Soul Mates

What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?

—Benjamin Staffin

What a nightmare that would be.

There are a lot of problems with the concept of a single random soul mate. As Tim Minchin put it in his song If I Didn’t Have You:

Your love is one in a million
You couldn’t buy it at any price.

But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves,
Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.

But what if we did have one randomly-assigned perfect soul mate, and we couldn’t be happy with anyone else? Would we find each other?

We’ll assume your soul mate is set at birth. You know nothing about who or where they are, but—as in the romantic cliché—you’ll recognize each other the moment your eyes meet.

Right away, this raises a few questions. For starters, is your soul mate even still alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93% mortality rate). If we’re all paired up at random, 90% of our soul mates are long dead.

That sounds horrible. But wait, it gets worse: A simple argument shows we can’t just limit ourselves to past humans; we have to include an unknown number of future humans as well. See, if it’s possible for your soul mate to be in the distant past, then it also has to be possible for soul mates to be in the distant future. After all, your soul mate’s soul mate is.

So let’s assume your soul mate lives at the same time as you. Furthermore, to keep things from getting creepy, we’ll assume they’re within a few years of your age. (This is stricter than the standard age gap creepiness formula, but if we assume a 30-year-old and a 40-year-old can be soul mates, then the creepiness rule is violated if they accidentally meet 15 years earlier.) With the same-age restriction, most of us have a pool of around half a billion potential matches.

But what about gender and sexual orientation? And culture? And language? We could keep using demographics to try to break things down further, but we’d be drifting away from the idea of a random soul mate. In our scenario, you don’t know anything about who your soul mate will be until you look into their eyes. Everybody has only one orientation—toward their soul mate.

The odds of running into your soul mate are incredibly small. The number of strangers we make eye contact with each day is hard to estimate. It can vary from almost none (shut-ins or people in small towns) to many thousands (a police officer in Times Square). Let’s suppose you lock eyes with an average of a few dozen new strangers each day. (I’m pretty introverted, so for me that’s definitely a generous estimate.) If 10% of them are close to your age, that’s around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you’ll only find true love in one lifetime out of ten thousand.

But with the threat of dying alone looming so imminently, society could restructure to try to enable as much eye contact as possible. We could put together massive conveyer belts to move lines of people past each other …

... but if the eye contact effect works over webcams, we could just use a modified version of ChatRoulette.

If everyone used the system for eight hours a day, seven days a week, and if it takes you a couple seconds to decide if someone’s your soul mate, this system could—in theory—match everyone up with their soul mates in a few decades. (I modeled a few simple systems to estimate how quickly people would pair off and drop out of the singles pool. If you want to try to work through the math for a particular setup, you might start by looking at derangement problems.)

In the real world, many people have trouble finding any time at all for romance—few could devote two decades to it. So maybe only rich kids would be able to afford to sit around on SoulMateRoulette. Unfortunately for the proverbial 1%, most of their soul mates are to be found in the other 99%. If only 1% of people use the service, then 1% of that 1% would find their match through this system—one in ten thousand.

The other 99% of the 1% (“We are the zero point nine nine percent!”) would have an incentive to get more people into the system. They might sponsor projects akin to One Laptop Per Child (but with a sleazier vibe). Careers like “cashier” and “police officer in Times Square” would become high-status prizes because of the eye contact potential. People would flock to cities and public gathering places to find love—just as they do now.

But even if a bunch of us spent years on SoulMateRoulette, another bunch of us managed to hold jobs that offered constant eye contact with strangers, and the rest of us just hoped for luck, only a small minority of us would ever find true love. The rest of us would be out of luck.

Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They’d want to join the club, so they’d get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They’d marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family. (Of course, this never happens in our world.)

All in all, the world of random soul mates is an even lonelier one than ours. I prefer Tim Minchin’s take on things:

With all my heart and all my mind I know one thing is true:
I have just one life and just one love and, my love, that love is you.

And if it wasn't for you, baby,
I really think that I would
have somebody else.

 https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/

Winnie the Pooh’s wise words on transcending meditation

Here’s Winnie the Pooh – describing the experience of the transcendental and affirming that anyone can experience it without much effort  

“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you suddenly know everything there is to be known.”

“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?”

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”

Source:http://tmhome.com/news-events/winnie-the-pooh-quotes-on-meditation/

Meditation- create health and well-being.

            

Brenda Lyons http://www.falconmoon.com/fantasy.html

Welcome to the Meditation page, a guide to help you create and develop your personal meditation practice and routine.

Many people commonly hold the image of meditation as focused on clearing the mind, holding certain seated positions, chanting "om's" and transcending the body. 

With Druidry meditation is more focused on the following

• The connection of body,mind,emotions and spirit.
• Deepening our awareness and connection to our body
• Strengthening our sense of connection to nature and the natural world
• Embracing/integrating emotions  and more richness in life 

To begin lets explore some of the ways meditation works and also the basics to make sure you get the best out of your experience.

How Meditation works

Our thoughts, feelings, body and actions are all influenced by each other and are inter-related as the image below depicts.

Our brain is a complex muscle and like all  muscles can become stressed, unwell or tight. Often stress is a core root of most ailments and modern problems , the constant mental chatter and worry over things, people and  emotions is something most people can relate to. You are probably feeling tense even reading this!

Most people say that its hard to find the "off switch" in their head, they feel that their body is tense or  as if they are purely "reacting" to life ,rather than fully  living it.

Meditation can help change this by creating "mind strength" which is one of the most empowering tools we can employ to impact and improve all aspects of life.

By learning to relax our body through breathing and focus our mind on peaceful or enjoyable images ,we begin to unwind and our emotions become soothed. We actually change the way our mind functions with meditation, enabling  us to move from higher frequency brain waves to lower frequency and calm the mind.

Slower wavelengths mean more time between thoughts, which means more opportunity to skillfully choose which thoughts you invest.

The following is an article on the scientific studies that support the incredible benefits of regular meditation

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/15/meditation-emotional-processing-emotions-brain_n_2123753.html

How to meditate.

The breath and mind work in tandem, so as breath begins to lengthen, brain waves begin to calm and slow down, but also the body responds by relaxing. There is no failure or success in meditation as it is a skill we learn to develop over consistent practice.

• Make sure you are warm, place some  relaxing music on, incense etc
• To begin the meditation,become comfortable, close your eyes, and eliminate as many interruptions as possible to ensure you can fully relax.
• Watch your breath. Simply notice your breath flowing in. Flowing out. Don’t try to change it in any way. Just notice.
• Silently repeat the mantra: “Breathing In. Breathing Out.” As your mind begins to wander, draw it back to your breath. Notice that as your breath begins to lengthen and fill your body, your mind begins to calm.
• Become aware of your body and slowly working from head to toe/toe to head focus and relax each muscle,joint, fibre of you body.
• You may wish to visualize a golden or coloured light filling your body as you do this
• Any thoughts , notice them and allow them to flow away/breath them out.
• Consistency is key.
• Either follow a visualisation/mantra/chant or allow this time for contemplation
• When you are finished take your time before you move or doing anything
• Short regular meditation sessions are much more beneficial than irregular or long.

Tips and tools.

• Choose a position you are comfortable in and ensure you are warm.
• Turn of phones etc so you are not disturbed. Create ambience with music, a favourite pillow/blanket,candles, scents etc 
• Short and regular are the best practice
• Thoughts do pop into our head and allow these to flow past or refocus on your breathing
• If you find following imagery difficult instead focus on the sensations or awareness's. 
• People can sometimes get "lost" and in this case refocus on your breathing and follow from where you can.
• Meditation can be for creating uplifting feelings and energizing
• Themes of meditation can include - compassion,de-stressing, self esteem, chakra's, reducing pain/discomfort, health, spirituality, problem solving etc
• With time meditation can be in silence and without imagery but choose what you are happiest with, not what is "expected"
• Meditation can be moving or focused on an activity such as walking, eating etc.
• Make it a time for self nourishment and care! 

Music link for meditation tracks .

http://www.rhapsody.com/artist/christopher-lloyd-clarke/album/vision-quest/track/the-journey

http://www.anugama.com/

Guided Meditations

http://druidtherapy.blogspot.co.nz/2013/06/the-wings-of-change.html

http://druidtherapy.blogspot.co.nz/2013/04/meditate-your-way-to-compassion.html

Source: http://druidtherapy.blogspot.com/p/meditation-to-create-health-and.html

Fenomen ega

Postoji jedna divna priča iz Sufi tradicije, koja ide ovako:

Živio je jednom jedan mistik koji je predano radio na sebi, držeći stroge askeze i meditirajući u osami duži niz godina. Jednoga dana, u dubini svog bića, oseti on da je došlo vrijeme da se konačno spoji s Bogom te pođe to i učiniti. Poslije dužeg puta, dođe tako pred Božja vrata, pokuca na njih, kad se s druge strane začu Božji glas:„Tko je to?“

        „To sam ja“, odgovori mistik. Na to mu Božji glas uzvrati: „Vrati se nazad!“

Prođe od tada nekoliko godina, mistik je nastavio raditi na sebi. Dođe vrijeme, opet on otiđe do Božjih vrata, pokuca, a s one strane se opet začu glas: „Tko je to?“

        „To sam ja!“ – viknu mistik što je mogao jače, kako bi ovaj put naglasio svu svoju riješenost i spremnost za sjedinjenjem s Vrhovnim.

        „Vrati se nazad!“ – opet mu, kratko, odgovori Bog.

…Prođu potom mnoge godine u meditaciji i samoodricanju, i mistik konačno ponovo stigne pred vrata Božjeg doma. Prišavši, tiho i smjerno pokuca – a s druge strane začuje se poznati glas: „Tko je to?“

         „To si – Ti!“ odgovori mistik … i nađe Sebe u sjedinjenju s Njim

Kada je riječ o EGU, mnogi nemaju ni približnu predstavu što bi taj pojam trebao, i mogao, značiti – dok su vrlo rijetki (bar za sad!) oni koji shvaćaju njegovu sveobuhvatnost, i totalitet njegovog utjecaja na Realnost i na našu percepciju „onoga što jest“. On je, zapravo, toliko prisutan – i „u nama“ i „oko nas“ – da ga uglavnom uopće nismo svjesni… Netko će zapitati kako je to moguće, ako je uopće istina, ali to je slična stvar kao kad zaronimo ispod površine oceana: svuda oko nas nalazi se nebrojeno mnogo kapljica vode (jer ocean je, svakako, sačinjen od njih) ali mi zapravo ne primjećujemo niti jednu jedinu. Tako je i s EGO-om; samo što ocean ima svoje granice, a EGO ih – nema!

Neki od „upućenijih“, o EGU znaju tek toliko da je on lažno-ja, za razliku od „nekakvog“ tzv. istinskog-ja, ali: „Tko će još razbijati glavu tim besmislicama, kad život od nas traži mnogo konkretnije stvari nego što su to kojekakve intelektualne tričarije?!…“ – I na tome se, nažalost, često sve završava; a mnogi o njemu ne znaju čak ni toliko. Konačno, u terminima psihoanalize, EGO („ego“) predstavlja „Središnji dio trodjelne strukture ličnosti, nastao modifikacijom „ida“ u dodiru s vanjskim svijetom.“ Kao što je i –„Centar racionalne svjesnosti i efektivne djelatnosti“… „uklješten“ između ida (nesvjesnog) i super-ega (nositelj moralnih normi, supervizor). Time je njegov zadatak – integracija pojedinih psihičkih djelova ličnosti u skladnu cjelinu, kao i da usaglašava težnje idas mjerilima super-ega. – Ukoliko to ne uspijeva, javljaju se razni, prije svega psihički a potom i duševni, poremećaji ličnosti.

…Sve to može biti točno – jer EGO, otprilike, jest sve to – ali takav pogled nije zaista točan, jer EGO jest i mnogo, mnogo više od toga. Njegov zadatak i funkcija nije samo, kako teoretičari kažu, „da se rukovodi principom realnosti“, ma što to zapravo značilo – već on jest sam Tvorac i Kreator te naše („EGO-kreirane“) Realnosti!

Imajući to u vidu, budimo sigurni da o EGU ne možemo mnogo saznati iz bilo kakvog opisa ili „definicije“, već je jedini put k tome – pokušati ga jasno pojmiti, i to budno sagledavajući sveobuhvatnost i sve-imputiranost samog njegovog čudesnog fenomena.

 Kroz vijekove su Sveti spisi pronosili istinu o tome, a prosvijetljeni mudraci slali poruke Istine, ali – mi „nismo imali uši da čujemo“. Svi oni su nam govorili o„nečemu“, a mi nismo bili sposobni shvatiti suštinu tog naučavanja zato, i samo zato, što nismo imali razumijevanje o tome – što je to EGO.

Zato onaj, i samo onaj, tko shvati EGO razumijet će i ISTINU!

Osho, kontroverzni indijski mistik i prosvijetljeni duhovni Učitelj, o EGU – njegovom entitetu – rekao je slijedeće: 

„Ego je prošlost, kontinuitet, sve što ste radili, sve što ste akumulirali, sve karme, sva uvjetovanost, sve želje i žudnje, svi snovi prošlosti. Sve što je prošlost – predstavlja ego. Ego može živjeti samo kroz pamćenje: tko ste, odakle ste došli, kome pripadate, zemlja, rasa, religija, obitelj… i sve patnje, sve rane, sva zadovoljstva – sve što se dogodilo u prošlosti. Sve što se dogodilo je ego, a vi ste taj kome se dogodilo. – Ta razlika mora biti shvaćena: vi ste taj kome se sve to dogodilo, a ego je sve ono što se dogodilo. Ego je oko vas. Vi ste u centru, bez ega“.

Oshov „ego“ i ovaj naš „ego“ jedno su isto, samo ga mi ovdje, iz dubokog poštovanja (nipošto o-božavanja, već samo poštovanja!) koje nužno zaslužuje takav „protivnik“, označavamo – i označavaćemo ga – velikim slovima: EGO.

http://radioliberum.org/fenomen-ega/

Imaju li ljudska bića slobodnu volju?

Imaju li ljudska bića slobodnu volju, ili su predmet sudbine? O ovom pitanju se razgovaralo već tisućama godina. Pogrešno je misliti da svi pojedinci podliježu istim zakonima. Oni, koji poput životinja, samo slijede svoje čisto instinktivne impulse, neizbježno podliježu zakonima sudbine; njihova vlastita priroda je ta, koja stvara njihovu sudbinu.

Oni s druge strane, koji su stekli majstorstvo nad svojim instinktima i svojim strastima, izmiču sudbini i ulaze u carstvo providnosti, milosti, gdje doživljavaju svjetlo i slobodu. Nemojte misliti da svatko može biti slobodan ili da svatko mora podnijeti neumoljivu sudbinu. Ne, sloboda ovisi o osobnom stupnju razvoja svakog čovjeka. Shodno tome kako misle, osjećaju i djeluju, ljudi ili padaju u kvačila sudbine ili privuku na sebe blagoslove providnosti. Tako su u nekim oblastima sputani, podložni sudbini, dok u drugima izmiču sudbini i slobodni su … dok dođe dan kada će njihova sloboda biti potpuna.

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

http://radioliberum.org

Learning How to Float by Mark Nepo

When we stop struggling,

we float.

When first learning how to swim, I didn’t trust the deep. No matter how many assuring

voices I heard from the shore, I strained and flapped to keep my chin above the

surface. It exhausted me, and only when exhausted did I relax enough to immerse

myself to the point that I could feel the cradle of the deep keep me afloat.

I’ve come to understand that this is the struggle we all replay between doubt and faith.

When thrust into any situation over our head, our reflex is to fight with all our might

the terrible feeling that we are sinking. Yet the more we resist, the more we feel our own

weight and wear ourselves out.

At times like this, I remember learning to float. Mysteriously, it required letting almost

all of me rest below the surface before the deep would hold me up. It seems to me,

almost forty years later, that the practice of finding our faith is very much like that—we

need to rest enough of ourselves below the surface of things until we find ourselves

upheld.

This is very hard to do. But the essence of trust is believing you will be held up if you

let go. And though we can practice relaxing our fear and meeting the deep, there is no

real way to prepare for letting go other than to just let go.

Once immersed, once below the surface, it is not by chance that things slow down, go

clear, feel weightless. Perhaps faith is nothing more than taking the risk to rest below

the surface.

That we can’t stay there only affirms that we must choose the deep again and again in

order to live fully. That we must move through the sense of sinking before being upheld

is what trusting the Universe is all about.

~Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Mark Nepo