Short-term Meditation Changes Brain

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital had meditation study participants take part in an eight-week meditation program requiring only 30 minutes of unstructured meditation per day. Brain scans conducted at the end of the test period showed that even within this brief span of time, changes in certain parts of the brain could be detected.

The brain scans showed that participants' hippocampal regions had increased, suggesting an increase in capacity for memory and learning. Also, the density of the amygdala decreased, implying a decrease in stress and anxiety.

Such studies demonstrate that the brain is highly malleable and readily responds to even short-term, light meditational discipline.

Source:

http://io9.com/5741192/even-a-little-meditation-can-change-the-structure-of-your-brain

Yoga Sutras: Subtle Attainments

The subtler attainments come with birth or are attained through herbs (ausadhi), mantra, austerities and rituals (tapas) or concentration (samadhi).

– Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, 4.1

Petros to Teach Patanjali's Yoga Sutras

Petros will be teaching an in-depth class on the famous Yoga Sutras of the ancient Indian master Patanjali. This form of spiritual practice is also known as Raja Yoga (Royal Yoga) and Ashtanga Yoga (Eight-limbed yoga), and is a complete system of attainment used by meditators for centuries.

Location:
Alpha Book Center
4532 N. 7th St.
Phoenix AZ

Date: Friday 7 January 2011, 7pm

$10 donation required

Yoga Sutras, 1.12-1.14

One's turbulent thought patterns are controlled and eventually mastered through practice and non-attachment. Practice means selecting the right actions and applying the right efforts to bring a stable advanced state. When such practice is done consistently and with devotion, it becomes a firmly rooted, solid foundation for further attainments.

-- Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 1.12-1.14

Yoga Sutras 1.2

Yoga is the restraint of the chaotic fluctuations of the mind which obscure one's innate Adeptship from oneself.

-- Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, 1.2

Petros will be giving a one-hour class introducing Raja Yoga (a.k.a. the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali) on Friday, 7 January 2011 at Alpha Books (4532 N. 7th St. Phoenix).

The Yoga Sutras may be read at: http://home.earthlink.net/~xristos/patanjali.htm.

Petros is now on Squidoo

Various eWakening and Petros websites have now been conveniently assembled on an easy-to-access Squidoo ™ page! Check it out! http://www.squidoo.com/ewakening

Squidoo is a popular publishing platform and community that makes it easy for people to create “lenses” online. Lenses are pages, like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything a user knows about a topic of interest — and snap it all into focus.

eWakenShare (Beta) is now online!

eWakenShare is now up and running. Petros' latest innovation combines spirituality with prosperity. Copy and share the eWakenShare meme and watch your prosperity become magnified.

Our Mysterious Universe, Part II

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled persons make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

-- Wikipedia

Creative Basis of Magick (Bertiaux)

The magician will always be looking for opportunities to create his own magickal system of the world. He will be looking always for ideas and the simplest of elements, to be found anywhere, from which there will emerge a picture of reality, his reality. The creative energies of true practitioners of this art of cosmic creation are collected from here and there and fused together into a very wonderful picture of being. This is the basis of magick -- your imagination is making the world to be as it is in itself.

-- Michael Bertiaux

Religion vs. Magic (AC)

The only real strength of any religion is derived from its pilfering of Magical doctrine; and, religious persons being by definition entirely unscrupulous, it follows that any given religion is likely to contain scraps of Magical doctrine, filched more or less haphazard from one school or the other as occasion serves.

-- Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears