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

Did mass meditation fuel stock market surge?

As predicted one year ago, a surging U.S. stock market has charged to record-breaking highs, the longstanding nuclear crisis with North Korea is quietly being resolved without incident, and public backing and congressional support are on the rise for peaceful new approaches to resolving the Iraq war and other conflicts around the world.

These dramatic and unexpected developments are just a few of the concrete signs of the success of the Invincible America Assembly in Iowa — the largest-ever scientific demonstration project to document the effects of large group meditations on the economic and social trends of the nation, according to Dr. John Hagelin, world-renowned quantum physicist, executive director of the International Center for Invincible Defense, and President of the Global Union of Scientists for Peace, who is leading the Assembly. Dr. John Hagelin is to present preliminary findings of the first year of the Invincible America Assembly — and to lodge predictions for the coming year.

More at:
http://www.rushprnews.com/press/archives/1231083

Surfing the Waves of Mind

Waves are the ultimate illusion. They come out of nowhere, instantaneously materialize and just as quickly they break and vanish. Chasing after such fleeting mirages is a complete waste of time. That is what I choose to do with my life. -- Miki Dora

Traveling child goddess gets back her divinity

She was the Nepalese child goddess who broke with centuries of custom and travelled overseas, only for her family to learn she was being stripped of her title for that breach of etiquette. For three anxious weeks, her family negotiated with authorities, insisting she had done nothing wrong.

And that effort has finally paid off. In a noisy and colourful return to Nepal, 10-year-old Sajani Shakya flew home this week to undergo a special cleansing ritual and to be told that her deity status remained intact.

The Kumari tradition dates back hundreds of years and with the King of Nepal having traditionally sought the blessings of the goddesses of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2785463.ece

Mirror Neurons Influenced by Culture

In a recent study by researchers at a UCLA neuroscience institute wanted to investigate the imprint of culture on the so-called mirror neuron network. Mirror neurons fire when an individual performs an action, but they also fire when someone watches another individual perform that same action. Neuroscientists believe this "mirroring" is the neural mechanism by which we can read the minds of other people and empathize with them.

When it comes to the influence of culture, they found that indeed, the mirror neuron network responds differently depending on whether we are looking at someone who shares our culture, or someone who doesn't.

Based on the research so far, it appears that neural systems supporting memory, empathy and general cognition encode information differently depending on who's giving the information -- a member of one's own cultural group, or a member of an out-group, and that ethnic in-group membership and a culturally learned motor repertoire more strongly influence the brain's responses to observed actions, specifically actions used in social communication.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070718002115.htm