When your activities and actions are gratifying, when you become engaged in what you are doing, when what you do serves you and others, when what you do does not tire you, you are doing what you are meant to be doing. When we are doing the work of your soul, there is no fear, there is no tiring, there is no negativity. There is a feeling of purpose and meaning.
Every challenge, every obstacle occurs so that we take a look at who we are. These are not to disappoint us to the point of feeling shameful or like a failure, they appear so that we become more aware. Each challenge is an opportunity to take a look at what lies beneath it, the fears behind it and choose to learn its wisdom. In the midst of the challenge, this may seem impossible, but the ego-mind is the only thing telling you that it’s impossible. The soul will be asking, guiding you to move forward into awareness. We can’t change what we don’t recognize.
Whether you listen to guidance from spirit, God, Buddha, divine or whatever works for you, you have free will to make your own decisions. Your decisions may guide you to the right of spirit or the left of spirit. There is no “standard” path of spirit. You choose how you learn and spirit will give you the freedom to do it your way. Your personality may be in control and not allow spirit to guide you, which in metaphysics is the hard way. You will always be battling your desires over that of your soul’s desire. You may continually feel like something is missing or that everything is always hard. This is the personality at work.
Let go of thinking you know how to do it better. Trust. Have faith that you may not know it all and that maybe, just maybe, there’s another way. What if you let go and trusted? What if you did and things went smoothly and you actually felt better about who you are and how things are unfolding? Doesn’t that sound easier than the battle of your own will?
The ego, you, your personality does not need to drive your bus. Take your hands off the wheel.
Thy will be done.
Consider this statement for a moment. Releasing your control and trusting a higher power will guide you towards your authentic power. If what you are doing now in your life isn’t working, what harm would it do to let go, release, take your hands off the wheel, to trust?
Trust that the faith you are allowing yourself to have or believe in is working. Do not get caught up in the “what ifs?” of your life. Keep your power in the now. You will always remain conscious of the outcome of your choices but you will be more present in every situation today.
Do what you need to do. You need to be involved in your life. Allow your intuition to guide your timing and motivation. This way you will trust that what you are doing is right because it will feel right. You will be moving through this earth plane as an empowered spirit.
Trust allows you to follow your feelings, bringing them into consciousness and letting them be directed by what feels right to you. Follow your heart, not your mind. The humanness in us will appear, the mind will take over, but we choose to recognize it and say “stop,” then take a breath and return to and trust the divine guidance of our hearts.
Catherine Zeeb holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Metaphysics. She has a private therapy practice in Edwards. You can visit her Web site at www.healing-spirits.net.
Souce: www.vaildaily.com
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Philosophy and Computer Science
"While reading the two and a half year old Slashdot post on Does Philosophy have a role in Computer Science, it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before. Cognitive Science and Computer Ethics are more established disciplines in universities, and the numbers of philosophy graduates double majoring in computer science and information systems are climbing. Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?"
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Mind training may slow Alzheimer
People who heave jobs which require large amounts of mental work may have some extra protection against memory problems which occur before Alzheimer's disease.
Also people with higher education levels may have such protection, according one study published by the Neurology journal.
The researchers said it may be that more strenuous mental activity strengthens the brain, or alternatively that genetic factors which underpinned individuals' employment and educational success may be responsible for larger amounts of brain reserve.
Study author Valentina Garibotto, of the National Institute of Neuroscience in Milan, commented: "The theory is that education and demanding jobs create a buffer against the effects of dementia on the brain, or a cognitive reserve."
Those people appear able to keep functioning for longer despite evidence of damage to their brains, she added.
Also people with higher education levels may have such protection, according one study published by the Neurology journal.
The researchers said it may be that more strenuous mental activity strengthens the brain, or alternatively that genetic factors which underpinned individuals' employment and educational success may be responsible for larger amounts of brain reserve.
Study author Valentina Garibotto, of the National Institute of Neuroscience in Milan, commented: "The theory is that education and demanding jobs create a buffer against the effects of dementia on the brain, or a cognitive reserve."
Those people appear able to keep functioning for longer despite evidence of damage to their brains, she added.
Mind over matter
Well known psychoanalyst and author Sudhir Kakar offers his views on a variety of subjects including his novels, Gandhi, India and the West.
Nice interview:
All your three novels were based on characters from history. What about the fourth?
It also will be historical. I like to have some ground under my feet.
You made your debut as a novelist at a not-very-young age.
I believe in the Hindu philosophy of ashrams; I began to write fiction seriously when I began my vanaprastha. I had stopped practising psychoanalysis, wasn’t teaching much, so I had more time, more reflective time. I needed to give some new voice to myself and found fiction ideal. When I was 10, I wrote plays for All India Radio; they were promptly returned, but I was very proud of the rejection slips. While I was in Germany, I wrote short stories in German; I was 24 or 25 at that time.
Why did you decide to base your first novel, The Ascetic of Desire, on Vatsyayana?
Since fiction was a new experience after so many non-fiction books, I didn’t want to go away from familiar territory. Kamasutra is sexuality territory and, therefore, psychoanalytical. The book is about a scholar, which also I know a bit about.
You have also translated Kamasutra. Are you surprised by the attention this ancient Indian book has received?
Very much so. It is by far the best known Indian book in the world. I recently met some German film producers who want to make a German film on Kamasutra based on my book. They will begin to shoot soon and they want to do it in India. I don’t think sex is the only reason why Kamasutra has become so successful. There have been many books on sexuality, in German, Chinese… It is not the oldest book on sex either; there are older ones in Chinese. Kamasutra got its reputation right from the beginning. How it achieved a cult status is one of the many mysteries of India.
The fact is, India’s international reputation rests on Gandhi and Kamasutra. I can explain why Gandhi, but not why Kamasutra.
Your last novel was on Gandhi.
I wrote Mahatma and Meera because I was intrigued by the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, especially with Gandhi. I wrote about Gandhi and women in Intimate Relations, where Meera had come up.
The coming together of Gandhi and Meera fascinated me. There were so many contrasts: he was a man, she a woman; he was Indian, she English; she was more of a real seeker than Gandhi, who wanted tolerance more. I found the psyches of these two very interesting.
If you were to look at Gandhi from a psychoanalytical point of view…
A: As a person he was very complex and had sexual problems. He had problems with people coming very near him, be it his family or Meera. That explains his problems with his children and Kasturba; he feared intimacy. A psychoanalyst can only explain illness, not greatness.
Where, then, does Gandhi’s greatness lie?
Gandhi is the Indian icon. There’s no one who matches him. I would agree with Einstein’s statement that posterity would find it difficult to believe such a man actually lived on this planet.
Somehow he is dismissed by young India. That’s sad. He’s become something to be used by “Munnabhai”, for instance. As for explaining his greatness, I will take his words for it. He said of wanting to follow the spiritual path; everything is secondary. Even non-violence is not a strategy, unless there is love behind it; unless you love the person you protest against, it means nothing. He wanted to love others, much further than tolerate.
I don’t know how successful he was or would have been as a politician, probably not much. He was more of a spiritual person acting in the world. People sensed that there was something unusual behind him, that there wasn’t any hatred or manipulations; there was purity and they could sense it. Lots of people, saints for instance, have that kind of purity, but not everyone could be Gandhi.
In your second novel, ‘Ecstasy’, you modelled your protagonist, Gopal, on Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
What struck me most about Ramakrishna was his freedom. He broke conventions in such complete ways; he had the freedom of crossing the gender boundaries. There was nothing new about it though, as saints like Chaitanya, long before him, too had cross-dressed in their devotion to the lord. Even the gods themselves have crossed the gender boundaries in Hinduism; our mythologies have several such tales, of Vishnu, Arjuna…
Our gender boundaries, culturally, are not stiff; though, unfortunately, that is not the case today. Tolerance was our biggest strength, becoming less tolerant is not Indian. The biggest strength of Hinduism is tolerance; I am saddened when it is regarded as weakness. The traditional Hindu is much more tolerant, that in fact is the biggest attraction of Hinduism. I am proud to say I am a Hindu because of that; almost everything is acceptable and I wish that quality would not go away.
You said that “Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy” in The Indians: Portrait of a People?
Whenever an Indian sees somebody, he makes several distinctions; the first is whether the person is male or female, then older or younger and then higher or lower. This is peculiar to India and it will take long to get out of it; it has been built into our psyche over thousands of years. But there has been a change with the coming of Islam and the brotherhood it advocated and Christianity questioning hierarchy. The democratic movements in the West also questioned hierarchy.
Talking of democracy, were you surprised by the rejection of Hilary Clinton in favour of Barack Obama?
I was; I would have thought the race barrier would have been stronger than the gender barrier. Obama offers a lot of hope, but I wonder what will happen when the elections come. If Obama wins, I will really be surprised but be happy that America has changed.
