Health Secrets to a Long Life

Seven Secrets to a Long Life

Lester Breslow, popularly referred to as "Mr. Public Health", is the outspoken visionary whose research played a significant role in asserting that simple lifestyle changes could drastically improve overall health. His landmark studies in Alameda county following the health habits of 7,000 people for 35 years resulted in the 'Seven Secrets': a list of daily health habits that proved strong indicators of how long people will live and how healthy they will be during their lifetime. The study showed that following the habits not only predicted lower mortality, but those who lived longer also suffered fewer disabilities. This news report shares the list.

LOS ANGELES (ANS) -- Want to live to a ripe old age? A University of California at Los Angeles professor who has followed the health habits of 7,000 people in Alameda County for 35 years says seven simple daily health habits predict how long people will live and how healthy they will be during their lifetime.

People in the study with poor health practices experienced more than 50 percent greater mortality over the 35-year period than those who had healthy habits, said Lester Breslow, M.D., professor of health services, emeritus, at the UCLA School of Public Health.

The study showed that following the habits not only predicted lower mortality, but those who lived longer also suffered fewer disabilities, Breslow said. "What was surprising to me was how these seven habits were so strongly predictive of mortality."

These health habits are:

· 1. Don't smoke.

· 2. Drink moderately or don't drink at all.

· 3. Get a good night's sleep of seven or eight hours.

· 4. Exercise 30 minutes at a time, several times a week. Walking vigorously is a top choice.

· 5. Forget the scales. Eat moderately to maintain weight in relation to height.

· 6. Eat regularly, whether that's two meals a day, three or five. Whatever you do normally, keep it up because it's the regularity of life and moderation in eating, sleeping and exercising that makes all the difference.

· 7. Eat breakfast every day.

Those people in the study who followed zero to three habits had 100 percent mortality rate after 35 years; those who had followed four to five habits had a 65 percent mortality rate; those who followed six to seven habits had a 50 percent mortality rate.
Deep Medicine

New Book Goes Beyond Medicine

Deep Medicine is a book about the meaning of health. It goes beyond the superficiality of symptoms to the underlying issues, exploring the complex, interwoven nature of health.

The core thesis of Deep Medicine is that everything we think, feel or do either fosters health or detracts from it. It follows that, if we are responsible for our own well-being, we need to look closely at our daily choices. Dr. Stewart explains, "Health-creating change is not simply a 10-step program or an 8-week course but a lifelong challenge. Making healthy choices and sustaining them is vital to our well being."

True health is about finding the balance between our inner thoughts and outer circumstances. According to Dr. Stewart, "When we lose this balance we may become ill." The work of health-creation and healing is a personal, conscious process, and deep commitment.

Combining the best of two established genres, self-help and spirituality, Deep Medicine offers daily practices, insights and self-assessments to help you create an optimal path to health that is meaningful, lasting and truly transformative.

More from Barbara Hubbard

THE PLANETARY BIRTH Part II: OUR CRISIS IS A BIRTH with BARBARA MARX HUBBARD
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.:

Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. This is the second of a two-part series on "The Planetary Birth." With me is Barbara Marx Hubbard, a futurist, mystic, author, and stateswoman. She is a person whose name was placed in nomination for the Vice President of the United States at the 1984 Democratic Convention. She is the author of The Hunger of Eve, An Evolutionary Journey, and The Book of Co-Creation. Welcome again, Barbara.

BARBARA MARX HUBBARD: Thank you, Jeffrey.

MISHLOVE: We were talking earlier about the influence of some of the great thinkers -- Abraham Maslow, Jonas Salk, Teilhard de Chardin -- a vision of a birth of a new culture on this planet. One of the other great influences, I think, in your thought has been Buckminster Fuller.

HUBBARD: That's right. I asked the question, "What is the meaning of our power?" The first answer was from Maslow, that the meaning of our power is to release our individual potential to create. The second was from Teilhard de Chardin, that the world is evolving to higher consciousness and greater freedom, to more complex order, and even a jump in consciousness collectively on this earth. The third was Buckminster Fuller, when he said we have the technology, the resources, and the know-how to make of this world a one hundred percent physical success, for everyone, without damage to the environment, in an earth-space open system. And suddenly, if you put together individual potential through Maslow, planetary evolution through Teilhard, and technological capability to serve the basic needs of humanity through Buckminster Fuller, you see a picture of such good news that it's stunning, it's shocking, given all the bad news -- that at the same time this might be true. And that's when I really took a personal quantum jump.

MISHLOVE: At least you saw one potential path to a positive future.

HUBBARD: I did. And I thought, way back -- this was 1967-68; I was so naive -- I thought, "Well, what if everybody knows? Everything will change!" And I thought all we need to do is find this out, because I was changed by knowing it.

MISHLOVE: Yes, and you did everything you could to spread the word.

HUBBARD: I was like a little tiny person with a flag -- "Hey! Look here!" I had so much good news that it was almost too much for people to take. I was a positive Cassandra. I wrote the letter to a thousand people; I started to network. But I didn't know the immensity of the task of changing consciousness. And now, some 30 years later, here we are, right at the threshold, but the dangers are greater, and yet the awareness is also much greater that we have to make a quantum change.

MISHLOVE: I think one of the insights that's come to you along the way is that it has to be deeper than just the theoretical principles of Bucky Fuller and Abe Maslow and Teilhard de Chardin -- that people need to be touched at a spiritual level.

