To quote Mike Zonta, H.W., M., “Translation is ‘magical thinking’ based on self-evident axioms and syllogistic reasoning (which is so say that Translation is not magical thinking at all).” And to quote Heather Williams, H.W., M., “Translation is the creative process of re-engineering the outdated software of your mind.” Translation is a 5-step process using words and their meanings and histories to transform the testimony of the senses and uncover the underlying timeless reality of the Universe.
Sense testimony:
Internalized algorithms can limit our access to Universal Mind.
Conclusions:
I/Truth am internalized Oneness, excluding nothing, limitless consciousness, all-accounted for, all reckoned for, all settled, the sole intent, the sole Intender.
Truth is All One, Infinite Universal, Mind Being — which I AM knowing as Consciousness is my own only SELF — ubiquitously expressing the unlimited instrumental intelligence that regulates/rules by perfect principle the entire harmonious whole.
Pure Universal Well Being Truth is self Evident Powerful Knowing Presence Ruling Integrity, harmony beauty everywhere instantaneously besides which there is none else.
Truths’ Essence is isomorphically knowing, known is its’ own autistically intimate androgynous polarity that oriri relationship secured, integrated surety precisely accurate perfectionally pleasing its’ own virtuous Kingdom of Heavenly delights
<3.
To come.
[The Sunday Night Translation Group meets at 7pm Pacific time via Skype. There is also a Sunday morning Translation group which meets at 7am Pacific time via GoToMeeting.com. See Upcoming Events on the BB to join, or start a group of your own.]
Someone once asked theBuddha,skeptically, ” What have you gained from meditation?” “Nothing at all,” replied the Buddha. “Rather, let me tell you what I have lost through meditation: sickness of soul, anger, depression, insecurity, the fear and burden of old age, the terror of death. That is the good of meditation which leads to Nirvana.”
–from Eknath Easwaran
Eknath Easwaran teaching what is thought to be the first credit course on meditation offered at a major university in the U.S. at U.C. Berkeley in 1968.
We’re accustomed to deepening our personal growth journeys during our “waking hours”…
Yet, what if your dreamtime could become a type of night school — a spiritual laboratory where you could raise your consciousness, heal from your past, and even practice learning new skills?
Lucid dreaming is being “awake” and aware that you’re dreaming when you’re asleep… a time where your conscious mind meets your unconscious mind.
Lucid dreaming also leads to lucid living. As you become more conscious during your nighttime, you begin to shift your awareness during your waking life.
Through a centuries-old Tibetan Buddhism form of lucid dreaming, you can move beyond passively participating in your dreams, into deeper states of active transformation.
This powerful, ancient practice, Dream Yoga, is the next level of lucid dreaming, according to author, Dream Yoga expert, and spiritual teacher Andrew Holecek.
Dream Yoga stretches you, turning your nighttime into a time for your most dedicated spiritual practice…
Practicing Dream Yoga opens the door to deep healing allowing you to work directly with your Soul to receive the exact knowledge you need — and in every area of your life from your health to relationships, even your work in the world.
During this rich 8-minute video, Andrew unpacks Dream Yoga and how a nocturnal spiritual practice can help you heal your body, release limiting beliefs and patterns, liberate your creativity, and more.
Don’t miss these highlights from Andrew’s teaching during this powerful 8-minute video:
(0:12) — The difference between lucid dreaming and Dream Yoga
(2:00) — Your mind is a spiritual laboratory while you’re asleep
(2:23) — 9 stages of consciousness in Dream Yoga
(3:04) — The benefits of Dream Yoga in your waking life
(5:21) — Using Dream Yoga to transform negative emotions into positive ones
(7:00) — Resolving lifelong conflicts with loved ones who have died
(7:52) — Discover the waking, mind-body connection in Dream Yoga
Plus, Andrew shares the #1 (simple!) Dream Yoga practice with you…
Dream Yoga allows you to greatly expand your awareness and possibilities for positive change –– which can result in greater fulfilment, happiness, and even better health.
The new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities.
is professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She’s also director of the Mental Health Patient Care Center at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in New York City.
TRANSCRIPT
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Rachel Yehuda: We’re just starting to understand that just because you’re born with a certain set of genes, you’re not in a biologic prison as a result of those genes — that changes can be made to how those genes function, that can help. The idea is a very simple idea, and you hear it from people all the time. People say, when something cataclysmic happens to them, “I’m not the same person. I’ve been changed. I am not the same person that I was.” And epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking that.
Krista Tippett, host: Genetics describes DNA sequencing, but the new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently, through changes in environment and behavior. And Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She’s studied the children of Holocaust survivors and the children of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas, large and small, that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities.
I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Ms. Tippett: Rachel Yehuda is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She grew up in a neighborhood in Cleveland that was heavily populated with Holocaust survivors, a fact she didn’t register so much as a child, but which later became pivotal to the discoveries she has helped make. I spoke with her in 2015.
Ms. Tippett: The way I start all of my conversations, whoever I’m talking to, is just wondering about how you would describe — how you would start to describe the religious or spiritual background of your childhood — however you would describe that now.
Dr. Yehuda: I had a very strong spiritual background. I was raised in an observant Jewish community. I went to a Jewish day school. My father was a rabbi. So there was a lot of Jewish study and Jewish culture and Jewish religion in our home and, also, at school. So I was surrounded by — actually, immersed in the bubble of observant Judaism.
Ms. Tippett: Right. So you told me that you were the first graduating class where you were given the option of getting — was this your Ph.D.?
Dr. Yehuda: This was my Ph.D.
Ms. Tippett: Ph.D. in psychology or neuroscience — that this young field was really just coming into its own. And so I just — I wonder how you would start to tell the story of — in your lifetime, the emergence of — the difference between what you thought you were going into when you, I guess, decided, maybe — what was it? — that you wanted to study psychiatry, and how you’ve watched that develop; what’s been fascinating to you to be part of, about that.
Dr. Yehuda: Well, it was fascinating from the very beginning. My work in graduate school was focused on stress hormones, and there was a great deal of interest in understanding the biologic response to stress. And then, in the ’70s…
Ms. Tippett: Was this around the time that “stress” was becoming this word that was in the culture?
Dr. Yehuda: Yeah, I think “stress” as a word was in the culture, really, in the ’40s and ’50s, also, but it wasn’t until around that time that there was a biology associated with stress. And people were very interested in it, and they were very interested in this idea that something that happens to you generates a biologic response. And people knew a lot about stress hormones from the adrenals, but what started happening in the ’70s and the ’80s was a recognition that there were stress hormone receptors in the brain.
And what that meant was that the brain wasn’t just barking orders at peripheral tissue like the adrenal gland; there was a dialogue going on. It wasn’t just the brain regulating everything. It was an ability of stress hormones to circle back and influence how the brain functioned. And even in the ’80s, as a graduate student, I was awed by that concept.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that one of the biggest challenges of our time, if not the biggest challenge of our time, is this: We live in a world that has grown ever smaller, both in terms of our internet-fueled scope of awareness and our shared threats — think climate change, nuclear war, infectious diseases. But we are less healthy, less happy, and less safe if we bequeath all of our precious attention to global matters, neglecting the ground beneath our feet.
I would even go so far as to say that we are less deep people if we don’t struggle with the texture of “the local.” It’s where the potential for the most intimate pains and transformational growth lie. It’s where “our people” are — warts, wounds, and all. And yet, if we become myopic in focus, we can let these pains shrink our empathy. We can become territorial, tribal — cut off from the cosmic sweep of environmental, economic, and spiritual crises that we share with 7.6 billion other human beings on the planet.
At this point, that beloved phrase of the 1970s may be surfacing in your brain: “Think global, act local.” Is it really so hard? This is an and/both situation.
Indeed, but what does it actually mean in this moment? What does that deceptively simple phrase tell me about how to wake up in the morning and consume news? I want to be an accountable citizen, and yet, who am I accountable to? And how can I maintain any semblance of well-being if I offer up my conscience to every tragedy that I have access to through the Internet?
What about my other precious resources: my work, my money? Is my energy better spent trying to feed the people in my own city, or are the hungry here quite high on the totem pole of suffering? Peter Singer’s “effective altruism” framework would tell me that it is those who are the most hungry that should get the most resources, regardless of the geography of the giver. The logical part of me gets this, but the me that drives by homeless folks as I take my daughter to school each morning hurts, wonders what lesson I am teaching her with my indifference to proximate suffering.
Which is all to say, I suppose, that one can understand the wisdom of an and/both approach to this terrible, beautiful world, but the limitations of our time, energy, and money are real. If I think about my grandparents’ lives, my parents’ lives, and mine, I can see how each generation has psychically expanded — growing more globally aware, more globally convicted — but also, how each generation has grown more confused about the contours of local thriving. It’s as if at the very heart of this conundrum is the sense that we are both everybody and nobody — these intellectual and cultural consumers at the broadest levels who struggle mightily to put our hands in the right dirt next to the right neighbors.
