Placebos are becoming more effective. How? - Telegraph Blogs

Amazing! And the comments are just as interesting as the article:

Placebos are becoming more effective. How? - Telegraph Blogs

Work: What's passion got to do with it?

There is some great advice in here for anyone considering a job or career change:

Shortcuts - If Not Passion for the Job, at Least Warm Feelings - NYTimes.com

The Meta-Message

You may or may not have noticed that I've been a bit scarce on email, on FB, on this blog, for the last couple of weeks. There's a good reason for that, which I'll get to in a minute.

First, have you ever had someone tell you what should have been great news in a spectral tone of voice? Or had someone tell you they were fine, while sounding horribly depressed? Did you take the words seriously? Or did you believe the tone of voice? If you're like most people, you paid more attention to the tone than to the words.

In NLP (aka neurolinguisitics), the non-verbals, e.g. tone of voice or body language, are sometimes referred to as the 'meta-message'. The meta-message is the overall vibe that extends beyond the verbal message. Let me suggest that the meta-message is the message.

What you may not know is that the meta-message exists for artistic communication and for electronic communication. The reason a piece of art, whether that's a painting, a poem or a song, conveys a mood is partly the mood the artist was in when he or she created the piece.

Several years ago, I was at a talk given by a wonderful man, an MD turned holistic healer after a quadruple bypass literally opened up his heart. His presentation included a guided meditation, which ended with a recorded song, which he had commissioned from a gifted singer-songwriter. Although the song was lovely, and the words were uplifting, all I could hear was the pain in the singer's voice. Wrong meta-message! It left me with exactly the opposite feeling to what was intended.

And so it is with writing, even if it is published electronically. Last week, I wrote most of a piece on '3 Ways to be 'Up' in a Down Market', I guess because I needed it, and figured if I needed it, so did others. But even though it was well-written, I was not 'up'. I knew that if I hit the 'publish post' button while in that state of mind, the meta-message was going to be 'how to let things get to you'! So I didn't publish it, and in not publishing it, I had nothing to send to my email list.

The message here is pay attention to your feeling states, and don't reach out to people on a large scale when your feeling states don't match your message. If you are someone who must reach out to large numbers of people on a regular basis (you're a teacher, a sales rep, or even a healer), you must learn to manage your feeling states so that your meta-message supports your message.

Sometimes, though, all of us need to just let our natural feeling states be, and turn inward to clean up our own issues. That's what I did -- I took some time, took my own advice, and that of my guides, and worked through my issues, at least enough that my meta-message is positive again.)

The 4 Kinds of Prayers

"...when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!”

Rabbi Marc Gellman, quoted in the NY Times

Entangled Minds: Skeptic agrees that remote viewing is proven

Entangled Minds: Skeptic agrees that remote viewing is proven

For a scientist (whose work I admire and use) to argue that you need higher standards of proof for remote viewing than other areas of science is just absurd.

Prayer May Reshape Your Brain ... And Your Reality : NPR

Prayer May Reshape Your Brain ... And Your Reality : NPR

What happened to the economy -- and what it portends for the future

From the Boston Globe:

"Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers - what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment - what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” - would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system."

Whole article here.

This is what it means for you:

• We are going back to much more of a 'pay as you go' economy. You know, the one you grew up in if you're over 40.
  
• Retail sales (remember, 70% of the economy is consumer spending) are going to be at a much lower level for a long time, first because people have to pay off their debt, and then because they'll have to save to buy things, because credit is and will be harder to come by.
  
• We are actually experiencing deflation now. We all know real estate prices are down, sharply in many locations. But you know all those 'sales' at stores, even grocery stores? Those are deflation in action. Here's a personal example: I bought my first GE toaster oven around 1977. I think I paid $29 for it. It broke and I bought a new one, sometime in the early 90's -- I think I paid $49. It broke and I bought a new one around 2001, again $49. It broke and I'm going to Target later today to buy a new one -- 'on sale' at $15. Looks like pretty much the same model I've had, over and over again.
  
• In deflation, people hang on to their cash. This makes sense, because you can buy an asset cheaper later than you can buy it now. Yet another reason for lower consumer spending.
• This may not change for a generation or more. My grandparents were adults, raising their families during the Great Depression. My parents, who were kids then, were part of the 'save before you spend' crowd, and I am too, because they trained me well. People who got caught in a debt trap this time around, and their children, will remember this painful lesson for a long time.
  
• You have to give people a REALLY good reason to buy something now, because they'll begin to expect that they can get it more cheaply later. Or it has to be something for which they're desperate.
• What are people desperate for? Food, shelter, and clothing (although most of us have enough clothing to last us a few years). And end to their physical suffering, i.e. health care (though I understand that even Kaiser Permanente's business is off). A way to stretch a dollar. A way to make more dollars to pay for food, shelter and clothing. Transportation to get to those places where they make the dollars. After that, it's all 'nice to have'. So how do you relate what you do to one of these things?
• When people need things, they're more likely to turn to the underground economy -- paying in trade (I have a friend in rural OR who gets paid for some of her services in pot, which she then uses to pay other tradespeople), or in untraceable green cash.
  
• People are more likely to buy things used -- that's part of the rise of craigslist and eBay. Flea markets will be busier, too, because people still like to handle the merchandise.
  

Is Happiness Catching? - NYTimes.com

Really great article and not just about happiness:

Is Happiness Catching? - NYTimes.com

My favorite findings:

- the more friends you have, the likelier you are to be happy
- your spouse's weight will affect yours less than your best friend's weight will

Feeling inadequate? Don't know why?

This explains it:

Mind - When a Parent’s Love Comes With Conditions - NYTimes.com

Are Some People Hard-Wired to Fail in Financial Markets? | The Big Picture

I'm posting this because of all the great links to brain science info:

Are Some People Hard-Wired to Fail in Financial Markets? | The Big Picture

Global Cooling? YOU Can Help!

Remember the old saying, 'everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it?' I'd like to suggest that you CAN do something about it.

There are lots of anecdotal reports of people changing the weather, through some combination of conscious intent and meditation. Here's one that happened to me on Mt. Shasta 2 years ago:

The group was meditating in a huge meadow, with a densely overcast sky. The air was completely calm — not a pine needle stirred. When we finished meditating, most people had felt raindrops (I didn’t feel them; I was either deep in meditation or asleep. However, rain will normally rouse me, and there were no wet spots on my clothes, so maybe it rained around me!) and the sky above us was completely clear in probably a quarter mile diameter circle! The surrounding sky, however, was still thickly overcast. Then, as we watched, the clouds formed an unmistakable heart shape in the center of the clearing directly above us, ringed by open space and then the original clouds.

Here are two more:

• A friend of mine, an amazing chi gung practitioner, tells of having the intention to protect her Minnesota home from an approaching twister, then going into the basement with her family to wait it out. When she emerged, the neighborhood was a disaster zone -- except for her house, which was in perfect condition, except that a piece of gingerbread trim she'd never liked had been pulled cleanly off the house.
• Dr. Valerie V. Hunt, Professor Emeritus of Physiological Science at UCLA, in her book, "Infinite Mind", writes of almost being stranded for the winter in Tibet by an early blizzard. Apparently, after the first blizzard there, you can't fly out until spring. She and a companion went into meditation, with the intention of clearing the weather. A hole was created in the storm and she flew out.

In the book, "Urban Shaman", Serge Kahili King, a huna practitioner, writes of successful group meditations to change the path of hurricanes.

Roger Nelson, designer and director of the Global Consciousness Project, did the following study while he was at Princeton University:

Every year, Princeton has extensive festivities around Commencement, which include a huge reunion of graduates. Typically, the University population (which has grown to 7500 graduate and undergraduate students, plus about 1000 faculty, in recent years) swells by 15,000 people or more.

Dr. Nelson used University records & the National Climatic Data Center to get the precipitation data for the town of Princeton and 6 surrounding communities on 4 of these festive days, for all the years which had all this data available, the years 1950 - 1986. The 4 days were the days of

• the P-rade, which is a parade of alumni, including the graduating seniors (Saturday - outdoors),
  
• Baccalaureate (Sunday - indoors),
• Class Day (Monday - outdoors), and
• Commencement (Tuesday - outdoors),

There was a significant difference in rainfall between Princeton and the surrounding communities for the days of the outdoor festivities, which are the days on which people typically wish for good weather. Dr. Nelson notes "...a trend toward less rain, less often, is quite persuasive on Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, but on Sunday, the day of Baccalaureate, no clear tendency is evident... A look at actual weather data seems to suggest that precipitation tends to stay away from Princeton for the P-Rade, and Class Day, and Commencement, to a somewhat unlikely degree." That is, a large group of people wishing for good weather tends to bring it! And I can personally vouch for the fact that, even when it rains on those days of outdoor festivites, the rain generally will hold off until after, or stop for, the festivities themselves.

So with all the agonizing about global warming, why are we not consciously intending global cooling? I'm not suggesting that it's the only thing we should be doing, certainly conservation, etc. are all still important. But what if this could help? And what could it hurt to add global cooling to your daily mediation or your prayer list?

Here's what I ask for every day:

"May the climate be turned back quickly, easily and gently, to that of 1950, in the best interests of all species."

Why 1950? Because my guides tell me that that is the farthest back we can go and still have everything remain in balance.

Will you join me?

Greetings from Mt. Shasta!

So much happened that it's unbelievable! I'm just back from the somewhat grandly, but also aptly, named "Ambassador to the Universe" training, held by CSETI, up on Mt. Shasta.

Before we got there, I got the message that if you ask for something with a sincere, open heart, which is in the highest good of all, it can only be granted.

Sunday night, we met at a private house on the side of Mt. Shasta, which the staff had rented for their accommodations. It's an amazing log home, whose 40x20 living room has a 18 foot ceiling, and then we sat outside the house for our stargazing.

Apparently, group cohesion with positive intention draws the star visitors. So on the first night, when the group is still forming, there's not a lot of activity. But not this time! My guess is that at least 40% of the group had been to one or more of these trainings, and including a Bay Area contingent of 8 people who have done group work on our own.

Activity began almost immediately -- 'flashbulbs' going off in the sky, 'shooting stars' that moved up instead of down, 'satellites' that aren't on the satellite charts. 'Satellites' that blink on and off. Mysterious colored lights in the trees in the field on the side of a mountain where there is no electricity. (For more of the basics, see this post from 2007, as well as this, this and this from 2008.)

In addition, I could feel that some beings were doing massive attunements so that the group would interact smoothly with each other and with the beings. Several other people apparently got the same message, because we talked about it.

The sheer volume of activity was overwhelming. Two years ago, you'd wait minutes, sometimes many minutes between sightings. The activity was more constant last year, but nothing like this year, when it was absolutely constant -- something was literally happening every second, and often several things were happening simultaneously.

This year, what was new for me was the activity of the radar detectors. Five people had brought standard car radar detectors, along with battery packs so that they could operate several miles into a National Forest, where there is obviously no electricity -- and no radar. The radar detectors would start to make noise, almost at random (more on that later). Here's the really strange part: while all of them had the same bands, two radar detectors, sitting just a few feet from each other, would go off simultaneously -- on different bands! The only explanation we can come up with is that the star visitors are using them as communication devices, and that different star visitors would use different bands.

And then one night, all of us heard a radar detector with a very distinctive chirp, kind of like the Mexican Hat Dance (de-de-doop, de-de-doop, de-de-doop) coming from the northeast part of our 50 person circle for probably 10 - 20 seconds. But no one in that quadrant of the circle had a radar detector!

Another night, I was facing west, and it looked like the Big Dipper had an extra star in its handle. I stared at it for several minutes, and,, not being an astronomer, it took me a while to realize that there shouldn't be a star where this was. As I was pondering how odd that was, it blinked out! At the next break, I mentioned it in the vicinity of one of the radar detectors, which chirped its assent. Yes, that was a craft!

I saw some pretty cool things in meditation, too:

• One group of star visitors showed me how they become one being. That one being is the craft they use to travel interdimensionally. They agree on what they're doing, and then they smoosh together, so that all the nervous systems become one nervous system, all the digestive systems become one digestive system, etc. I wish I could describe this better, but honestly, it's so hard to wrap my mind around it that I can't.
  
• A star craft that looked like a garlic bulb with an elongated top. I kept hearing a couple of other people talk about seeing (with their exernal sight) a craft that looked like a tear drop, and after a while, I realized that what I was seeing internally was what they were seeing externally. So I asked, and sure enough, their 'tear drop' was much wider at the bottom than a tear drop would be.
• The garlic bulb shaped craft had these articulated legs, like goose neck lamps, with pod like feet which automatically leveled the craft when it sat on the ground. When I thought about the similarity between this and the Lunar Module, something said, "Where do you think they got the idea for that, anyway?"
  
• I went into the garlic-shaped craft in my mind. And found myself in a huge hallway, being greeted by a gentleman who ushered me into a ballroom. What I 'got' from that is that what looks like a small craft on the outside isn't necessarily. These things don't operate by time-space standards that we do. [Others confirmed this for me, as well.] So maybe each of those orbs in the photo at the top is a craft!
  

Laugh of the Day

Many years ago, my credit card processing bank was the Bank of Beverly Hills. They dropped me, with only 30 days notice because I was too risky a merchant, despite having never had even one bad charge. This was a hardship, because many processors won't take merchants who do work over the phone, called audiotext, which lumped me in with sex lines.

Today I noticed that the Bank of Beverly Hills been shut down by the FDIC earlier this year. Ironically, I'm still in business!

Yet Another Reason to Meditate

One of the things meditation is best known for is reducing stress -- blood pressure, cortisol levels, etc. Turns out that elevated stress levels actually make it more difficult to cope with that stress, as you are less likely to actively make decisions and more likely to do things you have always done, by rote. As they say, one definition of insanity is continuing to do the same things, and expecting a different response. Here's the whole article:

Basics - Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop - NYTimes.com

Entangled Minds: Intuition Through Time: What Does the Seer See?

Turns out that seeing the future may be more than abstract -- Radin used eye pupil dilation and other measures of the eye to check for presentiment, and sure enough...

Entangled Minds: Intuition Through Time: What Does the Seer See?

Yes, your audience matters!

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Listener's facial expression alters speaker's language

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: The surprising links between anger and time perception

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: The surprising links between anger and time perception

More on the chemical experiment none of us agreed to

What's really in your shampoo | Salon

Meanings of chakras 8 - 12

Over the years, I have learned a number of different interpretations of these chakras, but this list makes the most sense to me:

• 8 - trust
• 9 - aloneness (i.e. the ability to be comfortable alone)
• 10 - responsibility
• 11 - wisdom
• 12 - power to manifest in the physical world
  

Another benefit of meditation: Decreased Social Anxiety

More than just relaxing, meditation helps improve self-image of anxiety sufferers, Stanford Research: