Could thinking we are younger make us younger physically and mentally?

This question is discussed in Counterclockwise, a new book by Ellen J. Langer. It’s available now on Amazon, here: Counterclockwise

Dr. Ellen Langer is a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. In 1979, she and 4 graduate students undertook a study where a group of male nursing home residents in their late 70s and early 80s were taken on a week-long retreat, where they were asked to live like it was the year 1959, i.e. 20 years earlier.

The results were startling… the men appeared to become younger.

Langer writes about this and other research in Couterclockwise—I’ll describe this study here because she covers it in chapter one, the only chapter I have read so far. This chapter is available as a pdf from the book’s page on Amazon—here’s a direct link to it: Counterclockwise, chapter one.

The 1979-1959 study

The men stayed in a place done up to look like it was 1959. All magazines, newspapers, films and TV and radio programs dated from that year, and there were daily activities such as discussions of 1959 current affairs, held as though it was the present.

In numerous other ways the men were encouraged to feel it was 1959, such as by having ID photos of themselves from that time, and discussing the work they had been doing then as though it was the present.

The psychologists measured a range of indicators of chronological age (they had to invent them, because there actually are none) before and after the retreat, and found the men had appeared to become younger. The results were compared to ones from another control group of men, who also improved—who wouldn’t, after a holiday from a nursing home, with daily activities?

The changes in the experimental group compared to the control group were significant, however.

They showed greater improvement on joint flexibility, finger length (their arthritis diminished and they were able to straighten their fingers more) and manual dexterity. On intelligence tests, 63 percent of the experimental group improved their scores, compared to only 44 percent of the control group.

The experimental group also showed better improvements in height, weight, gait, and posture. They also looked noticeably younger after the study, compared to the control group, according to impartial observers looking at photos.

The book

Langer describes how the study came about, and how it was conducted, in chapter one of the book.

She then says the following:

This study shaped not only my view of aging but also my view of limits in a more general way for the next few decades. Over time I have come to believe less and less that biology is destiny. It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits. Now I accept none of the medical wisdom regarding the courses our diseases must take as necessarily true.

If a group of elderly adults could produce such dramatic changes in their lives, so too can the rest of us. To begin, we must ask if any of the limits we perceive as real do exist. For example, we largely presume that as we age our vision gets worse, that chronic diseases can’t be reversed, and that there is something wrong with us when the external world no longer “fits” as it did when we were young.

Aah… a woman after my own heart!

Langer concludes this section with the following:

Mindful health is not about how we should eat right, exercise, or follow medical recommendations, nor is it about abandoning these things. It is not about New Age medicine nor traditional understandings of illness. It is about the need to free ourselves from constricting mindsets and the limits they place on our health and well-being, and to appreciate the importance of becoming the guardians of our own health. Learning how to change requires understanding how we go astray. The goal of this book is to convince you to open your mind and take back what is rightfully, sensibly, and importantly yours.

The psychology of possibility

Langer also writes about the psychology pf possibility in chapter one… a way for both researchers and the rest of us to approach things by focusing on possibilities, rather than the status quo. She makes the point that psychologists have traditionally studied the “norm”, rather than exceptions that could show possibiliies. She says “Much of my own research is designed to test possibilities, not to find what is descriptively true. If I can make one dog yodel, then we can say that yodeling is possible in dogs.”

She goes on to say:

When faced with disease or infirmity, we may find a way to adjust to what is. In the psychology of possibility, we search for the answer to how to improve, not merely to adjust.

For example, most of us believe that between the ages of forty and fifty, our eyesight will start to decline. If instead we thought that perhaps our eyesight could improve over time—be better than when it was at its best—we might develop ways to make that happen.

Also:

…many psychologists presume memory loss is a natural part of aging. An older person who doesn’t have memory loss is seen as an anomaly instead of becoming a model for how we all might be.

Wrap-up

I enjoyed reading chapter one very much—I think it would be valuable reading for anyone, whether or not they intend to go ahead and read the whole book.

I’ve never been a fan of thinking we are best off expecting and preparing for certain changes that are commonly said to come with being certain ages—I think these expectations become self-fulfilling.

My own reaction to things like eyesight problems, grey hairs and weight gain is to try looking for ways to reverse them, using the mind-body connection. I’m not the only one… I had an email recently telling me of someone who is starting to grow silky, coloured hair in place of grey, after setting the intention to do so (I’m not suggesting that grey hair is a disaster to be corrected, the person is exploring, I gather).

Ellen Langer’s research supports the idea that we create our own biology—as far as I’m concerned, this is a great development.

Too many of us believe the world is to be discovered, rather than a product of our own construction and thus to be invented.
~ Ellen J. Langer

Newsweek article

I’d also suggest if you are interested in any of this you check out Wray Herbert’s article in Newsweek: Just Say No to Aging? He writes about Counterclockwise, and has some interesting things to say.

Relevant links

Ellen Langer’s website and blog
Counterclockwise on Amazon

I’d like to thank Janni Lloyd for letting me know about this book’s arrival. Janni hails from Perth, Australia, and she writes about physical immortality here: Janni Lloyd. Thanks Janni!

Just a quick note regarding my last post… Frank would like me to let you know he very much appreciates the kind comments many of you left for him (and he is doing fine).

Comments about any of this are very welcome! More posts, a random selection:

• A Thousand Years
• Tomato Seeds And Delicious Fruit
• Ten Reasons To Decide To Live Forever
• Moments Revisited 1
• Moments

I bought these flowers to celebrate Frank coming home and my birthday – I thought they looked nice in the late afternnon wintry golden light. Mum gave me the glass jug for Christmas after we spotted it together in a second-hand shop in Bendigo.

