Without it you could not experience life, with it you are eternal. There are essentially three aspects to consciousness, specifically the subconscious mind, the conscious mind and higher consciousness. Each plays a pivotal role in creating your circumstances so understanding how the three are inter-related is fundamental to truly harnessing the power of your mind.

1. The Subconscious Mind
The subconscious mind is the incredibly powerful program that runs every aspect of your life automatically and without your conscience input. The most important thing you must know about the subconscious mind is that it is subjective in nature. This means that it can not reason or distinguish between positive and negative.

Simply put, any thought, message or order that is given to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough will in time be accepted as truth and consistently be carried out with exact precision irrespective of whether it benefits you or not.

In The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy explains that “when thoughts are conveyed to your subconscious mind, impressions are made in the brain cells. As soon as your subconscious accepts any idea, it proceeds to put it into effect immediately… it draws on the infinite power, energy, and wisdom within you. It lines up all the laws of nature to get its way. Sometimes it seems to bring about an immediate solution to your difficulties, but at other times it may take days, weeks, or longer… Its ways are past finding out.”

The subconscious mind’s inability to reason is not a weakness. In fact it is fundamental to its power. To illustrate this, imagine if your subconscious mind had to decide whether or not your heart should pump blood around your body, whether or not to immediately send white blood cells to heal a wound, whether or not to walk each time you consciously wanted to walk.

The subconscious mind’s subjective nature is responsible for every function you carry out automatically without conscious thought, from digesting the food you eat to healing a wound to speaking a language to driving your car – ultimately all your habitual actions. It is the storehouse of your memory. It never sleeps any more than your heart sleeps. Were the subconscious mind able to reason, your body would be unable to function and life as we know it could not exist.

Its power is also its Achilles heel. This is because its lack of reason means that it is equally willing to carry out positive programs as it is negative with often devastating effect. The true potential of the subconscious mind may be limitless but potential alone is more detrimental than useful when the programs carried out are negative. Having said this, given its inability to judge right from wrong, the subconscious mind can not be held responsible for the negative programs it relentlessly carries out. Who then is responsible?

2. The Conscious Mind
The conscious mind is also known as the objective mind or self-consciousness. It is the mind of your five senses, enabling you to consciously experience the physical world. Most importantly, it is that aspect of your mind that is able to reason. This ability to reason sets human beings apart from the plant and mineral kingdoms and places us highest in the animal kingdom. Your conscious mind essentially grants you freedom of choice. It is the seat of your will.

The All-Important Function of the Conscious Mind: Given its capacity to reason and discriminate your conscious mind has an incredibly important function. It is supposed to be the guardian of your subconscious mind ensuring that only wanted and empowering messages are allowed through. It is supposed to be the sole commander of your subconscious mind as it is only through the conscious mind that you can access the subconscious.

The words supposed to be have been stressed intentionally since most people have no idea of this role of their conscious mind. Instead they experience life in a zombie-like state, allowing messages from the media, society, school, friends and family to pass through to their subconscious unchecked, irrespective of their nature.

Charles Haanel explains it this way in the The Master Key System – “The subconscious mind does not engage in the process of proving. It relies upon the conscious mind to guard it from mistaken impressions. When the “watchman” is “off guard,” or when its calm judgment is suspended, under a variety of circumstances, then the subconscious mind is unguarded and left open to suggestion from all sources.”

Who is Running Your Show?
Unbeknown to most people their life is being run in strict accordance with a set of deeply ingrained subconscious programs that they did not consciously choose in the first instance. To make matters worse, it is argued that most of these programs were locked in place by the age of around ten.

This is because a child’s ability to reason is limited compared to that of an adult. This may enable a child to absorb new information with great superiority, but it also means that a child’s subconscious mind being more easily programmed, is left wide open to unchecked negative messages.

By the time a child has reached its early teenage years its reasoning abilities have significantly developed and so it is able to consciously choose what messages to accept. By then, however, core programs are already in place and the subconscious mind doesn’t want to know any different even if it has unwittingly taken error to mean truth. The simplest way to consciously override these negative programs is by learning to access your All-Knowing higher self.

About the author:
Tania Kotsos is the founder and author of Mind Your Reality. She has been studying mind power and the nature of reality for the last 15 years. After a successful 10 year career as an investment banker in the City of London, she decided to throw in the towel to pursue her dream of empowering people to transform their lives using the innate power of their mind.

Visit her website at: mind-your-reality.com

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The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
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For thousand of years, through deep inner inquiry, philosophers and sages have came to the realization that there is only one substance and we are therefore all part of it.

This substance can be called Awareness, Consciousness, Spirit, Advaita, Brahman, Tao, Nirvana or even God. It is constant, ever present, unchangeable and is the essence of all existence.

In the last century Western scientists are arriving at the same conclusion: The universe does indeed comprise of a single substance, presumably created during the Big Bang, and all sense of being – consciousness – subsequently arises from it. This realization has ontological implications for humanity: fundamentally we are individual expressions of a single entity, inextricably connected to one another, we are all drops of the same ocean.

Science and Nonduality is a journey, an exploration of the nature of awareness, the essence of life from which all arises and subsides.

What is nonduality, anyway?
There are many shades of meaning to the word nonduality. As an introduction, we might say that nonduality is the philosophical, spiritual, and scientific understanding of non-separation and fundamental oneness.

Our starting point is the statement “we are all one,” and this is meant not in some abstract sense but at the deepest level of existence. Duality, or separation between the observer and the observed, is an illusion that the Eastern mystics have long recognized and Western science has more recently come to understand through quantum mechanics.

Dualities are usually seen in terms of opposites: Mind/Matter, Self/Other, Conscious/Unconscious, Illusion/Reality, Quantum/Classical, Wave/Particle, Spiritual/Material, Beginning/End, Male/Female, Living/Dead and Good/Evil. Nonduality is the understanding that identification with common dualisms avoids recognition of a deeper reality.

So how can we better understand nonduality?
There are two aspects to this question, and at first glance they appear to be mutually exclusive, although they may be considered two representations of a single underlying reality.

The first aspect is our understanding of external reality, and for this we turn to science. The word science comes from the Latin scientia, which means knowledge. The beauty and usefulness of science is that it seeks to measure and describe reality without personal, religious, or cultural bias. For something to be considered scientifically proven, it has to pass exhaustive scrutiny, and even then is always subject to future revision.

Inevitably human biases creep in, but the pursuit of science itself is intrinsically an evolving quest for truth. But then quantum mechanics turned much of this lauded objectivity on its head, as the role of the observer became inseparable from the observed quantum effect. It is as if consciousness itself plays a role in creating reality.  Indeed, the two may be the same thing. As quantum pioneer Niels Bohr once put it: “A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself!”

The second aspect is our inner, personal experience of consciousness, our “awareness of awareness.” We have our senses to perceive the world, but “behind” all perception, memory, identification and thought is simply pure awareness itself.  Eastern mystics have described this undifferentiated consciousness for thousands of years as being the ultimate state of bliss, or nirvana.

Seekers have attempted to experience it for themselves through countless rituals and practices, although the state itself can be quite simply described. As Indian advaita teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj said: “The trinity: mind, self and spirit, when looked into, becomes unity.”

The central challenge to understanding nonduality may be that it exists beyond language, because once it has been named, by definition — and paradoxically — a duality has been created. Even the statement “all things are one” creates a distinction between “one” and “not-one”! Hardly any wonder that nonduality has been misunderstood, particularly in the West.

Science And Nonduality Anthology 3 DVD Set
Take twenty one of the finest thinkers in the fields of neuroscience, quantum physics, psychotherapy, art, Vedanta, Sufism, Judaism, and Buddhism and ask them some of the toughest questions known to humankind and this is what you get: A groundbreaking anthology of interviews that illuminate the deepest and most compelling mysteries of the human experience.

This DVD is the first of its kind to explore the convergence between science and nonduality. Rather than being heavily edited to direct the viewer according to a particular opinion, each of the interviews is a stand alone piece that allows us to fully experience the depth of the speaker. Each interview is a unique journey that ultimately brings us back to the source of all, beyond concepts and words. Enjoy!

3-DVD set, 21 interviews, 600 minutes, 0 All codes (playable worldwide), NTSC Video

The DVDs contain interviews with: Stuart Hameroff, Stephen Wolinksy, Peter Fenner Loibon Le Baaba, Rupert Spira, Jeremy Hayward, Rabbi Hoffman, Amit Goswami, Francis Lucille, Robert Dittler, Henry Stapp, Nahid Angha, Jeff Foster, Kebir Helminski, Peter Russell, John Prendergast, Bernie Baars, Olga Louchakova, Vijai Kapoor, Thomas Ray, Tim Freke

More Information: Science And Nonduality Anthology 3 DVD Set

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The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
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Some people may choose to modify their own behavior with self-help tapes which use subliminal messages to change negative behaviors or thinking patterns. On the other hand, subliminal messages can be used by others to alter a person’s behavior through a type of mind control. This may seem harmless enough, however, in the wrong hands these techniques can be used to control more than just purchasing choices.

Types of Subliminal Messages
One type of visual subliminal message consists of images with a logo, word, symbol or action depicted within it that eludes conscious perception. Another type of visual subliminal message contains stimuli repeatedly flashed across a screen at fractions of a second which is too fast for the brain to consciously perceive.

Audio subliminal messages present repeated phrases that elicit a particular response played in the background usually with nature sounds, nonsensical speech, or music in the foreground. Some of these recordings contain audio stimuli played at below or above the normal hearing ranges while others are barely audible.

Sometimes two messages are delivered simultaneously into both ears which are directed to affect a particular part of the brain. Another type of audio subliminal message is known as backmasking which occurs when phrases are recorded backwards and embedded within a song or other sound recording.

The last type of subliminal message is much more subtle than either the visual or audio. Electromagnetic waves whether they are extremely low frequency (ELF) or just low frequency (LF) affect the human body in various ways. By blasting the human body with electromagnetic waves the brain wave patterns are disrupted which can have profound effects on the nervous system. Technology is currently available to stimulate areas of the brain to produce psychological and physiological effects.

The Beginning
Subliminal messages were first developed in the United States during World War II with the invention of the tachistoscope. Air Force psychologists flashed images of friendly and enemy aircraft while gradually increasing the exposure speed and decreasing the size of the aircraft images. Pilots were quickly trained to recognize the smallest representations of different planes at 1/100th of a second with great accuracy.

In 1957 James Vicary used the tachistoscopic technique at a New Jersey drive-in theater to flash suggestions to eat popcorn and drink Coke across the screen at 1/3000 of a second at five second intervals. Although Vicary first reported a significant increase in refreshment sales, it was later determined that he did not even conduct the study. In 2007 the actual experiment described by James Vicary was conducted at the same drive-in theater using the same movie to present the subliminal messages to the audience. Interestingly enough, refreshment sales did increase after all.

In the 1950s, consumers, scientific researchers and government officials found the use of subliminal messages in advertising unethical. The controversy died down until the 1970s when the first commercials aired on television used subliminal messages. The FCC then issued a statement prohibiting the use of subliminal messages in electronic communication although there is no legal penalty associated with a violation.

Subliminal Message Usage Today
Many people use self-help products that incorporate subliminal messages to bring about an improvement such as weight loss. The key to this is people purchase programs to use on computers or to display on websites with full knowledge of the intended outcome.

Television is the perfect medium to use subliminal messages to control a population. Americans are a captive audience because we cannot afford to go out anymore. With the financial hardships of most Americans today, we are forced to rely on the television news channels for information that we used to get from newspapers.

Before the 2008 presidential election, Fox News flashed images of John and Cindy McCain onto the screen at the beginning of the program. It is one thing to have subconscious messages persuading you to buy a product, but to have a news channel use hidden images to influence an election is quite another issue.

Today subliminal messages can be found in television shows, movies, commercials, and video games flashing propaganda to persuade the public of many disturbing facts. Even the ticker text that scrolls along the bottom of the screen on many news channels now contains some type of subliminal message.

Invisible Subliminals
Because the brain only perceives these messages subconsciously, they can be used to influence behavior without the knowledge of the person subjected to them. Melvin D. Saunders states in “Are We Already Learning in a Subliminal Way” that humans “sense, perceive and react to a lot of consciously undetected stimuli.

Ultrasonics, infrasonics, radar, microwaves and various forms of radiation can produce bodily reactions without conscious awareness….Even while asleep or with certain brain areas anesthetized, other brain areas can perceive certain things and cause the body to respond to stimuli.” Any message not apparent to the reader or listener can be used to control them.

The United States government is currently using HAARP to interfere with the earth’s magnetic fields and your brain waves. The wave patterns in the ionosphere are identical to human brain waves. Therefore, interference in the earth’s magnetic fields can affect the human body’s magnetic field as well. Many patents that specifically state the intention of mind control, use these invisible waves to influence subjects.

HAARP is short for High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program consists of antennae that emit electromagnetic waves into the ionosphere. High concentrations of these waves have shown to cause mood disorders. Long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves can cause people to hallucinate, hear voices in their heads, develop psychic abilities or even to physically rock back and forth.

Dangers of Subliminal Messages
Since the beginning of civilization, those in power have tried to control people. If someone hears the same mantra over and over for an extended period of time, they will begin to believe it or react in the prescribed way. Cults frequently use this type of manipulation in brainwashing their members. Jim Jones’ Guyana tragedy is a perfect example of how repetition and constant auditory stimuli can make people believe anything.

Jim Jones constantly bombarded the members of his church with recordings persuading them of their paradise-like environment and righteous lives. Even though several members who escaped the mass suicide disagreed, only a handful actually tried to escape. Most of them did so only after observing fellow church members drop dead from the poisoned Koolaid.

Technology exists today that can track us, bombard us with invisible waves to control anything from sexual behavior to induce hallucinations. The implications are scary but real.

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Other than eating breakfast regularly, and eating more fruits and vegetables, the one characteristic that is present in all healthy older people is resiliency – that hard-to-measure quality of adapting to change, shifting with changing tides, and seeing the glass half full.

This is because your thoughts have real and measurable effects on your body and brain. Every cell in your body listens to your thoughts. Your immune cells know your deepest feelings.

Your stem cells are wired to your brain and help you repair and regenerate. But they ONLY turn on and make new brain cells when you relax!

Research has shown over and over again that learning to relax is one of the most important keys to long-term health and vitality. And it is a critical part of my program for achieving an UltraMind.

To use learn how to use that pharmacy between your ears, you need to learn how to hit your “pause button.” Today I will teach you how to do that. I will explain why stress kills, relaxation heals, and how you can begin turning on your relaxation response.

The Road to Vagus
Your immune cells, stem cells, and all the other organs and tissues in your body are connected to your vagus nerve – a long nerve that goes from your brain, through your chest and diaphragm, and throughout your body.

Your vagus nerve is a very special part of your nervous system that helps you calm your mind and turn on a cascade of healing that can reverse depression and dementia and help sharpen your mind – making old brains young again.

It does this by turning off your stress response and activating your relaxation response – what I call “hitting the pause button” – which most of us don’t know how to do. Most of us don’t need any help turning on the alarm system.

However, very few of us know how to calm this system down. We don’t know where our pause button is, and we don’t know how to push it. This is a serious health concern, because stress is very bad for your brain.

How Stress Destroys Your Brain
The effects of stress on brain health cannot be overstated. It shrinks the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain; reduces serotonin; lowers BDNF (brain derived neutrophic factor), which acts like Miracle-Gro for your brain cells; increases inflammation; increases belly fat; lowers thyroid function; and much more.

It is one of the chief causes of our broken brains.

• But what is stress?
• It is any real or imagined threat to your body or your ego.
• What does that mean?

It means your stress response reacts the same when you are in real danger (if you are about to be run down by an oncoming car) as it does when you perceive danger (if your boss tells you he thinks you are doing a poor job at work).

In both cases, a flood of cortisol and other chemicals is released into your bloodstream. These chemicals send messages far and wide, telling your body – and brain – to get ready for the danger at hand. In the first instance, the stress response is adaptive It prepares you to move out of the way of that oncoming vehicle.

In the second instance, the stress response is worse than useless – your body gets prepared for real physical danger but there isn’t any. There is only the perceived danger of your boss’s disappointment. The result is that you stew in your stress juices, and they poison your body and brain.

So how we think and what we believe make a huge difference in how healthy we are. There’s no doubt about it. Optimists live longer and are healthier!

This reminds me of a Tibetan man I met more than 20 years ago in Nepal who showed me the power of thought and belief in shaping our lives.

The Tibetan Healer
I traveled to Nepal as part of an expedition to study the public health problems of a village near the Tibetan border. Along the way I encountered a remarkable man, who had faced grave threats to his life and his place in the world. He was a Tibetan doctor who was captured in 1959 during the Chinese invasion and sent to a Chinese prison camp.

He dispassionately told me of his 22-year imprisonment in the camp, where he was stripped of his community, prevented from practicing Buddhism, tortured, and abused. I found it difficult to reconcile this serene man with the horrors he experienced.

During our conversation, I asked him to identify the greatest danger he faced during his 22 years of imprisonment. I expected him to say the relentless physical and psychological torture and sophisticated brainwashing techniques designed to make him renounce his spiritual beliefs and embrace communist ideology.

What he said astounded me.

“The greatest danger I faced during my imprisonment was the few moments I thought I might lose my compassion for my Chinese captors.”

Most of us cannot imagine worrying about having compassion for those who kept us locked away from everything we value for 22 years. Yet somehow, in small and large ways, our sense of control, meaning, purpose, and connection in life is one of the most powerful factors that determine our health and well-being.

What do you feel connected to? What gives you meaning and purpose? Answers to questions like these define who we are, not only mentally, but physically.

“Disease” is a disconnection from our sense of place in the world; a loss of control and meaning as we drift from television channel to television channel looking for a program to satisfy us; consume food disconnected from its origins, processed and unidentifiable from its natural state; as our families separate, disconnect, and communicate through text messaging and e-mail.

How do you take a pill to fix that? How do you know if you are stressed?

Well, you might crave salt, feel dizzy when you stand up, have trouble falling asleep, have sweaty palms or feel wiped out after exercise, or you might feel tired and wired. If so, you may have burned out your adrenal glands – the glands that kick into gear whenever there is stress.

So what’s the cure for burn out? How do you turn off the stress response and begin to heal from its effects?

Turning Off the Stress Response
The latest research has found two ways to turn old forgetful brains into young brains and turn depressed people into happy people. You have two choices.

Cut out your adrenal glands or have a pacemaker inserted in your neck, which stimulates the vagus nerve and triggers relaxation. Neither of those sound like much fun!

But you DO have other options to calm your mind.

One of my favorites is: just breathe. It automatically activates the vagus nerve. I teach you how to do the soft belly breath, a variation of ancient yogic breathing techniques, in Six Weeks to an UltraMind.

In the meantime, here are a few more ideas on how to push your pause button, and heal your brain.

• Make choices that make your life balanced – practice saying “NO” to others and “YES” to yourself
• Try yoga or meditation
• Get enough sleep
• Eat whole foods that decrease the stress response.
• Avoid stressed foods. The next time you reach for that industrial packaged food product, or fast food lunch just ask yourself if your food is “relaxed.”
• You might even try some herbs that can balance out the stress response, such as ginseng or rhodiola

I have just opened the door for you to learn how to calm your mind. You can learn much more in my new self-coaching program for achieving an UltraMind.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

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1. We solve problems in our sleep
Jeff Taylor woke in the middle of the night from a dream in which he created an electronic bulletin board that was lit up with eager job-hunters logging in from all over the map. He scrawled the phrase “Monster board” on a pad in the dark, then rushed to an all-night coffee shop and roughed out the plan for what became the stunningly successful internet job agency, Monster.com

If you want to solve a problem, or need a fresh perspective, sleep on it. Write down your intention (“I would like guidance on X”) before turning in, and be ready to record something whenever you wake up. Even if you have forgotten your dreams, you may find you have your solution.

2. Dreams coach us for future challenges and opportunities.
John Lennon dreamed he read his own obituary and was shocked to find that he had murdered himself, in front of the Dakota on Central Park. Eleven months later, he was murdered in front of the Dakota by a demented fan who identified with the Beatles star to the point where he married a Japanese woman, collected the same type of art, and signed out of work the day before the murder as “John Lennon”.

Lennon’s dream was precognitive; it showed him a future event that was played out when the wannabe John Lennon killed the real one. But dreams also give us early warnings: they show us future challenges (and opportunities) that may or may not play out, depending on whether we read the message correctly and take appropriate action. I believe that my own life has been saved from fatal road accidents on three occasions because I was able to use dream previews as travel advisories.

3. Dreams show us what our bodies need to stay well.
Wanda Burch’s dead father turned up in a dream in a white medical coat yelling at her, “Get to a doctor immediately! You have cancer!” She acted on the warning, getting medical help early enough to survive the disease. Her survival chances were greatly enhanced as she developed the ability to harvest healing imagery from her dreams, as recounted in her book She Who Dreams.

We have a wise physician and healer available in our dreamtime every night. Our dream doctor can predict possible symptoms long before they develop, prescribe appropriate treatments, and give us images the body can believe in to make us well or keep us well. Our dream doctor makes house calls and doesn’t charge a cent!

4. Dreams hold up a magic mirror to our actions and behavior
Renowned Swiss analyst Carl Jung was impressed by the experience of a wealthy businessman who was about to embark on a new venture when he dreamed that he got himself so dirty that his arms were covered in black muck, up above the elbows. He concluded that the new project was “dirty business”, and abandoned it.

Dreams give us an objective picture of our current actions and attitudes, and show us where they are likely to lead. When I was leading a very fast-track life, I dreamed I took a corner at insanely high speed in a beautiful racing-green Jaguar. Then everything came to a stop.  A doctor in a white coat turned up and inspected my engine. He cautioned me that I ought to be much more careful. “If you smash up this vehicle, don’t imagine you’ll get one as good any time soon.” I took the advice!

5. Dreams are a secret laboratory
Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, said that dreams were his “secret laboratory.” He recorded many thousands of dreams, and they guided not only his work in physics, but his researches in other fields such as philology and the interaction of mind and matter.

Many of our greatest scientists, inventors and discoverers have been world-class dreamers. The list includes Isaac Newton, physicist Niels Bohr, chemist Friedrich Kekule, inventor Elias Howe (who dreamed up the first practical sewing machine needle, giving us the modern garment industry) and Albert Einstein, who woke on a spring morning with the special theory of relativity clear in his head.

6. Dreams are a creative studio
Jacqueline Mitchard, author of the bestselling first novel The Deep End of the Ocean told Oprah she got her whole plot from a dream, though it took her several years to bring all of the book through. The stunningly original architect Frank Gehry dreams up building designs. He says he based part of his design for a cancer center on dream conversations with a woman friend who had died from breast cancer. He dreamed his dead friend told to make his design softer, to appeal to women patients; in the finished version he worked in shapes derived from the folds of fabric in a shawl.

To be creative is to bring something new into the world. Whatever our field of interest – from a dinner party menu to the next leap in nanotechnology – our dreams provide a creative studio where we try out new ideas and make connections that escape the everyday mind.

7. Dreams help us mend our divided selves
New York actor and playwright Roger Ziegler dreamed he looked in a mirror and saw many selves, aspects of himself at many ages, each bringing different gifts. He was thrilled as he watched them embrace and join together, becoming a single being – all except a shy five-year-old he had to rescue later on.

