The pursuit of happiness

It struck me as odd when I first found scientific confirmation that we remember bad things better. If the design of the universe was based on a positive principle, and my experience constantly reaffirms me that it is, then why would we forget the happy things?

But if you take a moment and think about it, it actually makes perfect sense. The reason that we have such difficulty in remembering the joy of our journey is that fun is something you have. It implies participation, and it only makes sense at the time.

Quite the opposite is true when you look at the bad and the ugly, they exist in the past. In fact, without them our past would probably be somewhat uneventful. Not that it would matter of course! If the argument holds true we will most likely be having too much fun to care.

It is therefore no real surprise that scientific evidence has shown that the relation between fun and care is inversely proportionate to each other. This means that if you have more of the one, you will by equation, have less of the other.

So how can we get more? Mingyur Rinpoche is a Buddhist monk and the author of the book "Joyful Wisdom". He carries the distinction of being dubbed "The happiest man alive" after he participated in research aimed at showing how mindfulness meditation could increase our happiness coefficient.

Previous research had shown that there is a shift in activity from the right to the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain in subjects who were happy, and the experiment wanted to determine if purposeful meditation could achieve such a change.

It turned out to be a huge success, and after eight weeks some of the participants showed an increase of up to 800 percent in left sided brain activity by following a 30 minute a day program of mindfulness meditation.

But meditation is only one of the ways that we can increase happiness. Various other experiments has shown that anyone can put a smile on their face just by focusing on happy things, proving the age old wisdom that energy flows where the mind goes.

Those who actively pursue happiness get it, and there is at least one Tibetan Lama that can vouch for it!

Talk Show Hosts and Me

I have found that over the years my choice in talk show hosts have changed considerably, and I must confess I think it all started with "Haas Das se Nuuskas" many, many years ago. In recent memory I guess, it has changed from Jerry, to Oprah, to Tyra, to Ellen, and lately I have been viewing The View.

Looking back I can still appreciate the reasons why I followed each and every one, except Jerry, but something changed along the way. The reason why Ellen recently started losing out to The View isn't entirely clear, but it happened only a view months ago. I remember at the time she was starting to introduce these amazing guests that had these incredible stories to tell, or talents to show. And then I lost interest.

She still has some of the most incredible guests, and she still delivers an incredible show, but something changed. I guess it's me, and if it is I have to tell you I am concerned. Why don't they?

The brain - A users manual: Part 1

As little as 20 years ago, most people believed that our brain start a slow route to decay shortly after we turn six. According to then, any injury we cause would lead to permanent damage and incapacitation. People understood their mind as something of value, something they had to protect, and people started to say things like: "... the mind is a terrible thing to waste...".

While this is still technically true, we now know that our brain does have stem cells that gives it a regenerative capability, although we have not really seen it in action. Our brain also undergo a second growth spurt after the one that ended at the age of six, and with the onset of puberty our brain start to "rewire" and restructure into the organ that will become host to our adult mind.

The secondary spurt of neural growth that occur at the age of our sexual awakening also adapts our hormonal and sensory apparatus to our sexual choice, fine-tune the control of our voluntary muscle system to adjust for the additional power and mass, and make the final neural path adjustments in response to our environmental experience and exposure. It is only after this fine-tuning has been completed that our brain can be considered as fully developed, finishing a process that started before our birth.

At least, that is what our current level of knowledge would tell us. As for tomorrow, who knows? We already know that science is investigating the possibility of artificially increasing our neurons in an attempt to treat age related dementia, and there are various other drugs under investigation that promise to boost our mental capacity. Right now I believe in the age old wisdom that you lose it if you don't use it. I never could adapt to using it's modern counterpart: "You snooze, you lose..."

When did you last polish your treasure?

We are lucky to have a kitchen window that faces to the west, which means that we get the cozy afternoon sun on a sunny winter afternoon like this. Add to this golden haze of light a polished crystal that dangles on a string and you suddenly transform a warm and lazy room to something that is alive and vibrant with hundreds of dancing little rain bow spots projecting on the walls, and through the doors beyond.

