They miss the lesson because the repeated signal created boredom and disassociation. It did not provoke them to move beyond passivity.

With these two methods, learning becomes interactive and stimulating, resulting in a quantum leap in personal growth.

You don't have to wait for all the right conditions before you can experience vertical growth; you can invite it to happen through choosing immersion in new, stimulating, life-affirming information.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Brief History Of Everything

2006-12-26T10:25:00.000-08:00

I was wondering about how everything we know came together to be the way it is right now and what will happen to us as a species.

The story of everything started 15 billion years ago.

The universe, as we know it, was created by an enormous explosion of matter to create space-time. A fiery, dense universe started to inflate.

For three billion years, optically dense matter/energy decoupled and created an invisible universe.

It took another billion years for clusters of matter to form. As heavier nuclei synthesized they formed protogalaxies.

After more than 5 billion years after the big bang, galaxies formed. Later, new galaxies, more like our own, with heavier nuclei came into being.

Around the 10 billion year-mark, our solar system, with orbiting planets formed.

A billion years later, in the primordial oceans of earth, atoms combined to form macromolecules capable of self-reproduction and self-assembly. This was DNA, the basis of all life.

DNA is the alphabet of life. Two strands of a double helix are linked by pairs of bases. There are four bases: adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine. All living organisms are formed by these four bases.

DNA resembles a spiral staircase and the order of how the bases are arranged in it create a particular organism. This DNA assembles an organism around it and copies itself. This copying is not always accurate. In most cases, the new mutations result in those organisms dying out. In some cases, however, it increases the chances of the DNA surviving and becomes biological adaptation.

Around 3 million years ago, our first ancestors inhabited the earth. They became increasingly more sophisticated. From the first hominid to 8,000 B.C. was the Old Stone Age; from 8,000 B.C. to 6,000 B.C. was the Stone Age, and from 6,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C. was the New Stone Age. From 3,000 B.C. to 2, 000 B.C. was the Bronze Age. And from 2,000 B.C. to the time the Christian calendar begins was the Iron Age.

The last millennium covered the Middle Ages to the Modern Age. The most critical stages came after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages; the pestilence that spread from Asia all the way to Africa, the Black Death; and the two world wars, which has resulted in the new threat of nuclear proliferation.

Where will we go now?

The next 100 years will be the most critical. It is at this stage where the pressure of new changes will force themselves on us. Besides the obvious political and economic problems, there are new problems that threaten our survival as a species: nuclear proliferation, environmental disasters, the population explosion, and epidemics and famines.

One solution may be the creation of a world government because the problems will be too much for any one nation. Assuming that by sharing of resources, peace and stability is established and most of our critical problems are solved, there will still be an evolutionary thrust to push us to build civilizations under the sea and move towards space.
The reason for this is that the world population will be around 36 billion people at the end of the century if it continues at its current rate of 1.9 percent, which means that it doubles every 40 years.

This will result in the creation of a new species of human beings to cope with building and inhabiting the new environments. Failure to do this will mean that by the year 2600, people will be standing shoulder to shoulder and the earth will literally be red-hot because of electrical consumption.

Over the past 10,000 years, there has been no significant change in human DNA, but it may all change dramatically over the next 1000 years as genetic engineering works on creating improved human beings. It will probably start with plants and animals, with many restrictions against it being used on human beings, but someone will break the taboo and start creating human beings outside the womb. These human beings will not be restricted by the size of the birth canal and will grow bigger brains. Our current brains are 3 pounds. Future brains may be around 5 pounds. They will also probably be bigger and stronger than we are now.

Overall, the entire thrust of everything, from our perspective, has been the evolution of matter from nothing, then life forms from apparent random permutations, and then the evolution of one particular species until it took over the entire planet.

It's an amazing story.

Of course there are many missing links to it--

What happened before the big bang? What banged? How did the atoms necessary for life sort themselves out to create the macromolecule that defined all life? How did one creature create a superior brain and nervous system?

One thing is for sure: the future is not going to be anything like the past. The prevailing wisdom that there is nothing new under the sun is in for a shock.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't Wait! Celebrate!

2006-12-24T19:43:00.000-08:00

We usually give ourselves permission to celebrate our fondest victory after we have achieved it. This is a perfectly logical and sensible way to behave--but it is all wrong!

The proof of the absurdity of this sequence is that your victories are probably few and far between and only the result of the most heroic effort.

Gedanken is a German word that means thoughts. It's what Einstein called his famous thought experiments. We are going to make our own Gedanken to show how modifying the standard rules of celebration affect the game of life.

Imagine you are the new coach of your local soccer team. You have 12 practice sessions to go before you meet the first team in the tournament. Unfortunately, the team you are playing against happen to be last year's champions. In addition, to make things worse, your team are last year's biggest losers. To put pressure on you, if your team doesn't win the tournament, you will get fired. Since you really, really need the job, because you have to keep your house from falling into foreclosure, you know you just have to win. In fact, the only reason you got this job in the first place is because no-one else was even willing to take on the job.

The only positive thing you can see right now is that you are being well-paid and the owner of the team has given you carte blanche to use any psychological or training procedure you like.

What are you going to do with this unrestricted power to act at your own discretion?

After your first practice game, you decide to celebrate a mock victory. Although your team is a bunch of losers, they are a congenial lot and really get into going ape wild in the locker room in mock celebration.

You do the same thing, week after week.

What is going to happen?

The pleasure of winning will become entrenched in their nervous system. Each practice of victory will bathe each team member's nervous system with an exhilarating rush of endorphins, enkephalins, catecholamines and serotonin to make them brighter. Their brain will respond to this stimulation and over time each brain will develop a more advanced neural network.

Besides the neurochemical transfiguration that is going on within them, they will also be increasing their vibrational levels and exciting the law of attraction to work in their favor.

In addition, they will train with more enthusiasm, enhance their skills sets, and work in a spirit of harmony.

The combination of neuro-stimulation, raising their vibrational levels, and the obvious expansion of skill and group coordination will drown at any vestiges of fear and doubt from their previous debacle and create a group consciousness of irresistible success.

When you unleash them during the first playoff, they will mow down the opposition, because that team will be complacent while yours will be highly motivated and empowered with well-honed skill sets.

Their first celebration in the locker room will be a highly-emotional experience as the realization of the cybernetic transposition between the past and the present experience sinks in.

This flow state will continue throughout the rest of the tournament and the probability of your winning it will be very high indeed.

Now how does this apply to you and your life?

Imagine that you are the head coach of your own sub-ego states. In the past, you have encountered defeat in achieving your desired goal. The team, in other words, is not in really good shape. However, through repeated mock celebrations, you will have completely routed out any opposition to victory.

You will attain your goal, whatever it is; no matter how many times you may have failed before.

In summary: a simulation of joy and a rehearsal of intended victory will create a completely new neuropsychological force in your life. When you practice the change you hope to see in your life, you will reach a point where it will be your experience.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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The Rise And Fall Of Curiosity

2006-12-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

It is not really clear whether humanity developed intelligence because it was curious or its curiosity developed its intelligence. It could very well be a combination of both, with our natural genetic capacity for inquiry stimulating more complex and interconnected neural nets and bigger brains.

For a long time, psychologists believed that intelligence was fixed, but new evidence shows that the more we learn, the more neural connections are formed and the more we can learn.

The driving force behind all learning is curiosity, the desire to know, to explore, to experience new things.

A curious lesson about the implications of appreciating and withdrawing from curiosity occurred between 1405 and 1433, when the Ming government, under the foresighted Yongle Emperor decided to establish a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean basin. He assigned Zheng He 317 ships, with 28,000 armed troops. This expedition awed the people of the coastlines, who were amazed by the nine-masted ships. These were the biggest ships ever known in the world, with a technology about 500 years ahead of its time.

During his first three voyages, Zheng He visited southeast Asia, India, and Ceylon, and on the next one, he traveled as far as East Africa. Liberally dispensing gifts of silk, porcelain, and other Chinese wonders, he also received amazing presents from his hosts.
The Chinese people learned much about other people, their customs, and their deities. Zheng He was also respectful. For example, in Ceylon, they erected monuments honoring Buddha, Allah, and Vishnu. They also astonished the people back home when they brought back "mythological animals" like the Zebra and the Giraffe.