I’ve had a fair bit going on since my last post—and I hadn’t intended to leave it this long before posting again. Frank (my partner) ended up in hospital for 5 days in mid-June, and the whole thing wasn’t exactly fun for either of us. I took him to the emergency department of The Austin late on a Thursday night, and after numerous tests and treatments he was released on Tuesday lunchtime… on my birthday!

It was a fantastic birthday present—not just because we could spend my birthday together at home, but also because he was okay. At the final follow-up appointment last Friday the doctor said to just go home and forget about it… there was nothing wrong with him. We thought this anyway, but it was very nice to have it confirmed.

Distance healing

One thing that Frank said helped him during his hospital stay was the two distance Reconnective Healing sessions I organised for him with my blogging friend Jenny Mannion. Jenny is in upstate New York and we are in Melbourne, Australia. Jenny has written about distance healing in her blog post here: Distance Healing.

For the first session, late on our Saturday night, Frank didn’t know about it until I told him the next day, and for the second, late on Sunday night, he knew in advance, and he lay still and told the others he was meditating! He felt a warm glow/energy descending over him during the session, and some other sensations and awarenesses—he felt that it really made a difference.

So thanks Jenny! I met Jenny through blogging and had never heard of Reconnective Healing before starting this blog—I remember saying recently on Vered’s mommy blog that the benefits of blogging may not necessarily come through having thousands of readers. I think I have confirmed this for myself very nicely.

Reading material

Another thing that Frank said helped him throughout the whole thing was reading the Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East books.

He says he loves these books, and he is on book 3 at the moment. I got off on book 1, but found myself skimming through the others… we are planning to order the last book, book 6, from Amazon soon. On the right is him reading one of them before we decided we had to get him to the hospital—I think the lamps look pretty funny, especially his halo (it was his idea I put this photo in).

Hair-dos

At least Frank’s hair looked tidy while he was in hospital, because he had his dreads fixed up by the rasta guy down in Smith Street the day before being admitted. I’ve had my dreads fixed, too—I figured I may as well keep my hair appointments while I was too distracted to do anything useful. I think my hair looks better—Frank said I look like a little Dutch girl, which I’m not sure is a compliment to the sophisticated woman of the world that I am. He said it was a compliment.

Celebration

So now I am 56! We went down to the pizza place for dinner, and unfortunately were harassed by a woman with mental illness who roams around (we always sit outside), and as we were both feeling rather vulnerable and shaky we didn’t handle it as well as we usually would, and things escalated and got very upsetting.

After she was dragged off by the police we ended up having an enjoyable night (she was back 20 minutes later but didn’t bother us).

I had tiramisu with a candle and a sparkler for birthday cake and Frank and Rachael the waitress sang Happy Birthday!

Naughty computer… good computer

To top it all off I have been dealing with not one but TWO hard drive failures!

About a week into June my iMac wouldn’t start up, and the prognosis from Apple telephone support was that the hard drive “table” was corrupted and I would have to erase the hard drive and re-install the operating system, which I did.

Luckily I had a backup of my home folder and all my downloaded software DMGs on an external LaCie hard drive, which I update with a program called SilverKeeper. I hadn’t done a backup for 5 weeks (I’d been getting slack), but luckily all this coincided with my computer break, so I didn’t lose much. It took quite a while to get her up and running again… installing this, updating that.

Then 10 days after the first failure it all went pear shaped again! This time it was obviously a hardware failure—and two local Apple guys came around to replace my hard drive. While standing there watching the grey screen as the iMac was trying to start up, they decided that the dark grey smudges in 3 corners of the screen were a warranty issue too, and they could replace the screen too, but they would have to take her away.

Which they did, and after 8 days of me having no computer except for Frank’s laptop for checking Facebook, my iMac now has a new hard drive, screen and logic board (the logic board happened last November), and my 3-year AppleCare warranty expires in 3 months time. I can only conclude that this is a good thing!

Except that it is taking me a while to gradually bring everything back (a cleanout isn’t such a bad thing, though).

I’ll finish up with a photo of me with the caterpillar Frank gave me for my birthday – we had been admiring him in the window of the local bookshop, and Frank went and bought him over a week before my birthday!

Well that’s it for me, for now. I’m hoping to be back to posting once a week again, and I’m looking forward to dropping over to my blogging friends over the next few days to see how everyone is going. Cheers!More posts, a random selection:

• A Magic Trick For Relationships
• Bloggers’ Recording Project Has Arrived!
• Galaxy For Blog Action
• Counterclockwise, by Ellen Langer
• What If? The Movie

“Sondra’s ideas are mind blowing and life altering for an entire generation” ~ Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love

I’d like write about Sondra Ray today!

Sondra is a rebirther, trainer, seminar leader and author. She travels extensively throughout the world, training rebirthers and leading personal growth workshops, as well as taking groups to India regularly.

It was through Sondra and her work that I was first introduced to physical immortality, rebirthing and many other healing techniques, and writers such as Louise Hay, Shakti Gawain and Ken Carey, in 1986. All of this brought about huge changes in my life, to put it mildly, for which I am very grateful.

Video interview

Below is a video of Sondra being interviewed in July 2007, in a Virtual Light broadcast. It’s 25 minutes long, and is mainly about rebirthing and birth trauma—she starts talking about physical immortality at about the 16 minute mark.

If you are at all interested in how birth trauma affects us, I’d encourage you to see through the rather long opening and the sound glitch at the start of the actual interview (and I wouldn’t describe the interview as dull). Here’s a link to the interview on the YouTube page, if you would rather look at it there, in a new window: Sondra Ray interview

Sondra’s background

Sondra started out in nursing. She obtained a B.S. degree in Nursing from the University of Florida College of Nursing and a Masters Degree in Public Health and Family Sociology from the University of Arizona. She was trained as a Nurse Practitioner in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and as a young woman worked in the Peace Corps, stationed in Peru.

By 1974 she found herself with her hair falling out and with various other issues, and she tried rebirthing, with the “founder of rebirthing”, Leonard Orr. Together with Leonard and others, she became a pioneer of the rebirthing practice.

