Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing: Benoit Blanco
in 1950, astronomer Arthur Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. How Hoag’s Object formed, including its nearly perfectly round ring of stars and gas, remains unknown. Hoag’s Object spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 600 million light years away toward the constellation of the Snake (Serpens). Many galaxies far in the distance are visible toward the right, while coincidentally, visible in the gap at about seven o’clock, is another but more distant ring galaxy.
Palestinian children wait to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen amid shortages of food supplies. (photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
15 march 24 (RSN.org)
The United Nations is warning that famine in Gaza is “almost inevitable.” Palestinians living in Gaza are struggling with extreme shortages of food, clean water, and medicine. Several countries, including Jordan, France, Egypt, the U.S., the United Arab Emirates, and now Germany, are coordinating airdrops of humanitarian aid to help alleviate the crisis, and the U.S. military is working to a build a temporary port on Gaza’s coastline to bring in additional aid. Critics have pointed out that airdrops and a temporary pier are insufficient, dangerous, and haphazard operations compared with ensuring a steady and reliable supply of aid delivered by trucks, which might be achieved by a cease-fire agreement. Gathered below are recent images from the growing crisis in the Gaza Strip.
Parachutes carry humanitarian-aid packages to the ground after being dropped from a plane, as Palestinians wait to receive them in Gaza City on March 9, 2024.
A view of makeshift tents set up by Palestinians that migrated to the south of the Gaza Strip in search of safety, in Rafah, on February 24, 2024.
Palestinian children collect wood, paper and cardboard to use as fuel, scavenging through the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli attacks, in Gaza City, on March 5, 2024.
Palestinian children who have taken refuge in Rafah due to Israeli attacks carry food distributed by charitable organizations, in Rafah, Gaza, on February 19, 2024.
Children wait for hours in distribution lines to gather enough water and food for their families, in Rafah, on February 25, 2024.
New Thinking • Mar 15, 2024 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1988. It will remain public for only one week. We all limit ourselves by attachment to old attitudes and outworn ideas. James Fadiman, PhD, author of Be All That You Are and many other books, offers several techniques to help us recognize and discard such attitudes and set goals for the changes we desire. A distinguished humanistic psychologist, Dr. Fadiman is past-president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.
gustav f. • Jun 18, 2023 Contents: 0:00 – Video Introduction 8:40 – Lecture Introduction 13:50 – Physical Nature of TMS 42:35 – Who gets TMS? 1:10:03 – The Psychology of TMS 1:36:52 – The Treatment of TMS 2:09:49 – Video Conclusion This is a lecture that, for a time, Sarno routinely gave to people experiencing The Mindbody Syndrome (TMS). While this video may be of use to anyone experiencing TMS, I have uploaded this in connection to my own video, A Mindbody Approach to (Protracted) Withdrawal Syndrome. There, I proposed that “withdrawal syndrome” is a form of TMS, with the same psychological basis and therefore a similar “treatment.” I hope this video may be of use to you.
MAD = refers to reckless, crazy, uncontrolled fury or anger. Mad can also refer to a demented state of being “out of one’s mind”.
QUESTION: What makes you mad?
STORY: When I am mad – I mean really mad – I am not capable of reasoning or thinking in a clear or sensible way. I’m sure you know what I mean. You’ve felt mad – right?. Every single human being has, at one time or another, kinda flipped out with feeling “mad as hell”. I felt mad when I drew this little imaginative drawing. Thankfully, drawing this picture – kinda drew the madness out of me. In this moment I was able to pay attention, to relax, to listen, to be present. “Know Thyself” is an ancient and essential practice that I have engaged for some time now to help me take a PAUSE when fear and anger blow up inside me. Then I am able to allow LOVE to guide me. If you might be interested in “Knowing Thyself” – I recommend two books by Red Hawk: Self Observation and Self Remembering.
QUOTES
“Inappropriate emotion can become a trigger to help me refocus attention on keeping the body relaxed – so the emotion does not capture and consume my attention.” ~ Red Hawk
“Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” ~ Aristotle
“When angry, count to ten before you speak. If you are very angry, count to one hundred.” Thomas Jefferson
EXERCISE
STOP.
Sit quietly. Assume an erect posture. Sense the breath.
Sit calmly and observe your emotional feelings right now.
Relax and listen to your body.
Honor an emotional feeling – by drawing it out.
Get your pen and paper and write words or draw lines expressing your feelings. If an emotion feels volcanic – allow yourself to erupt on the paper.
Then when ready, move forward into your day guided by LOVE.
…If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the Old and New Testament.
― Hermann Hesse
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Recognizing the empty, nonexistent, insubstantial nature of the ego is meditation on absolute bodhicitta.
~Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
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… The ego must constantly create enemies, because it must continue to perpetuate the belief in separation because that is how it stays alive in your mind. It must make an enemy out of life, out of others, and even yourself — in short, it must continue to generate illusions and continue to attack those illusions– but, [as ACIM teaches]: ‘Nothing real can be threatened; nothing unreal exists.’ THIS is the foundation upon which peace is built.
When there’s nothing to condemn, and no one to forgive, you are free. This is why ACIM states that only loving thoughts are true and everything else is a cry for help.
