Mood:  bright

This photo has been floating around the net for a few weeks now. Is it faked......we have no idea. Could it be just an optical illusion......maybe, or is there a real spirit lurking in this living room?

If you can't yet see the face, keep looking, as sooner or later you'll make eye contact.

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 10:56 CET

Updated: Wednesday, 15 February 2012 11:14 CET

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Mood:  incredulous

Residents of a block of flats in North London were outraged to discover cameras in their gardens barking out orders, telling them to leave the area immediately and that they were being monitored by the authorities.

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Wednesday, 15 February 2012 01:59 CET

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Mood:  bright

The United States may be the home for Sir Richard Branson's space tourism venture Virgin Galactic, but, even though flights are not scheduled to take off until at least 2013, is he already looking for a European base?

Almost 500 people have bought tickets for the 190-minute journey offering about five minutes of weightlessness in space for $200,000 (£127,000), taking off from a bespoke spaceport in the New Mexico desert.

Full Story from BBC

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Wednesday, 15 February 2012 10:23 CET

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Mood:  a-ok

A massive double-barrelled sunspot that has doubled in size in the past few days could now send a series of solar flares towards Earth.

Though the severity of the disruption is yet unknown, some scientists are predicting the spot could send off medium-scale solar flares.

These could cause radio blackouts and disruptions in the Earth’s polar regions.

Full Story from dailymail.co.uk

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 13:11 CET

Updated: Tuesday, 14 February 2012 17:07 CET

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Mood:  bright

by Priyanka Bhatia , Dec 30, 2011

It occurred to me a little too late that I was in a sketchy part of town. In anticipation of making it to my massage appointment, I had actually gotten off my bus five blocks before my stop- and by the looks of things that was the least of my problems.

If it wasn't enough that I was young and clearly a college student, I was also wearing a bright pink t- shirt proclaiming that sex-education saves lives; needless to say, I stuck out like a sore thumb in the southern town. Yet, even with my fingers trembling I was convinced that I would be perfectly safe, that I didn't have to rely on anyone for help. My cell-phone was neatly tucked away in my handbag and my fear was causing me to start talking to myself.  "It'll be okay Priya, you've dealt with 2,000 pound horses, so a dangerous person is nothing to you." Much like my pride, my pep talks weren't very helpful but neither was the cooing I received from the next bus stop I contemplated waiting at.
Walking seemed like the only real option since I didn't see the point in calling for help and so I continued. I went another block and sat down impatiently waiting for the bus next to a cemetery when I first pretended not to notice them.
 
Two perfectly innocent strangers were walking right towards me but rather than seeing them as helpful I saw them as dangerous.Dingy hair, a banged up eye, crutches and an old back pack were what greeted me as the woman sat down next to me. " What's your name?" "Annie" I lied because I was too scared to tell the truth. "You don't look like you belong here, where are you headed?" " I'm trying to get to Corporate Blvd but I got off the bus too early so I'm waiting for the next one. Do you know when it's coming around?" "Probably not for another hour but you should really get out of here before that. You're young and you don't blend in very well. I'm only helping you because you look like my niece and I can't see you get hurt. You're like fresh meat out here." The woman with stiches over her right eye pulled out her small wallet and showed me a picture of her beautiful niece. " You look exotic just like her. Isn't she pretty?" " She's gorgeous." I replied, shocked by the size of her injury as well as the picture of her fully clothed, clearly better off relative. " So Mike and I are going to walk you to wherever it is you need to go- the bus station is only a few blocks away and you can catch the next bus out there but I want you to be safe." I could feel my jaw drop," "Thank you so much."  "Don't mention it we don't want you to get hurt."
 
I was blown away by their act of complete kindness and generosity. These were strangers who I had been afraid of but what I really learned instead, was that they were far better, stronger people than I had ever been. In this one moment of kindness these two homeless individuals had so unselfishly taken me three blocks to my destination telling me horror stories that I couldn't imagine.
 
The woman had been beaten with a bottle of alcohol after someone snuck into her tent and  the evidence was as clear as the stitches over her eye.The man she was with, Mike never told me his story- he was silent but helpful, mumbling occasionally and walking slowly along with his crutches and his casted arm.
 