Suddenly the world of the Chinese people expanded beyond belief, as did those of the people visited.

Zheng He himself was reported to be a remarkable man, who was rumored to be very tall and broad and walked like a tiger. Chinese scholars escorted him, drew nautical maps and wrote fabulous reports on all that was being discovered.

Then in 1424, the Yongle Emperor died and with him the curiosity aroused by the Chinese expeditions. His successor, the Hongxi Emperor, who reigned from 1424 to 1425 slowly eroded the popularity of the expeditions. He was followed by the Xuande Emperor, who permitted one last expedition, during which time Zheng He died and was buried at sea.

A huge surge of conservatism not only ended the expeditions, but the bureaucrats even went as far as to destroy all known records of the expeditions. The nautical charts were burned. The treasure ships sat in the harbors until they rotted away. And the technology of how to build such sophisticated ships gradually passed into oblivion.

Zheng He discovered many countries, including Sumatra, Malacca, Java, Ceylon, India, Persia, the Persian Gulf, Arabia, the Red Sea, Africa, and Taiwan. He brought back to China trophies and envoys from more than 30 kingdoms. His records and maps may even have shown the Americas, Antarctica, and the tip of Africa.

What killed China's exploration of the world? Chinese bureaucrats steeped in Neo-Confucianism thought that since China was obviously the greatest civilization in the world that they had nothing to gain from mixing with foreign people.

China became insular and the Western World, so far behind in technology and the learning arts began to catch up. Eventually, a few centuries later, by the time of the Opium Wars, the small island of Britain had enough technology to completely humiliate this giant country and seize its major ports.

And just as the decline of a whole civilization can be traced back to the eclipse of curiosity, even on an individual level, most people only enjoy a brief expedition into learning about new worlds. After their schooling years, most people settle into a routine of quiet desperation and fail to realize that they live in a world of wonder and mystery.

The wonders of learning are enormous; besides personal growth, there is a thrill to it that makes everything else pale in comparison. Here for example is the poetic euphoria felt by Zheng He:

"We have traversed more than 100,000 li (50,000 kilometers) of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course (as rapidly) as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare…" (Tablet erected by Zhen He, Changle, Fujian, 1432.)

Conservative scholars at court, clinging to an outmoded philosophy, did not realize that
with the death of curiosity, they had also condemned the future of a great civilization. 100 years before Columbus opened up the Americas, China lost its chance to know and explore the world.

Without a sense of wonder, life is but a petty affair. Whenever a civilization, a country, an institution, or a person loses it, their world shrinks and entropy begins. Entrenched in the quotidian, life loses its luster, and the promise of what could be fades away like a dying sunset.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Will Our Collective Ignorance Kill Us?

2006-12-20T09:14:00.000-08:00

With three pounds of matter, called the brain, the human race has gained complete dominion over all of life on this planet. It has discovered the raw power of steam and used it to create the industrial revolution. It has discovered the raw power of splitting the atom and used it to create its own nightmare. It has discovered how to prolong and improve human life and this will result in a population explosion, where the rate of the human race doubles every forty years. Ironically, the great gift of humankind, superlative intelligence, may be the cause of its demise.

The solution, paradoxically, is more intelligence. Intelligence has to move from the few to the many. Literally, a new race has to emerge to keep civilization, even earth life as a whole, alive past this century.

The analogy often used is that most people are asleep, while others, those who are noticing the collapse of the environment and the coming storm, are said to be awakening. What does this really mean?

Perhaps, it means that most people, stuck in habituated or conditioned thought, are not capable of rising to a place where they can contribute anything more than resistance to the idea of the change that needs to happen.

Another analogy might work better.

The Internet is an artificial global brain. Theoretically, it allows anyone to contact anyone else. Those who use this medium to learn and communicate are "online." They are part of the aggregate of humanity that can share a community.

The rest of the world, either due to lack of interest or insufficient economic resources, are living in a more local environment. They are said to be "offline." They only know and communicate based on immediate stimulation.

As you can imagine, there is a huge disparity between the two populations. Those online have any kind of information available to them literally at their fingertips. Those offline have very little information to work on. The result is a growing disparity between the human race. Those who are informed and those who are not.

Similarly, in regards to the human race, only a small number are even aware that the world as a whole is in jeopardy. They have a poor knowledge of history, and do not realize how fortunate humanity was to have survived the dictators and the escalation of raw military power that emerged in the past century. They also have a poor knowledge of science, and do not realize that there is enough raw power to blow up the world eleven times over. Finally, they have a poor knowledge of social issues, ranging from pollution to self-seeking political and economic organizations.

The reason that they do not have this knowledge is because they do not think it is important. In many cases, too, they may not have access to this knowledge. In the past, the general ignorance of the masses did not matter that much. This was because there was never such a pressing need to create worldwide consensus on many issues, there was never a pressing need to reorganize and reprioritize human interests, and there was never the open possibility of general ignorance becoming deadly.

While it is not necessary to become a savant; it is necessary to become more intelligent, which means less conditioned, less ill-informed, less self-oriented, and less apathetic. A critical mass of intelligent people is necessary before the tide turns. Compassion and genius will not flourish in an atmosphere of indifference and confusion.

How can we make the upgrading of intelligence an important agenda for human beings?

We can improve the quality of all our media presentations, from print media to Television to Radio to movies to be less focused on trivial entertainment and more on providing meaningful messages. We can upgrade the educational institutions all over the world, from the model that is currently operating, which is still based on the ideas of the industrial revolution. And we can take individual responsibility and try to read more, understand more, communicate more.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Heralds Of The Dawn, Explorers Of The Light

2006-12-18T09:04:00.000-08:00

These groups, for the most part, fall into two classes, science and religion. (And those who seek to interpret and present the meanings of these two groups are the artists.)

Many religions have two branches. There is the exoteric branch, where the basic ideas and the story of its founders and the various histories are recorded. Here too is the big book, the manual, that describes how to follow its teachings. The new comer is fascinated by it, believing it to be the book of truth, where the mystery of all creation is finally unveiled. The veteran either accepts the big book as it is or makes a few fresh interpretations. Those who belong to the exoteric group are large in number.

But many long-established religions also have a secret branch, where the interpretation is wholly different, more insightful, and often informed by experiences of personal revelation. This is the esoteric branch. This group is seldom organized. If it is, then you can only join through a personal invitation. The qualifications to join are not clear and what you may learn may be startlingly different from what is taught in the main religion. This group is often secretive because the main branch may often consider the new ideas heresy. As you can imagine, the members of this group are few in number.

In Judaism, the esoteric branch were the Essenes. In Christianity, the esoteric branch were the Gnostics. And in Islam, the esoteric branch were the Sufis. Those who belonged to the esoteric branch were called mystics. Whether these groups still exist today, of course, is a whole other discussion. Besides these groups, there have been many other schools of mysticism.

In the 20th century, as both knowledge and communication technology expanded exponentially many ancient secrets were revealed. Out of this, a new brand of mysticism has unfolded, some may have their roots in earlier traditions, but others have many roots and can be considered eclectic. In fact, one can even be a lone mystic without relation to any group at all.

The essential difference between these two groups is the level of revelation. Both groups may have high levels of erudition and faith, both may believe that they have a firm grip on the truth, but the dividing line is that the mystic has an unworldly sense of awe and wonder, which may be due to spiritual experiences that made the knowledge more intimate and more alive.

While all scientists are in a quest for the truth, Physics is the specialized group that seeks to understand the whole universe.

Similarly, in Physics, too, I believe there is an exoteric and an esoteric branch. Everyone may know the same thing in both branches, but the level of intimacy with the knowledge is different.

Technicians are the large group. They know the mathematics, understand the formulas, and can present a decent exposition of the ideas.

The mystics of Physics, however, are harder to define. They have a different attitude and "feel" for Physics.

Perhaps an example might make it more clear. You will see at once that this type of person views Physics as a multi-dimensional experience.

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears it ticking, but has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison."

The mystic? Albert Einstein. (The Evolution of Physics, p. 31).

In Physics today, the masters are in pursuit of essence. They seek the essence of quantum mechanics, quantum logic, special relativity, general relativity, and some new directions that Physics is currently moving in.

I compare Physicists to mystics because they have much in common.

One, they both share the same quest: understanding the meaning of everything; coming up with a brief history of everything by examining the underlying principles or laws that govern the universe.

Two, many of their findings are remarkably similar. I'll give a really quick example. The lay person, informed by commonsensical observation, may believe that there is only one spatiotemporal dimension. The religious person may believe that there is at least a heaven and an earth (although some may factor in a few more dimensions referred to as purgatory and hell). But both mystics and physicists believe that there may be many dimensions. Mystics hold as many as 7 or more dimensions, while physicists hold as may as 11 or more (a new branch known as String Theory).

Three, both physicists and mystics, appear to gather their understanding from more than observation and experimentation; they develop insight. In-sight. They literally look within. For example, Albert Einstein would sit in silence, holding two rocks in either hand and slip into a state of deep relaxation, a Theta-level of consciousness, where he could then visualize his thought experiments more clearly. When he slipped into Delta, the brainwave state of sleep, he would wake himself up by dropping a rock. Mystics use a similar device, referred to as meditation or contemplation. They both understand that at the beta level of consciousness, the brainwaves of everyday waking consciousness, you pretty much have the same level of thoughts, and that to really understand anything, you need to drop to Alpha or, if you can, into Theta.

Ultimately, it is our appreciation for novelty that determines our capacity to open new fields of knowledge from the appearance of things. Those who wed a sense of awe and wonder with inquiry are those who discover the secrets of life. It does not matter to which group, if any, you belong to in your quest for the truth about the meaning of life, what matters most is the spirit of your quest. Your spirit and sense of adventure will inform the depths of your experiences and give you startling conclusions. In a world where most people are in a coma of habituated thought, it is remarkably refreshing to look upon everything with the eyes of a child; over time, with sufficient inquiry, this process then results in the evolution of the mind of a sage.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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An Open Letter To A Dying Planet

2006-12-16T15:59:00.000-08:00

It will soon be a new year and we are almost a quarter of the way into the first decade of the new century. Where are we heading now? What will happen to the human race? Will it overcome its shadow side and migrate to the stars, a vision of Star Trek, or will it annihilate itself, the way the Roman empire, the greatest empire on earth, the pride of the ancient world, whose brilliant legislature, political organization, unrivalled military might, grand architecture, innovative engineering and artistic achievements have now been relegated to dusty archives?

The future of humanity depends on awareness of its plight. Without awareness, extinction is highly possible. With awareness, a critical mass for change can happen.

At no time in the last ten thousand years since the Ice Age have we exhibited such astonishing genius or such abominable disregard for sentient life. Somehow we have arrived here in this new century despite the worldwide suffering and traumatic events of the past one.

The greatest peril facing our species may be the overpopulation of our planet. Our very success with science and technology to improve the survival of all human life may be our downfall. The current rate of growth is about 1.9 percent a year. This may not sound like an alarming figure but it means that the population doubles every forty years. Right now it is around 6 billion. By the end of this century it will be around 40 billion. By then, it will be too late to do anything. That is the current lifetime left for humanity unless we become sophisticated enough to migrate to the stars.

Can we do it? Can we survive as a species? In order to answer that question, let us look at the greatest century ever in the history of the human race, the twentieth century. Unless we learn from our mistakes, we will be condemned to repeat them. But this time, we may not have a second chance.

The journey of the exploration of inner space began in the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud explored the unconscious, linked neurosis to the sex drive, and sought to heal the past by examining it in the present. Initially shocked by his ideas, those who read and understood him then spread a new burst of awareness.

In the famous painting, The Scream, Edvard Munch, a Norwegian artist who followed the tradition of French Impressionism, epitomized the anxiety and terror of the human psyche, the grief that arose from recognizing the personal and collective pain in the unconscious mind.

Pablo Picasso's Cubism and Salvador Dali's Surrealism created more waves of awareness about the anguish of the individual soul tormented by the traumas of life, and this imagery of suppressed emotional pain spread even faster through the medium of surrealistic films.

But while a small proportion of artists were making public the existential angst of humanity, other great minds were marveling at the mystery of the universe. Albert Einstein declared that energy and matter could be exchanged, x-rays showed the insides of a living human being, and microscopes and telescopes started to reveal the world of the very small and the very large. In addition, amongst numerous other wonders, science developed contraceptives, giving couples the chance to experience intimacy without the need to raise a new family.

Human genius was on the rise everywhere. Startling discoveries were being made in the sciences that were radically transforming the very essence of human understanding and the way society functioned. But the most startling of them all, was the power of the atom. By isolating, smashing and splitting atoms, an enormous power of unimaginable magnitude had been discovered.

After the first atomic bomb was tested in Los Alamos, the chief scientist Robert Oppenheimer quoted a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita, "Now I have become death and the destroyer of worlds." The scientists were shocked at what they had discovered, but the use to which the power was put changed the entire history of humanity for the worse. The powers of the Western World opted for the short-term benefit of defeating Japan, but did not then realize that it had introduced an unfathomable nightmare of weapons proliferation that could destroy every living creature in the known universe.

Before the nuclear shadow fell on humankind, the most horrific cause of anxiety in the collective unconscious, total war had already been invented.

The first world war escalated human territoriality and aggression to an industrial scale. The mechanical energy that had been used to transform humanity from an agrarian and localized population to an industrialized and globally expanding population was now used for wholesale slaughter. Man became the victim of his own machines. Armaments could be manufactured on a large and rapid scale. The lethal invention of the gun now became the even deadlier machine gun; in the few seconds it took to kill one man, now a dozen could be killed.

But this was only the beginning of mass-scale suffering because never in the history of humankind had evil men had the means to exploit and destroy so many people so efficiently.

Joseph Stalin initiated the collective farms of communism. Under his interpretation of the ideology of communism, 22 million people died in the labor camps of his slave empire.

The Japanese invaded China in 1937 and slaughtered 60 million Chinese.

Adolph Hitler promised the German people the restoration of their honor and self-respect after the humiliation of Germany's earlier defeat and the penalty imposed upon them by their victorious enemies. Nazi Germany slaughtered another 50 million. 27 million of these were Soviet citizens. 6 million of them were Jewish people, who were systematically hunted and captured, stripped of all human dignity and murdered with ruthless efficiency.

Yet the havoc that was unleashed by the machinery of the industrial age was only the beginning of the flagrant abuse of raw power.

The second world war had leveled down many previously flourishing cities through continuous bombing over months like Rotterdam, Dresden, and Tokyo, but when the atomic bomb was dropped by America on Japan, two whole cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled in seconds.

Despite the overwhelming violence of these horrors, human cruelty continued unabated on a scale that had never ever before been witnessed on the face of creation.

Mao-tse Tung promising the Chinese people "a great leap forward," publicly humiliated landowners, initiated widescale persecution and torture on anyone who disagreed with him and gave the land to the peasants. These peasants overworked the soil, creating a famine of immense proportions and 30 million Chinese starved to death.

In Cambodia, Pol Pot, waged a war on his own people and one out of three Cambodians was murdered.

In Cambodia, Viet Nam, Rwanda, and Kosovo the bloodbath was relentless.

War had become remote, precise, and deadly. Human beings had become the cruelest and most savage creatures ever to have walked upon the earth. Even the Dinosaurs that once roamed the earth in the distant past did not have the same vicious intensity. They killed to survive, but human beings killed because of wounded pride. Intelligence enlisted to satisfy dark human drives created unspeakable suffering.

Yet somehow, remarkably, humanity, despite its new penchant for efficient slaughter, as a whole, still continued to progress.

Around 1950, America's statue of liberty became a symbol of hope for immigrants from around the world. With their zestful energy they infused renewed life into the country. Some of these immigrants were the greatest scientists in the world, including Albert Einstein; others transformed the New World through backbreaking labor. The result of this influx of brilliance and massive effort transformed the United States into a formidable economic and military power. To the rest of the world, exhausted and depleted by the aftermath of war, everything appeared bigger and better in America. It boasted taller buildings, bigger cars, a vast network of roads and railways, and a love for innovation and technology. America became the new hope, its vision of a promising new humanity dominating the rest of the world.

However a migrational shift existed across the whole world. Those who could not travel abroad moved in large numbers from the country to the city. Calcutta became overwhelmed with a population of 10 million people; Tokyo swelled as millions of country people became urban dwellers; and in the 18,000 square miles of Mexico city, an urban sprawl developed around the fringes of the city and discarded waste materials spread outwards.

All over the world, in rich and poor countries, cities became highly attractive: a place for greater wealth, broader freedom, and more excitement. Running out of room, cities began to grow upwards, becoming vertical, climate-controlled, and neon-lit. Their growth was due to a flight from the poverty experienced in the countryside and the lure of the promise of living in a consumer paradise. Shanty towns became common place around the fringes of many cities in the developing world, and the gap between the rich and the poor widened, with women becoming the poorest of the world's citizens.

Europe having exhausted its resources and population in colonization and total war now experienced an influx of the people whom they had subjugated. In the spread of imperialism, ties had been made with the conquered people. For example, Asians from India, Pakistan, East Africa, and Trinidad made England their new home. In Wembley, North London, the local Hindu people imported a magnificent temple, stone by precious stone, from their native country.

In the United States, too, migration continued, not only from overseas and from the country to the city, but also from its borders. Los Angeles has the largest Mexican population outside Mexico city. Preserving their cultural traditions, the growing Hispanic population is slowly changing the European mix of America into a Latino one.

After its victory in the Second World War, the United States became the strongest economy on the earth. Besides the influx of new ideas and labor from immigrants, the emphasis on science and technology created a revolution in telecommunications. Radio, television, Hollywood movies, satellites, and advertising from America influenced the rest of the world. American celebrities became popular everywhere, from the songs of Elvis Presley to the fights of Muhammad Ali. A celebrity in America usually became an international celebrity. Towards the last decade of the century, America initiated the network of computers that we now know as the world wide web.

Communications created the first sense of a global community. Everyone was able to see everyone else and share common human interests and values. 200 million people watched the wedding of Princess Diana and a little over two million watched her funeral. During the final World Cup Soccer match in 1998, 2 billion people watched it on television. With the advent of the mobile telephone, anybody on any street in the world could talk to anyone else anywhere on the planet.

Besides the thrill of watching each other, the human race also had a chance to watch itself. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the lunar expeditions was not pictures of a dead moon but the pictures of a living planet. Humanity began to see itself for the first time as a single species, rather than a collection of warring factions. From space, the planet looked like a big, blue marble floating in inky darkness. People noticed more ocean than land, the absence of any political borders, and the possibility of multinational friendships and the sharing of common experiences. Besides seeing itself, humanity also vicariously experienced the thrill of watching their home planet as a whole. Listening in to the astronauts live broadcast, they shared in their sense of awe.

While the balance of power shifted from Europe to North America, it then slowly began to shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific Rim. American supremacy was being challenged by the countries of the East.

One thousand years ago, Japan was isolated; in the 20th Century it started becoming an economic super-power.

Similarly, other "tiger economies" also erupted around the Pacific, with Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore creating cities that rivaled the cosmopolitan grandeur of North America. In Singapore, for example, the island has become a metropolis whose breathtaking skyline is only rivaled by that of Shanghai.

One thousand years ago, the silk roads to China led to the most refined civilization on earth. China had already invented printing, paper currency, the compass, and gunpowder. In the 21st Century, it is poised to become the new global super-power, because of huge foreign investments, particularly from Chinese living overseas, as well as its population of one billion people.

The greatest dilemma of the future is not our powerlessness, but our power, and not our stupidity, but our immense intelligence.

Initially, we used industrial and nuclear power to create carnage that made the terror of Genghis Khan look mild.

Later, despite whole populations being destroyed, we built up cities, explored space and our own minds and hearts, migrated closer to each other, and shared technology and communication.

In our most glorious century, we have known both the agony of wide scale destruction and the joy of rebirth.

We have seen what we all look like and shared our fondest cultural snapshots with each other.

It seems that in the last century of the last millennium everything changed for humanity.
Sigmund Freud exposed our dark human instincts. Evil men dominated whole nations and slaughtered millions. Conquering people began to coexist with those that they had once subjugated. Economic power shifted from one part of the globe to another. And the rate of knowledge expanded at a bewildering pace. Never before had humankind experienced so much, learned so much, and been exposed to so much raw power that it had learned to harness from nature.

In this new century we find ourselves experiencing an expansion of the cultural and global patterns we created earlier, and our greatest strength, our raw power and unsurpassed intelligence, can also turn out be our greatest weakness.

What will happen to humanity? Will the currently existing outbreaks of war expand to become an Armageddon? Will political, economic, military, industrial, and religious rivalry outweigh any common sense? Will we simply overpopulate and pollute ourselves to death? Will the accelerating economic inequality and exploitation of natural resources create its own brand of chaos? Will prevailing human helplessness at the size of our global problems overshadow us or will we choose to become more aware, educated, cooperative and communicative?

Humanity's future has become extreme: it faces either an apocalypse or evolution to a species that will live in space-stations and travel in star-ships. Everything hangs in the balance based on what we do this century. We have survived the past, but if the same naive patterns continue into the future, we will not make it.

Ultimately, even if we can overcome our individual and collective shadows, even if human decency can outweigh primitive aggression, even if human collaboration is finally possible and human genius is allowed full self-expression, we have one last hurdle to overcome, otherwise the past millennium will have been the last one for our species. Each decade, the stakes are rising. The warning of futurists has fallen on deaf ears. The probability of perishing in the coming millenium is no longer science fiction, it is becoming observable fact to even the most indifferent and ill-informed people.

A time will come when we will need a new home. No force on earth can stop over-population other than widespread devastation due to belligerence or the depletion of limited resources. Our only possible hope is to become star travelers.

Will we be ready to make the new leap to the stars or will the light of human genius, hindered by territorial animal disputes, fail to rise to a level that will save our race from oblivion?

Instant communication and rapid travel has shrunk the world. Can we now use our global brain, the Internet, to communicate in a meaningful way to create a collective change in the consciousness of humanity? We owe this not to ourselves but to generations yet to come. Positive action has to happen this century, a critical mass of awareness has to be reached, otherwise the resulting chaos will be beyond control.

In the past, according to the literature of various traditions, avatars would show up to guide us to wisdom, but we persecuted them. As witnessed by the atrocities of the past century, our shallow intentions and brute instincts are still with us. The only hope for humanity is a collective renaissance of awareness, because only the birth of a widespread intelligence will prevent catastrophe. An expansion of mind and heart has to happen at a critical mass.

Like you, I am no-one, but with you, we can be everyone. Please pass this message on. Throw this message in the bottle back into the ocean. A thousand years from now, one of our descendents will read it and be grateful for the life that they are now living; and it will probably not be on earth anymore. If you had the perseverance to read to this line, don't click "delete", click "forward." Here is why: The future can no longer be a revalidation of the past. There is too much at stake. Intelligence has evolved us from the apes, but the lack of it's positive application may also be our nemesis. Alone as individuals, we will not have much of a chance of saving our planet, but collectively, there is no limit to human genius. Can we evolve to a species that colonizes space or will we perish before we get there?

We are living on a dying planet, and you and I can sound the alarm bell. The Internet can make this possible. With each passing decade, the price of human ignorance will be extracting a heavier toll.

The antidote to apathy and withdrawal is awareness, which is the reason for this essay. Paraphrasing the words of Mahatma Gandhi, we can be the change we wish to see in the world. It begins with the click of a mouse button.

Unless sleeping humanity begins to wake up, it's emerging power of numbers, economic expansion, scientific exploration, and technological advances will be used for extinction not evolution. As you can see, we have already grossly abused the power that we possess; there is no guarantee that we will become wiser in the new year and in the new decade which will soon be upon us. Our power in all areas is expanding as our knowledge expands. Military toys are becoming deadlier; viruses are adapting to our most potent antibiotics and becoming unstoppably virulent; and ideological fanaticism is reaching a point where nuclear proliferation is not possible to contain. Awareness right now is our only hope. Unless, through awareness, humanity as a whole is willing to give up its conscious and unconscious hostilities, disaster is inevitable.

We can use the Internet to spread these ideas to every home and corporation and government in the world. Only 6 degrees of separation lie between us and anyone else in the world.

Without awareness, positive change is not possible. We owe it to generations yet unborn to spread awareness. This is the meme that will save our species. Awareness can blossom into knowledge and knowledge into positive action; but without awareness; through mere blind, reflexive living, chaos will erupt as surely as night follows day, or one century follows the next.

Please send this article to one or more people or post it somewhere. You can click "delete" or "forward." In a strange way, the fate of the world may have something to do with us. You and I will probably never meet, but we share a common bond. Despite all our differences, we are all connected. It is our greatest value. Let us act, each in our own small way, on an impulse, no matter how faint, to help the greater good.
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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Applied Mysticism

2006-12-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

Life has a way of working itself out. In the process of living your life, things have a way of resolving themselves.

Another way of saying this is "ask and receive."

Of course, to the logical, sequential-processing, fact-based mind, this makes no sense at all. It sounds like airy-fairy nonsense, mere wishful thinking.

How does it happen? Is it divine intervention, the presence of angels, or the subconscious mind suddenly paying attention?

I really don't know. I can tell you the process and you can apply your favorite explanation.

Here are the five steps:

One, ask for a solution to a current problem.

Two, envision a happy outcome.

Three, trust that an answer will show up

Four, let it go.

Five, the answer will appear.

I'll give you an example that happened yesterday. I was wondering how anything could be understood because the nature of all things is infinitely complex. Was it ever possible to have a theory of everything?

This was my question. It baffled me, and I did not even get to the stage where I could envision a happy outcome.

Not being able to resolve it, I gave up.

That same day, in the evening, I stumbled upon how Albert Einstein had spent his life pursing the same question. After his General and Special Theory, his dream was to find a theory of everything, a unified field theory. He believed in an elegant theory, where gravitation and electro-magnetism could be united. Unfortunately, what rudely disrupted his plans was the eruption of Quantum Mechanics, where elegance was not the norm and subatomic elements could either be observed or measured, but not both. Quantum Mechanics posited two more forces, the strong force and the weak force. The strong force is what holds an atomic nucleus together and a weak force is what is responsible for radioactive decay. Well, now, not one, but two theories of everything coexisted. One for the world of the very large, planetary bodies. And one for the world of the very small, subatomic particles. Albert Einstein died a puzzled man. He could not figure out how to unite gravity, the force created on a planet because of a curvature in space-time as it traveled around its sun, with electro-magnetism, the forces of light, electricity, and magnetism, with the strong force, the "glue" that bound protons and neutrons together in a nucleus, and the weak force, the force that was responsible for radioactive decay.

How could a theory of everything work on the scale of the very large yet fail on the scale of the very small? How could the elegant laws that governed the planetary bodies and systems of the universe fail to have any application in the world of electrons spinning around a nucleus? (Initially, when scientists had perceived the atom as a "miniature" solar system, this problem was not observed; but after learning how to split atoms, this model was considered nonsensical, because only probability patterns of energy existed at the subatomic level.)

How could the theory of everything have two completely different theories? It would be like a one way street where the signs pointed in both directions or a traffic light which had all three colors on at the same time.

"God does not play dice," he declared. But according to experiment after experiment in Quantum Mechanics, that is all that He did all day long.

Half a century after he died, however, along came String Theory, which posited that there was even something smaller than a quark and that it was a string, a vibrating string of energy that functioned in multiple dimensions to create the subatomic particles that could be observed. The entire universe, then, was an orchestra, a vibration at the level of the infinitesimally small, that played out different frequencies to create different constituents of things.

This debate, of course, is still raging, with many Physicists believing that since String Theory could never be experimentally verified (because the size of vibrating strings were infinitesimally small) that it was not valid, and more philosophy than science.

The point of this discussion, however, is that Applied Mysticism works.

I asked what I consider to be an impossible question. Can one understand everything? Is such a thing even possible? I thought this question so outlandish that I gave up on ever finding an answer. I even experienced some despair, that I would spend the rest of my life bewildered by everything. Then to my surprise, through a series of coincidences, I found that not only was my question not original but that this entire phenomena of the universe could be broken down into a quest for a handful of unifying principles.

Even though I did the steps in a random way and none of them fully, I still got amazing results. I actually developed the steps afterwards, through recapitulation of these events that I have just narrated to you.

I am still testing it, but I think that they should work better than my original haphazard application of Applied Mysticism, a term I have coined to describe this phenomena.

Here, however, is one possible explanation.

I do not know the agency that creates the answer but I think the process is made possible because one steps outside thought itself for a moment.

My take on this is that the problem of problems is a systematic one. It is not one or two rogue thoughts that are the problem. It is not a result of negative thinking or misperception because of erroneous presuppositions. The entire system of thinking itself is flawed because it is based on a need to find and resolve problems.

This is not an original idea, either. David Bohm had expanded on it fully. David Joseph Bohm was an American-born quantum physicist, who made significant contributions in theoretical physics, philosophy and neuropsychology, and to the Manhattan Project.

David Bohm, in his book Thought as a System, defined the problem with thinking itself.

"So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction."

"What is the source of all this trouble? I am saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That's part of our tradition. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It's like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, it's far over 20%."

"…the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us."

"Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call 'sustained incoherence.'"

"What I mean by 'thought' is the whole thing - thought, 'felt', the body, the whole society sharing thoughts - it's all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it's all one process; somebody else's thoughts becomes my thoughts, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thoughts, your thoughts, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings... I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence. A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department. They don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

"Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, 'felts' and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes...although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure....Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before.

"Now, I say that this system has a fault in it - a 'systematic fault'. It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere. You may say "I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem". But 'my' thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I am trying to look at, or a similar fault.

"Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates. (P. 18-19)"

Thus, the reason we have problems in the first place is because we think of things in a problematic way and manifest the situation. We then get stuck in it. The system of thought itself created the problem. Of course, we like to believe that the problem existed in reality and that we just smacked into it.

But reality does not exist without us, it is, after all, only an interpretation of sensory data. I know that this is not clear either, so let me draw a quick thought-experiment here.

Imagine if one early morning, 10 people were put on a bus and taken to a new town that none of them had ever been before. They were then allowed to roam around it for the whole day. Finally, in the evening, they would return back to their city of origin. Now, each one would be surprised by a separate interview. The physical aspects of the town (an objective reality) would be interpreted by the minds of those ten people based on their own interests, views, habits, predilections, patterns of observation, past history, favorite sensory modalities and submodalities, and soon. Each one would notice different things and filter out different things. In fact because of their differences, they probably would have dispersed and visited completely different places in that town. After the interviewers themselves got together, they would wonder if the visitors had been to the same town or ten different towns.

Reality-creation is an interpretive experience.

So the only way to escape the system of interpretive thought you are in is to follow the five steps I have outlined in Applied Mysticism.

Let us run through a theoretical example to make it clear.

Suppose, you need more money than you can currently receive from your job to pay some bills. Here is how you apply the five steps.

1. Ask for a way to pay the bills.
2. Imagine paying the bills.
3. Trust that the bills are paid.
4. Let it go.
5. The answer will appear.

How? How will the answer appear? It literally appears in a way that you had not thought of while trying to figure it out.

Your mind can only run over what you know:

The people you can borrow the money from.

The extra work you can do to find the money.

The things you can sell.

But all this data is mined from the past, because that is where all known variables exist.

However, what you need is an answer from the future. This answer comes in an unexpected way. In my own experience it has come as an insight, someone just showing up with the answer, and my finding the answer in a book that I happen to pick up. However, it can show up in any number of ways.

The only way to prove it, of course, is to try it. Then you will see the evidence for yourself. Follow the five steps. Something will happen. I found a whole steam of answers to my impossible question; imagine how much easier it would be to get the answer to a practical problem.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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What On Earth Is Going On Here?

2006-12-14T10:31:00.000-08:00

It's all a miracle, when you come to think of it.

All of it.

Billions of years ago, out of nothing, a universe evolved from a sound. The vibration of this "big bang" still continues to expand.

A planet evolved out of the masses of dead planets that would support life. As far as we currently know, no other planet in our galaxy supports life. There are rumors of space visitors but few of us have ever seen them, or their magnificent ships. It's all hearsay, and since pictures can be doctored and governments tend to suppress things in a reflexive way, the more we think about it, the more confused we get.

Millions of creatures on this planet; some of them in the deepest recesses of the ocean; some alive in the depths of the soil; some flying in the air; some leaping across the tree tops; some slithering down the rocks; and then, of course, there's us, living in concrete jungles, a species so intelligent that our closest biological parallel, the monkey, has the intelligence similar to that of a three-year-old human being.

We not only have an awareness of what is going on in our neighborhood but we have some pretty good ideas of what the rest of the galaxy looks like, as well as the universe as a whole. We have also developed enough mathematics and instruments to show us the smallest of things, a subatomic particle. To our surprise, we have found that it isn't a thing at all, but a cloud of energy, a probability pattern that appears to dance in and out of existence and may even travel back and forth in time.

Where did all these creatures, so many, so spectacular, and so astonishing at times, come from, and why are they here anyway? What, for example, is the destiny of a rat? an earthworm? a culture of bacteria? Do they have a higher purpose, too, or are they just here to breed, consume, excrete, and die?

But it gets stranger still.

Biologically, you had a high probability of not being here in the first place.

Out of millions of sperms that completely happened to miss the egg, you happened to be the one who made that biochemical "handshake." This, in turn, created a massive replication of very specialized cells that formed itself into a completely organized biological system of some trillions of cells. For the most part these trillions of cells appear to get along together and effortlessly run on autopilot for decades, maybe even three-quarters of a century.

And while all of this has happened and is still happening, you aren't, as far as you can tell, taking an active role in running the show. Your liver, without a thought from you, seems to know exactly what to do to keep you around despite that extra shot of Vodka you took to cheer yourself up yesterday.

Again, out of billions of people, it only took the probability of two to meet to bring you here. In fact, those two people may not even have gotten along very well with each other; but still, you're here, despite all the arguments they've had and may still be having with each other. Somehow you snuck in when they were in a good mood.

Spiritually, too, there was not much of a chance that you would show up here, either.

Assuming there is a spiritual dimension, there is probably a long waiting list to get a human body. The odds of getting one must be as astonishing as winning the lottery. After all, if there are billions here already, and all souls never die, then there must be an astronomical number in the other dimension. Since space-time is infinite, assuming they even have space-time there, the number of souls may rival the number of stars in the universe.

Out of all possible experiences, you had a select number that have shaped your personality to be the way it is. And out of the 60,000 or more thoughts you have had every day of your life, there are only a select few that you acted on to make your day the way it is today.

It's all so strange and mysterious that there is a group of us, called scientists, dedicated to looking into it, and this group has become so specialized because there is so much information that now very few of us even know what they are talking about.

Another group has formed as well, called philosophers, who try to piece all the disciplines together to create a big picture, but even this group has become overwhelmed and broken up into splinter units, and we will never ever again have the grand schemes of a Plato, a Kant, or a Spencer. The idea of a grand unified theory of life has all but been abandoned. Of course, there are still a few renegades, like Ken Wilber, who still like to write a brief history of everything, but even these attempts are more about creating huge sweeping classifications, then really explaining anything. It's not anybody's fault really,
there is just too much to consider and still too much to discover to allow a neat, overall pattern to be envisioned.

Then there are other groups, called politicians, who work hard on writing the rule books based on the prevailing ideas of world domination. And, they are followed quite closely, by people whom we will politely call industrialists, who are trying to do the same thing, except that they use a different kind of paper to determine the rules on how the rest of the species should live.

But, of course, the quest for power, does not stop there. There are also the armed forces, the environmentalists, the activists, the musicians, the theologians, and every other imaginable social cluster that is trying to weave a coherent pattern out of their own particular world-view.

The main difficulty everyone is having is not getting a clear idea of what is going on.

In the days of ancient Greece, a sapient homo sapient, like Aristotle, could embrace a complete world view. He impressed everyone for centuries as appearing to know something about everything.

But today, we know, for sure, that he didn't really know that much. Ironically, the awe that centuries of scholars had held him in was mainly due to the fact that very few people were willing to look into anything deeply at all. In fact, those who did ended up getting crucified or burned at the stake or some other gruesome finish.

Fortunately, along came epochs like the Renaissance and the Age of Reason where human curiosity finally broke the bonds of collective stupidity and original inquiry became acceptable again.

This, in itself, took on a massive momentum. After centuries of intellectual suppression, in this century, we ended up figuring out and inventing more than in the entire history of the human race. Today, the rate of knowledge is expanding at such a rapid rate each day that no one can keep up with it anymore.

A multi-talented individual, a "universal man" like Leonardo Da Vinci or Isaac Newton will never be known again. Unfortunately, this has happened not only because of the rate of expansion of knowledge but because toleration for genius has also faded. For example, someone like William Sidis, who in 1910, at age 11, lectured Harvard Mathematical club on "Four-Dimensional Bodies," spent most of his adult life hiding from the vituperation of the popular press.

Albert Einstein did not have a great start either. However, after being scorned by the university system and being forced to take the menial job of a patent office clerk, he managed to break free of the prejudice against intelligence by coming up with such startling ideas that the dozen or so people who understood what he was talking about embraced it and he became the first really smart celebrity.

But even Albert Einstein, after his few shocking revelations, spent most of his life in bewilderment. He constantly argued with Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and the ever growing army of the exponents of Quantum Physics. In this battle of wits, he never really gained any ground because the mathematical and experimental evidence kept on showing the world of the very small to be constantly more bizarre than anyone had ever previously imagined.

Albert Einstein argued that "God does not play dice." He believed that a grand, logical, aesthetic design should explain everything, but the evidence kept on piling up to show that God was indeed playing dice all day long.

Speaking of dice, even your own life, when you come to think of it, has been filled with many improbable interventions that rescued you from certain disasters, gave you insight when you needed it most, and created an entire pattern when you look back at it. No doubt, at the current moment, you're witnessing another role of the dice, and despite how rational and sensible you're trying to be things are working out in a most unusual way.

The probability of anything happening the way it has happened is so unlikely that about the only statement one can make about living on earth is that it is all a miracle.

At best, we only have a vague idea of what is really going on, and we have a way of muddling up our facts and inventing our own versions to explain the gaps, which only adds to the confusion. And we are not alone in this quest to keep things as befuddled as possible. Despite the astonishing discoveries of neuroscience, all educational systems throughout the world still operate on roughly the same educational paradigms invented a century or two earlier. And some even fail to rival that of the 17th Century.

Ironically, despite the beauty of this entire scheme of life on Earth, our internal agitation, both as individuals and as a culture, appear to have taken over for the most part. It appears that we are all simultaneously wrecking as much havoc as possible while crying for help. This is not a cynical comment. Evidence for it is as close as the nearest newspaper or Television or Radio News Channel.

Perhaps the greatest miracle is yet to come. At the current rate of overpopulation, pollution, nuclear arms escalation, genocidal outbreaks, archaic educational systems, rampant militarism, the machinations of multinational corporations, religious dogma, social unrest, economic spirals, environmental disasters, and the disappearance of entire species of flora and fauna, it's going to take another miracle to keep the Earth itself from total collapse. Again, there are rumors of this as having happened before, and there are talks of civilizations like Atlantis and Lemuria which appear to have disappeared without much of a trace, apart from archeological artifacts, which could also be explained in any other number of ways. Like the notion of life on other planets, we have, at present, no clear idea if a flourishing civilization once existed before we showed up. (And, if we assume the idea of reincarnation, we may be the very same rascals who messed things up in the first place.)

In conclusion, then, whatever we make of the prevailing ideas of the earth, its confused inhabitants, and its possible future, one thing is rather clear: everything that exists has happened out of a huge improbability of it ever occurring in the first place.

What will it take for us, then, as a species, to appreciate the miracle of life and have more of it, not only for ourselves and other life-forms, but for generations of sentient life yet to come?

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Conversations With God

2006-12-13T09:46:00.000-08:00

Words define our reality.

We use words to translate the split-second images in our minds into describing our experiences for others.

William Shakespeare invented 25,000 words, which are now part of our regular vocabulary, thus broadening our abilities to perceive our world in a unique and much broader way.

For the most part, language has been used as a means of communication between people.

However, it has also been used as a way to converse with God, or the great mystery of causation and origination, the pervasive pure consciousness that informs all experiences.

In some cultures, certain words, like those Sanskrit words used in the Ancient India, were used to connect a person with ultimate reality. This unique language appears in the earliest Upanishads (7th-8th century b.c.e.). But exactly how and when it evolved by the seers of that time remains a mystery.

These sacred words were called mantras and sutras.

A mantra is a sound that does not mean anything but which helps you transcend the limitations of thought and move to a state of ascending awareness. An example is "Om" which is used to represent the sound of creation, the primeval vibration that is believed
to have created all the other vibratory phenomena we call a universe. By sitting still and repeating this word with full attention, you transcend the limitations of the senses, the limitations of your identifications, and the limitations of your sequential thought processes. You attain stillness, poise, and equanimity over time because the word comes to inform your awareness.

A sutra is a sound as well, but it is also a word; it is something that has meaning. The word "sutra" itself means a stitch; it stitches the finite being with its infinite capacity.
The word "suture" that is used in English to describe a stitch by a surgeon comes from this word.

Sutras abound in Sanskrit, and in fact the entire language of Sanskrit can be said to have been invented as a way for a person to communicate with the divine. It is even believed that saying the word has an impact on the chakras, energy vortexes in the each of the subtle bodies, and the nadis, the subtle nerves. Their purpose is to conduct prana or vital force through the subtle bodies.

Many cryptic traditions refer to a number of discrete planes of existence, each with its own parallel "vehicle" of consciousness. Instead of a single physical body housing the soul, we have a series of "bodies" or "vehicles of consciousness". All these planes and bodies are connected by a pervasive consciousness.

Thus by using a sacred language, we not only connect with divinity, but with our own subtle powers that exist in an invisible way.

Here are a few examples of sutras.

Tat Tvam Asi (that tvam AH-see) which means "I am that." That, of course, refers to our spiritual essence.

Aham Brahmasmi (a-HUM-brah-MAHS-mee) which means "the core of my being is the ultimate reality and the source of all that exists."

Namaste (nah-mah-STAY) which means "my divine nature acknowledges the divine in you."

Sutras, however, are not merely brief statements. They can also be woven into complete dialogues that invoke the potentiality of the non-local mind.

The most famous is the Gayatri Mantra:

Om Bhoor Bhuwah Swaha, Tat Savitur Varenyam, Bhargo Devasya Dhimahi, Dhiyo Yo Naha Prachodayat.

A rough translation might be: "Oh God! Thou art the giver of life, remover of pain and sorrow. The bestower of happiness. Oh! Creator of the universe, may we receive they supreme light. May thou guide our intellect in the right direction."

The purpose of this invocation is to make the devotee more intelligent, more capable of insight, ingenuity and inspiration. This wisdom will then create a life of balance and harmony, truth and meaning, purpose and fulfillment, and ultimately a life of transcendental joy.

This mantra is said to be so potent that some people consider it their only form of devotion. There are numerous anecdotal reports of people who have miraculously resolved complex situation by using this mantra. They range from resolution of court cases, relief from debt, and escape from life-threatening circumstances, ranging from potential violence to a critical illness.

Over eons, the concept of God has changed to represent the idea of a physical being of sorts, but in the time the language of Sanskrit was evolving to connect with God, divinity was considered more along the lines of Baruch Spinoza, as an intelligence that informed all of creation, an abstract, energetic, and effortless organizing principle.

Baruch de Spinoza (1632 ��1677), a Dutch philosopher, was considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. He created a sharp separation from the medieval approach, especially scholasticism, which considered God as a being that was separate and distinct from its creation, an authoratative figure, not unlike the Grecian God, Zeus, or the Nordic God, Odin, that demanded a survile obedience that reflected the relationship between a Medeval lord and his serf.

Today Quantum Mechanics finds that the entire universe is intimately inter-related at a subatomic level. This leads to the speculation that the idea of separation itself may be the ultimate illusion.

Everything may, in fact, be stitched together by consciousness, what has been referred to as "the nonlocal mind." Thus, through the use of the sacred language, the spiritual aspirant hoped to suture the relationship between individual, conditioned consciousness with universal, pure consciousness, to suture the linear with the synchronistic, and to suture the time-bound and limited with the timeless and infinite. He sought to find the rhythm in the universe that would bless his life with a stream of well-being, and that would heal the schism of separation and seal the wound of fear with the balm of love.

The ultimate purpose of sentience appears to be to embrace the mystery, and for this it has evolved beings capable of creating sounds to penetrate the veils of existence in an attempt to suture the visible and the invisible worlds, the realm of effort with the effortless experience, the algorithmic with the non-algorithmic, and the conscious with the supra-conscious.

Language has been used to connect us with each other, to share our experience with one another, but once upon a time, in a world now almost completely forgotten, language was used to try to connect all the worlds together and to experience the bliss of transcendental harmony.
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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Questions Shape Worlds Out Of Infinite Possibilities

2006-12-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

A question is an inquiry. An inquiry creates an answering statement. The process of asking and answering questions is thinking. This thinking is also highly focused. Out of all the possible things you could be thinking of your attention has settled on a few ideas.
These ideas then bring about consequences or effects.

Questions, in short, are focusing tools for thinking. Thinking, in turn, affects all your experiences.

Who you are is a result of your thinking, and your thinking is a result of a question.

Your current experience of pleasure or pain is a result of what you thought and what you are now thinking.

A question create a focused thought. A focused thought is one where attention is paid to an intention. A focused thought is energetic. The potency of this energy is determined by the clarity and intensity of the thought. This focused thought creates an effect because it has the power to affect the quantum field of all possibilities.

What you think about you bring about. Your thoughts are actual wavelengths that go out into the quantum field and affect it. Every atom of the universe is connected to every other atom and each atom is in perfect awareness and communication with every other atom. A thought, which is a unit of intelligence, affects these atoms.

This is a brief summary of how the Law of Attraction works.

The fact that it does work can be proved experientially. When you think of any thought with enough intensity then let it go completely, the parallel shows up in your experience.

The unpredictable variables are when it will show up and how. After it shows up, the experience is always one of delight and amazement. We consider it miraculous because the chain of events that brought it about are not known to us. The only thing we actually know is that the effect we desired is now part of our experience.

The quality of your questions then determine the quality of your life.

At any point in time, you can either ask empowering questions or disempowering questions.

When you ask an empowering question, you set off a processional chain of events, an outflow of power, similar to switching on a light.

What happens is that you immediately affect your subconscious mind which in turn affects the superconscious mind. A whole series of events now take place in the invisible world, the world of the quantum field of all possibilities and in the world of pure consciousness.

When you ask an empowering question, you create a stream of empowered thinking. Your thoughts expand to investigate new possibilities, your emotions become positive, your body metabolizes better, your relationships improve, and you tap into new, often miraculous resources of energy and information.

You literally pull abundance to you like a magnet.

When you ask a disempowering thought, an invisible, psychic power disappears, and it is like switching off a light.

When the flow of this power is cut off, your subconscious mind jams up, and you experience a "stupid" or "confused" state; your body starts to tense up and your metabolism goes askew; people start to avoid you or actively oppose you; and you no longer attract the resources you need, resulting in a dwindling of opportunities, and eventually an experience of scarcity.

Questions can create a chain of invisible forces that either attract abundance or precipitate the loss of what resources you currently have, resulting in a condition of scarcity.

This whole cycle can happen at any time. You can be in a hellish situation, turn on the power, and things find a way to turn around in an amazing way. You can also be in a wonderful situation, turn off the power, and things start to dwindle and fall away.

And this entire chain of events is created by a question.

Your choice at any moment is to decide what to do with any stimulus. You can ask an empowering question about it or a disempowering question about it. This simple, almost effortless act of consciousness is enough to make either wonderful or horrible things happen to you.

The visible world only exists because of the invisible world. As physicist David Bohm expressed it, there is a cosmological order which is a distinction between the implicate and explicate order.

In his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, he describes it in the following way.

In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders (Bohm, 1980, p. xv).

The illusion is that the visible world is creating the invisible world. Your experience is what makes you think about things as affecting you. Yet, the opposite is just as true. The invisible world is creating the visible world. Your thinking brings about your experience.

If you are proactive, you will choose your questions carefully, and they will influence your experience.

If you are reactive, which is the default program for most human beings, then an experience will influence your thoughts and you will have more of that experience.

Your power to be an influencer or to be the effect of an experience is a choice.

