God Created the Beautiful Work of Art you are. He didn’t just Dream, He Drew. He didn’t just Draw, He Breathed His Breath of Life into you.
You are the most Beautiful Creation, for you are madeinthe Imageof God.
“Then the Lord God formed Man of dust from the ground, and Breathed into his nostrils the Breath of Life; and Man became a Living Being.” – Genesis 2:7
His Drawing is Pure Art, in how He did it, and why. And YOU are Beautiful Art in how you Live and Love. God Gives YOU His Spirit, so you may be Loving and Live Forever.
Yes, in Genesis 1:26-28 it it Revealed that we Human Beings are madeinthe Imageof God.
The ImageofGod is a foundational concept for understanding our significance and purpose.
God’s Image is His Inner Being, the Beautiful Expression of the Essence of God’s Attributes. And the most prominent are Love (1 John 4:8) Light and Holiness (Rev. 4:8) and Righteousness (Jer. 23:6).
The Likeness of God, refers to God’s Form (Phil. 2:6). It is the Expression of the Essence, of the Nature of God’s Person.
In each of us there is a strong yearning, a deep longing and desire to Love others, And, in Loving others we walk in the Light and come to hate darkness. We come to be Holy by being separated from anything sinful and being right with others and with ourselves. My Dear Friends, when we are Happy, we enjoy the Music. But when we are sad, we understand the Lyrics.
Much of the despair and unhappiness of Today can be traced directly to our departure from a Biblical Worldview.
Love is a Song you Sing with your Soul.
Our World is filled of sadness. But you may Dance like nobody is watching. You can lay down in the grass for no reason at all. You can sing a Song into your image in the mirror, or your reflection in someone’s eyes. . This World is yours. God is Blessing YOU and Guiding you in Life, if you but ASK.
He Dwells in each one of us as Spirit. We can experience Him in a very personal way. We can Pray, call on His Name, read His Word.
Your Prayers work Miracles!
Prayer offers countless Pathways pointing in all Directions, Bold and Beautiful as your Prayers expand deeper into the unknown Mysteries of God’s Love.
God has Blessed you with the Wonderful Gift of Life, and you are Blessing others when you share your Blessing.
Experience God’s Love, reflect upon His Blessings. He Dwells within us, as Spirit. We can experience Him in a Personal Way by Calling Upon Him with our Spirit, with our Prayer. Call on His Name, Read His Holy Word. HE is your Father, the One you came from, not through.
And, He is Listening. And He Loves YOU.
Enjoy this Magical Journey of Living and Loving. And please remember, YOU are Enchantingly Divine, a True Work of Art, Exquisitely Created and Deeply Profound.
Life is a Blessing from God. Your Prayers cleanse the Soul. Thank God for Being. His Precious Love will come to be greatly appreciated, when you awake. . May the Grace of God be with you always.
Labor Day is upon us – the unofficial end of summer – when some gleefully skip through Staples stocking up on back-to-school supplies and others linger on the beach before rolling up their towels and reluctantly dragging their feet out of the sand. We can thank the Labor Movement for creating this last summer holiday in honor of the contributions American workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country. Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894, when farming and manufacturing made up the bulk of the economy. Work was brutish and backbreaking at that time, consuming the waking hours of adults and children alike. American jobs have changed dramatically since then, so much so that it’s hard to imagine a time when weekends, workplace safety, and child labor laws didn’t exist.
The average person spends 90,000 hours at work in a lifetime. It comes as no surprise that study after study suggests that work satisfaction has a significant impact on our physical and emotional health. Physiologically, if you’re unhappy at work, your stress levels will increase. According to Ray and Terry, “Numerous studies have confirmed that chronic stress can contribute to decreased immune system function, gastrointestinal disorders, type 2 diabetes, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, and stroke. Stress with no constructive outlet can lead to anxiety, depression, difficulty concentrating, insomnia, and substance abuse… Perhaps most important, chronic stress accelerates the aging process.” (TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever)
If we want to live long and healthy lives, it makes sense to seek out jobs that give us meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, with mouths to feed and bills to pay, this can be a daunting goal. Yet, according to Ray, this will become a lot easier in the future. As artificial intelligence masters one human skill after another, work is going to be radically transformed. In his forthcoming book, The Singularity Is Nearer (to be released in 2022), Ray writes, “A 2013 study by Oxford University ranked 700 occupations on their likelihood of being disrupted in the near term (about a decade). At 99% likelihood of being automated were such job categories as tax preparers, insurance underwriters, telemarketers. More than half of the occupations had more than a 50% likelihood of being eliminated. High on the list were additional factory jobs, customer service, banking jobs, and of course drivers of cars, trucks and buses…. This is not a time-limited problem. AI, nanotechnology, and other technologies are going to continue to progress – exponentially – until we have superhuman-level AI and fully-automated atomically precise manufacturing (controlled by AI) in the 2030s.”
Hollywood typically pits AI against humans, swooping in to take over the world (and our jobs). But, if we pause and look around, we actually see a more nuanced reality where humans are partnering with AI to enhance our natural abilities and increase our productivity. While AI will inevitably take over certain job categories, Ray’s advice is not to worry because it will simultaneously create new jobs that don’t exist yet. Newly emerging jobs are higher on the skill ladder and include novel, more creative business models for earning a living compared to traditional “jobs.” There are many examples: scientists developing personalized immunotherapies, architects designing 3D printed modular homes, engineers creating large scale simulators to train autonomous cars. Musicians are independently sharing their music worldwide and social media influencers are connecting with millions of online followers. Many of us didn’t see that coming twenty years ago. These are all opportunities that have been created by new technologies.
Two thirds of jobs in the U.S. today have to do with creating knowledge of some sort. Almost all of these jobs didn’t exist twenty five years ago. They pay more, provide more gratification, and require more skills. Education is playing an essential role in preparing workers to fill these new jobs. According to the US Department of Education we’ve gone from 63,000 university students in 1870 to 20.5 million today. And we added 5.2 million university students in the United States between the years 2000 and 2015 online.
Machines are enhancing our ability to be creative in every way. Take for example three-dimensional printing. As 3D printing becomes more widespread, it is revolutionizing the manufacturing industry. Inexpensive and fast prototyping is now common with 3D printing. Engineers can design a new part on their computers and hold a 3D-printed model in their hands within minutes or hours—a process that might have taken weeks with previous technology. This allows for rapid cycles of testing and modification for a fraction of the cost of old methods. And as a result, people with good ideas but relatively little money can bring their innovations to the marketplace and benefit society.
While AI transforms the landscape of work, it will also drive down the cost of living, which means we won’t have to work as much. According to Ray, by the early 2030s, providing for your family’s basic needs will become relatively easy, because as products and services become information technologies they will undergo drastic deflation. In about a decade it will be inexpensive to live at a level that is considered luxurious today
Historically humans have had to compete with each other to meet the physical needs of life. But as we enter an era of abundance when material necessities are available to everyone, our main struggle will be for purpose and meaning. As we move forward, Ray says we must redefine work. “If you’re going to work less you’re not just going to sit around. What are you going to do with extra time? Well, you’ll do something that you enjoy. That you have a passion for. Why don’t we just call that work?”
As the economy shifts to place a greater premium on entrepreneurship, creativity, and adaptability, now is the time to explore your interests, find a passion, and run with it. Your biggest challenge might be dropping outdated assumptions and taking a leap of faith towards a future that is not yet defined. And in return, your biggest reward might be a healthier, longer, and more purposeful life.
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Found at the Anderson School. You too can enjoy the bounty of God’s Love in the Sacred Beauty He provides – but ONLY without pesticides!
.Close your eyes and imagine a World with Peace, where all Human Beings are brothers and sisters without hate and war and with Love.
We can come to the realization that every one of us is responsible. If we all share our food with the poor and we all care for the homeless and the Children that do not have parents, we will awake in a Dream, and live in a World that we will not regret Living in.
Yes, close your eyes and imagine a World with Peace.
“Whatever the mind of Man can conceive and Believe, it can achieve.” – W. Clement Stone
When the winds of our imagination gently sway among the fields of reality, one can see new clouds form in the vast and endless and Beautiful Sky of our mind.
YOU can bring Heaven to Earth with your compassion, with your Love. As we drift upon our Ocean of Dreams we can help others tremendously as they navigate through Life. You can go to higher Dimensions of Reality as your Life proves to be a Miracle for others in need. What you give to the World will see Gratitude from the Depths of God’s Heart. We are so Blessed. We have the chance to be Truly alive. Life is the most intimate and fragile reality we will ever have the chance to experience. Our actions arrive straight to the Soul, like an invisible torch that everyone can feel. How many smiles and tears are reflected in the composition of your Song of Life.
Let the Sunshine fill you Dreams. There is Magic and there are Miracles everywhere. This is a wonderful, wonderful Gift, the Gift of Life.
Yes, there is need to laugh and cry, to shelter from the storms, to be with friends and to be on your own, to Forgive and forget, and never know you know.
We are the most wonderful Creation of God, His Eternal Mystery and His Delight.
Welcome to the World of Today. The Color of God’s Love is painted on your Heart, always and everywhere. His Love is Eternal and will Always Be.
Love goes from one Dimension to Dimensions Unknown, from what we see to what we call unreality, Reflections of Reflections in Mirrors of Mirrors, that is beyond what is, to what may be.
The intricacies surrounding the meaning and interpretation of Love, we can feel but may not always see. Love does not possess, but sets you free if you want to be.
May every day of your Life be filled with the Happiness you deserve and with Love and the Blessings of God.
Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for Scientific American. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and Outside. Follow Ferris Jabr on Twitter
I have been fascinated with living things since childhood. Growing up in northern California, I spent a lot of time playing outdoors among plants and animals.
I have been fascinated with living things since childhood. Growing up in northern California, I spent a lot of time playing outdoors among plants and animals. Some of my friends and I would sneak up on bees as they pollinated flowers and trap them in Ziploc bags so we could get a close look at their obsidian eyes and golden hairs before returning the insects to their daily routines. Sometimes I would make crude bows and arrows from bushes in my backyard, using stripped bark for string and leaves for fletchings. On family trips to the beach I learned how to quickly dig crustaceans and arthropods out of their hiding spots by watching for bubbles in the sand as the most recent wave retreated. And I vividly recall an elementary school field trip to a grove of eucalyptus trees in Santa Cruz, where thousands of migrating monarch butterflies had stopped to rest. They clung to branches in great brown globs, resembling dead leaves—until one stirred and revealed the fiery orange inside of its wings.
Moments like that – along with a number of David Attenborough television specials – intensified my enthrallment with the planet’s creatures. Whereas my younger brother was obsessed with his K’Nex set – meticulously building elaborate roller coasters—I wanted to understand how our cat, well, worked. How did she see the world? Why did she purr? What were fur and claws and whiskers made of? One Christmas I asked for an encyclopedia of animals. After ripping the wrapping paper off a massive book that probably weighed half as much as I did, I sat near the tree reading for hours. Not too surprising, then, that I ended up writing about nature and science for a living.
Recently, however, I had an epiphany that has forced me to rethink why I love living things so much and reexamine what life is, really. For as long as people have studied life they have struggled to define it. Even today, scientists have no satisfactory or universally accepted definition of life. While pondering this problem, I remembered my brother’s devotion to K’Nex roller coasters and my curiosity about the family cat. Why do we think of the former as inanimate and the latter as alive? In the end, aren’t they both machines? Granted, a cat is an incredibly complex machine capable of amazing behaviors that a K’Nex set could probably never mimic. But on the most fundamental level, what is the difference between an inanimate machine and a living one? Do people, cats, plants and other creatures belong in one category and K’Nex, computers, stars and rocks in another? My conclusion: No. In fact, I decided, life does not actually exist.
Allow me to elaborate.
Formal attempts to precisely define life date to at least the time of ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle believed that, unlike the inanimate, all living things have one of three kinds of souls: vegetative souls, animal souls and rational souls, the last of which belonged exclusively to humans. Greek anatomist Galen proposed a similar, organ-based system of “vital spirits” in the lungs, blood and nervous system. In the 17th century, German chemist George Erns Stahl and other researchers began to describe a doctrine that would eventually become known as vitalism. Vitalists maintained that “living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things” and that organic matter (molecules that contained carbon and hydrogen and were produced by living things) could not arise from inorganic matter (molecules lacking carbon that resulted primarily from geological processes). Subsequent experiments revealed vitalism to be completely untrue—the inorganic can be converted into the organic both inside and outside the lab.
Instead of imbuing organisms with “some non-physical element,” other scientists attempted to identify a specific set of physical properties that differentiated the living from the nonliving. Today, in lieu of a succinct definition of life, Campbell and many other widely used biology textbooks include a rather bloated list of such distinguishing characteristics, for instance: order (the fact that many organisms are made from either a single cell with different compartments and organelles or highly structured groups of cells); growth and development (changing size and shape in a predictable manner); homeostasis (maintaining an internal environment that differs from an external one, such as the way cells regulate their pH levels and salt concentrations); metabolism (expending energy to grow and to delay decay); reacting to stimuli (changing behavior in response to light, temperature, chemicals or other aspects of the environment); reproduction (cloning or mating to produce new organisms and transfer genetic information from one generation to the next); and evolution (the change in the genetic makeup of a population over time).
