This Is Water

This speech is fantastic!

part one:

and part two:

now let it sink in.

here it is in writing:
If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

-----------------
not much to add after such utter brilliance.
 

Much Love!

Cause of death - sitting!

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

I ♥ FOOD

Photo: by me

If I see food which is shaped like a heart; I buy it!

As far as impulsive buying goes, I think it's a nice impulse

5 points to anyone who can guess what it is!

Much love

The Observing and Masternig of your emotions

This is a BIG one!

How do you stay in control of your emotions, rather than letting your emotions control you?

Emotions are important, they can help you guide your life. If you know how to use them and if you use them correctly.
If not, they run your life for you, without you even knowing or having a real say in the matter. This is what we want to avoid. It is important to be in charge, and to get to know your emotions.

Emotions change your physiological state: your breathing, your posture and your thinking; it changes your body chemistry - in other words, it changes you!

Emotions dictate your day-today-life. As you react to your surrounding; through anchored cues, which pull an emotion to the forefront, and run the show for you.

Lets see what the dictionary  says about it:

emotion

1. A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.
2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance: spoke unsteadily in a voice that betrayed his emotion.
3. The part of the consciousness that involves feeling; sensibility: 

So,

How do you master your emotions then?

It has to start with learning to observe yourself - recognizing when you are in different emotional states, and how your body and thoughts are affected by it - posture, facial expression, breathing, focus, thoughts etc.

Secondly observe your thoughts, truly stay with them. Observing what you think, and how your thoughts affect you. This might be a tricky one; it's like being a second awareness in your head - "seeing" what you think.

Monitor your thoughts, and your emotional state with it. Get to know your feelings, and learn to recognize when you are under the control of a certain emotion.

If you want to break a negative emotion coming on, do something unexpected, like clap your hands, spin around, jump, slap yourself - anything - to break your mind starting to run it's normal program, with the undesired emotion.

Just going for a walk or a light run will help your body chemistry, and turn around a sour mood. Or doing two of the following : Change your posture to a good one, put a smile on your face(even if it's a fake one), focus your thoughts on the positive, control and slow your breathing - taking deep slow breaths through your nose.


In Conclusion.

To master your emotions practice to observe your thoughts - learn staying aware of what you think

- and how you think about it.

As this sets you in the direction of your emotion.

A smile, a good posture and calm breathing will also put your mind in the right direction.

The better you get on observing yourself the easier it gets to halt and turn negative emotions once they start. You will also find that you will also experience less "negative" emotions.


Just for the record.

I don't really think there are such a thing as "Good" or "Bad". As, "it's all good" - however there are emotions that benefit your life and there are emotions that just help to give nuance to "the life experience". It is important to feel all emotions, but equally important to be in charge of your emotions so that you are the one who act, and not the emotion.

I mean, is it you or your emotions who buy/eat/choose/do/want: "the new I-pod", "the red one", "just a small chocolate", "a coke", "a line of coke", "a cigarette", "the chips", "a newer version", "delivered pizza", "ohhh the shiny one" and "whatever else they are advertising nowadays" or "whatever else you use to numb your emotions"

Good reading on the subject are among many others:
Paul Ekman - Emotions Revealed
and
Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence

Much Love

Do you have a problem?

Live food - Raw food - Heated food - Dead food - Deadly food

What do you eat?
If you find that you are eating mostly from the Deadly food list maybe it is time to think twice about your eating habits.


Live food - this is food which is alive
Examples:
Shoots and Sprouted seeds and nuts
Wild or Organic leaves/fruits/mushrooms/vegetables/flowers/berries/grasses. consumed straight after picking
Insects (eaten by mistake or with purpose as a part of the above)
Eggs (as above, picked from the nest)
Oysters
Living bacterial cultures - sauerkraut/nut or seed cheeses - this can be either raw or dead foods that you make alive with foreign bacteria through, for example fermentation


Raw food - food which has not been heated.
Examples:
Fruits
Vegetables
Dried Fruits
Sashimi

This one is easy, anything that has not been heated. Full of enzymes and fibres (if plant products), vitamins, minerals, good fats etc.


Heated food and/or Dead food - food that has been heated.
The nutritional value has decreased and the water has for the most part been cooked out of it. The molecule structure of the food changes and enzymes are killed. Some foods can have certain compounds released better through cooking, for example due to the fibres breaking down.
Depending on how you prepare the food it will be more or less dead. When I say dead food, it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, as in some cases you will receive more energy (calories), however you will not come close to the nutritional content in raw or live foods.

Superior ways of heating foods are: steaming, stir-frying in a wok using lime or water (not oil), using the oven on low-heat, and boiling (soups).

Deadly food - food that actively does harm to your health and your organism.
OK, here are the killers, I have more or less put them in the order that I rank them when it comes to damaged caused, particularly the first seven:
Soda - any kind of soda, you know them, Coke and all the rest.
Sugar - refined sugar in particular - sugar is (a) seriously addictive and harmful (drug). Avoid at all cost.
Flour - particularly white flour.
Artificial/Chemicals - Aspartame and all the other scary conservatives and e-numbers, they cause you serious harm.
Fast food - or more appropriately named, Junk food (you are what you eat, junk=trash people)
Ready Meals - same as fast food, it is trash!
Cooked or hydrogenated fats - Deep fried foods, or heated fats in general - seriously a bad idea.
Refined salt - Pure Sodium, if you want salt, change it for a natural salt, with the minerals all intact, a real salt has colour (red, grey, pink, purple, black) any colour but white.
Smoked foods - the smoking process creates carcinogens.   
Dairy- pasteurized dairy, no matter what the add campaigns say, it's bad news. It has puss, blood, hormones, vaccines, the protein casein (which promotes cancer growth), and it causes serious mucus build up in your lungs and sinus. Furthermore, it promotes asthma and allergy, and if you are not white European you will have even bigger problems with dairy. 
Soya - Most likely GM - Full of female hormones and other nasty substances, if you want to eat this your best bet is to eat small amounts and make it yourself (then it is a live food)
Meat - another dark horse to your health, if you really want to eat meat, eat only organic meat and fish from clean water, and do so in small amounts, and infrequently. Wild game is the best meat you can eat - pig (pork), cow (beef) and commercial chicken are some of the worst. And naturally sausages and hot dogs, they are nasty things and don't really deserve to be called meat. 
Alcohol -not a food but it has to be on here, as it does your body serious harm, if you want to drink, do so modestly and infrequently.

Simple tips that will get you away from the Deadly list are:

• Change your products from refined products to unrefined whole products - wholegrain etc
• Substitute your rice/pasta/potatoes etc. for Quinoa
• Change your soda drinks for fresh juice or water 
• Start using a real salt
• Use the cooking tips as given under heated foods
• Stop using your microwave oven
• Stop buying fast food, McDonald's and Co does not serve happy meals, they serve depression.
• Always eat organic. Particularly meat products.
• Start reading the ingredients on the products that you buy, if they have conservatives, sugar, salt, hydrogenated fats and soya lecithin (to just mention a few) just don't buy it.... if you really want cookies, well do like your grandmother, make your own (but use unrefined sugar and wholegrain flour)

Simple tips to improve your health through the diet:

• Eat a fruit before every meal
• Don't drink with your meal
• Drink plenty of water in-between meals
• Drink a fresh juice every day
• Start your day with a Green smoothie
• Chew your food properly and eat in a calm state
• Give thanks for your food
• Leave two hours after eating before going to bed
• Feel no guilt in combination to your food choices, eat and love it.

That's it for now people, Love yourself and treat your body with respect, it deserves it.

PS. at the moment the only animal products I eat are honey, bee pollen and insects (unknowingly).

Interesting - The Mind and the Universe

It is key to know and understand your mind. How your reality is created and how your actions and reactions work, how you defend your own unconscious behaviour and how your belief system locks you inside a box.

This film is great, it is actually two films; the first one is about your mind and the second about quantum physics..
.
I am posting it mainly for the first film, however the second is interesting too.


oh, and thanks to Sarah for showing this to me.

Much Love

This is a no brainer - time to act!

This is an urgent message please take the time to hear it, then sign the petition:

http://www.savenaturalhealth.eu/


 For more information about Alliance for natural health go to their website:

http://www.anh-europe.org/

People can lose their freedoms in matter of seconds and not come to miss them for decades

Apathy is not an option, only action is!

Stand up for what is right!

Much love.

What's the big deal with what you eat?

You are what you eat - a saying that you no doubt have heard. However, judging by how majority of people eat, I believe few people actually take in the reality of this statement.

You are what you eat - quite literally

Your body is constantly changing. Cells are dying, new ones are getting made in place of the old ones, fresh blood cells are being created, and much much more. Different cells/parts of your body regenerate with different frequency, everything from daily to yearly or more. But to give you a good idea of your body's regeneration, every 7 years you are a completely new make up of cells. Or to put it in another way; Today you are a completely new/different biological organism than you were 7 years ago.

Now here is a vital part; Your body creates its new cells from the minerals, vitamins, lipids, amino acids etc. that it receives from what you digest. Or to paraphrase once more; The compounds of what you digest becomes you!

This is pretty powerful information; You are constantly creating the new you, and play a direct role in the creation; You are the one who choose the building materials. You are the one who decides what your body will be made from.

You quite literally have the choice to degenerate by poor dietary choices or regenerating yourself by eating the best food ever.

Life without TV

A fated spring day in 2005 our TV stopped working.

P and I took it as a sign of sorts, and agreed on not buying another.

I can honestly say that it has been one of the best decisions taken in my life.

I never really spent much time thinking about the decisions I've taken in life and how they rank towards one and other, but now writing this, I can easily say that deciding to live without TV is among the top 10 best decisions, together with perhaps studying in the States, moving to London, changing my diet and moving to Brazil.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand: Life without TV

Living life without TV gave me a minimum of 3 hours extra per week, but to be more realistic an extra 8-10 hours or at times much more per week. And I say extra, because watching TV is dead time. It is time that you can spend doing things that is good for you, or give you something in return.

Time better spent improving your life; playing, learning, talking with friends and family, exercising, taking up a new hobby or just laying on the couch daydreaming etc.

You are what you drink

Water is the fountain of youth, and the elixir of life.

When you were born you were about 90% water. Think about it, that is allot of water. and when you are born, you are fully alive.

At the moment you are around 70% water.

When your body reaches 50% water, you are clinically dead.

We lose about 2.5 litres of water every day, through normal functioning, we need to get that back through our food, our skin and through drinking water.

Most people don't drink enough water, and water is life.
To make it easy, water is involved in most bodily functions, and if you want them to function well you want your body to stay hydrated with new fresh water.

Most people are chronically dehydrated, this shows up in various ways, everything from asthma and IBS to headaches and dry skin.

If you are overweight you can usually lose easy kilos by just starting drinking the right amount of water.

Your body needs about 1,5 - 2 litres per day to function normally, if you loose allot of liquid due to exercise or hot weather, more might be good. the more you weigh the more you need. and depending on your state of dehdration, and how dry your food is you might need, much more.

Start your day with plenty of water

Before you leave bed in the morning, drink a large glass of water (the larger the better) first thing in the morning...

Drinking warm water in the morning is also very helpful and cleansing for the system.

MY MORNING ROUTINE

My mornings are started with the drinking of around a litre of water upon wakening... a big glass before I leave the bed, and then I fill the glass and drink it again, during the waking process... I go to the bathroom and I empty, making my day start with a nicely clean and empty intestine each day...

I eat a raw vegetarian diet, rich in fibres and water.
I avoid eating 2 hours before I go to bed, and I avoid eating late at nights, so that my body can have time to do both the digestive process and general body maintenance while I sleep.

After I have been to the toilet, and I have finished my water, I flush my teeth with olive oil (cold pressed).
I flush and chew a table spoon of oil for 3-4 minutes, this helps my body to release toxins from the blood stream, through my mouth. I spit, then rinse with mineral salt and water, or bicarbonate soda and water; then I repeat the process. This is called oil pulling.

After this I brush my tongue a bit, and my teeth, then it is time for food. Depending on how much time I have available I either have a fruit to start me off, or I go for a green smoothie right away.

Today will be some melon, with a green smoothie following after about 30 - 45 minutes.

I always start my day with a green smoothie, which is a mixture of any dark leafy green, fruit (I usually use banana) and water, it's delicious and it sets me off for the best start of the day ever, full of energy and health.

- The water helps hydrate me and helps flush my kidney and liver in the morning.

- The oil helps me have whiter and cleaner teeth, a less toxic body and better health.

- The green smoothie helps me get a good helping of healthy greens in my stomach when my digestive fires are high, which sets for good assimilation and good energy to last.

habits create results, if you have good habits you will get good results!

Much love!

thoughts from my garden

I saw the film Network last night, it is from 1976, and hits a very rusty nail on the head. "There are no nations there is no democracy, there is only business, the world is a business."

The thought of countries is a dying concept, there are only multinational corporations, and they run us through governments, UN, WTO, IMF, etc. still pulling a cloak in front of eyes, making us believe that the concept of nations is still valid... well the blurring of the edges is strong when EU has taken the sovereignty from its member nations, and WTO punishes any nation who do not play it's game of Free Open Markets... private banking giants (IMF) are receiving money from nations to lend out to other nations, with clauses and rules which takes the freedom even further from the nation than it was before... We have seen Greece, we have seen Iceland, we can see what is happening in the USA, and we will soon be able to see what will happen to the UK, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

Then there is the impending war against Iran, the media networks are building it up and creating the groundwork for an attack... reports about people getting death sentences executed by stoning, and reports of civil unrest and nuclear weapons... all this so that we the people will not be too upset when Israel or USA throws the first stone....

death penalty in USA is by injection or electric chair, in Japan by hanging...

I don't see much difference from frying internally or getting battered by stones, so lets liberate USA, the people in the USA are ruled by a puppet government, they are an aggressor all around the world, they do have a nuclear bomb (and has used it in the past) they put their citizens in jail for very small minor offences in the name of profit. That's right jails are big business in the states and excellent access to free labour (slave trade), plus the tax payers pay for the whole thing.

Larger parts of the US prison population are in Jail due to minor Marijuana offences...

Marijuana, which is a proven medicine, one of the most effective pain killers on the market. The medicine companies would get big dents in their profit margin if people started making and using hemp oil as an anointment(said to heal skin cancer among many other ailments), or the leafs and flowers as a medicine...

Then we have Hemp, the answer to most of our environmental problems at this time in history: Strong Plastic, good fuel, high nutritional value, one of the strongest fibres known to man, stronger than wood. Now lets put this in to context for you, the brainwashed media and culture population.

Hemp if brought in as a industrial crop on full scale (in all nations) would wipe out the paper forest industry, the oil industry (yes, we would not need fossil fuels), in big parts the mining industry, iron ore, aluminium etc...
It would kill the cotton industry (whom uses 50% of all pesticides used in agriculture). The soya bean would also in big parts be made void if Hemp came in as a player, as would ethanol made from cane sugar... then we have the seeds, which would be able to feed the whole world, and would make very good animal feed (granted I would love to see a world without captured slave animals purely used for our consumption, particularly since the consumption of said meat is one of the main reasons to the poor health of the meat eating nations (cancer, heart decease etc.) and the main reason for our energy consumption, water consumption and in big parts pollutions.

One acre of Hemp is equivalent to one acre of grown forest when it comes to productivity, but you can replant it yearly ( a forest will take anything from 7 years +).

But as you can see Hemp (which doesn't have THC, which means you can't get high from it or use it as a "drug") would put many, very big industries on loose ground.

What you focus on gets amplified. so I don't focus on the above, but I do know about it, because I hold knowledge in high regard. I focus on love, gratitude, how amazing everyday is (they are you know), I focus on having the best time ever, all the time. I focus on my personal growth, I focus on laughter, harmony and beauty! I focus on my increased wealth, on my amazing health and all lives opportunities, which seems to be standing in a big cue just waiting for you to grab one or all of them.

I focus on my posture, I focus on my breathing, I focus on my thoughts, I focus on being concious... I focus on the truth... my truth is very different from the truth you are told by the media corporations, my truth is a truth that you don't get served up on the six o'clock news or in the morning news papers. My truth you can find in books, films and on the internet...

My truth is written between the lines, and my truth can be verified if you choose to know... and the lies of TV news and news papers can also be verified, all you need is a little will to wake up from the matrix, and start educating yourself.

It is a very liberating process... because you take back your freedom, the freedom of your thoughts, the freedom of your beliefs.

and when you start learning, you might get upset, you might get scared, you might be sad, you might not understand it... but you are learning.

Much love to you all!