The Scientific Power of Meditation

Meditation has been used in spiritual and religious circles for centuries while the benefits have been unseen to the planet at large. However, the blindfold has since been taken off and with the help of modern day scientific research and the internet, we now know the studiable benefits of meditation.

The video below does a quick 3-minute rundown on the benefits. I don't know about you, but after watching this I immediately started meditating.

Enjoy!

Link for those on mobile.

8 Mind-Bending Terrence McKenna Videos

Terence McKenna was one of the greatest minds of the last century. He was a philosopher, a psychonaut, and an all around mind-bending, hilarious individual that apparently would talk to "machine elves" on high does of magic mushrooms. 

McKenna is no longer with us physically, but if anything, he is more with us than ever before. Terence is spreading like wild fire across the internet and for good reason. Here are 8 videos of the great Terence Mckenna!

Enjoy!

1. The Message

2. Culture Is Not Your Friend

3. Nature Loves Courage

4. Schizophrenic or Shamanic?

5. Trust Yourself

6. You Must Have A Plan

7. Anthropology and Modern Anxiety

8. The Universe Inside

How To Meditate - A Simple Guide To Your Natural State

 Photo courtesy of www.reallifeglobal.com

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A 15 Minute Life Saving TED Talk: How To Make Stress Your Friend

In merely 15 minutes, this could save yours or a loved one's life. For so long stress has been seen as the enemy and is bad for your health. What if our very belief towards stress is what causes these health issues? So please, take a moment, and watch this compassionate, insightful, and inspiring TED talk that could help shift the planet to a more loving place.

Link for those on mobile.

5 Mind Blowing Alan Watts Quotes - 100th Birthday Edition

In light of Alan Watt's 100th Birthday (were he still alive) today, I thought I would share some of his wisdom with the world. This is my second Alan Watts Quotes post, so feel free to check out the previous article if you are still yearning for more. Enjoy!

1. "By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility. We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us."

2. "It is essential to understand this point thoroughly: that the thing-in-itself, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is not only unknowable--it does not exist. This is important not only for sanity and peace of mind, but also for the most "practical" reasons of economics, politics, and technology.. This is not to say only that things exist in relation to one another, but that what we call "things" are no more than glimpses of a unified process. Certainly, this process has distinct features which catch our attention, but we must remember that distinction is not separation."

3. "The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself."

4. "Everything is standing right out in the open, it's just a question of how you look at it. So you do discover when you realize this, the most extraordinary thing that I never cease to be flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me. Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms as you look around you. So far so good. But the truth is funnier than that. It is that you are look right at the brilliant light now, that the experience you are having that you call ordinary everyday consciousness--pretending you're not it--that experience is exactly the same thing as IT. There's no difference at all. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's the great discovery. In other words, when you really start to see things, and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see, what vision is, or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only they're hidden in the sense that all points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out. See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating a skinless drum, no light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything."

5. "Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't any difference. You are all of them, and when they come into being that's you coming into being, you know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it, like you breathe. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education on how to do it."

Rest in peace :)

One Cosmic Dance

Experience, the universe, is a unified process seen through a fragmented consciousness filter (ego). Each sense, each object, each person, each moment is put into a mental box. This labeling, however useful it may be, has put us under self-hypnosis creating a split world with separate objects. In reality, no one thing in and of itself exists. It is all relative. It is all one. 

Ten thousand things, one Tathata, one Suchness. 

And so there is the Observer and the Observed. We identify with the Observer and in-turn disconnect with the Observed. Without the Observed, there can be no Observer. The two are one. You are one. It is one. See the split, see the divided as one. Look. 

Every morning, 

before you begin the day, 

bring yourself back to the unity of experience. 

Every sentence needs a subject. The universe does not. This is why the Truth cannot be uttered. And too the Truth is always new, always fresh with the spontaneity of the moment. If something is thought, if something is said, like each word of a sentence, it goes on. Once thought, once said, it is now old. The Truth is always new.

All of experience is connected through awareness. 

Bring your awareness to the breath.

Let your awareness expand with each inhale and

sink in with each exhale.

Let it all fall in your breath.

Let each seemingly separate part of existence return to its origin: the Now. Not the abstract concept you have built up about the Now, but of what is. Time is not stacked vertically nor does it move forward or backward. What we call time is nothing but a memory (the reflection of yourself), and the mental conception of future events, all happening right now. What appears to be the movement of time is, in reality, direct felt experience morphing and shifting. Like a kaleidoscope spontaneously changing pattern. Creating a song, a dance. No matter how "awakened" or "asleep" one may appear to be, we are all apart of One Cosmic Dance.

Waking Up From The Dream of You

We are living in a haze, a drama, a dream-like state. We are trapped inside a personal narrative, a collection of thoughts that seem to be woven together somewhere in our heads, creating the story of "I". In this net of thought there are knots. In those knots you feel stuck, anxious, afraid. But in this fear there is freedom. Freedom from the very concept of you. Freedom from the known. 

With the acceptance and movement with the unknown (everyday ordinary existence) there is what some may call Nirvana. "You" don't have to do anything. In fact, "you" cannot. That is the frustration. We believe to be this central "I". The experiencer to experience, when all there is is experience. The two are not separate. You are not separate. "You" cannot do anything for there is no static "you" controlling the moment. This moment, this life, this is uncontrollable. See how it flows? Surrender to it. It is all one.

The "I" claims authority and ownership to events, or really, motions/vibrations that occur in the present moment. This creates a split world, an inside and an outside. You are seemingly inside, watching a foreign world whizzing by, but that is you. What you see/experience is who you are. And it is always here. You can never not be experiencing experience. And if there was no "experience" before birth or after death, you were not experiencing it. You have always been here and always will be. Nothing is or can be outside the realm of consciousness.

In this mental concept that you have built up of you and then its flip-side, the world you see around you, it makes this moment seem like a split-second, a sliver in the grand scheme of experience and time. Time is a tool, just like the mind. It only exists relative to an observer. Just like the sun appearing to rise and set from the perspective of being on Earth, if seen from outer-space, it is continuously shining. And so too "outside" the narrative of the self, there is no time passing. It is continuously there, condensed, unified into the present moment. But when the now becomes a blip in time, stuck somewhere in-between the past and the future, you are no longer with reality in totality. You are no longer with yourself.

There is a difference between deep thought and mindless thought. Most of the time, our minds are wandering sporadically, endlessly, without us even noticing. Become aware of these thoughts as they arrive and as they leave. Be fully aware of whatever arises in the field of consciousness, experience. Thought is not something you should avoid, or even can avoid. It is there, it is a feature, a script, but don't get lost in what it is presenting. 

Just like when dreaming, there is a story going on that you take part in, get lost in. However, there is the ability to "wake up" from this story when inside of the dream and become lucid. A fully conscious dream where you have the ability to do anything you wish. Right now, you have the opportunity to wake up from the dream of you and do anything you wish. 

This is our destiny, to awaken from the illusion of the self and to return to the Self. To what is. It is the hardest and easiest thing one can do. This is the blossoming of consciousness, it is happening inside us all. There is no time to wait, in fact, there is no time. All there is is now. And right now, you have the ability to have a radical revolution of the psyche. Transcendence of the ego is the next step in human evolution. The return to where you are. This is what the world needs. Societal change, yes, but it all starts from within. As above, so below. 

So stop trying to change the world and instead change yourself. The outer reflects the inner and the inner reflects the outer. Stop whatever you are doing and sit with yourself. Stop the distractions. Sit with the emptiness inside. Sit with the pain. Sit with the joy. Sit with whatever is. Sit and be still.