Rebirthing

Sondra has been described as the “Mother of Rebirthing”, because of her extensive training of rebirthers and her expert knowledge of how our birth trauma affects our lives. Rebirthing is also known as “breathwork” and “conscious connected breathing” (however “breathwork” is also used for other breathing styles).

Here’s a small excerpt from the information about rebirthing I found on Sondra’s website:

Rebirthing is a breathing process that increases our ability to feel and resolve the effects of our past.

The result is an increase in the level of physical and spiritual energy in our body, thus cleansing the many tensions held there. The result of the physical cleansing is that the mental and emotional origins of tension come back into consciousness and can then be healed. By learning to breathe consciously and fully, we discover and release the core issues now held in our mind and emotions.

Using a deep connected breath for approximately one hour, the Rebirthing process releases stress and tension from the body and accesses and releases stored emotion. The rebirthing breath opens the body’s energy channels and accelerates the flow of creativity and intuition.

Seminars

Sondra invented the Loving Relationships Training (LRT), which is a weekend healing seminar/workshop, lead by various different trainers. I attended my first LRT in 1986, and I remember the deep sense of connection I had with everyone and everything around me afterwards—which has never left me. After that I participated in LRT events for about 3 years, one of which was lead by Sondra herself.

These workshops used very creative processes to bring about healing. Sondra still holds LRTs and other events today, all around the world.

Personal life

The latest excitement is that Sondra has recently got married! Her husband Mark Sullivan is a rebirther, teacher, artist and poet, and he travels with her, organises for her and participates in her seminars. They got married in India, and will be living in Tennessee.

Books

Sondra has written 17 books! I’ve got 8—here’s a photo of a portion of my bookshelf:

The large dark blue one towards the left is A Course in Miracles, which I mention because Sondra studies the Course daily and her work is based on it. The next 8 books to the right are Sondra’s (or co-authored by her):
• Loving Relationships – the red book, probably more or less her signature book in the early days
• I Deserve Love – light orange, affirmations for loving yourself
• Celebration of Breath – about rebirthing, and has a GREAT chapter about physical immortality
• Pure Joy – Sondra wrote this at Sorrento, just out of Melbourne, which is quite close to where Frank lived for many years before we moved in together. The last chapter is sub-titled ‘Finding the Australia within you’.
• Birth and Relationships (with Bob Mandel) – how our birth trauma affects our relationship patterns, and what we can do about it
• The Only Diet There Is – heal anything, including overweight, with a diet of forgiveness (and more)
• Ideal Birth – about birth practices
• Rebirthing in the New Age (with Leonard Orr) – about the early, pioneering days of rebirthing, and though the rebirthing information is somewhat out of date, it’s a funny read for anyone who has lived in a share house.

and Sondra’s latest book is…
Rock Your World with the Divine Mother. I haven’t read this one… it’s about developing, or connecting with, our feminine aspect. The forward is written by Marianne Williamson—here’s an excerpt:

I remember first hearing Sondra speak. … In her words and, even more powerfully, in her being, I knew that night I had found a guiding light. … If Sondra writes a new book, I read it. I let go of my left brain and drink her in.

~ from the forward, by Marianne Williamson

I heard Sondra say in an interview that while the artist was designing the cover, there was an earthquake!

Different approaches

As far as I know there are nearly 7 billion people in the world today, and I think there would be about that many ways of both healing ourselves and achieving immortality of the body. We need to find our own individual approaches to these, in my opinion, the same as we do with anything.

My approach to healing and physical immortality is a little bit different to Sondra’s… on a superficial level, anyway. As far as I’m concerned, though, her leadership, knowledge, service, love, creativity, humour and plain gutsiness in these areas are fantastic, and for these I am very grateful. Thank you Sondra!

I’d love to hear what you think about any of this, if you would like to leave a comment below. If you don’t have a blog or a website, leave the ‘website’ box blank.

Sondra Ray and rebirthing links

Sondra’s website
Video of Sondra speaking, Part 1 and Part 2 – about rebirthing and more
Podcast interview with Alan Davidson, March 2009, about prosperity
Sondra’s books on Amazon
Philadelphia Rebirthing Center

Related post

Why We Sabotage Ourselves – about birth traumaMore posts, a random selection:

• On Overcoming Obstacles
• Moments
• How To Be A Man And A Woman Both At The Same Time
• Living Forever
• Feelings Are There To Be Felt

photo by antkriz

It doesn’t take an Einstein to see that all around us, people are obsessing over looking young. And those of us who wouldn’t say we were “obsessing” might still look longingly in the mirror now and again.

I thought I’d like to write my thoughts on this—and thank you to Evelyn Lim, who writes about how to attract abundance, for inspiring this post with a comment she left on one of my earlier posts.

I see the desire to look young in two ways, I guess.

One is that it can come from people being afraid of showing who they really are—a person comfortable with themselves doesn’t have to rush around getting botox and plastic surgery and so on. In this case, because trying to look young comes from fear, the striving, and often the results, are distasteful to many of us. There are some interesting articles about aging and plastic surgery on Vered’s mommy blog and Urban Panther’s life muser blog.

The other is that maybe when we try to look as youthful as possible, it’s because part of us knows that being youthful is the way we are meant to be. Physical aging somehow doesn’t truly make sense.

I think physical aging is a result of us not letting the life force flow through us as well as we might. If that’s the case, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use aging as feedback and investigate how we have been blocking our energy and work on unblocking it? If we look younger as a result, it is because we have made inner changes (including loving ourselves more)—I don’t think this pursuit or its results would be distasteful to any of us.

Also, applying a lotion or potion can be an act of self-love, or looking after ourselves, and feel quite different to desperate obsessing. This can lead to other people reflecting our self-love back to us with, well, love.

