Source: www.collective-evolution.com | Original Post Date: August 23, 2013 –

Cannabis has been making a lot of noise lately. Multiple states across the United States and countries around the world have successfully legalized medical Marijuana, and the Uruguay parliament recently voted to create the world’s first legal marijuana market.

This is good news as the health benefits of Cannabis are vast. With multiple medical and scientific studies to confirm them. But what about the harmful effects? All psychological evaluations from the intake of cannabis are largely based on assumptions, suggestions and observations (1). When we look at the actual science behind Cannabis, it seems negative effects are difficult to confirm.

Happiness is something that we all strive for, yet many of us find it challenging to grasp and even harder to maintain. Especially during these difficult economic times, happiness can feel like it is hiding just behind next week’s paycheck, a new job, or a distant raise. However, as Dr. Robert Putnam of Harvard University recently pointed out, “money alone can buy you happiness, but not much.”(1) It appears that happiness has less to do with money than we might imagine, and more to do with the people around us, how we live our lives, the way spend our time, and how we perceive ourselves and understand our life experiences.

Based on the latest research in psychology and my experience as both a psychologist trying to understand happiness, and as a human being searching for my own happiness, here are 11 ways to live a happier life… that have nothing to do with money!

1) PRACTICE GRATITUDE

In a recent experiment, a person in India said “hola” and “ciao” to three other people in France. Today, the Web, smartphones and international calling might make that not seem like an impressive feat, but it was. The greetings were not spoken, typed or texted. The communication in question happened between the brains of a set of study subjects, marking one of the first instances of brain-to-brain communication on record.

The team, whose members come from Barcelona-based research institute Starlab, French firm Axilum Robotics and Harvard Medical School, published its findings earlier this month in the journal PLOS One. Study co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School, hopes this and forthcoming research in the field will one day provide a new communication pathway for patients who might not be able to speak.

By Paul Lenda

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

There is a move towards seeking to live in harmony with nature, as was once the case, and not to treat the natural world as an enemy or something to be exploited. There is a shift to an integrated, holistic, interconnected, and transpersonal way of living, and away from the individualistic mentality that stems from a belief in separateness. There is transformation from the self-centered and ego-dominant individual to the selfless and unity-oriented being. There is a shift from the competition-based mode of operating in society to the cooperative-minded means of operation. All these shifts are occurring right now and will continue to occur if consciousness continues down its current path of positive progression into the higher echelons of being-ness.