Inspirational Entertainment! Our Next Feature-Length Inspirational Movie is Here!!! Be entertained and inspired to know that humanity it transcending to a new consciousness. Experience the shift now. If you saw The Secret and wanted more substance and spirituality, then you are going to love this movie with extraordinary world leaders like… – Stephen Covey, best-selling author 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Spiritual & Political Leader of The Tibetan People – Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Brand, Entrepreneur, 245th richest person in the world – Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South African Activist, opposed to apartheid – Jack Canfield, co-creator, Chicken Soup for the Soul – T. Harv Eker, creator, Secrets of The Millionaire Mind – John Assaraf, star in The Secret, best-selling author and entrepreneur – Russell Simmons, Entrepreneur & Philanthropist – Byron Katie, Author, Speaker – Wayne Muller, best-selling author, Legacy of the Heart – Marci Shimoff, star in The Secret, best-selling author, Happy for No Reason – Sir John Templeton, Billionaire, Investor & Philanthropist – Hari Nam Singh Khalsa, Spiritual Leader & Corporate Mentor – Gabrielle Roth, Musician, Dancer & Philosopher – Hale Dwoskin, The Sedona Method – Richard Carlson, best-selling author, Dont Sweat the Small Stuff – Janet Attwood, best-selling author, The Passion Test – Sam Keen, Author, Professor, Philosopher And that’s just the beginning.
Transformational conversations
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
#81 Mythology - Conversations with Richard Roberts, part 4
We are continuing our series of conversations with an author, a poet, a Tarot scholar and a mythologist Richard Roberts.
In the 1960s, Alan Watts presented Roberts with a letter of introduction to Joseph Campbell, which led to a 20-year mentorship with the famed scholar of mythology – a partnership which included collaborating in seminars and writing books, and which lasted through the remainder of Campbell’s life.
In his college days, Roberts had vowed never to write a novel until he had an idea no writer before him ever had. In a vision, he conceived of a book in which his characters would “go into” other literary classics and interact with the characters, all the while writing in the style of the original authors of those classics. Roberts regards the resulting book, The Wind & The Wizard, as his life’s masterwork.
In this episode, Richard Roberts dives into his research of life after death and the works on the subject, consciousness of the Universe, Gnosis, and his collaboration with Joseph Campbell on their book Tarot Revelations.
- From ghosts to enlightenment
- Earlier, Richard studied ghosts to find out if souls survive after death. In the same way, later he started to study gnosis to approach enlightenment. One day he found himself in a conscious sleep, and asked the question of “What is the meaning of everything”. He was given a telepathic symbol
- The Symbol of Gnosis
- Richard describes how to draw the symbol and its meaning
- William James afterlife
- William James (in the book published by Jane Roberts about his afterlife) says that he never encountered the God of the Bible, but there was this presence, a light that would give him anything that he needed to grow his consciousness in his afterlife state.
- Consciousness of the Universe
- Growing consciousness. We are part of God and God’s consciousness, and God’s consciousness grows as we grow our consciousness.
- Indian myths of reincarnation
- Collaboration with Joe on Tarot Revelations
- Joe’s contribution – the arrangement of the Marseilles deck
- A Disguise of Hidden Knowledge
- Game of Tarot has been designed to appear as simply playing cards
- Tarot Revelations – a unique book
- No one else at the time could have written this book, due to the combination of literature and study one had to go through
- Western “Book of the Dead”
- Richard’s & Joe’s palm readings
Friday, May 1, 2009
Dalai Lama: Smart does not mean happy
Dalai Lama: Smart does not mean happy – Articles of Faith – Boston.com
Dalai Lama: Smart does not mean happy
The Dalai Lama spent yesterday in Cambridge; I covered his visit to Harvard, and my colleague Jim Smith covered his visit to MIT. Here’s our dispatch, from today’s Globe:
CAMBRIDGE – Arrayed before him were deans and doctors, professors and pupils, and the full range of scholars who populate the hallowed halls of Harvard.
After the Dalai Lama slipped off his shoes, crammed his crossed legs into a too-narrow chair, and unceremoniously blew his nose, the world’s most revered and honored Buddhist monk offered a bit of wisdom for the sages: Being smart doesn’t make you happy.
During a day of high-minded events at Harvard and MIT, the 73-year-old spiritual leader repeatedly showed that he was not interested in the pomp of his surroundings.
When the crowd rose, in complete silence, as he entered Memorial Church, he said, abruptly and simply, “Sit down.”
At a tree-planting in his honor in Harvard Yard, he made it clear this would not just be for show. He chastised the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, for shoveling too little dirt on the birch sapling’s roots, and once the dignitaries had done their thing, he grabbed his shovel and smoothed out the ground, and then took a plastic water bottle and liberally sprinkled its contents over the sun-drenched green leaves.
At Harvard, he flipped through a program while a group of Tibetan girls performed a dance for him; at MIT, as the Buddhist chaplain delivered closing remarks, the Dalai Lama busied himself putting on his slippers.
His day had two major events – a talk at Harvard about the importance of educating people to be compassionate, as well as intelligent, and a fund-raising event for a new institute in his name, the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values, at MIT.
At Memorial Church, after being welcomed by Tibetan dancers and musicians, the Dalai Lama posed a rhetorical question, “whether education, intelligence, can bring inner peace,” and proceeded to conclude that it cannot. He joked about Harvard’s reputation, saying: “Some of my friends in the East once told me Harvard is so famous, even just to walk in that place is something sacred. That is too much, I think. Foolish people, or silly people, can walk [through] easily.”
At another point, he observed: “There are very smart scholars, professors . . . full of feelings of competition, full of jealousy, full of anger. . . . I don’t mean disrespect.”
He said, as he often does, that compassionate feelings appear to be a biological component of human beings – he cited the early connection between children and their mothers – and said those feelings need to be cultivated, not only by families, but also by schools.
He noted that Buddhist monks have weathered imprisonment in Chinese prisons with less apparent psychological damage than that experienced by veterans of the Iraq war, and said, “More compassionate persons, in spite of traumatic experiences, their mental state is still calm.” And he attributed some youth violence to a lack of “compassion, or affection, in family, or society.”
But he suggested that “Warm-heartedness” is difficult to teach.
“How to teach, I don’t know,” he said. “I often express these things. But how to implement, it’s up to you.”
At MIT, the Dalai Lama offered a mix of provocative ideas about promoting ethics in a secular society with banter and jokes that he chortled at himself.
After entering the nearly full Kresge Auditorium, where some guests had donated $1,250 or more for a pair of tickets, he kidded a Catholic monk in the front row that his head was less than perfectly shaved, unlike the Buddhist monks in the hall. Sitting cross-legged on a sofa, he recalled that he had visited a homeless shelter in San Francisco recently and told a man there that he, too, had suffered the same fate after going into exile in 1959. “I said, ‘Me too, homeless.’ ”
His talk centered on how to achieve genuine compassion – not the kind that people easily muster for friends who share their views, but compassion for those they don’t agree with.
The Dalai Lama also said the new ethics center should search for ways to help secular people build ethical values, arguing that most of the world’s 6 billion people are nonbelievers who won’t get ethics through religion.
He asked the Catholic monk whether secularism means rejection of religion, to which the monk replied, “that depends on your experience of secularism.”
“Very wise answer,” the Dalai Lama told him to laughter. “We need to promote secular ethics through education.”
The Dalai Lama had some imaginative ideas for MIT scientists to work for peace.
“You could invent an injection for compassion,” he said. “I would want that.”
And maybe commerce could contribute: “You could have shops selling compassion. In a supermarket, you could buy compassion.”
A student asked about ethics and the weapons industry. The Dalai Lama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his nonviolent campaign for Tibetan rights, said he hoped this would be the century for global demilitarization.
But a good start, he said, would be for institutions like MIT to invent a bullet “that misses ordinary people but hits the decision makers,” waving his arm in the path of a wiggling bullet to laughter and applause. “That kind of bullet needs to be developed. Wonderful.”
(Photo above, by Mark Wilson of the Globe staff, shows the Dalai Lama at Memorial Church at Harvard on 4/30/09.)
Sunday, April 26, 2009
#80 Mythology - Conversations with Richard Roberts, part 3
We are continuing our series of conversations with an author, a poet, a Tarot scholar and a mythologist Richard Roberts. In the 1960s, Alan Watts presented Roberts with a letter of introduction to Joseph Campbell, which led to a 20-year mentorship with the famed scholar of mythology – a partnership which included collaborating in seminars and writing books, and which lasted through the remainder of Campbell’s life.
In his college days, Roberts had vowed never to write a novel until he had an idea no writer before him ever had. In a vision, he conceived of a book in which his characters would “go into” other literary classics and interact with the characters, all the while writing in the style of the original authors of those classics. Roberts regards the resulting book, The Wind & The Wizard, as his life’s masterwork.
In this episode, Richard Roberts introduces the MonoMyth as a path to individuation, tells a story of his own “belly of the whale” experience, and how his publishing company Vernal Equinox Press came to be.
- MonoMyth as a path to individuation
- Myths are psychic openings to individuation
- For many academics myths at the time were nothing more than a bunch of fairy tales
- For one who places self-knowledge above empirical knowledge, myths are psychic openings to the inner world and to the outer cosmos
- Ouroboros symbol, ying-yang symbol
- Joe pointed out that serpent was the God of Levant thousands of years before the creation of the Book of Genesis
- Sophia and serpent
- Creation of the World, Adam, and Serpent as an instructor
- Joe’s mentorship for Richard’s evolution
- Tarot book publication
- Modern psychology confirms that the Tarot cards comprise an image comparable to that encountered in dreams of the path of initiation
- Belly of the Whale
- Morgan & Morgan press – a hoax publisher
- Richard’s mother got sick
- Getting stuck in New York airport
- Joe tells Richard to “ride the tiger”
- Court gives rights back to Richard
- Idea for the Vernal Equinox Press
- Publishing was expensive back then; Richard proposes the idea of his own publishing to Joe, he agrees
- Story of Vernal Equinox Press
- 1953 – Richard being grad student
- Course “Myth and the Bible” – no courses like that anymore
- Early vegetation gods (4000BC) would die and revive around Vernal Equinox, and it appears the Easter resurrection of Jesus follows this pattern. Therefore, synchronicity with Richard’s birthday of March 21.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
What A Combo - Bucky Fuller And Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Buckminster Fuller and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Press Conference, Amherst, 1971. This is a rather interesting and very historical video. Two genius’ in their own right, in the sameroom, sharing/discussing together the BIG QUESTIONS.
- Purpose of the universe
- Meditation and its uses
- Sense of Service
- Money making as the root cause of the predicament we are in today
Watch the videos!!!
Letting Go Of Expectations
Probably one of the hardest things to do is when you have to let go o expectations and desires, and yet it seems everywhere i look ( have been listening/seeing the Dalai Lama, Matthew Ricard, Arnaud Desjardins, etc) they all seem to point at happiness/peace /joy being personal and inside. Yet it seems we tend to keep looking on the outside for it.
Lately Ihave been coming face to face with my own shortcomings and failed expectations quite a bit. One wise teacher/friend once told me – “look at the faults and work with them, they give you the human experience fully. Nobody is perfect.”
Foudn this write up rather heart warming and in some ways very rich so here sharing it with you.
Click the link to read the whole article/write up. The posting below is but an excerpt if the well written piece
Let Go Of Expectations | Joyful Days
Let Go Of Expectations
The one thing that shatters relationships and ruins friendships more than any other is expectations. When we say that someone is not meeting our ‘needs’, we usually mean that he is not living up to our expectations. True needs are very few, but expectations are limitless.
When a person’s behaviour does not match your expectations, you can try to change their behaviour, or you could let go of your expectations. The first is an exercise in frustration and causes untold damage to relationships. The second is also difficult, but possible and worthwhile. Learn to let go.
1. Identify faulty assumptions
2. Seek to understand
3. Observe carefully
4. Recognise the consequences
5. Ask for agreement
Monday, April 20, 2009
Anticipating happiness and 'achieving' happiness | Exchange | Ode Magazine
Happiness and peace of mind have been states many of us have been looking for in some shape or form, so when this came into my mailbox today thought I would share it.
Anticipating happiness and ‘achieving’ happiness | Exchange | Ode Magazine
I remember when I was in high school, looking forward to college, I thought independence from my parents, thousands of new people to meet and access to all the arts, shows and parties I could handle would make me the happiest person on the planet. I remember, years earlier, staring at the ashes of half of my family’s house – the half containing my room and all my belongings.
College was good. After a while, though, it was kind of average. As for all of my possessions burning up, a year later it was only a curious fact from my past. Many researchers have found that people significantly overestimate the emotional impact of both positive and negative future events. Dan Gilbert, a leading researcher in this area, cites the dramatic study of a group of people that have won the lottery and a group of people who have become paraplegic; a year later, both groups are equally happy.
Art Markman, in a Psychology Today blog, cites other studies in which people were asked to anticipate how they would feel upon receiving high or low scores on an intelligence test. Those who anticipated their emotional response worked harder, longer and felt more confident about their achievement than people who did not anticipate the test’s emotional outcome.
These results form a curious paradox, in which anticipating happiness can lead us to achieve what we think will make us happy, but when we achieve it, there’s no serious or long-lasting impact. What can we do to find happiness, then? Well, according to this paradox, we can’t do anything. On the other hand, as soon as we view happiness as a state of being instead of an accomplishment, the conflict disappears. Of course we can rush around doing things and never be happy, because nothing external translates into internal contentment.
These odd study results have been anticipated for thousands of years by many spiritual traditions. The writer of Ecclesiastes writes about the vanity of accomplishment and our inability to anticipate the future. Eastern meditation focuses on learning to be “present.” Happiness is something we are or we are not, in the present moment. It has to do with the things we choose to believe or to focus on, with the stories we tell ourselves, with our ability to avoid worrying about the future or hanging our hopes on a later day.
Take a deep breath. Savor the moment. Nothing will make you much happier or much less happy than you are right now.
For more information, watch a presentation by Dan Gilbert or read Art Markman’s blog.
