I will be 86 in two days, absolutely no family or friends left. I have learned, against impossible odds, no matter how hard and how painful (I am disabled and can’t walk), I handle l00% of everything myself as it pertains to me. I still drive (safely) and go out to eat by myself; I still work at the same job for 50 years and won’t stop until I die (animal welfare work from local to international level; just quit a job taking care of someone as a Power of Attorney for l4 years due to his mental issues; finished six years of college a year ago; took four years of computer lessons; learn new things daily about world events and things on the computer; have tons of hobbies; and the list goes on. I suffer with pain, loneliness - except for my beloved kitty - but I will NOT ever give in to being OLD except in calendar time. I would rather die than act like so many old people - eat, shit, sleep, watch t.v. I want to cram a lifetime into my remaining time and I do so daily. I stay away from deadbeats. I want inspiring, motivating, challenging people in my life or I choose to stay alone with my kitty.
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LOOKING INTO THE MIDDLE DISTANCE
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- The strange dots you see floating in the sky are your white blood cells.
- The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.
- Polar bears are left-handed.
- Butterflies taste their food with their feet.
- Wearing headphones for just one hour will increase the bacteria in your ear 700 times.
- A sneeze travels approximately 100 miles per hour.
- 95% of people send text messages that they could never say in person.
- If you fart steadily for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.
- Everyone has a unique tongue imprint, just like fingerprints.
- Former President Bill Clinton only sent 2 emails in his 8 years in office.
- Dead people can get goosebumps.
- A blue whale's tongue weighs more than a baby elephant.
- It is physically impossible for pigs to look up at the sky.
- Astronauts can't poop and urinate at the same time. Because different removal methods are used for each process.
- It would take an average person about 76 8-hour business days to read all the terms and conditions they agree to in a year.
- The name of the award given to honor the best sites on the Internet is called "The Webby Award".
- Finland reserves the postal code 99999 for Santa Claus.
- By the time you finish saying " I love you," some 20,000 cells in your body will have died and be replaced by new ones.
- A cat's brain is a million times faster than an iPad and can store 1,000 times more data.
- Going through sad experiences actually makes us smarter and with that we become better thinkers.
- You share your birthday with at least 9 million people in the world.
- Bananas are happy fruit. Eating just one can help ease irritable emotions, anger, or depression.
- In ancient Egypt they paid their taxes with honey.
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JJM
The recipe for enlightenment seems simple enough:
Don’t want anything, and don’t mind what happens.
Plenty of folks say enlightenment is accepting whatever happens.
So you try it, the best that you can.
Then a loved one gets sick, or you learn about something terrible that’s happening.
Your not-minding suddenly falls apart.
Good.
The problem isn’t your adherence to this method.
Not minding what happens doesn’t actually make sense.
Enlightenment is the realization of wholeness and harmony.
It’s what is pointed to by words like love and peace.
Our adherence to love changes the outcome.
Ever-turning toward love heals us and the world.
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It is something else.
It is not a human quality, a human characteristic. It is not a human experience that is abnormally deep or strong. It is not a human experience at all.
It is not anything any human can perceive, understand, define, name. It is not anything any human can recognize or relate to.
Enlightenment is being that which every human is without having the slightest notion, the slightest inkling, the slightest awareness of being it.
Enlightenment is invisible to humans.
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DTR CRSS- LV CMPSSN FREEDOM SUPPORT
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Successful people avoid bad habits, the ones that take you to the downward curve of life:
(the failure part of The Slight Edge chart)
Just several examples:
1. Thinking Laziness.
I’m not talking about idleness per se, but about idleness in thinking. If you are a lazy thinker, nothing can help you. You cannot analyze what’s wrong, you cannot come up with better solution, because you don’t think at all. You let your life be led on autopilot.
The rule of thumb is this: if you consume more than you create, laziness in thinking creeps in. So, all of the modern, so-called entertainments – TV, video games, YT, social media – rob you of your thinking power.
When you consume content, especially with close to no reflection about it (mindless browsing on YT, sitcoms and soap operas, arcane games) autopilot takes over your mind’s steering.
The magnificent organ you have between your ears is of no more use than your liver or anus. It’s as passive as those other organs.
Did you know that the bigger the household income the less central place TV set takes in a house and it has the smaller screen?
2. Multitasking.
My wife can follow a TV show, talk with her girlfriend on a phone and fill papers for her work at the same time. I would have forgotten to breathe doing the same.
There was some research on multitasking and the conclusion was that even shifting from one task to another takes several minutes. So, whenever you multitask you actually waste a lot of time on those shifts instead of saving your time by doing two things simultaneously.
3. Asking Wrong Questions.
If you ask yourself “Why does it always happen to me?” or “Why can I never be on time?” your brain will be busy finding answers to those questions, instead of being busy with the good stuff.
The human brain is a search engine. This is its primary function. Whenever you throw a question at your brain, it happily chases it. It loves it, this is what it was created for. And it always provide you answers.
If you give wrong questions, you will not be happy with the answers. But the worst damage is done by occupying your brain with something totally not constructive. It’s like asking a Senior IT Engineer in your company to clean a toilet with a toothbrush. The guy is totally capable of doing this job, but you’d have so much more value if he got busy with your IT stuff instead.
4. Intoxication.
I mean all kinds of substance addictions: drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, taking drugs.
There is nothing worse than that. Even if you are healthy and smart, those kinds of habits put you on a slippery slope and in a disadvantaged position. That sets you up for struggle. Your health and brightness will deteriorate. The end of those is an accelerated-in-time trip to a cemetery.
Of course, you can win the odds and live longer than your peers despite your addiction. You can find a few successful people who smoked like a furnace or drank like drunkards.
But odds are significantly against you if you are addicted. And it's close to impossible that your quality of life will not suffer.
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DR
The purpose of Kriya Yoga is to increase access to subtle energy and channel it in certain ways, cleanse the internal organs in a subtle way to allow balanced pranic flow between the Ida and Pingala nadis, attain physical and mental purification, balance, and inner peace, induce Samadhi, and accelerate spiritual growth toward experiential union with the infinite divine cosmic consciousness, mainly through daily practice of various types of pranayama techniques to regulate and work with the breath, mantra chanting, mudras (spiritually powerful hand gestures or configurations of the body), bandhas (energy locks), asana postures, and meditation.
Yogananda described the purpose of Kriya Yoga as follows: "The Kriya Yogi mentally directs his life energy to revolve, upward and downward, around the six spinal centers (medullary, cervical, dorsal, lumbar, sacral, and coccygeal plexuses) which correspond to the twelve astral signs of the zodiac, the symbolic Cosmic Man. One half-minute of revolution of energy around the sensitive spinal cord of man effects subtle progress in his evolution; that half-minute of Kriya equals one year of natural spiritual unfoldment."
Your breath is a good anchor during meditation. Noticing the body breathing. You can bring Awareness to the Heart area or down into the Hara which is about 1 inch below the navel and rest your attention there. Observe thoughts when they arise as the Witness. You are just watching them without being dragged into them.
All thinking is either past or future and so relates to the unreal. The Real is here/now in the absence of being pulled into thoughts, without being pulled into believing ideologies and concepts, memories and imaginations related to past or future.
You can notice how the energy feels when you have become lost in the mind and dragged along by thoughts. Notice how it is when you are just Aware and observing.
Time is also illusory so even though we refer to the ‘present moment’ on a deeper level there is not even a present moment. There is just this here/now of eternity.
Be Aware of sounds and listen intently to sounds and to silence, as if trying to hear a far off sound as well. Listen intently to the sounds around you without labelling or thinking about them.
Be Aware of your surroundings without thinking about it and aware of the walls and floor of the room, the feel of the ground beneath your feet, the feel of the chair against your body, be aware of all that is Present with you here/now. Breathe.
Do not become discouraged or frustrated with yourself when you notice you have been lost in the mind, just gently bring your Awareness back to noticing the breath and disengage from following thought.
Really, thinking is not so much a problem as is Believing that the thoughts are true!
What pulls you into the mind stream of compulsive thinking is belief isn't it. Belief in some old story, usually. The root of which is the belief in a separate self.
LISTEN INTENTLY TO SILENCE AND TO THE NATURAL WORLD
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Rinse and repeat without judgment for some there is a lot of noise to cleanse.
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When you clap your hands, which hand creates the sound? Neither! It’s the Sync!
I have heard words such as, ‘universe, cosmic, existence…..’ being talked freely in spiritual circles. The words are popular especially among the affluent and the highly educated. More in the last 15 years or so.
Earlier, I have heard these words among Tamil Siddha Sages and disciples. Contrastingly, these are people who live almost or literally in rags.
I could relate only to the latter and have no idea what the former refer to.
Here is what I understood from the latter.
There is a famous Siddha saying that whatever is in the universe is in the individual and whatever is in the individual is also in the universe.
This means that the energy that drives the universe and the five elements that constitute the universe are the same factors that create and sustain the individual.
This translates to when ‘you’ as an individual ‘Sync’ with the universe realising your fundamental oneness, you are the universe in that oneness.
Being the universe yourself at this moment, self-help happens like how your body self-heals without your active and conscious participation.
In other words, it is not through the asker or through the asked that the universe communicates. It self-helps when an individual spark syncs with the whole at least for a while.
This sync is also called as surrender, and we understand these words to be extraordinarily different from the way they are used in common parlance.
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REACT WISELY
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INFINUM
Such a person, who is aware, healthy, integrated and evolved, resonates completely with the model of a fully evolved, self realized individual as depicted in the Bhagavad Gita, written over 5000 years back.
The Bhagavad Gita talks about the innate divinity of all human beings. It says all human beings are potentially divine and the goal of spiritual growth is to get in touch with the inner divinity- the Atman.
Both Transactional Analysis and the Bhagavad Gita philosophy emphasize the human being’s inner drive to health and growth.
The “Geetopadesam”, the rendering of Gita by Krishna to Arjuna, in the battle field, is one long session of Psychotherapy.
Krishna activates Arjuna’s Adult Ego state from the crest fallen, confused, Child Ego state.
All dimensions of the de-contamination (confronting one’s limiting beliefs) and de-confusion process are beautifully expounded and role modeled by Krishna in all ways- cognitive, affective and empathetic.
Krishna gives a clear depiction of a self realized soul, its capacities and qualities and eventually expounds the deep spiritual dimension of realizing one’s own divinity within oneself.
The philosophy of Bhagavad Gita
The Gita’s philosophy emphasizes the power of appropriate action and condemns running away from the here and now reality.
Facing reality with awareness, choosing the path of action with detachment and seeing the divinity in all human beings are the qualities of a self realised person.
Doing all action with Equanimity- mind in perfect balance- is the essence of Yoga. The balanced feeling, thinking and action is referred to as ‘Samathwa Bhava.’
This self realised person, as depicted through various verses of the Bhagavad Gita, is very much the same as Berne’s concept of an autonomous person.
The Gita condemns inaction and emphasizes action with awareness. Such action is to be taken after “having made pain and pleasure, gain and loss, conquest and defeat the same’ in the mind.
Such a development of the mind is referred to as “Stitha(steady) Pragnya(knowledge) ”.
Self-realization, according to Gita, is not attained by miracle or magic. It is attained in the normal life with depth added to it.
So autonomy from the Gita perspective is handling the packet of psychophysical energy, developing it, expanding it to bring the best out of it.
Thus, the self realized person is evolved, has equanimity and stability of mind, which will not be bogged down by external or internal stimuli.
Such a person is anchored in his/her own self and sees Divinity in self and others. Such a person rises to appropriate action.
The Bhagavad Gita amazes us with the clarity of thought and understanding which existed thousands of years ago about the evolved human being and which has stood the test of time.
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