Can anyone really be justified in condemning someone’s plea for help? …But YOU who know the Truth have the opportunity to give them love and to see no error in them, and in doing so, you are acknowledging God in them and reminding them of the Truth that they have forgotten: That fear is an illusion, that love alone is real…
— Aaron Abke
Our civilization enshrines ego values that destroy the world. Some of us are trying to find a deeper, more substantial value to base our lives on, and we are confronted with a forest of illusions that confuse the issue. Our attempts at revising our vision of what is real and what isn’t is difficult because we’ve been trained to accept ego values as bedrock truth and regard its tragedies as unfortunate but inevitable.
Traditions that question our habits of mind that give value to unreal things like ego and ignore the fundamental reality of “bodhicitta,” seem exotic and fanciful. (Does English have a word for that quality of mind?)
Do we in the West know that we need an “awakening mind,” one dedicated to the liberation of all beings? Our concept of reality envisions us all as separate beings with separate agendas in how to deal with the given social and physical challenges we’re confronted with. The mystery and beauty of the whole, of which we are each a building block, is reduced to big or little practical tests. We’ve been seduced by ego illusions.
There’s no better way to lose your way and your soul in the bargain. We are meant to be co-builders of the World Soul, and our insistence on anything that perpetuates ego concerns creates a planet in distress. We wander into a small life that amounts to a cry for help, but very little help comes because we’re all lost. It’s the blind leading the blind.
The Flowering Heart, Sarah Jarrett
We are a civilization crying for help, in spite of our heroic wars and domination of nature. We suffer from an excess of unreality.
We need more wonder and more questioning, and less self justification, and we instinctively know it. As a remedy, we attach ourselves to some guru or authority who is probably hiding their own self interest, their own “shadow,” and we stay lost. It’s amazing how messy life gets when we don’t know ourselves.
If we base our lives on separate self interest we make our lives a constant battle against enemies who want to destroy us. We wander into a swamp of monsters, most of them imaginary. If we do recognize the essential unreality of the ego we may start to get a glimpse of the unreality of our civilization. Beauty, mystery and God may be identical.
Reed J. Williams and Lindsay Morris | TEDWomen 2023
• October 2023
After bringing her son to a summer camp for gender-nonconforming children, photographer Lindsay Morris launched a project to share the campers’ stories with the world. One of them, Reed J. Williams, is now a powerful advocate for transgender youth. Together, Morris and Williams reveal two sides to the LGBTQ+ experience — one as a mother, one as a trans woman — and offer insight into the power of community.
The Lord of Works indicates concentrated effort applied with great determination and diligence to a situation requiring your whole attention.This is a card that often comes up to mark the achievement of goals in your working area, and teaches attainment through effort. It advises you to keep the pressure up so that you maintain momentum, and to pay attention to detail.It will sometimes appear in a reading to reveal a period where you concentrate all your thoughts and aspirations on one target, and then channel all your energies into that project, to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes people do this in order to avoid facing emotional pain and distress. It’s worth looking for evidence of this when the Three of Disks comes up. Whilst it can be useful in the short-term to achieve something when you feel hurt, it can often be very damaging if you continue to hide from your own feelings.The Lord of Works indicates high levels of professional ambition, and promises the drive and confidence to achieve these. There’s a good deal of dynamic energy attached to the card, and this is usually well-harnessed and put to good use.Take the Three of Disks as a largely positive card, which shows that hard work and concentration can eventually gain you your highest objectives. But it’s important to remember that you need to be fully focused on the project in hand, allowing nothing to get in the way.
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract.” The first step is an ontological statement of being beginning with the syllogism: “Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all there is.” The second step is the sense testimony (what the senses tell us about anything). The third step is the argument between the absolute abstract nature of truth from the first step and the relative specific truth of experience from the second step. The fourth step is filtering out the conclusions you have arrived at in the third step. The fifth step is your overall conclusion.
The claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, but they are always (or should always) be based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all that is. Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore complete, therefore sole, therefore one, therefore united, therefore harmonious. I think therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore I am Truth. Since I, being, am Truth therefore I, being, have all the attributes of Truth. Therefore I, being, am total, whole, complete, sole, one, united, harmonious. Since I, being, am Truth and since I am mind/consciousness, therefore Truth is Mind/Consciousness.
2) Dissociation causes emotional and psychosomatic pain.
Word-tracking: dissociation: unconnected, distinct, separate, antisocial, disjoined cause: make happen, make occur, make bee motion: to move, to feel, to touch, to contact, to sense, empathy psychosomatic; including both mind and body somaticize: to make an emotion physical. pain: payment, debt
3) Truth being one cannot at the same time be many, therefore Truth is one Body. Since Truth is one body, that which is dissociated, unconnected, distinct, separate, antisocial, disjoined is not Truth. Therefore Truth is total integration of all that is. Truth being being total integration of all that is and Truth being Consciousness, therefore Truth is indistinguishable Consciousness. Since Truth is all that is, therefore Truth is all that happens, all that occurs, So there can be no cause other than Truth. Therefore Truth is the only cause. Cause being that which moves (or emotion), therefore Truth is the only emotion. Truth being the only body and the only emotion, therefore the entire body of Truth is infused with the emotion of Truth. Truth being whole cannot at the same time be insolvent, therefore Truth is all-paying.
4) Truth is one Body. Truth is total integration of all that is. Truth is indistinguishable Consciousness. Truth is the only cause. Truth is the only emotion. The entire body of Truth is infused with the emotion of Truth. Truth is all-paying.
5) The body of Truth/Consciousness is infused with the credit-worthy emotion of Truth.
Palestinian children wait to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen amid shortages of food supplies. (photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