After my agonizingly long wait at the station and being hit on by an elderly man all I could think of was those two people. Those two wonderful people who had in that time made me realize how perpetually incredible and blessed my life is. " You be careful now, I'm gonna be worried about you all night." "Thank you both for everything; thank you so much."  And even after calling my aunt to pick me up from my final destination I couldn't help the tears from falling down my face.
 
How could two wonderful people be so incredibly stigmatized against to the point of being untouchable, unnoticeable, absent from every aspect of our lives to the point where we forget about them? Why is it that the first thing I noticed about them was their social economic status rather than their kindred spirits, their kind hearts or their simple humanity?
 
That common string keeping us together as creatures has gone from being so very inclusive to constantly being cut, separating us based on age, race, gender and now social economic class. Now, the commonality that used to be so standard- our humanity- has changed in such a way that we have to prove our likeness to others just to feel safe, to give us a false sense of security.
 
The problem lies in the fact that we've come to confuse rich and poor, old and young, black and white with good and evil- forgetting that what actually defines us isn't what we look like but rather what we stand for as I was so humbly taught by Mike and Barbara.

Article Source - dailygood.org

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Tuesday, 14 February 2012 01:17 CET

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Mood:  happy

In the latest UFO news, a cloud-like, unidentified flying object near Rome, Italy, is mystifying experts because of its unusual properties. What is it?

The UAP (unexplained aerial phenomenon) seems to be just another wispy cloud from a distance. But zooming in on the OVNI reveals a distinct, ribbon-like pattern never observed before in known cloud formations and defying meteorological classification.

Full Story from gather.com

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Tuesday, 14 February 2012 11:22 CET

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Mood:  bright

A star-gazer has filmed intriguing footage of a glowing UFO, which he says he spotted hovering over the Thames Estuary.

The man, identified only as Space999dude, recorded the phenomenon as he drove past the river at night, he said.

The mysterious, oval aircraft can be seen suspended in the air displaying several amber-gold lights of varying sizes.

Full Story from dailymail.co.uk

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Monday, 13 February 2012 23:45 CET

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Mood:  bright

The Dalai Lama has been telling us for years that it would make us happy, but he never said it would make us healthy, too.

“If you want others to be happy,” reads the first part of his famous formula, “practice compassion.” Then comes the second part of the prescription: “If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

Maybe the Dalai Lama knew all along or maybe he’s just finding out like the rest of us, but science is starting to catch up with a couple millennia of Buddhist thought. In recent years, the investigation of compassion has moved beyond theology and philosophy to embrace a wide range of scientific fields, including neurology, endocrinology and immunology. And while the benefits of being the recipient of compassion are obvious, new research shows that the practice of compassion has beneficial effects not only on mental health but on physical health, too.

Which is good news for everyone on the planet, as you can never have too much compassion. Job layoffs and home foreclosures, the cultural erasure of Tibet and the abscess that is Gaza, the sorrows of disease, natural disasters and death that are always with us: To create a short list makes one guilty of omission. Despite all the progress and advances we have made, there is still plenty about which to feel compassion.

So it can only be good news that in the last decade, the study of compassion and its associated emotions has caught the interest of science, with programs on affective neuroscience, as it is known, blossoming at places like Emory University, Harvard University and University of California, Los Angeles, to name but a few. In 2008, the Dalai Lama donated $150,000 to help kick start the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University in California. In 2010, he gave a chunk to the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, an offshoot of the Lab for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin.

Here’s even better news: We can train ourselves to be compassionate. In Europe, leading compassion researcher Tania Singer, director of the Department of Social Neuroscience, a wing of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, is exploring the use of brain imaging and biofeedback to teach subjects to activate parts of the brain associated with compassion. “One of our major goals is to see how we can actually train [people in] compassion in Western society,” she says, “not using one-to-one practices from Asia, but to see how we can integrate such training into our very busy and stressful everyday lives.”

Compassion starts with taking time out of our busy and stressful lives to empathize, which is the ability to register and mirror the feelings of our fellow creatures. But compassion takes this empathic response and adds the strong desire to alleviate that suffering.

From a social evolutionary point of view, compassion has long been considered something of an aberration, even a weakness. For Dacher Keltner, director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Born to Be Good, this is a major oversight. “We missed one of the most central elements in our physical evolution that has implications for gene replication,” says Keltner.

When you say the word “Darwinism,” Keltner explains, people immediately see an image of “red in tooth and claw” and “survival of the fittest.” But in The Descent of Man, Darwin writes, “Sympathy is our strongest instinct.” With human offspring among the most vulnerable in the mammalian world, Keltner argues, evolving the caregiving part of our psyches was critical for the survival of our genes. And in small groups of hunter-gatherers, from whom we evolved, social skills—particularly compassion—can prove to be matters of life and death. For Keltner, these aspects of our collective heritage should be emphasized in schools and other public institutions.

Scanning technology gives us a rough idea of which parts of the brain are implicated in compassion, although researchers point out that the brain uses the same regions for multiple functions. Experiments have implicated the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—an area associated with empathy and reward-based decision-making—in the compassionate response. When the ACC is compromised, patients manifest symptoms like increased aggressiveness, emotional blunting and impaired mother-infant interactions, all of which occupy the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from compassion. The other chunk of the limbic brain that is most frequently linked to compassion is the insular cortex, or insula, a region that helps both in emotional processing and in balancing the body’s functions.

Further down the brainstem, and back down the evolutionary time scale, researchers at Stanford have found interesting activity in the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a region responsible for muting the pain of severe injury that presumably evolved to help us escape whatever caused the injury. When shown disturbing images of suffering, the PAGs of test subjects light up. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, associate director of Stanford’s CCARE, theorizes that this is part of the neural machinery of compassion: an empathic response that prepares the way for a compassionate response, enabling us to move beyond the pain of others to do something about it.

To get from compassion to health, though, we must first take a detour through stress. Our stress responses evolved for do-or-die situations, for that proverbial encounter with the saber-toothed tiger. Today, though, real tigers have been replaced by paper tigers that never go away, so our fight-or-flight mechanisms stay activated for too long. This 24/7 alarm takes a major toll on circulation, digestion, immune and brain function and aging, for starters. Learning the effects of stress on the body is frightening enough to give you an anxiety attack—if you weren’t having one already.

Yet, oddly enough, developing the ability to feel the pain of others via compassion can lower stress levels. How could this be?

One possible answer comes from a University of Maine experiment in which a group of women was assigned the task of delivering an address to a roomful of professionals, a notoriously stressful experience. Some of the women were given emotionally positive coaching before the speech; others were guided in a way that was emotionally neutral. Subjects were tested before and after for three different measures: blood pressure, the presence of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva and high-frequency heart rate variability, a measure of the body’s ability to down-regulate the heart’s runaway tendencies.

The women’s stress responses had little or nothing to do with the kind of coaching they received. But the researchers found that those who self-identified as being on the high side of the compassion scale showed a measurable drop in their stress responses when they were offered emotionally positive coaching. The compassionate ones were able to utilize the support of others to mitigate the damaging effects of stress. Lead author Brandon Cosley theorizes that this ability might come down to practice. “It could be that people who are more concerned with others put themselves in situations like this, where there are these supportive interactions, and this emotional fluency helps them turn down their own responses when they are on the receiving end.”

Another path from compassion to health passes through social neuroscience, an emerging field in which researchers seek to understand how social interactions affect the wiring and firing of our nervous systems. A number of studies have shown that people with strong, positive social connections have lower inflammatory responses—a stress reaction linked to cancer, depression and arthritis—than people who are socially isolated or in conflict.

It turns out that some forms of compassion meditation—in which the practitioner consciously, intentionally dwells in caring regard for widening circles of fellow creatures—involves many of the same brain regions and brings with it many of the benefits of positive social interaction.

In a 2009 study by researchers at Emory University, 61 students were randomly assigned to either a six-week series of classes on compassionate meditation or a health discussion group. The study showed that attending one class or the other had no effect. But among the meditators, there was a sharp difference between those who logged the greatest number of hours in daily practice and those who spent the fewest on the mat. When they were subjected to a stress test, all of the heavy meditators showed a clear reduction in interleukin-6, a marker for inflammatory response regulated by the immune system, after the six-week training program.

That human beings have an innate instinct for compassion is not something anybody needed science to prove, of course. But research is beginning to answer one vexing question: Is compassion a fixed personality trait, locked in by nature and nurture, or can higher states of compassion be cultivated? Scientific studies suggest that we can learn to be compassionate and that compassion can even physically change the wiring of our nervous systems.

In a 2008 study carried out at the University of Wisconsin’s Lab for Affective Neuroscience, the empathic responses of Tibetan Buddhist monks with more than 10,000 hours on the cushion were contrasted with those of subjects who were newly initiated into compassion meditation. The test subjects were put into a brain scanner and subjected to sounds of human joy and distress as well as neutral sounds. The researchers found significantly more synapses firing in the monks’ insulas and ACCs during the distressing sounds compared to the novices. This suggests that, like playing the saxophone or throwing a curveball, compassion can be developed as a skill. The lead author of the study, Antoine Lutz, believes this skill may also be helpful for people prone to depression. “Thinking about other people’s suffering and not just your own helps put everything in perspective,” he says.

The vagus nerve, a cranial nerve that runs between the brain, the heart and gut, is another route through which compassion influences health. The vagus helps the brain regulate heart rate and respiration, among other things, and high vagal function is associated with all sorts of good things, such as efficient regulation of glucose and inflammation as well as lower incidence of heart disease and diabetes. Those with high vagal function are statistically better at regulating their emotions, attention and behavior, too.

It has long been believed that in adults, vagal function is about as stable as height; that is, once adolescence is over, you are pretty much stuck with what you’ve got. But recent research by Barbara Fredrickson, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Positivity, has shown that over a six-week course of “loving kindness” meditation, a Buddhist technique in which the practitioner extends positive feelings toward friends, associates and even enemies, subjects can raise their vagal function, reaping all the positive effects that come along with it. “Just as you can increase your muscle tone with physical training, so can you increase your vagal tone with emotional training,” Fredrickson says.

Of course, like anything else, too much compassion can be bad for your health. A 2004 study with caregivers of autistic children showed that the stress and pressure of this kind of relentless support left women impaired on a cellular level, setting them up for the whole host of stress-exacerbated health conditions. The challenge, then, is to open our hearts in ways that don’t end up harming those hearts. Especially today, when there is so much bad news and so many media outlets focusing on it, it’s easy to become paralyzed by the world’s suffering. “Don’t be overwhelmed,” says Stephen Post, author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People. “Know how to draw boundaries. And be careful to acknowledge limits.”

Compassion can’t cure cancer or banish suffering. But the steady re-orientation of the mind toward compassion can be the beginning of a virtuous cycle, with decreased stress boosting the immune system and the boosted immune system improving attitude, which can further enhance health. And we can all take comfort in knowing that we are part of a larger movement, says Charles Raison, clinical director of the Emory University Mind-Body Program: “We ignored the emotions for 50 years, and like everything that gets ignored or undervalued, like real estate, there’s a goldmine there”—a goldmine whose wealth we all can share.

Larry Gallagher, who wrote about healthy soil in the March 2010 issue, is working on his saxophone playing as well as his compassion quotient.

Article Source - dailygood.org

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Monday, 13 February 2012 01:05 CET

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Mood:  bright

In today's constantly connected world, finding solitude has become a lost art. In fact, Western culture tends to equate a desire for solitude with people who are lonely, sad, or have antisocial tendencies. But seeking solitude can actually be quite healthy. In fact, there are many physical and psychological benefits to spending time alone.

Full story from psychologytoday.com

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Monday, 13 February 2012 11:41 CET

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Mood:  chatty

If you're unlucky in love, it may be your name that's the problem.

Researchers have found that your first name could have an effect on your love life and have come up with a list of unlucky and lucky names.

But local experts are sceptical about the accuracy of the research, which found that singles called Kevin had the toughest time.

Full Story from nzherald.co.nz

Posted by Neil Bartlett DHyp M.A.E.P.H at 01:01 CET

Updated: Sunday, 12 February 2012 18:36 CET

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