March 31, 2008

Bon Mots from Eckart Tolle














Make friends with the present moment.

It's everybody's responsibility to discover their dysfunction within them.

What we react to in another we strengthen in ourselves.

Complaining if the ego's favorite activity to strengthen itself.

What you resist, persists.

Ego takes everything personally.

Worry is the compulsion to think.

March 27, 2008

Some Surprises

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." -- Albert Einstein


You've got a lot of choices. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice. -- Steven D. Woodhull


Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next. Jonas Salk


A person will be called to account on Judgment Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed but did not. -The Talmud-


If something you are doing is not working, doing more of it won't work any better. -- Source unknown

and, not at all surprising, but a good point:
"I like Thinking Big. If you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well Think Big." -- Donald Trump

March 26, 2008

A Big Mix










There is a big mix out there, and there are lots of different things going on, and there is not one way that was intended to be the right way. Just like there's not one color or one flower or one vegetable or one fingerprint. There is not one that is to be the right one over all others. The variety is what fosters the creativity. And so you say, "Okay, I accept that there's lots of variety, but I don't like to eat cucumbers." Don't eat cucumbers. But don't ask them to be eliminated and don't condemn those who eat them. Don't stand on corners waving signs trying to outlaw the things that you don't like. Don't ruin your life by pushing against. Instead, say, "I choose this instead. This pleases me."

~~~Abraham-Hicks

March 23, 2008

Quotes to Ponder




Giving another person too much power or taking too much power yourself are both sides of the same coin: misunderstanding personal power. (Marion Weinstein)


When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves. (William Arthur Ward)


Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all. (Norman Vincent Peale)


There are no failures in life, only results. (Anthony Robbins)

March 20, 2008

Thoughts.....


As you take a few minutes each day to quiet your mind, you will discover a nice benefit: your everyday, "ordinary" life will begin to seem far more extraordinary. Little things that previously went unnoticed will begin to please you. You'll be more easily satisfied, and happier all around. Rather than focusing on what's wrong with your life, you'll find yourself thinking about and more fully enjoying what's right with your life. The world won't change, but your perception of it will. You'll start to notice the little acts of kindness and caring from other people rather than the negativity and anger. (Jack Canfield)

People everywhere are looking for empowerment. Some people will seek it from the world around them, by believing that if they're successful, then they have power. Others will try to grab it from people in their lives by tearing them down. What is interesting is that everyone is looking for something that is already within them. Empowerment is the knowledge that you have the ability within you to create anything that you desire. All a person has to do to change their life is own their power. When you don't accept your power, you've given it away… To become empowered, you have to accept responsibility for your life. Responsibility doesn't mean blame. It means the ability to choose the way you want to respond to a situation. When you begin to take responsibility for your words, deeds, and life experiences, then you begin to accept your own power. You begin to believe that you have the power to choose. And once you recognize that, you have begun to open up to the Infinite reservoir of good within you. (Linda-Ann Stewart)

March 19, 2008

Small Steps Get You There

The things that we would be asking ourselves is, "What proportion of my day am I in vibrational harmony with my desires, which means, how much of my day am I happy, glad, eager, fulfilled, satisfied, complimentary? And what percentage of my day am I ornery, irritated, frustrated, or blaming?" And you don't have to do 100%, you don't have to do 90%, you don't have to do 80%. If you could even get around 55% feeling better, than not feeling so good -- you'd have significant movement in what begins to happen in your experience. Abraham-Hicks

March 18, 2008

Overachieving and Overreaching


This is from the Daily Om to which I subscribe. Overachieving is an imbalance. Haven't we all at times told someone to slow down and "smell the roses", only to hear a barrage of reasons why they have to continue on their mad pace? They could be addicted to what their work is providing for them.....the absence of painful feelings. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep all that "stuff" suppressed! We humans do unbelievable damage to ourselves by avoiding feelings we don't want to deal with. This is the only species which not only destroys each other, but also ourselves.


Overachievers are people who have achieved but still feel the need to do more, creating an imbalance in their lives. People who exhibit this behavior may be trying to compensate for feelings of insecurity and doubts about their worth. They may be chasing unresolved issues from their past into the present, or they might not be looking at their lives as a whole, but judging themselves based only on one aspect of their being. If this is a word that we’ve heard used with respect to our choices and lifestyle, it is worth examining in order to balance our lives for a more rewarding experience.

If we find that we cannot allow ourselves to experience and enjoy the present moment, putting pleasure off into some distant future, it may be a sign that we are being driven to achieve more than is truly necessary. Pushing ourselves beyond the point of exhaustion, or to the exclusion of important people in our lives, robs us of true and meaningful joy. Once we make the connection to the eternal part of us, it can nourish us and allow our priorities to shift from chasing after an elusive feeling to being fully present in the moment so that we can live our lives in the now.

Sometimes we need to look to those we love and admire in order to realize what we value about life. We can take time to note what we like about others, and then turn the mirror to reflect the light of those same words and feelings toward ourselves. It can be quite a revelation to see ourselves in this nourishing light. When we can put the energy that we’ve been devoting to a phantom sense of achievement into the truly satisfying aspects of our lives, we can restore the balance between our inner and outer worlds and experience true joyful peace.

If you knew that the next 24 hours are the last ones you have on this earth, how would you spend them? What's important to you?


March 16, 2008

What is Your Programming?

So many people need you to behave in a certain way for them to feel good. They condemn you for your selfishness. "How dare you be so selfish as to follow what makes you feel good? You should follow what makes us feel good." At an early age, you were convinced that you weren't smart enough to know, and that somebody else should make the decisions... You could not live in this culture during the times of your life without getting a huge amount of information relative to that, just in the way people respond to the things you do and say. Abraham/Hicks

March 14, 2008

Thoughts for the Conscious Mind














One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others. (Archibald Rutledge)


One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again? (Rachel Carson)


Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution. (Eckhart Tolle)


A sure way to get rich quick is to count your blessings. (Author Unknown)

March 12, 2008

Food for your Conscious Mind


You have the power in the present moment to change limiting beliefs and consciously plant the seeds for the future of your choosing. As you change your mind, you change your experience. (Serge Kahili King)


The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. (Victor E. Frankl)


Internal and external are ultimately one. When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently. Love and compassion arise, and they affect the world. (Eckhart Tolle) - www.eckharttolle.com


The invariable mark of wisdom is seeing the miraculous in the common. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)



March 11, 2008

A Full Embrace Excluding Nothing

I saw this somewhere and saved it because it's important. Unfortunately, I don't don't know who wrote it.


Finding Peace Within

Most people agree that a more peaceful world would be an ideal situation for all living creatures. However, we often seem stumped as to how to bring this ideal situation into being. If we are to have true peace in this world, each one of us must find it in ourselves first. If we don't like ourselves, for example, we probably won't like those around us. If we are in a constant state of inner conflict, then we will probably manifest conflict in the world. If we have fighting within our families, there can be no peace in the world. We must shine the light of inquiry on our internal struggles, because this is the only place we can really create change.

When we initiate the process of looking inside ourselves for the meaning of peace, we will begin to understand why it has always been so difficult to come by. This in itself will enable us to be compassionate toward the many people in the world who find themselves caught up in conflicts both personal and universal. We may have an experience of peace that we can call up in ourselves to remind us of what we want to create, but if we are human we will also feel the pull in the opposite direction—the desire to defend ourselves, to keep what we feel belongs to us, to protect our loved ones and our cherished ideals, and the anger we feel when threatened. This awareness is important because we cannot truly know peace until we understand the many tendencies and passions that threaten our ability to find it. Peace necessarily includes, even as it transcends, all of our primal energy, much of which has been expressed in ways that contradict peace.

Being at peace with ourselves is not about denying or rejecting any part of ourselves. On the contrary, in order to be at peace we must be willing and able to hold ourselves, in all our complexity, in a full embrace that excludes nothing. This is perhaps the most difficult part for many of us, because we want so much to disown the negative aspects of our humanity. Ironically, though, true peace begins with a willingness to take responsibility for our humanity so that we might ultimately transform it in the light of our love.

March 10, 2008

Awe and Wonder







If you already don't have reverence for all life, this article may change that for you.

Can Moths Or Butterflies Remember What They Learned As Caterpillars?

