YES in the face of change

As we approach the end of another calendar year, and in fact the beginning of a new decade, our thoughts may turn to the inevitability of change. When we embrace change and the challenges of a new year in our own lives, we find that our transformation is accelerated. Resistance to change does not alter its inevitability. On the path, only a continual "YES" to the processes of change moves us forward in a substantial way.

Aurobindo on inconscience

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil with its sweet and bitter fruits is secretly rooted in the very nature of the Inconscience from which our being has emerged and on which it still stands as a nether soil and basis of our physical existence; it has grown visibly on the surface in the manifold branchings of the Ignorance which is still the main bulk and condition of our consciousness in its difficult evolution towards a supreme consciousness and an integral awareness. As long as there is this soil with the unfound roots in it and this nourishing air and climate of Ignorance, the tree will grow and flourish and put forth its dual blossoms and its fruit of mixed nature. It would follow that there can be no final solution until we have turned our inconscience into the greater consciousness, made the truth of self and spirit our life-basis and transformed our ignorance into a higher knowledge.

-- Aurobindo, from The Life Divine, p. 627

Srimad Bhagavatam 1.2

The wise say that the truth of reality is known as Brahman, Paramatma, or Bhagavan -- the highest, unmanifest cosmic Consciousness. Sages who with wisdom and non-attachment delve deeply into this will see within themselves and this conciousness in pure devotion what they have read in the scriptures. For all types of human, regardless of station, the highest form of practice is found in devotion to God. With this devotion as a focal point for the mind, the Lord within is unveiled to one.

-- Srimad Bhagavatam Canto I Ch. 2, vv. 11-14.

Petros class: Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Petros will be giving a one-hour class introducing the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali on Friday, 11 December 2009 at Alpha Books (4532 N. 7th St. Phoenix).

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

Truth is Truth (Kay)

Only by starting with who and what I am is the problem precluded; all fear is removed; and then one may do the right thing, if there is 'doing' to be done. He or she beholds that Spirit is the sole self, that is 'I,' and this leaves no need for evolvement, cross-bearing, or crown-wearing; and already truth is truth.

-- Kay, 1994 Atlanta Awareness Center, tape 5N

Experience of No-Self (B. Roberts)

It was only by investing no value in an experience that I was able to find out its truth or falsity. What is false never lasts; it falls away of its own accord, while what is true remains, because truth does not come and go -- it is always there. So long as our experiences come and go and we are investing in them our own values, thoughts and emotions, we'll never find out if there is any truth in them, for truth is what remains when there are no experiences left.

-- Bernadette Roberts, from The Experience of No-Self

Meditation shown to lower blood pressure

A new study published in the American Journal of Hypertension has shown that meditative practice can have a measurably positive influence on lowering high blood pressure and improving overall cardiovascular health. The study involved nearly 300 individuals, about half of whom meditated regularly. Preliminary results suggest that the meditators' group was able to substantially lower blood pressure and evidence other positive effects in comparison to the control group.

http://tinyurl.com/yzbsq62

http://tinyurl.com/ykacmkn

Origins of life may lie in electrochemical processes

A few bioscientists in recent years have been rethinking the origin of life in the light of some new ideas. They think the most counter-intuitive trait of life is one of the best clues to its origin. As a result, they have come up with a radically different picture of what the earliest life was like and where it evolved. It's a picture for which there is growing evidence. Life, the new idea argues, is powered not by the kind of chemistry that goes on in a test tube but by a kind of electricity.

http://tinyurl.com/yj3nx55

Begin with oneself (Buber)

Just the perspective, in which a man sees himself only as an individual contrasted with other individuals, and not as a genuine person whose transformation helps towards the transformation of the world, contains the fundamental error which hasidic teaching denounces. The essential thing is to begin with oneself, and at this moment a man has nothing in the world to care about other than this beginning. Any other attitude would distract him from what he is about to begin, weaken his initiative, and thus frustrate the entire bold undertaking.

-- Martin Buber, from The Way of Man According to the Teaching of Hasidism.

How the brain creates "time"

Perhaps the most fundamental question neuroscientists are investigating is whether our perception of the world is continuous or a series of discrete snapshots like frames on a film strip. Understand this, and maybe we can explain how the healthy brain works out the chronological order of the myriad events bombarding our senses, and how this can become warped to alter our perception of time.

It seems that each separate neural process that governs our perception might be recorded in its own stream of discrete frames. But how might all these streams fit together to give us a consistent picture of the world? Ernst Pöppel, a neuroscientist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, suggests all of the separate snapshots from the senses may feed into blocks of information in a higher processing stream. He calls these the "building blocks of consciousness" and reckons they underlie our perception of time

"Perception cannot be continuous because of [the limits of] neural processing," says Pöppel. "A space of 30 to 50 milliseconds is necessary to bring together in one time-window the distributed activity in the neural system."

-- from New Scientist magazine (http://tinyurl.com/yh8ebs9)