Have your ever had an experience you thought was a coincidence, but a nagging feeling made you feel there was more meaning to it? Those nagging feelings may be the very seeds of your own psychic ability waiting to be cultivated.
Your psychic sense can be compared to the bubbles that surface on a quiet pond. As you quietly stare into a still pond, you will soon notice the movement of the water. When you continue to focus your attention into the small body of water, you will eventually see tiny ripples of water and small bubbles emerge from the depths of the quiet pond. That’s exactly the way your sixth sense will respond, when you pay attention to the “psychic bubbles” of insights that surface from the depths of your mind.
How can you develop your psychic ability naturally? Set aside time to do nothing but experience your senses. Absorb everything you observe or feel around you. When an image flashes into your mind or a feeling runs through your body, don’t be quick to dismiss it. Instead, allow yourself to savor it as you would a delicious dessert. If it is an image, observe the details of it but also pay attention to the way the image makes you feel. If it’s a feeling, try to make it into an image. Imagine it as a sound or a smell.
Try new activities and do old things in new ways. Loosen your focus on goals and try being flexible enough to stimulate your mind by doing something out of the ordinary. Follow your impulses and lean toward the unusual. As you do, you will be exercising your mind to function psychically.
Studies show that the brain waves of subjects change when they’re introduced to new materials or experiences. A person who is receptive to new experiences, new information, and has been exposed to unusual and varied life experiences, will find it easier to develop the ability. Therefore, act like sponge! Soak up as many experiences as possible to feed your mind the subliminal stimuli necessary to cultivate your psychic ability.
Exercise your extra-sensory mental muscle naturally with these five simple tips:
- Travel as much as possible and observe everything.
- Change your routine by driving a new way to work or in some other way.
- Try an exotic food and savor the experience.
- Talk to someone you think you have nothing in common with.
- Solve a problem by listening to a “hunch” or “gut instinct”.
Developing your psychic sense is a natural as learning how to exercise. One is for body fitness and the other is for mental fitness. Both give you the tools to reach your full potential and the ability to create an even better life than you have now. To develop your sixth sense naturally set aside time to accomplish nothing. Instead just experience the moment through your senses and become aware of everything as though you were just born.
Be Psychic- Tips For Awakening The Psychic In You
Honesty
Those who pride themselves on their honesty should also concern themselves with this principle: The effectiveness of honesty depends on a person's willingness to face the truth, which may conflict with this person's desires and provoke denial.
In such a case, how can one promote this willingness, despite this conflict? The answer to this question could prove useful to anyone who seeks to be effectively honest with people in denial. Ultimately, it could benefit these people, whose denial is contrary to their best interest. I go on the assumption that truth, or the conformity of thought to reality, is the sine qua non of vital efficacy. Health, pleasure, successful careers, and harmonious relationships require that we know the needs and capabilities of our nature, and the workings of the world. The absence of this knowledge leads to accidents, illness, suffering, failure, and death. Therefore, the first object of our desires should be truth, or the knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. Why then are people often unwilling to face it?
I believe there are two reasons for this unwillingness. Firstly, the desire to know the truth, which originates in the desire to live happily, spontaneously degenerates into the desire to be right, to avoid the insecurity and shame associated with error and ignorance, and also to avoid the effort to learn. Thus fear, pride, and laziness are obstacles to the pursuit of truth and happiness. People are unlikely to admit they are wrong when they are, unless they possess courage and humility. Whoever takes their good to heart should help them develop these virtues.
Secondly, the truth may be known from experience about a happy way of life. The desire to know the truth then turns into the desire to see the truth last. Mental inertia becomes the law, proportional to the force of attraction exerted on the mind by this happy way of life. Any upheaval that breaks the status quo is denied: "I cannot believe it; this cannot be happening." Reality is deemed unreal because it no longer tallies with the desired truth. Denial can therefore be regarded as a deviant process that conforms facts to ideas, instead of the opposite. Reason is overthrown and emotions reign, as one strives to prove reality wrong to spare oneself the loss of a happy way of life and the pursuit of another, this loss and this pursuit being associated with grief, strain, and doubt, or even despair.
