M.J. Rose

I often post here interesting articles I find via the FREE WILL ASTROLOGY newsletter. Adaptations of chapters from Rob’s book are posted in the weekly newsletter, and I have yet to post one of those segments here. So, it’s about time I do! (And the one below is particularly appropriate for our purposes here.) Generally, I think the concept of PRONOIA is one we ought to all become familiar with. Thanks to Rob B. for the constant inspiration:

The following piece is adapted from the book

PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings

The book is available for sale here.

Let me remind you who you really are: You are one of the chosen ones. You’re a luminous being. A primordial miracle. A resplendent avatar. You are a deity in disguise–not a Buddha or a Christ, but of the same lineage and made from the same mojo.

I want to be sure you get what I’m saying. You’re an immortal messiah. You have been around since the beginning of time and will be here after the end. Every day and in every way, you’re getting better at playing the mysterious master game we all dreamed up together before the Big Bang bloomed.

Let me put it another way. You’re a rebel creator longing to make the whole universe your home and sanctuary. You are a dissident bodhisattva joyfully struggling to germinate the seeds of divine love that are packed inside every moment.

It’s time to remember. You are a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs that has temporarily taken on the form of a human being, agreeing to endure amnesia about your true origins. And why did you do that? Because it was the best way to forge the exquisitely unique and robust identity that would make you such an elemental force in our 14-billion-year campaign to bring heaven all the way down to earth.

You and I are freedom fighters scrambling and finagling and conspiring to relieve all of our fellow messiahs from their suffering and shower them with more blessings than they know what to do with.

*

Lately, I must admit, our work has seemed almost comically impossible. Many of our brothers and sisters believe that everything is upside-down and inside-out. Is war really peace? Is slavery really freedom? Is ignorance strength? How did it all get so insane?

Even many of the smartest among us seem to have lost their vision. Cynicism has become a supreme sign of intelligence. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are popular.

At this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it ain’t easy to carry out our mission. We’ve got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life. We’ve got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of deceivers.

We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the cockeyed mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy.

That’s especially thorny because of the fact that a genocide of the imagination is raging world-wide. It threatens to render our imaginations numb and inert and passive and tame.

I know you know what I mean…

(for the rest, click here.)

Meditate on This: You Can Learn to Be More Compassionate

A new study shows that meditation opens the gateway to compassion

(Scientific American)

By David Biello

Like athletes or musicians, people who practice meditation can enhance their ability to concentrate—or even lower their blood pressure. They can also cultivate compassion, according to a new study. Specifically, concentrating on the loving kindness one feels toward one’s family (and expanding that to include strangers) physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy.

“There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence,” says Antoine Lutz, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the study. “That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion.”

Lutz and his colleagues, including neuroscientist Richard Davidson, director of the university’s Waisman Center for Brain Imaging where the study was conducted, took fMRI scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators as well as 16 others who had started with no meditation experience but received cursory training before they carried out a series of tests. During these tests, the researchers measured the flow of blood in the brains of both the veterans (some of them Tibetan monks) and the American novices as the subjects did or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while being subjected to various sounds with positive and negative connotations.

When engaged in compassionate meditation, the brain region known as the insula burst into action when the expert meditators heard the sound of a woman in distress. (The insula—a part of the limbic system—has been associated with the visceral feeling of emotion, a key part of empathizing with another’s emotional state.)

And when these experts heard the female screams or the sound of a baby laughing, their brains showed more activity than the novices in areas like the right temporal-parietal juncture, which plays a role in understanding another’s emotion…

Click here for the rest of this article.

Here is some absolutely ridiculous news from England! What will we humans think of next? I know, how about we impose a rating system on dreams?

Uncertain future for spiritualists

By Grant Woodward

FOR centuries spiritualists have asked that spine-tingling question, ‘Is there anybody there?’.

But soon they could be enquiring, ‘Is there anybody there… who is vulnerable, a sceptic, or likely to sue?’.

New consumer laws mean psychics will have to add disclaimers before they attempt to make contact with ‘the other side’.

Plans to repeal the Fraudulent Mediums Act next month and replace it with the new Consumer Protection Regulations have got the industry in a bit of a tizz.

Promises to raise the dead, secure good fortune or heal through the laying of hands are all at risk of legal action from unhappy punters.

Mediums say they will now be forced to add riders before they begin communicating with the spirit world.

One way round the new legislation could be to issue a disclaimer proclaiming it to be ‘a scientific experiment, the results of which cannot be guaranteed’…

For the rest of this article, click here.