HUBBARD: Well, I got touched myself. You know, I came from a Jewish agnostic, just completely non-metaphysical background. After I read Teilhard about the world evolving, and that that meant that the universe had a pattern, that there was some design, rather than it being meaningless as the scientists said, or Absurdists, or heading down to an inevitable heat death -- Maslow and Bucky and Teilhard saw it evolving. And suddenly I got affirmed in my own innate desire to evolve -- this little person who felt maybe she was crazy for wanting something to evolve. Suddenly I felt reinforced by the universe. I remember one day I was taking a walk, and I said, "Thank you" -- just this kind of outside shouting, "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" -- I didn't know to whom. And an inner voice said, "Thank you, Barbara." What that was, was an intuition that the universe is related to us in a feeling way. Obviously it's not scientific, it's not provable, but I had an internal experience that I, as an aspect of the creation, was related to the creation in a way that was two ways.

MISHLOVE: In other words, your vision of a positive path to a potential future was something that was related to the universe as a whole, in a personal way.

HUBBARD: That's right. Since the universe has been evolving for 15 billion years -- from subatomic particles to molecules to cells to animals to humans to ecologies to planetary systems -- I suddenly saw I was the creation of that whole process. Fifteen billion years it took to create you and me on this planet.

MISHLOVE: At this now moment.

HUBBARD: Right now. And that whatever motivation I personally feel is an aspect of the whole process, expressing as me, or as you. And I began what I call to surf the spiral. I began to go back and actually experience that's my story; that's not just an abstract, outside story. Because I realized my atoms, my molecules, my limbic brain, my neocortex, where did all that come from? The cosmos.

MISHLOVE: In a sense then, while one might say you're 64 years old, you could say equally truthfully that you're 15 billion years old.

HUBBARD: That's right. And I suddenly saw that all this question about our roots and our ethnic differences -- you know, we're all from the cosmos. We all have a 15-billion-year history, and I personally believe that as we head to the planetary birth, that each person will see themselves as a unique aspect of the whole, and that whatever their cultural roots are will be considered a gift to the future, but that the real roots of all of us go back, not only to just the big bang, because that was the physical manifestation, but in my understanding now, we go back to the universal intelligence.

MISHLOVE: The universal intelligence -- I think that's an important concept, because if we're to look at solving the enormous problems that we have, breaking free of well-entrenched, deep habit patterns of oppression, of waste, of warfare and violence across the culture, it's going to require some kind of quantum transformation of consciousness, and it needs to happen in our lifetime.

HUBBARD: That is the amazing thing. Here are my basic reasons for hope -- and a lot of people don't see this, but I don't see how they can miss it, actually -- but if you look at the 15-billion-year history, it is a continuous rise of consciousness and freedom -- I mean from molecule to cell to animal to human to us. There is no earthly reason why it would stop here, with a group of furry bipeds. We're only 50,000 years old as Homo sapiens sapiens. Do you realize whales are millions of years old? So we are very young as a species, and we look it, and we act it, and we're a mess. We still have little tips on our ears like wolves and little fangs here and a little hair here. We are actually just coming out of the mammalian stage. But if you add to our animal heritage, and even our spiritual heritage, our noosphere, our technological social system, you actually begin to see the possibility of the birth of a universal humanity. That's my particular word for it.

MISHLOVE: You sometimes call it Homo universalis.

HUBBARD: Right, and that we come from Homo sapiens through a birth process where we are shifting from self-centered consciousness to whole-centered, cosmic-, Buddha-, Christ-, God-centered consciousness.

MISHLOVE: In other words, to a large extent we still behave like monkeys.

HUBBARD: We do.

MISHLOVE: But there are role models, there are templates, if we look at the great saints and spiritual leaders of humanity.

HUBBARD: Well, I believe that every great religion -- which actually came through great individuals, although we may have lost track of that -- each great religion was an experience of a mystic, who experienced a higher state of being, and who created a teaching and disciples, who then created a religion, which got calcified and dogmatized often. But basically each culture is patterned with an experience of a higher state of being, and everybody's heard it one way or the other. For example, in Egypt with those pyramids, they were really the beginning of the idea of the human becoming a regenerating god. In India, through the great yogis, they transcended self-consciousness through yoga, through union with the all. In Greece we penetrated the visible world into the world of the invisible atom; in Israel, Abraham and God, the Covenant between humans and God for the transformation of the physical world -- the New Jerusalem, the new Heaven, the new Earth. Could it be that all those religions are ancient futurists?

MISHLOVE: Ancient futurists.

HUBBARD: Yes. And then when Buddha came in, there was a great individual that we actually have the story of, the history of, that represented human enlightenment. And then I believe that when Jesus came in, he came in to represent to us a map of the total physical and psychological transformation of the human to a co-creator with God.

MISHLOVE: In other words, Jesus came not so much to be worshipped by us as something far above us and unobtainable, but as someone pointing the way and saying, "Come be like me."

HUBBARD: His basic reason for being is to demonstrate what we can do. And when he said, "You will do the work that I do, and greater works than these will you do in the fullness of time," my experience is that that's true. Even if we could look at our situation right now, we are doing the work that he did, and greater works, but often without the consciousness. Whether it be in our healing, in our technologies, we can do Christ work, even now. But we're not yet in Christ consciousness as a collective. And by Christ consciousness I'm not talking about a religion. I'm talking about a consciousness that the source and the person are one: "The Father and I are one, and of myself I do nothing." That's what Jesus said. When any one of us realizes we are one with source, with spirit, with God, and that it is that flowing through us, then we too have those powers. That's my belief.

