God said:

The Truth of You bears no resemblance to the harried person you disguise yourself in. You are not this pressured person you think you are.

Sometimes you feel frazzled. However, frazzle is like a hot spell in the weather. There can be a hot spell in the weather. You can experience a heat wave, yet you are not the heat wave. You can have a hot spell, yet a hot spell is outside you. Frazzle is an addendum to the apparent appearance that is not you at all. If you were not hiding out in a body, you would have no clue as to what stress and strain could be. We come back again and again that you are not your body. Your body has temperature. The Essence of You does not. The Essence of You has nothing to do with up or down or any apparent change.

Consider stress like a sauna your body steps into. You are not a sauna. Your body enters a sauna, and your body steps out of a sauna. You can open the door, and you step out the same way you stepped in.

You, outlined in the form of a body, can kick up a storm, yet you can never be a storm. You can erupt like a volcano. You can be called a volcano, yet you are not a volcano. Your body can bear witness to a volcano. Your body can erupt, yet the essence of you remains Pure Being.

You can be called a spit-fire, yet Who You Are bears no resemblance to a spit-fire.

“Great Teachers can lead you to the doors of understanding, but it is up to you to enter.” – Lao Tzu

The Monks and The Woman

Two celibate monks, forbidden from even glancing at a woman were traveling to a monastery when they came to a river. The river was very flooded and was impossible to cross without getting wet. They had just decided which would be the shallowest path across the river when the monks noticed a woman a little way along on the same bank, also trying to find a way to cross.

Since the woman was having great trouble and being the gentleman that he was, one of the monks offered to carry her across on his shoulders. She accepted and they began to wade across; they reached the other side where he set her down, she thanked him and went her own way. The monks carried on in silence. ‘Why did you carry that woman across the river?’ The monk asked the other in dismay, ‘We are not allowed to talk to, touch… even let our eyes fall upon a woman let alone carry her! What were you thinking?’ The other monk listened with a smile upon his lips, then softly said. ‘But I put her down when I crossed the river. Why are you still carrying her?’

HJ: Our perception dictates whether we choose to see negativity or positivity—meaning that it is ultimately a choice.  Every single situation can be viewed in a positive or negative manner and both are equally valid.  Evidence can always be found to support each position.  So which are you choosing?  Something uplifting and expansive or contractive and negative?

– Truth

17 Ways to Conquer Soul-Crushing Negativity

By Angel Chernoff | Marc and Angel

When we are aware of our weaknesses or negative tendencies, we open the opportunity to work on them.

Ever had one of those moments when all you wanted to do was crawl back in bed, put a pillow over your head and shut out the world for a few hours? For a few days?

New research has opened up questions that it may be possible to lose your empathetic ability over time or that it could even possibly be increased through training. These questions were raised because scientists have recently discovered they can physically see people’s empathetic ability on brain scans. This research has added a great deal of information to the neuroscience field relating to emotion and has opened up questions with regards to two areas of empathy in particular: affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Compared to people who have a logical reaction to people’s emotions, empathetic people, or those with a strong emotional reaction to others, are found to have denser grey matter in specific areas of the brain.

Researchers at Monash University ^[1] hypothesised that through looking at images of the brain, they would be able to predict where individuals scored on the affective/cognitive empathy scale based on their neurological structures. A co-author of the study, Robert Eres, explained ^[2] that “people who are high on affective empathy are often those who get quite fearful when watching a scary movie, or start crying during a sad scene. Those who have a high cognitive empathy are those who are more rational, for example, a clinical psychologist counselling a client.”

1. Live a life filled with compassion and positive action.

Buddha wasn’t the only religious leader who wanted you to be compassion – you can find that teaching in others like Jesus Christ and Mohammed. It isn’t just beneficial to the world, it’s beneficial to your own spirit too. Compassion is critical to finding peace within yourself and taking care of yourself. And it may sound a little bit corny, but we all do better when we all do better.

2. Pay attention.

It annoys me to hear people to prattle on about “waking up” because it’s usually said in such a condescending way, but there is some validity to the idea of seeing the world for what it truly is. It requires mindfulness, that is paying attention to the little things around you. Many people don’t ever learn how to do that. So wake up, live mindfully, pay attention – whatever you want to call it. Just do it.

3. Be the change...

by Asim Choudhury

The anger of not having what we want or the way we want it and the resulting frustration in many ways derails our lives from where we want to go. The sense of vengeance and avenging life for not giving us what we want moves through us, causing decisions and indecisions for what could otherwise be a learning lesson for us, which is for our own good, disturbs us. In the meantime, when we are spending time in our anger, it is like spending time in our own tomb, where it seems life is killing us. Here, with all our decisions going against life, they are working against us.

Are we different from life? If yes, then we should try living without life! Since we are not different from life, our perception of life is our perception of our own selves. We experience life in ourselves, and we can choose our experience! Life goes where we go.

Are we angry with life? Are we complaining that it does not work and support us for our growth? Does it feel like somehow being stuck in life? Who are we complaining? Are we complaining about ourselves?

Within the past couple of years alone, the concept of geoengineering has sparked a growing  interest (which seems to be accelerating at a rapid rate) within the academic world. It’s also ignited a heavy interest in policy making, which is no surprise given the fact that we are talking about “geoengineering” the entire global climate in response to global climate change. That’s exactly what geoengineering is – a response to destructive human activity which we have yet to cease – and it involves injecting stratospheric particles/aerosols into the atmosphere to, again, reduce the effect of global climate change.

For example, SPICE is a United Kingdom government funded geoengineering research project that collaborates with the university of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Bristol to further examine the idea of Solar Radiation Management (SRM).

Some of the candidate particles to spray in the air proposed by SPICE (to name a few) are (source):

• Sulphate/Sulphuric Acid/Sulphur Dioxide
• Titania
• Silicon Carbide
• Calcium Carbonate
• Alumina
• Silica
• Zinc Oxide