I went to bed about an hour later (around 2am) but I couldn’t sleep because energy was just surging through my body. I was quite deep In-Between. For awhile, I watched the waves on the ceiling. It felt like I was underwater looking up at the waves but reversed.

At one point, something came into the room and jumped right into my face! I was so startled that I pulled the covers up over my head. It was so ridiculous! Why did I do that? I almost laughed out loud! Those of you who have been out dimension walking or entity hunting with me know that I’m rarely spooked, if at all. That’s why this was so funny.

Anyway, after a couple of seconds, I poked my head back out to see what the Universe had in store for me next.

A few minutes later, this spiral started coming out of the ceiling. It wasn’t just a spiral but more of a series of spirals within a larger spiral. It felt similar to the Fibonacci sequence. Each of the spirals was spinning around and there were a series of symbols spiraling down each of the spirals. Keep in mind that this is my organic brain trying to interpret what my eyes were seeing.

My feels like was that this was energy becoming matter in this dimension. Regardless, it was an incredible experience. I didn’t get much sleep that night but I didn’t care.

Steve Marshall talks to Rupert Sheldrake about dogma and delusion in contemporary science.

Millions of people around the world claim personal experience of unexplained phenomena, which can be as simple as ‘knowing’ who is calling them when the telephone rings. Mainstream science can provide no explanation for this, other than dismissing it as mere delusion. Rupert Sheldrake, after many years of investigating telepathy, the unexplained powers of animals and human precognition, believes that he can. Sheldrake claims that his theory of ‘morphic resonance’ not only explains these widespread phenomena, it also shows how simple organic forms can self-organise into more complex ones, as an addition to Darwin’s process of Natural Selection. According to Sheldrake:

“The formation of habits depends on a process called morphic resonance. Similar patterns of activity resonate across space and time with subsequent patterns. This hypothesis applies to all self-organising systems, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals and animal societies. All draw upon a collective memory and in turn contribute to it. A growing crystal of copper sulphate, for example, is in resonance with countless previous crystals of copper sulphate, and follows the same habits of crystal organisation, the same lattice structure. A growing oak seedling follows the habits of growth and development of previous oaks. When an orb-web spider starts spinning its web, it follows the habits of countless ancestors, resonating across space and time. The more people who learn a new skill, such as snowboarding, the easier will it be for others to learn it because of morphic resonance from previous snowboarders.”

There is far more to morphic resonance than this, but I’m not the one to explain, as I have to admit I don’t understand all of its many aspects. Sheldrake believes that memories are not stored in the brain but somewhere outside of it; the brain recalls them not as a hard drive does, by playing back physically-stored electrical signals, but more like a television that tunes into transmitted signals and decodes them as memories. It does this by morphic resonance. Here, there are strong similarities with Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and archetypes. Jung’s ideas were accepted (if rather half-heartedly) by many scientists of his day; although Sheldrake does get support from some of his peers, it tends to come privately. His explorations into the liminal areas of science are particularly unpopular with dogmatic sceptics, who regard the work as ‘pseudoscience’ and “outside the scope of scientific experiment’.

But Sheldrake, to the chagrin of his detractors, is not just another amateur crackpot but a bona fide scientist – a Cambridge-trained biochemist with a double-first-class honours degree and a doctorate. Before developing his current interest in parapsychology, he led more conventional research programmes and made important discoveries in plant physiology. Criticism of Sheldrake’s work makes fascinating reading, as it reveals so much about his critics. There is a good deal of professional jealousy and resentment that Sheldrake’s research continues to be funded by Cambridge University, and sour grapes because he sells a lot of books. Most commonly, his theories and findings are dismissed because they do not conform to accepted scientific dogma; this has made him a particular target of the materialists. Frequent, vitriolic attacks are not directed just at Sheldrake’s work either; in 2008, he was stabbed in the leg by a Japanese madman who had followed him to the USA, believing that Sheldrake was using mind-control techniques on him (FT236:5).

Sheldrake has borne all of this with uncommon grace and good humour; however, he retaliates with his latest book The Science Delusion, an elegant counter-attack on scientific materialism. As attacks go, it is rather polite and gentlemanly, but effective.

Just before publication, I spoke to Sheldrake about the ideas in the book and his motives for writing it. First, the title, which appears to be a direct swipe at Richard Dawkins. Did Dawkins really inspire this response?

