Meditation re-shapes the Brain

Meditation has long been considered a pathway to Spiritual progression, but a Huffington Post article by naturopathic doctor Michael Stanclift suggests it may also have a more direct physical impact upon practitioners.

Confirming long-held belief in the power of thought, and pointing to research from neuroscience, Stanclift says where we direct our attention actually changes the anatomy of the brain. Meditation helps us wilfully direct our attention and thus consciously create our physical as well as Spiritual evolution.

Understanding Meditation: How Attention Changes Our Brains, The Huffington Post 12/14/2011

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Academics Embrace Meditation

Harvard Magazine, January-February 2012, carries an article describing how some leading academics are embracing retreats conducive to the practice of meditation.

MIT Dalai Lama Center for Ethics fellow Sousan Abadian, a regular retreat participant, says: "Retreats allow us to access and strengthen subtle capacities and to hear ourselves and others on a different level."

Christopher Germer, clinical instructor in psychology in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and practicing Buddhist says: "Mindfulness has become probably the dominant paradigm of psychotherapy".

Cambridge psychotherapists Susan and Bill Morgan are attendees at a silent meditation retreat. Susan says: "The encouragement is to unplug from this world... to learn how to straddle that line between participant and observer all the time... and learn how to meet all of experience with a certain amount of equanimity."

Abiding Our Own Minds, Harvard Magazine January-February 2012

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The Occupy Movement In Relationship To George Washington, The Colonists, And How They Won The Revolution

by Gabriel of Urantia

The Occupy movement—no matter how many protestors—is overpowered by the might of the power-elite’s police force and “weapons of gas-destruction” against the poor and disenfranchised, students, and the once middle class, as the early colonists were by the British empire. (more…)

The Truth and Answers About Free Healthcare

by Gabriel of Urantia 

Jesus wasn’t a politician. However, I recently watched both Democratic and Republican debates. I was hoping to watch a third-party debate, but that’s another article. Maybe 10 minutes of the more than four hours of presentations were spent on the need for free national healthcare. And in those 10 minutes, from all of the candidates, I think I understood about 5 seconds of their 26-letter, bureaucratic jargon—jargon that really means nothing. As the Native American elders would say, “They speak with forked tongue.”

In order to talk about “free” anything, you have to realize what the root of the problem is. And that is: plain greed. You see, doctors are supposed to be healers. They are supposed to go into the profession because of a calling from the Creator, not for the desire to become rich or to have top status in a broken and materialistic society. (more…)

Pseudo Activism And University Students

The Great American Dream Is Over, But Many Millions Of Americans Still Hang On To False Hopes. The 99% Are Beginning To Awaken To The Entrapment Of The False Powers. Is There An Answer To The Future?

By Gabriel of Urantia 11/11/11

On Saturday my wife and I were driving to the Occupy movement in Tucson that was going to march to the Bank of America to protest. My son and two daughters were there already, as well as several others from our community. We drove past the University of Arizona stadium where the Wildcats football team was playing that day. We saw hundreds of college students walking with six-packs in their hands. As we drove by the university stadium parking lot, we saw thousands of students with kegs of beer and booths, all getting drunk and boisterous.

I thought this looked more like Sodom and Gomorrah than a university parking lot, even if there was a football game going on. But the main thought I had was these college students should be going to the Occupy Bank of America march. When we got to the march, there were only about one hundred people, but there were thousands of people at the university parking lot drinking beer. (more…)

Money, Morality and Spirituality

Late 2011 has produced numerous Occupy protests. The Occupy Wall Street Web site says their purpose is "fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations".

Capitalism has undoubtedly produced unparalleled progress; just compare the U.S. with the former, communist, USSR. But even in the pinnacle of capitalism, the U.S., many millions do not have access to basic medical care.

The so-called credit crunch of 2008 shattered the illusion of the efficiency of capitalism, leaving major banks reliant upon public bailouts to stay afloat at the expense of a deep global recession and the ensuing suffering of the innocent majority. (more…)

The White Baby Boomers’ and X-Generation’s Responsibility

(The Once Middle Class), The Cry of the Indigenous, And The 99% Movement

by Gabriel of Urantia

When I was a young man in my late twenties, I went to a sweat lodge facilitated by a shaman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who was a Taino native from the tribe where Christopher Columbus landed in Central America. I told him about a book I was reading by two white Harvard graduates and pointed out a part in the book that talked about some seagulls showing up over Columbus’ ship and guiding them to the landing where the Taino lived. They attributed this to Manifest Destiny—God. The shaman corrected the theory and told me that this so-called “manifest destiny,” perpetrated by the white powers, meant the deaths of millions of indigenous and the suppression of them for hundreds of years until this day. I did my own research, and the shaman was correct, of course. (more…)

Defining a Spiritualution - a Spiritual Revolution

In Reference to the 99% Movement and Occupy Wall Street
What the People Must Do to Win Over the Power Elite

by Gabriel of Urantia

Firstly, whenever the poor and disenfranchised—who were abused for years—took to the streets, they were hosed, attacked by the police dogs, beaten with sticks, and pepper sprayed. But now this new movement is not just a movement of poor blacks or other minorities but a combination of white and black races as well as yellow, brown, and red. It’s a true racial coalition that has representation from 99% of the population.

Now the children of the once middle-class parents are speaking out and protesting because they can’t get jobs and have huge student loans to pay off. Where were they when they weren’t as much affected by the greed and power control of the elite? (more…)

Spiritual Lessons from Steve Jobs

The sad passing of Steve Jobs has dominated the news of the past week. Jobs, the founder of Apple, has been phenomenally successful and a true game-changer in the field of technology, but one might question why someone engaged in such a materialistic industry is being mentioned on a Spiritual Web site.

Apart from being a Buddhist for most of his adult life, Steve Jobs' philosophy actually stands as an excellent example of Spiritual living.

Internet entrepreneur John Chow presents a superb summary of Jobs' teachings at Lessons I Learned From Steve Jobs, and although presented from a business perspective we can all take something from the key lessons of:

• Live Each Day Like It’s Your Last
• Surround Yourself with Great People
• It Doesn’t Matter What You Think! and
• Find Your Passion (more…)

Democracy: What It Is and What It Isn’t in America

Published by kind courtesy of Global Community Communications Alliance.
Please contact info@GlobalCommunityCommunicationsAlliance.org for permission to reprint.

Defining Democracy from a Fourth-Dimensional Consciousness

The following are definitions of both democracy and republic (from Microsoft Bookshelf ’95).

de·moc·ra·cy   noun
1.   Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2.   A political or social unit that has such a government.
3.   The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4.   Majority rule.
5.   The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.

re·pub·lic   noun
1.   a. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
b. A nation that has such a political order.
2.   a. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
b. A nation that has such a political order.
3.   Often Republic. A specific republican government of a nation: the Fourth Republic of France.
4.   An autonomous or partially autonomous political and territorial unit belonging to a sovereign federation.
5.   A group of people working as equals in the same sphere or field: the republic of letters.

Many people cannot see much difference between a republic and a democracy, and they shouldn’t, because in many ways they are both the same. But people’s understanding over the last 200 years in America of what both a democracy and a republic are has been diminished considerably. (more…)