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The Science Behind 2012
Past Lives
2012
What is the True Nature of Reality
The Basics of Quantum Healing
Million Dollar Idea With The Law of Attraction
Don't Take It Personally
Reiki on Dr. Oz (TV Show)
The Vibrational Energy Of Color And Aroma Therapy

 

 

The Science Behind 2012
Interview with Gregg Braden, New York Times
best-selling author of Fractal Time

By Laurie Nadel, Ph.D. / Host of The Dr. Laurie Show

If you are curious to know if there is any science behind the prophecies of 2012, scientist and New York Times best-selling author Gregg Braden has the information that will put it into real-time perspective. Geological time, that is.

After 22 years of scientific research, Braden’s new book Fractal Time explains why 2012 marks the end of a 5,125-year cycle.

Did you know that the Earth is presently moving across the equator of the Milky Way? When we talk about the changes that are coming up in 2012, some of those visible changes here on Earth are apparently in response to the astronomical changes that are being created by the Earth’s crossing of the Equator of the Milky Way. In an interview with Dr. Laurie Nadel, Gregg Braden talks about the Mayan prophecies of 2012 and what they mean to you.

Q: You say that 2012 is not the end of the world but the end of a world age—a 5,125-year cycle of time?

Gregg Braden: Some people speak about 2012 like any other news story that you hear about every day. Others who may not have heard anything about 2012 say, "What’s the big deal about a date?"

Q: Maybe they think it’s like Y2K.

Gregg Braden: Precisely! I was an engineer, working in the defense industry in the 1980s when I first began hearing about the year 2012. Some people were saying, literally, "It’s the end of the world." Others said, "It’s the end of the world as we know it." And some even said, "It’s the beginning of a thousand years of peace."

Everyone I asked had a different opinion. What I discovered as a scientist was that the only way that I would know what 2012 was all about was to understand the people who created the calendars that tell us about 2012. And the only way to understand them was to understand great cycles of time.

Q: What do you mean when you say, "cycles of time?"

Gregg Braden: Our own science now is telling us that we, on this planet, our lives, and our planet in general, are under the influence of great cycles of time; cycles within cycles, within cycles. Some of the cycles we know about, like the 24-hour cycle of the day for day and night, or the 28-days of a woman’s cycle. But the great cycles cover such vast periods of time that we don’t remember them from one civilization to the next. Our present great cycle is a 5,125-year-long cycle linked to an astronomical event that occurred in the year 3114 B.C.

Q: Now, that’s almost incomprehensible for people—3114 B.C.

Gregg Braden: It ends on December 21, the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2012 A.D.

Q: And in that moment or on that day, the sun, you say, is going to move into an alignment with the equator of the Milky Way.

Gregg Braden: What happens during this time—and we have to be really careful when we talk about this—there is an alignment that’s occurring because Earth does this little tip and this little wobble over long periods of time. As Earth tips and wobbles in its orbit, it changes the scenery of the night sky. It changes our orientation in space with respect to the center of our own galaxy –of our Milky Way galaxy.

Now, our own scientists have discovered—and they are publishing this openly—that the center of our Milky Way galaxy is a very powerful source of magnetic energy. The term they use is "magnetic filiments" that radiate from the center of our Milky Way. Where we are, in relation to that source of energy, has a huge effect on planet Earth. Sometimes we’re further away, and we’re tilted away from it, and the effect is less. Sometimes we’re closer or we’re tilted toward it, and the effect is greater.

On December 21st in the year 2012, we have a straight shot—a linear shot, unobstructed by any other planets or any other bodies in the solar system--where we have direct access to that field of energy.

Q: Now, does this mean that the magnetic poles are going to shift, and we’re going to have three days of darkness?

Gregg Braden: There is no scientific evidence to support that.

Q: I’m glad to hear that...

Gregg Braden: There has been a lot of speculation about it. The magnetic poles have certainly reversed in the past. I can tell you as a former geologist that we can see that in the geologic record, 14 times in the last 4-1/2 million years.

Each time, before the magnetic fields reversed, they had to weaken to a certain point before that reversal happened. Even though we have seen a decrease in the magnetic field strength of the Earth over the last 100 years or so, it is still so much higher than the measurement that is needed for it to reverse that the probability of this happening in the next three years between 2009 and 2012 or even a year or two after, it looks like it’s a slim probability. We’ve got so many other things to worry about.

Q: Are there new discoveries that show that we can think of time as an essence that follows the same rhythms and cycles that govern everything from particles to galaxies? Can we think of these things that happen in time as places within cycles?

Gregg Braden: The bottom line is that time is essentially a wave that is moving in one direction. Right now it’s moving from the present to the future. So, the seeds for things that are happening today and events like 2012 that are yet to happen have already occurred in the past.

If we know where to look into the past, it gives us a good idea of what we can expect in the present and the future. Time’s waves follow natural rhythms, cycles, and natural progressions. This means that we can measure, calculate, and predict when the seeds – the conditions -- for an event are going to happen again, and again, and again. This means that we can take the year 2012 calculate backwards, using natural rhythms to the times in our history when the seed for 2012 was planted. Looking at the seed, we can determine when the patterns and events that will happen in 2012 were set into motion. We can go into the geologic record to see what was happening then on the planet. Or we can go into the archaeological record to see what was happening to people to give us a really good idea of what we can expect over these next few years.

Q You talk about how the conditions for the Mayan end-date of 2012 have already happened in our past.

Gregg Braden: Absolutely!

Q: What can we do to prepare for what’s going to happen next in 2012?

Gregg Braden: To prepare for whatever is happening, we have to understand what it is that’s going to happen. This is the value of knowing precisely where to look in the past to understand what we’re about to experience or what we’re already experiencing now.

Q: Now, you talked about Pearl Harbor and 2001 as being years that were kind of hot dates when, in fact, the United States was, both times, attacked. What are some of the other hot dates that you refer to in the book?

Gregg Braden: For 2012, the records show that when we’ve look into the history of the Earth, into the ice cores in Antarctica, for example, it preserved a record of Earth’s past. When we look into those ice cores at the dates that are the fractals or the seed patterns for 2012, they tell us that in those dates the magnetic fields of the Earth became weaker. The energy from the sun was stronger so that the ice on the poles began to melt. The oceans began to rise, the climate began to shift, and the weather patterns began to change.

Q: We are experiencing that now.

Gregg Braden: Precisely, and that is the whole point. Has the Earth gone through a big change? Yes. Does it mean that something is wrong or something is broken? No! It always happens when we reach this point in a great cycle. When we are this distance from the energy source at the center of our Milky Way, when Earth is tilted and oriented the way it is, apparently, this is what always happens.

Therefore, to a large extent, we are already experiencing the great changes that so many have predicted. We are already seeing cities wiped off the face of the Earth near shallow coastlines. We are already seeing major magnitude earthquakes and tsunamis. We are already seeing forest fires ranging them across vast, open spaces. We are seeing millions of people die from disease. The United States is blessed in that we’re not experiencing as much here as in other parts of the world. But such change can happen anywhere and everywhere.

Q: The take-away message…?

Gregg Braden: It is good for us to prepare and to help other people that are having the problems of feeling the brunt of these changes. But here is the core: The geologic records show that the changes are intense; absolutely intense, but that they’re brief. They don’t last for generation, after generation, after generation. The archaeological records show that when past civilizations reach the point in their cycle where we are in right now, they made a mistake that we don’t want to repeat today.

Q: What was that mistake?

Gregg Braden: When the world began to change, civilizations of the past didn’t understand the change. They began to fight one another for the resources. In that violent competition for what was left when the world was changing, everyone lost. Nobody won. The civilizations collapsed. For example, Egypt’s 20th dynasty absolutely collapsed during precisely this period of time and no one even knew about them until thousands of years later.

We are at a point right now where we must choose to work together for this brief period of time to bring ourselves through this time of change. If we make the mistakes of the past and everyone loses. This why I feel that this book is so important right now.

Q: A lot of people kind of feel helpless when they start listening to stories about ancient civilizations ollapsing. They think about tsunamis and Katrina, and it’s very hard for people not to feel overwhelmed by the great scope of planetary movements and fractal time. For what can people hope?

Gregg Braden: On my website, www.greggbraden.com you will find a link to the Global Coherence Initiative.. When you click on that link, you can learn about the science-based initiative that allows each of us to learn a way of being that actually influences the fields of the Earth. In other words, you can learn how to have a positive impact on how we come through this time in history. This project is all about our relationship to the Earth through heart-based living.

Q: What is heart-based living?

Gregg Braden: In the past few years, our own science has made a radical, revolutionary discovery that changes everything about the way we think of ourselves and the world. What they found is that when we create heart-based feelings of gratitude, appreciation, care—literally, using the muscle of the heart to create these feelings—what we’re actually doing is generating a magnetic field inside our bodies that is part of the magnetic field of the Earth that undergoes the change.

The Earth’s magnetic field rises, falls, and regulates everything from climate to ice caps and sea levels. This magnetic field joins all life on Earth from a blade of grass, to an ant, to a goldfish, to a hamster, to us. When many of us come together and create a common feeling, that experience is called "coherence." "Coherence" can actually be measured. It is 0.10 Hertz. That is the measurement of the coherence created between the heart and the brain.

Scientists first found out about this during 9/11 when our satellites 22,000 miles in space began to register changes in the magnetic field of the Earth, when humans were having feelings about September 11th and the World Trade Center. This is a surprise to science. They asked, "Why would people experiencing 9/11, why would that possibly affect the magnetic fields of the Earth? There’s no connection, right?" Well, wrong. They found that there is a connection and this has led to what is called the Global Coherence Initiative Project.

Scientists are now building the sensors that can measure these magnetic fields and put them up onto the website where you can watch the fields change everyday in real time. In addition to measuring this field, the Global Coherence Project aims is to teach people how to create coherence in their everyday lives. It’s not a hard thing to do, and you don’t have to change your lives to do it. You don’t have to change your meditations, your prayers, or any practice. It’s a way of being in our hearts as we go throughout the day that’s very easy to learn.

Q: So, it’s kind of an awareness or biofeedback-type training.

Gregg Braden: That is part of it. When we create this coherence inside our bodies, it triggers about 1,400 biochemical changes. Anti-aging processes begin. DHEA level—the life-giving hormone—surges in our bodies. Our immune systems become really strong. We think more clearly. We become less aggressive. The magnetic fields of the heart are now being documented. We are facing the greatest challenges of 5,000 years of recorded human history. As we face the great challenges of our time, we are asking, "What can we do?" Here’s what we can do: We can learn the language of the magnetic field that is creating the changes and help bring that field from chaos into order.

We can influence the very fields that are creating the change. The Mayans cannot tell us how this cycle ends because we are writing the ending to this cycle while we’re living it right now. The fear about 2012 is stressing a lot of people but we have the ability to regulate the magnetic field by regulating the way that we work together through our hearts. The key is: we’ve got to work together to do it.

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PAST LIVES
By Ross Bishop


When you look into the face of a child the first thing you see is innocence. But if you look deeper, you will see more. Although we are often not aware of it, each of us carries the memories and unresolved pain of our previous incarnations.

Let's look at your situation: You came to Earth to resolve the issues that interfere with the acceptance of your eternal self. That interference surfaces as a set of beliefs that block your ability to hold compassion, especially toward yourself. When you are unable to hold compassion, you must live from your ego.

Living from the ego is guaranteed to create problems both for you and with the various people in your life. You make unspoken agreements with these people to mutually withhold unconditional love, but that does not blunt the pain and inner emptiness you end up feeling. It is through these feelings and the conflicts they create that The Universe tries to make you aware of your false beliefs and the behaviors they generate. If you recall from the previous article, we looked at how those are created. When you don't respond with compassion to life, The Universe finds ways to ramp up the intensity of your experience, encouraging you more forcefully to look at what you are doing.

If your conflicts are significant and unresolved when you pass from this life, the imprint of those unresolved experiences travel with you. This makes you more sensitive to this kind of problem when it reoccurs, in your next life and it will. You weren't able to finish your learning in the previous situation, so The Universe gives you additional opportunities to work through your issues and learn compassion.

Carrying pain from one lifetime to another is known as Karma, and it is often misunderstood. Karma is not about guilt or punishment. You are not punished in the future for your past behavior. Rather, The Universe takes what you haven't learned about living from compassion from one lifetime to shape the events of your next life to better focus your efforts. So, there is a "carry forward," but it's not punishment. It is to encourage you to learn so that you will not have to keep repeating the same cycle. And, this will continue until you are able to fully live in what I call "The God Space" (the place of complete compassion).

If you recall from the previous article, because you have free will, The Universe can only encourage you to find the truth for yourself. So in that context, let's look at how karma works:

Pretend it's the year 1650, and you live in the forest near a village somewhere in Europe. You are a student of herbal healing. You grow herbs and people from the nearby villages come to you for help.
Your heart's basically in the right place, but you also feel an undercurrent of self-doubt. You do good work, but the gratitude of the people starts to affect the hurt little girl inside who never felt really loved or appreciated. You develop false pride and an attitude.

The local priests hear of your work and become suspicious. In the first place, churches don't like competition and secondly, Church doctrine at the time is to urge people to accept their afflictions as punishment from God for their sins. You, on the other hand, offer healing as God's gift through nature.

The priests urge the people to find greater faith to deal with their afflictions and denounce herbal healing as suspect. Wounded by the criticism, you speak out in your defense. Unfortunately, even though your cause is just, you are also driven by wounded pride.

There is confrontation, positions harden and the situation escalates. The result is condemnation, torture to gain a confession, a trial for witchcraft and finally a burning at the stake. At the end you are wondering where God has been, since you feel wrongly persecuted, and do not feel that you have done anything wrong. . .

Yes, the priests were wrong, but this isn't about them. The priests have their own learning from this experience, and you are helping them with that, but  for you, this affair was created to help you see what happens to you when you feel powerless, unlovable and helpless. You will carry the issues, the beliefs and the fears underlying these unresolved issues into your subsequent lives. And these forces will determine the events of those lives so that you will have the opportunity to resolve your false beliefs and your ego vulnerabilities.

So today, three centuries later, what happens? First, the events of your childhood will amplify the issues you brought in around the misuse of power and your feelings of powerlessness and victimization. Your parents may be authoritarian or demanding, for example. However it plays out, you will get set up to react strongly around those issues. The Universe will continue to create life experiences until you see through the futility of living from your ego. No matter how long it takes, you must eventually grow frustrated with the conflict and turmoil that gains you absolutely nothing.

Eventually you will grow weary of the stress and conflict and begin to search for alternatives. It is then that you begin to disassemble the beliefs that drive your ego. And when that happens, real healing can occur. Eventually you will see through your fear and accept the truth about yourself. The power of the process is that you come to the truth on your own. Doing it yourself makes the truth unshakable. Incidentally, along the way, you may also become angry with God. It is a difficult process and it feels unfair a lot of the time.

This is an experiential process. You cannot learn it from books. Books and teachers can help show you the way, but the learning comes from what you do - from your life experiences and how you respond to them.

You can wait for life to bounce you around until you are forced to make the transition or, if you want to advance your development and sidestep a lot of the pain, you can learn to work with, not against, the issues that life presents. The shamanic journey process was developed many centuries ago and has established itself as the most effective way to accomplish this exploration. You can also use the journey process to also travel back to your troubling past lives and work with what happened back then.

I have written extensively about the shamanic journey process and how to use it in both Healing The Shadow and in my most recent book Journey to Enlightenment. I have also recorded a guided version of the shamanic journey process on CD. These are all available from: www.rossbishop.com.

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2012
by Ross Bishop


There is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the 2012 prophecies. Virtually every oracle predicts a time of tumult and chaos. Some even predict the end of days. These are incredibly charged issues, and they raise powerful emotional responses – as they are designed to. As we draw closer to that time, your concerns, fears and reactions are likely to escalate. You may experience anxiety and find yourself reacting more intensely than in the past. Those around you will likely be doing the same.

It is easy to get lost in the tumult and chaos of the moment, but it is important to remember that it is simply an acceleration of a process that has been in place for quite some time.

Humankind, for all its slips, failures and missteps has been on an inexorable march to live closer to the ideals of the God Space. Consider the history of issues like democracy, slavery or women’s rights over just the last few hundred years. It can appear to be a very flawed process, filled with conflict, roadblocks and bloodshed, but over the course of time, even with all our dead ends and false starts, our conscious awareness has grown.

Like the rest of humanity, you are here for a reason. You are here to learn to live from the God Space. You came from an unenlightened space and are transitioning into a more enlightened one. The challenge is not simply to glimpse the awakened state, or even to experience it, but to be it.

Enlightenment is the product of healing inner woundedness. It is the state we naturally enter when we leave fear, self-doubt and anxiety behind. In order to accomplish this, Christ went into the desert to deal with temptation. Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and confronted his inner demons. Real shamanic training requires seekers to confront their inner darkness. Life has
been designed to offer you that same opportunity.

Part of you lives in darkness because it is convinced that it does not deserve God’s grace. Your inner beliefs deflect the truth away from inner woundedness that you have been unwilling to address. These beliefs are not based in the truth and they separate you from the eternal. As long as you are convinced that you are unworthy, for example, your belief places a barrier between yourself and The Creator. Ultimate truth has no words. It is magnificent beyond description. Although it can be known, it is not and cannot be, a human-made idea or concept.

Thus far on your journey you have had a good deal of freedom regarding the confrontation of your doubts and fears. Conditions are changing and you are going to lose some of that flexibility. There will be greater pressure to address what you have thus far avoided. The process will not change, but the pace will. It is this shift, sweeping through all of humanity, that will create the changes predicted by the prophecies.

One thing that causes us difficulty is that transformation cannot occur without the destruction of what has been. Creation is a destructive process, taking that which exists and transforming it into something new. You cannot have a breakthrough without a breakdown. An acorn must be transformed in order for an oak to grow. The egg must be “sacrificed” to produce a chick. Old ideas must “die” before new ones can succeed them.

All transformation creates discomfort. The loss of familiar gives rise to a great deal of resistance. The amount of pain you experience will be related to the significance of the change and your attachment to your old beliefs. We make the process more difficult than it needs to be, but new behavior of any kind naturally raises anxiety.

Transformation is a road that passes through hell on its way to the light, or as Shakespeare wrote, “Such a foul sky clears not without a storm.” Even people who have had deep and profound spiritual awakenings can hold beliefs and unresolved inner pain that powerfully inhibit their ability to awaken.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, "Nothing endures but change." Heraclitus was speaking of the Earth, for here everything is born, grows, ages, withers, dies and decays. Destruction and renewal occur in order to sustain the viability of the greater whole.

If you think about the weather, nature is constantly rebalancing the environment. It uses the wind, storms, rain, lightning – even hurricanes and tornadoes, to shift energy around. These are all local disturbances that serve to rebalance the larger whole. And nature must disturb what is in order to create change. Standing on the fault line of an earthquake certainly does not feel harmonious, but it is one of the ways the integrity of the planet is maintained. How you experience change is a matter of perspective.

Consider the grains of sand on a beach. The grains are in certain relationships. Then a wave crashes in, sweeping up a gazillion grains of sand, reordering them, rearranging them, tumbling them, banging them up against one another, sandblasting everything on the beach. In that moment of chaos it is “hell” for the sand – confusion, disorder, clashes – up is down, down is up. The water is murky; no one can see what is happening. The old order has been obliterated. No one is certain about the future.

Then as suddenly as it came, the wave washes away, leaving in its wake a new order. Every grain of sand has been realigned and everything on the beach must adapt to the new order. And, although the grains of sand have been thrown into total chaos, the beach itself has just been reorganized and cleansed so that it will remain viable. Chaos reorders everything in creating a new order. Chaos is efficient. Chaos is externally imposed, obliterating the myth that you control your life.

In order to heal, you must be willing to let go of your beliefs and question your past assumptions. Otherwise you will cling to beliefs that distort your perception and limit the expression of your eternal self. The changes foretold in the 2012 prophecies emanate from this conflict. This is a very large subject and I have devoted two books and numerous articles to helping people address the issues relevant to it. You can find Healing The Shadow and Journey To Enlightenment (and articles) on my web site (www.rossbishop.com).

Dealing with internal and external conflicts teaches you two very valuable lessons – first, how not to create them and secondly, how not to get sucked into them. And those lessons can only be learned through direct experience, by failing to “do it right,” which means experiencing tumult, chaos and pain. The secret is to learn to be “in” life, but to have awareness so that you are not “of” it.

I do not say this to excuse disharmonious or dysfunctional behavior. Dysfunctional behavior has its own built-in consequence called pain. When you act contrary to the God Space, it is going to hurt! Hurt someone and you feel badly. You can bury those feelings for a time, but they eventually catch up with you.

The trap to be wary of is that you can of course, always do better. And yes, when you achieve enlightenment, you will be at peace. The world may not change, but the way you relate to it will. Enlightenment is not a destination, it is a way of life. It is a process that must be learned, practiced and refined after your interfering fears have been dispatched.

The struggle to achieve the God Space is not new. It has been with us for thousands of years. It is the essential struggle of human existence. Ideally, we could receive guidance about it from our religions, but the lessons of the great teachers have become so corrupted over time that they no longer hold much relevance.

The way to heal inner pain and shift out of egocentric existence is revealed to us in the old stories, commonly called fairy tales. These are the stories that guided our ancestors for thousands of years before the invention of organized religion and industrial capitalism. The undertaking exemplified in these stories is commonly referred to as the Hero or Heroine’s Journey. You will find these stories secreted away in the children’s section of your local library.

Another source that illustrates the hero’s/heroine’s journey are the Greek tragedies. The Greeks understood the importance of transitioning from the ego to living in harmony with the rest of the Universe. They knew that humans grew and were strengthened by adversity when faced with wisdom and courage.

The tragedies typically depict the downfall of a hero or heroine through a combination of hubris (ego) or fate (the will of the gods). The hero or heroine then has to undergo a trial and a transformation: a revelation or recognition (anagnorisis - "knowing again" or "knowing back") regarding ultimate truth (the God Space). Moses Hadas, a great classical scholar, said of the Greek tragedies, "Their gloom is no fatalistic pessimism but an adult confrontation of reality, and their emphasis is not on the grimness of life but on the capacity of great figures to adequate themselves to it." Aristotle spoke of the recognition as, "The change from ignorance to awareness . . ."

We grow and change when we confront fear and heal it. Otherwise life is merely a struggle, and we typically get consumed by the struggle and learn little (except how to struggle). And that gives us some clues regarding the 2012 prophecies.

The process of human transformation is not going to change. The 2012 prophecies change nothing in terms of the dynamics we are already familiar with. For centuries, God has said in effect, “Come, I want you to fly.” But the risk feels too great, and we demur. But God, knowing the truth, continues to encourage us. Each day we are urged in a hundred different ways to hold the
truth and move to the God Space. There are lessons. We call them problems.God sees them as growth opportunities. And when we resist, the intensity of the process increases. The result is that we sometimes hurt. This is a nudge to move us on our way, not pain to punish, but pain to move us out of our complacency.

The dramatic shift will be in the pace and in the pressure for change. Nothing different will be asked of you that has not been asked of you repeatedly in the past. But the changes will add a good deal of intensity to what has been taking place all along. Certainly you can wait until circumstances force you to change, but that is really doing it the hard way.

And it will be a time of unprecedented change. Some of it will appear as chaos, but it is important to remember that it is not random chaos. It is divine chaos. From the strictly human perspective, it will look like massive disruption, but everything that happens here has a purpose, a divine purpose, whether we understand it or not. That has always been true, but with the intensity and pace of events escalating, clarity about what is happening will help considerably.

In the past, your reluctance to shift to the God Space has only caused you discomfort. The period between now and 2012 is going to add dramatically to the pressure to make those changes and to the consequences of your resistance. Resistance is going to become a good deal more painful, putting a limit on your ability to defer.

Losing the ability to defer generates a powerful reaction in people. This is intended. It goes to the core of why we are here. Our resistance is driven by a core belief (often unconscious), that if we surrender to the God Space we will be found wanting and therefore rejected. This is an important topic, and I will address it in future articles. But for now, let me say that the fear of not being worthy, driven largely by our past-life experiences, generates a powerful resistance to what is being asked of us today. We are not able to trust.

When people ask me what the future portends, I tell them, “You are going to die.” That may seem crass, but it is the truth. It also has little to do with 2012. I remind people that we all are going to die. The events surrounding 2012 may change what we have come to expect regarding longevity, but we have really never had anything to say about that anyway! The only thing any of us has ever had is the freedom to decide how we are going to respond to life. Anything else is illusion. You don’t know whether you are going to have tomorrow or the day after. You hope and pretend, but most people avoid dealing with the reality that fundamentally life is not, and has never been, in our control.


for against thy will wast thou formed,
and against thy will wast thou born,
and against thy will dost thou live,
and against thy will shalt thou die,

The Talmud: Treatise XII. The Fathers: Chapter IV

Just as for the grains of sand on our mythical beach, waves of change frequently wash through human society. And how we respond to those waves is a matter of perspective. We resist most of them, but once-in-a-while we get knocked over. The prophecies tell us that before long, not just a wave, but a tsunami will wash over humankind. The usual ebb and flow of change people have lived with, and rarely liked, will be supplanted by a massive reordering. Nothing will be the same. The word of the day will be chaos, but I remind you, that it is divine chaos. You will be asked, more intensely to be sure, to address what you have thus far been avoiding.

The question is, “How will you dance with life?” Will you become frightened and resist, or will you work with what is being asked of you and move closer to the God Space? If you can find the faith to trust what is happening, you can surrender and swim with the river. If you cannot, you will have to resist, and then be destined to flounder, swimming upstream and in pain until you change. And that is exhausting! It is an issue of trust. We call it faith.

I would like to tell you that you have a choice in all of this. You don’t. Resistance only increases the pain, leading eventually to a crisis and a breakdown – what we call disease. And this only brings you to essentially the same transformation you could have made before creating the crisis in the first place.

Over the centuries the Greek word “apokalupsis” or “apocalypse” has been distorted by the Apostle John’s misunderstanding of the coming transformation. “Apokalupsis” means “the uncovering, the discovery, the revealing.” We are about to be confronted with the uncovering, the discovery and the revealing of who we are, what we are and how we came to be here. I urge you to have faith - God didn’t create all this magnificence to simply turn it into a ball of cinders.

There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul
that has lost its way.
The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and
despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams.
Against this peril we can never surrender.
The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in
moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will
take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

The Book of G'Quon

Copyright©2008 Blue Lotus Press

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What is the True Nature of Reality?
The Basics of Quantum Healing
by Deepak Chopra, M.D.

What I hope to do this morning is to give you a brief glimpse into the quantum mechanical body-mind, to at least attempt to understand the exact nature of what the human body is like and also the exact nature of what the Cosmic Body is like.

We use terms like mind and body and universe, but what really is the exact nature of these things? What is the mind, what is the body, what's the exact nature of physical reality? As children, we always had questions like, "Where was I before I was born? What am I doing here? What happens after death? Am I confined to my physical body? Am I just a skin encapsulated ego in a bag of flesh and bones? What really happens to me? Do I have a local address? Where do I live in this universe?"

And it's interesting that science today is beginning to ask the same questions. After all science is the quest for the truth and if you're a real scientist, these are the questions that are most critical to us.

One of the interesting things that science has found, this should have been obvious all along, is that what we call perception, what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, is really the least reliable test of what reality really is. We cannot trust our senses at all!

After all, the senses tell us that the earth is flat and we don't believe that anymore. The senses tell us that the ground that we stand on is stationary and we know it's spinning at dizzying speeds and hurtling through outer space at thousands of miles an hour. The senses tell us things have a certain taste, smell, size, texture. Maybe that's not the way they really are.

There was an experiment done at Harvard Medical School about 20 years ago. A group of scientists took some kittens and brought them up in a room that had only horizontal stripes. All the visual stimuli in the room were horizontal. Another group of kittens was brought up in a room that had only vertical stripes. And when these kittens grew up to be wise old cats, it turns out that one group of cats could see only a horizontal world. The other group of cats could see only a vertical world. And this had nothing to do with the belief system of these cats.

It's a phenomenon that psychologists call Premature Cognitive Commitment. Premature, because we make it at a very early stage of our development. Cognitive, because that's how they cognize or see the world. And commitment, because it fixes us to a particular reality, it imprisons us in a fixed mode of perception.

There are many variations of these experiments. In India, when they train elephants, they take the baby elephant and tie it with an iron chain to a huge tree. Then they start cutting the size of the chain and the tree. Ultimately you can tie the elephant which a big animal now, with a flimsy rope to a green plant but the elephant is unable to escape. It's made a commitment in its body-mind that it's in a prison!

Or you can do another simple experiment. Take some flies and put them in a jar. After a while remove the lid from the jar and you'll find that most of the flies, except for a couple of pioneers, will not be able to escape. They make a commitment in their body-mind that they're in a prison.

People will tell you who work in aquariums that you can separate fish from each other. They're in big glass tanks and the separations are transparent glass partitions. You can remove the glass partition after a while. The fish will swim to the edge of where the partition was and return . They made a commitment that that's as far as they can go.

All these experiments, and there are many variations of these, are pointing to a very crucial fact as far as the mechanics of perception is concerned. And that is that our initial sensory experiences and how we interpret them or how they are interpreted for us actually structure the very anatomy and physiology of our nervous system in such a way that ultimately the nervous system serves only one function: to keep reinforcing the initial interpretation. Anything that doesn't reinforce the initial interpretation doesn't even get into the nervous system. So if you don't have a concept or a notion or an idea that something exists, then your nervous system won't even take it in.

That's a very peculiar fact because it tells us that with bits of sensory experience, we'll never be able to comprehend the whole. We never will be! After all the human eye can see only between 380 and 500 billionths of a meter. There's nothing sacred between 360 and 370. It doesn't exist for us.

And so too for the other senses. This is true not only of the human species but of all species. A honeybee, for example, doesn't have the apparatus to see the usual wavelengths that you and I perceive. It senses ultra-violet. When a honeybee looks at a flower at a distance it doesn't see a flower. It sees honey from a distance but it misses the flower altogether. A snake would experience the same thing as infrared radiation which means nothing to you and me. A bat would experience that as the echo of ultra-sound which also means nothing to you and me. And a chameleon's eyeballs swivel on two different axis. You can't even remotely imagine what this would look like to a chameleon.

So what's the real nature of the world? What's it really like? We can't trust the senses. They give us a very distorted view. They break up that wholeness into a small fragment and we call it reality. We happen to agree about it. We even call it "objective reality" and we have a whole methodology that we call "science" to explore that . If you really understand what science is, then science at least until now has not been a method for exploring the truth. Science has been a method for exploring our current map of what we think the truth is. And the map is not the territory. The territory that we explore is really an extension of the map we have. If we don't have the complete map then we will not explore the territory that is not within the framework of that map.

Sir John Eckles who won the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine several years ago made the statement, "I want you to understand that there are no colors in the real world. That there are no textures in the real world. There are no fragrances in the real world. There is no beauty, there is no ugliness. Nothing of the sort. Out there is a chaos of energy soup and energy fields. Literally. We take that and somewhere inside ourselves we create a world. Somewhere inside ourselves it all happens."

It's not out there at all! Go to a physicist and ask him what's this made up of? And he'll tell you there are just four basic forces: gravity, strong interaction, weak interaction and electromagnetism that make up everything that exists. Gravity is that which holds us to the ground, makes the planets move and holds them together. The strong interaction holds the nucleus of an atom together. If you disrupt it you get a nuclear explosion. The weak interaction is a force that is responsible for transmutation of elements and radioactive decay. And electromagnetism is that which we experience as light, heat and electricity.

Ask a scientist, "Is there anything else?" and they'll say, "No, there isn't anything else. Everything that exists out there is made up of these forces." And ultimately even these forces come from one unified force which scientists today call the Unified Field. And everything that is there, all stars, all galaxies, all flowers, all human beings, everything that exists is just these forces of nature.

So what is the material world then? The material world is a cord that comes out of these forces and the cords of intelligence that structure particulate matter in fact exist inside us. We are the creators of this world. Literally.

There was an interesting conversation I once heard between a spiritual master and his student in India. At one point the student looked at this master and he said, "I don't know about you. You must live in a different world." And the master said, "No. We live in exactly the same world. The only difference is you see yourself in the world, and I see the whole world in myself. It's a minor perceptual shift that you need to make."

So let's talk about this minor perceptual shift. Because our current understanding is that this world is made up of matter that exists in space and time. That even human bodies are nothing other than bits and pieces of matter. That the human body is a physical machine that has somehow learned to think. That it's the dance of molecules that creates the epi-phenomenon of consciousness: thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, concepts, ideas, philosophies, dogma, religion. All these. Poetry is the expression of the dance of molecules. Somehow these molecules move around and we get this epi-phenomenon called thought. We have physical machines that have learned how to think.

And of course this superstition is very pervasive in the world of contemporary medicine also. We are basically bogged down in the superstition of materialism which says that sensory experience is the crucial test of reality. Therefore, all our healing methodologies are also based on this superstition. We have magic bullets for the treatment of illness. And we have the expressions like, "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is." Or if you can't believe you ate the whole thing you can have a couple of Alka Seltzers. If you can't sleep at night there's a sleeping pill. It will cure insomnia. You're feeling anxious? There's a tranquilizer. It will give you tranquillity. You have an infection? Take an antibiotic. It will cure the problem of infection. You have cancer? There's chemotherapy, radiation, surgery. If you have chest pain, you can pop some nitroglycerin. Better still, have a bypass operation.

These are the magic bullets that are supposed to get rid of disease and improve our health but in fact all these magic bullets are symptomatic approaches. They relieve symptoms or at best mask symptoms while the underlying process remains unchanged. Sometimes they interfere with mechanisms of disease. And mostly scientific research today is basically elucidating mechanisms at disease. So if we know how bacteria multiply, we can kill them and then we'll get rid of infection. If we know how cancer cells multiply, we can kill them and then we'll get rid of cancer. It doesn't work because mechanisms of disease aren't origins of disease. We can interfere with mechanisms of disease and disease finds an alternative way of expressing itself.

For example, one of the leading causes of death is not the AIDS virus or HIV disease but from antibiotic resistant organisms that are acquired in hospitals. Several years ago, the California Medical Association did a study which revealed that over 100,000 people die in the United States from antibiotic resistant organisms acquired only in hospitals. The number one cause of drug addiction in the world is not the street drugs of Colombia, but legal medical prescriptions. And despite the fact that more people have done research on cancer in this country than have cancer, despite the fact the incidence of cancer in fact has increased in the last 3 decades, anywhere from 30-300%, depending on the type of cancer you're talking about. 36% of all patients in a university hospital, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, were suffering from iatrogenic disease which means disease as a result of biotechnical medical intervention: disease a patient had because they happen to see a doctor.

So something is wrong. Something is wrong. I don't mean to really give the impression that biotechnical medical intervention is not useful. It's extremely useful in acute illness. But it does not alter the overall expression of disease in a population. It merely changes its expression. We no longer have epidemics of polio, tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria and smallpox. But in their place we have higher incidence of cancer, heart disease, degenerative disorders and obesity. The overall picture hasn't changed because the model that we've structured of the human body is not the correct model. The human body is not a frozen sculpture fixed in space and time. The human body is a dynamic bundle of energy, information and intelligence that constantly is renewing itself and is in exchange with the larger field of energy, information and intelligence that we call the universe. That in fact if we could really see the human body as it is, not through the artifact of sensory experience, you would see it to be much more exciting.

The Greek philosopher Heraculutus compared the human body to a river. He said a river is a very mysterious thing. When you look at a river it looks the same to you in every second of its existence but in fact it's not the same river. He said you cannot step into the same river twice because new water flows in all the time.

And it's true also of the human body. If you could understand your body as it really is, you would see that the real you cannot step into the same flesh and bones twice because in every second of your existence you're renewing your body, changing it more rapidly, more effortlessly, more spontaneously and more easily than you can change your clothes. We can take a number of processes: eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, but most fundamentally the movement of consciousness which expresses itself as these processes, and you would see how effortlessly, how easily you can change your body and in fact are doing so all the time.

The physical bodies that you're using to sit on these chairs, for example, aren't the ones that you walked in with a little while ago. Even with one breath you take in 10 to the power of 22 atoms. An astronomical amount of raw material that ends up as your heart, brain and kidney cells, your neurons, your DNA. With each breath you breathe out 10 to the power of 22 atoms. It's an astronomical amount of raw materials that is coming from every bit of your body. You are literally breathing out bits and pieces of your brain tissue and heart and kidney. Actually, technically speaking, we are intimately sharing our organs with each other all the time.

The American poet Walt Whitman said, "Every atom belonging to you as well belongs to me." And this isn't a metaphorical statement at all. "Every atom belonging to you as well belongs to me." I can't even call my personal body my own. And I try calling everything else my own. I can't even claim a copyright on my own physical body. Right this moment in your body you have a million atoms that were once in the body of Christ. Based on radioactive isotope studies and mathematical computations it can easily be shown that in this moment of your existence you have a million atoms that were once in the body of Christ, in the body of Gautama Buddha or Leonardo Da Vinci or Michelangelo or Mr. Saddam Hussein. You can't separate yourself from anything physically or anybody that has ever existed.

In just the last 3 weeks, a quadrillion atoms, 10 to the power of 15 atoms have gone through your body that have gone through the body of every other species on this planet. And if you do radioactive isotope studies which have been done very elegantly, you can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that you replace 98% of all the atoms in your body in less than one year. You make a new liver every 6 weeks, a new skin once a month, a new stomach lining every 5 days, a new skeleton - it seems so hard and solid, but the skeleton you have now you didn't have three months ago. Even the brain cells that you think with as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, as those basic elements, they weren't there one year ago. And the DNA that holds memories of millions of years of evolutionary time, in fact hundreds of millions of years; the actual raw material of it comes and goes every six weeks. Those atoms drift in and out like migratory birds every six weeks.

And if you want to be a real stickler about it and account for the last atom and every little sinew and collagen and cartilage, then in less than two and a half years you replace every atom in your body down to the last single atom. So if you think you are your material body then you certainly have a dilemma. Which one are you talking about? The 1991 model is not the same as the 1990 model or even the one from a few months ago.

So here I stand before you with my l991 model and yet I don't feel that I wasn't here last year. Yet I don't feel that I wasn't here 2 years ago. Maybe there's a deeper reality to the physical body. Maybe the physical body is what the Rishis of India call maya, illusion, that which gives us the appearance of something but in fact there is something else behind the mask of mortality. Behind that facade of mortality there's something else which outlasts the physical expression of the physical body.

I stand here with a physical body but I have memories and hopes and aspirations and ideas and dreams that were there last year, that were there 2 years ago. They also change but not so rapidly as my physical body. The shelf life of my emotions is a little longer than the shelf life of my molecules.

So maybe the body is merely the place my memories are calling home for the time being. Maybe the DNA is also just that place that my evolutionary memory is calling home for the time being. Maybe I'm not physical molecules that have created the machine or created the epi-phenomenon of consciousness. Maybe I'm consciousness itself that has learned how to create the physical machine. Maybe I am a force of intelligence coming out of that same unified field that makes stars and galaxies and rain forests. Maybe I come from that same place too. And maybe that place was never born and never died and in fact was always there. I've just forgotten for the moment.

And this is exactly what scientists are beginning to see. Scientists are beginning to see that it is not thoughts which are a product of molecules, but in fact molecules are structured out of fluctuations of information in a field of infinite information. That it is consciousness which is the phenomenon and matter which is the epi-phenomenon. It is consciousness which conceives, governs, constructs and actually becomes physical matter.

In the last few years we've seen some extraordinary research in this field coming out of prestigious universities and medical schools and places like the National Institute of Health. About 20 years ago it was discovered, for example, that our thoughts and our feelings have physical substrate to them. When you think a thought you make a molecule. To think is to practice brain chemistry. And in fact these thoughts are translated into very precise molecules known as neuropeptides. '"Neuro"' because they were first found in the brain. And 'peptides' because they're protein-like molecules. And thoughts, feelings, emotions and desires translate into the flux of neuropeptides in the brain.

You can think of these neuro-peptides like little keys that fit into very precise locks called receptors on the cell walls or other neurons. So the way this part of the brain speaks to another part of the brain is not necessarily in English with an Indian accent, but in the precise language of these neuropeptides.

What was found subsequently, which was absolutely fascinating was that there were receptors to neuropeptides not only in brain cells but other parts of the body. So when scientists started looking for receptors to neuropeptides in cells of the immune system, for example: T cells, B cells, monocytes and macrophages - when they started looking at them, they found that on the cell walls of all these there were receptors for the same neuropeptides which are the molecular substrate of thought.

So your immune cells are in fact constantly eavesdropping on your internal dialogue. Nothing that you say to yourself, which you're doing all the time, even in sleep, escapes the attention of the immune cells. Not only that, the immune cells, it was subsequently discovered, can make the same peptides that the brain makes when it thinks. Now here we come to a startling finding, because if the immune cell is making the same chemicals that the brain is making when it thinks, then the immune cell is a thinking cell. It's a conscious little being.

In fact, the more you look at it, the more you find that it behaves just like a neuron. It makes the same chemical cords that the brain uses for emotion, thought, feeling and desire. An immune cell has emotions. It has desires. It has an intellect. It knows how to discriminate and remember. It has to decide when it sees a carcinogen, "Is this a carcinogen? Should I go after it? Should I leave it alone? Is this a friendly bacteria? Should I go after it or leave it alone?" It has to remember the last time it encountered something. In fact it remembers the last time somebody else encountered the same thing.

Your immune cells can immediately recognize anything that has ever been encountered by any living species. If you are exposed to pneumococus for the first time in your life, your immune cells still remember the last time somebody somewhere in prehistoric time encountered a pneumococus and knows how to make the precise antibody to it. It's not only a thinking cell but it remembers way back into the evolutionary history of not only the human species but other species as well. So you ask a good neurologist the difference between an immune cell and a neuron and they'll say there isn't any. The immune cell is a circulating nervous system.

Now if that wasn't enough of a startling discovery, the subsequent discoveries in science have been even more interesting, because when scientists started looking elsewhere in the body they found the same phenomenon. When they looked at stomach cells and intestinal cells they found the same peptides. The stomach cells make the same chemical cords that the brain makes when it thinks. Of course they're not verbally as elite as the brain, in that they don't think in English or Swahili, but nevertheless, they are thinking cells. When you say, "I have a gut feeling about such and such," you're not speaking metaphorically anymore. You're speaking quite literally because you're gut makes the same chemicals as the brain makes when it thinks. In fact your gut feelings may be a little more accurate because gut cells haven't yet evolved to the stage of self doubt.

What science is discovering is that we have a thinking body. Every cell in our body thinks. Every cell in our body is actually a mind. Every cell has its own desires and it communicates with every other cell. The new word is not mind and body connection, we have a body-mind simultaneously everywhere.

So when you say, "I have a sad heart," then you literally have a sad heart. If a scientist was looking inside the heart, he'd find it heavy with sadness. He'll find it heavy with sad molecules. If you say, "I'm bursting with joy," a scientist could look at your skin. He'll find it loaded with emipramine which is an antidepressant which in fact, has been used in the treatment of depression by psychiatrists. If you say, "I feel exhilarated, unbounded and joyful," and I was to examine your blood, I would find high levels of interluken and interferon which are powerful anticancer drugs.

About two years ago, interlukens and interferons were released for the treatment of kidney cancer and melanoma. The only problem is they're extremely expensive. An initial course of interluken can cost you something like $40,000. But you could take a joyride on "Magic Mountain" and make a few million dollars of interluken too. Of course, if that was your idea of fun. In fact it isn't the joyride at all, it's your interpretation of it. Because if you panicked on that joyride you wouldn't make interluken, you'd make cortisol adrenaline which is completely the opposite. It destroys the immune system.

When you have the experience of tranquility, you're body makes Valium and it's identical to the Valium that Hoffman LaRouch makes except it's made in precise doses for the right target organs. It doesn't make you feel like a zombie. It is an immuno-modulator. It modulates the activity of the immune system. Even little white cells know how to make Valium. If you are jittery then your body makes jittery molecules, adrenaline, more adrenaline, cortisol. And they're not made just by the adrenal glands. They're made everywhere in the body. Little platelets make adrenaline and they huddle together in their fright. That's how the clotting cascade starts.

So I think the first major breakthrough in medicine, if that's what we're going to call it, is that the mind has escaped the confines of the brain. It's not confined to the brain, it's everywhere in our body. And if that wasn't enough, it seems that now it's breaking the confines of the body - out there. Our mind is not even imprisoned in our body. It's completely non-local. It's everywhere in space and time. In fact, our mind is part of a non-local field of information that we can only call the cosmic mind.

The German philosopher Nietzsche said, "We live on the presumption that we think when it's equally possible that we are being thought." And, there may be something to that. What we call our Cosmic Body of the universe may be in fact a projection of our collective consciousness. We've learned to create that too. Just like we've learned how to create the body, we've learned how to create the universe.

A few years ago, scientists got interested in a group of hormones called pheromones that were produced by plants. So if you infect a plant, for example, with gypsy moth, the plants will give off hormones into the atmosphere called pheromones that immediately inform the rest of the forest that there's gypsy moth around - be careful. And the rest of the forest will immediately make the appropriate antibodies to protect itself. A plant is aware. It's got a mind. it informs the others, "This is what's happening. Watch out!"

Insects communicate through pheromones too. You've seen termites build perfect columns in the dark with arches that meet at the top, perfect architectural designs. How do they do it? They communicate through pheromones. Sexual and mating behavior is influenced through pheromones.

But recently it's been found that these pheromones in fact may also be the molecular substrate of our emotions. An experiment was done at Stanford, a particularly cruel experiment, where mice were taken and were given electric shocks. After a while the mice were removed from the room. Other mice are brought into the room and as soon they enter the room they panic. They release stress hormones and cortisol because they have inhaled the pheromones of fear.

And now it's known that in fact for every single emotion that we have there is a counterpart, a molecular event that happens not only inside our body but in fact we release those pheromones as information substrates into the environment. So now when you say, "l went into this room and I felt that the atmosphere was really tense." That's physiological. When you say, "I went to this holy shrine and I felt peace, love and compassion." That's completely understandable from a physiological point of view. You say, "I don't know what it is about this chap, but he certainly gives me the creeps." That's also completely understandable.

Emerson, the philosopher, said, "Who you are shouts so loudly in my ears, I cannot hear what you're saying." And he was making a physiological statement, completely understandable from the dynamics of how neurobiology operates. What we will call the universe is in fact a Cosmic Body that we have created in exactly the same way that we have created our physical body.

And in fact, even though the artifact of sensory experience said, "There's a world out there separate from me and there's something here that's my body that's separate from that," that's not physiologically true. We are not skin-encapsulated egos confined to a bag of skin and bones. We may be the Universal Mind itself. There 's a Universal Body that we have, there's a Cosmic Body that we have and we share our personal body and our Cosmic Body with each other all the time. And we have learned to create both in exactly the same way, and our Cosmic Bodies are as crucial to our survival as our personal bodies. They're equally our own.

So, this is the teaching that comes to me, at least I can't take any credit for this incidentally. I'm just a messenger of a very ancient form of teaching that is known as the Veda, and Ayurveda is the part of Veda that deals with health, the health of nature. And Veda says that if you just remember who you are, you'll suddenly recognize that you, in fact, are the Creator.

At one time a fundamentalist preacher met a Vedantist, and the two were talking for a while. After a while the fundamentalist looked at the Vedantist and he said, "It seems to me that you're an atheist." And the Vedantist looked back at the fundamentalist and he said, "I used to be one until I realized I was God." And of course this offended the fundamentalist who said, "Are you denying the divinity of Jesus Christ?" And the Vedantist said, "Heavens! I've never denied anybody their divinity. Why would I do it to Jesus Christ ?"

This is the essential teaching of the Vedic tradition, and it has very practical applications. The Veda says, "As is the atom, so is the universe; as is the microcosm so is the macrocosm; as is the human body, so is the Cosmic Body; as is the human mind, so is the Cosmic Mind." And if you feel uncomfortable with the word "Cosmic Mind," we can simply call it a "non-local field of information with self referral cybernetic feedback loops." I give talks these days at medical schools and people are very comfortable with that definition.

Our bodies are literally the music of nature. We have here a symphony which is part of a symphony that has been there forever. The Veda says, "Behind the mask of mortality is that quantum mechanical body, that subtle Causal Body, it's something you always had. You always had that. Fire cannot burn it. Water cannot wet it. Wind cannot dry it. Weapons cannot cleave it. It was never born and it never dies."

Is there any basis for that? Today we are seeing that in fact there is basis. If you could see the body again as a physicist could see it, all you'd see is atoms. And if you could see the atoms as they really are, not through the artifact of sensory experience, you'd see these atoms of particles that are moving at lightning speeds around huge empty spaces. These particles aren't material objects at all. They are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void of energy and information. If I could see your body not through this sensory artifact, I'd see a huge empty void with a few scattered dots and a few random electrical discharges here and there 99.999999% of your body is empty space! And the .000001% of it that appears as matter is also empty space.

So, it's all empty space. The question is what is this empty space? Is it an emptiness of nothing or a fullness of non-material intelligence? In fact it is a fullness of non-material intelligence...or information that influences its own expression. And with that definition, it's very obvious that this empty space is not an emptiness of nothing but a womb of creation. And nature goes back exactly to that same place, to fashion a galaxy and a rain forest, as it goes to fashion a thought. It's the same place. And it's inside us, it's our inner space which gives rise with amazing fertility to all these things that are so crucial to us: right, wrong, God, Heaven, sin, salvation, damnation, grace. All this comes from the same place. We are it! It's right there.

Bringing that to quantum healing, bringing that whole perspective to quantum healing, we can see how practical it can become. Because we have to begin to understand the body is really, ultimately, just a field of ideas. And the universe is just a field of ideas, literally a field.

A scientist by the name of Herbert Specter did an experiment about 20 years ago. He was at the National Institute of Health, head of Molecular Biology. In this particular experiment he gave mice an injection of a chemical called Polyisee which stimulates the immune system. He had the mice smell camphor at the same time. After a while the mice would smell camphor and it would stimulate the immune system. He took some other mice and gave them psychlophosphamite which is a chemical that destroys the immune system and had them smell camphor at the same time. And they smell camphor and they destroy the immune system. Here's 2 groups of mice now. One that smells camphor and stimulates the immune system. One that smells camphor and destroys the immune system.

In one group of mice if you give them pneumococcide they get pneumonia and die of it very quickly. If you give them carcinogens, they get cancer and die of it very quickly. In the other group nothing happens. And what's the crucial difference between survival and death in these mice? It's the interpretation of the memory of the smell of camphor.

Is this relevant to us? You bet it is. Because like those mice, we too have conditioned ourselves to respond to memories in a certain way. We link stimuli to certain memories and every time we're exposed to those stimuli we reinterpret the universe and ourselves according to the memories. We become the victim of the stale repetition of outworn memories.

It's estimated that the average human has 60,000 thoughts a day. This is not surprising. What is disconcerting is that 90% of the thoughts you have today are the ones you had yesterday.

So through the same mechanics we keep creating and become bundles of conditioned reflexes and responses constantly being triggered by people and circumstance into the same predictable biochemical responses and ultimately into the same behavioral responses and ultimately into the same patterns of disease, aging and death. We take our sensory experiences to be real. The sage, the seer Audishankra, who lived a long, long time ago in the Vedic tradition of India said, "The reason we grow old and age and die is we see other people growing old, aging and dying. And what we see we become." What we see, we become - because we hold that to be true. We cannot see the world again with fresh eyes.

In the Shiva Sutras, which are again thousands of years old, the yogi of all yogis, Shiva himself, says, "If you want to recreate the world, then look at it with fresh eyes." The way it really is. Look at it without the camouflage of your own memories. A true yogi says, "I use memories but I don't let memories use me."

In the Shiva Sutras, again, Lord Shiva says, "Look at a beauteous person or an ordinary object as if for the first time." How many people can do that? Because they've forgotten to get in touch with the one who is seeing. We are just a bundle of conditioned reflexes. The outcome of our thoughts and feelings. But who is having these thoughts and feelings? The one who's having these thoughts and feelings is not the thought. The one who is having these feelings is the silence between the thoughts. The one who is having these feelings is consciousness itself. But consciousness itself is not thought, it's the source of thought.

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome. I just want to go over a couple of case histories to show how relevant this is. In fact, how relevant this is to not only our survival as a species, but the survival of our own planet.

This young patient that I had, (he was in fact from this area) - he was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, be has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

And where is the Self? Is it in the brain? Is it in the body? Where is it? Because this is really the only important experience as far as the Vedic teaching of India is concerned. It's the only important experience. The Rishi says, "All your problems exist because you never paid attention to yourself, only to your experiences." And you're not your experiences. You're the one who's having those experiences. Enlightenment is not another experience. It's the discovery of the timeless factor in every experience. And who's that timeless factor? It's you!

Where is the Self? Scientists have been looking for it for a long time. Dr. Penfield the neurophysiologist and neurosurgeon in Canada, also a Nobel Laureate, when he operated on patients, he would cut open the skull and look inside. During operations, he'd take an electrode and stimulate different parts of the brain.

So he'd stimulate some part of the motor cortex and the patient's arm would start going up. That's the part that controls movement. He'd ask what's happening to the patient. The patient would say, "My arm is moving up." And then he'd say, "Are you moving your arm?" The patient would say, "No. It's moving up." Then he'd say, "OK. Now you move it." And the patient would move the arm up.

No matter where you look you'll never find the decision maker in the brain You'll only find the execution of those decisions. The motor cortex, for example, in the brain, it's that place that executes the commands. But where is the commander? You cannot find it. It's not local. It's everywhere or nowhere depending on your perspective. It's everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And that's who you are! That's who you are. You're everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You don't have a local address.

And you're not confined to your physical body either. The Rishi when he finally understands his from his own experience of immortality, he says, "When I'm in this state, I know for sure that my real state is this Bliss Consciousness. This bliss that follows me wherever I go. It's closer to me than my body, and there is no past because what I'm seeking is so near, there is no room for a past. What I'm seeking is the one who's doing the seeking. It's closer to me than my body, closer to me than my mind. It follows me wherever I go And when I know this then I'm in bliss."

This is not happiness. Happiness has reasons for it. You're happy because of a reason. But when you're happy for no reason whatsoever, then you're in bliss When you're grounded in this bliss then you recognize that you're not in the body, the body is in you You're not in the mind, the mind is in you. You're not in this universe, the universe is in you. Body, mind, universe just happened to you because you find them interesting. That's all.

This is ultimate Quantum Healing that gets rid once and for all of the maya of mortality, of the facade and superstition of materialism. When people get grounded in this experience then they lose all fear, including the fear of death.

The poet Tagor said, "This is just a remembering." And it, again, comes not by going outside. It comes by going inside, by doing that inner work, by going inside, by remembering. It comes by remembering that Silent Witness that was with us. There's a part of you that was with you when you were born. It was with you when you were a child. It was with you during adolescence. It's there right now listening. It's independent of all the experiences. It's that Silent Witness inside.

Tagor, in one of his celebrated poems, he says, "I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was that power that brought me into this world in the middle of the night like a little bud that opens up in the forest at midnight. And yet in the morning when I looked upon the light, I felt that I was no stranger in this world. That the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its own arms like my mother. Even so, in the moment of death I will step into the same unknown that has been ever known to me "

What you need to be afraid of is not the unknown, because that's where we live all the time. What we need to be afraid of, if anything, is the known! Because the known is the rigid patterns of past conditioning that imprison us in a prison of space, time, and causation - squeeze us into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime. When that's not the way it really is.

He says, "Because l love this life I know I can never fear death. The child cries out when it's mother takes it from the left breast only to find in the very next moment consolation in the right one. Space, time, matter, energy are similarly engendered by frequencies of self interaction. Curving back within myself, I create again and again. Ultimately I'm not all of this, I'm the field itself."

In the Gita, Lord Krishna, speaking to Arjuna says, "Know yourself as the field and the knower of the field." The poet Rumi says, "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there."

So I'd like to end with a little quote from Franz Kafka, whom everyone remembers as more or less a writer whose literary reputation rests on his portrayal of acute suffering. But he said something which is a brilliant affirmation of the path to enlightenment. He said, "You do not need to do anything, just remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, just wait. Do not even wait, just be quiet, still and solitary, and the universe will expose itself to you. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

In those words, one feels the breath of reality because they speak to us without disturbing their own stillness. And if we really want to know what they whisper to us, then we must learn to be equally still ourselves. Thank you very much.

A Talk Given by Dr. Deepak Chopra, M.D. at the Seattle Center on May 18, 1991.
Originally appeared in Vol. 1, No. 21 of The Sovereign Scribe, P.O. Box 350, McKenna, WA 98558

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Million Dollar Idea With The Law Of Attraction
By Gary Evans
Manifesting Reality Isn't Hard Work After All

Anyone can provide value in one way or another! There are no two people exactly the same with the same skills and the same way of looking at things. You truly are a unique individual and that unique individuality is your greatest asset.

By using the Law of Attraction you can demand the actualization of your own million dollar idea and receive the plans with very little effort. A lot of people reading this article may feel that $1million is way out of reach and not within their comfort zone, whereas some may feel that $1million is nothing and a very little amount indeed.

To people like John D. Rockefeller, $1million really was not a lot of money and I doubt he would have considered that amount of money wealthy at all.

Your mindset around money will ultimately determine whether or not you will actualize the amount you desire, yet that is not what I want to share with you in this article. I want to help you to discover your $1million dollar idea so you can go out and work towards it.

Bear in mind that if you can provide $1,000 worth of value to 1000 people then you will have just created $1million dollars.

First off, make a list of everything that you know and have some interest in. Making money really isn’t a hard task, but you shouldn’t be making money doing something you do not enjoy – that’s the worst way to make money!

You may want to spend the next couple of days sporadically thinking about this list and when inspiration comes, you can add to it. Once you’ve got your list, you want to order it, by placing the most fun thing that you are interested in at the top and the least fun thing at the bottom.

Take the top 3 items from your list and meditate on them. By this I mean find a quiet, comfortable spot where you won’t be disturbed for at least 30 minutes, close your eyes and begin to quieten your mind. Let all thoughts just drift away without giving them your energy.

Then when you feel very relaxed and comfortable you can begin to think about those top 3 subjects. Think about how you can creatively use them to create money and begin to formulate ideas. These don’t have to be million dollar ideas, but just think about different ways in which you can monetize them.

Once 30 minutes has passed, say to yourself several times:
“I intend my million dollar idea to present itself to me”

And that’s it! Repeat the entire process (except for making a list) for the next 10 – 20 days and pay attention to what’s happening in your life. You shouldn’t be searching for a million dollar idea – your work is already done in the meditation, so just let the universal forces bring to you the “how”.

Remember, when you take score of where you are currently at, you are telling the Law of Attraction that you want more of the situation you’re currently in. Forget about taking score, just let whatever happens, happen.

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Don't Take It Personally!
By Cherie Scheurich, Ph.D., LPC, CHLC
www.lotusholisticlife.com

A very important part of changing our thinking and thus changing our lives includes the aspect of learning how to avoid taking another’s behaviors personally. What exactly does that mean anyway? Well, first of all, it’s a valuable lesson to understand that no one else’s choices are about you. When you take another’s choice personally, you create a faulty and distorted lens in which to see all life. In reality, behavior comes from what one has to gain – even if the only thing he/she has to gain is to be consistent with him or herself and past choices. No one is really doing anything to you personally. No one picks you out to purposely hurt you without the primary goal of gaining something for themselves. You never have to feel a loss of self-esteem based on someone else’s choice. All choices are made based on how the choice will benefit the person making it – not purposely to hurt you. People are just not made that way. However, sometimes it can feel like others are purposely doing things to you. Let’s look at some examples to better explain this.