Yes, women have ruled democracies in South Asia, but we shouldn’t forget those women have been part of a hierarchical society. And caste plays a significant part. In a country like India, the feeling is: a Brahmin woman is better than a lower caste male. We don’t mind a woman ruling us as long as she is of a higher caste. The biggest thing would be if Mayawati becomes the Prime Minister.
Font: www.hindu.com
Nice interview:
All your three novels were based on characters from history. What about the fourth?
It also will be historical. I like to have some ground under my feet.
You made your debut as a novelist at a not-very-young age.
I believe in the Hindu philosophy of ashrams; I began to write fiction seriously when I began my vanaprastha. I had stopped practising psychoanalysis, wasn’t teaching much, so I had more time, more reflective time. I needed to give some new voice to myself and found fiction ideal. When I was 10, I wrote plays for All India Radio; they were promptly returned, but I was very proud of the rejection slips. While I was in Germany, I wrote short stories in German; I was 24 or 25 at that time.
Why did you decide to base your first novel, The Ascetic of Desire, on Vatsyayana?
Since fiction was a new experience after so many non-fiction books, I didn’t want to go away from familiar territory. Kamasutra is sexuality territory and, therefore, psychoanalytical. The book is about a scholar, which also I know a bit about.
You have also translated Kamasutra. Are you surprised by the attention this ancient Indian book has received?
Very much so. It is by far the best known Indian book in the world. I recently met some German film producers who want to make a German film on Kamasutra based on my book. They will begin to shoot soon and they want to do it in India. I don’t think sex is the only reason why Kamasutra has become so successful. There have been many books on sexuality, in German, Chinese… It is not the oldest book on sex either; there are older ones in Chinese. Kamasutra got its reputation right from the beginning. How it achieved a cult status is one of the many mysteries of India.
The fact is, India’s international reputation rests on Gandhi and Kamasutra. I can explain why Gandhi, but not why Kamasutra.
Your last novel was on Gandhi.
I wrote Mahatma and Meera because I was intrigued by the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, especially with Gandhi. I wrote about Gandhi and women in Intimate Relations, where Meera had come up.
The coming together of Gandhi and Meera fascinated me. There were so many contrasts: he was a man, she a woman; he was Indian, she English; she was more of a real seeker than Gandhi, who wanted tolerance more. I found the psyches of these two very interesting.
If you were to look at Gandhi from a psychoanalytical point of view…
A: As a person he was very complex and had sexual problems. He had problems with people coming very near him, be it his family or Meera. That explains his problems with his children and Kasturba; he feared intimacy. A psychoanalyst can only explain illness, not greatness.
Where, then, does Gandhi’s greatness lie?
Gandhi is the Indian icon. There’s no one who matches him. I would agree with Einstein’s statement that posterity would find it difficult to believe such a man actually lived on this planet.
Somehow he is dismissed by young India. That’s sad. He’s become something to be used by “Munnabhai”, for instance. As for explaining his greatness, I will take his words for it. He said of wanting to follow the spiritual path; everything is secondary. Even non-violence is not a strategy, unless there is love behind it; unless you love the person you protest against, it means nothing. He wanted to love others, much further than tolerate.
I don’t know how successful he was or would have been as a politician, probably not much. He was more of a spiritual person acting in the world. People sensed that there was something unusual behind him, that there wasn’t any hatred or manipulations; there was purity and they could sense it. Lots of people, saints for instance, have that kind of purity, but not everyone could be Gandhi.
In your second novel, ‘Ecstasy’, you modelled your protagonist, Gopal, on Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
What struck me most about Ramakrishna was his freedom. He broke conventions in such complete ways; he had the freedom of crossing the gender boundaries. There was nothing new about it though, as saints like Chaitanya, long before him, too had cross-dressed in their devotion to the lord. Even the gods themselves have crossed the gender boundaries in Hinduism; our mythologies have several such tales, of Vishnu, Arjuna…
Our gender boundaries, culturally, are not stiff; though, unfortunately, that is not the case today. Tolerance was our biggest strength, becoming less tolerant is not Indian. The biggest strength of Hinduism is tolerance; I am saddened when it is regarded as weakness. The traditional Hindu is much more tolerant, that in fact is the biggest attraction of Hinduism. I am proud to say I am a Hindu because of that; almost everything is acceptable and I wish that quality would not go away.
You said that “Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy” in The Indians: Portrait of a People?
Whenever an Indian sees somebody, he makes several distinctions; the first is whether the person is male or female, then older or younger and then higher or lower. This is peculiar to India and it will take long to get out of it; it has been built into our psyche over thousands of years. But there has been a change with the coming of Islam and the brotherhood it advocated and Christianity questioning hierarchy. The democratic movements in the West also questioned hierarchy.
Talking of democracy, were you surprised by the rejection of Hilary Clinton in favour of Barack Obama?
I was; I would have thought the race barrier would have been stronger than the gender barrier. Obama offers a lot of hope, but I wonder what will happen when the elections come. If Obama wins, I will really be surprised but be happy that America has changed.
Yes, women have ruled democracies in South Asia, but we shouldn’t forget those women have been part of a hierarchical society. And caste plays a significant part. In a country like India, the feeling is: a Brahmin woman is better than a lower caste male. We don’t mind a woman ruling us as long as she is of a higher caste. The biggest thing would be if Mayawati becomes the Prime Minister.
Font: www.hindu.com
Software helps boost cognitive function
Beginning in January, CHP members who are 65 years or older will be able to order a software called InSight, a PositScience program designed to speed up and sharpen visual processing and memory, important parts of overall brain fitness. There is no additional out-of-pocket cost for CHP members.
"We found out about PositScience and actually looked at a lot of their data and literature, and it appeared that this was a program that would benefit our senior members," said Dr. Nancy Van Vessem, CHP's chief medical officer.
Studies ongoing for some time show that with the right drills, the user can improve cognitive function, thereby reversing the natural decline that occurs with aging.
"What we realize is that how well people do in many, many ways has to do with how well they can maintain their cognitive function," Van Vessem said. For members of the health plan, that equates to better quality of life.
"It's part of what we call a brain fitness program," she added. "Just like we want people to maintain their physical functioning, we think it's important for people to maintain their brain functioning."
A typical InSight activity on the computer exercises a certain brain function. In the part called "Bird Safari" the user exercises his or her visual precision by locating specific birds in the peripheral vision after they flash very quickly on the screen.
"I was most impressed by the studies," Van Vessem said. One in particular was the ACTIVE Study, which stands for Advanced Cognitive Training in the Independent and Vital Elderly. It involved 2,800 participants across the country and was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
"Actually, what it shows was after doing the training, that there was a big effect in the ability to take in information and the speed with which that information was used," she said.
Neuroscientist Dr. Joe Hardy explained that the exercises are done in 10-minute blocks. A session is 40 minutes, or four of the blocks.
Results documented were based on 10 hours of training over about a 10-week period. "You see the results immediately," he said. "In other words, you see those benefits to the speed of processing and the useful field of view, taking information in more quickly and efficiently. Those are evident immediately," he added. "Really what we see is a change in the trajectory of aging."
For years, cognitive decline was believed to be irreversible, but Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco and PositScience founder, and his team suspected that the brain does change. With the right stimulation, it can expand and form more neuro-connections.
Font: www.tallahassee.com
"We found out about PositScience and actually looked at a lot of their data and literature, and it appeared that this was a program that would benefit our senior members," said Dr. Nancy Van Vessem, CHP's chief medical officer.
Studies ongoing for some time show that with the right drills, the user can improve cognitive function, thereby reversing the natural decline that occurs with aging.
"What we realize is that how well people do in many, many ways has to do with how well they can maintain their cognitive function," Van Vessem said. For members of the health plan, that equates to better quality of life.
"It's part of what we call a brain fitness program," she added. "Just like we want people to maintain their physical functioning, we think it's important for people to maintain their brain functioning."
A typical InSight activity on the computer exercises a certain brain function. In the part called "Bird Safari" the user exercises his or her visual precision by locating specific birds in the peripheral vision after they flash very quickly on the screen.
"I was most impressed by the studies," Van Vessem said. One in particular was the ACTIVE Study, which stands for Advanced Cognitive Training in the Independent and Vital Elderly. It involved 2,800 participants across the country and was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
"Actually, what it shows was after doing the training, that there was a big effect in the ability to take in information and the speed with which that information was used," she said.
Neuroscientist Dr. Joe Hardy explained that the exercises are done in 10-minute blocks. A session is 40 minutes, or four of the blocks.
Results documented were based on 10 hours of training over about a 10-week period. "You see the results immediately," he said. "In other words, you see those benefits to the speed of processing and the useful field of view, taking information in more quickly and efficiently. Those are evident immediately," he added. "Really what we see is a change in the trajectory of aging."
For years, cognitive decline was believed to be irreversible, but Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco and PositScience founder, and his team suspected that the brain does change. With the right stimulation, it can expand and form more neuro-connections.
Font: www.tallahassee.com
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