Our dreams put us in touch with many parts of ourselves, including shadow aspects we may have sought to repress or deny, and also that larger and wiser Self who can help us grow.

8. Dreaming is a key to better relationships
Schoolteacher Marybeth Gurske dreamed that her heart was opened, and she saw an “energy cord” running from her open heart to her dream partner, the ultimate “Mister Right.” She painted that beautiful image. When she dated men, she checked whether the energy in the encounter matched that of the dream, and moved on fast when it did not. Every night, she imagined herself being drawn, inexorably, by that heart-cord towards the man of her dreams. Fourteen months later, she found him and they are now married.

Dreams can introduce our life partners. They can also put juice and depth into an existing relationship, or show us when it is time to cut our losses and move on. Sharing dreams in a family circle or among friends or workmates is a great way to build stronger connections, solve mutual problems – and have fabulous fun. Through dreams, we can also heal our relations with our departed, bringing a blessed sense of forgiveness, closure and continuing or reviving love.

9. Dreams recall us to our larger our purpose
Australian Aborigines say that the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them, like predators stalking in the woods. Dreams put us in touch with our bigger stories and our larger life purpose. When we can make a connection between life’s everyday dramas and a bigger story, we find courage and direction for whatever life throws at us.

Based on the book The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination © 2007 Robert Moss. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.

About the author:
Robert Moss is a world authority on dreams, a bestselling novelist, and a former foreign correspondent and professor of ancient history. He is the author of The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination and The Secret History of Dreaming (New World Library).  Visit his website www.mossdreams.com

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The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
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Some were patients who had what were thought to be incurable brain problems; others were people without specific problems who simply wanted to improve the functioning of their brains or preserve them as they aged. For four hundred years this venture would have been inconceivable because mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy was fixed.

The common wisdom was that after childhood the brain changed only when it began the long process of decline; that when brain cells failed to develop properly, or were injured, or died, they could not be replaced. Nor could the brain ever alter its structure and find a new way to function if part of it was damaged.

The theory of the unchanging brain decreed that people who were born with brain or mental limitations, or who sustained brain damage, would be limited or damaged for life. Scientists who wondered if the healthy brain might be improved or preserved through activity or mental exercise were told not to waste their time.

A neurological nihilism – a sense that treatment for many brain problems was ineffective or even unwarranted – had taken hold, and it spread through our culture, even stunting our overall view of human nature. Since the brain could not change, human nature, which emerges from it, seemed necessarily fixed and unalterable as well.

The belief that the brain could not change had three major sources: the fact that brain-damaged patients could so rarely make full recoveries; our inability to observe the living brain’s microscopic activities; and the idea — dating back to the beginnings of modern science – that the brain is like a glorious machine. And while machines do many extraordinary things, they don’t change and grow.

I became interested in the idea of a changing brain because of my work as a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. When patients did not progress psychologically as much as hoped, often the conventional medical wisdom was that their problems were deeply “hardwired” into an unchangeable brain. “Hardwiring” was another machine metaphor coming from the idea of the brain as computer hardware, with permanently connected circuits, each designed to perform a specific, unchangeable function.

When I first heard news that the human brain might not be hardwired, I had to investigate and weigh the evidence for myself. These investigations took me far from my consulting room.

I began a series of travels, and in the process I met a band of brilliant scientists, at the frontiers of brain science, who had, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, made a series of unexpected discoveries. They showed that the brain changed its very structure with each different activity it performed, perfecting its circuits so it was better suited to the task at hand. If certain “parts” failed, then other parts could sometimes take over. The machine metaphor, of the brain as an organ with specialized parts, could not fully account for changes the scientists were seeing. They began to call this fundamental brain property “neuroplasticity.”

Neuro is for “neuron,” the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for “changeable, malleable, modifiable.” At first many of the scientists didn’t dare use the word “neuroplasticity” in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notion. Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain.

They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many “circuits” and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not. One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior – surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.

In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for eighty-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were fifty-five. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. I spoke with Nobel laureates who were hotly debating how we must rethink our model of the brain now that we know it is ever changing.

The idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron. Like all revolutions, this one will have profound effects.

The neuroplastic revolution has implications for, among other things, our understanding of how love, sex, grief, relationships, learning, addictions, culture, technology, and psychotherapies change our brains. All of the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, insofar as they deal with human nature, are affected, as are all forms of training.

All of these disciplines will have to come to terms with the fact of the self-changing brain and with the realization that the architecture of the brain differs from one person to the next and that it changes in the course of our individual lives.

While the human brain has apparently underestimated itself, neuroplasticity isn’t all good news; it renders our brains not only more resourceful but also more vulnerable to outside influences. Neuroplasticity has the power to produce more flexible but also more rigid behaviors – a phenomenon I call “the plastic paradox.”

Ironically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our plasticity. Once a particular plastic change occurs in the brain and becomes well established, it can prevent other changes from occurring. It is by understanding both the positive and negative effects of plasticity that we can truly understand the extent of human possibilities.

For more information: Norman Doige

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Psychologists Robert Emmons at the University of California at Davis, and Michael McCullough, at the University of Miami, are foremost researchers in field of gratitude. What they have learned so far is that gratitude is good for you, really good for you.

In an experimental comparison, people who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). It doesn’t end there.

Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based). And there’s more. Young adults who practice a daily gratitude intervention (self-guided exercises) had higher levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness and energy compared to the group that focused on hassles or thinking of how they were better off than others. The researchers keep adding to the list benefits that come from practicing gratitude.

Given all the benefits, how interesting it is that we designate only one day to giving thanks.

Heart and Soul
Researchers have found that when we think about someone or something we really appreciate and experience the feeling that goes with the thought, the parasympathetic – calming-branch of the autonomic nervous system – is triggered. This pattern when repeated bestows a protective effect on the heart. The electromagnetic heart patterns of volunteers tested become more coherent and ordered when they activate feelings of appreciation.

There is evidence that when we practice bringing attention to what we appreciate in our lives, more positive emotions emerge, leading to beneficial alterations in heart rate variability. This may not only relieve hypertension but reduce the risk of sudden death from coronary artery disease.

The more we pause to appreciate and show caring and compassion, the more order and coherence we experience internally. When our hearts are in an “internal coherence state,” studies suggest that we enjoy the capacity to be peaceful and calm yet retain the ability to respond appropriately to stressful circumstances.

Neurobiologically, gratitude is nested within the social emotions, along with awe, wonder, “elevation” and pride. It can be both practiced and experienced.

Soul and Serotonin
An example of practicing gratitude is volunteering to help others in return for having been helped. As an experience, it is felt in the same frontal regions of the brain that are activated by awe, wonder and transcendence. From these cortical and limbic structures come dopamine and serotonin, the chemicals for feeling good inside.

Gratitude, then, can be a total body experience and beyond – meaning the deepest and widest gratitude comes from the soul and that part of the brain – the amygdala – that registers “soul” experiences.

So when we look at snow-capped peaks or golden swatches of changing aspen or the Milky Way at night from high in the Rockies, our souls sing and our bodies are suffused with streams of dopamine and serotonin, the gifts of gratitude. In short, feeling gratitude and appreciation on a regular basis helps heal us at every level of our being.

Otherwise
Sometimes the poets point the way to gratitude more than the scientists who can demonstrate its benefit. Jane Kenyon was a poet who understood appreciation. Much of her life, until she died of leukemia in 1998, she suffered from bipolar disease, with severe depression.

Her poem, Otherwise , reflects her wisdom in appreciating and giving thanks for the ordinariness of life that we often take for granted until it’s taken from us. She must have been one of the exceptional healers this article describes.

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Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect’s findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

Understanding the Hologram
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration:

The Aquarium Analogy
Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect’s experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate “parts”, but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these “eidolons”, the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

Time And Space Disappear
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be – every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of “All That Is.”

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a “mere stage” beyond which lies “an infinity of further development”.

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious “whole in every part” nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram’s theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

The Hologram As Information Storage
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage – simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word “zebra”, you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like “striped”, “horselike”, and “animal native to Africa” all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information–another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with evey other portion, it is perhaps nature’s supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best.

Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

Is The Brain A Holographic Storage?
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram’s theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram’s belief that our brains mathematically construct “hard” reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called “osmic frequencies”, and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really “receivers” floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram’s views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Explaining Para-Psychological Phenomena
Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual ‘A’ to that of individual ‘B’ at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

LSD Experiments
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species’s anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman’s experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual’s consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations “transpersonal experiences”, and in the late ’60s he helped found a branch of psychology called “transpersonal psychology” devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof’s newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

Transpersonal Experiences
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain — as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as “reality”.

Even visions and experiences involving “non-ordinary” reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book “Gifts of Unknown Things,” biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then “click” off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if “hard” reality is only a holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is “there” or “not there” because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson’s are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram’s holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect’s findings “indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality”.

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Stemming from this research are innovative techniques and technologies that utilize the heart’s powerful rhythms to intercept and manage stressful emotions. Couples around the world are using this scientifically validated heart-focused approach to deal more effectively with today’s heightened stress, fear and anxiety and to revitalize their heart connection.

Better Communication Comes from the Heart
HeartMath’s research uncovered that negative or stressful emotions lead to disorder in the heart’s rhythms which impairs our ability to think clearly and reason; our actions become reactive and our decision-making and communication skills are much less effective than when we are in a calmer state.

Conversely, this research also shows that positive emotions like love and appreciation can change the heart rhythms to a “coherent,” smooth and ordered, pattern. As the brain and nervous system synchronize to the heart’s coherent rhythm, emotional stress is released. In this coherent state the capacity for communicating and making decisions is enhanced, we’re more intuitive and more sensitive.

Saving our Marriage
Tammy and Reynir Jonsson were on the brink of divorce. Despite their efforts to save their marriage, the stress of finances, raising teenagers and the pressures at work was destroying it. Their biggest issue was strained communications. When Tammy and Reynir would try to communicate it was impossible for them to get past their feelings of hurt, judgment, anger and blame.

Tammy says, “Reynir was always angry and I always felt hurt and unappreciated. Whenever we’d try to talk it would end in a screaming match. It got to where we felt like not communicating because we knew we’d never see eye-to-eye or resolve anything. This went on for years.”

Psychologist Deborah Rozman, Ph.D. says, “During these difficult times stress can be extreme and communication is vital to keep our relationships strong. Couples can easily learn how to shift their heart rhythms into coherence, to intercept their stress response and reset their emotional physiology. The benefits are more open-heartedness, better communication and enhanced problem-solving abilities – all of which we need right now as we navigate through these challenging times.”

Nurture your Heart Connection:
Dr. Rozman offers some simple strategies to help couples get their hearts in-sync.

The Quick Coherence Technique® is a scientifically validated three-step exercise. This deceptively simple technique will help you adjust your heart rhythms into a coherent pattern.

1. Heart Focus: Shift your attention to the area of the heart and breathe slowly and deeply.
2. Heart Breathing: Keep your focus in the heart by gently breathing – five seconds in and five seconds out – through your heart. Do this two or three times.
3. Heart Feeling: Activate and sustain a genuine feeling of appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. Focus on the good heart feeling as you continue to breathe through the area of your heart.

Additional practices to help revitalize your relationship:

• Set a few minutes each evening to connect with your partner. Share about how your day went, your concerns and fears related to work, finances, etc. The act of sharing with someone who cares about you helps to revitalize feelings of being connected.
• When your partner is talking, practice listening without interruption. Listening from a place of genuine care, even if the issues aren’t resolved yet, can provide tremendous release.
• Take a few quiet moments before bed to focus on something about your partner, or something they did, that you really appreciate. In the morning share with your partner what it was that you appreciated about them. You and your partner will both benefit as you engage in feelings of appreciation at the start of your day. Keeping an appreciation journal is also a great practice.

Ray Varlinsky, a licensed California Marriage and Family Therapist and certified Gottman Couples Workshop Leader, says, “One of the things I suggest to the couples I work with is to use emWave Personal Stress Reliever (PSR) whenever they feel stressed. Based on HeartMath’s research, the concept behind this technology is to engage the heart’s rhythms to transform stressful emotions.

I ask couples to use the emWave PSR to calm themselves down, self-soothe and reconnect with a positive feeling and with their relationship. When the heart rhythms are coherent, they can talk about what triggered the feelings that came up and how it made them feel. Being in a coherent state helps ensure success at working through the issues that arise.”

Case in Point
“All these years we’ve been saying similar things but couldn’t hear each other because of the negative emotions we carried around with us. Nobody teaches you emotions 101. The emotions would stack and the stress would accumulate and that’s what entered every conversation we would have,” says Tammy. “Now, before a communication we each take a couple minutes to get in coherence. We adjust our heart rhythms, we release the stress, we get our attitudes right and then we communicate. It’s amazing what you hear from the other person when you do this.”

Reynir added, “Before learning to use the HeartMath tools and the emWave PSR I had a very difficult time managing my anger. Now I’m a lot happier in my life. I’m calm and I feel much more in control. My interactions with my wife and my kids are a lot smoother. Now we can do things together we couldn’t do before because we’d be fighting. What we’ve learned is so easy anyone can do it. But if you don’t know what to do you end up a victim of your emotions.”

Tammy and Reynir suggest taking a couple minutes throughout the day to pause and get in coherence. This has significantly reduced their daily stress and enhanced their quality of life. The added benefit, according to the Jonssons, has been a rekindling of their romance. Tammy says, “Reynir sends me sweet text messages and calls me on his lunch hour. Reopening our hearts to each other feels so good.”

During the month of February HeartMath is offering their “Improving Relationships” e-booklet free of charge. You can download it at heartmath.com/improvingrelationships. HeartMath founder Doc Childre’s “De-Stress Kit for the Changing Times” is always available for free download at www.heartmath.com/destresskit. To learn more about the emWave Personal Stress Reliever please visit www.emwave.com.

About HeartMath®
HeartMath LLC (www.heartmath.com) is a cutting-edge stress solutions company providing a range of unique services, products, and technology to improve health and well-being while dramatically reducing stress. Their emWave Personal Stress Reliever technology won the Last Gadget Standing People’s Choice Award during the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show.

For 17 years HeartMath clinical studies have demonstrated the critical link between emotions, heart function, and cognitive performance. HeartMath’s work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals such as American Journal of Cardiology, Stress Medicine, Preventive Cardiology, and Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

HeartMath’s organizational clients include Duke Medicine, Mayo Health System, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sutter Health. Cisco Systems, Boeing, and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as dozens of school systems and thousands of health professionals around the world.

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The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
Click here to download

Some early evolutionary examples of increasing degrees of freedom are the processes by which living systems obtained energy. Evolutionary biologists believe that early living cells used simple fermentation. These bacteria broke sugar molecules down into smaller molecules such as carbon dioxide and water, taking for their own use the energy which bound these molecules together.

This process was limited by the availability of these sugars and certain acids, and after a while (a billion years or so) supplies began to run low. Some bacteria escaped from this constraint by developing a new way of obtaining food, photosynthesis. Using the energy of sunlight, they converted carbon dioxide, water, and minerals into energy-rich organic compounds. Since these simpler molecules were much more abundant than the sugars needed for fermentation, the new cells could survive in a greater variety of territories. A new degree of freedom had been established.

But this process had its own drawbacks. It produced oxygen as a waste product. To us oxygen might seem a most beneficial gas, yet it is a very reactive chemical. Combining readily with many other substances, it can destroy many of the complex molecules on which life depends. To the cells of the time it was poisonous pollution.

After several hundred million years, so much oxygen had accumulated in the atmosphere that it threatened life on Earth. Nature’s response was to exploit oxygen’s destructive qualities and capture the energy released as oxygen reduced larger molecules to smaller components.

This new process of obtaining energy – called respiration – was far more efficient than either fermentation or photosynthesis, and greatly expanded the range of resources at life’s disposal. With respiration, organisms were not limited to sugars and minerals for food, they could extract energy from the more complex molecules that fermentation and photosynthesis created. Life could now feed off the products of other living systems. A major new branch of evolution had emerged – the animal kingdom.

The animals that first colonized the land were amphibians. But they could never roam far from water. Even toads, who spend most of their life on land, have to return to water in order to reproduce, since tadpoles — their larval stage – must live in water. Reptiles overcame this hurdle by developing tough shells for their eggs, encapsulating a watery environment for the growing embryo. Their eggs could be laid on dry land, miles from any water. Another degree of freedom.

Another step towards greater freedom was warm blood. Since heat speeds up chemical reactions, the rate at which an organism can convert food into energy is a function of its temperature. Cold-blooded animals like snakes and lizards rely largely on the Sun for warmth, absorbing its heat directly into their bodies. When there is no sun to bask in, these creatures become quite sluggish.

Warm-blooded animals – namely, birds and mammals – have overcome this handicap, by developing an internal heating system that keeps the whole body at the optimum temperature for its metabolism. Being less dependent on the temperature of their surroundings, has given them a new degree of freedom. They can be active in a wide variety of conditions and can inhabit regions too cold for reptiles.

The Freeing of Humanity
With human beings came many new degrees of freedom. Speech freed us from the limitation of learning only from our individual experience. Our ability to deliberate upon the future has given us a certain freedom of will; we can choose those actions that offer us better chances of survival or that enhance our comfort and well-being.

Walking on two legs rather than four, meant that our hands were free to do many new and useful things. We did not have to chase after our prey, we could set traps for it. Being able to create clothes and shelter freed us to live in cooler climates. The wheel further enhanced our freedom of movement, giving us the means to transport heavy loads with much less effort. Agriculture brought us other liberties, enabling us to raise our own animals, grow our own crops, and store the harvest for later use.

As we settled in communities, individuals took on differing responsibilities. Some caught the food, others prepared it. Some made the clothes, some collected water, others built new shelters. This increasing specialization brought greater efficiency, and with it yet greater emancipation from the constraints of the physical world. We were free to take on other activities such as pottery, smelting, forging, tanning, spinning, weaving, carving, healing, teaching, writing, painting, sculpture, and music-making.

Yet more liberation came with the Industrial Revolution. No longer did we have to spend most of our life tilling the land; we were free to improve the quality of life in many ways. The steam engine freed us from a dependence on sheer muscle power. Machinery of all kinds increased the efficiency of production, resulting in a plethora of material goods that allowed us to do more tasks and achieve grander goals.

Sturdier ships, railways, and later automobiles and planes, gave us far greater freedom of movement, and allowed industry to use resources from around the globe. Medical discoveries relieved us of from the scourge of many diseases, freed us from much physical pain, and helped us recover from physical injury. In these and other ways, the Industrial Revolution, liberated us from many of the constraints of our bodies and from many of the limits imposed by our environment.

Today information technology is leading to an emancipation from work itself. Automated factories produce cars, electric motors, television sets, radios, cameras, computers, and digital watches with almost no input of human energy. In banks, offices, warehouses, and supermarkets information technology is increasingly taking over functions previously performed by people. Accountants, lawyers, pilots, architects, draftsmen, doctors, engineers, secretaries, and others are being released from many of their routine tasks.

The consequence is plain to see. The more developed nations are no longer heading towards full employment but towards ever-increasing unemployment. Unemployment is usually seen as undesirable, both personally and socially, and something to be fought against at all costs. Yet, somewhat ironically, it is the very thing we have been striving for.

From the dawn of civilization people have been seeking to work less – not more. To this end we have invented a wealth of labor-saving equipment – plows, windmills, water-wheels, pumps, weaving looms, milking-machines, combine harvesters, lawn-mowers, elevators, washing-machines, food-processors, microwave ovens, power drills, vacuum cleaners, electric pencil sharpeners, automatic car-washes, and motorized golf-carts to name just a few.

The intention behind almost every technological development from the first stone axe to the automated bank-teller has been to reduce the time and energy we spend in physical toil. Yet, now that we are finally seeing the fruits of our labor-saving efforts, we are holding on fiercely to the very thing we have tried for so long to leave behind.

On the one hand we love work for what it brings – security, self-esteem, comforts, human contact, challenge. On the other hand we resent it for what it demands of us – the time we have to spend at it, the energy and freedom it seems to take from us. How many of us, if given the money we now receive from work, would still choose to spend our time in an office, a truck, a store, a print-shop or a coal-mine? The majority want what work gives, not the work itself.

We fear unemployment not because we fear the loss of work itself, but because we fear insecurity, uncertainty, loss of self-esteem, material discomfort and possibly hunger – all things that work has helped us avoid. In addition, since our economies are based on the input of human labor (human time is the principal component of any price, the natural resources being intrinsically free), wide-scale unemployment can spell disaster for a nation’s economic well-being.

The question we should be asking is not how to maintain employment, but how to create an economic system that can distribute resources and enhance our well-being, while at the same time fulfilling our age-old wish to be free from unwanted toil.

Freedom for What?
Freedom from toil is not the only freedom we have sought. We have fought to be free from oppression; fought to overthrow dictators and tyrants; fought for the freedom to vote for the government of our choice. Nations have battled to gain independence from other nations, erected statues to proclaim their liberty, and stamped it on their money. We have struggled for freedom from slavery, freedom from prejudice, and freedom from persecution. For the freedom to say what we believe, to live where we wish, and to worship as we choose.

But what is all this freedom for?
Our underlying motivation, as ever, is to move away from pain and suffering towards greater joy, and contentment. This is the underlying freedom for which we have worked and fought. To be free from all that seems to stop us from finding peace and fulfillment.

To an extent we have been successful. We have eliminated or reduced many sources of suffering. We have found ways to satisfy most of our body’s needs. We have increased our standard of living. We have been able to fulfill many of our desires. But are we really any happier?

In 1955, a study was conducted to find out how many people in America were happy with what they had in life. At that time 30% of those polled felt they were happy with their lot. The same study was repeated in 1992. Over the intervening 37 years the material standard of living had improved considerably: per capita income and consumption had both doubled, average house size had doubled, the number of cars per family had nearly tripled, the number of TV stations had increased by a factor of twenty or more, plus the picture had gone from black-and-white to color. Yet the number of people who were happy with their lot was exactly the same – 30%.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this. First, material well-being does not equate with inner well-being. Second, the percentage of the population who know how to be happy has not changed at all. We have done almost nothing to educate people in one of the basic wisdoms of life. In this respect we are still far from free.

The Freedom to be Free
A mind that is caught up in the past is not free – no more free than a mind caught up in concerns about what may or may not happen in the future. A person worried about the opinions of others or anxious for security is not really free. We are not free if imagined fears drive our perception and our decisions. Nor is our thinking free if we judge someone on the basis of their race, dress, profession, accent, or beliefs.

We saw earlier that we already possess most of the understanding and technology necessary to avert environmental catastrophe. And we have the money. What we do not have is the will to do what we know is needed. Free will requires a free mind, not a mind caught up in worry and concern.

To be truly free we need to move beyond our cultural conditioning. We need to release ourselves from our attachments; from our concern for past and future times. We need to be free of our illusions. Free from unnecessary fear. The freedom we now need is the inner freedom that allows us to think more intelligently. The freedom to draw more deeply upon our creativity and use it in ways that are in our true best interests. The freedom to follow our vision, and find that which we truly seek.

This is the opportunity that our many physical freedoms are opening us to – self-liberation. The freeing of our minds so that we may be our true, authentic selves.

This new freedom requires a new kind of work – work on ourselves. In this respect we have not reached the end of work at all. There has merely been a shift in the arena of work from outer to inner. A shift to the next phase in human evolution.

For more information please visit the author’s website: Peter Russell

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