“No,” admits Sheldrake, “the title was at the insistence of my publishers, and the book will be re-titled in the USA as Science Set Free. Dawkins is far less important outside Britain. Actually, he’s not really very important here either – it’s just that the British media find him a convenient figurehead for the tide of evangelical atheism we’ve seen in recent years. Dawkins is a passion-ate believer in materialist dogma, but the book is not a response to him – although I do object to his dumbed-down representation of science.

“I’ve actually been thinking about the ideas in this book for many years, perhaps 30 or 40. Certainly, since I was an undergraduate and realised that something had gone horribly wrong with science. There was no point in dealing with the problem piecemeal: it was essential to look at the whole picture. There were so many assumptions in place and I wanted to open things up, which is what I’ve done by turning the issues into questions.”

The Science Delusion begins by laying out the 10 dogmata of modern science:

Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots”, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activity of brains.

The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the Universe suddenly appeared).

The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not ‘out there’, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Each of these is allotted a chapter in the form of a question, and a short list of further related questions addressed directly to materialists. Some are very funny, highlighting the inherent and often silly contradictions in so much accepted dogma. Is Nature Mechanical?, for example, points out that the mechanistic theory was intended to be a metaphor but has come to be taken literally. Living organisms are not automata, a fact that is patently obvious to any cat or dog owner; few readers would regard themselves as a genetically programmed machine in a mechanical Universe. As Sheldrake puts it: “Most of us feel we are truly alive in a living world – at least at weekends.” Two of his questions to materialists are: “Do you think that you yourself are nothing but a complex machine?” and “Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?”

Sheldrake questions many of science’s basic ‘truths’, which are revealed, with splendid irony, to be either assumptions or, heaven forbid, beliefs. That the Universe began with a Big Bang has been orthodoxy since the 1960s, but it is actually a theory, and one that raises as many questions as it provides answers. Sheldrake does not dispute the theory but compares it to religious creation myths, all of which begin with an initial act of creation by God; the Big Bang theory is different only in that God has been removed from the story. One of the basic tenets of physics is the law of conservation of matter and energy, which asserts that neither can be created or destroyed: the amount of matter and energy in the Universe is always the same. Except of course, in the primal singularity of the Big Bang, when the Universe appeared from nothing, violating all of science’s laws. Sheldrake quotes Terence McKenna: “It’s almost as if science said, ‘Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.’”

Most physicists believe that only about four per cent of the mass and energy in the Universe is conventional; the remaining 96 per cent is made up of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’, about which nothing is known. Gravitation should be slowing down the expansion of the Universe, but observations made in the mid-1990s showed that it is actually speeding up. The continued expansion of the Universe is now believed to be driven by dark energy, which is reckoned to account for 73 per cent of the Universe’s total mass-energy. In the current model, the amount of dark energy may be increasing, counteracting the gravitational pull that should make the Universe contract, driving its expansion in an apparently continuous process of creation. This should not be possible, but the conservation laws apply only to the four per cent of ‘standard’ matter and energy, not necessarily to the mysterious remaining 96 per cent. In the light of modern cosmology, asks Sheldrake, how can anyone possibly be sure that the total amount of matter and energy has always been the same?

The reliability of another of science’s ‘constants’ is also doubtful: the speed of light may not be as constant as we have been led to believe. “When I investigated this some years ago,” Sheldrake tells me, “I came to realise that although the speed of light is assumed to be constant and precisely known, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. The speed of light is measured regularly, in university laboratories all around the world, and each comes up with slightly different results. The final figure is arrived at by a committee of expert metrologists who average the ‘best’ results and arrive at a consensus. But this is not based on all the results they are supplied with; some are discarded, either because they differ too much from what is expected or because their source is not considered totally reliable.”

Measurement of the speed of light began in the early 20th century. Initially, there were considerable variations, but by 1927 the experts had agreed on an “entirely satisfactory” speed of 299,796km (186,300 miles) per second. The following year, this mysteriously dropped by around 20km (12 miles) per second. The new speed was recorded all around the world, with the ‘best’ values closely matching. This lower speed remained constant from about 1928 to 1945, then in the late 1940s it went back up again. It was suggested by some scientists that this might indicate cyclical variations in the speed of light.

“Now we may never know,” Sheldrake laments, “because the problem was eventually solved by locking the speed of light into a closed loop. The metre is now defined by the speed of light – which is defined in metres. So if the speed of light really doesvary in the future, the metre will vary with it, and we shall have no way of telling! I took this up,” he goes on, “with some of the experts. I visited one – he actually had a sign on his door sayingChief Metrologist. When I inquired about the 1928 to 1945 variation he muttered, ‘Oh you know about that, do you?’ He admitted it was a little embarrassing that so many respected scientists had made faulty measurements during that period…

“‘But this is interesting!’ I said. ‘What if there really werevariations? Shouldn’t it be investigated?’ He looked at me aghast. ‘Whatever for? The speed of light is a constant!’ The Universal Gravitational Constant also varies,” adds Sheldrake, “but they’re a bit more open about that.”

The constancy of the speed of light is regarded as sacrosanct among physicists. When alleged ‘faster than light’ neutrinos made world news last summer, the celebrated Professor Brian Cox explained the issue in layman’s terms for BBC radio. Adamant that the speed of light is a “universal speed limit” that can never be exceeded, he came up with a neat analogy. If an aeroplane were to travel from London to Australia at this absolute maximum speed, there would be no way of making the journey any faster. Apart from, he added, digging a tunnel through the Earth and taking a shortcut. So you see, declared Cox cheerfully, the neutrinos are not necessarily travelling any faster than light – they may be simply taking a shortcut through another dimension! To a non-physicist, it seems surprising that experts find it easier to accept a universe of multiple dimensions (which is possible, but only theoretical) than to question scientific dogma.

Are memories stored as material traces in the brain? Sheldrake is not alone in concluding that they are not. Since the 1890s, a vast amount of research time and money has been spent on this fascinating question and still no traces have been found. Typically, laboratory animals are taught to perform some task, then parts of their brains are surgically removed; later, they can still remember what they have been taught, despite in some cases having hardly any brain left at all. The animals presumably also learn to distrust humans wearing white coats. Sheldrake explores the evidence in great detail and puts a very convincing case. One of his arguments against physically-stored memory is that: “Memories can persist for decades, yet the nervous system is dynamic, continually changing, and so are the molecules within it.” So how could memory be stored in the brain so that it is not lost by molecular turnover? Sheldrake cites recent experiments in which cater-pillars were taught to avoid a stimulus. After undergoing two larval moults and metamorphosis within the pupæ, the resultant moths still remembered what they had learned as caterpillars.

Sheldrake maintains that memories are stored somewhere outside of the brain and retrieved by morphic resonance. So could these memories – and perhaps ideas – be accessed by others? I once met the late Bob Moog at a Theremin convention and thanked the Great Man for inventing voltage-controlled synthesisers. To my surprise, he looked slightly embarrassed and shrugged: “Oh, it was no big deal, just an idea that was going around at that time – it was in the air. Lots of other people must have had the same idea, but I was just lucky that I was able to do something with it.” Most creative people have experienced the zeitgeist at some time or other; had Sheldrake, I inquired, ever known any materialist scientists to complain of falling victim to it?

“No,” he laughs. “But I’m probably the last person they’d tell about it anyway! It has happened many times in science though: Newton and Leibniz, for instance, both simultaneously invented Calculus. On the 75th anniversary of Vogue magazine, I was invited to a symposium at Vogue House to talk on morphic resonance and the zeitgeist. There were many people from the fashion world designers, retailers and so on, and some from finance and the stock market. All were convinced there is a zeitgeist and that they had experienced it. Some had suspected they had spies working inside their company, passing ideas onto their rivals! But it’s people accessing a collective memory. I haven’t dealt with creativity at all in this book, but I believe creative people may be tapping into something beyond space and time.

“When I was writing A New Science of Life, I was very aware that others must be working on the same idea, so I’d better get on with it. And sure enough, there were two or three. One of them, Nicholas Greaves, was not a scientist but an estate agent; he just had this idea come into his head and felt he must express it. His version is called ‘Duplication Theory’. We met, and found that both of us had ideas that were very similar.”

In The Science Delusion, Sheldrake reminds us that scientists are, above all else, human, with all the short-comings and foibles of other mere mortals: “They compete for funding and prestige, constrained by peer-group pressures and hemmed in by prejudices and taboos.” This image runs directly counter to that actively promoted by scientists in recent history – one of a totally impartial, dispassionate elite, who can be uniquely relied upon to reveal the exact truth. Sheldrake quotes Ricky Gervais, who naïvely claims that: “Science is humble… It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along.” This popular view of science is aired regularly in the media by other high-profile celebrities. Stephen Fry (“The stupid person’s clever person”) is an enthusiastic devotee of Richard Dawkins, whose supporters, incidentally, include a surprising number of comedians.

Since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, the world of science has professed to operate in “an open-minded spirit of enquiry” but this is rarely true in practice; any modern research programme is under a good deal of pressure to not produce unexpected or unwanted results. Making waves by questioning accepted dogma is simply not on. Rupert Sheldrake may well be correct in his assertion that something fundamental has been ignored by science – it could even be something as important as gravity. But unless science comes to practise the open-mindedness that it preaches, we may never know. As Sheldrake writes:

“In the Enlightenment ideal, science was a path to knowledge that would transform humanity for the better. Science and reason were the vanguard. These were, and still are, wonderful ideals, and they have inspired scientists for generations. They inspire me. I am all in favour of science and reason if they are scient-ific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and sceptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.”

Rupert Sheldrake website: www.sheldrake.org

The cardinal told members of the Union League Club downtown that the Church may otherwise sell its hospitals, pay penalties, or in a last resort, close them altogether, rather than offer birth control. George says offering birth control would be cooperating with evil. [My italics]

Pretty strong language, Frank, considering that we are talking about a practice that an estimated 98% of women have used at one time or another. Too bad the church doesn’t view pedophilic priests with the same degree of horror.

Interestingly he also adds, “What is the place of church in society that is secularizing itself very, very rapidly?” which shows that he is well aware that the church is fighting a rearguard action to retain its tenuous hold on believers and retain any relevance.

He is right that the world, especially the developed world, is secularizing extremely rapidly. As a result, we are seeing a schism in the religious world. The liberal forms of the Abrahamic religions are losing members. It looks like the conservative wings have decided that their best chance of survival is to revert to rigid orthodoxy, and so we see the rise of Catholic dogmatism, Orthodox Judaism, and fundamentalist Islam, essentially a reversion to medieval male-dominated beliefs and practices.

But going against modernity is not a viable policy in the long run. There is no going back on the goal of women’s equality and emancipation. Modernity always wins. The great trends of history have been inexorably towards greater equality for the formerly marginalized. Those rigid religious groups that tried to hold back this tide will become more desperate and extreme even as they sink into oblivion.

Add this article from the NY Times last week:

The Vatican has appointed an American bishop to rein in the largest and most influential group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying that an investigation found that the group had “serious doctrinal problems.”

The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.

The conference is an umbrella organization of women’s religious communities, and claims 1,500 members who represent 80 percent of the Catholic sisters in the United States. It was formed in 1956 at the Vatican’s request, and answers to the Vatican, said Sister Annmarie Sanders, the group’s communications director.

Word of the Vatican’s action took the group completely by surprise, Sister Sanders said. She said that the group’s leaders were in Rome on Wednesday for what they thought was a routine annual visit to the Vatican when they were informed of the outcome of the investigation, which began in 2008.

“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.

“I would imagine that it was our health care letter that made them mad,” Sister Campbell said. “We haven’t violated any teaching, we have just been raising questions and interpreting politics.”

The verdict on the nuns group was issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is now led by an American, Cardinal William Levada, formerly the archbishop of San Francisco. He appointed Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle to lead the process of reforming the sisters’ conference, with assistance from Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki and Bishop Leonard Blair, who was in charge of the investigation of the group.

They have been given up to five years to revise the group’s statutes, approve of every speaker at the group’s public programs and replace a handbook the group used to facilitate dialogue on matters that the Vatican said should be settled doctrine. They are also supposed to review the Leadership Conference’s links with Network and another organization, the Resource Center for Religious Life.

Doctrinal issues have been in the forefront during the papacy of Benedict XVI, who was in charge of the Vatican’s doctrinal office before he became pope. American nuns have come under particular scrutiny. Last year, American bishops announced that a book by a popular theologian at Fordham University, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, should be removed from all Catholic schools and universities.

And while the Vatican was investigating the Leadership Conference, the Vatican was also conducting a separate, widespread investigation of all women’s religious orders and communities in the United States. That inquiry, known as a “visitation,” was concluded last December, but the results of that process have not been made public.

Check out this video of ocean currents: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003800/a003827/Perpetual_Ocean_24fps_960x540.mov

There are a dozen attributes to life, to building a positive attitude, embedded in the very word ‘Spirituality’. Let me walk you through each letter of the word ‘spirituality’.