MISHLOVE: Well, it's interesting that you should be expressing it this way, because if we look at the history of mysticism we see that in almost every culture, in almost every generation, there are mystics who are saying, "I have achieved a state of union with the divine, or with the whole, and I have a vision of that." But it's considered rare. It's not considered common, by any means, and you seem to be saying that it's incumbent upon this generation to achieve those states of consciousness, and to translate that into a new path into the future.

HUBBARD: Well, I'll tell you the facts of it. Environmentalists tell us we really have 30 years at most to radically change our behavior or destroy our life support system and go through a real devolutionary spiral. Now, when and how would anything change so fast within 30 years? That's very difficult to imagine, knowing how slow we are. However, given the vast speed-up of connections, and given the communication systems, and given the fact that we're constantly impinged upon by awareness that we are connected, mainly in a painful way -- through war, through hunger, through environment -- is it possible that that crisis it itself a trigger of consciousness, and that if enough of us choose to -- I think it's part of the human intentionality here -- if we would choose collectively to shift that consciousness, even by intention, I believe we could have an extraordinary effect on the collective consciousness of the earth.

MISHLOVE: And I think it may be fair to say that this isn't just a belief of yours. It's something that came from deep within you as a vision.

HUBBARD: Well, I had two great peak experiences in my life. The first I call a planetary birth experience, and that was in 1966. I was asking the question, "What is our story? What on earth is comparable to the birth of Christ?" And I really meant that the story of the birth of Christ changed the whole world.

MISHLOVE: Yes. Something that could motivate generations of people.

HUBBARD: I knew from seeing earth from space and everything, of course, that we are one body, so it must be one story. So what is the story, I asked. And you know, I ask the universe questions, and I always get these answers. The answer I got was in the moment my mind's eye went into outer space, just like that, and I saw the earth as a living body, and I was a cell, along with everybody else, in it, and the earth was struggling to coordinate. It was gasping for breath; it was feeling the pain. And I actually had a whole-earth experience.

MISHLOVE: Feeling the pain.

HUBBARD: Of the whole. And at one instant in time I felt the pain of the whole system. It was an intense, unbearable degree of pain. And strangely enough, in this precognitive experience, with the pain came a flash of light, and with the flash of light came a moment of shared attention on the part of the human race, and with that shared attention love started to be felt simultaneously in the body. All I can say is it was a precognitive experience.

MISHLOVE: In other words, a vision that a time will come when the pain of this planet will be so great that people all over the planet will focus their attention on a kind of loving consciousness that will be desperately needed to ease that pain.

HUBBARD: Well, you know, I had the analogy -- since I'm a mother of five I use birth analogies a lot, and it is so true of a birth on the biological level that when the pain becomes most intense is exactly the moment before birth. And when the baby is born and there's that great release for the mother and the child, the baby at first doesn't know it's been born. Its nervous system is not linked up, and it cries. Here's my analogy. The planet is one living organism. We have been connected up. We have even stepped off the earth and seen ourselves as one body, and our nervous system collectively has not yet sufficiently come together for us to have a moment of shared awakening that we are one body; and that when we do, there will be a flash of light. Every mystical experience, or many mystical experiences, from all cultures, have light. And I wonder, Jeffrey, if there is such a thing in store for us as a shared mystical experience, what Peter Russell calls the white hole in time. It is a version of a Second Coming, a global brain, a great awakening. When I talk about this to audiences, I often say, "How many of you have an intuition of something great coming like this?" And you know what? About half the audience already feels it. But there are not many cultural affirmations of it. So I got the answer -- when I had this experience the answer that I heard on the inner plane was, "Our story is a birth." So our story on this earth is a birth. It has taken 15 billion years of gestation to create a planetary system who now is awakening to itself as a whole, and who is aware that it is born into a universal dimension of consciousness and action.

MISHLOVE: I want to go back to the idea of pain, because so many people feel nihilistic, pessimistic. They don't have positive vision. In fact, the old vision is often one of Armageddon, one of tragedy, one of heat death. There are many negative images.

HUBBARD: Yes there are, and partly I think the mass media has a disease. I call it disempathitis of the nervous system, dead on empathy. If you think of the media as our collective nervous system, it's filtering out good news. If something creative, innovative, loving happens, that's not news. If something is burnt or killed or destroyed, that's news. So we are being constantly flooded with information of our breakdown, but not concurrently and equally with our innovations, our loving. So we have a very bad self-image.

MISHLOVE: Even in the spiritual context it seems that mostly what you get in the media are scandals and superstitions.

HUBBARD: So the media is giving us a nervous breakdown -- I mean literally that's a pun, a nervous breakdown.

MISHLOVE: There's a kind of cultural cynicism that's so common.

HUBBARD: I feel that if the media began to do what you're doing on a larger scale, and particularly if the news were interpreted as the news of what is growing, what is evolving, that you would find very rapidly a new situation. The way I ran for Vice President was I proposed a Peace Room as sophisticated as the War Room in the White House, to map every innovation and success, to connect it and to communicate it live over television, on a continuous basis, until we could see the emerging world. And a person like myself seeks out the emerging world.

MISHLOVE: Well, there are many people who say that this is the biggest story of the century that the media is overlooking.

HUBBARD: The media is overlooking the story of our birth. But you notice a baby's nervous system, what it does is cries and puts you to sleep. Our mass media cries and puts us to sleep. It cries, and the pain is real. And maybe we have to feel more pain until we can wake up.

