Sunday 29 September 2013

parallel universe and the physics of beauty

"On Andromeda, the mirror-world of human experience, aesthetic laws work like natural laws on earth. This is the physics of beauty. Plants grow there otherwise and flowers bloom in another way, mirroring how the Gaian habitat would look were it seen ecstatically, beheld in the rush of beautiful looking, without identification. On Andromeda everything looks that way, normally.

The parallel world in Andromeda is a close replica of the world inhabited by humanity on earth except that it contains no refuse, no rejected or superfluous elements of any kind. Identification produces the illusion of division, a false perception of inequality in which some factors must always be discarded, discounted, disrespected. On Andromeda no one throws anything away because there is nothing to discard. There is no look that does not praise what it beholds. In that parallel world everyone gets the attention they need because no one gets a special or superfluous dose of attention.

Throughout the entire range of the Becoming the myriad mirror-worlds are co-emergent one pair at a time. The Divine Trinity arises because in each pair the primary counterpart is coupled with a secondary counterpart. Primary counterparts mirror each other, as earth and Andromeda do. The secondary counterpart to earth, dimensionally concealed within the sun, mirrors the coupling of earth and Andromeda. The mirroring is fractal and extrapolating: the entire galaxy of Andromeda mirrors life on Gaia, but not vice versa, because the mirroring is assymmetric.

The Andromedan mirror-world and the earth-world arise together, co-emergently, just as people in a room arise simultaneously with their images beheld in a mirror placed in the room. When they appear in the room so do their images appear in the mirror. When their images appear in the mirror so do they in the room. Twinned worlds are subliminally intermingled the way dream and waking are. Each world lends some of its physical properties to the other. Scientists on earth will be forever baffled by the most elementary properties of the physical world as long they fail to realize that another set of laws intrudes into terrestrial laws. In cosmic co-emergence the beauty of physics intermingles with the operation of physical laws.

An example of co-emergent physics can be seen in the realm of plants and trees. A stalk of wheat would not be able to stand erect were it subject exclusively to terrestrial laws. The grain in the head of the stalk is heavy, and so the grain falls to earth due to terrestrial laws, but the stalk of the growing plant defies gravity. It plunges upward, straight and true. Before it can fall, die and regenerate, the grain must be raised into communion with the entire cosmic environment. The beauty of its self-offering is framed by Andromeda laws. On earth gravity is the primary world-shaping force. On Andromeda, levity is.

It is true that centrifugal force on earth has its counterpart in centripetal force, in gravity, but it would be pure foolishness to presume that centrifugal force -- i.e., fleeing away from the center of mass -- holds the wheat-stalk upright, or allows trees to dance lithely in the air, or causes millions of other plants, grasses and climbing vines to writhe ecstatically toward the heavens. Human ingenuity cannot produce the miracle of the wheat-stalk, the spiralling morning glory vine, or a massive sequoia tree. In terms of engineering these are living design miracles that defy both gravity and mechanical law. Nothing constructed by human skill could be so supple and yet so stable. Constructed on terrestrial principles, the wheat stalk is nevertheless incapable of standing tall and steady due to terrestrial laws alone. It needs the co-emergence of Andromedan physics. The plant-world on earth mirrors the physics of beauty, the aesthetic laws that prevail on Andromeda. Van Gogh’s sunflowers grow there as they appear in his paintings, gelatinously puckered into the translucent plasma of the atmosphere.

Scientists on earth will never work out terrestrial physics unless they recognize that all physical events on the planet arise from the conjuncture of two distinct systems of physical law, Andromedan and terrestrial. It takes two to know one."

John Lamb Lash

earth is living breathing entity

"it appears the planet is a living breathing entity" ~ an astronaut looking back at Earth

http://www.upworthy.com/some-strange-things-are-happening-to-astronauts-returning-to-earth

Saturday 28 September 2013

two sleeps

We are planning to try this, in fact I slept like this for years when I would settle my children and fall asleep with them for maybe three hours or so then get up again and do things before going to bed later.  I liked the head space I was in in these 'in-between' hours, it was calm and creative, though at the time it was just what seemed expedient and felt right for the circumstances.












http://slumberwise.com/science/your-ancestors-didnt-sleep-like-you/

"Ok, maybe your grandparents probably slept like you. And your great, great-grandparents. But once you go back before the 1800s, sleep starts to look a lot different. Your ancestors slept in a way that modern sleepers would find bizarre – they slept twice. And so can you.

The History
The existence of our sleeping twice per night was first uncovered by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.

His research found that we didn’t always sleep in one eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

References are scattered throughout literature, court documents, personal papers, and the ephemera of the past. What is surprising is not that people slept in two sessions, but that the concept was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the standard, accepted way to sleep.

“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.

An English doctor wrote, for example, that the ideal time for study and contemplation was between “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Chaucer tells of a character in the Canterbury Tales that goes to bed following her “firste sleep.” And, explaining the reason why working class conceived more children, a doctor from the 1500s reported that they typically had sex after their first sleep.

Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past is replete with such examples.

But just what did people do with these extra twilight hours? Pretty much what you might expect.

Most stayed in their beds and bedrooms, sometimes reading, and often they would use the time to pray. Religious manuals included special prayers to be said in the mid-sleep hours.

Others might smoke, talk with co-sleepers, or have sex. Some were more active and would leave to visit with neighbours.

As we know, this practice eventually died out. Ekirch attributes the change to the advent of street lighting and eventually electric indoor light, as well as the popularity of coffee houses. Author Craig Koslofsky offers a further theory in his book Evening’s Empire. With the rise of more street lighting, night stopped being the domain of criminals and sub-classes and became a time for work or socializing. Two sleeps were eventually considered a wasteful way to spend these hours.

No matter why the change happened, shortly after the turn of the 20th century the concept of two sleeps had vanished from common knowledge.

Until about 1990.

The Science
Two sleeps per night may have been the method of antiquity, but tendencies towards it still linger in modern man. There could be an innate biological preference for two sleeps, given the right circumstances.

In the early ‘90s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr of National Institutes of Mental Health conducted a study on photoperiodicity (exposure to light), and its effect on sleep patterns.

In his study, fifteen men spent four weeks with their daylight artificially restricted. Rather than staying up and active the usual sixteen hours per day, they would stay up only ten. The other fourteen hours they would be in a closed, dark room, where they would rest or sleep as much as possible. This mimics the days in mid-winter, with short daylight and long nights.

At first, the participants would sleep huge stretches of time, likely making up for sleep debt that’s common among modern people. Once they had caught up on their sleep though, a strange thing started to happen.

They began to have two sleeps.

Over a twelve hour period, the participants would typically sleep for about four or five hours initially, then wake for several hours, then sleep again until morning. They slept not more than eight hours total.

The middle hours of the night, between two sleeps, was characterized by unusual calmness, likened to meditation. This was not the middle-of-the-night toss-and-turn that many of us experienced. The individuals did not stress about falling back asleep, but used the time to relax.

Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford, points out that even with standard sleep patterns, this night waking isn’t always cause for concern. “Many people wake up at night and panic,” he says. “I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”

Outside of a scientific setting, this kind of sleep pattern is still attainable, but it does require changing our modern, electric lifestyle. Very cool person J. D. Moyer did just that. He and his family intentionally went an entire month with no electric light.

In the winter months, this meant a lot of darkness and a lot of sleep. Moyer writes “…I would go to bed really early, like 8:30, and then get up around 2:30am.  This was alarming at first, but then I remembered that this sleep pattern was quite common in pre-electric light days.  When this happened I would end up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then going back to bed.”

Moyer didn’t set out to reproduce our ancestors sleep pattern, it just happened as a byproduct of a lot of dark hours.

Should We Revive Two Sleeps?
Although history shows that two sleeping was common, and science indicates that it is (in some conditions) natural, there is no indication that it is better. Two sleeps may leave you feeling more rested, but this could simply be because you are intentionally giving yourself more time to rest, relax, and sleep. Giving the same respect to the single, eight-hour sleep should be just as effective.

Note too that two sleeping needs a lot of darkness – darkness that is only possible naturally during the winter months. The greater levels of daylight during summer and other seasons would make two sleeping difficult, or even impossible.

Perhaps two sleeping is merely a coping mechanism to get through the long, cold, boring nights of the winter. Today, we don’t need to cope. So long as we give our sleep the time and respect it needs, getting the “standard” eight hours of sleep should be fine.

But next time you wake up at 2 AM and can’t sleep, just remember your great, great, great, great, great grandfather. He did the same thing every night.

Update
Well this article proved exceedingly popular! Thank you to everyone who visited, or took the time to leave a comment. I would encourage new visitors to have a read through the comments below for some interesting ideas and perspectives. I learned two things in particular:

1. This is far more common that I thought. A lot of commenters either practice, or used to practice this kind of sleep.

2. Another possible reason for two sleeps is tending the fire during the night. Several clever readers noted that in order to keep a fire running through the night, we would need to get up and tend it.

Commenters also raised questions regarding non-European and non-Western cultures, which we’ll be digging into in future articles. For anyone who wants to learn more about this kind of sleep, I’ve linked below to two books referenced in the writing of this article, available on Amazon."

from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

"Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says...
...Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness...

..."For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."

The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too.

Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view.

"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."

Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep

Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops
Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it
Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this is when there is the lowest amount of activity in your body
After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream
In a full sleep cycle, a person goes through all the stages of sleep from one to four, then back down through stages three and two, before entering dream sleep

Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally."

