Every society has a certain center of gravity, around which the culture's ethics, norms, rules, and basic institutions are organized, and this center of gravity provides the basic cultural cohesion and social integration for that society. This cultural center of gravity acts like a magnet on individual development. If you are below the average level, it tends to pull you up. If you try to go above it, it tends to pull you down.

-- Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

Scientists induce out-of-body sensation with virtual reality

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that "the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self," is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams...

Full story:
http://iht.com/articles/2007/08/23/healthscience/23body.php

Cactus of the Tarahumara

Transported by Peyote I saw that I had to defend what I am before I was born, and that my Self is merely the consequence of the battle I waged in the Supreme against the untruth of evil ideas. -- Antonin Artaud, The Peyote Dance

"For the seeker after truth only meetings with very great masters and very great sages can be really interesting. It is better to seek, seek, and seek again a real sage, a truly liberated sage, and spend perhaps no more than a single day with him, than to dissipate one's efforts in encounters and conversations with less representative persons, or persons who are further from true realization."

-- Arnaud Desjardins, from The Message of the Tibetans (qtd. in Thomas Merton's Asian Journal.)

Will or Won't

"Will is the fuel which carries awareness through all areas of the mind, that spirit, that spiritual quality which makes all inner goals a reality. Unfoldment does not take time. It takes a tremendous will. That will has to be cultivated, just as you would cultivate a garden. Those energies have to all be flowing through, in a sense, one channel, so that everything that you do is satisfying, is complete, is beautiful."

-- Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

Walking damages environment more than driving?

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated. Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance.

. . .

"A chilled ready meal is a perfect example of where the energy is wasted. You make the meal, then use an enormous amount of energy to chill it and keep it chilled through warehousing and storage.” The ideal diet would consist of cereals and pulses. “This is a route which virtually nobody, apart from a vegan, is going to follow,” Mr Goodall said. But there are other ways to reduce the carbon footprint. “Don’t buy anything from the supermarket,” Mr Goodall said, “or anything that’s travelled too far.”

Original:
Times UK
http://tinyurl.com/yta3ut