MISHLOVE: You have written about higher forms of consciousness and how they are essential if we're to grasp the whole. Most people, I think, tend to be more concerned about their own problems -- their job, their health. People seem to be so wrapped up in these things that they don't always notice that there's a whole going on.

HUBBARD: It's interesting to me that the mass of people have faith. Whatever the culture, whether it be in South America or India or Africa, the so-called simple people basically are religious. It's the sophisticated people and intellectuals who are not.

MISHLOVE: Well, it's kind of a blind faith on the one hand, but blind skepticism in reaction to it.

HUBBARD: On the other. But I think there's more truth in the blind faith than in the blind skepticism. You know, when they do surveys of the American people, I don't know, 60 percent have had mystical experiences; 75 percent believe in UFOs; they believe in the resurrection of Jesus and the Second Coming. I wonder if they're not more true than the more limited, rational intellectual who is guiding things these days. I personally had a very deep Christ experience that led to The Book of Co-Creation.

MISHLOVE: Could you talk about that?

HUBBARD: Well, it came after my planetary birth experience, and then my becoming a futurist, and I began to see that Homo sapiens is evolving, and that the power of science and technology will either radically destroy or transform us -- not only our consciousness, but our technology. And I wondered, what could be a human type that could handle this power? Because we see that we mainly misuse power, so the more powerful we get the worse we become. And I was asking another question of the universe: "What is the future human like?" I was in Santa Barbara to write a book on it, and had a writer's block. One day I got lost, and I was driving through the Santa Barbara hills. I saw a little sign that said Mount Calvary Monastery, and I had actually an experience of light. I went up the mountain, followed the sign, went to a little Episcopal monastery, and there was a hang gliders' club jumping off a higher mountain, about 50 people in butterfly wings above Mount Calvary, and I had an image of human metamorphosis, that we would all be changed. And I had an inner experience of the Christ not as Jesus of Nazareth, but as an omniscient, omnipresent field that was actually pulling us forward toward the total and radical fulfillment of our divine human potential. And I heard the words, "My resurrection was real. It is a forecast of what the human race will do collectively when you love God above all else, your neighbor as yourself, your self as a Godlike being, combined with science and technology. You will all be changed." And I suddenly thought, "Oh my goodness, Western civilization was built on a story of the radical transformation of the person to life everlasting, and through science and democracy and technology and industry we're hitting up against the limits of the biosphere. We are learning to extend our life span. We're learning to build new parts. We're learning to go live in outer space. And I made a quantum jump which I think nobody else has really made, between the high technology of Western civilization and the promise of Jesus.

MISHLOVE: That is unusual.

HUBBARD: I mean, it's never done. And I saw that part of the mystery is the science of matter, whereby the physical world is being transformed. And then I went back to people like Aurobindo and the Mother, who were working on cellular immortality.

MISHLOVE: In India.

HUBBARD: In India; and people who were studying the aging process, and people who were looking at regeneration and cryonics, and even these far-out things like cloning and taking DNA and resurrecting a whole being. Those are very weird for a biosphere; but what if the human race is to be a cosmic species, and what if Jesus is a template of the cosmic human, and what if our new powers are actually to transform and transcend creature human conditions? And so I was guided to the New Testament, and I opened up on my favorite passage: "Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep. We shall all be changed." And I started to write, and I feel I was inspired by a kind of whole-system consciousness -- not to interpret the New Testament, because I'm not a scholar or a theologian, but as a futurist, to unpack it for our generation, as a guide to universal life.

MISHLOVE: In other words, to take a look at the coding of the ancient myths and the deep vision of the prophets and apostles and mystics, and to interpret it in the light of what is possible today with our science.

HUBBARD: Exactly.

MISHLOVE: And what is our greatest possible hope for ourselves as a species.

HUBBARD: And you know, many scholars are going back to try to get the historical Jesus, and they're saying, "This didn't happen, that, and all the myths are probably untrue." My thesis is we will never know what really happened back there, but whether or not, Jesus' life may be coming true, through us being able to do what he did. In other words, if the human race advances to the point of being able to do it -- and I had a wonderful conversation with an Indian guru, Yogi Amrit Desai of Kripalu. I was telling him about my Christ experience, and I said, "You know about the Resurrection." Well, he said, "Our guru's guru, Babaji's guru, was able to do this." Like Yogananda, and Sai Baba.

MISHLOVE: Sure, these things are known in mystical traditions throughout the world.

HUBBARD: And Michael Murphy's book, The Future of the Body. He uses scientific language like extrasomatic capabilities. But is it possible that actually we are not having to be bound to this physical body, but that through our advanced consciousness, and possibly extended technologies, that thought can create bodies more sensitive to thought?

MISHLOVE: Barbara, we're out of time, but you've certainly laid out an incredible vision for us, and I can see from the gleam in your eye and the smile on your face that it is a living truth for you, and a radiant, joyful truth, and that you offer promise to everyone who hears you. Thanks so much for being with me.

HUBBARD: Thank you, Jeffrey.

Orgasmic Consciousness?

(This article raises the question of whether there are other more lasting ways of switching off fearful thinking, which we might call orgasmic consciousness or Level Two Living. Dr. Wright)

Female orgasm: switches of brain areas governing fear
2007/03/26

New research indicates that parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off during female orgasm.

In the study to map brain function during female orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain that governs emotional control is also heavily deactivated.

Female orgasm switches of brain areas governing fear“The fact that there is no deactivation in faked female orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain,'' said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings at the meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

In the study, Holstege and his colleagues at Groningen University recruited 11 men and 13 women, together with their respective partners.

The volunteers laid on a scanning machine bed and were injected with a dye that shows changes in brain function on a scan. For the men, the brain scanner tracked activity during rest, during erection, during manual stimulation by their partner and then during ejaculation, brought on by the partner's hand.

For the women, the scanner measured brain activity during rest, while they faked an orgasm, during manual stimulation by their partner, and while they experienced genuine female orgasm.

Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanning machine needs activities lasting at least two minutes to record an activity. But the men's climaxes didn't last anywhere near that long, meaning he could not reliably compare the scans before climax and during.

However, for female orgasms, the results were clear, he said.

When women faked orgasm, the cortex, the part of the brain governing conscious action, lit up. It was not activated during genuine orgasm, the AP reports.

The most striking results, however, were seen in the parts of the brain that shut down, or deactivated.

“During female orgasm, there was strong, enormous deactivation in the brain. During fake orgasm, there was no deactivation of the brain at all. None,'' Holstege said. “It looks like to have an orgasm, you need to not be fearful or full of anxiety.''

A New Era

Barbara Marx Hubbard, teaching at Wisdom University in Santa Barbara, has written The Book of Co-Creation, and Revelation: Our Crisis is a Birth, heralding a new era of Conscious Evolution, a new field that arisen in our generation as humanity had learned to destroy and create with powers we used to attribute to gods. It heralds the evolution of evolution from unconscious to conscious choice. We have entered the transition to the next stage of human evolution or devolution and self-destruction. “This change from nature-based evolution to human-based evolution is, by far, the largest change to occur since the first single cell life appeared…. the creatures that take evolution into their own hands have no experience in the game.” James Martin, “The Meaning of the 21st Century. “

This new era is designed exactly to provide “experience” in the “new game” of consciously evolving, using intellectual, experiential, dialogic, meditative modes of “divining the design” of our lives as agents of conscious evolution.
Working from an understanding of the recurring patterns of evolution, including the rise of human culture and religion, we are all learning to map Our Turn on the Spiral, starting with Social Evolution from 1945 to the present and beyond, tracing the rapid breakdowns and breakthroughs leading us now into “Late Transition” on planet Earth.

Also we are proceeding to Self Evolution, with each person mapping his or her own process of Self Evolution, as it coincides and is influenced by Social Evolution. We are exploring both intellectually and experientially the continuing incarnation of Self – the idea that a new species is being born within us, a more universal human, that we have not yet experienced the full model of who we are becoming, that an evolutionary spirituality has taken hold that is driving us to realize the “Soul of Evolution” as our own passion to be more, do more, create more.

We are learning to focus on the emergence of the Evolutionary Woman and the Evolutionary Man as individuals and in relationship. Humans have left the Garden of Eden. We have traveled the path of individuation, separation and power over nature. We have come to the end of this phase. Now evolving humans are stepping by choice into the Second Garden, the “Garden of Cocreation.”

We are preparing for the Second Genesis as through advancing technologies we are gaining power to place human intent into matter. To have the wisdom to handle all our new powers, we learn to align with our essential self, to resonate with one another, to deepen our spiritual attunement to the subjective experience of the Impulse of Evolution, as we discover our deeper life purpose in the recreation of the world. The Garden is in essence a global School for Conscious Evolution, a kindergarten for godlings. We experiment with this myth in words, art, movement, and expression of various kinds.

Vocational Evolution follows, where each person is assisted in tapping into this deeper life purpose seen not merely as a personal purpose, but as an indivualized expression of the design of creation, a vital element of the emerging world. Cocreativity and new projects emerge.. The Wheel of Cocreation is offered as a field of coherence in which to find teammates and assist in the connection of what is already working. Our purpose is to contribute to political, economic and social change through the development of an Evolutionary Agenda

Visions of a Universal Humanity: We envision together the next stage of evolution, based on “quantum capacities,” joining genius at the growing edge, developing together a strange attractor, that combines our spiritual, social, and scientific/technological potentials at the next level of synergy.

Life Objectives:
• To place the current human condition in the process of evolution using insights gained from 14 billion years of transformation as lessons to guide us in our own conscious evolution now.
• To deepen contact with the Essential Self, learning to self-map and nurture the developmental path of the universal human that each individual is on.
• To gain tools to integrate all levels of self – body, local self, essential self, universal self, and beyond, aiming at becoming whole beings, full spectrum selves, cocreators of new worlds.
• Through understanding the great opportunities now emerging to evolving our world, to identify and commit to specific sacred action to fulfill the potential of the self and the world.

What does the word "Namaste" Mean?

> I have been told it means something like to
> pay homage to the inner light in all living things.
> Can you help me with this???
> sgray@javanet.com

Namaste is a form of greeting, comparable to shaking hands.


"Shake hands and come out fighting." It's the referee's
final counsel to two pugilists about to beat each other's
brains out with clenched fists. Even outside the ring, a
handshake can be a little off-putting. When one returns
to the West from an extended sojourn in Bharat or
elsewhere in Asia, the hand suddenly thrust forward can
seem more ominous than friendly, especially if the hand
offered is that of a stranger. Of course, one soon
acclimates and the menacing aspect of this salutation subsides.

Perhaps that moment of intimidation derives from the history of
the handshake. According to one anthropologist, the handshake evolved in medieval Europe, during the times of knights. It seems not all were laudable Lancelots or gallant Gallahads. More than a few would approach opponents with concealed weapons and when within striking distance do the needful, driving dagger or striking sword into the unguarded paladin.

To fend off the fear of a foe's foul foil, knights took to offering their open and visibly empty hand to each other. It was a kind of surety, a gesture of trust which said, "See, I am unarmed, so you may safely let me approach." As the story goes, soon the gesture itself took on meaning and the less noble, less lethal man on the street adopted the handshake as the proper way to greet others.

In much of the world today, people do not shake hands when they meet. They may hug formally or kiss one another on the cheek, as in eastern Europe and Arab states. They may bow softly, eyes turned to the ground, as in Japan and China. The Hawaiian greeting, termed "honi," consists of placing the nostril gently beside that of the person greeted, a kind of sharing of breath, which is life and Pran(a).

For, Hindu(s), of course, the greeting of choice is "Namaste," the two hands pressed together and held near the heart with the head gently bowed as one says, "Namaste." Thus it is both a spoken greeting and a gesture, a Mantr(a) and a Mudr(a). The prayerful hand position is a Mudr(a) called Anjali, from the root Anj, "to adorn, honor, celebrate or anoint." The hands held in union signify the oneness of an apparently dual cosmos, the bringing together of spirit and matter, or the self meeting the Self. It has been said that the right hand represents the higher nature or that which is divine in us, while the left hand represents the lower, worldly nature.

In Sanskrit "Namas" means, "bow, obeisance, reverential
salutation." It comes from the root Nam, which carries meanings of bending, bowing, humbly submitting and becoming silent. "Te" means "to you." Thus "namaste" means "I bow to you." the act of greeting is called "Namaskaram," "Namaskara" and "Namaskar" in the varied languages of the subcontinent.

Namaste has become a veritable icon of what is Bharatiye. Indeed,
there must be a Bharatiye law which requires every travel
brochure. calendar and poster to include an image of someone with
palms pressed together, conveying to the world Bharat's
hospitality, spirituality and graceful consciousness. You knew
all that, of course, but perhaps you did not know that there can
be subtle ways of enhancing the gesture, as in the West one might
shake another's hand too strongly to impress and overpower them or too briefly, indicating the withholding of genuine welcome.

In the case of Namaste, a deeper veneration is sometimes
expressed by bringing the fingers of the clasped palms to the
forehead, where they touch the brow, the site of the mystic Third
Eye. A third form of namaste brings the palms completely above
the head, a gesture said to focus consciousness in the subtle
space just above the Brahma-randhra, the aperture in the Crown
Chakr(a). This form is so full of reverence it is reserved for
the Almighty and the holiest of gurus.

It is always interesting, often revealing and occasionally
enlightening to muse about the everyday cultural traits and
habits each nation and community evolves, for in the little
things our Big ideas About Life find direct and personal
expression. Take, for instance, the different ways that American
and Japanese tool-makers approach the same task. A saw for
cutting lumber, if designed in the U.S., is made in such a way
that the carpenter's stroke away from his body does the cutting.

But in japan saws are engineered so that cutting takes place as
the carpenter draws the saw toward himself. A small detail, but
it yields a big difference.

The American saw can, if leaned into, generate more power, while
the Japanese saw provides more control and refinement in the cut,
requiring surprisingly less effort. Each has its place in the
global toolbox. each speaks -- like the handshake and namaste
greetings -- of an underlying perception of man's relationship
with things.

In the West we are outgoing, forceful, externalized. We are told
by Ma bell to "reach out and touch somebody." We are unabashedly
acquisitive, defining our progress in life by how much we have --
how much wealth, influence, stored up knowledge, status or
whatever. Every culture exhibits these traits to some extent, but
in the east Mother is there to remind us, "Reach in and touch the
Self." here we are taught to be more introspective, more
concerned with the quality of things than their quantity, more
attuned with the interior dimension of life.

So, there you have it, the whole of Eastern and Western culture
summed up in the handshake which reaches out horizontally to
greet another, and Namaste which reaches in vertically to
acknowledge that, in truth, there is no other.

Joe Maharaj

The Parable of the Room

Imagine for a moment that we are all sitting in one huge room. The room that we are in has doors and windows and is like any other room that any of us have been in except for the fact that the room is freezing cold. In fact, it is so cold that everyone in the room has several layers of warm clothing on: hats, gloves, and parkas to insulate us from the bitter cold.
And so there we are huddled in the freezing room, desperate for warmth.

Nobody really knows how long we’ve been in this room. We just know it is a long time. But suddenly, after what seems like an eternity, one among us looks up from her huddled crouch and realizes that there is some kind of strange contraption on her back. She strains to see what it is but cannot quite make out the details. After a few moments of examination, she notices that there is a string attached to the contraption. After a moment’s hesitation, she pulls the string and a soft humming begins to emanate from it. Nothing else happens for a moment or two and so she sits back down and huddles against the cold.

While she is examining her contraption and pulling her string, a few people notice her activity and stand to watch. After seeing what she is doing, they too notice a contraption on their back and an attached string but they do not pull the string. Instead they watch the girl as she pulls her string. They watch to ensure no harm comes from this. They watch as the girl sits down. Nothing happens and they immediately lose interest and settle back down to resisting the bitter cold.

After a few moments, however, the girl who originally pulled the string notices something. Something has changed in the air around her. “What is it,” she thinks to herself. And then she realizes! The air around her seems to be warming up, and rapidly. She can no longer see her breath and her body is becoming uncomfortable under the extra load of clothing. She strains her neck to look at the contraption and immediately realizes that the contraption is some sort of personal heating system. Surprised, she looks around and notices that everyone else is also wearing one just like it.

Incredulous, she wonders why nobody has seen this heater before or never pulled the string. Perhaps they were concentrating too hard against the cold and simply did not see beyond the frost in their breath and the ice on their clothes. Perhaps they simply believed that no other existence was possible. No matter, after a few minutes she is becoming decidedly uncomfortable and she now, with some degree of excitement, begins to remove her clothing layer by layer as the air warms around her.
The people huddled immediately around her have now looked up and noticed her excitement. What is more, those closest to her are also noticing a change in the air temperature. The heater on her back is so powerful that she has now affected the temperature a few meters all around her.

People have noticed.
People are warming up.
People are becoming uncomfortably warm.

They ask her what is happening and she explains about the heater on their backs. She suggests that if they turn on the heaters, they could warm up the room even more. She also advises that they should start taking their layers of clothing off because once their heater is on, their bodies will quickly become uncomfortable beneath the layers of fabric.

Some, but not all, of her immediate neighbors take her advice and pull the string. A few moments pass and the air around them rises a few degrees. Feeling uncomfortable, they also begin to take off their clothes.
Now, there is a small bubble of excitement in the room. A few more people (this time a little farther away from the center) are beginning to look up and wonder what all the excitement is about. There are even people standing off away in the corners who have heard the bustle and are straining their eyes and ears to see and hear. A buzz begins to move through the room and a few people here and there, perhaps the ones who are most resistant to the cold, look up, stand up, and wonder what is going on.

They ask those around them but most of the freezing people they ask are too cold to worry and too bitter to care. Still, some people are talking and the word is spreading. They say something about warmer air and that some kind of heating system is available to everyone.

Some are even saying that people are taking of their clothing. The more skeptical laugh at this. However, the braver ones, the ones who are tired of being cold, the ones who trust the rumors, the ones who can see the small island of people beginning to dance in the warmth, strain to look at their backside and lo and behold, they see a string attached to a contraption. Getting swept up in the rising excitement, they pull the string and the air around them immediately begins to warm.
They begin to feel warm uncomfortable.
They begin to take off their clothes.


Now as we pause and look around at the room we notice islands of radiant heat in a sea of bitter cold. Here and there, dotted throughout this huge room of individuals, people are starting to realize that the bitter cold is not something they have to live with. More and more see that within their grasp is all the heat they need to get warm and stay warm.

Still, and at first, it is only a few people here and there. The ones who are more adventurous, the ones who are tired, the ones who are desperate for a new world, these are the first ones to pull the string. They talk, of course. They point out the rising heat. They excitedly exclaim “look, we don’t need too many clothes!” But most people in the room are too busy trying to keep warm to give them much thought.
“Crazy,” they think to themselves. “They’ll all just freeze to death.”
For a while, it seems, little progress is made. More and more turn on and heat up, but against the huddled masses, it seems like a drop in the bucket. However, the heaters are powerful; far more powerful than we initially think. And after a certain point, it is not just the local temperature around the individual heaters that is affected. When enough have turned on their heaters, and when the heaters have been running long enough, a shift occurs. Instead of localized islands of heat, the entire room is impacted and the ambient temperature begins to slowly rise. Once The Shift has occurred, everyone, no matter how inured against the cold, no matter how tightly huddled against the arctic blasts, begins to feel the rising temperature of the room.

After a certain point, nobody can ignore what is going on.
At this point individuals in random locations in the entire room begin to look up to see what is up. Hundreds and, soon, thousands now notice the excited activity of a handful of their once frozen compatriots. They ask, with some confusion, “what is going on.”
T
hey are told, “there are heaters! There is warmth. It takes only a moment. Just pull the string.”

They see the excitement, they feel the heat, and now, swept up in the growing excitement, waves and waves of frozen room dwellers pull the string. They don’t even wait to start taking off their layers. Even before they pulled the string, they felt the warmth and were becoming uncomfortable beneath the clothing.
Of course, now that so many are tuning in and turning on, the rise in temperature is no longer subtle. Now the thermometer rises a degree every few minutes and the consequent discomfort rises fast as well. It is at this point, as we gaze at waves and waves of people jumping to their feet, turning on their heaters, and stripping their clothes, that we begin to see the problem. Fear has begun to cascade in waves through the huddles masses. Many people, whose only experience had been to huddle against the bitter cold, stare around them in total dismay. The room is now heating so fast, and people are stripping so quickly, that they are confused and befuddled.

Questions flood through their minds. People all around them are staring and smiling and pointing and stripping. Some have even reached the point of total undress and are now running bare naked around the room jumping with the sheer joy of freedom. They are confused. “What is all this about?”, they wonder. What is worse, all this confusion is compounded by the pain they are in. The room is so warm now, and their clothing so thick, that they are literally beginning to bake inside their clothes.
It is a crisis, but it is one the people in the room seem able to handle. There are many who have already weathered The Shift and they understand the process. They reach out, they explain, they help removing clothing, they calm, they smile, they respond and there are so many individuals with lightened layers of clothing that there is lots of help, lots of support, and lots of reassurance.

Most people respond.
Most begin taking off their clothes.
Some even turn on their heaters but at this point there is enough people with backpacks on and heaters turned up that it no longer matters if the new comers are turning on their heaters or not. In fact, at this point, people are starting to advise against it. The temperature is a perfect 28 degrees.

The Shift has occurred. No more heat is required.
Still, there are problem areas. A few, a small handful, cannot cope with the rapidity of the change. They have to assimilate information too fast and they cannot. They see the frenzied dancing and the smiling faces. They see the naked people and amidst all the odd sensations they are experiencing, they cannot process the pain in their body. A few snap and run screaming around the room. Some are mad. Others are shouting, “the end of the world is here.” Others experience total panic and flee out of the room or leap from the windows. Those that can be restrained are gently held and their clothes gently removed. The new reality is explained and they are held until they are calm. Those that cannot be restrained or who flail too violently are left to themselves until they exhaust their reserves. When they are silent, they are approached and assistance is given. Those who “leave” too soon are lost, but only temporarily. Eventually, they calm down and return without clothing.
How many will panic? How many will need to be restrained? How many will “leave the room” and have to come back at a later date? It is hard to say at this point. It will all depend on the action and initiative of those who have gone before. In fact, how fast the process unfolds, how quick we shall restore the calm, how smoothly we shall navigate The Shift will depend entirely on the concerted actions of the people in the room.

Still, there are no unknowns here.
There is no chance.
It is all up to you.
If you are one of the ones that has gone ahead, reach out.
If you are one of those that remain beneath the layers, reach out.
There is nothing to fear.
The room is warm.

Michael Sharp, The Book of Life

Starting the Dialogue with God

Welcome to Hearing God’s Voice within you. Today is a really exciting day because we are going to start the dialogue with this Presence of Love within us.

It’s important to start by extending Love to your thoughts, by quieting your mind, and then feeling the connection you have with God’s Voice within you. Once you have quieted your mind and made that connection more real by feeling It within you, the next thing you want to do is start the dialogue. You want to say “hello” to God’s Voice, to this Presence of Love within you. It’s just like when two people see each other across a crowded room and make eye contact and want to connect with one other. There is a vibe between them, but if nobody makes the first move, nothing is going to happen. It’s the same with God’s Voice, with this Presence of Love within us. We have to start the dialogue. We have to begin the conversation.

What’s so great about starting the conversation with God’s Voice is that no matter what you say, it’s okay. You can’t say anything that this Presence of Love within you could ever judge you for or ever dislike you for. It’s absolutely safe. Everything you say is welcome. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just important to start the dialogue. Some people might call this prayer. Talking to God might be considered prayer. Any conversation that is directed to God could be considered prayer. Again, the content doesn’t matter. If talking to God is prayer, then listening to God could be called meditation. Once you’ve started this conversation with God, it’s then important to actually be quiet and listen if you want to hear something back.

How many times has someone come to you and said, “Oh my gosh! I have this horrible problem and I really need some advice. I really need to know what you think. I really need to know what I should do ... and this and this is going on … and this and that happened….” And they never actually stop talking long enough to hear any advice? I think this is what we do often times with God. We start the conversation and tell God what is going on. We share what’s in our mind or in our heart and then we say, “Oh! Gotta go … Oh! The phone is ringing … Oh, I have to get this done right away,“ and there is no time to stop and listen. That is the meditation. It’s not that you have to do any particular technique. It’s just that you have to actually stop talking and then listen. And the process of extending Love is so wonderful because you can use that process throughout your dialogue with God. You can continue to extend Love to whatever arises.

So you’ve begun the conversation and then you say to God, “Okay, I’m going to be quiet now and I’m going to listen. I’m going to stop talking and hear what you have to say.” Then a thought arises that says, “You’re never going to hear anything.” Or maybe during the conversation you have the thought, “Well that was stupid. I shouldn’t have said that.” Whatever it is—whatever thought arises—just extend Love to it and keep going. You extend Love to it and then give yourself the opportunity to be quiet and hear.

What is really important about this process of talking to God and listening is that you don’t want to always be listening for words. God speaks to us in every form imaginable. We’ve talked about having a thought, a vision, a light bulb moment, some insight and answer comes to you, or having some thought enter your mind that is just the right thing in that moment. You might get a song stuck in your head that is the perfect answer to your question. God is speaking to us using any and every form imaginable. Yes, God speaks to us in words—absolutely! Though to God, words are equal to every other form of communication. Words are equal to feelings, to thoughts, to a vision … it doesn’t matter. They are all just forms of communication. None are higher than another, so it is very important to be open to hearing in the broadest sense. We are really just receiving communication.

In today’s exercise, extend Love to your thoughts, quiet your mind, feel your connection with God’s Voice, and then start the dialogue. Remember, all communication to God is welcome. When you are done sharing with God all that you want to share, then make the decision that you are going to stop talking and just listen. You are going to receive God’s communication to you. In this particular exercise, you want to be absolutely open to any and every way that God is communicating to you. You don’t want to miss the forest for the trees by only listening for words. Allow yourself to become aware of whatever feelings, thoughts, insights, visions, etc. are coming to you. Become aware of those thoughts within the mind and allow yourself to receive the communication and guidance that is in them, because the communication is there. In the coming days, we will work specifically on hearing words, but for today, be open to receiving communication from God’s Voice in whatever form it comes. Allow yourself to experience that God is speaking to you and let yourself receive that communication in any form imaginable.