Friday 27 September 2013

delicious raw strawberry granola

This really is delicious to everyone I have offered it to, though I say it myself...



here's the recipe:

150g almonds, soaked
75g sunflower seeds, soaked
150g fresh coconut
1 tsp mesquite powder
1 tsp maca powder
1 tsp rosehip powder
½ tsp vanilla powder
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
3 dried figs
3 dried apricots
300g strawberries, sliced
2 pears or apples, diced
2 Tbsp cold pressed honey

Process together all the ingredients except the last three, until broken down and smooth
Mix in the chopped fresh fruit.
Crumble the mixture over dehydrator sheets
Dehydrate until a little set then mix in honey
Continue to dehydrate until desired consistency

Thursday 26 September 2013

more on telemorase activator 65

Here we describe what we have been experiencing since being on the supplement TA65 which activates the enzyme telomerase and also seems to do a lot else besides.

Monday 23 September 2013

rosehips, vitamin c, iron and joints




More about rosehips:
Rosehips are the fruit of the rose. They are very rich in iron and vitamins C, D and E and also contain vitamins A, B1, K, P, B3 plus pectin, phosphorous, calcium and magnesium.  Rosehip powder is a very economical source of these nutrients.
Vitamin C increases mental function. It helps protect the unsaturated fats in the brain from free radical damage and oxidation. Vitamin C is a crucial factor in preventing much modern degenerative disease. Our requirements of vitamin C for superb health are far greater than the recommended amounts quoted to stop us getting scurvy. In addition vitamin C content is easily lost during transportation and storage so, where locally grown organic fresh fruit isn't abundantly available, it is wise to supplement our diet with vitamin C rich substances.  Iron is very often deficient in women and children and iron rich plant sources are invaluable. Vitamin C helps with the absorption of iron.  The rose hip has the highest concentration of iron of any plant known.

Recent research undertaken at Copenhagen County hospital suggests Rosehip powder may help to reduce joint pain.  Norwegian research carried out by Orthopedic Surgeon Odd Warholm together with his research team at Westfold central Hospital Norway produced similar findings. Some of the research was reported in an article in The Telegraph newspaper.  The vital substances for this are in the seeds.  

enjoying the equinox and a shot of the life force

Sat over the swirling mists on Glastonbury Tor in the early morning light, mesmerised by the swaying grasses beyond which little to be seen but the mist.

Understanding more and more the concept of 'your life is not your own'.  Yes, for sure, we have a life story but we cannot own life itself, any more than we can own the sun or the wind or the rain.  Life is about being part of the life-force itself - if you want to feel alive!

Recently we began taking the telomerase activator supplement TA65.  A big and newish subject, we just write an article for Funky Raw magazine about it and I don't feel I can preempt publication! - for now I am just going to quote the following:

"...We get the feeling and impression that telomerase is actually doing something more than just lengthening telomeres...we get the feeling that this enzyme ... has multiple purposes. The experience of being on TA65 is quite distinct. ...we feel it is changing our life trajectory. Ever since we were born and even in our so called youth we were aging, Now it feels different. This is about turning on an enzyme that we have not experienced since we were embryonic. While eating raw is rejuvenating, having our telomerase activated is actually youthing..."

Wednesday 18 September 2013

anaru maori healer

We have been lucky enough to have indigenous Maori healer Anaru Paine staying at our house over the last few days and hear the sounds of the screams of his clients...As he explains, he releases pain he doesn't cause it.  Having had two treatments with him over the last two years I can vouch for this.  The pain experienced as he clicks the body back into place feels safe and beneficial, and we are restored to wellbeing - there is even a  subtle euphoric high afterwards, if a little wobbliness.  Allow time for a warm bath afterwards if you have a treatment with him.  For sure he just a special presence, maybe attributable to his background living on his tribal lands. His mother is of Tuhoe tribe.  You cna read a bit more about Anaru here:
http://maorihealers.com/the-healers/anaru-paine




'No matter how small Tuhoe are (in number)
Their laughter resounds through the night

Tuhoe people have a love of deep belly laughter. They will laugh at the face of darkness. Deep belly laughter is known to be one of the highest of the healing arts. It is the fastest way to erase fear. All Maori Healers featured on this website are renowned for their ability to bring forth the deep belly laughter within others'

Wednesday 4 September 2013

sunrise agua blanca


first footprints on the sand, Agua Blanca

Tuesday 3 September 2013

foundation of wellness

The Secret of Healing with Richi
"we have wellness within us, we have this well-being that is innate and we all have access to it because we are all alive..."

Monday 2 September 2013

never ending fig tree


The local fig tree at Ciel Azul, Ibiza, every day the sun ripens another load of figs ready for us to pick...walking down the dusty lane into the sweet aroma of this spreading fig tree and climbing into it, hand straight to mouth and gathering more to take back...apparently figs are the fruit a primate will go for in preference to all other food.  Densely mineralised and alkalising with the cleansing power of the little seeds in  them, they also contain lots of mono-amine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI's) which help keep neurotransmitter levels up and make us feel good..