Who Speaks for the Climate?

Last week I had the opportunity to attend to a Max Boykoff’s conference from his book Who Speaks for the Climate.Max Boykoff is the leading researcher and critical voice on the media and climate change.

Even though I am not an expert at all about climate change I can tell you that it is a fact that media is talking about it, and sometimes not telling the whole truth about it, also the experts are making a big effort to open our eyes in order to wake up our awareness about it.

It doesn’t matter where you live, we all live in the same planet, and this planet we call earth is alive, and we can see that everywhere. Lots of people are telling us nowadays that earth is our house and we must take care of it, I would go farther and say we are one with earth, we can’t separate our lives from earth, we eat, breath and drink from earth, actually we are physically connected to earth all the time.

When we think about earth we think about the whole planet and sometimes it could be overwhelming, because we think that saving the whole planet is a huge task, and it is, but we can start with being aware of it and do the things we can do to help in our everyday life, the ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY(EPA) has 9 you can do at home:

1-Change the lights to Energy Star bulbs
2- Look for Energy Star products
3- Heat and Coll smart
4- Seal and insulate you house
5- Use green Power
6- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
7- Be green in you yard
8- Use water efficiently
9- Spread the word

For further information you can visit EPA page:

http://epa.gov/climatechange/wycd/index.html

But most of all be aware that you are part of earth and you are not separate from it, you are connected to earth, and you will always live here in this planet also named by ancient cultures

Mother Earth

God Bless You

Do I live in a friendly or a hostile Universe?

Tags

anger, Einstein, happiness, Peace, Universe

This is the second part of Einstein’s philosophical thoughts.

Einstein who is best remembered as a scientist, found wisdom in his search for true, He said this:

“The most important decision you’ll ever make is
whether you live in a friendly universe or a hostile universe”

This literally can change the way you perceive the world, the way you perceive reality, because if you choose to live in a hostile world, then you will find a hostile world everywhere you go.

You may think these are just feeling good words, which may sound nice, and eventually may work for some issues, but they can’t change the word as it is.

Well these words are more powerful than you may think, let’s have simple example of how we perceive the “world outside”.

Try to remember when you were going to buy a car, let’s say you decide to by an specific car from a brand, almost everyday when you are on the streets, you may start noticing the same model of car you want to buy, you start noticing there are different types of the same model you want to buy, and you start encountering more and more cars of that brand than ever before.

The cars did not show up magically that day, they already were there before, but you didn’t notice them, because you didn’t think about them, but in the moment you start to think about it, they seem to show up more and more.

There is no difference with what Einstein said, (after all he is considered the brightest mind of the last century) when you choose to live in a hostile word, you start to find bad news, the people you talk to seem to tell you bad news most of the times, you find the worst drivers on your way, and bad news become a part of your life. It doesn’t mean there are not good people or good news, but you chose to live in a hostile Universe, therefore you perceive a hostile Universe everywhere you go.

The opposite is true as well, when you choose to live in a friendly Universe, you start to see opportunities everywhere you start to see more and more good news, or maybe you stop watching the news, you find good people all the time, good things start to happen. It doesn’t mean that there are no more bad news, it is just that you decide not to focus on them and start focusing in good things instead.

Trungnpa Chogyam in his book The Sacred Path of the Warrior has a very important observation:”we can actually cure ourselves of depression if we recognize that the world we have is good”

If you decide to live in a friendly world and wake every morning saying to yourself

I live in a friendly world.

Then at some point, you may find yourself in a different word, because you discovered reality is nothing else than what we perceive trough our thoughts, through the memories we have accumulated from the past, and that it is different to everyone, because everyone has chosen, even without knowing to live in a friendly or a hostile world

It is your choice

God Bless you

Imagination is Everything, it is the preview of life’s coming attractions

Tags

Disney, Dyer, Einstein, imagination, relativity

Albert Einstein is well known for his contributions to science, but most people don’t realize Einstein was also ahead of his time with his philosophical thoughts, we have been using some of Einstein’s principles in human development as well as in physics . His research in quantum physics are the basis of how we can change our reality by changing our thoughts, but not only in a philosophical way, but in a scientific way as well, because of Einstein we now know that the particles in an atom depend on the observer, that we can change the atom’s form from a particle to a wave,therefore we now know as Dr Wayne W. Dyer says:

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

There is also the relativity principle which I will talking about it in a future post, but the one we a going to talk about it is “Imagination”

Imagination by definition is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses. It is our ability to create something that doesn’t exist (yet) in our minds, but it is also the ability to create what we imagined in our reality as well. All of the biggest accomplishes in human history started as a thought, started as imagination. It is called imagination, because it is the creation of imagethe with a thought.

There has been great examples of great people who has had great imagination: Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Gandhi, martin Luther King, and so many others , and of course one of my favorites Walt Disney, who is the best example of imagination. He did not only used imagination to create Disney and everything that we now know about it, he also promoted imagination, because he knew the power of it, he knew that everything he created started as a thought, as an image in his mind.

