Volume 6 Issue 11: November 2008
“All Time is Now”
Greetings!
I hope that everyone had a wonderful October 31! Yes, I know I’m late with this issue…it didn’t occur to me that this issue had to be out last night…until about 4:30 a.m. today.
Well for those of you in the US are you ready for November 4? I certainly am! I am so tired of hearing the telephone ring at all hours (practically) for a recording telling me how and who encourage me to vote for. Um-huh…I really wish these phone calls were illegal. It’s not enough we have to listen to the television ads…okay, I’ll stop before I really get wound up! 
A really funny (I think) thing that I did…okay…I have this habit of answering the phone (sometimes) especially when I know that it’s these idiotic pre-recorded messages and I just give the recording all kinds of grief..Well, the one and only time I didn’t do that was just recently. This was like the thrid call I’d received that evening and I heard the man’s voice come on and I didn’t say anything, thinking it was a recording, at the end when they said the candidate’s name I simply said, “I don’t think so!” and the guy stopped talking and squeeked, “ok”. Unfortuntely I hadn’t launched into my tirade, and really give the guy ‘what for”, maybe it’s just as well, the poor man sounded like he might have fallen apart had I done that.
This month (meaning October) flew by so quickly!
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In this Issue:
Eye on the Sky: Old Farmer’s Almanac Full moon times, dates and names
Article: There are two this time one is a warning about those sweet little baby carrots and
the other is: Mind Controls Body in Extreme Experiments by William J. Cromie/ Source: Harvard Gazette
Links
Turtle’s Pond-erings
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Eye on the Sky:
November, 2008
As evening twilight fades on the 1st, the crescent Moon and brilliant Venus hover side by side, 10 degrees high in the southwest. Two nights later, on the 3rd, the Moon dangles beneath Jupiter. During the month’s final 10 days, Venus approaches Jupiter and floats below it on the 29th and 30th. The Moon closes the month hanging below the planet pair; all three brightest nighttime objects gather in the deepening twilight. Mercury concludes its fine autumn apparition during the first four days of the month, now just 6 degrees high at magnitude -0.9, low in the east just before dawn. At midmonth, Saturn rises before 1:30 a.m.; it is halfway to the zenith at dawn, in the southeast.
November’s full moon names are: Full Beaver Moon: for both the colonists and the Algonquin tribes, this was a time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. This full moon was also called the Frost Moon.
December, 2008
The year’s most striking conjunction blazes on the 1st, an hour after sunset as Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon form a brilliant triangle, 15 degrees high up, in the southwest. The two planets stay reasonably close together for a few more nights. The Geminid meteors on the 13th are washed out by an exceptionally high, bright, and large Moon: The year’s closest lunar approach happens five hours before the full Moon, on the 12th. Expect unusually strong tides. Meanwhile, Saturn starts to rise before midnight beginning at midmonth. The ringed planet hovers next to the Moon from midnight to dawn on the night of the 18th-19th. Winter begins with the solstice on the 21st at 7:04 a.m.
December’s full moon name: Full Cold Moon. This is the month when the winter cold fastens its grip and the nights become long and dark. This full moon is also called the Long NIghts moon. (Makes sense as this is when winter begins.)
Special thanks to: the Old Farmers Almanac
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Article: A Warning about those sweet baby carrots
The following is information from a farmer who grows and
packages carrots for IGA, METRO, LOBLAWS, etc.
The small cocktail (baby) carrots you buy in small plastic
bags are made using the larger crooked or deformed carrots
which are put through a machine which cuts and shapes them
into cocktail carrots. Most people probably know this
already.
What you may not know and should know is the following:
once the carrots are cut and shaped into cocktail carrots
they are dipped in a solution of water and chlorine in
order
to preserve them (the same chlorine used in your pool).
Since they do not have their skin or natural protective
covering, they give them a higher dose of chlorine.
You will notice that once you keep these carrots in your
refrigerator for a few days, a white covering will form on
the carrots, this is the chlorine which resurfaces.
At what cost do we put our health at risk to have
esthetically pleasing vegetables which are practically
plastic?
We do hope that this information can be passed on to as
many people as possible in the hopes of informing them
where
these carrots come from and how they are processed.
Chlorine is a very well known carcinogen.
***
Mind Control Body in Extreme Experiments: by Harvard Gazette
In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators’ shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering.
If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.
Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monk was required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours.
Why would anyone do this? Herbert Benson, who has been studying g Tum-mo for 20 years, answers that “Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There’s another reality we can tap into that’s unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo meditation.”
Benson is an associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He firmly believes that studying advanced forms of meditation “can uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses.”
Benson developed the “relaxation response,” which he describes as “a physiological state opposite to stress.” It is characterized by decreases in metabolism, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. He and others have amassed evidence that it can help those suffering from illnesses caused or exacerbated by stress. Benson and colleagues use it to treat anxiety, mild and moderate depression, high blood pressure, heartbeat irregularities, excessive anger, insomnia, and even infertility. His team also uses this type of simple meditation to calm those who have been traumatized by the deaths of others, or by diagnoses of cancer or other painful, life-threatening illnesses.
“More than 60 percent of visits to physicians in the United States are due to stress-related problems, most of which are poorly treated by drugs, surgery, or other medical procedures,” Benson maintains.
The Mind/Body Medical Institute is now training people to use the relaxation response to help people working at Ground Zero in New York City, where two airplanes toppled the World Trade Center Towers last Sept. 11. Facilities have been set up at nearby St. Paul’s Chapel to aid people still working on clearing wreckage and bodies. Anyone else who feels stressed by those terrible events can also obtain help at the chapel. “We are training the trainers who work there,” Benson says.
The relaxation response involves repeating a word, sound, phrase, or short prayer while disregarding intrusive thoughts. “If such an easy-to-master practice can bring about the remarkable changes we observe,” Benson notes. “I want to investigate what advanced forms of meditation can do to help the mind control physical processes once thought to be uncontrollable.”
Breathtaking results
Some Westerners practice g Tum-mo, but it often takes years to reach states like those achieved by Buddhist monks. In trying to find groups he could study, Benson met Westerners who claimed to have mastered such advanced techniques, but who were, in his words, “fraudulent.”
Benson decided that he needed to locate a religious setting, where advanced mediation is traditionally practiced. His opportunity came in 1979 when the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet, visited Harvard University. “His Holiness agreed to help me,” recalls Benson. That visit was the beginning of a long friendship and several expeditions to northern India where many Tibetan monks live in exile.
During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.
The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.
To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation. Benson believes that such a capability could be useful for space travel. Travelers might use meditation to ease stress and oxygen consumption on long flights to other planets.
In 1985, the meditation team made a video of monks drying cold, wet sheets with body heat. They also documented monks spending a winter night on a rocky ledge 15,000 feet high in the Himalayas. The sleep-out took place in February on the night of the winter full moon when temperatures reached zero degrees F. Wearing only woolen or cotton shawls, the monks promptly fell asleep on the rocky ledge, They did not huddle together and the video shows no evidence of shivering. They slept until dawn then walked back to their monastery.
Overcoming obstacles
Working in isolated monasteries in the foothills of the Himalayas proved extremely difficult. Some religious leaders keep their meditative procedures a closely guarded secret. Medical measuring devices require electrical power and wall outlets are not always available. In addition, trying to meditate while strangers attempt to measure your rectal temperature is not something most monks are happy to do.
To avoid these problems, Instructor in Psychology Sara Lazar, a Benson colleague, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of meditators at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The subjects were males, aged 22-45, who had practiced a form of advanced mediation called Kundalini daily for at least four years. In these experiments, the obstacles of cold and isolation were replaced by the difficulties of trying to meditate in a cramped, noisy machine. However, the results, published in the May 15, 2000, issue of the journal NeuroReport, turned out to be significant.
“Lazar found a marked decrease in blood flow to the entire brain,” Benson explains. “At the same time, certain areas of the brain became more active, specifically those that control attention and autonomic functions like blood pressure and metabolism. In short, she showed the value of using this method to record changes in the brain’s activity during meditation.”
The biggest obstruction in further studies, whether in India or Boston, has always been money. Research proceeded slowly and intermittently until February 2001, when Benson’s team received a $1.25 million grant from Loel Guinness, via the beer magnate’s Kalpa Foundation, established to study extraordinary human capacities.
The funds enabled researchers to bring three monks experienced in g Tum-mo to a Guinness estate in Normandy, France, last July. The monks then practiced for 100 days to reach their full meditative capacity. An eye infection sidelined one of the monks, but the other two proved able to dry frigid, wet sheets while wearing sensors that recorded changes in heat production and metabolism.
Although the team obtained valuable data, Benson concludes that “the room was not cold enough to do the tests properly.” His team will try again this coming winter with six monks. They will start practice in late summer and should be ready during the coldest part of winter.
Benson feels sure these attempts to understand advanced mediation will lead to better treatments for stress-related illnesses. “My hope,” he says, “is that self-care will stand equal with medical drugs, surgery, and other therapies that are now used to alleviate mental and physical suffering. Along with nutrition and exercise, mind/body approaches can be part of self-care practices that could save millions of dollars annually in medical costs.”
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Links
An awesome, fun video and a newsletter to subscribe to!
Video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3157713909750171574
Newsletter: Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy
This is so great! Your song on the radio instantly! http://www.theradio.com/
Ok, this is awesome…but, how did they do this? http://www.jonco48.com/blog/shoe_20shadow.jpg
I love this! Because chess is war…in Claymation!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXM3wrIhcwY
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Turtle’s Pond-erings
Why is it that some people in positions of power love to harrass and beleager the point that those under them can do nothing to change the way things are? Is it to show those of us on the receiving end how not to behave or to just get us good and angry? I personally feel it is a lack of education/training for those people. It just makes it hard on the rest of us who know they will eventually get back what they gave out.
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That’s all for this time, keep smilin’.
Until next time:
May the Creator hold you in the palm of His hand and
may you float as a feather upon the Breath of the Creator.