I can’t tell you how many people of a wide variety of ages, whom I know right now, are deliberating about where to live with a tremendous amount of angst. Stay near my birthplace, my family, or spread my wings and accept that my professional success and my own story play out somewhere else? Move to be near my children and grandchildren, giving up a home, a community, a landscape I’ve always known, or live out the last of my days among that which I’ve invested in longest? These are not just questions of personal happiness; to my mind, they are questions of 21st–century meaning-making.
We are, each of us in different ways and with different dressing, asking: Who am I? What am I for? Who am I for? In what place(s)?
At the Obama Foundation Summit last week, Anand Giridharadas touched on this in his riveting opening talk, the full text of which you should definitely read if this conundrum feels alive for you, too. He writes:
“Many change makers no longer ask what they owe a community, but where they can find the highest marginal impact. I wonder if the values of optimization and effectiveness have caused some change-makers to forget the value of loyalty.”
Loyalty, says psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is a red-state virtue. Perhaps. But I also think it’s a value that is being remade for absolutely everyone by the technological advancements and environmental threats we face. At its worst, it can feel like a cruel new math of care. I am exposed to the suffering of many, but can only attend to a few. The gap weighs heavy and unresolved on my relatively small, human heart. It also makes me feel the catastrophic vulnerability of anonymity. When the apocalypse comes, who will hold my hand?
At its best, it feels like a spiritual crisis of such depth and breadth that it might just remake us.
“Let’s not be chickenshit about this. Break the rules — not the law, but the rules. … This is the final exam for democracy.”
–Robert Upshur “Bob” Woodward (born March 26, 1943) is an American investigative journalist and non-fiction author. He has worked for The Washington Post since 1971 as a reporter and is now an associate editor there. Wikipedia
Perhaps the real challenge in AI (artificial intelligence) is not consciousness but is sexuality. Just as we cannot separate ourselves from our consciousness (indeed it is the essence of who we are), we cannot separate ourselves from our sexuality either. So even if AI creators could eventually come up with an AI which is self-consciously aware of itself, what will that mean without some sort of sexuality.
As we teach in Prosperos classes, sexuality is just another form of creativity. So without sexuality, without creativity, what good would it be to be self-consciously aware of oneself?
Not much, I think. Other than being a very nice computer.
On the other hand, if they do come up with sexual, self-aware robots, that is, as Eugene Struthers might say, taking it to a “whole ‘nother level.”
Maybe She’s Not Such A Heinous Bitch After All
Starring Rachel Bloom
Written by Rachel Bloom, Adam Schlesinger, Jack Dolgen
REBECCA:
I USED TO THINK MY MOTHER WAS THE WORST
THAT IF SHE DIDN’T KILL ME I’D KILL HER FIRST
BUT NOW BIRDS ARE SINGING
THE FLOWERS ARE PINK
YES, SPRING IS HERE
‘CAUSE I’M STARTING TO THINK THAT
MAYBE SHE’S NOT SUCH A HEINOUS BITCH AFTER ALL.
BACKUP SINGERS:
MAYBE MAYBE
MAYBE MAYBE BABY BABY
REBECCA:
MAYBE SHE’S NOT SUCH A HEINOUS BITCH AFTER ALL.
BACKUP SINGERS:
MAYBE MAYBE
SHE’S NICER TO HER BABY
REBECCA:
I DON’T WANT TO BASH HER HEAD IN WITH THIS CUP
IT MAY SOUND HARSH
BUT THAT’S A HUGE STEP UP.
MAYBE SHE’S NOT SUCH A HEINOUS BITCH AFTER ALL.
I STILL HATE HER
DON’T GET ME WRONG.
BACKUP SINGERS:
REALLY HATE HER
GENUINELY HATE HER
REBECCA:
BUT IT’S MORE LIKE THE WAY
NORMAL GIRLS HATE THEIR MOMS.
BACKUP SINGERS:
EVERY DAUGHTER KINDA HATES THEIR MOM
REBECCA:
ALL I EVER PRAYED FOR
EVERY DAY
WAS TO RESENT MY MOTHER
IN A REGULAR WAY.
MAYBE SHE’S NOT SUCH A HEINOUS BITCH AFTER ALL!
BACKUP SINGERS:
SIT BESIDE HER
SO WEIRD YOU LIVED INSIDE HER
REBECCA:
MAYBE OLD AGE HAS TAMED THIS WITCH AND MADE HER A DOLL.
BACKUP SINGERS:
BUT LIKE ONE OF THOSE
EVIL HAUNTED DOLLS
REBECCA:
SHE’S BEING SO NICE
IT FILLS MY SOUL.
FOR ONCE I DON’T WANT HER TO HAVE A CANCEROUS MOLE.
BACKUP SINGERS:
DARK!
REBECCA:
MAYBE SHE’S NOT SUCH A HEINOUS BITCH AFTER ALL.
I KNOW IT SOUNDS LIKE
I’M FALLING IN LOVE.
BACKUP SINGERS:
IN LOVE
REBECCA:
WELL WHEN WE’RE FINDING A MATE
IT’S OUR PARENTS WE’RE THINKING OF.
BACKUP SINGERS:
THINKING OF
REBECCA:
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH HER WAS MY FIRST FAILED ROMANCE
NOW FINALLY THE CUTE BOY’S ASKING ME TO DANCE
MAYBE SHE’S NOT SUCH A HEINOUS BITCH AFTER ALL
BACKUP SINGERS:
SAY YES
IT’S TIME TO ACQUIESCE
REBECCA:
MAYBE SHE’S NOT SUCH A HEINOUS BITCH AFTER ALL
BACKUP SINGERS:
SINCE YOU WERE BORN
SHE’S NEVER MADE YOU POPCORN
REBECCA:
MAYBE SHE’S NOT SUCH A HEINOUS BITCH AFTER ALL…
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Rachel Yehuda: We’re just starting to understand that just because you’re born with a certain set of genes, you’re not in a biologic prison as a result of those genes — that changes can be made to how those genes function, that can help. The idea is a very simple idea, and you hear it from people all the time. People say, when something cataclysmic happens to them, “I’m not the same person. I’ve been changed. I am not the same person that I was.” And epigenetics gives us the language and the science to be able to start unpacking that.
Krista Tippett, host: Genetics describes DNA sequencing, but the new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently, through changes in environment and behavior. And Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She’s studied the children of Holocaust survivors and the children of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas, large and small, that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities.
I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Ms. Tippett: Rachel Yehuda is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She grew up in a neighborhood in Cleveland that was heavily populated with Holocaust survivors, a fact she didn’t register so much as a child, but which later became pivotal to the discoveries she has helped make. I spoke with her in 2015.
Ms. Tippett: The way I start all of my conversations, whoever I’m talking to, is just wondering about how you would describe — how you would start to describe the religious or spiritual background of your childhood — however you would describe that now.
Dr. Yehuda: I had a very strong spiritual background. I was raised in an observant Jewish community. I went to a Jewish day school. My father was a rabbi. So there was a lot of Jewish study and Jewish culture and Jewish religion in our home and, also, at school. So I was surrounded by — actually, immersed in the bubble of observant Judaism.
Ms. Tippett: Right. So you told me that you were the first graduating class where you were given the option of getting — was this your Ph.D.?
Dr. Yehuda: This was my Ph.D.
Ms. Tippett: Ph.D. in psychology or neuroscience — that this young field was really just coming into its own. And so I just — I wonder how you would start to tell the story of — in your lifetime, the emergence of — the difference between what you thought you were going into when you, I guess, decided, maybe — what was it? — that you wanted to study psychiatry, and how you’ve watched that develop; what’s been fascinating to you to be part of, about that.
Dr. Yehuda: Well, it was fascinating from the very beginning. My work in graduate school was focused on stress hormones, and there was a great deal of interest in understanding the biologic response to stress. And then, in the ’70s…
Ms. Tippett: Was this around the time that “stress” was becoming this word that was in the culture?
Dr. Yehuda: Yeah, I think “stress” as a word was in the culture, really, in the ’40s and ’50s, also, but it wasn’t until around that time that there was a biology associated with stress. And people were very interested in it, and they were very interested in this idea that something that happens to you generates a biologic response. And people knew a lot about stress hormones from the adrenals, but what started happening in the ’70s and the ’80s was a recognition that there were stress hormone receptors in the brain.
And what that meant was that the brain wasn’t just barking orders at peripheral tissue like the adrenal gland; there was a dialogue going on. It wasn’t just the brain regulating everything. It was an ability of stress hormones to circle back and influence how the brain functioned. And even in the ’80s, as a graduate student, I was awed by that concept.
Continue reading How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations →