Source: Circular Time

The Judea-Christian view of time is that it is linear..therefore, it is consistent with a timeline…and so have created time that has a beginning and an end….This is how Western Europe and America have created their view of sacred ‘spaces or locations’. Their linear time view of the world has an ending,the final resting place or Heaven is where their culture defines Sacred locations…This idea that time has a timeline can best be seen in the Bible…For example, the world seen through traditional Christian eyes includes an interpretation of historic political and social events as the cultural views of history in that it is interpretable as God’s plan, which completes after Revelations and the second coming.

This view of time can have numerous impacts on Earth’s spirituality and land. It can be illustrated by the Western European tradition of colonialism and their need to ‘subdue the earth’. These terms are realized because of the feeling that ‘sacred space’ is elsewhere or in Heaven. This belief of the idea that the current location of Earth is inferior or flawed has led to the industrialization of the world and the new global market far cheap goods.

For traditional Native Americans, they conceive time as being circular similarly to the seasons. This view of time as a circle or a repeating process creates continuous unique outcomes that are infinite in possibilities. The circular view of time, if fully realized can do remarkable things to our modern concepts of time. For Example, a belief in continual or infinite time creates a calm refreshing feeling of ‘having time’. The opposite view could be epitomized by a man running to the subway station to catch a train. Alternatively, the idea of ‘Indian Time’, which is ever repeating, has quite interesting effects on the concept of location or space. The word space should not be thought of as outer space, but as an entire area that encompasses their life.

Again, this idea of Indian circular time or after a while the loss of ‘feeling’ of time creates unique bonds with Land, which can be seen in Native Americans sacred locations like mountains and lakes. Once, you lose the idea of time and think of location first, the land you live on becomes your life. This land is than passed from generation to generation. As more and more people live and die on the same piece of land without the thought of time- The location start showing patterns and symbols. these patterns and symbols can be seen by long term inhabitants of the land, which allow them to locate themselves within the concept of Nature.

The inherent feeling of connection to everything is felt by the circular thinker because Time has no meaning and location is the only consideration. This connection to space over thousands of generations, creates the spiritual experience in everyday life. These experiences are felt for thousands of generation in the same spot and patterns start emerging. As patterns emerge the characteristics of animals and plant life can be seen as patterns due to the connection to time and the communal understanding of the location.

Most NDEs share certain common traits, but not all NDEs have every trait and some NDEs don’t follow a pattern at all. Here are the traits that “typical” NDEs share:

Feelings of calmness – These feelings may include peacefulness, acceptance of death, emotional and physical comfort.

Intense, pure bright light – Sometimes this intense (but not painful) light fills the room. In other cases, the subject sees a light that they feel represents either Heaven or God.

Out-of-body experiences (OBE) – The subject feels that he has left his body. He can look down and see it, often describing the sight of doctors working on him. In some cases, the subject’s “spirit” then flies out of the room, into the sky and sometimes into space.

Entering into another realm or dimension – Depending on the subject’s religious beliefs and the nature of the experience, he may perceive this realm as Heaven or, in rare cases, as Hell.

Spirit beings – During the OBE, the subject encounters “beings of light,” or other representations of spiritual entities. He may perceive these as deceased loved ones, angels, saints or Go

Communication with spirits – Before the NDE ends, many subjects report some form of communication with a spirit being. This is often expressed a “strong male voice” telling them that it is not their time and to go back to their body. Some subjects report being told to choose between going into the light or returning to their earthly body. Others feel they have been compelled to return to their body by a voiceless command, possibly coming from God.

Life review – This trait is also called “the panoramic life review.” The subject sees his entire life in a flashback. These can be very detailed or very brief. The subject may also perceive some form of judgment by nearby spirit entities.

The tunnel – Many NDE subjects find themselves in a tunnel with a light at its end. They may encounter spirit beings as they pass through the tunnel.

Source: Carl Jung

Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul. — Carl Jung

Jung’s theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego,which Jung identifies with the conscious mind. Closely related is the personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but can be. The personal unconscious is like most people’s understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. But it does not include the instincts that Freud would have it include.

But then Jung adds the part of the psyche that makes his theory stand out from all others: the collective unconscious. You could call it your “psychic inheritance.” It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.

There are some experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others: The experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu (the feeling that you’ve been here before), and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood as the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature.

A nice example that has been greatly discussed recently is the near-death experience. It seems that many people, of many different cultural backgrounds, find that they have very similar recollections when they are brought back from a close encounter with death. They speak of leaving their bodies, seeing their bodies and the events surrounding them clearly, of being pulled through a long tunnel towards a bright light, of seeing deceased relatives or religious figures waiting for them, and of their disappointment at having to leave this happy scene to return to their bodies. Perhaps we are all “built” to experience death in this fashion.

Source: Universal Intelligence-By Albert Einstein

The harmony of natural law…reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

There is something about the universe — an elegant order in the way everything fits and unfolds, an inexplicable beauty in its living patterns, and the mysterious depth and expressiveness of it all — that reminds us of the brilliance we see in the works of great artists, scientists, engineers, and saints.

Christians see a higher intelligence they call God’s plan, or the will of God. Taoists see a higher intelligence they call the Tao, the Way of Nature. Meditative traditions speak of cosmic consciousness. Most indigenous peoples consider all of nature to be intelligent and alive. Scientists speak of natural laws — and some are now researching what they call complex, adaptive systems — systems that respond to the world around them, in ways that look a lot like learning. The whole process of evolution is clearly a learning process, a developing of new variations that work better, or work in new environments. Some people see evolution as the dynamic unfolding Great Story of the Living Universe and consciously celebrate and learn from it.

I bundle all these phenomena into one package and label it “universal intelligence.”

When I’m feeling esoteric, I might describe it something like this: We live in a sea of information, a web of interconnection, a field of what some Buddhists call inter-being — a dynamic state of interactive, resonant existential communion. There are universal patterns, powers and wisdom at the core of our being, and the universe vibrates with our every act and thought. What happens in one place and time is linked to everything else far more intimately than we could ever imagine. Synchronicities and analogs abound. Certain patterns keep cropping up: We see BRANCHES in trees, rivers, roads, fields of study, computer circuitry. We see CYCLES in planets, electrons, food chains, wheels, the flows of water and carbon through the biosphere, and the recycling bin. It is no accident that we use the word VISION to describe perception, imagination, insight and prediction. Patterns like these (branches, cycles, vision, etc.) are alive with useful meaning. At every level, the universe is rich with lessons and resonances as it in-forms itself, intimately co-being and co-evolving, learning and remembering. Intelligence is everywhere. There is information and wisdom here we can tap into. There are flows and textures and energies, resistences and assistances, that we can join and follow, or grow stronger and wiser wrestling with.

I simply assume that there is an order that is larger than us, which has its own logic and direction which we are not in charge of. If this is true, then working against this higher power will demand more effort than working with it, and will generate little, if anything, of lasting value except learning — which is always available — and sometimes catastrophe. This would suggest that we subjugate ourselves to this higher intelligence. However, experience suggests that we can, to a certain degree and with great caution, manipulate this higher intelligence for our own ends — which we do through science and engineering by applying natural laws and through religion by praying. But natural order is complex beyond our capacity to know fully, and if our manipulations are at all arrogant — presumptuous that we know what we’re doing — we will likely end up creating a mess like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. A third — and, to me, more satisfactory — strategy than total submission or manipulation is to respect, befriend, cooperate with and creatively move in harmony with this infinitely powerful and complex intelligence, to the best of our ability.

Humility is, naturally, an excellent place to begin in our efforts to cooperate with universal intelligence. Humility in this case simply means an honest appreciation of our own limitations and a real respect for the ancient and awesome wisdom of the greater intelligence(s) in which we’re embedded. Humility means starting from a place without arrogance, with flexible certainties, a place of respect, curiosity, wonder and willingness to learn — in every situation we can manage it.

“Letting go” is another part of cooperating with universal intelligence — being unattached to outcome, realizing we’re not in control. Not being in control doesn’t mean that we don’t have a significant role. Indeed, our influence is part of what shapes the unfolding of whatever happens next. But that is influence, and not control — sometimes more, sometimes less, and always participatory, not unilateral. (This also means leaving behind blame and shame and reconceptualizing responsibility as our [or another's] actual role in events in which all of us have roles. Taking responsibility for the past would mean consciously acknowledging that what we did — whatever we did — played a role in what happened. Taking responsibility for the future would mean consciously choosing a role and playing it out as best we can, knowing that we are only one of many players.)

In what I experience as my best times, I feel more like a conduit for a larger, all-inclusive intelligence, or like my life is an active part of something larger that is trying to happen. When I’m in that state of awareness, there is a sense of being guided. It isn’t so much that I’m told what to do in so many words (although that has happened occasionally, too), but rather that I can feel when I’m “on track” or “off track.” It is a gut feeling that what I’m doing is the right thing (or not) at this time. Often it is more than a feeling of “being in the flow,” but an apparently objective fact. Ideas, resources, opportunities, and other openings inexplicably appear in ways that facilitate rapid progress in a particular direction — as if someone or something were clearing the way for me.

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” ~ Albert Einstein

The subconscious mind is not locked into conventional time but seems to live in a sort of “spatial” time as opposed to the “linear” time of the conscious mind. This means that time, to the subconscious, seems to be irrelevant and therefore expandable or shrinkable according to its needs.

Time often passes slowly – or stops altogether – in moments of crisis or emergency Many people have experienced an extreme slowing down of time in car accidents. A motorcyclist describes being knocked off his motorbike by a car. The impact catapulted him into the air and as soon as he hit the ground he lost consciousness. However, those two or three seconds became massively extended; he felt like he was gliding through the air, almost floating above the scene, and remembers how beautiful the windscreen glass of the car looked spraying out into the sunlight.

A Navy test pilot who in taking off from an aircraft carrier only to find that his plane wasn’t developing power. It started rolling immediately, and then ‘everything went into slow motion.’ What he did over the next eight seconds was so complicated that it took him 45 minutes to explain it.

These kind of stories are often told by sportspeople too. This might seem a little anomalous at first, but sport is a kind of artificial re-creation of emergency situations. Whether a goal keeper makes a save in the dying minutes of a ‘crucial’ soccer match doesn’t really matter at all, of course, but all the players and the crowd treat it as a matter of life and death. A professional goalkeeper recalls how once, when playing in an ‘important’ FA cup match, somebody fired a shot from close range which seemed unstoppable.

“Everything went into slow motion for me. I moved across, watching the ball drifting slowly to my left and then I dived, lifting my right hand to turn it over the bar. All was like a slow-mo replay and everything was quiet, like some mystical dream, until my right hand made contact with the ball. Then everything zipped back into conscious time.”

Basketball players, when they experience being “in the zone” report that the basket seems bigger, and feeling an almost mystical connection to it. The legendary hitter Ted Williams has said that sometimes he could see the seams on a pitched baseball. Gymnast Carol Johnson found that on some days she experienced the balance beam as wider, so “any worry of falling off disappeared.”

Football quarterback star John Brodie said that he found periods in every game when “time seems to slow down, in an uncanny way, as if everyone were moving in slow motion. It seems as if I had all the time in the world to watch the receivers run their patterns, and yet I know the defensive line is coming at me just as fast as ever.”

This time dilation experience may relate to studies of psychologist Robert Ornstein in which increased information processing by the brain can result in a “stretching” or slowing down of the experience of time.

Source: Understanding Flow

For thousands of years, before Descartes, Newton, and the beginnings of modern science, people believed that all of nature was a single organism and that everything was connected. Responsiveness to signs from the Universe was a normal part of daily life, for everything from passing clouds to passing events was perceived to speak in ways that mattered.

Struggling to define the essence of this underlying connectedness, people used words such as God, Atma, essential life force, universal mind. But these words fell far short of reality because, by their nature, words limit and contain—and the nature of this unified connectedness can’t be boxed in or tied down. “The name that can be named is not the eternal name,” said the Tao Te Ching.

In current times, quantum physicists encounter similar difficulties in struggling to define the basic nature of matter. They have found that the boundaries that isolate one thing from another exist only at the most obvious and superficial level; at deeper levels, all things-atoms, molecules, plants, animals, people—participate in a sensitive, dynamic web of information.

This interrelatedness is something for which we have an intuitive sense. Even if we have no formal beliefs about a higher power, the concept of being connected to a dynamic force beyond ourselves shows up in an ordinary, everyday phrase: “in the flow.” “Go with the flow,” we might say, or, “I’m really in the flow today.”

When we try to define flow, it is also tough to nail. One approach is to study a readily observable aspect of it, which is what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did in defining flow as “optimal experience, a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity.” In that state, which most often occurs during intense physical activity, we feel strong, alert, and at the peak of our abilities. This is connectedness—to an activity, to a moment.

Often when people speak of flow, however, they are alluding to it in a larger sense. They are speaking of a connectedness to larger patterns of events and meaning.

Flow is the natural, effortless unfolding of our life in a way that moves us toward wholeness and harmony.

Flow is natural because we personally do nothing to cause it to exist. Whether or not we give it our conscious attention, it just is. Sometimes we may hardly know it’s there: when obscured by our fear or anger it can run underground like a river. But when we move into greater awareness and trust, it emerges in all its strength and power.

Flow is effortless because when we learn to swim with it, its currents move us easily, smoothly and gently through life. Our stress, struggle, and uncertainty drop away, and our joy, peace, satisfaction, happiness, and effectiveness increase.

In 1990, Carl Sagan persuaded NASA to use the Voyager 1 spacecraft to take a photograph of the planet Earth from a distance of 4 billion miles. The result was simply arresting: a portrait of our home as a tiny, fragile speck of blue adrift in an unimaginably vast sea of space. In a commencement address for the public release of the photograph, astronomer Sagan offered these profound words:

Related Pages:
Big Picture
Gaia Theory
Butterfly Effect

Source: Juggling and Flow

Many jugglers talk about the therapeutic, almost meditative state they experience while juggling. It is not uncommon for people keep three bean bags in their desk at work and take juggling breaks. After juggling, they notice they are refreshed and alert, better able to get the work done.

One characteristic of flow is that a person is challenged by an activity while not being overwhelmed by it. There is a goal-directed, rule-bound action system providing feedback to the participant, so that he or she knows how s/he is performing. In flow, one’s concentration is so focused that there is no attention left to think about irrelevant concerns or problems. Self-consciousness tends to disappear.

People report a distorted time sense. While an outsider may see a frantic pace, the participant engaged in flow senses that time has slowed down, allowing ample time to do what is necessary. Activities that provide access to this state of flow are so gratifying that people will engage in them for their own sakes, not just for external rewards.

It is possible to be in a state of flow during one’s leisure time, or while at work. People who experience flow while at work report an increased autotelic attitude towards their jobs. “Surgeons speak of their work: ‘It is so enjoyable that I would do it even if I didn’t have to.’”

When describing optimal experience , we have given as examples such activities as making music, rock climbing, dancing, sailing, chess, and so forth. What makes these activities conducive to flow is that they were designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve. They have rules that require the learning of skills, they set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible. They facilitate concentration and involvement by making the activity as distinct as possible from the so-called “paramount reality” of everyday existence.

People in a state of flow report experiencing an increased sense of awareness, confidence and ability. The idea of taking a juggling break at work, or while studying seems most beneficial.

The flow model recognizes that jugglers bring different abilities and skills to their sessions. Depending on the individual challenge (or lack of, in relation to the individuals’ abilities) offered by the task, jugglers may feel either bored, anxious, or motivated. While it may not be possible in all cases, the flow model offers jugglers to a technique to design their sessions to match and elevate their psychological moods.