When you are lying in bed at night thinking about your day, are you not the center of your own world? Of course, you are. You are lying in bed every night thinking… “I” this and “I” that. You might think, “Why did I say that?” or “What was I thinking?” or “I have to get that done,” etc. You might think, “I wonder if he meant what he said?” or “What was she thinking when she did that to me,” or What should I do?” The point is that all your thoughts come back to you. Well, guess what? Everyone else is in bed at night thinking the same thing: “I,” or “me.” Everyone is the center of his/her own thoughts and choices. If someone else is thinking of you, it’s through the lens of how it affects him.

Think about it. Maybe you and your husband haven’t been getting along quite as well as you were in the past. You notice that your husband is spending lots of time away from home, and eventually you find out that he has been cheating on you with your neighbor. The cheating is not necessarily about you. It probably was not planned to “get you back.” You don’t have to take it personally and suffer a loss of self-esteem or beat yourself up about it. Regardless of what each of you contributed to the relationship or maybe lacked in committing to the relationship, your husband still chose to cheat because he had something to gain by it. Obviously, he became interested in someone else – that’s about him. Regardless of what you did or did not do, he could have made a different choice that could have kept him in the relationship if he had wanted to. He could have: asked you to go to a marriage counselor; informed you that he felt that his needs were not being met; informed you that he didn’t think the relationship was working out; or he could have just told you that he is not interested anymore and is planning to get divorced; or anything else. His choice to cheat may have been a combination of his lack of remaining committed, his frustration or intolerance of you, and/or his interest in someone else. And, indeed, you most likely contributed in some way. But still, his choices do not make you a failure. You do not have to lose self-esteem because of his choices. You will probably feel some sense of loss, which is quite normal and justified. Obviously, the relationship is just over – and that’s all. Change happens, and it’s time to move forward. It’s not about you personally. It was a combination of events that led to this incident. Everyone needs to own his/her own choices.

When a thief goes out to rob someone, his goal is to gain someone else’s money. The fact that he chooses a victim is secondary to his main goal of getting the money. It’s definitely about what he has to gain.

Even if the a situation is a positive one, it’s still about the person making the choice. If you decide to give a large sum of money to charity, of course someone else is going to benefit. But, the initial goal is about you. First, you are being consistent with your own positive identity, then you feel good about doing a positive deed, and finally, someone else benefits from your kind heart. Your choices are always about you first; otherwise you would never think to make them.

Understanding the difference is difficult sometimes when your heart is breaking from a painful event or loss. But the point is that if you can sort out all the faulty and distorted thoughts, you can focus on the real pain of the event and get through it quicker. Taking it personally only creates a faulty lens of failure and victimization that could affect how you interpret future events as well. When you understand that everyone is responsible for his or her own choices – good, bad, or indifferent, it’s easier not to take it personally and you can maintain a healthier view of life!

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The Vibrational Energy of Color and Aroma Therapy
By Cherie Scheurich, Ph.D., LPC, CHLC
www.lotusholisticlife.com

 

Quantum physics teaches us that the energy of our thoughts and emotions attracts the consequences of our reality. We also know that the body’s seven chakras are the vortex-like energy centers, vibrating and spinning at a variety of speeds and frequencies. Each chakra is also associated with a energy-rich, vibrational color, which contributes to the unique manifesting power of that chakra. Lower frequencies of thoughts and color energies attract lower level manifestations. Lower frequencies can result in the unbalanced and non-harmonious energies of lack and loss, which will in turn become manifest into our reality. Higher frequencies of thoughts and color attract the vibrational energy of abundance, success, and balance in all areas of life. When all of our seven chakras are unblocked and vibrating in harmony, we are more balanced and thus have happier, healthier, more successful, and more joyous lives.

Recent research identifies each color to have its own distinctive frequency, which is received through sensors in the eyes. Experiments on color research also reveal that even people who are colorblind are able to successfully sense these color frequencies. It’s been proven that color energy impacts our bodies and has a distinct power to change our mood.

Color Therapy has more recently been discovered to have the potential to advance developmental characteristics. Higher levels of spiritual growth positively correlate with the frequencies and energies of maintaining a positive mood. As a result, color therapy can enhance potential for conscious awareness.

In addition to mood characteristics and spiritual properties, color energy can also greatly impact physical responses. Light/color energy has the power to stimulate the pituitary and pineal glands, which regulate hormones and other physiological systems. Therefore, color therapy is quickly becoming recognized for its influential factors in mood-altering capabilities and improvement in physical ailments. The color chart below identifies the associated chakra, mood characteristic, improved physical benefits, and spiritual characteristics of each color.



COLOR THERAPY CHART

COLOR

Chakra

Mood Altering Characteristic

Improves Physical Characteristics

Spiritual Characteristics

Green

Heart Chakra

Sedative, cooling, calming, soothing, fluidity, growth, renewal, money, prosperity, birth, nature, precision, trust.

Liver, swelling or growth, anti-inflammatory, stimulant, washes out toxins, healthy bones, painful joints, allergies.

Balance, new beginnings, healing, health, integrity, harmony.

Red

Root/Base Chakra

Anger, power, ambition, passion, pioneering, materialistic, impulsivity, revolution, danger, warmth, excitement, passion.

Circulation, chronic illness, non-infected wounds, scar tissues, kidney function, heart, muscles, blood, & bone.

Awakening, liberation, life-force energy, grounding.

Hot Pink/

Magenta

Crown Chakra

Care of little things, love from above, abundance, pure confidence, vivacious, fun.

Improves insight into illusions and masks.

Bridge to spirit, connection with divine love and spirit, beyond passion into compassion, pure spirit.

Blue

Throat Chakra

Calming, deep inner peace, communication, protecting, relaxing, deep inner changes, cleanliness, tranquility, unity, safety, clarity.

Arthritis, anti-bacterial, anti-cramping, headaches, farsightedness, restful sleep, pain relieving, nervousness, insomnia, hemorrhage, herpes, warts, lowers blood pressure and fever.

Peace surpassing all understanding, spirituality, nurturing, benevolence, openness, wisdom, insight, faith, Godliness.

Yellow

Solar Plexus Chakra

Mental activity, learning, intellect, hope, vitality, acquired/learned knowledge, individuation, alertness, concentration, focus, cheerfulness, fear, self-esteem, confidence.

Digestion, gall bladder, liver, immune system, nervous systems, nerve toner.

Left brain, empowerment, confidence, combating fear, obsessions and habits.

Orange

Sacral Chakra of Creativity

Happiness, warmth, creativity, pleasure, sensuality, sexuality, generosity, sociable, aspiring, gregarious, energy, excitement.

Depression, relaxant, sclerosis, heart disease, boosts immune system, circulation, raises blood pressure, artery disturbances, endocrine balancer.

Awakening to wisdom within, joy.

Purple/

Violet

Crown Chakra

Stimulates emotions, meditation, inspiration, intuition, inner emotional release, loyalty, synthesis, alchemy, service, union, artistry.

Menopause, spleen, relaxant, builds leucocytes, anti-viral.

Opens inner doors, spirituality, higher mind, transformation, vision, wisdom, mysticism, service, balance of yin & yang.

 

The scents of aroma therapy also have a vibrational (movement) energy. From ancient times, scents have been known for creating pleasure and well-being. Some of the essential oil from ancient times are still available today. Scents and smells, in general, are important factors in psychology. The sense of smell is one of the most primary triggers to memories- both positive and negative. Signals from different olfactory sensors trigger different spots in the brain’s sensory map, which in turn trigger memories of stored smells. These smells and memories then trigger a variety of emotions related to the memories. Each essential oil in the aroma therapy line targets certain olfactory sensors, which are tested to uniquely stimulate specific moods. Therefore, aroma therapy scents can be used to produce a variety of stimuli facilitating desired emotions and moods. In addition, more recent studies have successfully begun to identify the positive effects of aroma therapy on factors of healing and sustained attention.

By understanding the impact of vibrational light and color, and aroma energy, you have the power to purposefully alter your own and others’ mood characteristics and physical ailments to bring about desired changes. Begin balancing your vibrational energies today to enhance and influence the consequences in your life.

*Check out our collection of Mood-lites and aroma therapy products! I keep my color therapy lights in my desk drawer and change out on my desk lamp bulbs based on my mood and how I physically feel. And I use my aroma therapy diffuser for creating the atmosphere I desire. They really work!


Research Sources:
Brain Briefings. Smell and the olfactory system. Society for Neuroscience, Summer, 1995.
Chakra – Your Energy Centers. www.yourvibrationalenergy.com.
Chakra – Your Energy Centers. www.yourvibrationalenergy.com.
Liberman, Jacob. Light: Medicine of the Future. Santa Fe, Bear & Company, 1991.
The Energy of Color. www.aletapippin.com/articles/energy.
The Power of Color. www.mood-factory.com/Research.
The Vibration of Success. www.yourvibrationalenergy.com

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