Fearful or Fearless?

You need only watch the evening news to see how fear driven humanity has become. So much of what the media presents displays and exacerbates our fears that we have to wonder, how much of our daily individual experience includes fear? Do we need fear? Can we live without it?

Many of the world's finest minds have chimed in about fear. Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation. Marcus Aurelius thought that if you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. President Roosevelt taught us that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. The Buddhists think that mindful meditation relieves us of our fears.

Some consider fear to be paradoxical: Fear is what keeps our boundaries. If we do not listen to that fear, that knowledge that there is something imminent that is not us, we will face the second type of fear, the fear that destroys all boundaries.

What do YOU think?

Reaching The Source of All Creation

Most of us feel that there is a source or creator or God or ultimate order to life. Connecting to this for some of us, is fleeting, takes effort and may even be something we think very little about. How do YOU connect with the spirit within you? How often do you connect? How does this connection effect your life?

A Vietnamese spiritual leader, Ching Hai, touches on this by answering the following:

Q: What is the first step one must take toward reaching God?

A: We must pray that if God exists, please guide me, please help me. And stick to your religion and pray to that religious head that you believe in to help you. If you're Christian, pray to God, pray to Jesus, Santa Maria. If you're Buddhist, pray to Buddha, to Bodhisattvas, Quan Yin Bodhisattva, Amitabha Buddha, etc., to help you. That's the first step.

The second step is, we must lead a virtuous life as prescribed in the Bible and in the Buddhist scriptures or in any other religious scriptures. I haven't seen any major religion which teaches people to do bad things. So follow your own religious ethic, as the second step.

The third step is, we must find someone, and very importantly, who has known God, who has realized God, to show us something, to share with us the wealth that he or she has got. Just like if we want to speak English, what is the first step? Prepare the money for it, so that the teacher will accept you and then go and find a teacher -- one who can speak English. If you find one who speaks Spanish, then no good. It's very easy.

What do YOU think?

Molly Brogan

Together We Create a Planetary Smile

Since 1998, Princeton researchers have been collecting data on internet activity and its relation to global events in an effort to demonstrate that across the world, humanity is connected and evolving together. Complete information of the project can be seen at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others who have been collecting data from a global network of random event generators. The network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world running custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. The data are transmitted over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where they are archived for later analysis which is expected to show anomalous deviations associated with Global Events when there is widespread participation or reaction to the event, and we can expect large-scale coherence and resonance.

The purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We have learned that when millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network shows correlations. We are driven by that evidence to infer that something like a "consciousness field" exists, and that intentions or emotional states which structure the field are conveyed as information that is absorbed into the distribution of output values of labile physical systems. We can interpret this as evidence for participation in a growing global consciousness. Our thoughts and feeling can make a difference. It suggests we have the capability and responsibility for conscious evolution. We make the world we live in, and if we Do No Harm, we can help create a Planetary Smile. What would it be like to gradually recruit pretty much every person on the planet to join in a planet-wide smile? I can imagine the Earth herself would feel that, and it is easy to imagine that we all might be changed just a little, for the better, by such a shared experience.

The category of events that have that have the greatest effect on global consciousness are: celebration; spiritual event; terrorist attack. One interesting analysis showed that terrorizing and/or Partisan events that evoke openness or concern have the same kind of impact, as do meditations and catastrophes. In other words, events that seem to be the opposite in value, can have an equal impact on the consciousness field. Our participation is important, all of it.

What do YOU think?

When This Life Ends and the Next Begins

What are your thoughts on life after death? What happens to "us" after we die? I think it is safe to say that we have all wondered about what happens to us after we die at sometime in our lives. Much of what we believe is gleaned from our religion or culture and there is a wide variety of scenarios to choose from.


The Bon religion of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism both maintain that crucial moments of transition are charged with great spiritual potential, especially the intervening moments between death and rebirth. This intermediate period, called bardo, is a state of suspended reality in which the deceased are presented with a series of opportunities for recognition of the true nature of Reality. If the deceased persons are capable of recognizing the confusing and often frightening bardo visions as simply their own mental projections reflective of the previous life's thoughts and deeds (karma), the ongoing cycle of birth and death will be overcome. Failure to recognize these appearances, on the other hand, leads eventually to rebirth and further suffering in cyclic existence (samsara).


Neville Goddard, 20th Century mystic, recounts his ideas about the life/death transition at the time of his father's death: "Saturday when I learned he had made his exit I thought of him constantly and I filled my very being with thoughts of my father and all he represented in my world. And then the whole night began to unfold and everything with which I had crowded my mind during the day now became objective. I saw my father as he was at sixty and the peak of his power, and all his children and grandchildren. I saw everything, and now I know there is no death and that he is moving into the world that he himself has created."


What do YOU think?