But Walt Disney knew that an image in your mind is not enough, you need to implant that image in your heart in order to create that image as a reality and not only as a dream. Disney knew that when you put your heart in an idea, there are big chances it will come true, because your heart is the connection with your Higher Self, it is the connection with God, therefore , when you connect your ideas with God, magic starts to work for and with you.

When you wish upon a star your dreams come true

So use your imagination to create the life you want, the people you want to be with, the circumstances you need in your life, and then put your heart on those ideas,feel it as if it already exists in your life, then thank God for them, and be ready to enjoy Life’s coming attractions.

God Bless You

Are you living in the present moment? If not, this video could help.

Tags

consciousness, living death, Present, TED

Ric Elias had a front-row seat on Flight 1549, the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. What went through his mind as the doomed plane went down? At TED, he tells his story publicly for the first time.

Ric learned a lot from being in the edge of death, and he shares his learning in a very simple way. Being close to death makes you put things in perspective, makes you realize you have been wasting precious time doing something that is not worth it, expending too much time being worry for things that have already happened or that may never happen.

Eric says this

“I collect bad wines”

He says if he has a good bottle of wine and he is with th right person, he will open it, because he may never have the time to open it.

He also says he doesn’t argue now to be right, he wants to be happy instead.

Don Juan the chaman in Carlos Castaneda’s book is always talking about your own death, it says that your death can teach you more than your own life, because knowing you are going to be death takes away the urgency to accumulate possessions. It also makes you braver and stronger, because you know that one day you are going to be gone.

He also says something that really caught my attention, he says that he wasn’t rally afraid of death, though he didn’t want to die, because he wanted to help more people, he wanted to see his sons grow up, he wasn’t afraid of dying.

It makes you wonder that being so close to death could make you see it as it really is, as something natural, as the next step towards our evolution, returning back to the Source, returning back to the state of peace and endless consciousness. Return to God, which I believe it couldn’t be sad at all.

But for now we only have this moment and nothing else, so we can keep busy living or keep busy dying.
It is your choice

God Bless You

http://on.ted.com/A7hv

Gratitude

Tags

God, Gratitude, life, now, presence, thank

Here is this beautiful video about gratitude, about presence, about living in the now, in the only day we have: TODAY.

In the first place I thought about explaining the meaning of the content of the movie, then I realized I didn’t need to explain it, you just need to see it by yourself to experience it.

I hope you have a great day.

God Bless You

play video

Who’s packing your parachute?

Tags

Osteen, Parachute, Peace, plumb, thanks

Last Sunday I was watching Joel Osteen’s show(www.JoelOlsteen.com), and he was telling the story of an US Pilot, named Charles Plumb, here is the story:

He was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane as destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”
“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.

“ I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back, and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”

Plumb thought of the man hours the sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Now, Plumb goes around the world giving conferences, and he always asks his audience:

“Who’s packing your parachute?”

The People that is packing our parachutes are the ones that we don’t notice most of the times, the people that do the “small things” for us: the people that is cleaning the streets, cleaning the office, the policeman, the waiter at the restaurant, the cashier at the grocery store. All those people that we sometimes barely notice and that many times we don’t even know their names, are always there for us, even when we don’t even notice them.

You could do many things for these people behind you, but sometimes the best way to do something for them is to say “thank you” from the heart, letting them know, that they are really important for you, that they are doing a great job for you and that you really appreciate it.

A simple way to do this is to do it one at a time, this way we can start by finding one person that does somethong for us, and start thanking one person every day, trying to be aware of all the persons behind you, one person per day, one at a time. you can write them a letter, an email, a text message, you can thank them in person.

I am pretty sure you won’t run out of persons that are now helping you, you may even notice that you are aware of more and more people every day that are there to make your life easier.

I also want to Thank You for reading my posts.

God Bless You

Capt

Meditation: a scientific approach

Tags

BBC, health, Meditation, New York times, Sindya Bhanoo, Tibet

During the last decades, there had been several studies about the benefits of meditation. When people in the early seventies started to hear about meditation, they thought it was like a new ORIENTAL religion, and the ones that would practice it would feel good and would try to convince others about the benefits, but most of those were convinced because they coul see a change in the other person. Actually when you meditate, you feel good, and that should be a satisfactory argument, but for us in the occidental world, we need facts in order to believe in certain things, like meditation.

That is why there had been so many studies about meditation, because we know it’s good, but we need to see the numbers, the data, the benefits of practicing it in a way we can understand.

Some studies found that the brain of the meditators have increased the gray mass, like the one published at Psychiatry Research:

Analyses in a priori regions of interest confirmed increases in gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus

They studied prior non meditators who meditate for 8 weeks, and found out extraordinary results for the meditators.

The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress, so meditators not only increased their capacity to focus, but they decreased their capacity to suffer stress in the same conditions that they used have before.

Sindya Bhanoo explains this study in a simple way in the New York times

New York Times: How Meditation can change the brain

There have been other studies to regular meditators, like this one expalined in the BBC which was made to Buddhist meditators:

BBC: Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study

In the study they found out that the meditators have an high capacity to reorganize the neuronets:

When one relaxes into the state of oneness the neuronets change andr the psychological wall between them and their surroundings. Meditators claim to have a deep harmony between them and their surroundings.

Unfortunately all this studies can’t give you the experience of meditation, that can’t be explained with words, because each one experience it in a different way. So try it now if you haven’t done it previously, and if you already are a meditator, now you know some scientific data of what you are already experiencing.

God Bless You.

The Dark Side

Tags

Dark side, ego, happiness, spirit

Inside all of us there seems to be a dark side, the one that tells us to do the things we will regret later.

There is nothing to be afraid of, as Deepak Chopra mentions in his book ” The Shadow”

” if we work closely with our own shadow instead of running away from it, we will find a peace hard to get anywhere else.”

Do you remember those movies where there isn angel in one side an a devil in the other side? The angel is telling to do the right thing, even if it will make us uncomfortable, and on the other side there is the devil, telling us to do what is not right. In the movies, most of the times the devil wins and the character ends up doing something that is wrong, even if it regrets that decision later.

We have those two sides in ourselves, one is the ego and the other one is our true Spirit, they both live inside of us, but only one is real (the Spirit) and the other one is not (the ego). And deep inside if us, we know that, we can identify what is true and what is not, and even if we listen to the other side, we know it is not right.

But we can’t fight the ego, because it is not real, and we can only fight what is real, instead of that, we can be aware of it, and choose not to listen to it. But that is not possible all the times, if it would be, then we would all be saints, and there wouldn’t be a need to be here on earth. During our lives we will certainly listen to the ego many times, but it is not a lost fight, if we are able to learn from our mistakes, then the ego starts loose its strength, and eventually we would listen to it less times than the ones we listen to the Spirit.

But there is something important we need to consider, we must not get angry to ourselves, for our mistakes, for the times we listened to the ego, If we do that, then we are listening to the ego twice.

We must learn from our mistakes, the we are reactivating the learning process that we had when we came to this world, the we would learn as much as we learned when we were toddlers, that everything was new and we learned so much because we made so many mistakes, but we learned from them always.

So next time you listen to your dark side, use it as a tool to learn from it and become a better person than you were before.

God Bless You

We are all connected

Tags

awareness, God, One, oneness, spiritual, world one

We have been hearing for sometime about the concept that we are all one. Recently I learned about the Aspen trees, which I believe is one of the best examples we have, in order to understand this concept.

The aspens typically grow in large clonal colonies derived from a single seedling, and spreading by means of root suckers; new stems in the colony may appear at up to 30–40 metres from the parent tree. Each individual tree can live for 40–150 years above ground, but the root system of the colony is long-lived. In some cases, this is for thousands of years, sending up new trunks as the older trunks die off above ground.

In other words, there aren’t a bunch of trees; there is only one tree, but we perceive them as several trees, but they are connected to each other, one of them wouldn’t be able to survive by itself, because it is not a separate tree from the others, they all are one single being.

It is the same with us, we perceive each other as a separate being, we perceive ourselves as separated from everyone, though we are not, we are one single being, we are all connected by the same living energy, we all share the same root: God.

“He who angers you conquers you.” -

This quote from Elizabeth Kenny contains so much true about anger.

What is a conquest?

A conquest is when you are able to govern others, it is when you are able to make others do what you want them to do. And that is exactly what others are doing when you get mad “because of them”. They have power over you, they have power over your emotions, you are doing what they want you to do.

It means we believe we are not responsible for our anger, instead we believe that others are responsible for it, we believe that our anger is originated in someone else, we believe we are not in control of our anger and our emotions, we believe others are.

If we believe this, then we are right, others can control our anger, and we can’t, because every time someone pushes the right button, we get mad, without noticing. We let others to be in control of our emotions, because we believe so, because we believe that it is the only way, because we are not aware of the true:
We react to situations, because of our believes, we don’t think we are wrong, be believe everybody else is wrong.

Emotions are generated inside of us because of our believe system, we get mad because we believe someone else is wrong.

The same action can get someone mad, and someone else not, then it means it is not the action, it is me who is creating anger, not the action.

For somebody, a child crying at church can be annoying, but someone else, wouldn’t even notice the sound. Then it is not the action; it is us.

This is the first step to get free of anger; to realize it is not the others, it is not an external action, the ones responsible for our anger; We are responsible for our anger, it is generated because of something we believe inside of us, it is because we believe others are wrong, and we are right.

Next time someone else “turns you mad” be aware of that, then you would be taking the first step towards freedom; free of anger.