Jay Kshatri's Blog, page 7

The Power of Meditation to Transform the World

Gordon Davidson and Corinne McLaughlin in their 1994 book, Spiritual Politics, have given an excellent exposition on the power of meditation not only as a tool for achieving stillness, calm , and healing, but to use it as a way to connect to the greater web of life and influence reality for all of humanity.  A deep meditation practice is thus not a static affair, but can become one full of action and purpose through accessing and directing Divine Energy for the greater good of all:

“One of the primary ways we can help in world crises is through the power of meditation. While prayer is often referred to as talking to God, meditation is about listening to God, or to that higher, wiser part of ourselves that is the spark of Divinity within us.

Meditation is the mind’s power to hold itself steady in the Light and in the Light to become aware of Divine purpose. Meditation is called the Science of Light because it works with the substance of Light. Light is the result of the fusion of Spirit and matter. Meditation helps us develop a sense of detachment emotionally and mentally so we can be more effective in helping the world from the inner side. When we react emotionally to an event, we cannot be of help, as our emotional body is vibrating on the same level as the problem rather than working from higher level in order to help heal it and transmit it into something positive. Meditation also helps to purify us, bringing up long-suppressed emotional negativity within us, so that it can be burned up by the fire of the mind in contact with Spirit. It also burns up illusions and distortions in the ind – our fear, anger, and hatred – and this enables us to perceive the world more clearly.

Concentration and steadiness of mind is also developed by the practice of meditation. This allows us to think more clearly and creatively about personal and social problems and to find solutions. Meditation helps us develop our intuition and helps us manage stress. The inner peace we find in meditation helps us to create more peace in the world. It also fills us with healing energy, for ourselves and others in need of healing.

Meditation develops inner resources and energizes us so more can be accomplished with less effort. Just as personal meditation can help us discover more clearly what our purpose is in life, group meditation can also help an organization, public interest group, or government align more directly with its mission. This enables it to fulfill its higher purpose and channels organizational resources in a more effective direction. Meditation in groups can also assist us in working together to bring about a more positive future.

We can use a reflective form of meditation to explore new understanding of an idea – to expand it or refine it – or to find a creative solution to a particular social problem. This type of meditation actively engages the abstract mind or intuition by holding it steady in the Light and dedicating the exploration to the highest good.

Visualization

One of the doors to meditation in the early stages is visualization, since it works according to the occult law that form follows thought. The creative imagination pictures a form, and the mind gives energy, life, and direction to this form. Visualization builds a bridge from the emotional to the mental plane that can affect the physical world in positive or negative ways.

For example, if a loved one is late getting home, we often tend to picture something horrible happening to him /her. Instead we need to consciously visualize positive images in great detail. We can visualize our loved one traveling safely and happily and arriving home perfectly fine. In just this way wee can visualize the healing and unification of those groups or nations involved in a conflict, asking first that this be for their highest good. Many people visualize a stream of white light radiating from the center of their forehead – from their ‘third eye’ center between the brow – which can be directed where needed, surrounding the person(s) and the situation in Light.

Now that we’ve all seen pictures from NASA of the whole Earth, we can easily visualize our planet surrounded by love and Light and at peace, as this strengthens all efforts toward world unity and synthesis, and also helps to heal environmental problems.

Effects of Meditation

Science has offered an explanation for the peace-promoting effects of meditation in terms of quantum field theory. Physicists Josephson, Domash, Hagelin, and Sudarshan believe that impulses of coherence in consciousness could move much like an electric current in a supercooled wire and jump gaps from brain to brain by traveling in a field of consciousness that is much like a vacuum state. Physicist Itzhak Bentov explained that  good mediator can charge the electrostatic field surrounding his or her body so that it will be resonant with the frequency of the Earth at 7.5 cycles per second. This enables the meditator to affect any body vibrating at a similar frequency range.

The Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia found there was less radiation in the Kiev cathedrals near the Chernobyl nuclear accident than in other locations nearby. In conducting tests, they found that radiation seemed to be reduced by one-third in the churches, raising the possibility of a causal link with prayer and meditation.

Right Intention

From the perspective of the Ageless Wisdom (Alice Bailey), the problem with trying to do good in the world by insisting on the power of one’s own developed discipline, whether meditation skills or anything else, is that our ego gets too identified with the fruits of the action and is not sufficiently detached from the results to allow spiritual energy to flow through. What is encouraged in the Ageless Wisdom tradition is to first purify our motives for wanting to help, and the to align our personal will with God’s will, asking for the highest good to come from our efforts, realizing we may not consciously know the deeper lessons and karmic purposes being played out in a given situation.

All the spiritual traditions warn that meditation can be dangerous if there is not right motive involved – a desire to serve the world in some way rather than to serve only the self or to achieve personal powers.

Much of the inner work to be done is for the future, not the present, to prepare the blueprint for the new consciousness and forms to manifest. In doing this kind of inner, meditative work, we need to remember that we may not see the fruits of our work for many years – in fact, we may never know the results of our work at all. There is no objective way to verify that any specific event is directly the result of an inner, meditative effort. And, in fact, we can only do this work successfully if we develop a sense of detachment from the need to see the results.”

Think Smarter World Insight

Meditation is the starting point to access higher levels of consciousness. When we meditate, we calm the mind, and ideally stop the abundance of free-will thoughts (the day to day worries about the past and future that remove us from our firm grounding in the present moment). These stray thoughts and fears distort the Source Energy that is flowing through us. By tapping into that Divine Source Energy, we are able to connect to everything and everyone in existence as well as access all of the collective knowledge and wisdom present in the Universe. The more we quiet our own mind the more we allow Source Energy to fill us and work through us. We then vibrate as close to the Source Energetic Vibration as possible and are able to Co-Create with the Divine.

Meditation is often taught as a means get us to that “quiet” and “still” point. If we can get there, that’s the place for understanding what the Divine seeks to create and experience through us. We can then use our own imagination and creative powers to send that intention through the cosmic web of interconnectivity to materialize that intention.

So in short, the steps are to still the mind, connect to the Divine Source, listen carefully for guidance, and then use our free will intention through visualization and desire to manifest what the Divine has revealed to us. When you are listening carefully, the guidance will come to you through thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Higher states of consciousness recognize that this guidance is in the highest interest for yourself and everyone else. When you embrace that, you recognize your true purpose and are then able to translate the materialization of that purpose through your thoughts and intentions during your meditation practice.

Meditation in this way is Frequency matching to the Divine Source Energy Field. The goal is to get our personal energy as close as possible to the Divine Source Frequency. Everything in creation is energy and thus we are energy consumption and transformation beings. All parts of our reality have a frequency – foods, water, colors, sounds, words, thoughts, material goods, and of course people. The energy we “consume” all has an effect on our energy body and how effectively we are able to connect to Source and thus how powerfully we are able to co-create our reality as well as the state of our health. When we more fully allow in the Divine Light to our being, sickness is rare. We have essentially let the perfect force of creation, perfect us. Where we get into trouble is by blocking that perfect energy through our negative free-will choices.

The food we eat as an example, is just a convenient “delivery mechanism or wrapper” to deliver the energy and information our bodies need to thrive. The books, movies, tv, music, and news we consume all has either an energetic frequency raising effect or a lowering one. As does the words we listen to and say to other people. The highest energy content is in things where Love, Beauty, Joy, Kindness, and Compassion are the main ingredient. Unfortunately, it is easy in our current society to consume things that are just the opposite of those healthful frequency boosting substances. And, as the typical human has approximately 50,000 thoughts per day, consuming energetic information that causes you to have negative or fearful thoughts has a strong detriment to the state of your energy body.

Meditation thus becomes a critical tool to manage your energetic vibration. The more you meditate, quiet your mind and connect to the Divine Source, the more you will become aligned with the highest vibration of creation. Your desires, emotions, and intentions will then naturally be motivated to making that higher vibration materialize in our present day reality. Your meditation practice then will become much more than achieving a calm state of mind and personal healing, it will become a catalyst for radically transforming the world into the image of the Divine. You will be directly involved in bringing Heaven down to Earth and become a Sacred Activist. You and the Source, will be One. There is no higher objective in any lifetime.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

 

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Artist Alex Grey on how each of us can be a Mystic Visionary

 

A beautiful exposition on divine mystical experience from cosmic artist, Alex Grey:

“Experience God as the Divine Artist and Cosmos as the masterwork of Creation. The Transcendental Unmanifest Realm is mirrored in our Immanent Manifest Realm. We are all Sacred Mirrors, reflections of the Divine. Since God is the creator we are also creators, co-creators. The creative impulse is inherently evolutionary because it resists known pathways and seeks a new adaptation, a new style, sound, method, or understanding uniquely suited to the new moment. Every moment is fresh, unknown, with the freedom to develop in any way – this is the power and message of Art for the Soul’s renewal.

When we recognize our own roles as creators of our reality, we are no longer a victim of our circumstances, and are empowered to activate our own imagination and intention to create the life we love.

God makes love to us through the Visionary experience. The Mystic Visionary opens their spiritual eye and beholds the conjunction of love and beauty as the basis and wonder of creation. Mystic Art provides a means for both artist and viewer to align with the creative force and unite with God through contemplation of Cosmic symbolism. We reflect on visionary art, in order to glimpse the Divine Imagination and align ourselves with God. Beauty attracts us by the shine of the divine – it’s God that’s the true magnet in Beauty.

Reflection is seeing as a spiritual practice. The Great Wisdom masters and traditions hold up a sacred mirror of the universal light of love. Reflection is clarified attunement to the cosmic symbolism in life and recognition of the Godself in everyone. When sacred mirrors face each other, the infinite is revealed.

Each of us is an utterly unique reflection of the divine. Every moment we can choose to see ourselves, every other, our world and cosmos as Sacred Mirrors, opportunities to recognize God’s presence. This transformative view relies on the fundamental mystic insight of unity across all dimensions of the immanent and transcendental order. How each of us see ourselves and our world sets our path in life. Our worldview determines how we treat each other and the environment, so it is crucial that we awaken to our highest possibility. What we think and believe are the boundaries, limits, and possibilities of who we are and what we can create and become. Our consciousness evolves through phases from a primal to a more elevated worldview. The function of spiritual teachings and practice is to catalyze the phase shifts toward identifying oneself as a Sacred Mirror.”

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**
Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

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Duane Elgin on Impermanence

 

Author and Activist Duane Elgin wrote a beautiful and technically engaging description of how material reality is fluid and ever-changing, not static and solid – something quantum scientists have been proving over the last century and the Buddha explained in great depth over 2,500 years ago:

“The Buddha awakened to interdependent co-arising and the insight that there is no solid and enduring reality. In turn, he taught that our failure to recognize the flux and fluidity of existence produces an inaccurate and therefore unsatisfying relationship with the flow of life. An analogy clarifies this process: If we assume that the universe is a regenerative system that, for illustrative purposes, is arising or emerging at a pace of, say, 100 frames per second, and if we further assume that in everyday life our pace of perception is functioning at, say, 25 frames per second, then the regenerative universe will not appear to us as flashing into existence at each moment but rather will seem to be a seamless whole of solidity that endures over time. The Buddhist teacher, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, describes this process clearly:

So everything arises and ceases at the same time, moment to moment. This is the condition of the universe and the condition of our own mind, perceptions, and experiences, without exception. But because it is so subtle and the movement so rapid, because each moment is so similar to the one that just vanished, we make up a continuum. Just as we do when watching a movie, which is actually twenty-four frames flashing each second on a screen, we create substantial appearances. (Kongtrul, 2013, p. 28)

Without precise attention, we can easily lose ourselves in the cosmic movie theatre. However, as we increase the precision of our perception to match the pace of manifestation of the universe, then all becomes trans- parent and there is no longer a boundary between our perception and the universe arising—all is co-arising as one direct experience. When both are embraced in awareness, the two are naturally one in experience— awakening wisdom and compassion.

Appreciating that we live within a co-arising universe is immensely valuable as it offers a way of understanding subtle spiritual insights such as the “impermanence” of reality. When we regard the world around us as solid and enduring, we are not seeing the lightning fast pace whereby the entire universe arises and passes away as a continuous flow. Then, in thinking the world around us is solid and permanent, it is only natural that we would try to grasp hold of and possess the seeming solidity of things. Because this intention is not in accord with the actual, dynamic nature of existence, we can quickly find ourselves out of alignment with the true nature of a continuously regenerated reality, and this engenders feelings of dissatisfaction and disconnection.

Similarly, we may read about the “emptiness” of reality and be perplexed by what this means from a conventional perspective. However, in the context of an interdependent co-arising universe, the fullness of one moment vanishes completely only to be replaced by the fullness of the next instant of manifestation. All that existed in the preceding moment disappears completely so all things are truly empty of an enduring, physical existence. This is a subtle and foundational insight for a wise relationship with the complete dynamism of reality.

The ideas of impermanence and emptiness are confusing when seen from an “ordinary” perspective but they come into shining simplicity and clarity of meaning when seen from the perspective of a gigantic cosmic theater being projected into existence moment by moment as a seamless whole. All of existence is an evolving and learning system that never rests in its creative co-arising. There is no permanence. At every moment everything vanishes only to be born anew at every instant.”

TSW Insight–>We as co-creators with Universal Consciousness are the ones collectively creating our reality every instant. Why do then things appear solid – because our thoughts stay the same. Humans have 50,000 thoughts per day – most coming from stored memories in the subconscious – 95% of our thinking then is habitual. Thus, our physical reality stays the same, and appears static. If we want our reality to change, then we need to think differently and break the cycle of habitual thoughts that create more of the same experience from moment to moment.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**
Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

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Ubuntu – A World of Unlimited Abundance and No Money – Part Two

As we discussed in Part One, UBUNTU Contributionism, is a concept and movement being promoted by investigative archeologist and scientific researcher Michael Tellinger, that aims to create a new society which delivers unlimited abundance and does so with the elimination of money.

“At its heart, Ubuntu Contributionism rests on the simple fact that everything created in our world is done by people, not money.”

Yes, we’ve created a system to “compensate” and “differentiate” among people via money, but at the end of the day, people individually and working together, using the earth’s resources, create everything in our existence. Money is a system that we use to “entice” people to provide their labor and intelligence to get things done and provide a medium of exchange of resources. You provide your labor hours for something that you can exchange (money) for some goods or services at a later date. But of course, everything isn’t rosy in our current system:

What are the Pros and Cons of the Money System?

Pro’s

As a medium of exchange, money is effective in compensating people for goods and services that they produce.
The pursuit of money produces a desire in people to create new goods and services.

Cons

Vast inequality of resources between people arises over time, as those with special access or privilege are able to find ways to ensure un-equal distribution of money to themselves.
Requires people to spend 2/3 of their waking hours doing work. People not free to fully pursue their passions and things that truly make them happy.
Money causes people to behave in hyper-competitive ways and win-loss scenarios in a continual effort to get more of it.
Meaning, purpose, and principles get diluted in the continual need to make money to survive and get things done.
Pursuit of money encourages hoarding of resources, information, and cooperation which all result in a situation of scarcity. Money does not create more, it actually ends up creating less.

 

What the UBUNTU Contributionism System proposes is a wonderfully abundant society where everyone gives a small amount of their labor hours without compensation, and in return, they can have whatever they like that other people and companies make, because everyone has decided to provide it without charge. The UBUNTU System accomplishes this through a few simple requirements of participants:

Everyone must choose some profession that represents their “labor of love” which uses a skill they have expertise in or would like to develop expertise in (this would be something you truly enjoy doing – remember, there is no money, and no “career paths” to be concerned about…). Each person is expected to work for around just 3 hours per day in their chosen field. (why only 3 hours? – because without the waste and duplication that comes in for-profit, capitalistic / competition based systems, society collectively would produce much more than it needed with even only that small amount of time).
Everyone must spend a few hours a week in a task is that is necessary for the collective good of the society.

If you make those two “contributions” – you get to freely have whatever the society produces free of charge. Your time, energy, and love – contributed to the common good in about 18-20 hours per week – is all that is  necessary for you to have whatever you like. You would be able to live securely (housing, food, transportation), need for nothing (access to all types of goods and services), and have an abundance of free time to pursue your hobbies, passions, and personal life development objectives (no restrictions or limitations on what you could do, because whatever was necessary for you to pursue your hobbies or dreams, would be provided freely).

How can this be?

Think about your own job – how do things get done? You probably will start thinking of the materials you use in your job. How do you get those things? You pay other people and companies for the goods and services you need to make your product and then you create something that you specialize in, right?  Once made, you then add a profit margin to your product cost, and then sell it. [Recognize that throughout the whole process, it is people doing all the work through a vast interconnected system – money gets them to do it, but it is the people themselves creating all the materials, components, and final products – not the money].

Now, picture, if the people and companies where you bought your materials and services, in turn had no costs for their operations – no labor cost, no materials cost, and no energy costs – all inputs were free of charge. Their effective “costs of goods” is zero. They are now able to give their products and services away freely. In an UBUNTU Contributionism society, everyone produces things at zero cost, and is thus able to supply it to others for free.  There is thus no need for money. Whatever you need to survive and thrive is provided openly and freely within the system.

A few key questions you might ask are:

We use the incentive of money for people to get into certain industries and produce certain goods and services. In addition, some of those services may not be so attractive (think garbage collection). Why would people be motivated to keep doing those things if there wasn’t a strong profit motive? MT answers: “The good news about human passion and the variety of things that interest people is, that for every budding Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, there are a thousand crazy young scientists who are equally passionate about chemistry and solving the sewage situation. They know how to turn raw sewage in to compost, clean water, energy and other things we have not discovered yet because it is not financially viable. Once we let these great minds loose and allow them to play in their laboratories they will deliver many great discoveries.” – As we move towards more advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies, we should be able to automate many things in society to free up humans to live more expansive lives. See the Venus Projec t for ideas on how this will come about over the next 30-50 years.
If people could get things for free, why would they be motivated to do any job? MT answers: “No – the system is called Contributionism, where everyone contributes a few hours per day of their own skills to the community. You have many skills and various passions that you have developed throughout your life. Now you can put them to productive use. The reason why everything is available to everyone all the time is because of this very simple principle. After you contribute your 3 hours per day, during which you perform your “labor of love”, you will still have 18 hours to to sit on your ass and do nothing. In an UBUNTU community this will be highly unlikely, because you will be pursuing many other hobbies and passions – all for free, which access to all the tools you need to pursue such hobbies – just because you have chosen to stay in this community and contribute your labor of love for the benefit of everyone.”


If there is no profit motive any longer, would everyone have the same amount of “things” and would there be no differentiation in things like the homes people live in, the types of cars they drive, differences in vacations, access to luxury items, etc? MT answers: “There is no land ownership in UBUNTU communities. Everyone has a beautiful home of their own to live in, designed and built for them for free, by the best architects and builders, based on the size of their family  or needs. Everyone is allocated land by the community and Council of Elders, based on what they do for the community. Farmers will have as much land as they need to produce whatever it is they are producing  in sufficient quantity for their community. Material possessions do not exist because everything is available to everyone all the time. Big mansions and expensive cars are a side-effect of capitalism, only afforded by those with money, mostly to show off their material wealth that separates them from those who cannot afford it. They are status symbols, mere expressions of ego than anything else, causing separation and creating envy with the rest of the problems we are trying to eradicate from our lives…Much of what you may have accumulated in your life will have a different meaning or value to you in a moneyless society where everything is available to everyone. You will have access to infinitely more things that you can imagine at this present moment. You will most likely get rid of all the junk you have been hoarding – knowing that if you need something, you can go get it or simply order it to your exact specifications.”
If people didn’t have the incentive of making large sums of money, why would innovation of new goods and services occur at the same pace as it does now? MT answers: “This is one of the most misconstrued arguments raised by many. It is impossible for us to make a value judgment on human nature while being trapped in the matrix. We have no idea what human nature is – we don’t even know what it means to be human. We are so caught up in the matrix where most of still deny that we are utterly enslaved by the system. Our perception of humanity is totally skewed by the community we grow up in. Show me a person who will not give their time and energy for something that they truly enjoy. Our values and morals are dictated to us by others with ulterior motives. Our view of the world and humanity around us is dictated by the global media and politicians who promote war and conflict above peace and unity. We are constantly told that people are inherently lazy. We are told that unless we work hard we will never amount to anything. We live with constant stress on so many levels, it is a miracle we can function at all. Most of us do work we hate, but we have to do it just to survive. Deep down people know that they are abused, but they don’t know what to do about it. Laziness is a consequence of capitalism – it is not part of human nature…Maybe the so-called lazy people know instinctively that only a rat can win the rat-race, and and they choose not to be part of that race. Those who say that human nature is to be lazy and confrontational have become clones of the capitalist indoctrination and have forgotten what it is to be human. People are born with natural talents, gifts and passion for different things. Those talents are destroyed throughout our childhood by the education system and society at large. Eventually people forget their dreams and passions and simply take on any job just to survive. Human nature is completely contrary to these characteristics. We are all part of the great creation – our principal nature is to create, to be creative, to give expression to our God-given talents.”
Why Not Just Fix the Current Money System instead of Going to UBUNTU? – Michael Tellinger addresses this question in many ways in his book. My high level summary of MT’s views are that as long as money is part of the equation, then there will always be someone who has more and someone who has less. Money inevitably leads to a situation of scarcity – there is never enough of it. And, those with particular access, political connections, and accumulated wealth will always find ways to get more money for themselves and leave less for others. Competition and the ethos of us versus them, winners and losers, and less and more will always be present. Yes, we can certainly make the current system “more fair” or socially equitable, or perhaps even “kinder and gentler”. For example, by eliminating the banking cartels and the central banks, we could reduce the “tax” on government money that they impose and return that wealth to the people of the world. We could also introduce new forms of currency such as bitcoin and perhaps even “community-based” local currencies that would encourage people to spend their money in their local communities. But at the end of the day, we would still be left with the same problem of having to put artificial values upon certain occupations and skills and thus resuming the “bidding war” for goods, services, and human resources which would again result in scarcity and high levels of wealth inequality. True, we could agree as a global society to put more “band-aids” on the situation such as higher taxes and forced redistribution of resources, but again, they would be band-aids and temporary measures that never address the true disease underneath – a money driven system that holds people hostage and puts a price on their heads their entire lives. With UBUNTU, everyone, literally everyone, is unleashed from birth to achieve the highest version of themselves they can possibly be during their lifetime on earth. And, to enjoy that lifetime in comfort, safety, and collaboration and harmony with their fellow citizens around the globe.

Michael Tellinger answers around 20 different questions like this in a FAQ section at the end of the book. Please take a look there to get more of your questions answered. In general, I think it is fair to say that the implementation of UBUNTU would certainly require mapping out many different scenarios and contingencies. Once you starting seriously thinking about UBUNTU you’ll start coming up with your own questions.

Wouldn’t there be shortages for things? What if people ended up using more than was estimated – if everyone only worked 3 hours per day, it would seem there would be no way to “scale-up” production to produce the extra that was needed?
If only some people follow Ubuntu, wouldn’t I be at great risk of not having any money? What happens if the Ubuntu community I am a part of can’t survive? I’ll have given up my job, given up money, and now I’ll be lost.

How does Ubuntu Contributionism work?

First, the Five Point UBUNTU Mantra:

No Money
No Barter
No Trade
No value attached to anything which makes it more valuable than anything else- because all of our contributions have to be respected and accepted as equally valuable
Everyone contributes their natural talents or acquired skills for the greater benefit of all in their community.

Migrating from a capitalistic system to a contributions system won’t be easy of course. There would certainly be a “transition” time when aspects of both systems are functioning. However, Michael Tellinger believes that UBUNTU will be most easily implemented at first in small towns:

The first phase will probably be the slow and steady decentralization of the urban metropolitan jungles that evolved as a result of the chase for money, as people lose the desire to keep chasing the money and choose an easy relaxed life in the country….People who are ready to build communities that are self reliant without the ugly influence of money…Strong rural and farming communities with a strong sustainable platform will provide the framework for developing future UBUNTU communities in control of their own destiny.

As a first step, these small towns first appoint a town Council of Elders. This group would make decisions early on as to how to arrange the particular town they were responsible for, what projects would be necessary to undertake, and what beneficial regulations to enact for the benefit of all people.

The emphasis will be to create as many community projects as possible and slowly reduce our dependency on outside produce, materials, and money until we don’t need any money at all. These projects must cover as many diverse skills as possible to allow as many people as possible with as many diverse skills as possible to participate. It has to be a social, industrial, agricultural, scientific and cultural initiative that will potentially include everyone in the community…for now, these people are being used as slave labor by large corporations, government research institutions and the industrial military complex. Their skills and talents have been hijacked by the corporations and we the people get no benefit at all from their genius. In most cases, many of the great inventions are kept locked away, hidden from the global population. This will be reversed as these great minds join the communities of their choice and contribute their talents to the people rather than to corporations. And so, our towns will be filled with the greatest minds in science, medicine, energy, education, recycling, engineering, and agriculture and more to help implement all the proposed plans. Contrary to what we are constantly bombarded with by the media, the solutions to our problems are simple. There are immediate and effective solutions for most of our needs that can be provided very quickly if the people stand together as united communities. – pg. 124-125 Ubuntu

In essence, a small town which decides to go the UBUNTU route, can start to outline how it would provide the essential six resources for basic life – food, water, shelter, energy, education, and transportation  – get projects under way for those and start sharing the output of those projects freely among themselves. They can then scale from there as they start developing more advanced capabilities, services, and projects.

Yes, for a time, there will be a hybrid system, where people will have jobs in other towns and use money to augment whatever else they would like to have. It is expected that they will also sell some of their output to non-UBUNTU towns to make money for a while. Ultimately, as they continue to develop new capabilities, services, and products, the town should be able to go completely self-reliant within a UBUNTU non-money based system.

And once one town demonstrates that UBUNTU is feasible, then people in neighboring towns, states, and countries after seeing the benefits of UBUNTU in action will naturally want to implement UBUNTU in their own communities. UBUNTU will thus hit a tipping point and scale up naturally around the globe.

[*Of the six essential resources – the cost of energy is the key expense driver in a capitalistic system and why things cost so much. Everything we do and produce takes energy (electricity, fossil fuels) in order to create it. Over the years, there have been quite a few people who have figured out to create “free-energy” devices utilizing quantum physics principles. Unfortunately, they have been squashed and kept away from the general public – why? – because the people who make a lot of money supplying you expensive energy don’t want you to have it. The good news is that it’s possible and it is coming – once you have it, implementing concepts like UBUNTU will be much easier than we think.]

The hope is that once people in neighboring towns start to see how good the life is in the UBUNTU towns, they desire to convert their own communities to UBUNTU. Ultimately, an UBUNTU domino-effect occurs.

What would be the outcome of a UBUNTU Society?

No Crime
No Hunger
No Homelessness
No Greed
No Gluttony
No Extortion
No Hording
No Debts
No Hierarchy
No Control
No Accounts
No Obstacles to any kind of progress
Not Utopia – but The Natural Order of Things

Are we Really Free in a Money based Society?

Most of us have grown up thinking that the more money we make, the more “freedom” we will enjoy. As we grow up, the society we view around us reinforces this message. We look around at others and our situation and experience that the more money we have the more we are able to do things and acquire things. Sophisticated structures are set up to constantly give us the message that we should want to acquire as much money as possible so that we can “live” like the images of the people with large amounts of wealth do. We are given “aspirations” and given that no other real alternatives are provided, we internalize those aspirations (to make as much money as possible) as real and sensible. And as we make more money, and experience the material benefits that provides, the message gets reinforced strongly at a subconscious level.

We become completely accustomed to view most of life through the lens of money. We place a dollar value on everything – experiences, goods, and even other people. Anything or anyone that helps us make money is viewed positively, and anyone or anything that causes us to potentially make less money is viewed fearfully.

Furthermore, we are told that since there is “never enough money” for everyone and to get all the necessary things done (like wipe out poverty, maintain and rebuild infrastructure, provide healthcare for everyone), that we must constantly pursue a “growth strategy” – the economy is never big enough. The hamsters must work harder and run faster to get to the elusive goal of enough money for everyone.

Of course as this is going on, some lift up their heads and realize that there is in fact quite a lot of money, but it has magically been accumulating in the hands of a very small group of people. Hmmmm, that’s interesting. We’re told that’s normal, and the “American Way” – we should not begrudge people who have “worked hard”, followed the rules, and smartly figured out “legally” how to acquire vast sums of wealth. Hmmmm, indeed.

The reality is that as long as we have money involved in society, we will always have these distortions. The motivation to have more money than someone else, will always cause people to do things that are not in the best interests of everyone else.

A money based system ironically creates scarcity and not abundance. People don’t freely share resources and information and instead duplication and waste becomes rampant. Ever since the Gutenberg Press was invented, we’ve had proof that it is the open sharing of knowledge and information that accelerates societal development and creativity in all human endeavors. The internet has unleashed the same effect in modern times. But even with the openness and universal access of the internet, it doesn’t overcome the desire of corporations and individuals to closely guard their “intellectual property” as a means to ensure they can extract value (money) from it.  Yes, in some ways, the internet has forced upon some industries a version of free or near-free intellectual property sharing (think streaming music and wide availability of citizen journalism).

Most businesses though have been able to stay with their current model of creating products and services, guarding their IP, and competing heavily in the market for the highest price. In some cases, the consumer wins and prices go down. But the consumer also loses by slower product development cycles, less innovation (since insights by one person or company are not readily shared), a focus on disposability of products versus longevity (the need to sell more and more constantly), public companies focused on quarterly profits rather than long-term meaningful contributions to society, and an over-use of earth resources due to all of the above.

What needs to happen for Ubuntu to be a Reality (and scale Globally)?

The one key ingredient would be a significant rise in Global Consciousness. A tipping point in human awareness and understanding that we are all one, interconnected family that at its core, shares one divine source. Our external appearances and personalities are mere masks for the single awareness and consciousness we all share and that intimately connects us all. We would need to realize that there is no “other”, it’s all “us”. Enough of us would have to wake up to the realization that money causes us to go in the opposite direction – us vs. them, winning at all costs, hoarding vs. sharing. If dividing and conquering is the objective, then money is the ammunition to get the job done.

Ubuntu on the other hand, is by its very nature the definition of collaboration, co-creation, and interdependence. A level of consciousness that would radically transform life on planet Earth to one of joy, love, beauty, robust health, and endless creativity.

Can we get there in our life time?

I think so. But clearly a number of things will need to happen to ensure success. We’ve already spoken about a dramatic rise in consciousness. The other key thing is dramatic advances in technology. Michael Tellinger writes in the book of how the UBUNTU System actually frees up scientific collaboration around the globe and brings major break throughs in low cost or free energy, effective health care treatments and preventive services, and robotic and artificial intelligence automation that frees up human labor for more creative pursuits. Many people on the planet have already made major strides in these areas but many discoveries unfortunately have been suppressed and hidden from the public (too much money to be made from the old technologies – no matter what the cost to humanity…).

Michael Tellinger’s work as a scientific researcher has unearthed many of these technologies that ancient civilizations had developed and that we could (re)-Discover for ourselves. Jacques Fresco of the Venus Project has been working in this regard as well. And, lastly, when the truth comes out of Extra and Intra Terrestrial Life in our Solar System – it’s safe to say, “suddenly” we will have access to much more advanced technology than we currently enjoy. In fact, maybe we’ll even get to have those “replicators” that appear in Star Trek and can instantly materialize whatever we choose. Those “break-throughs” will allow us to dramatically change the way we organize our societal arrangements and economies and provide us with many interesting choices.

The near term choices we will need to make will involve alternatives to the current money system being discussed around the world…Most of these, though they implement a fairer version of the system then we currently have, all still have some form of money currency at their heart. But at this point, I have not seen any system like UBUNTU that takes money completely out of the equation (which is not based on Barter, Trade, or the like). UBUNTU Contributionsim appears to me to be the system that very well could be the right long term choice for a truly enlightened society on planet earth that unleashes amazing levels of prosperity, happiness, health, creativity, and technological advancement.

If you’ve read this far, then UBUNTU is clearly something that has sparked a flicker of hope in your imagination. Here are some resources to help in further investigating this wonderful concept:

The UBUNTU Contributionism Book
Michael Tellinger has done many videos on his scientific research work on ancient civilizations for Gaia Television. He has also done a couple of segments on an overview of UBUNTU and recently began an 8-part seminar series on UBUNTU Contributionism. If you want to really get to the heart of UBUNTU – these are a great place to start:

Michael Tellinger on Contributionism – Gaia.com
Michael Tellinger – Hidden Origins series – segment on Transitioning to Abundance
Michael Tellinger – Hidden Origins series – UBUNTU Segment One (of Eight) – Introduction to the UBUNTU Movement


UBUNTU USA Website
UBUNTU Global Website

 

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**
Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

 

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Ubuntu – A World of Unlimited Abundance and No Money – Part One

Could you imagine a day where you would not use or need money for anything, yet you could have everything you wanted? It seems like some type of fairy tale at first. But once you begin to start peeling back the layers of your societal conditioning and get to the core of what Michael Tellinger is really saying in his book – Ubuntu Contributionism – you move from the space of fairy tale to the land of clear eyed optimism. You begin to be able to clear away the dust on the trail of how to get to Ubuntu from where we are today. By the end of the book, you no longer imagine a giant chasm with no way to get across, but the emergence of a path, that is no easy trek, but is one that can definitely (and should be) travelled. As you allow yourself to imagine further, you see yourself arriving in a land of paradise – where every person on the planet is happy, lives in peace, lacks for nothing, and has all the tools at their disposal to explore their creativity on a daily basis.

Sounds wonderful right? So what is stopping us?

 

One thing – Money.

We’ve been trained, mentally conditioned, to believe that the medium of exchange we call money is an absolute necessity for people to “provide” their time and expertise to other people. What we forget is that money actually doesn’t do anything. People do everything.

We are repeatedly told that our problems are insurmountable and that it is all very complicated and that only money can solve the world’s problems. We now know that this is a lie – because money does nothing. People do everything – people grow the food, build the bridges, and solve the mathematical equations and create the most beautiful works of art. People do everything in great spirit and joy when they are allowed to do so. Money is the obstacle that prevents us all from creating and thriving.

The concept of Money, we feel, gives them the incentive to do those things. But what if everyone did everything for free? If everyone “freely gave away” their time and everyone equally shared in the fruits of each other’s labor and creativity, then we wouldn’t need money. You could have everything you wanted because it was all being made without money and shared freely.

A move towards a world without money, is a giant step towards higher consciousness and a highway to enlightenment. UBUNTU Contributionism is a system for a new world of evolved and conscious beings that realize the importance of unity and equality. Because we are a deeply divided species, on every possible level, there is no unity and equality present on our planet. We need to re-learn the basic principles of unity and equality – which will be difficult for many, based on the gluttony and greed that has taken a firm hold of the world disguised in many cloaks of glitter.

What Michael Tellinger shows is that in UBUNTU, since everything being freely shared without the drag of things like profit mark-ups, patent licenses, interest and debt payments, and other things which add “cost” within a capitalist system, you in fact would create much more material goods and services with less resources. Actually, you would need only to work 3 hours per day in a job which matches your skills and desires, in order to share in all the abundance the UBUNTU System produces.

There would be no duplication of efforts as competition would be a thing of the past, and since everything would be shared freely – as one person, team, or company developed a better way of doing things, they would share it with whoever in the world also wanted to use their ideas or technologies. Innovation wouldn’t stop because the profit motive was eliminated, innovation would actually skyrocket!

A Money System Designed to Create Debt Slaves

Certainly, the current system of capitalism and money produces good things – builds infrastructure, allows for the development of creative services and products, and has allowed for technologies to be developed that connect people around the globe. Unfortunately it also produces some very bad things – creates massive inequality, constantly pushes for over-consumption in order to achieve growth, and strips away the earth’s resources at an unsustainable pace.

Money is created primarily by private banks and lent out at interest. The interest can only be repaid if the economy and money supply constantly inflate. Prices emerge from the use of money in markets to trade goods between people and firms; but the process does not work at the edges of the system, that is, with the input of natural resources or the output of pollution. Much economic growth comes from transforming preexisting natural systems and services—land, oil, gold, trees, fish, water—into money; but the Earth does not trade or haggle over price, it just passively supplies, up to a point. If money, as Tolstoy said, is a new form of slavery, then the planet is the biggest slave of all. – Excerpted from THE EVOLUTION OF MONEY by David Orrell and Roman Chlupatý.

It is gravely sad, that in America, the wealthiest nation on the earth, that 25% of children live in poverty and 75% of adults live paycheck to paycheck. And though the world is swimming in money, still 2/3 of the world’s population live on less than a few dollars per day and in precarious health and safety conditions. Yet, since the crash of 2008, the world went from $50 Trillion in debt to close to $200 Trillion in debt. A 300% increase! Where did all the money go?

It goes to one place – a global banking syndicate – people who set up our global money system to do exactly what it is meant to – create an interest rate driven debt system that skims the world’s wealth directly into their pockets and leaves billions of people and governments in debt and without the adequate food, water, shelter and other resources they rightfully should have.

To understand the Global Banking Syndicate – you only need to look at one thing – the privately run Federal Reserve Banking System that most developed countries operate under. You then need to look under the hood and realize that these institutions are not part of or controlled by the governments they operate in – they are private companies that are owned by a group of banking families that have been controlling our money supply for hundreds of years. And, when a country needs to create money, they do so and charge the country interest for the privilege.  Imagine that, a country pays interest to some other entity for its own money!

So, when in 2008 the banks caused the biggest financial disaster in the history of the U.S. and needed to be bailed out, the U.S. Government borrowed that money from the  “U.S. Federal Reserve Bank” which is owned by foreign bankers, paid interest on that money, and then turned around and gave it back to the same bankers who caused the problem in the first place. It was the biggest theft of public money in the history of the world – some $150 Trillion dollars over the last eight years. All in plain sight for everyone to see. An amazing feat of sleight of hand and illusion the world has ever experienced. The bankers caused the problem, got paid for it, left the major countries with mountains of debt, and then hid the money away in places like Panama (and the ten to fifteen other offshore havens they have created over the last fifty years).

Yet most of us continue on our daily slog without putting the pieces together of the massive crimes taking place right in front of our eyes. As Michael Tellinger mentions in the book, the character Morpheus captures this apathy aptly in the movie the Matrix:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you ‘re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them the enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of the are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Sound familiar? Look around, the same people who are being taken advantage of on a daily basis by a system set up to keep them miserable and in financial slavery, is the same system they vociferously defend as the only thing that can get them out of their misery. It’s a brilliant and sad con – you’re victims actually fight for your right to abuse them. They are addicted to the poison you’re giving them.

But over the years, there have been some very prominent people who saw through the system and spoke out:

“Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. It is written,” he said to them, My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers.” – Matthew 21:12-13

“The refusal of King George 3rd, to allow colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the revolution.” – Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s angst was not to end there, as the bankers did not give up…

The First Bank of the United States was set up in 1791 as the first private bank in the USA by the Rothschild banking family. It was at this time that we start reading the spine-chilling statements by the bankers and other industrialists regarding their global perspective. The patriarch of the Rothschild empire at the time Mayer Amschel Rothschild made his intentions clear with his infamous, ‘Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.’ Twenty years after the launch of the private central bank, the U.S. Congress refused to renew the charter and voiced their intention to go back to a state issued value-based currency on which the people paid no interest to any banker. Once again we see the level of influence by the bankers on global political affairs when Nathan Mayer Rothschild issued a blatant threat against the U.S. Government. ‘Either the application for renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war.’ After a resolute U.S. Congress refused to renew the charter for the First Bank of the United States, Nathan Mayer Rothschild blurted, ‘Teach those impudent Americans a lesson. Bring them back to colonial status.’ Shortly after this inflammatory statement Britain launched the war of 1812, financed by the Rothschild controlled Bank of England to re-colonize the United States and force them back into slavery under the Bank of England. The plan was to plunge the United States into so much debt through the war that they would be forced to accept a new central bank – and the plan works. The United States Congress was forced to grant a new charter for yet another private bank that supplied the currency and provide the public with loans at interest, the Second Bank of the United States. Once again, private bankers were in control of the nation’s money supply and did not care who made the laws of how many British and American soldiers had to die for it. – Tellinger, UBUNTU Contributionism

Over the subsequent years, other presidents have tried to stop this madness. They realized that a nation not controlling its own money supply and paying interest to banking cartels made no sense at all. One president was actually successful in getting rid of them for a while:

In 1832, US President Andrew Jackson successfully campaigned for his second term as President under the slogan, ‘Jackson and No Bank’. (He said) ‘Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost,  you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!’ Jackson succeeded in blocking the renewal of the charter for the Second Bank of the United States and went on to become the only president to actually pay of the national debt created by the bankers. – UBUNTU Contributionism

But the bankers of course did not give, up, they came back again and again and they ramped up an unsavory collaboration with corporations which prompted Abraham Lincoln to say:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country…corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. –Tellinger, UBUNTU Contributionism

If you connect the dots and follow the trail of bread crumbs, you will end up coming to some uncomfortable truths about our history and the wars we have been involved in. From Woodrow Wilson, to Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and even Ronald Reagan, you will see a line of presidents who have tried to free the U.S. from this scourge. Michael Tellinger does a wonderful job in the UBUNTU book of giving a good overview of those issues. I encourage you read the book to learn more about this important understanding of our past and current economic system. Also, see the excellent TedxTalk by Dr. James Glatfelter of how the world is essentially controlled by 800 corporations which are mostly owned by a criss-cross holding of banker / shareholders. This concentration of power in the hands of a shockingly small number leaves us all vulnerable.

But for now, let’s move on to Part Two of this article, and look at some of the key features of how the UBUNTU Contributionism System works in action.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**
Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

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Mystic Insights – No. 5

The conscious material world is a play. A piece of theater. An illusion. And in today’s difficult reality, a constant distortion of Source Energy / Love.

The Truth occurs outside of our waking physical existence. It is there we are connected to Source more clearly (or through a highly meditative state) and where we “program” the play we want to experience.

When people are aligned with the Source, then their “waking play” is a Divine play, free from massive human fear-based, egoic distortion.

“Go within, So You Won’t Have to Go Without”

In a “divine play” state we can experience the material world in a lighter, love-driven way. With everyone acting in that manner, then our daily lives take on a radically different character. We would learn to go inside, be quiet and still, and enter into Universal Consciousness more often to access the Divine truth. We would then come out to the material world to play with and experience that divine truth in material form.

“Keep striving to be a clear conductor of the Light. No filtering, just pure transmission.”

We would steadily break down any barriers between our waking self and spiritual higher self / Source / God. Heaven would come down to Earth.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

 

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**
Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

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Mystic Insights – No. 4

Inspiration arises when one is aligned with the infinite creative potential of Source Energy. People intrinsically at their core, are attracted to and motivated by Inspired people and Inspirational ideas. Their Soul knows that is where they need to go.

Inspiration is the Elimination of Limitation

The Divine Source has no limitations. When you are “creating” and being creative, you by definition are firmly in the Present Moment. That is the only place where creation and manifestation occurs. To dwell in the past or worry about the future is to relinquish the creative power of your infinite potential.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

 

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

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Mystic Insights – No. 3

Every moment is meant to demonstrate that all is One. Just an infinite variation of One Consciousness. Witness and observe with calm detachment every scene of the show in every moment.

Envision the highest outcome and the highest good for all in every situation. Meditate, visualize, and will on that. Adjust your energy vibration to that level and reality around you will conform.

All this points to the constant fluidity and connection between all beings and all things. Resisting someone or some thing doesn’t make sense. They all have the capacity to change and the Light is working through all of them.

Anything and anyone can produce good at any time as long as you don’t withhold positive, loving energy from them.

OM

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

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The World’s Most Powerful Search Engine – Intuition

If Google is our search engine into the physical world’s collective knowledge, then intuition is our search engine into the aggregated knowledge of the entire universe—or rather, of all that is and has ever existed in Mind, Body, or Spirit. This aggregated knowledge is often referred to as the Universal Consciousness.

When we’re using our intuition, we allow information and guidance to reach us from beyond our conscious—and even subconscious—mind. The information usually comes in the form of a feeling. As an example, some people speak of having a “gut feeling” about something; others shy away from the concept of “trusting their gut” because it may seem to be an illogical reaction, clouded by our biases. But these are, in fact, trustworthy feelings, and if we pay attention and listen to them closely without any mental editing, they’re usually quite accurate.

As Carl Jung put it: “This term [intuition] doesn’t denote something contrary to reason, but something outside the province of reason.” Experiments have also been done to verify our “gut instinct.” The May-July 2004 issue of What Is Enlightenment? Magazine featured the research of parapsychologist Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe, who sought to find if the gut has “perception intelligence.”

According to Radin, research results support growing evidence that humans do have more than one brain—that there is a ‘dense place of neurons, down below’ that points to the existence of a belly brain … In an experiment at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) with twenty-six pairs of people, Radin showed one person—the “sender”—eight minutes of video images, split into four segments, each according to their emotional content: happy, angry, sad, neutral (no images). Sixty feet away, a second participant—the “receiver”— was locked in a sealed room with electrodes monitoring heart, skin, and stomach muscles. The sender consciously tried to send the images to the receiver. The results have been persuasive. IONS research director Marilyn Schlitz says, “We’re seeing that the gut is a very sensitive organ, so even if you’re in another room, my gut can sense when you see a particularly evocative image and respond emotionally. Therefore your state can influence my state.”

So, for those who have felt these gut instincts, you would be wise not to ignore them. You may not want to use these signals exclusively, but when your gut reaction is matching up to other data, you certainly should pay attention.

Our intuition can be useful in a broad array of situations. The website Applied Intuition (www.AppliedIntuition.net) further describes intuition as follows:

The “information” accessible through intuition consists not only of objective facts—statements that can be said to be true or false—but also subjective human knowledge: comprehensive understanding, broad perspective, accumulated experience, and knowledge that cannot even be described verbally. Intuition feeds each person’s acquisition of private self-knowledge, as well as his perceived and evolving relationship with the greater reality of which he is a part. Intuition nourishes him as he encounters challenges along his life path. It does so by giving him “information” of a greater sort than provable facts.

Regular meditation is a great practice to develop our intuition skills. It calms the mind and allows us to more easily connect to the subconscious parts of our mind—or those that connect to the Universal Consciousness.

To gauge your level of intuition, use the following ThinkSmarter Quick Test to see if you’re on the right track regarding an issue of importance to you, such as a relationship, purchasing decision, life decision, business decision, or the like.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK AND USE THE BEST DATA AVAILABLE

Have you looked at the issue from multiple angles, used varied resources and inputs, and eliminated biases from your decision making? Do diverse reputable and trusted sources concur? Can you tell your parents, spouse, and children about what you’re going to do or believe without reservation? Would they think more or less highly of you?

TRUST YOUR INTUITION AND FEELINGS

Once you visualize yourself actually having made the decision or adopted the belief, how does it make you feel? Do you feel energized and positive, or hesitant and uncertain?

ACT IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF ALL INVOLVED

Is what you’re contemplating doing, believing, or achieving drawing you closer to other people, or does it cause separation (I’m more, you’re less; I win, you lose, I’m better, you’re different)? Are you driven by love or something else (fear, hatred, delusion)? Do you create a win-win scenario or a win-lose scenario by your thoughts and actions?

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

**Sign up for the Think Smarter World Newsletter here and download a Free Copy of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World**

Think Smarter World is a non-commercial site. All information is provided freely and with love for the benefit of humanity.

The post The World’s Most Powerful Search Engine – Intuition appeared first on Think Smarter World.

Being Mindful and Asking Critical Questions to Get Out of Our Mental Comfort Zones

It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

The reality for most of us is that we stay within a comfort zone of our beliefs and experiences and become accustomed to navigating our daily lives within that structure or framework. For the most part, this is okay. But in a time of significant change, this static knowledge and understanding can leave us out of touch and limit our potential. In fact, globalization and rapid technology advancements are by definition jolting large segments of our population out of their comfort zones on a daily basis. The way of being or doing things that worked just five years ago—or even one year ago—is no longer effective.

Unfortunately, for most of us it takes a crisis of some sort—either externally imposed on us or something of our own making—to push us into confronting our established patterns. This, of course, can be very painful, both for ourselves and for those close to us. For example, if we don’t take care of our health very well, we may end up with a major illness—heart disease or cancer, for example. Suddenly our world is upside down, and we’re pushed out of our comfort zone in a big way. If we don’t learn new ways of thinking or change our existing patterns of behavior, we risk the greatest change of all: death.

And yet, for many people, it’s during these extreme periods of crisis that they experience great insights and personal transformation. The crisis often leaves us with no place to hide from ourselves, and the truth of our existence is laid bare. We’re forced to confront aspects of our perceived reality that we’ve allowed to remain obscure, to shine light on things that have remained in shadows. In some instances, the tragedy or crisis hasn’t happened to us directly, but is of such magnitude that it forces (or should force) us to confront our beliefs on a major issue, as if it did happen to us or could in the future.

Of course, wouldn’t it be better to obtain those life-changing insights without the tragedy? (We don’t want to sit around saying, “Hey, can’t wait till a good crisis comes so I’ll finally be able to learn something new!) In fact, wouldn’t it be great to proactively gain the wisdom to perhaps avoid or minimize the crisis or tragedy in the first place? And, isn’t it the case that, when we finally do acquire that new knowledge, we often say, “Wow, I wish I would have figured this out sooner!” That itself is a key insight: the knowledge or information was always there—it may have existed for years, decades, centuries, or even longer—but we didn’t discover it. So we need to become better knowledge explorers.

The way to do that is to get proactively uncomfortable, to push ourselves out of our mental comfort zone and challenge our beliefs and ways of doing things.

I believe much of what we believe, what we do, and what we think, is out of habit. And, as we know, there are good habits and bad habits. How do we know if we’re in the grips of a bad habit? Simple, we just ask ourselves:

Is this working for me?
Am I getting the results I want?

This forces us to be conscious and mindful about ourselves. Many times, by just stopping and becoming aware of our thoughts and actions, we can identify what’s holding us back, why it’s arising in our lives, and how to get past the hurdle. That is mindfulness in action.

What is mindfulness?

Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, teacher of meditation and founder of the mindfulness-based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts, puts it well:

Mindfulness means paying attention in a ” particular way: on purpose, in the present

moment, and non judgmentally.

This mindful process of asking questions, of being proactive rather than reactive, leads to new insights and a deeper under- standing of ourselves and the world around us. And if all of us could be just a little better, a little smarter, and a little better informed, we could change the world by first changing ourselves. Just picture that happening on a global scale. Wow!

Blogger Mary Jaksch who writes the Goodlife Zen blog put it well in one of her posts titled “Use the Spirit of Enquiry”:

Beginner’s Mind is about using the spirit of enquiry—without getting stuck in preconceived ideas. There’s a Zen story about this: A professor once visited a Japanese master to inquire about Zen. The master served tea. When the visitor’s cup was full, the master kept pouring. Tea spilled out of the cup and over the table. “The cup is full!” said the professor. “No more will go in!” “Like this cup,” said the master, “you’re full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

You can see how this story applies not only to learning about Zen, but to learning about anything at all. The spirit of enquiry is the mind that is open to the unknown, and empty of preconceived ideas. Focus on questions, not on answers.

By simply asking questions of ourselves and others, and using technology such as search engines to harness the world’s collective information and wisdom, we can transform our world. Here’s a simple process to get you started:

THE FIVE-STEP PROCESS TO BETTER KNOWLEDGE AND INSIGHT

1. IDENTIFY A TOPIC OR AN AREA YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT.

Ask yourself why you believe what you do.
Ask what information you’ve amassed, or experiences you’ve had that lead you to these beliefs or understanding of a particular subject.
Who do you look up to that has influenced you to hold these beliefs? Do the reasons still hold up today? Could they be wrong? List out the reasons.

2. IDENTIFY THE OPPOSITE POSITION FOR YOUR BELIEFS ON THIS PARTICULAR TOPIC.

Who holds these beliefs?
Are they credible?
What causes them to think this way?
Am I missing something that they seem to know?

3. TRY TO ADOPT THESE DIFFERENT POSITIONS IN YOUR HEAD.

How does it feel?
Could you see yourself adopting this new viewpoint?
Live with it for a couple of days and see if you start to get some insights into these different beliefs.
Keep asking why someone would believe this as opposed to what you believe.

4. VALIDATE, OR AT LEAST DEEPEN, YOUR KNOWLEDGE BY INVESTIGATING DIFFERENT SOURCES.

Conduct simple Google searches.
Identify the most trusted thinkers in this area and read what they’ve written.
Watch programs from trusted, unbiased sources.

5. FINALLY, CATALOG WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED.

Organize newly found information into categories that help you break down complex issues or topics into more easily understandable conclusions.

By now, new knowledge and insights will have formed, leading you to deep levels of understanding of the issue at hand, as well as other topics that were likely identified during your search.

THE TRIANGLE

By following the five-step process to better insight, my hope is that you’ll encounter the truth I find in my favorite shape: The Triangle.

The reason I embrace the triangle is that in the course of my life’s experiences, I’ve found that there are always three sides to every issue:

Your view
The other person’s view
The reality or truth that’s somewhere in between




Many times you’ll find that the third side is closer to your point of view; other times, it will be closer to the other person’s. But if you can figure out what that third side is for each situation, you’ll go a long way in achieving success in life.

RELIABLE SOURCES

In addition to being mindful, I think we also need to have an arsenal of outside sources—newspapers, books, magazines, etc.—to provide us with high-quality ideas and information to contemplate. A methodology I find useful is to set up a system of sources that I know I can rely upon for credible and thought-provoking material. They encompass various aspects of my life—general life topics, personal health, work-specific topics, and hobbies and sports—and I refer to them on a daily basis. The knowledge I receive from these sources triggers me to think more deeply about a topic, and then guides me to proactively search for more detailed information about it.

QUESTIONS FOR GROWTH

As in the previous chapter, asking questions is a key driver of growth and knowledge acquisition. Here’s a list of questions that can help you get uncomfortable (but in a good way!):

What are my core beliefs?
Why do I work in my chosen profession?
What would I do differently if money or time were not considerations?
If I were to die today, what would I hope people would say about me and the life I lead?
Do I make a difference for the people closest to me?
Do I strive to be of service to others rather than on focusing on myself?
If I had (a) certain skill(s), how would my life be different? How would one go about acquiring those skills?
Am I putting any parts of my life on hold? Why?
Who do I trust the most and why?
Who would I most like to be and why?
If I could change three things about myself, what would they be? What’s stopping me?
What do I believe is the purpose of my life? Am I living it? What do I need to change to do so?
What bad habits do I want to break, and what good habits do I want to cultivate?
Am I a good listener?

Overall, the two critical questions to always ask yourself are:

Is what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, or how you’re feeling, working for you?
Are you getting what you want by your current course of action and thoughts? If not, then it’s time to think differently.

~Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

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