Meditation

Obama’s Best Speech Never: What the President Should Have Said

OBAMA’S BEST SPEECH NEVER
Obama’s speech at Ft. Hood, honoring the dead in the recent shooting, is being hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric.  Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic (http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11/the_best_speech_obamas_given_sin...) says:
(blockquote)
“I guarantee: they’ll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won’t do it justice.

Selling Salvation V: An Economy of Spirit

In my last post, I suggested that philanthropism — giving away goods, services, and knowledge, rather than selling them — was a more ethical choice, and one which could be viable even in the modern capitalist world economy.  Many thriving organizations — charities, non-profits, and open-source organizations — give away their work for free, subsisting only on donations of money and labor.  And plenty of small, tribe-sized economies have existed without money or trade in the past.  But could the whole modern world really run this way?

For the Love of the Work

Ultimately there would be no reason to have money in such a society. If you could just walk to the grocery store and grab whatever you wanted, there wouldn’t be much incentive for you to go to a job you didn’t like. So maybe everything would collapse.  After all, why would anyone even operate a grocery store, when they could just sit at home watching TV?>>Read more »

Selling Salvation IV: Philanthropism

Why? In brief, when you buy or sell something, you’re saying, “You’re worth $X to me.”  This demeans it.  You’ve bleached out its essential uniqueness and inherent absolute worth, and given it a value on a dollar scale.  In unfettered capitalism, EVERYTHING is placed on a dollar scale, everthing becomes a commodity, and everything — including sex, work, life, and salvation — is valued only in the marketplace.
But the other extreme — living without trade — presents problems for daily living, because the exchange of goods is the foundation of the modern economy.

Natural Perfumes Now Available on Altglobe from Aquarian Bath

I am pleased to announce for the first time on my blog that I am now offering a line of Natural Perfumes at http://www.AltGlobe.net.  By natural perfumes I mean those that are made with plant based fragrance ingredients, which are pure essential oils. Essential oils have been used in perfumery for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians, East Indians and Hebrews used them. Perfumes were used in bathing, anointing, ritual and as incense. Plant essences were used primarily in perfumes up until the early 1900's, at which point synthetic perfumes began to be developed. These chemical fragrances were relatively cheap to create which lead to the decline of natural perfumery. >>Read more »

July 09! Be bigger then your usual self!

July 09! Be bigger then your usual self! Expand your human capacity!
Kindness and forgiveness is the theme of the month — times for the core of the brave!
 
July is the internal process, the process within, and as we are surrounded with an external energy at times it will seem impossible to quiet the mind and look for the space of sweetness and calm.

Meditation and Breathing Techniques

Human breath exists in a liminal place, that is to say it's between two things.  The action of breathing is automatic like a heartbeat, but it can be controlled like a morning stretch.  Air itself is insubstantial, but we know that it's as material as the ground beneath our feet.  This may be why mastering breathing is so important to the practice of meditation – how we breathe affects our bodies and spirits alike.  Controlled breathing makes relaxation come more easily, and provides a focus for quieting the mind.>>Read more »

Meditation - Choosing the Time and Place

Commenting on the first post in this webinar, M. Davies said that “the primary benefit [of meditation] is, quite simply, taking control of your own mind.”  The thoughts in our minds race on whether or not we pay attention to them, and we assume that this is simply the way our brains work>>Read more »

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