These are some ways I see the desire to look young… how do you see it?More posts, a random selection:

• Is The World Getting Better Or Worse?
• Paul’s Letter To The Corinthians
• Good Saturday
• The Journey, With Brandon Bays
• Sondra Ray – Rebirthing And Physical Immortality

photo from Nepal by Marina & Enrique

[Update, May 13 - I believe now that these books are entirely fictional, and Spalding did not travel to India at the time described. To me, the message is authentic, as it is consistent with information from other sources.]

I’ve just re-read volume 1 from the set of 6 books, Life And Teaching Of The Masters Of The Far East, by Baird T Spalding, for the first time in 22 years, and was blown away by it.

Baird T Spalding was a geophysicist and mining engineer, born 1857, who travelled a lot doing geological surveys, and he and a party of fellow American scientists spent over 3 years traveling with immortal masters in India and thereabouts, from 1894.

I bought the set and read it in 1986 (in those days it was 5 books)—it was pretty standard reading for anyone interested in physical immortality. I enjoyed it, felt I understood it, lent the first volume to my breathwork buddy ‘D’, lost contact with ‘D’… and never got the book back!

Because the series has been invariably sold as a 5 (or 6) volume set, I felt less than enthusiastic about buying it again—I already owned the rest of the set. I have leafed through the other volumes occasionally over the years, but somehow couldn’t get into them. But then I discovered recently you can buy the separate volumes on Amazon—and Bingo, I am the proud owner of a new volume 1 with a different cover from the rest. And as I said, I have just read it and been blown away.

The story

The books are kind of like a cross between a boys-own adventure and a spiritual guide. In volume 1, Spalding and his group are taken by three guides Emil, Jast and Neprow for treks around and through the Himalayas and its foothills, staying for short or longer periods in various villages and temples along the way. This book covers the first year of their travels.

They discover fairly early on that their guides could travel large distances in only a few minutes by disappearing and re-appearing somewhere else, and were creating their food out of thin air. In the course of the book they observe people walking on water, walking through fire, and rooms being kept warm and lit with no discernible power source. They also learn that their guides and their many friends, who they also meet, are immortal and mostly several hundred years old, while looking like healthy young people (except more interesting).

The guides and their friends are extremely warm, friendly and loving, and they go to great lengths to explain that they are regular humans who are doing things all humans are capable of doing.

Spalding and the books

Spalding kept handwritten notes of his travels, and friends asked him for copies, so he typed up what became volume 1, and carried these typed copies around to give people. In 1924 a woman printed 1000 copies to give to her friends, and within 60 days, orders for over 20,000 copies were placed.

After the success of volume 1, Spalding went ahead and wrote more of his materials up to become volumes 2 (1927) and 3 (1935), about his second and third years with the immortals. He was 70 in 1927.

After this Spalding wrote and spoke extensively about the teachings of the immortals. Volume 4 (1948) consists of some of his writings about these teachings, and volume 5 (1955) was published 2 years after his death in 1953, and contains material from lectures he gave in the last 2 years of his life.

Very little has been known about Spalding’s life—he apparently kept people’s focus well and truly on the message he conveyed. So it was very exciting for people who loved his books when someone went though “ten dusty cartons” in the publisher’s warehouse and found “unpublished Spalding manuscripts and papers, magazine articles, personal letters, photographs, and other biographical materials”, some of which have been compiled into volume 6, published in 1997. I’m quoting from the DeVorss website (the publisher).

Eternal life

The message in the books is very clear—we are immortal beings who have nothing to gain by dying, and everything to gain by reaching for full expression (my description). Of course, it is ironic that Spalding himself died, aged 95, as have quite a few other people who have spread the ideas of physical immortality.

Maybe these people saw a truth, but at the time they lived, humanity’s group mind had not evolved to the point where enough people love life so much they don’t want to leave, and are willing to heal themselves of anything, so that it becomes easy for everyone to slip into physical immortality. The immortals in these books have done it anyway.

Is it true?

Detractors of Spalding say all sorts of things about him—personally, I think that if information resonates as truth, or as useful, then it is true, or useful. Spalding’s story resonates as truth to me. He wrote at the start of one of his books: “In this I sincerely and with all respect remind the reader that the more receptive one is, the more one receives.”

The books and me (and you)

To me this series of books covers similar territory to other books I have been re-reading regularly over the years (The Door of Everything, Ken Carey’s books), but because I haven’t ever read this ‘Life and Teaching’ book again since the first time, I can see a huge difference in how I perceive it now to how I perceived it then.

I understood the message of the books back in 1986, and felt inspired by it, but I was too “buried” to really take it in. While I had so many “problems”, the information seemed nice and fun, but not immediately useful. I notice that I am far more alert and clear about it’s message now, and find it very relevant to me and the people around me, today.

I’d really recommend these books to anyone who has been even slightly intrigued about physical immortality—or volume 1, anyway! I think it explains the physical immortality outlook very well, and certainly more completely than I have on this blog. Much of it is couched in religious terms, which I find doesn’t interfere with the message, but some might.

Here’s a link so you can look at it (and some reviews) on Amazon: Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East, Vol. 1

And ‘D’, if you discover this post when you are Googling away looking to buy your missing volumes on the internet, do drop me an email (or leave a comment, wouldn’t that be funny!)

Speaking of comments, I’d love to hear what you think. You are welcome to leave a comment if you are not a blogger—if anyone who has read Spalding’s books is reading this, it would be great to hear your thoughts about them.
More posts, a random selection:

• Insects Versus Mother Theresa
• Paul’s Letter To The Corinthians
• Happy Birthday, Let’s Live Forever!
• A Magic Trick For Relationships
• Feelings Are There To Be Felt

photo by Mediatejack

I’d like to share the following excerpt from The Door Of Everything with you. This book was authored by “the guiding voice of Father consciousness at the center of your soul”, and written down by Ruby Nelson. This excerpt comes from the chapter titled ‘The Sacred Seed’.

