23. May 2010 by admin.

Though the average city slicker wouldn’t notice, global warming is melting glaciers, creating intense hurricanes, and heating up forest fires in the United States so much that more wildfires than ever are blazing more area for longer periods of time, because as earlier and earlier springs trigger earlier snow-melt, forests become drier and stay so longer.

Though the average hiker wouldn’t notice, the Alps and other mountain ranges have experienced a gradual growth spurt over the past century or so thanks to the melting of the glaciers atop them. For thousands of years, the weight of these glaciers has pushed against the Earth’s surface, causing it to depress. As the glaciers melt, this weight is lifting, and the surface slowly is springing back. Because global warming speeds up the melting of these glaciers, the mountains are rebounding faster.

Though the average astronomer wouldn’t notice, our warmer planet’s carbon dioxide emissions is having effects that reach into space with a bizarre twist. Air in the atmosphere’s outermost layer is very thin, but air molecules still create drag that slows down satellites, requiring engineers to periodically boost them back into their proper orbits. But the amount of carbon dioxide up there is increasing. And while carbon dioxide molecules in the lower atmosphere release energy as heat when they collide, thereby warming the air, the sparser molecules in the upper atmosphere collide less frequently and tend to radiate their energy away, cooling the air around them. With more carbon dioxide up there, more cooling occurs, causing the air to settle. So the atmosphere is less dense and creates less drag.

Though the average gardener wouldn’t notice, as global warming brings an earlier start to spring, the early bird might not just get the worm. It might also get its genes passed on to the next generation. Because plants bloom earlier in the year, animals that wait until their usual time to migrate might miss out on all the food. Those who can reset their internal clocks and set out earlier stand a better chance at having offspring that survive and thus pass on their genetic information, thereby ultimately changing the genetic profile of their entire population.

Though the average anthropologist wouldn’t notice, not only is the planet’s rising temperature melting massive glaciers, but it also is thawing out the layer of permanently frozen soil below the ground’s surface, with a whopping 125 lakes in the Arctic disappearing in the past few decades, backing up the idea that global warming is working fiendishly fast nearest Earth’s poles. This thawing causes the ground to shrink unevenly, and leads to sink holes and damage to structures such as railroad tracks, highways and houses. Meanwhile, the destabilizing effects of melting permafrost at high altitudes is causing rockslides and mudslides, with recent discoveries revealing the possibility of long-dormant diseases like smallpox re-emerging, as the ancient dead, their corpses thawing along with the tundra, get discovered by modern man.

Though the average botanist wouldn’t notice, the melting in the Arctic might cause problems for plants and animals at lower latitudes, but it’s creating a downright sunny situation for Arctic biota. Arctic plants usually remain trapped in ice for most of the year. Nowadays, when the ice melts earlier in the spring, the plants are eager to start growing. Research has found higher levels of the form of the photosynthesis product chlorophyll in modern soils than in ancient soils, showing a biological boom in the Arctic in recent decades.

Though the average naturalist wouldn’t notice, we’ve all had to start looking at slightly higher ground to spot our favorite chipmunks, mice and squirrels. Researchers found that many of these animals have moved to greater elevations due to changes in their habitat caused by global warming. Similar changes, of course, are also threatening Arctic species like polar bears as the sea ice they dwell on gradually melts away.  

Though the average doctor wouldn’t notice, those sneeze attacks and itchy eyes that plague us every spring have been worsening in recent years. Global warming over the past few decades has caused more and more of us to start suffering from seasonal allergies and asthma much sooner than normal. Though lifestyle changes and pollution ultimately leave people more vulnerable to the airborne allergens they breathe in, research has shown that the higher carbon dioxide levels and warmer temperatures associated with global warming are also playing a role by prodding plants to bloom earlier and with more allergens produced earlier, allergy season lasts longer. What does this all mean? Well;

1. Global warming is real. Multiple types of measurements and analyzes (weather stations, sea level monitors, borehole temperatures) agree with each other and show that the planet has warmed by 1.1 °C or 2 °F since about 1750. The magnitude of warming, and the rate of warming is beyond natural variation.

2. Warming varies with geography and with time. Climactic changes on planet Earth are not constant in time or space. High latitude regions may warm three times as much as the global average. Some regions may cool for extended periods. Short-term (annual, decadal, multi-decadal) Climactic changes are caused by sun spot cycles, El Nino/ La Nina, volcanic eruptions, and ocean current variations. These natural variations in time and space have existed in the past and should be expected in the future.

3. The global temperature record is best understood as the combination of a slow, long-term warming (un-natural/anthropogenic) and shorter-term fluctuations (natural). The combination is a record that has considerable variability: decade or more periods of temperature stagnation or decrease (1900-1910; 1945-1975) and periods of rapid increase (1910-1945; 1975-2005). The increases clearly dominate the decreases for global temperatures, producing a net warming of 0.8 °C or 1.4 °F since 1880, near the start of the instrumental record.

4. The most likely cause of 21th century long-term warming is the increase in green house gases related to human population growth and activity. This enhanced greenhouse effect should not be confused with a natural greenhouse effect caused by water vapor and background carbon dioxide in the atmosphere prior to human activity of burning hydrocarbons (Industrial Revolution). The natural greenhouse effect has prevented Earth from being an icy planet and allows the biology appropriate for a “blue planet” whose mean temperature is about 15 °C.

5. Carbon dioxide is the most important of anthropogenic greenhouse gases causing current warming. It’s prominence results from its atmospheric abundance combined with the warming potential of carbon dioxide molecules. Carbon dioxide also has a long atmospheric lifetime. If emissions of carbon dioxide were to plummet to zero today, it would take about 200 years for the Earth’s temperature to drop to pre-industrial values. The Earth (oceans, biomass) is now absorbing about half of the carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere each year; the other half stays in the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse gas concentration by about 2 parts per million per year. Our actions of today are mortgaging future generations.

6. Without immediate global action, projections to 2100 show carbon dioxide concentrations growing to about 600 parts per million, double current concentrations. Future global temperature increase for that much greenhouse forcing will be about 2.5 °C or 4.5 °F. Temperature change in the Arctic could be three times the global increase. Such temperature changes will cause sea level to rise, many glaciers to melt, snow seasons to shorten, and persistent drought. Spring runoff will be earlier, but summers will be longer and hotter. Agriculture will be disrupted. There will be both losers and winners in a warmer world; most researchers predict that losers will outnumber winners.

7. What’s the most prudent path? The most prudent action we can take, with our children and grandchildren in mind, is to curb greenhouse gas (particularly carbon dioxide) emissions immediately. There are many benefits from moving from a carbon-based economy and dependence on foreign governments, to a more sustainable green economy.

To be continued……

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14. May 2010 by admin.

As a culture we tend to be strongly outer-directed; we are not trained to venture inward to find the next steps of our growth. As a result, much truth lies hidden within us, in the depths of our self. Of that unknown, hidden self, there is much that must be unfolded in order for us to embody the truth of divinity.

For instance, one of the tasks of the present age now is to draw on its spiritual heritage and, through reestablishing the collective female consciousness, develop a way of life which doesn’t need a domineering hierarchy at its base and which returns humanity to its efforts to live out the knowledge that they are all one.

Our discontent and subtle suffering spring from the loss of the feminine values, and we face formidable obstacles in restoring this value. To be fed only male images of the divine is to be badly malnourished.

For the ordinary mind, whose mind is a checkerboard of crisscrossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible, and fear is created, not by the world around them, but in their mind, by what they think is going to happen.

For ordinary people spirituality means being a ‘nicer’ person and loving a nebulous creator while fearfully retaining all the rules of morality and ideas of God they were ever taught. The accumulation of their old religious concepts often festers into moral guilt or self-righteousness, while effectively sapping strength from any new spiritual inspiration.

What happens when there is no transformation of spiritual consciousness?

It’s very subtle: unknowingly the ego uses religion to preserve itself, defend itself, change the world for itself, and thus religion becomes the servant of the ego, its cloak and its mask. This is the most powerful position the ego can possibly assume, because it is all in the name of the divine and ultimate truth.

For instance:

the revelation of the divine to the feminine psyche is not wholly understandable to the masculine consciousness, for which reason it has been largely ignored, not taken seriously, and simply brought into conformity with the masculine psyche.

the most basic reason for uneasiness with female metaphors for God is that unlike the male metaphors, whose sexual character is clocked, the female metaphors seem blatantly sexual and involve the sexuality most feared; female sexuality.

the old argument that in the end truth must be the same for all is not very convincing when ultimate truth reveals itself to men only, or when men only have defined it, taught it, propagated it, are its sole authorities, and historically have defended it with outright wars.

if female history is different, if female biology if different, if female psychology is different, if all the hundreds of little responses to life’s daily occurrences are different, how can the spirituality be the same?

There’s often a big temptation for persons on their spiritual way to leave their ordinary life behind and seek a greater involvement in ‘practice,’ but these people must realize that the ‘practice’ is always done right where they are.

Spiritual growth is not attaining a permanent perfected state that is rid of negative emotions or experiences. It is, instead, finding out who we are. Awareness and acceptance and acceptance of all parts of ourselves grants us freedom and enables us to understand and have compassion for others.

We must realize that all of life is relationship.

Presently, the entire world is being driven insane by this single phrase: “My religion alone is true.”

All paths to spiritual enlightenment are good. It depends on conditioning and tendencies and living in the present moment. Different lines of approach suit different types of people. Eternity is now, if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.

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7. May 2010 by admin.

One of the hot topics in psychology today is “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and, not surprisingly, it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.

Our sensitivity to - and affinity for - fluency is an adaptive shortcut. According to psychologists, it helps us apportion limited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our attention and we have to quickly figure out which are worth thinking about.

An instinctive preference for the familiar made sense in the prehistoric environment in which our brains developed, psychologists hypothesize. Unfamiliar things - whether they were large woolly animals, plants we were thinking of eating, or fellow human beings - needed to be carefully evaluated to determine whether they were friend or foe. Familiar objects were those we’d already passed judgment on, so it made sense not to waste time and energy scrutinizing them.

One thing that fools us is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. When people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.

Playing with legibility can also change perceptions in subtler, less predictable ways. Psychologists at Princeton University have found that when a personal questionnaire is presented in a less legible font, people tend to answer it less honestly than if it is written in a more legible one. They also found that, when presenting people with written descriptions of moral transgressions, increasing the contrast between text and background to make it easier to read the description made people more forgiving.

The persuasive power of repetition, clarity, and simplicity is something that marketers, political candidates, speechwriters, suitors, and teachers - already have an intuitive sense of. What the fluency research is showing is just how profound the effect of that persuasiveness can be.

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2. May 2010 by admin.

So, how are we going to go against the momentum of evolution up to this point? How are we going to overthrow the tyranny of eons of conditioning and embrace change, and expand our sphere of identity to embrace the whole?

Is it a matter of pure effort and will, onerously working against our own proclivities driven by a sense of mission and vision? This might be part of it.

But fortunately, evolution gave us a shortcut. When confronted with the unknown, with chaos, with change, although we have a lot of resistance, there is a part of us that gets excited. Despite our resistance to change, we nonetheless long for it. Statistics show that what keeps employees working at a company is not better salary, not more benefits, but a growth-oriented environment where people feel like they’re being provided an opportunity to continuously evolve.

I think it’s no accident that we feel most alive when we’re growing and evolving, when we’re confronted with challenges that require us to develop new capacities, to stretch beyond the known into the undiscovered land of our emerging self, of who we are becoming. That is when we are most in touch with that evolutionary impulse at the heart of creation.

At the heart of every human being, I feel, is a spark of that initial impulse that has been driving the whole event. And, if we can align ourselves with it, ground ourselves in it, it will give us all the inspiration, strength and perspective we need to do its bidding.

Remember where we came from. We are, after all, the eyes and hearts of the Big Bang. We were there before it all began. And the creative evolutionary dynamics that have given birth to this entire universe in all its glory and diversity are now alive in us. And, in a very real sense, they are only now attaining the peak of their power. Because, in us, these powers now have attained consciousness. They can be directed.

And although this universe has been going for 14 billion years, the action is really just getting started. So far, we’ve had three big bangs. The cosmic big bang that brought it all into existence in the first place. The big bang of life. And the mind’s big bang that brought forth the miracle of human consciousness. And it’s my conviction that if enough of us take the leap I’m speaking about, before long, we will find ourselves in the midst of a third big bang. The big bang of the human spirit.

As we free ourselves from the shackles of our animal nature, from short-term thinking, from self-interest, from rigidity and narrowness and fear, and step up to our true creative roles as conscious, enlightened co-creators of the Future, we will witness a creative flourishing that will make the first three big bangs seem puny by comparison—then the Word will have truly become flesh, not just in one. But in the many.

On a personal level, this will be our salvation, our liberation. On a collective level, I think we will have not only come into maturity as a species, we will have found our place in the universe. And the Earth and the Heavens will rejoice in the Glory of what we can express.

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