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2008) — Butterflies and moths are well known for their striking metamorphosis from crawling caterpillars to winged adults. In light of this radical change, not just in body form, but also in lifestyle, diet and dependence on particular sensory cues, it would seem unlikely that learned associations or memories formed at the larval or caterpillar stage could be accessible to the adult moth or butterfly. However, scientists at Georgetown University recently discovered that a moth can indeed remember what it learned as a caterpillar.

The Georgetown researchers found that tobacco hornworm caterpillars could be trained to avoid particular odors delivered in association with a mild shock. When adult moths emerged from the pupae of trained caterpillars, they also avoided the odors, showing that they retained their larval memory. The Georgetown University study is the first to demonstrate conclusively that associative memory can survive metamorphosis in Lepidoptera--the order of insects that includes moths and butterflies--and provokes new questions about the organization and persistence of the central nervous system during metamorphosis.

"The intriguing idea that a caterpillar's experiences can persist in the adult butterfly or moth captures the imagination, as it challenges a broadly-held view of metamorphosis -- that the larva essentially turns to soup and its components are entirely rebuilt as a butterfly," says senior author Martha Weiss, an associate professor of Biology at Georgetown University.

"Scientists have been interested in whether memory can survive metamorphosis for over a hundred years," says first author Doug Blackiston, who completed the interdisciplinary research while earning a PhD in Biology from Georgetown University in the labs of developmental biologist Elena Casey and behavioral ecologist Martha Weiss. The brain and nervous system of caterpillars is dramatically reorganized during the pupal stage and it has not been clear whether memory could survive such drastic changes.

The findings of the Georgetown researchers suggest the retention of memory is dependent on the maturity of the developing caterpillars' brains. Caterpillars younger than three weeks of age learned to avoid an odor, but could not recall the information as adults, whereas older caterpillars, conditioned in the final larval stage before pupation, learned to avoid the odor and recalled the information as adults. In addition, the results have both ecological and evolutionary implications, as retention of memory through metamorphosis could allow a female butterfly or other insect to lay her eggs on the type of host plant that she herself had fed on as a larva, a behavior that could shape habitat selection and eventually lead to development of a new species.

While most research on learning and memory in insects has centered on social insects, such as honeybees or ants, Weiss' lab is particularly interested in solitary insects, such as butterflies, praying mantids, and mud-dauber wasps. Weiss and her colleagues will continue to study how these self-sufficient, multitasking insects use learning and memory skills to adapt to their environments.

This study was farther afield from the neural cell specification research that is ongoing in Casey's lab. Casey, associate professor of Biology at Georgetown, focuses on identifying the signals that are required to direct a cell to develop into a neuron and determining how the complex human central nervous system evolved.

Blackiston, now conducting postdoctoral work at the Forsyth Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology and the Department of Developmental Biology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, is currently examining learning and memory in aquatic vertebrates.

Journal reference: Blackiston DJ, Silva Casey E, Weiss MR (2008) Retention of Memory through Metamorphosis: Can a Moth Remember What It Learned As a Caterpillar? PLoS One 3(3): e1736. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001736 http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001736


March 8, 2008

Inspiration







That you agree with everything you see posted on this Inspiration Blog is not important. Take what you like, and leave the rest.

The one factor that has been unknown by most humans, that is understood by the beasts, is that Well-being truly does abound, and that you are blessed beings who live in an atmosphere of grace, and that unless you are doing something to pinch off the Well-being, it will be yours. Look for the evidence of the Well-being, and be an advocate for Well-being rather than an advocate for getting rid of what does not feel like Well-being, then little by little, by little, your own personal experience begins to take shape in a way that is more satisfying to you. Abraham/Hicks


Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, but learning to dance in the rain.
(Author Unknown)


When you are afraid, you find things to fear all around you. When you are hurt, you see suffering and hopelessness. When you are angry, you discern plots and enemies lurking everywhere. When you feel guilty, you seek out disappointment and take it as well-deserved punishment and lose your will to grow. Of course, while all of this negativity is going on, something good is also taking place. Find that good. Be grateful for finding it. Your seeking the good is the greatest good you'll find. (David Viscott, from the book, Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations)