11/30/2010

Soul Group Journal - November 30, 2010


Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!

Dr. Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of experiments that will soon be published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Bem tested the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to "see into the future" is often referred to as psi phenomena.

"The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results." – from Bem's pre-publication abstract, Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect

Bem did find that certain people demonstrate stronger effects than others. In particular, people high in stimulus seeking - an aspect of extraversion where people respond more favorably to novel stimuli - showed effect sizes nearly twice the size of the average person. This suggests that some people are more sensitive to psi effects than others. - Psychology TodayReality Sandwich



Ben Okri, author

"Beware [be aware] of the stories you read or tell;
subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness,
they are altering your world."
— Ben Okri

"Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love." — Ben Okri

Ben Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Having spent his early childhood in London, he and his family returned to Nigeria in 1968. He later came back to England, embarking on studies at the University of Essex. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Westminster (1997) and the University of Essex (2002), and was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2001.

Since he published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), Okri has risen to an international acclaim, and he is often described as one of Africa's greatest writers. His best known work, The Famished Road, was awarded the 1991 Booker Prize. He has also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and was given a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Okri has been described as a magic realist, although he has shrugged off that tag. His first-hand experiences of civil war in Nigeria are said to have inspired many of his works. He writes about both the mundane and the metaphysical, the individual and the collective, drawing the reader into a world with vivid descriptions.

Ben Okri discusses his approach to writing on YouTube

Books by Ben Okri



Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth, by Eric Herm

A run-in with Roundup herbicide was a transformative episode in farmer Eric Herm’s shift toward sustainable agriculture. A fourth-generation farmer, Herm tells the tale in the book Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth: A Path to Agriculture’s Higher Consciousness (Dream River Press)

Eric Herm grew up on a cotton farm near Ackerly, Texas. He left the farm to pursue other interests, traveling to various places across the world before returning to his roots. Upon arriving back on his family farm, he noticed many changes in not only the landscape but the methods of commercial agriculture that were causing more long-term problems. He began searching for answers to these problems, slowly discovering healthier organic methods which provided the inspiration for his book, Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth.



A large supercell thunderstorm cloud over Montana, July, 2010

Photo by Sean R. Heavey



11/04/2010

Image of a deep space traveler

Image of a deep space traveler. Comet Hartley II - November 4, 2010



NASA's Deep Impact (EPOXI) probe completed its flyby of comet Hartly 2 today, and it is now in the process of beaming back its collected data. This is the first photo available from the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL).

11/01/2010

Decisions and Tests - from Christ Mind Expressions: Book One

Published on Scribd.com - eBook in PDF format

Christ Mind Expressions
The Pierrakos Transmissions
Book One
339 pages
8.5 x 11"



excerpt from: Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 2
1996 Edition
March 25, 1957
Decisions and Tests
(copyrighted material)
Visit: www.pathwork.org



Greetings in the name of God. I bring you God’s blessings.

My dear friends, God’s love penetrates the entire creation. It is a living force, a beam that meets itself in an eternal round, as everything spiritual must move in circular completeness. All creatures are in search of this powerful beam of love, whether consciously or unconsciously. The longing to feel this love drives, pulls, spurs humans and spirits. They will have an understanding of the yearning according to their state of development, will draw conclusions, and follow through with their will and their thoughts. Or they will not interpret these feelings correctly and will allow this driving force to act through them and even lead them into mistakes. Not realizing the real nature of the feelings and the search, the person will look for false goals and false fulfillment. However, those who reach the stage of development where they already understand what these hitherto inexplicable feelings of longing really are have taken a great step. They will also know in what direction to go.

Thus there will be fewer errors and misunderstandings about one’s own soul forces, and their messages will be translated correctly.

The love for God, the longing for God, is the driving force in every human being. Even those who have not yet found God, or who believe that they do not believe in God, harbor these strong currents in their soul. Those who experience a complete turnabout in their spiritual development and recognize God in consciousness enter into a new life. This can happen within one and the same incarnation. Whoever steps through this door will already live in a much lighter world, yet there are many more gates to pass through.

Most people find life on this earth incomprehensible. They cannot recognize its meaning and purpose because they see only through their physical eyes. The contact with their spiritual eyes has not yet been established. Therefore everything seems meaningless -- their sorrows, their trials, their loneliness. But when you understand that this life is one of many learning periods, one link in a long chain, you will at first sense and later comprehend more and more fully the connections. Then your goal will no longer be immediate happiness through the fulfillment of every single wish in this existence. You will instead direct your vision toward the whole. Thus you can bear the deprivations of this life. And thus you can pass the tests and fulfill the conditions necessary to enter a higher state of existence, a permanent happiness that cannot be taken away by any outside force.