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It’s almost too easy to shred the logic of such lists. No one has ever managed to compile a set of physical properties that unites all living things and excludes everything we label inanimate. There are always exceptions. Most people do not consider crystals to be alive, for example, yet they are highly organized and they grow. Fire, too, consumes energy and gets bigger. In contrast, bacteria, tardigrades and even some crustaceans can enter long periods of dormancy during which they are not growing, metabolizing or changing at all, yet are not technically dead. How do we categorize a single leaf that has fallen from a tree? Most people would agree that, when attached to a tree, a leaf is alive: its many cells work tirelessly to turn sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into food, among other duties. When a leaf detaches from a tree, its cells do not instantly cease their activities. Does it die on the way to the ground; or when it hits the ground; or when all its individual cells finally expire? If you pluck a leaf from a plant and keep its cells nourished and happy inside a lab, is that life?
Such dilemmas plague just about every proposed feature of life. Responding to the environment is not a talent limited to living organisms—we have designed countless machines that do just that. Even reproduction does not define a living thing. Many an individual animal cannot reproduce on its own. So are two cats alive because they can create new cats together, but a single cat is not alive because it cannot propagate its genes by itself? Consider, also, the unusual case of turritopsis nutricula, the immortal jellyfish, which can indefinitely alternate between its adult form and its juvenile stage. A jelly vacillating in this way is not producing offspring, cloning itself or even aging in the typical fashion—yet most people would concede it remains alive.
But what about evolution? The ability to store information in molecules like DNA and RNA, to pass on this information to one’s offspring and to adapt to a changing environment by altering genetic information—surely these talents are unique to living things. Many biologists have focused on evolution as life’s key distinguishing feature. In the early 1990s, Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute was a member of an advisory panel to John Rummel, manager of NASA’s exobiology program at the time. During discussions about how best to find life on other worlds, Joyce and his fellow panelists came up with a widely cited working definition of life: a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution. It’s lucid, concise and comprehensive. But does it work?
Let’s examine how this definition handles viruses, which have complicated the quest to define life more than any other entity. Viruses are essentially strands of DNA or RNA packaged inside a protein shell; they do not have cells or a metabolism, but they do have genes and they can evolve. Joyce explains, however, that in order to be a “self-sustaining system,” an organism must contain all the information necessary to reproduce and to undergo Darwinian evolution. Because of this constraint, he argues that viruses do not satisfy the working definition. After all, a virus must invade and hijack a cell in order to make copies of itself. “The viral genome only evolves in the context of the host cell,” Joyce said in a recent interview.
When you really think about it, though, NASA’s working definition of life is not able to accommodate the ambiguity of viruses better than any other proposed definition. A parasitic worm living inside a person’s intestines—widely regarded as a detestable but very real form of life—has all the genetic information it needs to reproduce, but it would never be able to do so without cells and molecules in the human gut from which it steals the energy it needs to survive. Likewise, a virus has all the genetic information required to replicate itself, but does not have all the requisite cellular machinery. Claiming that the worm’s situation is categorically different from that of the virus is a tenuous argument. Both the worm and virus reproduce and evolve only “in the context” of their hosts. In fact, the virus is a much more efficient reproducer than the worm. Whereas the virus gets right down to business and needs only a few proteins inside a cell’s nucleus to initiate replication on a massive scale, the parasitic worm’s reproduction requires use of an entire organ in another animal and will be successful only if the worm survives long enough to feed, grow and lay eggs. So if we use NASA’s working definition to banish viruses from the realm of life, we must further exclude all manner of much larger parasites including worms, fungi and plants.
Defining life as a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution also forces us to admit that certain computer programs are alive. Genetic algorithms, for instance, imitate natural selection to arrive at the optimal solution to a problem: they are bit arrays that code traits, evolve, compete with one another to reproduce and even exchange information. Similarly, software platforms like Avida create “digital organisms” that “are made up of digital bits that can mutate in much the same way DNA mutates.” In other words they, too, evolve. “Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it,” Robert Pennock of Michigan State University told Carl Zimmer in Discover. “All the core parts of the Darwinian process are there. These things replicate, they mutate, they are competing with one another. The very process of natural selection is happening there. If that’s central to the definition of life, then these things count.”
I would argue that Joyce’s own lab delivered another devastating blow to NASA’s working definition of life. He and many other scientists favor an origin of life story known as the RNA world hypothesis. All life on our planet depends on DNA and RNA. In modern living organisms, DNA stores the information necessary to build the proteins and molecular machines that together form a bustling cell. At first, scientists thought only proteins known as enzymes could catalyze the chemical reactions necessary to construct this cellular machinery. In the 1980s, however, Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman discovered that, in collaboration with various protein enzymes, many different kinds of RNA enzymes—or ribozymes—read the information coded in DNA and build the different parts of a cell piece by piece. The RNA world hypothesis posits that the earliest organisms on the planet relied solely on RNA to perform all these tasks—to both store and use genetic information – without the help of DNA or an entourage of protein enzymes.
Here’s how it might have happened: Nearly four billion years ago, in Earth’s primordial soup, free-floating nucleotides – the building blocks of RNA and DNA—linked into longer and longer chains, eventually producing ribozymes that were big enough and complex enough to make new copies of themselves and thus had a much greater chance of surviving than RNAs that could not reproduce. Simple self-assembling membranes enveloped these early ribozymes, forming the first cells. In addition to making more RNA, ribozymes may have joined nucleotides into chains of DNA; nucleotides may have spontaneously formed DNA as well. Either way, DNA replaced RNA as the main information-storing molecule because it was more stable. And proteins took on many catalytic roles because they were so versatile and diverse. But the cells of modern organisms still contain what are likely remnants of the original RNA world. The ribosome, for example – a bundle of RNA and proteins that builds proteins one amino acid at a time – is a ribozyme. There’s also a group of viruses that use RNA as their primary genetic material
To test the RNA world hypothesis, Joyce and other researchers have tried to create the types of self-replicating ribozymes that may have once existed in the planet’s primordial soup. In the mid-2000s, Joyce and Tracey Lincoln constructed trillions of random free-floating RNA sequences in the lab, similar to the early RNAs that may have competed with one another billions of years ago, and isolated sequences that, by chance, were capable of bonding two other pieces of RNA. By pitting these sequences against one another, the pair eventually produced two ribozymes that could replicate one another ad infinitum as long as they were supplied with sufficient nucleotides. Not only can these naked RNA molecules reproduce, they can also mutate and evolve. The ribozymes have altered small segments of their genetic code to adapt to fluctuating environmental conditions, for example.
“They meet the working definition of life,” Joyce says. “It’s self-sustaining Darwinian evolution.” But he hesitates to say that the ribozymes are truly alive. Before he goes all Dr. Frankenstein, he wants to see his creation innovate a completely new behavior, not just modify something it can already do. “I think what’s missing is that it needs to be inventive, needs to come up with new solutions,” he says.
But I don’t think Joyce is giving the ribozymes enough credit. Evolution is a change in genes over time; one does not need to witness pigs sprouting wings or RNAs assembling into the letters of the alphabet to see evolution at work. The advent of blue eye color between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago—simply another variation of iris pigments—is just as legitimate an example of evolution as the first feathered dinosaurs. If we define life as a “self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution,” I cannot see any legitimate reason to deny self-replicating ribozymes or viruses the moniker of life. But I do see a reason to ditch this working definition and all other definitions of life altogether.
Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.
I nervously explained these ideas to Joyce on the phone, anticipating that he would laugh and tell me they were absurd. After all, this is someone who helped NASA define life. But Joyce said the argument that life is a concept is “perfect.” He agrees that the mission to define life is, in some ways, futile. The working definition was really just a linguistic convenience. “We were trying to help NASA find extraterrestrial life,” he says. “We couldn’t use the word ‘life’ in every paragraph and not define it.”
Carol Cleland, a philosopher at the University of Colorado Boulder who has spent years researching attempts to deliniate life, also thinks that the instinct to precisely define life is misguided—but she is not yet ready to deny life’s physical reality. “It’s just as premature to reach the conclusion that there is no intrinsic nature to life as it is to define life,” she says. “I think the best attitude is to treat what are normally taken as the definitive criteria of life as tentative criteria.”
What we really need, Cleland has written, is “a well-confirmed, adequately general theory of life.” She draws an analogy to chemists in the sixteenth century. Before scientists understood that air, dirt, acids and all chemical substances were made of molecules, they struggled to define water. They could list its properties—it was wet, transparent, tasteless, freezable and it could dissolve many other substances—but they could not precisely characterize it until researchers discovered that water is two hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom. Whether salty, muddy, dyed, liquid or frozen, water is always H20; it may have other elements mixed in, but the tripartite molecules that make what we call water water are always there. Nitric acid may resemble water, but it is not water because the two substances have different molecular structures. Creating the equivalent of molecular theory for life, Cleland says, will require a larger sample size. She argues that, so far, we have only one example of what life is—the DNA and RNA-based life on Earth. Imagine trying to create a theory about mammals by observing only zebras. That’s the situation we find ourselves in when trying to identify what makes life life, Cleland concludes.
I disagree. Discovering examples of alien life on other planets would undoubtedly expand our understanding of how the things we call living organisms work and how they evolved in the first place, but such discoveries would probably not help us formulate a revolutionary new theory of life. Sixteenth century chemists could not pinpoint what distinguished water from other substances because they did not understand its fundamental nature: they did not know that every substance was made of a specific arrangement of molecules. In contrast, modern scientists know exactly what the creatures on our planet are made of—cells, proteins, DNA and RNA. What differentiates molecules of water, rocks, and silverware from cats, people and other living things is not “life,” but complexity. Scientists already have sufficient knowledge to explain why what we have dubbed organisms can in general do things that most of what we call inanimate cannot—to explain how bacteria make new copies of themselves and quickly adapt to their environment, and why rocks do not—without proclaiming that life is this and non-life that and never the twain shall meet.
Recognizing life as a concept in no way robs what we call life of its splendor. It’s not that there’s no material difference between living things and the inanimate; rather, we will never find some clean dividing line between the two because the notion of life and non-life as distinct categories is just that—a notion, not a reality. Everything about living creatures that fascinated me as a boy are equally wondrous to me now, even with my new understanding of life. I think what truly unites the things we say are alive is not any property intrinsic to those things themselves; rather, it is our perception of them, our love of them and—frankly—our hubris and narcissism.
First, we announced that everything on Earth could be separated into two groups—the animate and inanimate—and it is no secret which one we think is superior. Then, not only did we place ourselves in the first group, we further insisted on measuring all other life forms on the planet against ourselves. The more similar something is to us—the more it appears to move, talk, feel, think—the more alive it is to us, even though the particular set of attributes that makes a human a human is clearly not the only way (or, in evolutionary terms, even the most successful way) to go about being a ‘living thing.’
Truthfully, that which we call life is impossible without and inseparable from what we regard as inanimate. If we could somehow see the underlying reality of our planet – to comprehend its structure on every scale simultaneously, from the microscopic to the macroscopic – we would see the world in innumerable grains of sand, a giant quivering sphere of atoms. Just as one can mold thousands of practically identical grains of sand on a beach into castles, mermaids or whatever one can imagine, the innumerable atoms that make up everything on the planet continually congregate and disassemble themselves, creating a ceaselessly shifting kaleidoscope of matter. Some of those flocks of particles would be what we have named mountains, oceans and clouds; others trees, fish and birds. Some would be relatively inert; others would be changing at inconceivable speed in bafflingly complex ways. Some would be roller coasters and others cats.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for Scientific American. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and Outside.
School Calendar 2021-22First Semester Sept. 7 – December 17 2021
Sept. 7 (TUESDAY) First Day of First Semester Oct. 11 (Monday) Columbus Day Holiday Nov. 22 – 26 Fall Break (and Thanksgiving) Dec. 17 Last Day of Fall Semester
Second Semester
Jan. 4 (TUESDAY) Second Semester Begins Jan. 17 (Monday) Dr. Martin L. King Holiday Feb. 21 (Monday) Presidents’ Day Holiday Mar. 14 – 18 Spring Break Holiday April 15 & 18 Good Friday and Easter Monday Holidays May 24 – 27 Adventure Trip May 27 Last Day of Spring Semester
Lyrics/songs texts/paintings/articles
are property and copyright of their owners and provided for educational purposes.
Copyright Disclaimer – Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.
Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of “fair use”.
“Everyone we meet is fighting a battle we know absolutely nothing about. Be kind. Always.” – Robin Williams
Learning to Love creates Beauty for your mind. It enables us to be tranquil, open our Hearts, and exhale the negative toxicity. Love is Music for the Soul. . If you listen to this Music, the Music of Life, the Music of the Heart, you create your own Dimension, your own World.
When we call upon God to use us, to use our abilities to help others, we find Inner Peace and we help Peace prevail.
Tonight, look at the Stars with someone in need of Love. You never know when your last day will come. So listen to this Music, as you learn to Love. . If you only knew what a Gift you are giving to people in their few moments of Life. Your Music of your Life will be the only sounds some will ever truly hear.
There is a Hidden Name of our Creator in our DNA.
Our Sacred DNA is composed of 4 elements: hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. Carbon is what makes us Earthly Beings. When carbon is replaced with nitrogen, we have all colorless, odorless, and invisible gases. They form the letters Y-H-W-H, which is the Name of God. click here to read more
We have the innate ability to touch the very core of our Humanity. . Everyone bears a very heavy burden. We could easily drown in a flood of tears thinking about the sadness that prevails. But our Kindness, Gentleness and Compassion brings Hope into our World. Let us be forever grateful for Life and the Love that Created it. . May your Light and Love shine.
There is a message of Hope and Joy that you can know. It is from the depths of God’s Heart. His Love is the perfection that is you. In this precious moment you can feel the Divine Love of God wrapping His Arms around you to let you know you are deeply Loved.
Pray, and you will feel as Blessed as you Truly are. God will Bless you in all things.
The Love of God is Surreal and Delicate, yet Powerful.
Through His Love, happiness will be abundant. Through your kindness, gratitude and generosity, our World will become so much better because you are here. Share God’s Love and be very happy.
Goodnight.
Dr. Otto Warburg: The Man Who Discovered the Prime Cause of Cancer
Dr. Otto Warburg was a Nobel Prize-winning German scientist who dedicated his life to researching cancer and in the 1920’s discovered it’s prime cause.
Frustrated by the lack of acceptance of his ideas, Warburg often spelled out the axiom attributed to Max Plank, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
Like all breakthrough scientific discoveries and the scientists who’ve discovered them, they are often laughed at for decades before they are acknowledged as true.
This occurs not because their conclusions are unreasonable; it occurs because either their peers don’t understand their work or because industries profiting from the lie go to great efforts to prevent the truth from becoming widely known.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its shoes,” Mark Twain was quoted as saying.
The highly-respected Nobel Laureate Dr. Otto Warburg was one such scientist.
Dr. Otto Warburg: ‘Cancer is a Metabolic Disease’
Born in Germany in 1883, Dr. Otto Warburg was a physiologist, medical doctor and Nobel Laureate who spent much of his life devoted to researching and understanding cancer.
During the first world war he served as an officer in the elite cavalry regiment and was awarded the iron cross (first class) for bravery.[1]
Warburg stood out among his peers as one of the most highly regarded scientists in the world. In 1931, he was the sole recipient of the nobel prize in physiology or medicine.[2] Over the course of his career he was nominated for a nobel prize 47 times.[3]
His work was published in a number of books including his keystone volume The Metabolism of Tumoursin 1931. In a presentation to other Nobel Laureates in 1966 he made the following bold statement:[4]
“The cause of cancer is no longer a mystery; we know it occurs whenever any cell is denied 60% of its oxygen requirements.”
Warburg hypothesized that cancer cell growth was fuelled by tumor cells producing energy (adenosine triphosphate or ATP) by the anaerobic breakdown or fermentation of glucose.
Whereas healthy cells generate energy primarily through a reaction between oxygen and glucose (they “oxidize” glucose) within the mitochondria of the cell, cancer cells produce energy through the fermentation of glucose in the absence of oxygen.
The end result of energy production by healthy cells is the production of carbon dioxide, which promotes health by serving as a potent antioxidant and by shuttling more oxygen into cells.
Conversely, the end result of glucose fermentation by cancer cells is lactic acid or lactate, which can be consistently found in high levels within the bodies of people with cancer.
“Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by fermentation ofSUGAR.” – Dr. Otto Warburg
Dr. Warburg made it clear that the root cause of cancer was oxygen deficiency caused by malfunctioning mitochondria.
But as highly-regarded as he was by his peers, none of them took his finding seriously: It was almost as if they saw him as an otherwise brilliant scientist with a single flaw.
Frustrated by the lack of acceptance of his ideas, Warburg often spelled out the axiom attributed to Max Plank, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”[5]
It wasn’t until the past decade that Warburg’s work has begun experiencing a resurgence, and publishing activity of scientific papers worldwide has begun to soar.
It took almost 100 years, but scientists are finally beginning to acknowledge that Warburg had been right all along.
“All normal cells have an absolute requirement for oxygen, but cancer cells can live without oxygen – a rule without exception.” – Dr. Otto Warburg
Modern Research Validates Otto Warburg’s Discovery
When a cell is deprived of oxygen, it undergoes a metabolic shift – from the oxidation of glucose to glucose fermentation – aptly titled The Warburg Effect.
The second this shift in metabolism occurs is the moment it becomes a cancer cell. It’s also the moment that genomic instability and mutations begin to occur.
Warburg knew it – and in recent years, a myriad of other scientific studies from across the world have verified it: Only after a cell is deprived of oxygen (hypoxia) do genetic mutations begin to occur, or said differently, hypoxia is the primary driver of genetic mutations.
Carlos Sonnenschein and Anna Soto of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachussets wrote in a study they published in 2000, “We argue that it is necessary to abandon the somatic mutation theory.”[24]
That was over 17 years ago, and the medical establishment is still pushing the outdated, fairytale (yet profitable) story that cancer is caused by genetic mutations.
(I hope this inspires you to stop believing in authority and to question everything you’re told.)
Thanks to the research of Dr. Otto Warburg and many others, we now know that cancer is a metabolic disease caused by oxygen deficiency– not a genetic disease caused by genomic mutations.
Homing in on The Root Cause of All Disease
To broaden our understanding of the effects of hypoxia on cells, Dr. Arthur C. Guyton– author of one of the most widely used medical textbooks in the world, The Textbook of Medical Physiology – made this extraordinary statement in 1976:
“All chronic pain, suffering and diseases are caused from a lack of oxygen at the cell level.” – Dr. Arthur C. Guyton
Suddenly, our quest to discover how to prevent and cure cancer, we’ve not only identified cancer’s prime cause, but in doing so we’ve come face-to-face with the possibility that what cures cancer, cures all diseases.
What this means is that cancer and all diseases are metabolic in nature, and remarkably, all can be reversed by restoring the efficient use of oxygen.
are property and copyright of their owners and provided for educational purposes.
Copyright Disclaimer – Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.
Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of “fair use”.
“The Soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.” – Native American Proverb
The Longest Journey from the head to the Heart. is a road not taken by many. But on this Beautiful Pathway, I found my way Home.
In a broadcast Ravi Zacharias asked, “Can you talk about Education without looking into the Human Heart?” And my thought was – no, it is impossible to even think of educating a Child without looking into the Heart of that Child. A Child may never remember what you said, but he will always remember how you made him feel. Always.
How I clearly remember my Mother, Marie, when as a young Child, I discovered she had completed the longest Journey. That was when I came to know Love profound – the kind of Love one finds only in the Compassion expressed by Jesus. Yes, I discovered the Love of God in my Mother.
Marie Anderson
By the time she had completed her brief sojourn in Life, she had shared with me the most precious Gift of all, more precious than Life itself. It was a Love so profound – the kind of Love one discovers only in the Sanctity of Forgiveness and in the Light of Hope, when all seems lost – such Love as is conveyed in the deeply Compassionate Words found in the New Testament.
It was Love that not only never dies, but opens up the Heart and Blossoms like a Flower in the wind with each new Dawn. This kind of Love dwells deep within your Heart and overflows out into the World around you and becomes a Blessing to everyone you meet.
To the World you may be one Person, but to one Person you might be the World.
You have witnessed such Love, in the smiles and in the laughter that surround your Child, as your Heart embraces the precious moments you share. And your Child has witnessed the same in the unconditional Love you have given.
It is now my Belief that an Infinite Journey is possible. This Journey is longer than we can imagine and it never ends.
“Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; Praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the Truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.” – 1 Corinthians 13:8-10 .
My Dear Friend, the longest Journey may not be from your head to your Heart, but through your Heart.
Such a Path leads to everyone, everywhere, beyond our Time and place. It leads us to the destiny of all those who will Live beyond. For that is the Nature of Love that Lives within each one of us. Love, is ultimately what we Live for. Love is what we are. Love is all we leave behind that truly matters. And Love Profound, is Eternal.
Let Love guide your precious Life and become your Northern Star. Let it point the way. It is the Pathway Home.
Goodnight.
Learn to slow down and just be, so you can hear the Universe speak. How to Live forever: meet the extreme Life-Extensionists
Tomorrow’s world: “It’s time to look beyond the past of dying to a future of unlimited living.”
Some sleep on electromagnetic mats, others pop up to 150 pills a day. But are ‘Life Extensionists’ any closer to finding the key to longevity? Alex Moshakis meets some of the people determined to become immortal.
In 2016, an American real-estate investor named James Strole established the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, a nonprofit based in Arizona which aims to galvanise mainstream support for science that might one day significantly prolong human life. Standards in modern medicine are allowing us to live longer now than ever before. But that is not Strole’s concern. What good are a few more measly years? He is interested in extending life not by days and weeks, but by decades and even centuries, to the degree that mortality becomes optional – an end to The End. “The deathist paradigm has to go,” a line on the Coalition’s website reads. “It’s time to look beyond the past of dying to a future of unlimited Living.”It describes its supporters as “early-adopting advocates, numbering in the thousands”.
Life extensionists (or longevists, or immortalists) fit neatly into two types. The first are rationalists: scientific researchers at the coalface of gerontology, the study of ageing, chipping away at the many technical difficulties of ending entropy. Strole is the second type. A businessman, he has no formal scientific training, but is nevertheless resolutely committed to the cause, eager to rally behind new findings. He hopes to live indefinitely, or at least until 150. But he is ultimately reliant on researchers finding a way. Consider him less a gerontological groupie than a politely optimistic mega-fan, sitting on the sidelines of science, willing on a major breakthrough.
He isn’t alone. Life extensionists have become a fervent and increasingly vocal bunch. Famously, the community includes venture capitalists and Silicon Valley billionaires, non-gerontologists all, and nearly all men, who consider death undesirable and appear to have made so much money they require infinite life in which to spend it. But now mere mortals are joining the throng, heads filled with fantasies of forever. Humans have lusted after immortality for as long as they have been alive. So far the quest has been unsuccessful – we still die! But good news: paradise is reported to be closer now than ever before, and private clinics and online pharmacies are promising to help get us there, “there” being the future, all of it.
Until the end of time: James Strole, founder of the Coalition for Radical Life Extension in Arizona, with some of the many pills and supplements he takes daily.
Strole has beenan evangelist of Human immortality since he was a child, when his grandmother died, and he felt “a pain you can’t even describe, it’s so deep in your gut.” He was 11, still new to the world, and he came to think of death, like most of us do at some point or another, as deeply unfair.
In the early 1970s, when he was in his 20s, he began touring the US as a public speaker, sharing what was then limited gerontological research, but nevertheless extolling its possibilities and advocating the anti-ageing benefits of a positive mindset: “Isn’t life great? You can live forever if you really try!” Because Strole is not scientifically accredited, he mostly based his patter around inspirational healthy-living tips, much of which would now fall under the umbrella of common-sense wellness: exercise, eat well but not too much, look after yourself. But still his message seemed radical, and he was not always well-received. Audiences wary of Strole’s ideas condemned him for testing God’s will, or disrupting the natural order. His concepts ran counter to the common world view – that we live and then we die.
Nevertheless, he persisted. He considered himself fortunate to work in a field that meant he was privy to insider information and he became convinced a significant breakthrough was around the corner. To fully prepare his body for the rigmarole of centuries-long life, he adopted a strict health regimen. He fasted, juiced, cleansed and devoured supplements, inviting audiences to do the same. Eventually, a community formed, driven by a shared, urgent aversion to death. “We felt then how important it was to do everything you could to stay alive,” he says
Strole is now 70. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, a desert town. In the life-extensionist mode, he avoids dairy and rarely touches bread, though he devours a whole heap of other things. Recently his diet has included pills, branded “Cognitive”, which he takes twice a day and claims have all sorts of nourishing effects on his brain. (What good is maintaining the body if not the mind?) The pills are part of a self-directed anti-ageing process that requires a lot of swallowing. On some days, Strole takes 70 supplements, including a tablet that “energises the mitochondria” (mitochondria produce energy) and whose effects resemble “a shot of coffee, minus the jitters”, as well as vitamins, multi-nutrients and metformin, a diabetes drug that has become so popular among life extensionists that one referred to it as “the aspirin of anti-ageing”. In the early mornings, when the Arizona air is still brisk, he takes a cold dip in his pool to shock his immune system into better function, and at some point or another he lies face-up on an electromagnetic mat that whirs silently against his body and “opens up the veins”, and engages in a breathing regime that, he says, “balances the hormones”.
These are typical life-extension strategies, though most people supplement regimens with their own ideas. Some fast. Others arrange expensive stem cell replacement therapies. To maintain a supple mind, the gerontologist Marios Kyriazis, who is in his 60s and heads the British Longevity Society, reads the newspaper upside down, and whenever that becomes too easy, he reads the newspaper upside down and reflected in a mirror. Think of it as an alternative to Sudoko.
Aubrey de Grey: as serious gerontologists, “We’re interested in people not getting sick when they get older”
What good is all of this? The current life-extensionist strategy is twofold. First, achieve a “wellness foundation,” Strole says. Second, stay alive until the coming gerontological breakthrough. All that is required is to “live long enough for the next innovation,” and presuming you do, “You can buy another 20 years.” Twenty years here, 20 years there, it all adds up, and suddenly you’re 300. This is a common view. Last year the British billionaire Jim Mellon, who has written a book on longevity, titled Juvenescence, said: “If you can stay alive for another 10 to 20 years, if you aren’t yet over 75 and if you remain in reasonable health for your age, you have an excellent chance of living to more than 110.” To most, 110 seems a modest target. Why not forever? “It’s not some big quantum leap,” Strole says, by way of explanation. He invokes the analogy of a ladder: “step by step by step” to unlimited life. In 2009 the American futurist Ray Kurzweil, another supplement enthusiast, coined a similar metaphor, referring instead to “bridges to immortality”.
Where to begin with the almighty question: why would anyone think this a good idea? Strole is openly afraid of death (who isn’t? He argues), though he seems more motivated by a kind of curiosity. We live our lives knowing they will one day end. Imagine what we might accomplish if they didn’t. (It is not clear exactly what Strole might actually want to accomplish: self-actualisation? World peace? That tricky jigsaw?) The American entrepreneur Dave Asprey, who is 46 but hopes to live beyond 180, and who takes 150 supplements a day, told me: “I can’t imagine running out of exciting new problems to solve!”
This motivation is common – the burning desire to help – and it can be seen as morally virtuous or horribly presumptuous, depending on your opinion on the altruistic potential of a bunch of disproportionately wealthy, middle-aged men. (Is it possible the future will become a refuge for the rich, who experience life as a sequence of exquisite events and who might not understand the concept of entropy as relief or escape?) Few life extensionists openly admit to hedonistic impulses. “You can only smoke so many Cuban cigars,” Asprey says, “before you’re like, ‘I’ve got to buckle down.’” Though when I asked the British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey why indefinite life appeals, he replied, half-joking: “My hot tub.”
Keeping father time at bay: but why would we want to live to 180? Illustration: Nate Kitch/Observer
De Grey, a serious scientist, considers life extension a health issue, which is perhaps the field’s most convincing argument. Gerontologists are not hoping to end death, he says. Instead, “We’re interested in people not getting sick when they get old.” No matter how much society rails against the concept of immortality, nobody really wants to suffer through Alzheimer’s, or suddenly fall foul of cardiovascular disease. Gerontology is the act of developing treatments for age-related diseases, de Grey argues – of reducing the causes of death, not death itself. “The benefits of living longer are not the point,” he says. “The benefits are not having Alzheimer’s disease.” For de Grey, indefinite life is a by-product, not a goal.
Are we anywhere near to a breakthrough? So far, research has produced modest yields. Gerontologists speak prophetically of potential, but most warn a significant human development remains somewhere far off in the distance – almost in sight but not quite. Richard Hodes, the director of the National Institute of Aging, a US government agency, told me that, though research in animals has led to “dramatic increases in lifespan”, some of them multi-fold, “There has been far less quantitative effect as those models have moved towards mammalian species.” The biologist Laura Deming, who in 2011 established the Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm that supports “high-potential longevity companies”, told me that startups continue to successfully root out biological markers of ageing – inefficient cells, mitochondrial decline – but that, in humans, “We really don’t know right now what will work and what won’t.”
Much of gerontology focuses on identifying types of damage that accumulate with age and developing ways to halt or reverse that accumulation. It has been discovered, for example, that as we grow older, certain cells become ineffective but nevertheless stick around, getting in the way like comatose guests at the end of a house party. Removing those cells have helped mice have longer, healthier lifespans (this is called senescence.) Similar forms of genetic engineering have been successful in other animal models. But to reach the mainstream, gerontologists must convince government agencies to support human adoption, a complicated and long-winded task, given the general view that death is a normal human process. Why play God?
In any case, it is likely that one single longevity strategy alone won’t help us much. Life extensionists enjoy a metaphor: humans are complicated machines, they say, like cars, but mushy. And what happens to a machine if you don’t look after it? It rusts. It splutters and spurts, until it reaches its inevitable conclusion. De Grey considers ageing a “multifaceted problem”. Humans incur many different types of damage. We don’t just rust. We scratch. We dent. Rubbish accumulates in our footwells and grime develops in our engines. We require multiple strategies of repair – constant fine-tuning. What’s the point in removing those senescent cells if that molecular junk continues to build up?
De Grey shares Strole’s belief that innovations are coming. But, unlike Strole, he considers current strategies almost pointless. He does not take hundreds of supplements. He does not pay for stem-cell transfusions. “I want to wait and see,” he says. At 56, he is content to sit tight for treatments that have become “progressively more effective… so I don’t have to use clunky, first-generation therapies that may have side-effects.”
This does not seem to bother Strole, nor others in the community. Time is running out! Bring on the treatments! At RAADfest, the Coalition’s annual conference – “the Woodstock of radical life extension” – visitors are invited to root through the latest in anti-ageing products, of which there are many. Try DHEA PRO-25, an “anti-ageing hormone”. Or NAD+PRO, advertised to “boost physical and mental energy”. Or Piracetam, from the family of “smart drugs”, or nootropics, which claim to enhance brain function. Strole named the area: “The marketplace of your future.” It is popular among RAADfest guests for the power of its promise: the opportunity to realise the hoped-for self. This is Wellness 2.0 – beyond the cosmetic. We have been anti-ageing our skin for years. Why not our insides, too?
Jim Mellon is reported to have described the longevity market as “a fountain of cash”, and has urged friends to invest. Business is already lucrative, but it is a market that appears to take little notice of efficacy. The majority of anti-ageing products remain unregulated – “patent pending”, in the vernacular – and more than a few appear utterly useless. Earlier this year, the US government released a statement condemning the anti-ageing fad of transfusing young blood into older bodies, a practice researchers have proved effective in mice but which, the FDA said, “should not be assumed to be safe or effective” in humans. (The treatments cost thousands of dollars, and led to concern that “Patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors.”)
A decade ago, the American Association of Medicine publicly condemned the sale of “anti-ageing hormones,” an industry that was reported to be worth $50bn. “Despite the widespread promotion of hormones as anti-ageing agents by for-profit websites,” the association said, “the scientific evidence to support these claims is lacking.”
The oldest person to have lived, Jeanne Calment, reached 122, though she was perhaps not the greatest example of good health: she smoked until she was 117. The most successful life-extension methods we know of seem to be those we have known all along: eat well, sleep well, exercise, reduce stress and rely on modern medicine, which has prolonged average lifespans significantly over the past 160 years.
Strole does that and more. So far it’s working, he says. He is 6ft 4 and “the perfect weight” – with a slick of glossy grey hair. Perhaps his regimen is effective. Or, perhaps, like Calment, he has won a kind of genetic lottery, his healthy hair predisposed. It is difficult to say exactly, but, as of this moment, he will die. What happens if a breakthrough doesn’t arrive in his lifetime? “Well, then we’re in a little bit of hot water,” he says. But “it’s better to go for it than to not go for it. It’s better than just settling in. Don’t go quietly into the night.”
World’s Second Smartest Human Reveals The Vitamins And Supplements He Takes Daily
Taking vitamins and supplements often gets a bad rap because they’re not regulated by the FDA and many people believe that you should ingest these vitamins naturally through healthy foods. While there is nothing wrong with this mentality, it’s not for everyone and, apparently, not what Rick Rosner believes in. Rick Rosner is the second smartest human in the world with an IQ of 192, according to The World Genius Directory, and he takes approximately 50 pills everyday.
Rosner has taken dozens of IQ tests, most of which he has received the highest score ever, and was first labeled a genius when he was in kindergarten.
While some might suggest that Rosner’s obsessiveness over his health and taking his pills is over-the-top, Rosner says that the vitamins and supplements help his brain “work better.” In an interview with Business Insider, he detailed the pills he takes and the frequency for each, but he clarified that he is not a doctor.
Below is the list in his own words:
“Omega 3 fish oil capsules. This is supposed to be the good fat, more liquid at normal temperatures, to take the place of not-so-good, more solid fats.
Half an aspirin daily. Along with flossing your teeth, taking half an aspirin or a baby aspirin each day might be the cheapest, easiest way to extend your life. Aspirin knocks down inflammation and keeps your blood thin. You can get a year’s worth of aspirin for a buck at a discount store.
Metformin. A drug for Type 2 diabetics that decreases glucose production in the liver and helps your body use insulin more efficiently, reducing spikes in blood sugar (and possibly reducing the likelihood of cancer). Metformin is one of two drugs that may fool your body into reacting as if you’re ingesting fewer calories, possibly flipping your metabolism into extended-life mode.
Metoprolol. A blood-pressure drug that I take that knocks down adrenalin and the fight-or-flight response. It lets me drive in LA without my blood pressure going up.
Glisodin. One of the many things I take which is supposed to clean up cellular gunk, stuff that builds up over a lifetime. This may help slow down graying of hair, might cause slight euphoria. Hard to tell.
Avodart (generic name dutasteride). It knocks out DHT (dihydrotestosterone), a form of testosterone that makes your prostate blow up and your hair fall out. Whenever you see a TV ad where old men are always rushing off to pee, you’re seeing an ad for a DHT blocker. An added benefit of DHT blockers is they cause your body to pump out some extra testosterone to compensate, so it’s a little like being on steroids. Don’t let women come in contact with this drug — it could lead to the birth of a hermaphrodite.
Glucosamine and chondroitin. For less-creaky joints. Our dog gets this, too.
Fancy multivitamins from Life Extension and Vitacost. The kind with about 45 obscure ingredients.
SAM-e (S-Adenosyl methionine). This is supposed to keep your liver all nice. Also, milk thistle, which is also supposed to help your liver.
Astragalus. May help fight the shortening of telomeres.
Fiber gummies. I like food and don’t have perfect food habits, so I use fiber gummies and carb blockers to compensate for my lack of eating discipline. Fiber gummies are fiber in the form of gumdrops — candy that makes you poop. The faster food moves through you, the less you absorb. Carb blockers suppress a digestive enzyme so you only absorb 75% of the carbs you eat when you take them with a meal. You poop a little more, but it’s worth it.
Fat blockers. These are pure punishment and should be avoided for all but the fattiest meals. It’s better just to eat less fat. For instance, peel most of the cheese off a piece of pizza — it will still taste just like pizza.
Prescription and non-prescription drugs to lower cholesterol.
Curcumin. Reduces inflammation and is a very pretty orange color.
Credit: Womanista
ToCoQ10
L-carnosine
ALA and acetyl L-carnitine
Vitamin D3
Vitamin C
Vitamin E with selenium and also Gamma E
Lycopene
TMG (trimethylglycene)
Calcium
Benfotamine
N-acetyl cysteine
Mangosteen pomegranate noni complex
Vitamin K
Horse chestnut (for varicose veins)
Quercetin & bromelain
Coffee. This is the only brain drug I know for sure works. It doesn’t make me smarter, but it keeps me alert. Started drinking it about two and a half years ago. Used to nod off every afternoon at work. No more, thanks to coffee.
Phosphatidylserine
DMAE
Aminoguanidine
Centrophenoxine
Piracetam
Cognitex from Life Extension
Vinpocetine (occasionally)
Methylene blue. A dye that is in Phase III clinical trials to see whether it clears out junk amyloid protein in the brain. MB may act as a detergent, helping to break up amyloid, which can clog the brain, killing neurons. Might be good if you’ve taken some shots to the head. I worked in bars and got punched in the face a few times — but not anything like the shots taken by football players. (Plus, methylene blue makes your urine a rich emerald green.)”
In addition to taking these supplements everyday, he also allegedly visits five different gyms in a typical day. He claims that taking the pills and exercising regularly help him to slow down the aging process of the body and allow him to stay alert.
What are your thoughts on taking vitamins and supplements? Please share, like, and comment on this article!
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School Calendar 2021-22First Semester Sept. 7 – December 17 2021
Sept. 7 (TUESDAY) First Day of First Semester Oct. 11 (Monday) Columbus Day Holiday Nov. 22 – 26 Fall Break (and Thanksgiving) Dec. 17 Last Day of Fall Semester
Second Semester
Jan. 4 (TUESDAY) Second Semester Begins Jan. 17 (Monday) Dr. Martin L. King Holiday Feb. 21 (Monday) Presidents’ Day Holiday Mar. 14 – 18 Spring Break Holiday April 15 & 18 Good Friday and Easter Monday Holidays May 24 – 27 Adventure Trip May 27 Last Day of Spring Semester
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are property and copyright of their owners and provided for educational purposes.
Copyright Disclaimer – Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.
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My Dear Friend, Look UP, and drink in the Majesty of God’s Eternal Skies.
As you look, your eyes are immersed into depths of unimaginable Beauty.
The Language of God’s Love comes from a Truly Passionate Resource: all of Nature.
There is a Transcendence, a Purity of Love, a sublime Poetry in Nature that elevates our Spirit and makes it Beautiful Art. It is beyond what we can comprehend – a Gift from Heaven.
We are born with God’s Unconditional LOVE. His Love is our Existence and will pass to Eternal Life. His Love will never die.
God’s Love is so much greater than we can ever imagine. His Love for us is the most powerful reality we can ever discover. The more we become aware of God’s Love, the more we become Happy, fruitful and fulfilled. My Dear Friends, Life is filled with Beauty. Just look all around you. Notice the tiny bumble bee, the small Child, and the smiling faces. smell the rain, feel the wind. . Truly Live Life by sharing who you are, what you Believe, what you Dream.
Look at yourself, who do you see? Look all around you, what do you hear? If you avoid the arrow of false need and the bullet of greed, you will Live to know the Beauty all around you.
Read the Sacred Words of our Lord and reflect upon just how valuable every Word inscribed in the Holy Bible is. If you look at the Sky long enough, you will hear the wind calling your name. Look longer and deeper and you will see a whole other World before you. The strings of darkness that define the night, teach us to embrace the night and adore the Light.
Humanity can see past clouds of illusion. Your Precious Spirit will not remain in your grave, with your understanding of what God has done for you, of His Love for you.
You can feel a deep emotion that you cannot explain.
Open your eyes as wide as a Child viewing the World for the very first time. A Child has a way of taking you on his journey. And suddenly, you find yourself flying,
My Dear Friend, if you feel hurt, if you are broken inside, Pray for yourself. Your Prayer is an act of Love. God will Hear You and Cherish you. Pray for yourself and God’s Mercy will make you stronger. Prayer is Perfect for relieving the mind of tension and stress. Thank God for Giving you a Precious and Sacred Mind that can be at Peace. The dark of this night will disappear, and the Light of a new Dawn will show you the way.
Now, close your tired eyes. The Dream of Life will appear again.
Understand why we are here. It was not by your choice, but by the Will of God. Reflect upon the Heart. Look neither left, nor right; for the Path to God is always before you. There is Perpetual Purpose with every precious breath you take, with every force of your energy that moves you forward, toward Love.
“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with Love and Reverence.” – Henry David Thoreau
There is something beyond the physical design of your Being. With every Beautiful Brush Stroke God has painted an Eternal, Beautiful Work of Art – YOU, Pray to not let the oppression of evil rob you of the Beautiful Blessings that abide with your Sacred Being.
“Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the World.” – I. John iv.4
Drink in the Majesty of the Majestic skies. Be at Peace. Embracethe Heavenly Mist. Drink the fresh aroma of Nature’s Purity, and Peace. Surrender your will, to the Will of God.
God is the most Beautiful Reality there is.
Trust in God and Love Him with your whole Heart. Put Faith, Family, and Friendship as priorities in your Life.
Live, Love and Laugh. Life is precious. It is a Gift to treasure in every moment. It is a Promise.
Goodnight.
Yes, There Is A Shortcut To Success (And It’s Not Working Harder)
The other day, someone commented on a post of mine in which I promised them a “shortcut” to success. They said, there’s no such thing. That made me wonder. Really? There are no shortcuts in life? Only the hardest working people in the world win? It’s a popular belief, which should be reason enough to question its validity. But let’s explore this idea.
Let’s say there are no shortcuts and everyone is as successful as they absolutely deserve to be. Does that mean Bill Gates, who makes about $11 billion per year (or $1.3 million per hour!) works 54,000 times harder than the average American worker who earns $50,000 per year? How is that even possible?
Look. We all want to believe hard work pays off. And it does. But at a certain point, you can’t work any harder. You have no more time than anyone else. So what do you do? You have to learn how to work smarter. And that means learning from someone who’s already been there. Here are three lessons to remember.
1. Don’t Go It Alone — Get a Guide
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin
For years as a writer, I struggled to get noticed. I blogged and nobody cared, tried to write books no one would read, and failed to motivate myself to work. I wanted a publisher but didn’t know anyone in the industry and didn’t have any readers to show for my work. I was stuck.
What I needed was someone to show me another path. It didn’t have to be a shortcut. I was just tired of the long road to success — because it was leading nowhere — desperately wanted to know what was missing.
In any great story, there is a point in the journey when the hero meets an obstacle he cannot overcome. This is the moment when the guide arrives. This is the essence of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey: you cannot succeed without someone wiser to show you the way. Frodo needed Gandalf. Luke needed Obi-wan. And you and I need a mentor.
Sure enough, in my own journey, that’s what happened. I met a handful of people who acted as guides in helping me become an author, speaker, and entrepreneur. My dream became a reality within a matter of 18 months. But this wasn’t because I hustled — it’s because I found a guide.
And you know what? I didn’t work any harder in those 18 months than I did in the previous seven years. But I did work smarter — not because I was any smarter, but because someone showed me a better way. I met the right people, connected with the right networks, and practiced my craft in the right way. In other words, I found a shortcut.
But maybe you don’t like thinking of success this way. I certainly don’t. It’s embarrassing to admit I got a little lucky, that I was in the right place at the right time, that it wasn’t just about the hustle. But that’s the truth. And I think we need to acknowledge this reality.
2. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel — Learn from Others’ Experiences
“True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.” – David O. McKay
How do you find a guide, or in today’s terms, a mentor? It’s not as easy as we’d like.
First of all, mentors tend to be busy people. So getting in front of one will take work. People move around so much these days, and so many things, including our careers, are constantly changing. It stands to reason, then, that your mentor will not just be one person, but a team of people.
In my book, The Art of Work, I call this an “accidental apprenticeship.” The idea here is that if you pay attention to your life and the people who are in it, you will find there are those around you right now whom you can learn from. In that sense, the best mentor is the one that’s right in front of you.
Still, you’ll want to be intentional about getting into relationship with this person. Here are several things to remember:
1. When you reach out, make your first ask a small one. In other words, don’t lead with, “Will you mentor me?” Instead, ask for a few minutes of their time, offer to buy them lunch/coffee/whatever. 2. Make it about them. Ask specific questions about choices they made in their own success journey and why. 3. Take notes. When you meet with this person, write down everything they say. Honor their wisdom by capturing as much of it as possible. 4. Follow up. This is perhaps the most important and most often overlooked secret to getting into relationship with influencers who can eventually become part of your team of mentors. 5. Become a case study. Hands down, this is the best thing you can do to earn the attention of an influencer. And if you do this consistently over time, you will get people interested in mentoring you. Demonstrate that their advice works and tell the world about it.
Do this enough times, and people will be lining up to give you their time, attention, and ideas. Because the truth is nearly everyone wants to help someone who is going places, so they can feel responsible for that person’s success.
3. Don’t Succumb to Scarcity — Embrace Abundance
“True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful.” – Paul Sweeney
My friend Mary told me when she was first starting out as a writer, she asked an author out to lunch. “How do you get published?” she asked. The person wouldn’t tell her. She said those were her secrets and that Mary would have to find out for herself.
That day, Mary vowed that if she ever made it as a writer, she’d share everything she learned with other aspiring authors. A few years later, I called her asking for advice, and she made good on her promise.
Shawn Coyne, long-time New York editor, told me a similar story. Back in the day, nobody in publishing shared anything. There were no guidebooks on how to be an editor. He had to figure it out all on his own. Once he did, instead of hoarding his knowledge, he decided to share it in a book, blog, and podcast.
This refusal to succumb to the scarcity mindset changes everything. When we let go of our perceived scarcity and embrace our actual abundance, it changes so many things:
Scarcity kills our creativity. Abundance expands it.
Scarcity makes us afraid. Abundance makes us brave.
Scarcity pushes people away. Abundance attracts.
It can feel a little risky to embrace this mindset, this idea that there are guides out there who will help you and opportunities for success yet to be uncovered. But it is a much better way to live than to assume the alternative, that everyone is out to get you and there is no way you’ll succeed.
Once you do experience this abundance, you will have an opportunity to help others, which is one of the greatest rewards of success.
I realize this may come off as manipulative or even sound a little unsavory. Don’t influencers just want to help people out of the kindness of their hearts?
Well, maybe. But they’re busy. And so when push comes to shove, they’re going to invest in people with promise, not takers who seem to make everything about themselves. Your best bet is to be remembered as the ambitious person with lots of questions who was eager to learn, not the know-it-all who was more interested in herself than the person with experience.
We all love to feel important and valued once in a while. When seeking someone’s help or advice, appeal to this side of them, not their more noble, generous side. As you earn their trust, you will see more of this side. But in the beginning, assume they are only interested in helping themselves. So make it worth their while.
It’s better to lead with humility than arrogance.
Don’t be so strategic it stifles the relationship. But be intentional with your time and focus it on those who will give you a return on your investment. I guarantee you this is how your would-be mentors are thinking.
Here’s What It All Boils Down to
“Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.” – Arnold H. Glasow
So how does this work? Well, let’s recap the above in a few important lessons to remember:
Lesson #1: You can get where you want faster if you follow in someone else’s footsteps. Find a guide or mentor you can learn from and emulate, even from afar. This is the difference between those who continuously struggle and those who find a faster way to succeed. Humble yourself and trust that there are those out there who want to help you.
Lesson #2: Learn from other people’s experiences to grow your own capacity. In other words, don’t waste years trying to figure things out. Instead, sacrifice time and money to accelerate your learning. Invest in opportunities that allow you to learn from the successes and failures of others. That might mean taking a course, hiring a coach, or working for free for a certain period of time in exchange for experience.
Lesson #3: When opportunity seems limited, change your mind. It might mean moving across town to a co-working space. It might mean ponying up to go to an industry conference where all your peers are. Or it might just mean realizing there are plenty of chances for success right where you are.
Geography matters, but mindset matters more. And chances are, there’s an opportunity closer than you realize. You just might have to move towards it before it will come closer to you. You can’t just sit around and wait for things to happen — for mentors to come find you and for opportunities to fall in your lap. Luck, of course does happen, but it’s better to look for luck than wait for it.
Because luck is often hiding in the hard-to-reach places that most people are too timid to approach.
Who knows? Maybe as you scan the horizon for the right opportunities, you just might see a shortcut.
School Calendar 2021-22First Semester Sept. 7 – December 17 2021
Sept. 7 (TUESDAY) First Day of First Semester Oct. 11 (Monday) Columbus Day Holiday Nov. 22 – 26 Fall Break (and Thanksgiving) Dec. 17 Last Day of Fall Semester
Second Semester
Jan. 4 (TUESDAY) Second Semester Begins Jan. 17 (Monday) Dr. Martin L. King Holiday Feb. 21 (Monday) Presidents’ Day Holiday Mar. 14 – 18 Spring Break Holiday April 15 & 18 Good Friday and Easter Monday Holidays May 24 – 27 Adventure Trip May 27 Last Day of Spring Semester
Lyrics/songs texts/paintings/articles
are property and copyright of their owners and provided for educational purposes.
Copyright Disclaimer – Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.
Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of “fair use”.
My Dear Friends, we are worthy of the Love we give.
Our Lord will not leave us without comfort, if we call upon Him in our darkest hour. If we have Faith, even the small size of a mustard seed, and we ask for His Help, it shall be done.
Pray for the Blessing of God, and your Prayer of Faith shall shelter you from harm, and your sins they shall be Forgiven. Our unseen and Benevolent God of Grace and Goodness will grant you Peace.
Now, be in a hurry to go nowhere.
The Beautiful and bountiful Blessing of God’s Birds have always Loved you. They fly and sing all day, like Angels.
And His Flowers have always Loved you. The Beauty of their colors and shapes and scents, they so graciously share.
Taking the Time to notice and enjoy these Blessings makes Life more bearable by reminding us that we, too, can fill the air with Beams of our Light and Love and laughter, and through the sounds of our voices as we share the Beauty of Caring and Loving and Forgiving, forever.
Seek the Beautiful and emotional moments found all around, in the Majesty of God’s Gift of Life.
“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate Time” – Jean-Michel Basquiat
You bring Heaven to Earth with your Prayers.
Your Ocean of Dreams can be realized, when you help others through Life. Your Prayers are a Window to Higher Dimensions. Your Life is a Miracle and you can give that Gift to the World from the depths of your Heart.
There is nothing Higher than the Love of God for you. Your Prayer transports the Soul to magical realms. Your Love for others is Angelic and brings to Earth Rays of Light, Love and Joy. Your Love lifts the World into a Beautiful Resonance. The incredible Ethereal Voice of Prayer, becomes very Heavenly and relaxing, and finds you falling through Time. Keep spreading your Love and Peace all around. Let us erase the negative History of Mankind. We all are Sacred Children of the Lord. We all are one. We are a Family, the Family of Man.
The Songbird really speaks what our Hearts want to say.
Today I Pray for you. I Pray for your Heart free of sadness, your mind free of worries, your Life full of gladness, your body free of illness, and a day filled with God’s Blessings.
And remember, laughter is Life’s shock absorber.
No one can say how much God Loves all Living Beings and their Beauty. Sorrow comes from the way they are more and more not being respected. Let us Pray for understanding of the damage and pain we are causing. May the displeasure of our actions cause us to open our ears, our eyes and our Hearts.
A careless word may kindle strife A cruel word may wreck a Life A timely word may level stress A Loving word may heal and Bless.
I think I dated this one, once.
.Johnson & Johnson vaccine: How is it different?
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine could mark a turning point in the pandemic.
Millions of people have received the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in the United States, but now there’s a new kid on the block. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for emergency use, making it the third vaccine available in the U.S.
Here, Dr. Michael Stevens, associate chair of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the VCU School of Medicine, describes the differences between the three vaccines and the benefits of the new one from Johnson & Johnson.
What is the difference between how the Johnson & Johnson vaccine works and how the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work?
The ultimate difference is the way the instructions are delivered. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use mRNA technology, and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses the more traditional virus-based technology.
mRNA is essentially a little piece of code that the vaccine delivers to your cells. The code serves as an instruction manual for your immune system, teaching it to recognize the virus that causes COVID-19 and attack it, should it encounter the real thing.
Instead of using mRNA, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses a disabled adenovirus to deliver the instructions. This adenovirus is in no way related to the coronavirus. It is a completely different virus. Although it can deliver the instructions on how to defeat the coronavirus, it can’t replicate in your body and will not give you a viral infection.
Are there benefits to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, based on its technology?
Absolutely. The huge advantage to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is that it is a single shot. The mRNA vaccine requires two.
As well, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine can be kept at essentially refrigerator temperatures for months, and it’s stable. The mRNA vaccines aren’t as stable and require super cold storage temperatures. Once they’re out of cold storage, you only have a small window of time to administer them.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is much more like a regular vaccine and is much easier to distribute and maintain. That has huge implications for rural areas of the country. Those areas might not have the ability to keep the mRNA vaccines at super cold temperatures.
Aren’t cold storage and stability some of the reasons the rollout of the vaccine has been a challenge?
We have the capacity in a lot of the U.S. to get the cold storage mRNA vaccines out, but it can be a challenge in rural areas. When you start talking about a vaccine that is more stable and only involves a single shot, this is great news. The easier it is to give, the more people we’re going to vaccinate in the U.S. But this is also true internationally, where delivering a tricky mRNA vaccine can be a challenge in some areas due to the cold storage requirements.
I’ve heard the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is less effective than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Your thoughts?
We have really done ourselves a disservice with how wildly effective the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are. No one is going to say they don’t want a highly effective vaccine. We are all grateful, but at the start of the pandemic if you said you were going to produce a 60% effective vaccine, that would have been beyond most people’s wildest dreams. Compare that to the flu [vaccine], which can be 50% to 60% effective some years.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was found to be 72% effective at preventing moderate to severe cases of COVID-19. Across the board, it was around 66%. I think part of the reason is because it was studied later in the pandemic. Now there are more of these variants out there. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was less effective in South Africa, where one of the variants has appeared. It was 57% in South Africa. I think if you were to test the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines now, they might be less effective because of the variants.
Isn’t a main advantage of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that you’re less likely to get severely ill from COVID-19?
In the study population of almost 44,000 people, some of whom received a placebo and didn’t get the vaccine, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 85% effective in preventing hospitalizations and death. Even if the vaccine wasn’t 100% effective at preventing disease, it looks like it reduces severe disease. That is really what you want from a vaccine.
Can those who’ve gotten the vaccine still transmit the virus?
We don’t know, but you have to figure if someone has less virus, they might not transmit it as effectively. This could slow down the number of additional cases. That is really the idea with a vaccine, but nobody knows that for sure. That is the hope.
There will still be people who get sick, especially since there are so many cases. People are still going to need to wear masks and socially distance. It’s not a passport to go back to normal living. If you are, in theory, one of the 5% who got the Pfizer vaccine and still got COVID-19, you could still transmit the virus to people, and they could get super sick.
Will I be able to choose which vaccine I get?
We aren’t there yet. That won’t be possible in the short term. I would say get what you can get when something becomes available to you. I really don’t think people should wait. If you have access to get any vaccine, you should get it. Even if it doesn’t completely prevent it, you are much less likely to have severe disease and die. Maybe you’re just at home and feel terrible as opposed to having to be admitted to the hospital with low oxygen. Hospitals and clinics are going to be limited in the short term on what they can provide folks.
These vaccines are safe, right?
If it has emergency use authorization from the FDA, it has been held to a very high safety standard. These vaccine trials have had just massive amounts of patients. There have been at least 30,000 patients in each one of these trials, and Johnson & Johnson’s had 43,000 people. There were no harm signals in the Johnson & Johnson trials.
We have a few reports of possible severe adverse effects from the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Reports of severe adverse effects are being monitored and investigated closely. We still have to collect long-term safety data. For any immediate issues, those are usually collected in the vaccine trials. We have months of data now that show the vaccines are safe.
For more information
For a variety of news and information on COVID-19 and how VCU Health is keeping patients safe, please visit ourCOVID-19 News Center.
Lyrics/songs texts/paintings/articles
are property and copyright of their owners and provided for educational purposes.
Copyright Disclaimer – Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.
Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of “fair use”.
When I started this Weblog it was with a simple vision: to create a place to rest, to sit down and relax your mind.
You are one in Forever and one in the Favor of God. How Beautiful and Sacred is our place in Nature. Life is Beautiful and with so many Blessings we simply have not the Time on this Sacred Earth to count them all. . My Dear and Precious Friends, all the great things in Life come from sharing our Love.
Faith means that we have Peace, even when we don’t have all the answers.
“Happiness is a Butterfly, which when pursued is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” –Nathaniel Hawthorne
One Day, your Destiny will lead you to look for the Daylight behind the dark shadows that fall in the distance of your memories.
We are all prisoners of the past, possessed by our desire to travel beyond, wherever there is Beauty and Live among the Stars.
We Live in the dark between the Stars, looking for the one we cannot find, the me in we. . Cradled in the silence of the Universe, we search for the cosmic Child, in the dark vastness that is both dangerous and Beautiful in its complexity and mystery.
There in the Sky, that’s where we want to Live.
Dark energy causes the vast Universe to expand ever faster and faster, as it spurs very, very distant galaxies to move away from us fasterthanthespeedof Light, and therefore become Infinite in our unknowing, in our lack of awareness, as they are outside of our conception, far beyond what we can ever see.
Which reminds me of our awareness of God, as our minds race ever faster past this moment in Time. . And, our uncomfortable Reality upon this Earth becomes strewn with incredible feats and acts just to survive.
It takes our imagination to picture the Beauty of Tomorrow – portraits hung in empty halls. Yes, we Live in the memories of yesterday and remember the Dreams of Tomorrow.
Reflection takes us back to enjoy our memories of each day as they bring back into focus the times that were so much simpler, during days that will always be the best.
What a Gift we have Living through the years. Then we blink our eyes and our Time disappears.
In sharing your Love, remember, a candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.
This terrible virus is teaching us to share, and to be still and enjoy the finer things in Life – like the Love, Peace and the Joy in one’s Soul.
Yes, something wonderful is coming out of this terrible time – as we focus more upon Home, Family and feelings, which we now see coming back and was so needed. And as we remember, we find new aspects of Life and Living Beautiful beyond words. And we can give thanks for bringing Beauty into Life.
God Lives in every Living Being, in every Leaf that falls, in every feeling of Joy, and every act of Kindness, in sharing and caring, in Loving and Forgiving.
Life is a Prayer.
You will never know all the wonderful things your Life has done in the Life of others. When you put your Heart in what you are doing, God keeps Blessing you in more ways that you ever imagined.
“There is no denying that there is evil in this World but the Light will always conquer the darkness.” – Idowu Koyenikan
Our expressive and compassionate acts of caring and giving, takes others on a journey of ecstasy. Words will fail to express the gratitude felt by others for sharing your Life and your Love.
In our World, sometimes of darkness and sadness, our Lord offers Peace, Love, and Tranquility to the Heart of our fragile Human existence.
He is the Light and the Ray of Hope to a brighter Tomorrow, where darkness and sadness will never prevail.
Life can be Beautiful, with the lyrics of Living intelligent and understandable. There can be pure poetry flavoring our Human relationships.
You are Love, Oh, Child of God, and He is the Gravity of all that Truly matters.
Cross over the river of doubt. There is another side, another shore. It is Beautiful, and one day looking back over Time, you will come to see and say, the River flows on endlessly to empty into the Ocean of God’s Love.
Close your eyes, and Pray, and Journey on into Infinity’s Arms. The Love you find, will float on and on.
The One who Composed the Beautiful Ballad of Life and Love, is the Artist who brought YOU to Life, and Truly Blessed you with Being.
Prayer elevates us out our problems and allows a brief look into Heaven.
Heaven is that Moment when God looks into your eyes.
Open them.
. Goodnight.
“Oh, Great Spirit” Chief Yellow Lark Native American, Lakota Tribe
“Oh Great Spirit, Whose Voice I hear in the winds, And whose Breath gives Life to all the World, hear me! I am small and weak, I need your strength and wisdom.
Let me walk in Beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things you have made and my ears sharp to hear your voice.
Make me wise so that I may understand the things you have taught my people. Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock.
I seek strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy – myself. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes.
So when life fades, as the fading sunset my Spirit may come to you without shame.”
It is interesting how some moments of silence are just as powerful as words.
click her to read more God promises,“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
Parents, who see one of their children hit the fan, often have a hard time appreciating this verse. In fact, as the home school movement ages there are more and more parents claiming the verse does not mean what it says, because it didn’t hold true in their experience.
Here are just a few of the reasons a child is lost to the world and how parents caused it to happen without even trying.
I say “without trying” because when children turn out poorly, as many do, parents are at a loss as to why. It is always unexpected – certainly unplanned. An eighteen-year-old is unthankful and rebellious, walks around like the family is his enemy and he has been enslaved and abused by them his whole life. Anger is his first response to everything and to nothing.
If you view old TV programs made 50 years ago of families relating to one another, they look like today’s ideal Christian home school family. Daddy is respected and honored and Mother is cherished. Family problems were always resolved with good cheer and forgiveness. Teenage morality was taken for granted. The future was bright and full of hope, and there was no state of rebellion in the kids.
In contrast, modern TV and movies usually represent today’s average family – accurately I might add – as dysfunctional psycho wards of vindictive anger and disrespect. In most movies the family is already divorced or going through the painful process. If a movie were made with a teenager loving his parents as they love their children and each other, and everyone with good cheer and hope for the future, it would be considered corny and unrealistic to the point that the only people who could relate to it would be the ones who stopped watching TV thirty years ago.
So I am going to tell you how kids come to a ruinous end without their parents exerting any effort or attention to the process at all. In fact, that is the first step toward sabotaging your children’s future—no effort and no attention.
1. Get so busy providing for them that you don’t have time for them.
Children are like plants growing every day. They need regular attention and direction.
When children turn out poorly, as many do, parents are at a loss as to why.
I plant a garden every year. And about half of the time I wait too long to stake my tomatoes. A small plant doesn’t need staking. and I tell myself I will stake them before it becomes critical. But it may rain for an entire week, or I get busy doing something else and can’t get around to it. The plant gets so big the stems fall on the ground. When the leaves of a tomato plant are exposed to the soil they quickly develop disease. When the fruit touches the ground it will rot about the time it should be getting ripe. This year I had a second late patch that I intended to stake but waited too long. I finally staked them but too late to prevent the disease.
It is not what I did; it is what I didn’t do that spoiled the crop. So it is with children, they need constant pruning and fertilizing and training to grow up instead of down—to reach for blue skies instead of crawling along the ground. So the worst thing you can do for your children is just ignore them and allow nature to take its course. Plan on training them but never get around to it. Children need the constant sunshine of their parents’ smile and approval. They need to be pointed in the right direction day after day. They need admonition like a plant needs fertilizer. And as water activates the fertilizer, making it available to the roots, smiles activate our admonition making it available to the soul of the child. Children raised right grow up right, no exceptions. It is God’s certain promise (Proverbs 22:6).
2. Set a bad example.
The second thing parents do that will assure a bitter outcome for the children is to set a bad example.
Some people would say fighting in front of the kids has negative consequences. All fighting whether in front of the kids or in private will be destructive, but the most destructive thing is not the fighting as much as how you fight and how it is resolved. I have known families that had big fights, but – I hope you can understand this – their fights were not personal. They were resolved as publicly as they were waged, and the public displays of anger did not create deep hurt in anybody. There are some loving souls that express themselves loudly and with emotion. They punctuate their points with explosive words and gestures, but they are equally as effulgent in their make-up and passionate love. Kids come to understand the heart of their parents and are more influenced by their intentions than their rhetoric. A wife of a certain temperament can scream at her husband that she hates him, and the children hear her saying, “I love you so much, you exasperate me to the point I could kick you just before we make love again.” The kids know the outcome is going to be as always, Mom and Pop making up and saying they are sorry and that they didn’t mean it and melting in each other’s arms. Public fights should be resolved in public so the kids can see the process of how it is worked out and how forgiveness and understanding occurs.
So the worst thing you can do for your children is…plan on training them, but never get around to it.
I have seen other families where the parents were careful to never fight in front of the kids, but the children are able to see the tension and ill will building, and they observe it being taken into the bed room where they occasionally hear muffled but raised voices. The parents come out not speaking to each other, followed by hours or days of emotional distance. Now that kind of fighting is indeed harmful to the children. They are able to read the souls of their parents and they feel the bitterness and hate in every moment of silence and self-control. Bad example. Leaf blight. Rotting fruit.
The bad example extends to every area of life. Any discipline you want your children to have you must exemplify it yourself. You can set a bad example in criticizing others, in carelessness with money, un-thankfulness, unkindness, laziness, irresponsibility, and more. Be what you want your children to be and you will be providing the best training possible.
3. Expressing displeasure regularly.
This is a biggie. It is so subtle that parents don’t even know it is happening. I have observed parents relating to their children in intermittent displeasure and seen the negative effect it is having. When they ask my advice I have pointed out their destructive tendency to always criticize or show displeasure with their child. They are usually shocked and unbelieving. “I love my children,” they exclaim. And I respond, “But?” They fill in the blank, “But, he is so stubborn and willful, always doing the opposite to what I tell him.” And with exasperation, and what I detect as anger, they say, “I have spanked him and it seems to do no good; I just don’t know what to do any more.” I follow up with, “You say he is stubborn most of the time; how do you respond most of the time?” She answers, “Sure, I am displeased; what else could I be; I can’t be happy when he is so stubborn.”
It is a vicious cycle. A child’s bad behavior provokes looks of displeasure and looks of displeasure provoke bad attitudes leading to bad behavior. I have said it so many times. If you cannot train your children to do as they ought, it is far better to lower your standards and enjoy them as they are than to allow your looks of displeasure to become the norm. A kid may grow up to be undisciplined and self-willed, but there is no reason to add to it a feeling of being unloved and unable to please.
Any discipline you want your children to have you must exemplify yourself.
I am not suggesting that there is not a remedy that solves the bad behavior. I only emphasize that a vital part of stopping the bad behavior is to cease the cycle of looks of rejection, followed by more bad behavior, followed by more looks of rejection, followed by “I hate you and never want to see you again; why did you have to be my mother/father?”
I have spoken of it elsewhere, especially in my DVD, The Joy of Training, and the article, The Flavor of Joy (found in the back of To Train Up A Child), so I will not go into detail here, but suffice to say, child training is causing the child to want to please you and be like you. They will want to please you only when they find pleasure in your presence. You must become the vital source of their joy if they are going to give up their rebellion and choose to exercise self-discipline and self-denial.
4. Not enforcing boundaries.
The next best way to destroy your children without trying is to fail to enforce boundaries. It is easy to do – to not enforce boundaries. Just love your kids and believe they will turn out OK as long as you do not create any self-loathing or feelings of rejection like we talked about above. Smile and believe in the innate goodness of their sweet little hearts, and trust that someday they will grow up and take responsibility for their actions.
It is easy to avoid enforcing boundaries because it is the path of least resistance. You don’t have to stir yourself or upset the kids. Let them do as they please – free expression, you know – and they will become your average normal reprobate. But at the least you won’t look like the party pooper. It is a do nothing job that has been left undone by millions of parents.
If children all came into the world disciplined and wise and willing to deny their impulses for the greater good, we could just leave them to free expression, but every parent knows better. All children come to us innocent but fallen. They are hedonistic, self-indulging hippies in their natural state. Left to themselves they will bring their mothers to shame (Proverbs 29:15).
Adults are supposed to be mature enough to choose the virtuous path and do what they ought to do even if is contrary to their desires. That is character, something that you’re not born with; it has to be developed. And children don’t have character unless they are properly trained. Children do not see the need for self-denial or self-restraint. They feel desire and they do what feels good. So if a parent does nothing, their children will become quite schooled in the dark arts of self-indulgence. Therefore, parents must constrain their children to right behavior. In time their moral understanding will develop and they will begin to choose good, even when it is contrary to their carnal desires. Character is formed, and as training continues his character grows stronger until he matures into an adult.
5. Leaving them to choose their friends.
Many parents have done a good job in training their young children, and have put them on a path of virtue, but in their early teens they are influenced by their peers and yield to temptation while knowing it is not the right path. Even well trained children are flesh and are capable of falling into sin—just as is a moral, disciplined adult.
Kids are not wise. They do yet understand the consequences of wrong choices. They need guidance and oversight until they are about twenty years old – sometimes a little older. About the time kids graduate from college they are wise enough to discern good from evil. If you disagree with that assessment, explain spring break at the beach, or fraternity initiations. Woe!
It all starts very young. You must choose the social circle for your children and guard it. The quickest way to throw your children away is to enroll them in daycare or preschool or first grade. You lose all control over their friends, and they will become part of the social pool, eventually reduced to the lowest common denominator. If your child shares a pool with kids where just one of them has crapped in the water, your kid is swimming in crap. A few good kids don’t keep the water clean, but one bad kid pollutes it for everybody. I cannot remember the good kids in my third grade, but there were a couple bad ones I will never forget. I can remember their foul words and deeds to this day.
It all starts very young. You must choose your children’s social circle and guard it.
This is probably the hardest thing for a parent to do. It requires great effort and constant vigilance to sift your social circle. There are times your kids will not understand, and there are times that other parents are offended, but a mother hen should guard her chicks against the foxes and coyotes, regardless. It may require an adjustment to your lifestyle to protect your kids. A chicken that has roosted under a chicken hawk nest needs to move even if it is inconvenient. If your church is full of public school kids, you will need to keep your children at your side all the time and not allow them to get personal with a child going to public school. It becomes impossible to limit the social contact of a teenager in such an environment. They shouldn’t have the burden of constantly choosing or eliminating people from their acquaintance. Find a social circle that is righteous and productive where you have nothing to fear from 25 of the teenagers getting together to play soccer or go roller skating together.
Remember, they will evolve from you providing their complete social circle to choosing for themselves. You cannot control them past the age when they grow to be autonomous, so you must train them to wisely chose their friends. For the time will come when what you say has little bearing. Train them before they are ten and you can trust them when they are twenty.
6. Finally, you can destroy your children by not giving them any responsibility or holding them accountable.
Remember the key ingredient is “without trying.” Neglect or preoccupation is the culprit. It is operating under the assumption that somehow everything will work out. You are best suited to the task of training your children when you work under the assumption that they are destined to ruin unless you get proactive and do some things much better than the average parent.
Responsible action is the duty of all people, and accountability is the inevitable result of being part of a society where the principle of cause and effect is well understood. When there are two people in the room, insofar as they can have an effect on the other, each is responsible for his actions, and the law of love makes us responsible for our neighbor’s well-being. “Let no man seek his own [to advance self], but every man another’s wealth” (1 Corinthians 10:24). Seek to advance the wealth of your neighbor.
You should give your children responsibility according to their ability. A child who can walk should be held responsible to pick up his dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket, clean up spills, and place his toy and books back where they belong. This is the foundation of all future responsible actions.
As they get older, they should be responsible to do their share in domestic chores. They should be held responsible to keep up with their boots and shoes if they take them off outdoors. If a kid loses his shoes he should have to work to make the money to buy a used pair at the second hand store. Even a five-year-old can appreciate the value of responsible action when he has to pay the price for irresponsibility. If a teenager throws a ball through the window he should pay to have it repaired.
Accountability is what you demand and exact when they are caused to answer for the way they have handled their responsibility. If you fail to hold them accountable, they are in fact not responsible. It is much easier to do it ourselves, but the children must learn, and the burden falls on us to stay involved for their sakes.
I have observed a beautiful principle. The children most accountable to act responsibly are the happiest and most secure in love and grounded in good will. You learn to love your neighbor one act of caring at a time.
This could have been a list of ten or fifteen ways parents destroy their children without trying, but these six are about all we can stand in one dose. I still believe the Word of God when it says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
I know there has been a movement to disbelieve the passage as the Holy Spirit inspired it, but the fact remains that when they are trained right they stay right without interruption until they are old. I am an example of right training, as is my wife. My five children were trained in the way they should go and I now see all twenty of my grandchildren (more on the way) being trained that way. I expect a continuance of 100% positive results just as God promised. I will not lower the standard, and you should not lower your expectations because of the poor results others are experiencing.
It is difficult in our world “to train up a child in the way he should go,” and some very good and sincere people fail, not for want of personal righteousness, and not from want of trying, but from want of training the kids in the way they should go. Those who fail should not deny the standard but humbly admit their failure to have trained properly. They can analyze the reasons for their failure and have added wisdom to contribute to those parents who are still in the game training their kids.
Finally, if you have young children still in the process, but your oldest son has been a disappointment, don’t give up. Humbly ask your wayward son where you went wrong. It doesn’t matter what you said, or what you did, or what you intended; the bottom line is what did he believe and feel. If you cannot let go of the anger and resentment toward him or you spouse, and you cannot humble yourself enough to listen to him instead of condemn, then truly there is no hope for the rest of your children.
I have seen families lose their first child to the world, but take it as a wake-up call, and revive their hearts and efforts, resulting in saving the other children from the same fate. Even if you failed with your first child, the promise is still true and you can “Train up a child in the way he should go,” knowing of a certainty “he will not depart from it.”
Lyrics/songs texts/paintings/articles
are property and copyright of their owners and provided for educational purposes.
Copyright Disclaimer – Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.
Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of “fair use”.
Each of us is on our own Journey trying to find ourselves, find our True purpose in Life.
And as our minds flutter and falter and get anxious, we find it difficult to absorb all that becomes so incomprehensible.
My Dear Friends, our Faith is what we need to help us through. . God will abide with us and help us in these difficult Times. . “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my Righteous Right Hand.” – Isaiah 41:10
Let us share the Love and the Light. Sharing our Love with others brings such Joy and Happiness. You Truly make a difference in this fragile World by being patient and Kind and Loving. Be a Ray of Sunshine to Light the Path for others.
God has Blessed us with the wonderful Gift and Beautiful awareness that is you. . Being and Believing is finding the Pathway toward a New Horizon of understanding.
The Beautiful Work of Art you are, is filled with Love, the Love of God.
“Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive Soul to tears.” – Edgar Allan Poe
You are a Blessing, a magnet to Higher vibrations of thought, a new behavioral pattern of Love and Light and Wisdom.
Please understand that YOU are a Beautiful Gift sent to this Earth to fulfill a Purpose, of sending positive energy to those around you. You are a Phoenix rising in the Sacred Heart of someone.
“You have 100% control over your thoughts, words and actions, and 0% control over everything else.” – Sara Y. Rigler
There is a better World and it does exist, and it is inside of us, if we Believe.
With our Prayer we are touched deeply, for there is no separation between man and GOD. It is the Communication of the Heavens for all Eternity. When you Pray, your mind becomes Peaceful and tranquil, and your thoughts are soothing and ascend to Higher Plane of Existence.
Listen to your Soul. You can finally come to realize how things that are material can cause a great damage to oneself. But, there is something that will allow you to feel both Alive and Real.
Be grateful that our Almighty God has given us one more chance to see the Beautiful rays of the Sun, the rays of a new Day, Today. Be glad for being Alive.
Prayer quiets the mind and brings Peace and relaxation. It allows us to connect with God. Our Heavenly Father longs for our Praise and Gratitude. Prayer is where you find all is quiet and Peaceful.
The Harmony between each other, Nature, and the sounds of Creation is a Harmonic Piece of God’s Heart. YOU are a Beautiful expression of the Creative Energy and the Love of God.
Scientists Transmit Thoughts from one Brain to Another
But are we close to reading other people’s minds?
By LEE DYE
An international team of scientists has succeeded in transmitting the thoughts of one individual into the brain of a second person, located thousands of miles away, combining some of the latest technological marvels with the long arm of the Internet.
This is thought to be the first time that two brains have communicated with each other directly over a long distance without the sender having to utter a single word.
Two greetings — “hola” and “ciao” — made the historic trip from India to France, where they were received and spoken by a researcher who was blindfolded and equipped with earplugs. The scientists wanted to ensure that the receiver knew what his colleague 5,000 miles away was thinking because of the brain-to-brain transmission, not because of some other cue.
The research, published in PLOS One, was conducted by scientists in Spain, India, France and the United States.
The scientists wanted to prove, even with technology that will likely seem arcane in the near future, that it’s possible for two human brains to communicate with each other directly, Alvaro Pascual-Leone of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, co-author of the study, said in a telephone interview.
Brain to brain transmission is a hot topic among scientists around the world, and last year researchers at the University of Washington claimed to be the first to carry it off when a student on one side of the campus moved a finger while a colleague thought about the command on the other side of the campus.
The Harvard team took that one step further with the first transmission of specific words.
But the breakthroughs also include a warning. This should be very valuable for medical applications, especially for patients with communication problems, but it could also be a source of devastating misuse. Does it pave the way for humans to read the minds of others, even without their consent?
“I always worry that as we do this initial step with healthy subjects, even under all the regulatory oversight, that it could lend itself to the fancy of people who just want to play with it,” Pascual-Leonesaid.
Or as the study concluded in its final line: “The widespread use of human brain-to-brain technologically mediated communication will create novel possibilities for human interrelation with broad social implications that will require new ethical and legislative responses.”
Or in plain language, this could be the start of something really, really big, or really, really bad.
It should be emphasized though that the current level of research poses no such threat.
Simply transmitting two words required both the “emitter” and the “receiver” to be hooked up to robots and sophisticated hardware that makes the participants look more like captives in a psycho ward than casual greeters. And the feat required the conscious cooperation of both participants, who had to be trained for the task.
An electroencephalogram captured the brain activity of the emitter in India, and converted the letters of the two words to binary code, which was sent to a nearby computer and then over the Internet to the receiver in France. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the receiver’s end enhanced the electrical signals in a key part of the brain, making the receiver aware that a message would be coming through.
“TMS was basically a way to inject the information into the receiver’s brain,” Pascual-Leone said.
This technology is a noninvasive way to alter functions inside a brain. An electromagnetic coil attached to the skull emits magnetic pulses, which in turn generate electric currents that stimulate nerve cells in the brain.
It doesn’t hurt, and bares no similarity to the shock treatments of yesteryear, and it holds promise for modifying emotions and neural activity.
It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2008 for use on patients who suffer from severe depression. But it is so new that it is authorized only for those who do not respond to traditional medications.
Other researchers are testing it for a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders including migraine headaches and Parkinson’s disease.
The technology used for this research is obviously state of the art, but technology is advancing so rapidly that in a relatively short period of time this work will probably look clumsy. So the limitations of today could well be the opportunities of tomorrow, both for good and for bad.
Will it someday be possible to read another person’s mind, without his or her even knowing it? Will our innermost secrets belong to everyone? Or will we be able to alter antisocial behavior, transforming the criminally insane into responsible citizens?
“The rational for doing this type of research, at least for us, is to help patients,” Pascual-Leonesaid. “But could you use some form of noninvasive stimulation, even with people who are unaware, and insert a message into them?
“Not the way we have done it, not with technology that’s available now, but maybe that’s something that could eventually be developed,” he said.
The research is evidence that we’ve passed through the starting gate, but to where?
Lyrics/songs texts/paintings/articles
are property and copyright of their owners and provided for educational purposes.
Copyright Disclaimer – Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.
Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of “fair use”.
Love totally transcends all space and Time. Love transports you to another dimension of reality, one that TRULY exists.
The celestial Beauty of your Love is unworldly and will always remain unmatched.
Love lifts the mind into a higher dimension. It fills the Human Heart to the brim, flowing on gentle wind. Only you can Love another enough to traverse into a place where Time can breathe freely.
Take the Time to explore the Nature of your Sacred Being. Life will suddenly pass by. Love, Live and Laugh. Stop, Listen and Breathe. Enjoy the Miracles of your mind, the depth of your Heart, the Blessings of your Creation.
The deeper Reality of our Humanity lies beyond Joy and sorrow, beyond the moment. It is the opening of a Door.
Our fleeting appearance is the Light, shining on a pathway, to God.
God is the Light of the World. And we are shining Bright to spread His Love, to share His Peace, to give Hope to others.
Let the Beauty of Nature remind you of the Goodness of God.
One act can bring Kindness. One thought can bring Life. One smile can start a Friendship. One look can birth Love. One word can make a Heart endure.
Spread the Love of which you are made.
Don’t look for the most Beautiful person in the World, look for the person who will make your World the most Beautiful.
Turn another page in your precious Life and don’t look back to the past, because you will destroy your Future. The Future is not the past.
Our World is filled with goodness. Just search for it. There are TRULY good people who always care for others. They will care for you.
Our World needs us to express the positive, calmness and Peace. Your demeanor can become a therapy to keep other minds fresh and active, to motivate every person you meet. . You can heal yourself as you heal others. Everyone needs the knowledge of your awareness and compassion and to benefit from it.