‘S’ stands for Seva, to think beyond yourself and reach out to others. Seva is to be selfless in your thoughts and way of life. Most of us are sevikas or sevaks in some form or other; for we know that the joy of giving is far greater than the joy of receiving.

‘P’ signals two aspects, the first of which is the passage of life. None of us are immortal. So on this passage of life as William Penn, the poet wrote, “I expect to pass through the life but once, if there be any kindness I can show, let me do it now, as I shall not pass this way once again.” And even as you do so, please do it with a sense of perseverance for perseverance can move mountains. So run your own race in very act of life.

Moving on to the three ‘I’s in the word ‘spirituality’, these reflect three distinct values. Integrity, Inner Voice and Inspire – be inspired and inspire others. Integrity is character. Inner voice is the stairway to spirituality as it always goads you to do what is right, to live by one’s conscience and by values. Following this stretch is inspirational for you and others as well.

‘R’ is to learn to smell the roses on your way. Being positive is so restorative. You will never feel that you are ever in the midst of a storm. Every situation can then be faced with equanimity and fortitude. For one knows that this, too, shall pass.

‘T’ stands for transcendence, so transcend with inner reflection, meditation, yoga, self-control and compassion. The second ‘T’ says, if you practice these creative ways of looking at life, you will surely attain tranquillity and be at peace with yourself.

‘U’ is all about the universality and oneness of humankind. On realising this, increasingly you are able to brush aside prejudices. Differences cease to matter. Aren’t each one of us just a speck in the universe?

‘A’ is for acceptance. Accept yourself and others unconditionally. ‘A’ also entails the total negation of arrogance, and with humility being the ACE in your chosen field.

And this brings me to the letter ‘L’ that reminds you to have the largeness of heart to remember only the goodness of people and blanket out any pain or hurt that is encountered in varying degrees of relationships. The past and future are of no relevance as we cannot control or predict either. Most important, learn to travel light. The Moment is now. Life is too short, so cherish every moment.

‘T’, the second last letter in spirituality, stands for Trust. Let me share something that Steve Jobs would say: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” How true!

And finally – ‘Y’ – the last letter, stands for You – and for me, too. Only YOU can make this happen.

Valuing silence leads to a deeper connection with ourselves.

We live in a culture that values sharing every thought and feeling as it occurs. As a result, we often don’t pause to reflect on what we have just said. This lack of reflection can lead to a superficial connection with ourselves. In contrast, by paying attention to the silence within our conversation and embracing those spaces, we can connect more deeply with ourselves. This deeper connection is the basis of an authentically engaged and self-actualized life.

Paying attention to the silence as the space between our verbal exchanges allows the meaning of these exchanges to be assimilated into our psyches and from that place of depth, our creative engagement naturally flows. Creative engagement with our internal processes allows us to discover more of who we are, to take in previously hidden aspects of ourselves, and to reconfigure ourselves, if we so choose. This is what allows us to be more deeply authentic in the present moment. By being more authentic, we become more self-actualized and can impact our world in powerful ways.

Communicating verbally and then being silent are both vitally important. They form two parts of a whole that we dance between. The verbal communication expresses to the world what is going on inside of us. The silence, the gap between our talking, if it is valued, will allow us to digest what we just said and to discover what we want to say next as it emerges in the present moment. Our communication becomes a forum to explore new territory in ourselves by listening to what we just said rather than talking about what we already know. Does it fit, is it true, is it really how I feel, are some of the questions we can ask ourselves in those reflective moments of silence. This allows us to move from the unknown into self-discovery. From this process, personal growth often occurs.

When I value silence as a therapist in a session, I discover what is going on within me in the moment. I listen in a finely attuned way to my client so that I understand more of the subtleties of what makes them tick and how they make meaning of their life. The same benefit of valuing the silence that occurs in a therapist-client relationship is relevant to any relationship, whether it is spouse to spouse, parent to child, or friend to friend.

Consider pausing the next time you are talking to someone and you find yourself automatically saying what you normally say. Reflect on what you just said — does it resonate? Then, see if what you say next seems true to who you are in the moment. See if what you say leads to a self-discovery. You will then be experiencing the power of silence.

Source

It’s perhaps as inevitable as seeing a partially clad Danica Patrick trying to sell us domainnames; the 2012 Mayan doomsday phenomenon is coming to this weekend’s Super Bowl.P>

All this doomsday nonsensewas bound to grab the attention of one or two marketing departments, and for the famous 2012 Super Bowl ads, the automobile manufacturer Chevy wants you to know that when the end of the world comes, you’d better be driving their car.P>

But if you drive a Ford, you’ll die.P>

The doomsday parody shows a Chevy Silverado pickup being driven by a guy — with a dog for company — as he rolls through the ruins of a city. He coasts past what appears to be the head of a large Transformer, a crashed flying saucer, a burning Bob’s Bog Boy and gurgling volcano. To push the point home, the opening scene shows a newspaper headline “2012 Mayan Apocalypse” with the subhead “Will the world end today?”P>

(It must be the end of the world, we’re being forced to listen to Barry Manilow’s “Looks Like We Made It.“)P>

Eventually, the apocalypse survivor (plus dog) meets up with some buddies. They all drive Chevys. But where’s Dave? Sadly, he drove a Ford. Which means Dave avoids the misery of an eternity listening to Manilow’s ballads because… Dave’s dead.P>

Car manufacturer competition and doomsday fun-making to one side, the one thing that caught my eye was the image used on the front of the newspaper.P>

In 2008, I wrote my debut article on the 2012 hysteria over at Universe Today called “No Doomsday in 2012.” Accompanying my article, I Photoshopped an image of a Mayan temple plus apocalyptic explosion. I have no clue if Chevy was inspired by my depiction of doomsday, but I’m happy to take the credit nonetheless …P>

This article was provided by DiscoveryNews.

The great omission in North American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space free from outside pressure which is the incubator of the spirit. — Marya Mannes, author and critic

In today’s constantly connected world, finding solitude has become a lost art. In fact, Western culture tends to equate a desire for solitude with people who are lonely, sad, or have antisocial tendencies. But seeking solitude can actually be quite healthy. In fact, there are many physical and psychological benefits to spending time alone.

Benefits of Seeking Solitude

1. Solitude allows you to reboot your brain and unwind. Constantly being “on” doesn’t give your brain a chance to rest and replenish itself. Being by yourself with no distractions gives you the chance to clear your mind, focus, and think more clearly. It’s an opportunity to revitalize your mind and body at the same time.

2. Solitude helps to improve concentration and increase productivity. When you remove as many distractions and interruptions as you can from your day, you are better able to concentrate, which will help you get more work done in a shorter amount of time.

3. Solitude gives you an opportunity to discover yourself and find your own voice. When you’re a part of a group, you’re more likely to go along with what the group is doing or thinking, which isn’t always the actions you would take or the decisions you would make if you were on your own.

4. Solitude provides time for you to think deeply. Day to day responsibilities and commitments can make your to-do list seem as if it has no end. This constant motion prevents you from engaging in deep thought, which inhibits creativity and lessens productivity.

5. Solitude helps you work through problems more effectively. It’s hard to think of effective solutions to problems when you’re distracted by incoming information, regardless of whether that information is electronic or human.

6. Solitude can enhance the quality of your relationships with others. By spending time with yourself and gaining a better understanding of who you are and what you desire in life, you’re more likely to make better choices about who you want to be around. You also may come to appreciate your relationships more after you’ve spent some time alone.

Despite knowing these benefits, it can be a challenge to find time alone in a world that seems to never sleep. Here are a few ideas to help you find more time to spend with yourself.

♦ Disconnect. Set aside some time each day to unplug from all the ways you connect with others. Turn off your cell phone, Turn off your Internet. Turn off your TV. If you use your computer to create, such as writing, then write without all the bells, dings, and beeps that come along with being connected to the Internet. You’ll be amazed at how much more you can get done when you’re not distracted.

♦ Get Up or Get In Early. Wake up a half hour or an hour earlier than everyone else in your house and use that time to create, produce, problem solve, meditate, or whatever makes you happy. This strategy also works if you can get to work before everyone else arrives and the phones begin to ring.

♦ Close Your Door. It’s simple, but can be very effective. A client who owns a community-based magazine puts a sign on her door when she doesn’t wants alone time. The sign reads “I’m editing or writing. If the police are here, the office is on fire, or George Clooney calls or stops by, you can interrupt me. If not, please hold all questions until my door opens.” She said that she decided to put up the sign after she realized that her presence in the office was a stimulus for questions. “Whenever I was in the office,” she said, “it seemed like there was one question after the next. I was constantly getting interrupted, and it was hard to get my work done. Then I noticed that on the days I was working on a story outside the office, my phone hardly ever rang, even if I was out the whole day. Apparently, whatever questions came up somehow got handled without me. It made me realize that just by being in the office I was a magnet for questions. So I put up the sign and it works like a charm.”

