Fractal Enlightenment

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3 Ways to De-colonize the Human Condition

dec3 “It would be a mistake to think this culture clear-cuts only forests, it clear-cuts our psyches as well. It would be a mistake to think it dams only rivers. We ourselves are dammed (and damned) by it as well. It would be a mistake to think it creates dead zones only in the ocean. It creates dead zones in our hearts and minds. It would be a mistake to think it fragments only our habitat. We too are fragmented, split off, shredded, rent, torn.” ~ Derrick Jensen

Colonialism, expansionism, imperialism, call it what you will. It has systematically destroyed both our psychological and ecological environments. It is a heartless man-machine hell-bent on conquering, consuming, controlling and repeating, ad infinitum. Like Frantz Fanon said, “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence.”

And in its naked violence it leaves paths of mass destruction that transform healthy environments into burnt-out husks. Unhealthy and unsustainable, colonialism is an engine with outdated machinery and parochial, dyed-in-the-wool equipment. It rampages over environments like a mindless, hyper-violent backhoe; close-minded and dogged in its obsolete dog-eat-dog worldview.

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Be Yourself: Let Go of the Guilt

“The only permission, the only validation, and the only opinions that matters in our quest for greatness is our own.” ~ Dr Steve Maraboli

There is nothing more tragic than a person that feels they need to wait for permission to be happy, live their life or be their most authentic self. When our minds are plagued by fear, guilt or unworthiness we begin to believe that we don’t deserve to be truly happy until the other people in our lives are as well.

Or perhaps we do the opposite. We feel as though we have no right to be angry, sad, depressed or unhappy because we still see so many in the world that have so little compared to us. Either way, when we feel guilty about being our most authentic self and start operating from the notion that we need to wait for the world outside of us to give us the green light to start feeling however we feel, we are wasting precious time.

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5 Sacred Herbs for Cleansing the Spirit

smudging herbsSmudging or the burning of sacred herbs is a common practice in many healing ceremonies and shamanic traditions. Its a way of purifying and cleansing a space, person or an object of negative energies or influences. Burning certain herbs gives access to the power of the plants and the fragrance releases a high vibrational energy which protects the physical and spiritual bodies.

Sage is the most commonly used herb in ceremonies. Some of the other herbs used are – Copal, palo santo, sweetgrass, cedar, tobacco. The herbs used for smudging are tied into a bundle and allowed to dry to make a “smudge stick”. In traditional societies the herbs used for smudging are considered sacred and the smudge stick is treated with great respect. Smudge stick is fanned around the person’s body several times with the intent to cleanse the energy fields.

Let’s look into the five common sacred herbs used for purification and removing negative energies-

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The Great Rewilding: Three Ways to Rewild Humanity

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” ~ Aldo Leopold

The Great Rewilding is an awakening to the realization that we live in a fundamentally unhealthy, unsustainable culture where rampant nature deprivation has exacerbated psychological neurosis and the balance between nature and the human soul has been lost.

It’s a return to living courage-based lifestyles that are in accordance with nature, as opposed to fear-based lifestyles that are at odds with it. In conservation biology the term “rewilding” is the rehabilitation process of captive animals. In the case of the Great Rewilding, the captive animal being rehabilitated just happens to be human. Here are three ways to get the ball rolling toward such a rehabilitation.

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Brain Wars: Six Cognitive Biases and How to Combat Them

cognitive gears “Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.” ~ Anthony de Mello

Nobody is immune to cognitive biases, not even trained psychologists and logicians who thoroughly understand them. We can become more aware of them, but we will never be immune to them. And that’s okay. We don’t need to be impervious in order to be more open-minded. We just need to be more understanding, more intelligent, and more imaginative in our approach, especially toward beliefs that have not previously been questioned.

Like Robert Anton Wilson cryptically said, “I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination.” Indeed, we generally only need to turn the tables on belief in order to combat most cognitive biases. But if that’s not enough for you, here are six particularly prevalent cognitive biases and how to combat them.

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How to Start Eating Mindfully

“Whenever we eat or drink, we can engage all our senses in the eating and drinking experience. Eating and drinking like this, we not only feed our bodies and safeguard our physical health but also nurture our feelings, our mind, and our consciousness.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Imagine this: you are about to eat your favorite dish – pasta in spinach sauce for me – and you take the first bite. Now try doing this – after the first bite, place the fork back down and begin to savor the different flavors in the pasta. Chew slowly, don’t talk and tune in to the flavor of the spinach, for example, the aroma of the different herbs present in your pasta.

Repeat this for the course of the meal and you will experience a deeper connection with your body and the food you eat. This practice is known as ‘Mindful Eating,’ a concept with its roots in Buddhist teachings, helps us become conscious of what you consume and when to consume and not just eating mindlessly to beat stress.

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Non-Duality and Presence: Guidelines for Increasing Awareness

“The gap is your connection to the field of pure potentiality. It is that state of pure awareness, that silent space between thoughts, that inner stillness that connects you to (your) true power.” ~ Deepak Chopra

Give Up. Let Go. Repent. Stop fighting. Just Be.

There are many teachings; religious or otherwise that we may have some connection with in our lives for the simple reason that – at some time or another – we have had a charged experience in relation to that set of teachings. In relation to them, we have had an ‘aha!’ moment where our perception finally melted and we experienced true being.

Sogyal Rinpoche calls it the true nature of mind, Eckhart Tolle the ‘Now’. In a new teaching (to me anyway) the notion of non-duality can help us, in a few simple steps, to remember that perfection is an illusion, and that we are simply ‘reality’ experiencing or exploring itself.

As Eckhart Tolle says in his short autobiography in the Power of Now, the first trickles or gaps in his perception, were when he thought a thought along the lines of, ‘I just can’t live with myself any longer.’ The idea that there is a separate ‘I’ to ‘my-self’ brings about the realization that we live within this world of separation, and that actually, we are not separate from our experience at all.

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5 Ways to Know if the Mind is Your Master or Slave

“Nothing in the world can bother you as much as your own mind, I tell you. In fact, others seem to be bothering you, but it is not others, it is your own mind.” ~ Sri Ravi Shankar

wandering_mindOur minds are probably the most powerful tool that we could ever own. In fact, our entire life is dependent upon our thoughts about it. Whether or not we have a good life, a mediocre life, or a terrible life is not so much contingent on the actual circumstances of our lives, but in our thoughts pertaining to the circumstances.

For example, two people can be watching the exact same movie, one person can focus on the bad acting of one of the characters and let that ruin the entire movie for them, while the other one is focused on the amazing music soundtrack and appreciates the costumes and set design. Both people experienced the exact same movie but only one enjoyed themselves. Such is our lives. And yes, it is true that no two people will have the same experience about the movie, but the principal still works the same.

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How Dehydration Affects your Body

importance of water

Water is a basic necessity in order to maintain a healthy body and a clear mind. Since the human body is two third water, hydration affects almost all functions of the body – temperature control, cognitive functions, kidney function, physical performance, energy levels, gastrointestinal function, heart function, headache, skin and other chronic diseases.

If we were to ask you, whether you are hydrated right now or not, most of you would not know the correct answer to that. The general tendency to connect physiological thirst with water, is what makes us miscalculate the hydration levels. But to say how much water one should drink is a difficult thing, as it is a subjective measurement depending upon one’s lifestyle, physical activity level and energy expenditure.

Significance of water in our system

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Breathtaking Satellite Photos of Fractal Patterns on Earth

Fractals occur naturally in every scale of life from the inconceivably large to the microscopic, and as I have always said, one needs to observe their surroundings and marvel at this amazing natural phenomena. Paul Bourke, a computer scientist at the University of Western Australia, started documented intriguing fractal patterns spread across the world, using Google Earth.

Bourke looked at the different landscapes and areas across the globe – from mountain ranges, rivers, forests, sand dunes to wetlands – and when zoomed out, these landscapes formed replicating fractal patterns. For example, if you look at a leaf, the veins bifurcate into even finer veins and they subdivide once again into even finer veins and this entire surface of the leaf resembles fractal characteristics.

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