Scars remind us of where we have been, but they don’t have to dictate where we are going.
Prayer is the most powerful healer. With God you have everything you need to heal your mind, your body and your Spirit.
.With Faith in our Lord God, you are stronger than you realize. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the realization that something else is more important than fear.
Ask God, the ONE and Only who created ALL Living Things known and unknown, to heal you.
God has an intimate understanding of every Person’s Story, EVERY Person He Created. Your fervent Prayer will draw you into His Heart.
Your Prayer will purify your Sacred Human Soul.
My Dear Friends, the best and most Beautiful things of this World cannot be seen or touched. They must be felt by the Heart.
If you surrender to the Beauty and Sweetness of God’s Blessings found in everything around you, your Spirit will be elevated beyond all expectations.
Goodnight.
Speak From The Heart
Speaking from an open Heart can be the strongest move of all.
What’s Your Heart Say? The Practice Speak from the heart. Why?
One Christmas I hiked down into the Grand Canyon, whose bottom lay a vertical mile below the rim. Its walls were layered like a cake, and a foot-high stripe of red or gray rock indicated a million-plus years of erosion by the Colorado river. Think of water – so soft and gentle – gradually carving through the hardest stone to reveal great Beauty. Sometimes what seems weakest is actually most powerful.
In the same way, speaking from an open Heart can seem so vulnerable yet be the strongest move of all. Naming the Truth – in particular the facts of one’s experience, which no one can disprove – with simplicity and sincerity, and without contentiousness or blame, has great moral force. You can see the effects writ small and large, from a child telling her parents “I feel bad when you fight” to the profound impact of people describing the atrocities they suffered in Kosovo or Rwanda.
I met recently with a man whose marriage is being smothered by the weight of everything unsaid. What’s unnamed is all normal-range stuff – like wishing his wife were less irritable with their children, and more affectionate with him – but there’s been a kind of fear about facing it, as if it could blow up the relationship. But not talking is what’s actually blowing up their relationship – and in fact, when people do communicate in a heartfelt way, it’s dignified and compelling, and it usually evokes support and open – heartedness from others.
How?
This week, look for one or more opportunities to speak from your heart. Pick a topic, a person, and a moment that’s likely to go well.
Before you talk: · Ground yourself in good intentions. To discover and express the truth, whatever it is. To help yourself and the other person.
Get a basic sense of what you want to say. Focus on your experience: thoughts, feelings, body sensations, wants, memories, images, the dynamic flow through awareness; it’s hard to argue with your experience, but easy to get into wrangles about situations, events, the past, or problem-solving. .
Be confident. Have Faith in your sincerity, and in the Truth itself. Recognize that others may not like what you have to say, but you have a right to say it without needing to justify it; and that saying it is probably good for your relationship.
When you speak: · Take a breath and settle into your body.
Recall being with people who care about you. (This will help deepen your sense of inner strength, and warm up the neural circuits of wholeheartedness.)
Soften your throat, eyes, chest, and heart. Try to find a sense of goodwill, even compassion for the other person.
Bring to mind what you want to say.
Take another breath, and start speaking.
Try to stay in touch with your experience as you express it. Don’t get into any sense of persuasion, justification, defensiveness, or problem-solving. (That’s for later, if at all.) Be direct and to the point; when people truly speak from the heart, they often say what needs to be said in a few minutes or less; it’s the “case” wrapped around the heart of the matter that takes all those extra words.
Keep coming back to the essential point for you, whatever it is (especially if the other person gets reactive or tries to shift the topic). And feel free to disengage if the other person is just not ready to hear you; maybe another time would be better. “Success” here is not getting the other person to change, but you expressing yourself.
As appropriate, open to and encourage the other person speaking from the heart, too.
And afterwards: know that whatever happened, you did a good thing. It’s brave and it’s hard (especially at first) to speak from the Heart. But so necessary to make this World a better place.
are property and copyright of their owners and provided for educational purposes.
Copyright Disclaimer – Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,and research. Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.
Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of “fair use”.
We come from the LIGHT
and the LOVE
of God.
And one precious Day,
we will return to the LIGHT
and to His LOVE.
We are all Children
of GOD,
and we will return to
HIM.
Each precious Child
emanates from the LIGHT
of Love.
The Love of God
is traveling throughout the Universe
so we may use our free will
to explore and gain knowledge
of our TRUE essence,
of our LOVE.
“Your Unfailing Love,
O LORD,
is as vast as the Heavens;
your Faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds.
Your Righteousness is like the mighty mountains.
Your Justice like the ocean depths.
You care for people and Animals alike,
O LORD.
How Precious is Your Unfailing Love, O God!
All Humanity
finds Shelter in the Shadow of Your Wings.”
– Psalm 36:5-7
My Dear Friends,
when you feel tears
in your eyes,
and clouds begin to form
in your mental sky,
then you know that God’s Love dwells within
and you are in touch
with the moment.
Today,
we may have a strong culmination
of so many emotions
hidden deep inside. Yes,
it is hard to express Love
for the Beauty in our Lives
without tears welling up
in our eyes.
But please understand,
though we may be
down trodden, burdened or troubled be,
the Lord has a Plan.
We may not always understand,
but if we put our Trust in Him,
all will be well.
“For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you Hope and a future.”
– Jeremiah 29:11
Our FAITH
fills us with Hope
and makes our Hearts
Sing.
It brings us
Peace and Joy and Comfort.
In God’s Immortal Melody of Love, are the Wonderful Lyrics of Living.
With Love
in our Hearts,
Life is enchantingly Divine.
Our Love
for others
creates such Beauty
for All.
You are an amazing Creation
of God.
And,
you deserve Happiness and Love.
Find the Joy in Life
by looking for the Beauty
all around us, and within.
Our World
was Created by Our Lord
with Light and Natural Serenity.
Look to Nature
and to everything Natural. What you will find
is God’s way of saying “I Love You”.
There are many languages
to say what will be said.
And the Language of the Lord
is Beauty.
And everything He Created,
is Beautiful.
.
This precious Day only happens once.
Cherish the moment.
On this truly inspirational Planet
open your eyes
to the Light
of His Eternal Love.
You
are truly an Exquisite Creation. Let us learn
to smile,
to laugh,
to speak Kindly
and Give abundantly,
to pass Kindness forward,
to allow our mind to truly rest
and share Happiness,
to spark Hope
and embrace with warmth
everyone and every
Living Creation.
With the Love of God
flowing through your Heart,
the chaotic World
we are living in
will one Day be
at Peace.
“Let there be Peace on Earth. And let it begin with ME.”
– Jill Jackson Miller
Herbs can not only increase energy, but they can quickly and effectively alter mood and uplift the spirit in ways that conventional medicines can’t.
Each plant has its own essence to share with us…and sometimes this is communicated through scent. It’s amazing how effective aromatic plants can be for boosting our mood, increasing focus and energy and shifting our perception…just smell a rose, and notice whether you feel the same afterwards!
Many of the herbs on this list are aromatic plants, but not all of them. Herbs have many ways of uplifting the spirit, from relaxing tension to increasing energy and focus, to boosting mood…so you’ll find some non-aromatic gems on this list as well! I’ve also included (at the bottom) some aromatherapy essential oils to inspire, revitalize & boost mood, as well as some of our favorite tea blends and other herbal products to uplift the spirit.
Lemon Balm
This divine smelling herb can change your mood with just one whiff! Lemon balm tea has traditionally been used to soothe upset stomach, help dispel fevers, calm upset or anxious children (and adults), and boost mood. It is a favorite in aromatherapy, and we’ve included it in our latest ‘Out of the Blue’ uplifting tea blend for it’s amazing ability to soothe and invigorate the spirit.
Lemon Myrtle
This Australian native has similar effects to lemon balm and other citrus scented herbs. It has antimicrobial & anti-fungal properties, and is used for colds & flus, as a sedative, for digestive upset, as well as in many body and dental care products. The high percentage of fragrant citral oil (found in lemon and lime) is the key to it’s invigorating and uplifting properties…just have a sniff of the leaves, and you’ll be instantly boosted.
Peppermint
Don’t overlook this common herb as an amazing ally for boosting mood, and stimulating the mind. A good strong cup of peppermint can get you going without the need for caffeine. It clears the sinuses, and gets you breathing deeper. The scent of peppermint is clarifying and refreshing, which is exactly what it can do for your spirit!
Damiana
One of our favorite ‘happy herbs,’ Damiana has a long reputation as an aphrodisiac. We love it for its ability to boost mood and relax tension (probably part of the reason it can get you in the mood)! It also tonifies the kidneys.
St John’s Wort
This herb has come into the limelight in recent years as a natural antidepressant and nervous system tonic. It works in a similar way to pharmaceutical SSRIs (so shouldn’t be combined with them), by inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin. Traditionally it was (and still is) used as a wound and nerve healer. It has a restorative effect on the nervous system.
Tulsi
Tulsi is the Sanskrit word for ‘Holy Basil’ and is revered in India as a sacred plant and ‘the queen of herbs’ for its restorative and spiritual properties. It is considered a purifier of the mind, body and spirit.
Modern research has classified it as an ‘adaptogen,’ an herb that helps our bodies adapt to stress (physical, emotional and environmental), and restores balance in the body. Tulsi is also revered for its effects on the brain and memory, and it is used as a meditation aid. Tulsi has a lovely spicy sweet clove & mint scent, and is also used in aromatherapy for its clarifying and uplifting effects.
Rosemary
Another powerful aromatic herb, there is no need to describe the common scent of rosemary! The aroma of rosemary alone has been linked (link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278584609000633) to improving mood, clearing the mind and relieving stress in those with chronic anxiety or stress hormone imbalances. Known as a brain and circulatory stimulant, Rosemary can help boost body and mind without the use of caffeine! Rosemary is also known for its antibacterial, antifungal, and powerful antioxidant as well as an immune stimulant. Wow! I’m feeling better already just thinking about the powerhouse herb!
Brahmi
This is not an aromatic herb, instead it (partly) works by increasing blood flow to the brain. Brahmi is also considered an adaptogen (see Tulsi above), and has been found to reduce feelings of stress and anxiety, while increasing intellect and memory.
Gotu Kola
Similar to Brahmi, Gotu Kola is an adaptogen and brain tonic. It has been found to reduce anxiety and depressive moods, and improve cognitive function. It also improves circulation and has antispasmodic and anti-inflammatory effects.
Rhodiola
Also known as golden root or roseroot, this adaptogen and tonic herb is used to improve both mental and physical energy, memory and performance under stress. It has been found to be very effective for depression by boosting energy, and balancing hormonal systems. Rhodiola is one of our favourite herbs to replace caffeinated stimulants, as it not only boosts energy and mood, but it supports the adrenal system.
Mucuna
Also known as Velvet Bean, this herb has potent libido and mood-enhancing properties due to its effect on dopamine levels in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which, like serotonin, regulates mood. It has been found effective in treating depression and low libido. It is also used as a supplement to rebalance brain chemistry after indulging in alcohol and other drugs.
Yerba Maté
This stimulating tea from South America is packed full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants (as well as caffeine). It boosts mood, energy, digestion as well as sex drive! As this herb does contain caffeine, use it with caution if you have anxiety or stress-related issues.
Guayusa
This rare herb from the Amazon is prized as a lucid dreaming herb. It’s actually quite stimulating and contains a significant amount of caffeine. However, the buzz from Guayusa is extremely clear, positive, focused and dreamy at the same time, with no jitters or crash. I personally find it enhances my visual perception, and it is excellent for meditation (as well as dancing and working), and as an adjunct to other magical herbs!
OTHER HERBS TO NOTE
Passionflower, Oat Straw, Valerian, Chamomile, Skullcap & California Poppy
These herbs all work by relaxing and nourishing the nervous system, and help relieve anxiety, stress & depression.
Siberian Ginseng, Korean Ginseng, Ashwagandha, Maca, Suma, Reishi, Chaga, Cordyceps
These herbs are all considered tonics and adaptogens, helping the body deal with stress and increasing energy, stamina and immunity, and decreasing fatigue. Supporting the body with these amazing tonic herbs can boost overall wellbeing, and help us feel our best.
AROMATHERAPY
The “smell” receptors in your nose communicate with parts of your brain that serve as storehouses for emotions and memories. When you breathe in essential oil molecules, some researchers believe they stimulate these parts of your brain and influence physical, emotional, and mental health. (https://www.umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/treatment/aromatherapy)
In a more practical sense, Aromatherapy can have an immediate and profound impact on our mood and energy.
Here are some of our top aromatherapy oils for uplifting the spirit and mood:
Our Snifters range of aromatherapy inhalers include many uplifting choices:
Alive, Happy, Focus & Breathe all include uplifting scents to stimulate your mood, mental clarity and more!
TEA BLENDS
We’re very excited to bring you our latest tea blend…Out of the BLUE. Using many of the herbs listed above, this blend has been formulated to help revitalise, uplift and boost mood.
We also love our luxury Vibrancy blend. This one is definitely stimulating, so take care if you’re sensitive to caffeine. It also has nervine tonics and mood boosters to round things off.
Another great choice is our Stress Less blend, a great choice for anxiety & tension or just to chill out at the end of a long day.
OTHER PRODUCTS
Looking for the convenience or herbal extracts or capsules to help boost mood and energy? Some of our favourite products include Love Bubble liquid extract, Activate chocolate elixir, our classic BlissTea liquid extract, Vibes capsules and many more.
Hope all these recommendations inspire you to get UPLIFTED and ACTIVATED
with the power of herbs!
Wishing you the best of health, The Happy Herb Crew!
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