We lovingly refer to this time of day as fairy time, and no-one can resist giving the crystal a little twirl to marvel at the intricate dance of light and color that results from it. It is truly a wondrous site to hold, and always manages to lift my spirit and warm the cockles of my heart.

But the daily dust of living is a constant threat to this display, and we have to remind ourselves to polish it every now and then...

The arrogance of the human race

It just struck me again how arrogant the human race can sometimes be...

For many decades we have had the technology to search for intelligent entities beyond our planet. In trying to make contact we have been using the mathematical equation that describes a common occurrence in all forms of life, the Fibonacci series.

In stark contrast to this we are discovering more and more evidence of some kind of consciousness beyond life. Not that this is news by the way...

Mentalists and spiritualists and mediums have been telling us that they communicate with conscious entities all the time. And the same goes for the prophets, witches and shaman that communicate with the spirit, nature and the spirits in nature, and have so since the dawn of time.

Recent experiments even confirm that creativity itself may be like some kind of entity that people can communicate with, and that the expression we give to creativity is nothing other than our understanding of this connection.

The bottom line to all of this is that, for a very long time we have known that somehow consciousness exists beyond what we call life. And yet, when we try to communicate to entities beyond our planet we use 'life' as the basis of our communication effort.

I find it strange, and rather arrogant. Don't you?

The mood of water

Dr Emoto discovered that the crystalline structure of water changes according to what it was exposed to. It turns out that the crystals that water form when it freezes look beautiful after being exposed to love, and crappy after they are dosed with hate.

After two bottles of water are left overnight on a piece of paper, the crystals they form depend on the words we have written on the paper. The same happens when a group of people focus on love and sends it to a bottle of water, even if that bottle is locked in a safe on the other side of the globe, or when certain types of music is played to the water.

Which just goes to show that "Love, love changes everything...", and that you have to be mindful of water because 75% of our brain consists of water (99% if you go according to molecule count).

Innocence lost - Part 1

At approximately the age of four children lose their innocence and become capable of deceit. The exact time of “crossing over” can be tested in a simple experiment that heralds the child’s ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes. When this ability develops a child is able to switch his perspective to that of another person, and they begin to think what other people think, and care what other people feel.

This milestone in childhood development is also considered to be the stage where children begin to reason logically and start to communicate intelligently about the world according to their own experience in an effort to gain a better understanding of their own perception.

If you would like to know more about "crossing over" and the early childhood development that lead up to it, you will find Part 2 here.
if you want to read the full article you will find it here.

who wants to live forever?

It seems as if the race to immortality has reached fever pitch proportions, with some of the new technologies almost competing in our search for the fountain of youth. Take for instance the chemical they found in red wine that doubled the normal lifespan of lab rats, or the protein that switches off our “genetic” old age trigger.

And have you heard about the new bio-printing technology that uses the natural self-organizing ability of cells to literally print a 3D organ. If that is not science fiction enough, they have found that suppression of our immune systems create conditions that may allow our bodies to repair themselves. In laboratory experiments they have found that lab rats could grow back their tails, and the clipped ears of the mice repaired themselves when kept under these conditions.

The question that remains to be answered is what are we going to do with the extra time, and will this promise of eternal youth be of any good to the planet we live on? Under my own friends at least, the answer remains undecided.

The spirit of plants

It was in the early 1900’s, and thanks to the discovery of the lie detector that we first became aware that plants are more than just compost, and that they seem to display some kind of prescience.

As much as I guess by accident, but profound in its implication we found that somehow a plant knew who was going to harm it, and who was going to care for it. The finding that plants “knew” things that people intend never gained a big following, but that doesn’t change the fact that they do…

Take a look at some classic experiments here.

And if you would like to know more about this, tell me why and ask...