Now I would like to talk about the group of people who have passed through the first gates, who have already recognized these fundamental truths. Such people often do not progress as well as they could. After all, how fast each individual will proceed is up to his or her free will. One person may just drift along and have to reincarnate many, many times to overcome or fulfill one thing, experiencing it again and again. Others, who have recognized these basic truths, will act differently and direct their aim toward spiritual progress -- which does not mean withdrawing from earthly problems. On the contrary: for earthly and spiritual problems are very closely connected. An earthly problem is actually the expression of a specific spiritual problem. The difference is only in how the solution of a problem is sought, from what vantage point. Only if you solve the problem on the spiritual level can you find its true earthly solution.

We often see that people know this or that, but they still do not perceive the connecting links within themselves. They still look for God and for knowledge somewhere outside of themselves, for instance through increasing their outer knowledge -- which in itself is good, but not enough.
There must be a continuous balancing. The acquired knowledge must always be applied on a personal level, digested and evaluated within, so that harmony is established. To achieve true progress, you have to grow from both sides. New outer knowledge has to be acquired when the old has been integrated and assimilated within. Knowledge must never remain theoretical. It must be put into practice and take root in your personal life. Thus every person needs to widen his or her knowledge of the true nature of creation and of the spiritual laws. But the outer knowing is only one part, which must not be taken as the whole. Without the other part, the inner assimilation, there can be no harmony in your progress, no real fulfillment, and thus actually no progress.

You have to get acquainted with yourself, attend to yourself, examine yourself, and acquire the discipline to overcome the resistance which is so difficult at the beginning. You have to observe all your notions about yourself which flatter you and with which it is so easy to deceive yourself. Then you have to cast them off or revise them. This work is something special, something different for each one of you, yet most of it is similar, or can even be the same. When we talk about the spiritual progress of the human being we mean something very individual for each one of you. And you, my dear ones, should search yourselves and ask: “What hidden part of me still does not react according to the sole reality, the spiritual laws, even if only on a subtle, inner level? Where do I lack clarity about certain things in myself?”

Such self-examination should go on at all times. Then you will be able to slowly eliminate that which is not yet right within you, so that you become happier. You have to be clear about what obstacles are in you, and to gain clarity you need inner search and also true inner will and effort. For if you lack happiness in any area, you can be sure that the lack is directly connected with a specific inner block. Were your wishes simply granted without your first eliminating the inner obstacles, that could never make you really happy. You could not build lasting happiness; it would have to dissolve. Only when you have established inner harmony, a relationship to God in which His laws are accomplished within you, is your soul mature enough to encompass happiness.

People often wonder about communication with God’s world. “Yes,” they say, “I can quite believe that such communication is possible, but what can it mean to me? What do I need it for?” My answer is that such communication can give you one of the parts necessary for your further development, namely intake from the outside. Furthermore, it gives hints, help, and direction for searching, discovering, and applying the outer knowledge to the inner problems, which is the second necessary part of development. For this, you need constant encouragement, strength, and blessing, apart from very specific, concrete help. Yet even that can be given through spirit communication.

There have always been some exceptional, wise humans to whom others could be guided. In these cases too, just as with a medium, God’s world is directly active. The particular person is then an instrument of God’s world. In one case the influence is through inspiration, in the other it operates directly. But the help from the outside, in whatever way, is an important element without which you cannot grow. You can use the knowledge thus acquired as material, as the building blocks, with which you build your life in your own way.


- oOo -


Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky

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The 19 month dark star cycle

Telescope photo of Venus at dark transit of the sun


Photo of Venus at inferior conjunction  

This is a telescopic photo of the planet Venus taken on October 31st by Henry Mendt of Maracaibo, Venezuela, and found on Spaceweather.com.   

Right now, Venus is passing almost directly between Earth and the sun, an event astronomers call an "inferior conjunction." It happens every 19 months, more or less. The next such inferior conjunction between Earth and Venus will be in the first week of June, 2012, about nineteen months from now. 

Although Venus orbits the sun in 225 days, the earth is also moving in her orbit around the sun. Venus is always playing 'catch-up' with the earth, which is why it takes more than 19 months for Venus to "transit the sun" from an earth-based point of view. It is a *dark transit* because Venus is presenting its nighttime side to earth viewers. A presentation at a 2007 meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences, American Astronomical Society, diagrammed the correlations between this cycle of Venus, sunspot activity, and major disease outbreaks on Earth. You can find that information here 

When the daylight side of Venus faces toward earth, it is second only to  the moon in brightness. Depending upon the location of Venus to the sun  in its bright-side part of the cycle, Venus is known as either the  'evening star' or the 'morning star,' because it is brightest just after  sunset in the early evening, or just before dawn in the morning.  Now,  during its transit of the sun, Venus is a dark star. 
--
Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky