Card of the day

27. Healing
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Healing
You carry your wound. With the ego, your whole being is a wound. And you carry it around. Nobody is interested in hurting you, nobody is positively waiting to hurt you; everybody is engaged in safeguarding his own wound. Who has got the energy? But still it happens, because you are so ready to be wounded, so ready, just waiting on the brink for anything.

You cannot touch a man of Tao. Why? - because there is no one to be touched. There is no wound. He is healthy, healed, whole. This word whole is beautiful. The word heal comes from the whole, and the word holy also comes from the whole. He is whole, healed, holy.

Be aware of your wound. Don't help it to grow, let it be healed; and it will be healed only when you move to the roots. The less the head, the more the wound will heal; with no head there is no wound. Live a headless life. Move as a total being, and accept things.

Just for twenty-four hours, try it - total acceptance, whatsoever happens. Someone insults you, accept it; don't react, and see what happens. Suddenly you will feel an energy flowing in you that you have not felt before.

Osho The Empty Boat Chapter 10

Commentary:

It is a time when the deeply buried wounds of the past are coming to the surface, ready and available to be healed.

The figure in this card is naked, vulnerable, open to the loving touch of existence. The aura around his body is full of light, and the quality of relaxation, caring and love that surrounds him is dissolving his struggle and suffering. Lotuses of light appear on his physical body, and around the subtle energy bodies that healers say surround each of us. In each of these subtle layers appears a healing crystal or pattern.

When we are under the healing influence of the King of Water we are no longer hiding from ourselves or others. In this attitude of openness and acceptance we can be healed, and help others also to be healthy and whole.

Another closet favorite

I had to. I heard it on my iTunes and I had to. (blush) sorry. I'm a sucker, I know. Sometimes it sucks being a girl and liking silly romantic stuff. I blame it on Moulin Rouge. Yeah, that's it. Moulin Rouge. (sounds good anyway) :)
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You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs.
But I look around me and I see it isn't so.
Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs.
And what's wrong with that?
I'd like to know, 'cause here I go again
I love you, I love you,
I love you, I love you,
I can't explain the feeling's plain to me, say can't you see?
Ah, she gave me more, she gave it all to me
Now can't you see,
What's wrong with that
I need to know, 'cause here I go again
I love you, I love you

Love doesn't come in a minute,
sometimes it doesn't come at all
I only know that when I'm in it
It isn't silly, no, it isn't silly, love isn't silly at all.

How can I tell you about my loved one?
How can I tell you about my loved one?

How can I tell you about my loved one?
(I love you)
How can I tell you about my loved one?
(I love you)

The Harsh Light of Science

Daniel Dennett on why a scientific study of religion is necessary.

by Daniel C. Dennett • Posted March 20, 2006 12:09 AM

From the FEB/MAR 2006 issue of Seed:

Jesus, made from the elements.

Religion is such an important phenomenon that it is high time we directed all the magnificent truth-seeking tools of science on religions, to see what makes them work in the ways they do. I am not suggesting that science should try to do what religion does, but that it should study, scientifically, what religion does. Is there a good reason to oppose this? Those who are dubious about, or fearful of, the authority of science will have to search their souls. Do they acknowledge the power of science, properly conducted, to settle controversial factual questions or do they reserve judgment, waiting to see what the verdict will be? The ethos of science is that you pay a price for the authoritative confirmation of your favorite hypothesis, risking an authoritative refutation of it. Those who want to make claims about religion will have to live by the same rules: prove it or drop it. And if you set out to prove it and fail, you are obliged to tell us.

Read the rest here

Have you phoned a friend today?

The Pitfalls of E-mail

By: Marina Krakovsky
Summary: Research suggests that communicating via e-mail alone can doom a relationship.
http://www.psychologytoday.com psychologytoday

We assume that the opportunity to edit ou written words means we put our best foot forward but a recent study suggests that communicating vi e-mail alone can doom a relationship

Janice Nadler, a social psychologist and Northwestern University law professor, paired Northwestern law students with those from Duke University and asked each pair to agree on the purchase of a car. Researchers instructed each team to bargain entirely through e-mail, but half the subjects were secretly told to precede the negotiation with a brief getting-to-know-you chat on the phone. The results were dramatic: Negotiators who first chatted by phone were more than four times likelier to reach an agreement than those who used only e-mail. In the study, which will appear in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, subjects who never spoke were not only more likely to hit an impasse but they often felt resentful and angry about the negotiation.

While all sorts of online exchanges can be misunderstood, social scientists say that faceless strangers are especially likely to run into problems. "Through that initial phone call, people become real," says Susan Barnes, a professor of communication at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Simply foregoing common pleasantries can make a message come across as rude—especially if communicators don't know each other. A rushed e-mail may give the impression that the exchange is unimportant. And, because first impressions set the tone for subsequent interaction, Barnes says, the exchange can quickly go downhill.

Nadler says the missing element in electronic communication is rapport, that in-sync state that's easier to establish in person or by phone. Facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice—all these social cues are missing in e-mail (and smiley-face "emoticons" can do only so much to replace them). But because messages travel almost instantly, people act as if they're in a face-to-face conversation, says David Falcone, a psychology professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia. Because of this illusion of proximity, we're duped into thinking we can communicate about touchy subjects, such as disagreements or criticisms, and that the tone of our writing will be perceived correctly.

Furthermore, says Nadler, just because we can send a message anytime doesn't mean someone is there to receive it. Yet people often fear a delayed reply is a potential blow-off.

And when we feel slighted, we are more apt to throw a fit via e-mail than we would by phone. "The anonymity of e-mail leads to rudeness," says Barnes, adding we may not feel accountable, especially if we've never actually spoken to the other person. Even if we mean well, the lack of second-by-second feedback, by which we constantly adjust our words in conversation, can cause us to go on blithely composing messages that will rub the recipient the wrong way. John Suler, a psychologist at New Jersey's Rider University who specializes in cyberspace behavior, believes that talking first on the phone might set expectations at an appropriate level—an effect that then carries over into the e-mail relationship.

The less we know someone, the more likely we are to engage in what therapists call transference, the tendency to project our desires or fears onto another person. Without social cues, says Falcone, these tendencies can run wild, causing us to interpret messages in ways that are "overly self-affirming and, potentially, extremely inaccurate." Suler adds that in the negotiation study, the initial phone call may have served as a "transference antidote," making the partners more real to each other.

So Beautiful...

Rosette_ballauer_2400, originally uploaded by Christina's Play Place.

The Rosette Nebula - from Astronomy Picture of the Day apod

When Roses Aren't Red
Credit & Copyright: Jay Ballauer (All About Astro, 3RF)
Explanation: Not all roses are red of course, but they can still be very pretty. Likewise, the beautiful Rosette Nebula and other star forming regions are often shown in astronomical images with a predominately red hue - in part because the dominant emission in the nebula is from hydrogen atoms. Hydrogen's strongest optical emission line, known as H-alpha, is in the red region of the spectrum, but the beauty of an emission nebula need not be appreciated in red light alone. Other atoms in the nebula are also excited by energetic starlight and produce narrow emission lines as well. In this gorgeous view of the Rosette's central regions, narrow band images are combined to show emission from sulfur atoms in red, hydrogen in blue, and oxygen in green. In fact, the scheme of mapping these narrow atomic emission lines into broader colors is adopted in many Hubble images of stellar nurseries. This image spans about 50 light-years in the constellation Monoceros, at the 3,000 light-year estimated distance of the Rosette Nebula.