Rabbit Island
What an inspiration – two guys buy an island on Craigslist and decide to turn it into a retreat for artists.
It looks stunning:
You are what you eat
I love nothing better than when science really pushes the boundaries. Eventually, I think, a lot of wisdom from traditional medicine and other spiritual practices will become understood scientifically. A small step on the way is this study that suggest that you are what you eat. The study found microRNAs that are normally found in plants circulating in mammalian blood.
Oversized yoga mats
I just bumped into Square 36′s oversized yoga mats. What a fantastic idea.
Regular yoga mats, as they point out are great for optimising the number of people in a yoga studio, but not great for optimising your yoga or workout space.
I wonder what shipping to the UK on one of these puppies costs?
Square 36 Oversized Yoga Mat
Looking for Ancient Tibet
A documentary that went in search of isolated power places in East Tibet to find the last living holders of a thousand year old Yogi tradition.
Inspired by nature – how trees make for a better solar panel arrangement
Could tree branches hold the secret to more efficient solar energy?
It took the inquisitive nature of a thirteen year old to notice something that has been staring us in the face. This incredible story shows how nature has it all worked out, as Aidan discovered that arranging solar panels in a way that mimics the way trees grow can actually give us more efficient clean energy creation. Not to mention that it looks better.
As Aidan points out:
People see winter as a cold and gloomy time in nature.
But then, he had an epiphany while hiking:
I noticed something strange about the shape of the tree branches. I thought trees were a mess of tangled branches, but I saw a pattern in the way the tree branches grew. I took photos of the branches on different types of trees, and the pattern became clearer.
Having discovered that tree branches grow in spirals that mimic the Fibonacci Sequence, he thought it must be the most efficient way to collect sunlight for photosynthesis. He wanted to test his hypothesis so he designed a tree shape with solar panels instead of leaves.
Read more here
Five Principles for a better life
Reiki is an amazing hands-on healing method. It’s simple to learn and powerful. The first thing I was ever taught at a Reiki class was the five principles:
Just for today, I will not be angry Just for today, I will not worry Just for today, I will be grateful. Just for today, I will do my work honestly. Just for today, I will be kind to every living thing.
I like to end my morning meditation with these, and I remind myself of them throughout the day – these will make your life better as you start to live them.
Perception
William Molyneux was born in Dublin and was a natural philosopher and writer who came up with question: Imagine you are blind from birth. You can, by touching objects, tell if they are cubes or spheres through the sense of touch. Now imagine that you are suddenly able to see. Would you be able to know which object is a globe and which is a sphere by sight alone before you touch them.
This became known to philosophers as Molyneux’s question and it asks us to question at a fundamental level how we know something. Is it only by our perception, or is there some universal “roundness” about a sphere that allows us to know it is a sphere no matter how we sense it.
There are two opposing views that try to answer this question – empiricists and nativists. Empiricists insist we are the sum of our experience, but we are born without innate understanding of, for example, a sphere, while nativists believe that we have some built in notion. It is classic nature vs nuture.
A new study suggests that the empiricists are right:
For the critical test, however, in which the children first felt an object and then tried to distinguish visually between that same object and a similar one, the results were barely better than if they had guessed.
The answer to the age old question that Molyneux posed is, at first sight, “no”. There doesn’t seem to be any “cross-modal representation” between senses. However, the study also showed that subjects very quickly compensated, suggesting that the brain is very malleable longer into childhood than previously thought.
China to ban reincarnation
As reported in the times, China is trying to mandate who can and cannot reincarnate. What an utterly ridiculous idea. And what spiritual or religious society is going to allow a human law to rule over the divine?
What will they think of next?