It’s pretty long—I was intending to pick bits out and string them together for you, but I ended up leaving all this part in. So I hope it isn’t too long for reading this type of writing on the web, and that you find it useful in some way. I do! I’ve added some sub-headings to make it easier to negotiate online. Here goes…

A tomato seed
Let us return to the tomato seed and look at it more closely. Is it strictly a seed, a little collection of molecules that cling together in a certain way to form a certain kind of matter? If you had never seen a tomato seed, and had never heard of a tomato, the seed probably would appear to be no more than an insignificant bit of matter capable only of a short, unproductive existence followed by decay.

However, if someone told you about the tomato seed, explaining that within those apparently inactive molecules a divine pattern was held in waiting, eager to come forth, a pattern for a fragrant, leafy plant which would flower and bear delicious fruit, you would find it hard to believe.

Knowing nothing at all about the reality of tomatoes, you probably could not visualize such an impossible thing as a big green plant with red fruit growing out of an uninteresting-looking seed. You would, no doubt, laugh uproariously at the quaint idea that all you had to do was bury it under the dirt, then keep it watered, and the forces of nature would co-operate with it to bring about its amazing change of form.

A different pattern
When you are told that your very being is a seed containing a pattern altogether as different from what you appear to be as the tomato seed-pattern is different from what it appears to be, this idea is just as difficult to visualize. You can accept the tomato idea readily enough because it is a very ordinary thing, with tomatoes you have seen it happen.

But with human beings, the problem of visualizing a complete change of form is something else again, you have never personally known anyone to experience such a radical change. Human beings are born, they grow, they think and dream and create for a while, then die. If they contain a pattern for some other destiny, it is no more obvious to your surface mind than the pattern in a tomato seed is obvious to your naked eye.

Where is this Grand Cosmic pattern contained within you? Where is the nucleus of your own sacred seed? How can you feel its reality, believe in its existence, plant and tend and let it grow?

The nucleus of that sacred seed is your soul. Your soul is not an elusive entity hiding out somewhere within, your soul is the collectively organized life force in every atom, every molecule, every cell of your body. Your soul is the total consciousness of your being. It is the very awareness that animates you, that lets you experience living. Your soul is light, pure light, the very Light of Life.

The life force
Just as the plant pattern in the tomato seed is locked within its life force, awaiting proper conditions for automatic release, the Christ pattern within you is locked within your life force, awaiting proper conditions for a similar release.

In the case of the tomato, its life force is released when it is planted and kept moist long enough to interact with the forces of nature and draw unto itself the necessary building materials found in its surroundings.

In the case of yourself, the life force is released and begins to grow, drawing in the building materials supplied by nature, when your attitude of mind and heart provides the proper conditions for such growth. The needed growing materials are available to you just as they are to the tomato, they are supplied by me, and they would have been drawn unto you easily and naturally if your attitude had not caused conditions to be wrong for growth.

Your life force has, for the most part, gone unappreciated by your surface mind. You fully realized that you had a soul and that it was most likely an eternal soul which would, someday, have a chance to express more freely without the encumbrance of a physical body. Did you stop to wonder what the physical body was for, why I imprisoned your soul within one?

Did the tomato seed stop to wonder why its life force was imprisoned in the molecules of a seed? Did it look forward to the time when the seed would die of old age and set its life force free? No, it realized instead that it was in the seed for a purpose, that through the seed it could work its way to full maturity, to full fruition. It realized that within the seed its divine pattern was contained.

Body, mind and soul
As man, you are a threefold being—mind, body and soul. If either is missing, you are a seed without fertility. If the life force of a tomato is not within a seed, it cannot sprout and fulfill its destiny. If the life force of a man is without a body, it must clothe itself in the substance of a new body before it can fulfill its destiny. The soul is the sacred seed while the body is the vehicle through which it finds expression, in much the same way that the brain is the vehicle through which the mind expresses.

Your soul is a living part of me and my omnipresent life. Your soul is constantly being regenerated and revitalized by the great life-essence which circulates throughout my cosmos. This life force reaches all, supplying animation to all, tying all things together in one dynamic wash of ever-flowing, ever-renewing consciousness.

This indescribable life force is being received by my children in varying degrees, depending entirely upon your attitudes. Your body is the vessel which receives it, your mind controls the angle of the vessel, and your heart determines how much of this River of Life you will let in.

The River is flowing all around you, in it you live and move and have your being. It is the supply found in nature from which your sacred seed may draw to unfold within you the pattern of your Grand Cosmic Self.

The spark of life
Your sacred seed, your spark of life, awaits only the cooperation of your totally-still heart center. When you have extended this cooperation, the sacred seed will begin to grow, to fulfill its cosmic pattern as the human hull falls away and allows the holy metamorphosis to be completed.

You have much to gain by learning to appreciate your spark of life. Concentrate on its presence, feel it, enjoy the silky flow of it as it gushes up from the deep well of your soul. This spark of life is more than just the human consciousness you thought yourself to be. This spark of life is the very Light of Christ which I wedded to you and from which you cannot possibly be divorced. By simply learning to appreciate it, you may cause its flow to be enhanced until it gushes up and becomes a living fountain that can never be diminished.

By the opposite attitude, you can decrease its flow. You can squeeze it out of your body altogether. But you cannot destroy it or cause yourself to become anything apart from the Light of Christ, for it is out of this very light that I have shaped your being.

The elemental nature of life is to increase, to seek more and more expression. This law of increase holds true within you as readily as it does in any aspect of nature. Life is a joyous, singing river ever surging onward. As you feel it and appreciate it, the little trickle finding outlet through your being will bubble up into a flood, drawing you into the beautiful pathway of the River of Life More Abundant.