Our logical minds are trained to take any experience and project its consequences and we then live in the ordinary world of surviving

Yet it is our creative mind that can turn everything around for us. When we use this, then we step into the extraordinary world of thriving.

Using our creative mind means ignoring current conditions and imagining
what we want to happen instead. This intervention in the current flow of events will then create a completely new chain of events.

The chain of causality can be interrupted at any point. All it takes is asking an empowering question. This will engage the creative mind. The subconscious and the superconscious then move in the direction of your thoughts. And the circumstances that you envisioned become your experience. You can then continue to direct these experiences in the favorable direction that you created.

However, the idea of causality itself is actually an illusion. It is part of the Newtonian paradigm. When billiard ball A hits billiard ball B then it moves it on a specific trajectory. On the experiential level, this is what actually appears to be happening. When you point something in a certain direction and apply force to it, it appears to move in that direction, whether it is a thought, a human body, a car, or an airplane.

But, in the quantum field, A does not exist because it always has a predecessor. Thus for anything to exist everything else must exist simultaneously.

Nevertheless, for the purpose of this argument, it serves us well. Thus, A, in this theory is the question. It then stirs forces in the invisible world which will then have an effect on the visible world.

The question is the most important part of your creative force. Questions create science and art. They create a search for truth. They create a quest for resolutions. They create
the intention that shapes causality to work for or against you. Ultimately, questions create civilizations. The difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe was entirely due to the questions that were asked in those periods.

A final speculation. It is possible that pure consciousness asked itself this question: what would happen if I pretended to be other than myself and created a universe where I experience myself other than I am?

Assuming the paradigm of causality, which works well in the sensory world, questions create thoughts that create effects, and it is the quality of our questions that determine the quality of our lives. Poor indeed are those who ask poor questions. Add a positive spin to any inquiry and you can birth a miracle.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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The Alchemy Of Focus

2006-12-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

The alchemy of focus is changing the lead in your life into gold because you always get more of what you focus on.

Here is a complete blueprint on how to use focus to turn lead into gold.

Your focus stimulates you in many ways. It connects with your thoughts, feelings, and actions. It influences your ingenuity and your energy levels. And it sets the law of attraction to move in a particular direction to bring you more of what you focus on.

The way to get full value out of focus is to improve your skills at it.

First, decide on what you really, really want and make that your focus. Just one thing which will give you a feeling of massive satisfaction when you succeed in it. It could be working on your business, improving your relationship, or experiencing health and vitality.

What in your life is not working for you? What one thing could you change that would improve everything else? When you can answer those two questions, then you will have found what you need to focus on.

Second, decide on focusing on it the way you want it to be rather than the way it is right now. Focus on the future, not the past. Envision how you want it to be. Then act as if it were already in the process of happening.

As you do this focusing, it doesn't really matter if you have a clear idea on how to change things. Just by choosing your focus you are giving your subconscious mind permission to come up with insights.

Third, decide on breaking up that focus into an even smaller unit. What one thing in your field of interest do you need to start on? If it is your business, for example, what one thing can you do today to start things rolling in the right direction. You may have a list of a dozen things that need to happen, but what is the ONE thing that you can do right now.

Fourth, decide on whether you are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Which perceptual modality do you tend to use more often? You can discover this through some self-observation.

If you are visually oriented, you can make the image of what you want to happen a movie that is colorful, bright, close, fast, specific, and three dimensional.

If you are auditory oriented, you can make your inner voice louder, clearer, and more promising. You can alter content, meaning, volume, tonality, tempo, location, harmony, inflection, word choice, duration, and uniqueness.

If you are kinesthetic oriented, you can alter the temperature, texture, flexibility, vibration, pressure, location, tension, movement, speed, weight, steadiness, size, and direction.

Once, you've done this inner work of identifying what you want to focus on, identifying what aspect of that focus to hone in on, identifying your ideal outcome,
and identifying your sub-modality, the next thing to do is to take action.

So, the fifth step is to take action. Here is a mnemonic to help you. What is the ABC of success? It is to take Action. It is to Believe in the value of your action. And it is to have Courage as you take action. Thus, you need Action, Belief, and Courage.

The sixth and final step is to monitor everything you are doing by creating charts and logs.

Focus is not an easy thing to do. It takes work. It takes practice. It takes discipline. It is more than just a good idea. It is the way to succeed in anything. It is the modus operandi of success.

The opposite of focus is distraction. Unfortunately that is the place where most people spend their lives.

Here is a brief story to hammer in the value of using your time and energy in a focused way.

An apprentice to an alchemist was told to go to the desert, to find a particular oasis, to gather up pebbles, and to bed down for the night. The alchemist told him that in the morning, he would wake up, look at the pebbles and feel both delighted and saddened.

The apprentice went to the desert, found the oasis, gathered up the pebbles, put them in his pockets, and bedded down for the night. In the morning, all the pebbles had turned to gold. He felt happy that he was now a wealthier man. Upon reflection, he also felt saddened. He had not focused much when he was gathering the pebbles. He could have picked bigger pebbles, more of them, and stored them into a large sack instead of his small pockets. He could have been much, much wealthier indeed, a man with an abundance of resources to do anything his heart desired.

Because we cannot see the outcomes of our actions, we tend to withhold our power. The result, in retrospect, is that we come to realize how much better we could have done if we had just applied a little more effort.

When you focus, you bring the possibility of real power to completely change any of your experiences for the better. Focus is the real secret behind any success. The better you get at it, the more successful you will be. At any point in time, you can turn your life around by choosing the magic of focus. With focus, you can turn lead into gold.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Move Your Body, Change Your Life

2006-12-09T06:55:00.000-08:00

We often think that our thoughts and feelings affect how we live and move in our bodies, but it can also be the other way around, too.

How you move can affect how you feel, and how you feel can affect how you think, and how you think can affect the state you're in and the outcomes you produce.

The best way to feel really, really depressed, is to look down, slump your shoulders, breathe in a shallow way, and mumble. Try this for five minutes or less, and you'll notice how awful you feel. Then notice how you find thoughts to fit into this mood. Finally, notice how other people start to avoid you and how your creativity, intelligence, and productivity are at a near standstill.

Alternatively, you can decide, right now, whatever mood you're in, to change it, to move your body in such a way that you send a signal to your brain that you are alive and well and ready to change the world.

Now try this. Start breathing more deeply, straighten out your shoulders, puff out that chest, look up, smile, or preferably, grin. Walk briskly. Speak in a louder tone. In five minutes or less, you'll wonder why you were ever in a bad mood. You see possibilities everywhere. Your ingenuity kicks into high gear. You can be, do, and have anything.

Physiology does more than affect your moods; it can affect how much vital energy, called prana, that you absorb into your body. You are literally sucking into your body positive life-force particles from the air, from the sunlight, from the food that you eat. Your nadis or subtle nerves, open up and can conduct more life force.

Go for a walk on the street. See how most people are pretty down. Look at how their shoulders fall, their walk shuffles, and their faces reflects agitation and despair. But you will see a few bright people, too. They are smiling and laughing with shoulders thrown back, and their whole body is open to life and new adventures.

Sometimes it does seem that we live entirely in our heads and that our bodies are something that we move around in. But really, you live in your whole body, and if you want to be more responsive to life, the trick is to create an expansive feeling in your body by changing your posture, your breathing, your facial expression, and your rate of movement.

What you perceive to be reality is always only your own interpretation. All events are complex but we tend to shape them according to our personal story. This interpretation is not only acted out on a mental and emotional level, but also on a physiological level. Further this interpretation then shapes the experience in subtle ways until you can feel fully justified that your interpretation is the truth.

The only truth is that you are making everything up as you go along.
Rather than seeking truth, which is a relative phenomena, it is far more meaningful to make a choice as to what is empowering.

The most empowering thing possible for anyone of us is to be ourselves more fully, and as we permit ourselves full self-expression, whether or not this fits in with the currently prevailing cultural norms, we expand our ability to feel more alive.

Your body is a powerful to interact with the world as an empowered soul. This is much more than positive thinking. It's positive living by experiencing the vitality of your body and how it affects all aspects of your life. You are not an abstraction, but a living, moving, thinking, and feeling being. How you move your body can have a profound influence on how you live your life.

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Resource Box

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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