To help a person acknowledge an undesired truth about a radical change in reality, one has to couple honesty with wisdom to heighten this person's awareness of the human capacity for adaptation. This capacity is best illustrated by the example of people who have suffered a terrible misfortune and progressively discovered a new outlook and a new happiness, more enlightened and satisfying than the old ones. In addition, one has to stimulate the will of this person, who is left with a formidable challenge: to start her or his life over. Lastly, this heightened awareness and this stimulated will may weaken at times, calling for reinforcement. All in all, against the unwillingness to face the truth, the effectiveness of honesty is always difficult and uncertain.
The Madness of Playing Games
If a lone, unkempt, person, standing on a soapbox were to say that he should become the Prime Minister, he would have been diagnosed by a passing psychiatrist as suffering from this or that mental disturbance. But were the same psychiatrist to frequent the same spot and see a crowd of millions saluting the same lonely, shabby figure - what would have his diagnosis been? Surely, different (perhaps of a more political hue).
It seems that one thing setting social games apart from madness is quantitative: the amount of the participants involved. Madness is a one-person game, and even mass mental disturbances are limited in scope. Moreover, it has long been demonstrated (for instance, by Karen Horney) that the definition of certain mental disorders is highly dependent upon the context of the prevailing culture. Mental disturbances (including psychoses) are time-dependent and locus-dependent. Religious behaviour and romantic behaviour could be easily construed as psychopathologies when examined out of their social, cultural, historical and political contexts.
Historical figures as diverse as Nietzsche (philosophy), Van Gogh (art), Hitler (politics) and Herzl (political visionary) made this smooth phase transition from the lunatic fringes to centre stage. They succeeded to attract, convince and influence a critical human mass, which provided for this transition. They appeared on history's stage (or were placed there posthumously) at the right time and in the right place. The biblical prophets and Jesus are similar examples though of a more severe disorder. Hitler and Herzl possibly suffered from personality disorders - the biblical prophets were, almost certainly, psychotic.
We play games because they are reversible and their outcomes are reversible. No game-player expects his involvement, or his particular moves to make a lasting impression on history, fellow humans, a territory, or a business entity. This, indeed, is the major taxonomic difference: the same class of actions can be classified as "game" when it does not intend to exert a lasting (that is, irreversible) influence on the environment. When such intention is evident - the very same actions qualify as something completely different. Games, therefore, are only mildly associated with memory. They are intended to be forgotten, eroded by time and entropy, by quantum events in our brains and macro-events in physical reality.
Games - as opposed to absolutely all other human activities - are entropic. Negentropy - the act of reducing entropy and increasing order - is present in a game, only to be reversed later. Nowhere is this more evident than in video games: destructive acts constitute the very foundation of these contraptions. When children start to play (and adults, for that matter - see Eric Berne's books on the subject) they commence by dissolution, by being destructively analytic. Playing games is an analytic activity. It is through games that we recognize our temporariness, the looming shadow of death, our forthcoming dissolution, evaporation, annihilation.
These FACTS we repress in normal life - lest they overwhelm us. A frontal recognition of them would render us speechless, motionless, paralysed. We pretend that we are going to live forever, we use this ridiculous, counter-factual assumption as a working hypothesis. Playing games lets us confront all this by engaging in activities which, by their very definition, are temporary, have no past and no future, temporally detached and physically detached. This is as close to death as we get.
Small wonder that rituals (a variant of games) typify religious activities. Religion is among the few human disciplines which tackle death head on, sometimes as a centrepiece (consider the symbolic sacrifice of Jesus). Rituals are also the hallmark of obsessive-compulsive disorders, which are the reaction to the repression of forbidden emotions (our reaction to the prevalence, pervasiveness and inevitability of death is almost identical). It is when we move from a conscious acknowledgement of the relative lack of lasting importance of games - to the pretension that they are important, that we make the transition from the personal to the social.
The way from madness to social rituals traverses games. In this sense, the transition is from game to myth. A mythology is a closed system of thought, which defines the "permissible" questions, those that can be asked. Other questions are forbidden because they cannot be answered without resorting to another mythology altogether.
Observation is an act, which is the anathema of the myth. The observer is presumed to be outside the observed system (a presumption which, in itself, is part of the myth of Science, at least until the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was developed).
A game looks very strange, unnecessary and ridiculous from the vantage-point of an outside observer. It has no justification, no future, it looks aimless (from the utilitarian point of view), it can be compared to alternative systems of thought and of social organization (the biggest threat to any mythology). When games are transformed to myths, the first act perpetrated by the group of transformers is to ban all observations by the (willing or unwilling) participants.
Introspection replaces observation and becomes a mechanism of social coercion. The game, in its new guise, becomes a transcendental, postulated, axiomatic and doctrinaire entity. It spins off a caste of interpreters and mediators. It distinguishes participants (formerly, players) from outsiders or aliens (formerly observers or uninterested parties). And the game loses its power to confront us with death. As a myth it assumes the function of repression of this fact and of the fact that we are all prisoners. Earth is really a death ward, a cosmic death row: we are all trapped here and all of us are sentenced to die.
Today's telecommunications, transportation, international computer networks and the unification of the cultural offering only serve to exacerbate and accentuate this claustrophobia. Granted, in a few millennia, with space travel and space habitation, the walls of our cells will have practically vanished (or become negligible) with the exception of the constraint of our (limited) longevity. Mortality is a blessing in disguise because it motivates humans to act in order "not to miss the train of life" and it maintains the sense of wonder and the (false) sense of unlimited possibilities.
This conversion from madness to game to myth is subjected to meta-laws that are the guidelines of a super-game. All our games are derivatives of this super-game of survival. It is a game because its outcomes are not guaranteed, they are temporary and to a large extent not even known (many of our activities are directed at deciphering it). It is a myth because it effectively ignores temporal and spatial limitations. It is one-track minded: to foster an increase in the population as a hedge against contingencies, which are outside the myth.
All the laws, which encourage optimization of resources, accommodation, an increase of order and negentropic results - belong, by definition to this meta-system. We can rigorously claim that there exist no laws, no human activities outside it. It is inconceivable that it should contain its own negation (Godel-like), therefore it must be internally and externally consistent. It is as inconceivable that it will be less than perfect - so it must be all-inclusive. Its comprehensiveness is not the formal logical one: it is not the system of all the conceivable sub-systems, theorems and propositions (because it is not self-contradictory or self-defeating). It is simply the list of possibilities and actualities open to humans, taking their limitations into consideration. This, precisely, is the power of money. It is - and always has been - a symbol whose abstract dimension far outweighed its tangible one.
This bestowed upon money a preferred status: that of a measuring rod. The outcomes of games and myths alike needed to be monitored and measured. Competition was only a mechanism to secure the on-going participation of individuals in the game. Measurement was an altogether more important element: the very efficiency of the survival strategy was in question. How could humanity measure the relative performance (and contribution) of its members - and their overall efficiency (and prospects)? Money came handy. It is uniform, objective, reacts flexibly and immediately to changing circumstances, abstract, easily transformable into tangibles - in short, a perfect barometer of the chances of survival at any given gauging moment. It is through its role as a universal comparative scale - that it came to acquire the might that it possesses.
Money, in other words, had the ultimate information content: the information concerning survival, the information needed for survival. Money measures performance (which allows for survival enhancing feedback). Money confers identity - an effective way to differentiate oneself in a world glutted with information, alienating and assimilating. Money cemented a social system of monovalent rating (a pecking order) - which, in turn, optimized decision making processes through the minimization of the amounts of information needed to affect them. The price of a share traded in the stock exchange, for instance, is assumed (by certain theoreticians) to incorporate (and reflect) all the information available regarding this share. Analogously, we can say that the amount of money that a person has contains sufficient information regarding his or her ability to survive and his or her contribution to the survivability of others. There must be other - possibly more important measures of that - but they are, most probably, lacking: not as uniform as money, not as universal, not as potent, etc.
Money is said to buy us love (or to stand for it, psychologically) - and love is the prerequisite to survival. Very few of us would have survived without some kind of love or attention lavished on us. We are dependent creatures throughout our lives. Thus, in an unavoidable path, as humans move from game to myth and from myth to a derivative social organization - they move ever closer to money and to the information that it contains. Money contains information in different modalities. But it all boils down to the very ancient question of the survival of the fittest.
Ian Fleming - James Bond's Creator
Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908-1964), the author of the James Bond 007 novels, was the grandson of a Scottish banker and the son of a Conservative MP (Member of Parliament). His father died in the first world war. In his will, he bequeathed his property to his widow on condition she never remarries.
Ian's youth was inauspicious. He was expelled from Eton following a sexual liaison with a girl. He left Sandhurst without obtaining an officer's rank, having been caught violating the curfew. He continued his education in Kitzbuhel, Austria, in Munich and in Geneva where he studied languages. But the chain of disappointments continued apace. He failed in a Foreign Service exam and had to join Reuters as a journalist. There he successfully covered a spy trial in Russia (1929-32).
He then joined a British investment bank as a stockbroker and moved to live in a converted temple in Belgravia, a fashionable district of London, where he entertained the members of the Le Cercle Gastronomique et des Jeux de Hasard.
In 1939, Fleming took on an assignment for The Times in Moscow - in effect a cover. He was spying for the Foreign Office and later for Naval Intelligence where he attained the rank of Commander.
During the second world war, he worked from room number 39 in the Admiralty building in Whitehall as assistant to Admiral John Godfrey. He was involved in the evacuation of Dieppe in 1940, in the smuggling of King Zog out of Albania and in setting up the Office for Special Services, the precursor of the CIA.
As commander of the 30th Assault Unit, he sometimes operated behind the German lines, trying to secure important documents and files from destruction. But, mostly, he directed the Unit's operations from London.
When the war was over, he built a house - Goldeneye - in Jamaica. He worked for the Kemsley group of papers and vacationed every winter in the island.
While awaiting the divorce of one of his numerous paramours - the pregnant Lady Anne Rothermere - the 44 years old Fleming wrote "Casino Royale" published in 1953. It was the first of 12 James Bond thrillers, translated to 11 languages and with total sales of 18 million copies. James Bond novels are now being authored by a new generation of writers.
In 1961, John F, Kennedy, the newly elected president, listed a James Bond title as one of his favorite books. Many movie plots were loosely based on Fleming's novels and have grossed, in total, more than $1 billion. The 007 trademark was merchandised and attached to everything, from toys and games to clothes and toiletries.
But Fleming was also renowned for his non-fiction: tomes like "The Diamond Smugglers" and his "Atticus" column in The Sunday Times where he served as foreign manager (1945-9). He successfully branched into children's literature with "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1964), also made into a movie.
Ironically, his mother died and left him a fortune in 1964 - when Fleming was already wealthy and dying. The trip to her service may have done him in. His son committed suicide in 1975 and his wife died in 1981. He left behind one heir: James Bond.
The Characteristics of Soul
At the dawn of spring, I am reminded by my children the joy of anticipating new life.
They will usually see a flower or two that has made its way through the soil to a world beyond itself. What starts out as a seedling or bulb is transformed by nature's capacity to evolve.
Inside each of us lies dormant an awareness, an identity, an ability to grow beyond what we appear to be. Every moment, we are being challenged by others and by circumstances to create a life that exceeds our present state of living.
To move toward our highest good takes a willingness on our part to let go of what we know to what can be known in and through us. You and I are part of the Created Order we see around us, and we are participants in Creating Order out of what we have been given to care for.
With this in mind, let us turn to ways our soul can be described in the characteristics that make up a flower:
1. The Ground.
The ground nurtures, protects, and gives birth to a flower. Inside the womb of the ground, life is taking root long before we can see it. Because we cannot see a flower that has been planted in the earth, does not mean life is not being created. To be full participants in our world means to be fully connected and rooted in the world we have been given.
2. The Stem.
The stem begins its growth in the earth below and into the sky above. This part of the flower is the connecting characteristic of the plant. Much like humanity, we are in this world without being fully of it. This creates a sacredness to our lives. It is our unique ability to live and grow in a way no one ever has, is, or ever will.
3. The Flower.
In full bloom, a flower is the illumination of all the life that has preceded it. The radiance and color that pour out of it create life. Notice the next time you look at a flower how you are affected by it. You may notice your heart open and be filled with joy. Or, you may notice more energy and clarity in your vision for being blessed with great beauty.
4. The Spirit of a Flower.
The spirit of a flower is the life force moving in and through it. It is the essence of a flower that identifies with your spirit. This part of you opens from the inside out and becomes ONE with the spirit of a flower. It is the same energy that runs in and through you. Like a flower, you begin to radiate your own soul from the essence of your own being.
Each spring, take the time to notice the part of you opening up to new life. Just like flowers, we grow from the inside out. What illuminates in our life began inside us. We nurture these inner qualities of attention until they eventually take root and grow into our daily lives. The growth that follows is created from what we attend to or hold our attention on within us.
Like the pedals of a flower opening to the world around it, we create a presence of awareness. In full bloom, the beauty or the lack thereof touches the lives of everyone around us. As our inner patterns of attention move through us, the world illuminates the seeds of awareness contained within us for so long. Here, a life is created. It is the life of our soul.
Samuel Oliver, author of, "What the Dying Teach Us: Lessons on Living"
For more on this author; http://www.soulandspirit.org
Introduction To Humanities
Although it has been a good 10 years since I went to college, I can remember my intro humanities class like it was yesterday. Introduction to humanities was a prerequisite for pretty much all humanities majors. I thought I was a smart kid because I was such a thoroughly modern one. I didn't really want to read all of those old classics. To give you an idea about the type of course it was, it was cross listed so that classic civilization majors would have to take it to. Who read from Plato up through Dante and not that much further. To say I was skeptical of the utility of the class would be putting it mildly.
Once I started reading my introduction to humanities course work, however, my opinions changed very quickly. I had always considered myself somewhat of a philosopher, but I was amazed to find 2000 year old philosophy that was, in many ways, new to me. The ideas had been around for so long, and yet many of them were beyond my exposure And experience. In a very real sense it was my actual introduction to humanities. I had read books before, but I had no understanding about where the ideas I liked came from.
In a lot of ways, that introduction to humanities course really changed my tastes. I never became a classical civilizations nerd exactly, but I did get into a lot of older literature. After that class I took a course on Viking mythology, and absolutely loved it. We read some of the Icelandic sagas, as well as some of the earlier Germanic epics that were their precursors. It really got my imagination going, and gave me some ideas for modern stories to work on.
My humanities studies eventually leaned towards modern lit. After all, contemporary literature had been my passion since I was very young. Nonetheless, I think that that introduction to humanities course really enhanced my perspective. By knowing the roots of modern literature, I was able to bring a more intelligent and educated perspective to my reading. You can not really understand books without understanding where they come from and what preceded them. And you can't really be a good student of culture or even of society in general without understanding literature. It all goes in a spiral, and that spiral traces its origins back to the ancient Greeks and even before.
Blocking site or key logging is one better than the other?
3 Arrests in 8 days in one small town, the first arrest an engineer, the second arrest was a Doctor, and the third was a 26 year old. All three of them were using the Internet to lure teenage girls into meeting with them for the express purpose of molesting them.
"The message is, I hope the parents of children will start monitoring what their activities are on the Internet. There are a lot of pedophiles preying on these children," said Johnston. (James Johnson is a police officer in Ardmore, Alabama).
"Check your caller I.D. Know who your kids are talking to. If you can, go into the history on your computers. Know what times they are talking to these people. They always want to talk when their parents are gone," he said.
This is such a serious problem that the FBI admits to playing catch-up when it comes to combating clever pedophiles using the Internet, and Law Enforcement agencies plea for more money to combat this growing threat.
The Bottom line is this; try as they may the government can’t stop pedophiles or keep online pedophiles away from your children, it’s up to you to keep them safe and the good news is that there are methods that can be used to not only stop online predators from harming your children, but protect yourself as well since many predators also threaten families if the victim talks.
One of the methods available is called Blocking software, this software works by blocking objectionable content from ever showing up, the software is updated frequently, often daily with a list of sites (called blacklisted), places that cannot be accessed by the computer, using either a web browser such as Internet Explorer, or an instant messaging client and whenever someone tries to access an Internet page the site is compared to the blacklist and the site/chat room is either allowed or not.
The other method is keylogging, this method work by recording everything that is typed on the keyboard or clicked by the mouse. One of the advantages that is provided by this approach is if your child has been approached online they generally will not come out and tell you since an online pedophile almost always threatens the child or their family if they talk, and many times the child feels guilty or somehow responsible for the pedophile’s approach in the first place.
Unfortunately the online pedophile knows this and capitalizes on guilt, shame or fear this is all part of the grooming process that the offender uses to ease the child into an abusive relationship.
Blocking software has its place, and is generally better used for young children since it will keep unwanted material from ever showing up, but it’s use is apparent, that is anyone over the age of 8 or perhaps even younger will know that they are being redirected to a safe website, as a parent or guardian you are definitely the best judge of your child and what they should be allowed to see, and where they should go. Which brings us to key logging software, there are many key loggers available some of them will even email you when a certain word or words that you choose are used.
Please remember that child predation is the most underreported crime in the United States, and although the statistics vary greatly depending on the source and many other factors, but the fact remains that as a parent or guardian something should be done.