♦ Use Your Lunch Time. Don’t spend your lunch time working at your desk. Don’t spend it running errands. And if you regularly go out to lunch, don’t think that it always has to be with others. Once a week or even just a couple of times a month, commit to spending lunch with yourself. Walk. Sit in the sun outside. Go to a park and eat. Enjoy the time you have alone.

♦ Schedule solitude. Literally. Mark off time in your day planner or calendar for spending time with yourself. If you can make time for all the little extras you fit into your day, like stopping at Starbucks or picking up something at the mall, you can schedule time in your calendar for solitude. It doesn’t have to be long. Any time that you can spend alone with yourself to reboot, meditate, focus, relax, create, produce, and/or think deeply is better than no time.
In my next post, I’ll talk about ways to negotitate alone time with friends and family and how to not feel guilty for wanting “a little space.” In the meanwhile, if you have effective strategies you use to steal a little time for yourself, please share them with readers in the comments section below.

Tapping into transformational technologies promises a better future for everyone. A quick glance at the headlines lets us know the score: dark days ahead. With growing concerns about ­population size, economic meltdowns, energy shortages, water and food shortages—this list goes on—alarmists are having a field day. For the first time in a long time ­parents are predicting a worse life for their children than their own.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. We are now entering a ­period of radical transformation. Progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic ­biology and many other breakthrough technologies will let us make greater gains in the next two decades than we’ve made in the previous 200 years. We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp.

If that sounds like hogwash, there are good neurological reasons for this reaction. Before we turn our attention to where we’re going, let’s first ­address why it’s so difficult to believe we can ever get there.

Every second our senses are deluged with data, more than we can possibly process. To deal with this overload, the brain is continuously sifting and sorting, trying to tease apart the critical from the casual. Since nothing is more critical to the brain than survival, the first filter most of this incoming information encounters is the amygdala, an almond-shaped portion of the ­temporal lobe responsible for ­primal emotions like rage, hate and fear. It’s also our early-warning ­system, an organ on high alert, constantly scanning our environment for anything that could threaten survival. Anxious under normal conditions, once stimulated, the amygdala becomes hypervigilant. But so potent is this response that once turned on, it’s difficult to shut off, and this is a problem in the modern world.

These days we’re media-saturated. Thousands of news outlets compete for our mind share by vying for the amygdala’s attention. The old newspaper saw “If it bleeds, it leads” works because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear. Our early-warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the “tiger in the bush” variety. Things have changed. Many of today’s dangers are probabilistic—terrorists might attack, the economy could nose-dive—and the amygdala can’t tell the difference. Worse, the system is designed not to shut off until the threat has vanished completely, but probabilistic dangers never vanish completely. Add in impossible-to-avoid news media continuously scaring us in their attempt to capture market share and you have a brain convinced it’s living in a state of siege.

What does the world really look like? Turns out it’s not the nightmare most suspect. Violence is at an alltime low, personal freedom at a historic high. During the past century child mortality decreased by 90%, while average human life span increased by 100%. Food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever (groceries cost 13 times less today than in 1870). Poverty has declined more in the past 50 years than the previous 500. In fact, adjusted for inflation, incomes have tripled in the past 50 years. Even Americans living under the poverty line today have access to a telephone, toilet, television, running water, air-conditioning and a car. Go back 150 years and the richest robber barons could have never dreamed of such wealth.

Nor are these changes restricted to the developed world. In Africa today a Masai warrior on a cellphone has better mobile communications than the President did 25 years ago; if he’s on a smartphone with Google, he has ­access to more information than the President did just 15 years ago, with a feast of standard features: watch, stereo, camera, videocamera, voice recorder, GPS tracker, video teleconferencing equipment, a vast library of books, films, games, music. Just 20 years ago these same goods and services would have cost over $1 million.

Four powerful forces are starting to emerge, each with enormous world-changing potential, none more ­important than the accelerating rate of technological progress. Right now all information-based technologies are on exponential growth curves: They’re doubling in power for the same price every 12 to 24 months. This is why an $8 million supercomputer from two decades ago now sits in your pocket and costs less than $200.

This same rate of change is also showing up in networks, sensors, cloud computing, 3-D printing, genetics, AI, robotics and dozens more industries. Biotechnology has been on such a wild, exponential ride that a state-of-the-art lab, complete with automation—what would have cost millions of dollars just ten years ago—can now be had for under $10,000.

Our second force is the do-it-yourself innovator. A DIY revolution has been steadily brewing these past 50 years but lately has begun to boil over. Backyard tinkerers have moved from custom cars and home-brew computers into once esoteric fields like neuroscience, biology, genetics and robotics. Today these small teams of motivated DIYers can accomplish what was once the sole province of large corporations and governments. The aerospace giants felt it was impossible, but Burt Rutan flew into space. Craig Venter tied (some say beat) the mighty U.S. government in the race to sequence the human genome. Right now high school and college students are using the tools of synthetic biology to complete real-world projects that rival the output of major biopharmaceutical companies.

With 440 patents and a National Medal of Technology, Dean Kamen is one of the greatest DIYers in history. Lately he’s turned his attention to the problem of water scarcity, which until recently was considered an impossible boondoggle. “When you talk to experts about water,” he says, “they’ll tell you with 4 billion people making less than two dollars a day, there’s no viable business model, no economic model and no way to finance development costs. But the 25 poorest countries already spend 20% of their GDP on water. Four billion people spending 30 cents a day is a $1.2 billion market every day. It’s $400 billion a year. I can’t think of too many companies in the world that have $400 billion in sales a year.” Kamen is in beta trials with his Slingshot, a water purifier that can turn anything wet (polluted water, seawater, even latrine water) into the purest water on Earth at a rate of 1,000 liters per machine per day for less than 0.02 cents a liter.

Our next force is money—a lot of money—being spent in a very particular way. The high-tech revolution created an entirely new breed of wealthy techno-philanthropists who are using their fortunes to solve global, abundance-related challenges. Bill Gates is focused on eliminating malaria; Naveen Jain is crusading against poverty in India; Pierre and Pam Omidyar are bringing electricity to the developing world. The list goes on and on, a force unrivaled in history.

Lastly, the very poorest of the poor, the so-called “Bottom Billion,” are finally plugging into the global economy and are poised to become the “Rising Billion.” The creation of a global transportation network was the initial step down this path, but it’s the combination of the Internet, microfinance and wireless communication technology that’s truly transformational. Over the next decade, and for the first time ever, 3 billion new voices will join the global conversation. What will these people desire? What will they create? If for no other reason than the law of large numbers and the power of their potential, this puts the Rising Billion in the same category as exponential technology, the DIYers and the techno-philanthropists: a potent force for abundance.

Alone, each of these forces has ­enormous potential. But acting together, amplified by exponentially growing technologies, these innovations take the once unimaginable and turn it into the now ­actually possible. And abundance for all becomes: Imagine what’s next.

Want to think outside the box? Try actually thinking outside of a box. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers had students think up solutions to problems while acting out various metaphors about creative thinking and found that the instructions actually worked.

The authors of the new paper were inspired by metaphors about creativity found in boardrooms to movie studios to scientific laboratories around the world and previous linkages established between mind and body. Angela Leung of Singapore Management University and her coauthors from the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and others wondered if the same was true of metaphors about creativity. “Creativity is a highly sought-after skill,” they write. “Metaphors of creative thinking abound in everyday use.” Their experiments went beyond metaphors that activate preexisting knowledge and demonstrated for the first time some metaphors “work” by activating psychological processes conducive for generating previously unknown and therefore creative ideas.

People talk about thinking “outside the box” or consider problems “on the one hand, then on the other hand.” So Leung and her colleagues created experiments where people acted out these metaphors. In one experiment, each participant was seated either inside or outside of a five-by-five-foot cardboard box. The two environments were set up to be otherwise the same in every way, and people didn’t feel claustrophobic in the box. Participants were told it was a study on different work environments. Each person completed a test widely used to test creativity; those who were outside did the test better than people who were inside the box.

In another experiment, some participants were asked to join the halves of cut-up coasters before taking a test—a physical representation of “putting two and two together.” People who acted out the metaphor displayed more convergent thinking, a component of creativity that requires bringing together many possible answers to settle on one that will work. Other experiments found that walking freely generated more original ideas than walking in a set line; another found truth in “on the hand; on the other hand.”

All this suggests that there’s something to the metaphors we use to talk about creativity. “Having a leisurely walk outdoors or freely pacing around may help us break our mindset,” says Leung. “Also, we may consider getting away from Dilbert’s cubicles and creating open office spaces to free up our minds.”