Full expression
This is what happens when you become the Living Christ. You do not suddenly become something else, or somebody else, you merely express a fullness of what you already are. You merely allow the Light of Life to come forward and increase. You merely allow the soul to stand forth in full reign over your body kingdom, your own personal soul whose right it is to have full reign.

Meditate on the life within you, cherish it. How joyous the surge of it! Imagine that surge doubled, tripled, multiplied by a hundred, by a thousand. That glorious Light of Life will respond to your appreciation and begin immediately to shine brighter.

It is a sad mistake to regard life as a bore which must be endured, with all its hardships, until death comes to set you free. Death is not the road to freedom, it will merely retard your progress. The life force in your body is the key to the freedom that you seek.

The chapter then goes on to talk of caterpillars and butterflies.

What I think is… let’s hear it for the life force and delicious fruit! I’d love to hear what you think.

I was telling Frank what this post was about, and that I needed to find a photo of a tomato plant, and he said: “why don’t you put in a photo of our chilies?” I thought: “well, there’s an idea!” – so on the right you will find a photo of one of our chili plants. Which leads me to ask… would you rather be a tomato seed or a chili seed?

I’ve done a great big makeover of my About page, in case anyone’s interested. I put in a new photo—I made Frank take it in the kitchen (perhaps I should rephrase that)—I’m parting my hair on the other side now, for the first time in my whole life. Cheers!
More posts, a random selection:

• What If? The Movie – Clip 3
• Is Death Natural?
• What If? The Movie, A Review
• A Thousand Years
• Feelings Are There To Be Felt

photo by demi-brooke

It’s as if we are gods and goddesses living in little mud hovels and driving around in clunky, funky old jalopies.

This is from Shakti Gawain, in her book Living in the Light. It is from the chapter Spirit and Form, which is about integrating the physical reality we find ourselves in with our already fully developed spirit.

So… are we really gods and goddesses? I think so!

Easter time

At the end of my last post, What if? The Movie – A Review, I related a question Dr Bernie Siegel posed in the testimonials area of the What if? website – “What if Jesus was the only normal person to have lived?”

I put it in because I thought it was a quirky and relevant thought, but it turns out to be very relevant here also, this being my Easter post and all. I didn’t plan it!

I happen to think that the message of the Jesus story is that we can all do the “miracles” that he did. I also think that the Easter story was showing us, with Christ’s death and resurrection, that we can overcome death. After all, the Christian scriptures are full of references to “eternal life” and not seeing death and so on.

Anyway, it was very interesting to read people’s thoughts on Dr Bernie’s question! Here are some excerpts from some of the comments…

Miguel – wisdom and life I guess that praying all day would be normal

Jenny – heal pain naturally We ALL are children of God. We all have powers beyond our wildest dreams. We are all healers and can manifest if we believe and love ourselves and our Source/God.

Tess – the bold life Well that means we will won’t be normal until we “do even greater things”.

Vered – mommy blogger I think it’s good to challenge ourselves and ask ourselves whether “normal” could be something completely different – and much better.

Kelly – writer, mom, traveller I think if Jesus were the only normal person to have lived, then a world of miracles awaits, and that’s an idea to hold onto.

Ribbon – fragments, treasures, memory I think that Jesus is a celebrity of “normal”… I think that there are probably quite a few so called normal people all about the place.

Evelyn – attract abundance Hmmm….it got me thinking about what “normal” is?

Tom – business coach I once tried to live a day as Jesus would have lived and I made it for about 27 minutes.

Dot – deeper issues This is exactly the approach of Christian Science………Jesus said that any one of his disciples could do what he did, which CS interprets as meaning anyone who believes.

I must say I enjoyed Ribbon’s comment, describing Jesus as a celebrity of “normal”. Could it be that we (or perhaps the early leaders of the Christian church) have put Jesus on a pedestal so we would have a cop-out from doing as Jesus has done?

Our true nature

I’ve always remembered an analogy I once heard for our relationship with God (or the Source, or the universal creative energy)…

“If God was a pie, we are all pieces of pie. We are not the whole pie, but we are still pie.”

I agree with this… that we are all part of the God-pie—in essence, we are God.

Healing ourselves

All of this isn’t much help if we are still driving around in those clunky, funky jalopies.

Luckily today there are many resources to help us heal ourselves, physically and emotionally, so we can fulfill our potential. I think consulting healing practitioners who can facilitate the transformation process would be the best bet for anyone who is either very ill or wants to change quickly, and there are also books, audio programs and movies for finding information, techniques and inspiration.

I’ve listed the books I’d recommend for healing and transformation on my resources page—most of them are the ones I have personally found most helpful. I’d also like to comment on three movies I have discovered recently:

1. You Can Heal Your Life, The Movie.

This movie tells the story of Louise Hay and her work. I think it is a great introduction to the field of healing from within, and both introduces and extends her book You Can Heal Your Life very nicely. It begins and ends with a character deciding whether they are willing to change, so could be great for someone who is feeling stuck. (If you are interested in following up on this DVD, it would be best to search for it yourself, so you get the zoning and shiping rates to suit you.)

2. What if? The Movie – Awakening.

I reviewed this movie in my post What if? The Movie, A Review. Through giving examples of healings that have occurred and discussing new findings by science, this movie shows it is possible for us to heal ourselves.

3. The Living Matrix.

I’ve just read about this movie in a post by Jenny Mannion, The Living Matrix Movie — The New Science of Health and Healing is Here. I haven’t seen this movie yet, as it is just out, but I understand it is very inspiring. It covers new scientific discoveries that confirm or explain alternative mind-body healing methods—certainly one for the doubting Thomases, I’d imagine. Please do read Jenny’s review if you are looking to heal yourself of any illness, or know anyone who is.

We can do it, the healing is there for the taking.

So come on all you Gods and Goddesses—let’s show the world who we really are!

I made a video. It may not be my finest moment, but I couldn’t resist putting it up. I had pressed RECORD on my computer for Frank to muck around, and found myself stuck in the background. Here ’tis!

Now, wouldn’t you like to join us for eternity?

Have a great Easter break over next weekend, everybody!

Related posts

Easter Sunday – from last year (my first and hopefully last post with a picture of people jumping).
Good Saturday – my second ever post, which has the distinction of being my only post to have never received a comment—if any kind soul would like to remedy that, I would greatly appreciate it.

More posts, a random selection:

• Counterclockwise, by Ellen Langer
• What If? The Movie
• Feelings Are There To Be Felt
• How I Found Immortality
• An Unusual Experiment

What if? The Movie – Awakening is a must-see, in my opinion. Here’s why…

What if? gently breaks the news that we have unlimited potential. That the way most of us are expressing ourselves in the world today is only a mere shadow of what we are capable of doing and being.

New possibilities for existence are introduced by asking “what if?” questions, that allow us to consider these possibilities without having to decide right away whether we want to take a deeper interest in them.

In the movie, we are first shown some history of mankind’s outmoded beliefs, and how we have limiting beliefs programmed into our subconscious mind from an early age—and how we can change this programming.

Then it moves onto talk about gene activity being controlled by our minds, people who have healed themselves from within, people who live without eating, overcoming aging and death, and last but not least, finding fulfillment from knowing who we really are and expressing our true nature.

The key is in the cast.

I found the speakers in What if? to be warm and intelligent, and to have the natural assuredness of people who have lived with their ideas and beliefs for a long time, and developed great expertise in their field.

Quite a few of the 30 or so speakers in the movie come from the science and medical professions. Dr Joe Dispenza, a neuroscientist and chiropractor, has great knowledge of the specifics of the mind-body connection, and Bruce Lipton, Ph.D. was a career biochemist whose book The Biology of Belief is about his discoveries about how our beliefs influence our gene activity.

Bernie Siegel, M.D., who has a background as a surgeon and prefers to be called “Bernie”, started Exceptional Cancer Patients, a specific form of individual and group therapy utilizing patients’ drawings, dreams, images and feelings.

Other cast members include Brandon Bays, who I wrote about in my post The Journey, With Brandon Bays (I first heard of her from What if? in January and jumped at the opportunity to go to her workshop when she visited Melbourne in February), Joanna Cherry, founder of Ascension Mastery International, and Dan Brule, breathworker extraordinaire (my description).

And James Sinclair, producer and director of the movie, who speaks very eloquently on camera and in narration, about his thoughts and visions of what is possible.

There are far too many great people in the cast for me to mention them all—there are bios for the What if? cast here, if you wish to explore further.

My take

I found What if? very inspiring… I already knew we are capable of healing ourselves of anything and fulfilling our potential, but seeing this movie gave me an extra boost towards making it happen in my daily physical life. An extra level of confidence. It had something to do with seeing all these intelligent, thoughtful, gracious people so calmly sharing their experiences and knowledge, that made me feel “yes—we can do this”.

I’d also like to say I very much liked the music! I thought it was very moving and enhanced the feel of the movie at the right times, without being intrusive.

I bought the DVD, which has bonus footage of the cast members speaking, and a director’s commentary of almost the whole movie, narrated by, well, the director, James Sinclair. I loved the director’s commentary—I always enjoy getting the inside information, especially when the topic is something I’m rather interested in.

What if? is available as a download (for $4.95) as well as a DVD, from the What if? website.

I’d like to finish with a “what if” question posed by Dr Bernie Siegel—he didn’t ask it in the movie… I found it buried away on the website in the testimonials section and thought it captured the tone of the movie—profound, yet light-hearted—rather well.

He asked:
“What if Jesus was the only normal person to have lived?”

Maybe it might help us to re-define what is “normal”.

Comments are very welcome!

Related posts

What If? The Movie (with a short clip)
Interview with James Sinclair, Director of “What If?” Part I (from Jenny Mannion)
Evelyn Lim’s post My Personal Creed has a short review of What if? at the end.More posts, a random selection:

• Fires In Victoria
• 5-Year Plan For This Blog
• The Fountain Of Youth Gets An Update!
• But I’d Get So Bored!
• Why We Want To Live

This is me eyeing off my first birthday cake—nothing’s changed—beside the apple tree, with the house, wash house and a shed in the background (June 1954).

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Let’s Live Forever…
(pregnant pause)
Happy Birthday to you

Yes – it’s Let’s Live Forever’s first birthday today!

On a cool crisp autumn morning in 2008, a whole YEAR ago today, little LLF was delivered into the nurturing arms of his new database and WordPress installation, on a server at DreamHost, which I thought would suit him nicely. I gave him the name Why Live Forever?, intending that together we would talk about reasons why people might want to live forever.

Unfortunately, it turned out the server wasn’t quite large and comfy enough… feeding him and changing the bed linen turned out to be painfully slow, so I had to move him to a new server, at a small company called Little Oak. He got a brand new database and WordPress installation… this pleased him greatly, but the transfer took about 2 weeks and the whole thing was a pain in the neck for me.

Over the next few weeks, little Why Live Forever? grew, though it was a strange, lonely and scary world he found himself in. Would there be anyone to keep him company? Before long some friends came and left comments, and he and I both cheered up considerably!

Except it became clear his name wasn’t very good, so I took a deep breath and presented him with a new domain name, and yet another database and WordPress installation. As I had no idea how to transfer a blog, I copied over all his posts and comments by hand, one by one. Luckily he was still pretty small at that stage.

In those days I dressed him in some clothes called Misty Look. Some of you might remember how he looked when he was a kid… here’s a picture!

The header is a photo Frank took at 7 a.m. at a party we went to—the drummers were greeting the dawn, after a very hot night. I was trying to find some way of making little LLF look exciting—don’t know if it worked. We were both pretty scared about our foray into the blogging world, talking about physical immortality and all.

LLF and I were dropping in on other bloggers, and they would reciprocate, sometimes finding the weirdest ideas they had ever seen. This was embarrassing at times, but we got over it.

After a while I hankered for some clean, white, grown-up clothes for LLF. I looked and looked and nothing quite suited until I found an outfit called Thesis! He feels comfortable now, and ready for action! And so do I!

Friends

Needless to say, little LLF wouldn’t have thrived without some friends. These days he has a Top Commentators plugin, which tells us which friends have dropped in to chat the most times.

LLF and I have been dropping in on these friends too, and have read all sorts of interesting things! Here’s what we found our 20 chattiest visitors so far this year saying:

Evelyn has been writing about Akashic Records, and funnily enough, Dot has also written about her experience with Akashic Records.

Jannie, the Mistress of Funsterment, often writes about singing and songwriting, while Ribbon from Perth shares her internal map of reality with us, and has been known to write about the pursuit of desire. Our friend Tess has written about celebrating in difficult times (boldly).

Cath, who writes about success in business, has written about how to be a business success story at any age, and life coach Davina has written about believing in yourself. Vered, a mommy blogger, has written an article about children’s self-esteem.

Patricia often writes about important issues, for example funding for treatment for cleft palates, and Stacey writes about creating balance in life, such as in her article about struggles in life.

On Daphne’s blog Joyful Days she writes about happiness and abundance, and Marelisa writes about creativity, productivity, simplicity and abundance, and has many happiness tips to share. Tom writes about working for yourself, and growing your business.

Jenny, who has a blog about healing, writes about healing pain from within. Kelly writes about life and everything, such as in her articles about enduring friendships and backpacking. Lance’s blog is all about life—one of his articles is about life lessons.

On Miguel’s blog he writes articles about things like focusing on your strengths, and Natural has been thinking out loud about whether to be anonymous on a blog. Barbara has a blog all about blogging tips, which help many a blogger.

Last but not least is The Urban Panther, life muser, who has been known to write about social events.

Thanks to you all!

Thanks everyone—bloggers and non-bloggers—for helping me make it through the first year. Here’s to new developments and growth in all our projects!

• Feelings Are There To Be Felt
• Why We Want To Live
• This Blogging Life!
• An Unusual Experiment
• Think And It Shall Be So

photo by mandj98

What would you be doing today if you believed you were never going to die?

I know I would be doing exactly as I am doing today… finalising Frank’s tax records to send to our accountant, interspersed with writing this post, and I just went for a short walk, leaving Frank slaving at the kitchen table going through receipts. Because I do believe I’m never going to die, and this happens to be what I get the urge to do today.

When I first started seeing my lifespan this way, in 1986, at the age of 33, I realised that lots of the things I had been doing were motivated by thinking time was running out. In my twenties, when I was working full-time, I’d get up early on weekends to pack lots in—”we get back what we put in!” I thought. (I still think that, but would apply the idea differently, now.)

I thought I had to do lots to have an interesting life, and therefore feel satisfaction. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Also, I remember thinking I wanted to create a lot of memories I could reflect upon when I was old—I thought that when I became frail and elderly, I would want to have lots of good memories to keep me company.

Intuition

Nowadays, I know about being in present time and following intuition, and I firmly believe these are what lead to satisfaction in life.

Many of us are finding ways to be right in the present moment, for example by meditating, getting into our creative flow, and being in moments of joy with loved ones.

Once our attention is in the present moment, we can tune in to our intuitive prompts and follow them, if we want. To get better at this skill, we can practise choosing intuitively which way to drive home, and work up to the big things, which can include making interesting plans and building something up (a business, a castle, a blog).

We can’t ever access intuition though, if our attention is not in the present, and it is not in the present if we are making decisions with regard to some imagined future restriction. There’s a big difference between building a business because it is exciting and creative for us, and because we feel we need to store nuts away for our inevitable decline.

Making the most of time

Doing things because of the age we are and will be, being busy because we might miss out on things, acting from consideration of future restrictions, and trying to create great memories, are not being in present time.

Therefore, doing them makes it impossible to follow intuition, and gain the satisfaction that comes from doing so, no matter how much they are dressed up to be “making the most of life”.

Also, using our imagined possible imminent demise for trying to enhance life is being WAY out of present time. It is manipulating how we feel and deciding what to do from the ego, not the intuition.

Anyway, why try to make the most of our time when time is not running out? There is only the present moment, and it is eternal—you can only slip into it when you forget about time.

Lazy boots!

What if our intuition is saying to stay in bed all day? If we are thinking “life is short” and that we need to make the best use of what time we have, we will force ourselves to get up and at it!

Maybe if we had stayed in bed all day, in this example, we might have had a fantastic idea, or got inspiration for solving a problem, or simply got some physical rest we needed.

(I’d suggest here that if we have responsibilities to dependents, intuition won’t lead us to desert them. It might lead us to change how we operate, if that’s what we need to do.)

But if we are in “making the best use of our limited time” mode, we won’t ever know what might have been. If we constantly do (or don’t do) things because we are concerned about time running out, we never find out how we can stop wasting it. Intuitive promptings simply don’t know about future limitations, which are invented by our busy minds.

An alternative

If we believe we are never going to die, or grow old, we are free to explore what satisfies us, without that edgy feeling of time running out. It brings us totally into the present moment in a magical way. We never feel we are missing out on anything, so can explore exactly where we are right now.

What do you think about this? How did you feel about the question at the start?

Related posts

A Thousand Years
But I’d get So Bored!
Is Living Like Today Might Be Your Last A Good Idea?

More posts, a random selection:

• Friday The 13th.
• Galaxy For Blog Action
• An Unusual Experiment
• Let’s Live Forever!
• Staying Young