Ideas About Life

Group Consciousness

Have you ever been walking somewhere and you felt like someone was looking at you? And at that moment, you turn and someone is there. We write things like this off as being a coincidence but is it?

Scientists say that we only use 5-10% of our brain power. Maybe one of the abilities we have is awareness of group consciousness but we are just not practiced enough to notice it all the time. I personally believe in group consciousness. Through my experience, that is what we are and it explains why we all care about each other doing well: I know this doesn't always show up in everyday life but watch when people are really in need and we have all seen strangers going to the help of others.

What might be the ramifications of this:

• We realize there are no boundaries between us.
• When we think or imagine, we know we are communicating and sending out energy that starts these thoughts in motion. And we know we are asking from a source that want us to receive.  

  

The ability of intent. The ability of team work.

What is the power of intent and people? If we all decided to work together across the Earth, we could achieve incredible goals. What type of achievements might be possible?

• 4 months -1 yr to solve all food problems
• 4 - 5 yrs to reach equal socioeconomics standards globally
• 4 - 7 yrs to stop all wars
• 6 - 10 yrs to create sustainable energy for 90% of our needs
• 8 - 12 yrs to cure 90% of all diseases

If it took 4 years to start, imagine if we could be looking back from 2024 and have achieved all of that. What kind of statement is that. And it is possible. How? I am not sure exactly but I know that everything that is happening on this Earth is of our decision, either individually or communally. Therefore, it is in our ability to change anything we want.

Where to start? Join different organizations or start your own to promote whatever gets you excited. Or get involved in government. It is in our intention.

Note: I know that the subject matter of world problems is sometimes considered bland talk, thoughts of hippies or philosophers or pie-in-the-sky talk that can "never really happen". But this is all possible and we stand at a time when change can happen.

Driven by Pleasures & Pain

Woke up this morning? Ate some breakfast? Decided to put off a few house chores until later? Everything we ever have done or will do is because of Pleasure and Pain. We are sentinel beings and all of our actions are about the senses. Whether it is pleasure in mind or pleasure in body, all of our actions are driven by this.

Either we want to heighten pleasure or avoid pain. Think about everything you have done this week. What drove us. Why is this important to know? Because it helps us understand our motives and bring awareness to our action.

Fountain of youth (no. 1)

Laughter. One of the best tools for health and vitality. I have thought about this before but I was watching my brother's dog the other day and something interesting caught my eye. Every time my brother and I would laugh, no matter how small, the dog would wag his tale. It is almost like there is something intrinsically good in laughter or its energy.

What is our DLR (daily laughing ratio)? Underneath are some interesting points. Pretty fantastic stuff:

- A recent study showed that pre-school-aged children laugh up to 300 times a day, but by the time we reach adulthood, we laugh a mere 17 times per day on average!

- University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore: a study, which is the first to indicate that laughter may help prevent heart disease, found that people with heart disease were 40 percent less likely to laugh in a variety of situations compared to people of the same age without heart disease.

- American College of Cardiology: researchers found that laughing increased blood flow by more than 20 percent - a similar effect to that of aerobic activity. The positive effect of laughing lasted for 30-45 minutes.

- Gives an excellent internal massage to the digestive tract and enhances blood supply to important internal organs like the liver, spleen, pancreas, kidneys and adrenal glands.

Have a great day.

http://stress.about.com/od/stresshealth/a/laughter.htm

http://www.umm.edu/features/laughter.htm

Oops, wrong shaped model

What if our global economic models are shaped wrong? We hear a lot about consumer confidence, import ratios and the DOW market changes. What do they all mean?

Our economy is based on our countries and companies selling more. What if people have already bought enough? And I know, some people say it is impossible to shop too much but excluding these shopaholics, lets take a look at this.

Lets create a new index. It is an index that tracks people's and businesses' natural purchasing behavior: the Natural Purchasing Index (NPI). If the NPI equals 1.0 and global productions of goods is 1.2, and if countries and companies are evaluated on selling at that level, then they will not meet analysts short-term expectations.

Either the NPI will need to be brought up or our expectations for countries and companies will need to be lowered otherwise they won't get the valuation they want for investors.

As globalization becomes more of a natural phenomenon, more companies will create more products and services. Where is the point where we stop creating goods without considering global planning. I believe that there is a NPI and it does not match current expectations and this disharmony causes more market turmoil, job losses and socioeconomic pressure than is needed.

Awareness Meditation

If you could increase the time in your week by 15-20%, sleep deeper and rejuvenate yourself better as you rest, would you do it. If all you had to do was use 10 minutes of your week to achieve this, would you see that as valuable. That can be the impact of doing awareness meditation twice a week for 5 minutes.

Here is my challenge to you then. Try it for two weeks and see what happens. The growing data of the value of meditation is increasing each day and I believe it is one of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves.

Quick overview of awareness meditation:

Take thirty seconds to a minute to allow yourself to relax. Then take two easy breaths and begin being aware of the sensation of the breath in your nostril(s) as you breathe naturally. Put all of your awareness on the sensation you feel inside your nostril and at the rim of your nostril as the breath moves in and out.

This is the foundation of awareness meditation:

1. Bring your awareness to the sensation of your breath as it moves in and out of nostril(s).
2. Bring awareness to anything that the mind has wandered to. Simply note what it is.
3. With compassion, bring your awareness back to the breath.

Once you start meditating, you might notice that your mind wanders/moves to one of six sensations: thoughts, feelings, sounds, smells, body sensations and light through your eyelids. Your awareness may go to things such as thoughts about whether are you doing this right, what you need to do later, friends, work and the sort. You might also hear sounds or feel things in your body. Simply be aware of what has captured your mind’s awareness and then bring your awareness back to the breath.

Important note: it is not essential to clear your mind. This is one of the great hurdles for people starting meditation. This will happen naturally as you practice. Simply notice the idea you mind has wandered to and return to the awareness of the breath.

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If you would like more info on how to practice, a two-page document is below.

Download Awareness_Meditation.pdf

Stop writing

I got an email from someone yesterday suggesting I stop writing. I thought is was interesting. He said that there is enough talking out there and that more action needs to be happening. I sort of agree with him and I don't. I will write a little bit more about this tonight. Have a great day :-)

Follow-up from this yesterday: I agree that talk without action might not be useful. On the other hand, I am writing for three reasons:

• I believe words can be some of the greatest catalysts for imagination, change and action.
• I have been asked a lot where I got some of my thoughts and realized that they come from 20 years of learning and that some of the material is difficult to find. A blog is a simply way to communicate them.
• Doing the writing forces me to get clarity on ideas before I share them.

Something / Nothing: Incredible Life

How incredible is life? Very incredible.

Have you taken a moment lately to notice the magic of laughing with a friend, the taste of a raspberry or the feeling of kissing with your lover.

A few years ago, I asked myself that question: how beautiful, incredible and special is life. I had an intuition that I could use reason to figure it out. So I asked if there was a way that I could be 100% certain, and all of a sudden, the idea of God / No God came into my mind.

It seems that the importance of life lays in the fact that all of life is either made by God or a greater energy or it isn't. Why is that important? Here is how I worked through it using a mixture of daydreaming and reason:

If after dying, God appeared and asked me, "Robert, how did you enjoy your time on Earth". I would say it was good. And if he asked me if I would have acted any different if I truly knew I was his son and everything around us was him. This would have caused me to pause but I believe my answer would have been yes. I would have looked at life different and stripped off any boundaries about what is possible.

The second option: If right before dying, you realized, there was nothing else, would you have lived your life differently? Look around you at everything you can see and feel. There is equally as much possibility that this was a fluke but what an incredible fluke. We laugh, we cry, we breathe, we love. If there is no God, it is truly magical what we are experiencing and every moment is infinitely precious.

If we take these ideas as truths and not as a theory, it is quite powerful. Either we are children of God or we are a very unique occurrence in a vast universe. Either way, it says that life and we are very very beautiful.

Have a beautiful day :-)