A Journey

I have noticed recently that there are several random viewers from different parts of the world beginning to be more frequent. As well, I would hope, as those of you who like to read whenever you can. This being said, before going any further, if you enjoy this blog or have enjoyed any other blog you have read, please share the whereabouts with someone you know. This may not be easy, as many are not the slightest bit interested. But try, if you can.

The reason for this blog; I am about to depart for a weeks holiday in Tenerife with my beautiful family. As well as this journey I will be taking another one, of a different nature. I will be reading Paramhansa Yogananda’s ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’. For those of you who have heard of this book, or even read it, will know what I am speaking of. Those of you who haven’t. Make some practical use of the internet and google it!

I am sharing this information with you who read this to say that I will not come back from Tenerife the same person as I went away. I will have read one more book, seen 7 more sunsets, seen my sons smile countless times. What more is there to pray for?

When I return from my holiday, I will be sharing several insights from this great book, by this great man. And for those of you who are interested it will take you about 3 minutes to read them. Or roughly as long as it has taken you to read this. There will be a Yogananda category and a Kriya Yoga Category for you to Read, enjoy and share.

Have a Blessed week. Enjoy the ups and downs. But, first, form your opinion about this post.

Speech

“The purpose of all speech is to clothe thought and thus make our thought available for others. When we speak we evoke a thought and make it present, and we bring that which is concealed within us into audible expression. Speech reveals, and right speech can create a form of beneficent purpose, just as wrong speech can produce a form which has a malignant objective.”

Alice Bailey.

Words have weight and are very powerful. We may not realise this in our day to day life where it has become the norm to complain, insult and generally be negative in a variety of ways. What I want to make clear with the above quote is that what you say to others will have a great effect on them!

Instead of being negative and complaining, why not be positive and enthusiastic. Give someone a compliment and see the smile that beams across their face. My mum used to say that ‘manners cost nothing’, and this seems to have grown into something more than simple manners.

Try it, experiment with the words you use. If you complain often, try not to express these thoughts. If you usually joke and insult friends and colleagues, try instead to stay quiet or offer the odd kind word.

Like many of my blogs, it will not have an effect if one person does or does not do this. But, if everyone who reads this try’s to be a little more positive, and in turn has a positive effect on someone else’s day, it will start a chain reaction, people will effect others and so on. Then things may begin to change.

Read all about it

From newspapers to blogs.

Imagine a time before television. A time when one could only receive information from books and newspapers, and only much later on, the radio. You could of decided which book, or article, or parchment, or hieroglyph you wished to assimilate.

Then came along the trusty television. The thing we all turn to for information and entertainment. But more than anything else, as you may have noticed, advertisements. Love them or hate them is up to the individual, but I know what it is that I like thank you.

Now I am communicating with you over the internet. No paper, no trouble, no effort, just reading someones blog entry. How easy is this compared to searching some tomb for a parchment you wasn’t even sure existed? But there were some in the past who wanted, needed this knowledge, understanding and ideas more than anything else and went after it. We can all find many examples of these individuals if we think for a second.

So we have come a long way from the printing press. Surely this is a good thing? I can read peoples thoughts and communicate with them anywhere in the world. If they have an internet connection of course. Telepathy is not easily attained.

So choose what information you receive wisely. If you want to be happier, try not to watch so much news. If you want to be smarter, read any book. And if you want to get better at some thing. Practice it!

The Retweet

Retweet and Share; Share and Retweet

I recently read an article on Renard Moreau Presents blog, about the social networking site Twitter. This is the link:
http://renardmoreau.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/twitter-isnt-bad-part-2/ It is a short and sweet post, please have a look. After reading myself I had the thought to create my own Twitter post.

My focus will be on the sharing side of Twitter, or, The Retweet. We have all pressed that retweet button several times if we are users of Twitter. It takes no time or effort or money, but makes the recipient very happy. It could be a fine article on growing a business that you share with all your followers; a piece on Language or sport or finance. Or simply a quote that someone decides to share with the Twitter world that could make everyone who reads it smile!

I am on the Twitter site to share and communicate with people I would never be likely to meet otherwise. Robin Sharma, Sir Nick Faldo, even Barack Obama, and many more as well. When I come across some good piece of advice, or an inspirational quote, I simply share it with all of my followers. The Retweet. This then moves the cycle further and gives them the opportunity to decide if they like it enough to share with their followers. And on and on the cycle goes.

To sum up. If you find something inspirational or interesting on Twitter, WordPress or Facebook, think about all your friends or followers who might like to know about this information you have found. After all, the internet is about sharing information, masses of it that we could never digest. So we know what we like and then look for, read and research this thing that interests us. We have friends and colleagues who are also interested, and through Twitter and Facebook we can share thoughts, feelings, words, pictures, knowledge and information to name but a few.

If you find a piece helpful or of interest but find yourself breezing past it without liking or sharing, why is this? We have joined a social network site for that reason.

Retweet and Share. Share and Retweet

Life

We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up;
This is our world.
All we have to do after that-
Is to die.

Blogging Inspiration

I have spent the morning reading and re-reading the blogs that I follow, and ones they in turn have recommended. I love to read, and have many books on many subjects, but the WordPress community offers something different.

When I started this blog it was to share fragments of information that I had acquired, that is all. But no sooner had I begun, bloggers were reading and commenting, which in turn led me to their blogs.

So far I have found many inspirational blogs that I will continue to read because I know from experience the content will be fantastic. And I’m aware that people are enjoying this blog in turn, which is all a man, a woman, a blogger can ask for.

Thank you for reading, for sharing, for inspiring. If its morning when you read this; have a wonderful day. If its evening; have beautiful dreams.

Words in Language

To communicate with one another we must use language. Language is made up of words; verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, which make up sentences. Words are made up of letters which in turn form an alphabet. Each individual word has meaning, and when someone pronounces a word we assume we know what the other person is talking about.

Before reading any further, I would like to ask you to think about a certain word, which is well used and very simple, but can have a multitude of meaning. The word I would like to bring to your attention is WORLD. When you read this word WORLD, what does it bring to mind? What picture does it paint for you personally? WORLD.

If you have never thought about this before take a second and really think about what associations you have with the word.

What will follow is an extract of what George Gurdjieff has to say on this subject. If you are a regular reader you will have read something before about this man. Here, he is simply telling someone how many different interpretations there can be of one word, let alone a sentence:

“Let us take some other word, for example, the term ‘world’. Each man understands it in his own way, and each man in an entirely different way. Everyone when he hears or pronounces the word ‘world’ has associations entirely foreign and incomprehensible to another. Every ‘conception of the world,’ every habitual form of thinking, carries with it its own associations, its own ideas.
In a man with a religious conception of the world, a Christian, the word ‘world’ will call up a whole series of religious ideas, will necessarily become connected with the idea of God, with the idea of the creation of the world or the end of the world, or of the ‘sinful’ world and so on.
For a follower of the Vedantic philosophy the world before anything will be illusion, ‘Maya.’
A theosophist will think of the different ‘planes,’ the physical, the astral, the mental, and so on.
A spiritualist will think of the world ‘beyond,’ the world of spirits.
A physicist will look upon the world from the point of view of the structure of matter; it will be a world of molecules or atoms, or electrons.
For the astronomer the world will be of stars and nebulae.
And so on and so on. The phenomenal and the noumenal world, the world of the fourth and other dimensions, the world of good and the world of evil, the material world and the immaterial world, the proportion of power in the different nations of the world, can man be ‘saved in the world,’ and so on, and so on.”

Intensity of Efforts

Many times in this blog I have stated that I believe people can develop. But that it is not easy! If one wants to improve in a certain recreation, efforts must be made, the more the better.

In todays blog I will be taking two quotes from different men to emphasise this point. The point that if you really want to develop a skill, it is possible over time.

The first is from a man I have been reading a lot of quotes from recently, all of which are very true. His name is Baltasar Gracian, (1601-1658). If you like this quote and Gracian interests you, you can type his name into Wikipedia and read all about him to your hearts content:

“Prize intensity more than extensity. Perfection resides in quality, not quantity. Extent alone never rises above mediocrity, and it is the misfortune of men with wide general interests that while they would like to have their finger in every pie, they have one in none. Intensity gives eminence, and rises to the heroic in matters sublime.”

Not the easiest paragraph to digest, but with a few readings you can see what Baltasar is getting at. The first two sentences hold much of the meaning: Quality is better than quantity.

The next quote is from a man named Ouspensky. It is written in much simpler English that the last. He is explaining to one of his pupils the need for pressure when trying to achieve a certain goal. In this case learning a language. The Russian language:

“If you want to learn a language, you must learn a certain number of words every day and give some time to the study of grammar and so on. If you want to learn Russian and begin by learning five words a day, I will guarantee that you will never learn it. But if you learn two hundred words a day, in a few months you will understand Russian. It all depends on elementary statistics. In every kind of work or study there is a certain standard. If you give it a certain amount of energy and time, but just not enough, you will have no results. You will only turn round and round and remain approximately in the same place.”

But… It is clear that this could be achieved. It is no small feat to learn the Russian language, or Arabic for that matter, but there are many people living today who have learnt them.

All this taken together should show the point I am trying to make. That progress is a slow process. But if you have a clear goal in mind, be it to learn a language, or loose weight, or be a better golfer. It can be reached.

Can Baboons Read?

This is very interesting! Makes you think… But more than that, what do different people associate with different words?

Earlier this year, French behavioral scientist Jonathan Grainger and his team taught baboons to read. Well, not exactly. They taught the baboons to recognize words. The baboons played a game on a computer screen. When a fake word appears, they were supposed to press a blue plus sign. When a real word shows up, they were supposed to press a green circle. The baboons were rewarded with food whenever they got the correct answer. Over time, they learned to recognize common letter combinations, like TH, PR, RD, and others. After months of playing this game, the baboons accurately distinguished between a made-up word like “bnol” and a real word like “bowl” 75% of the time. That’s better than your average three-year old.

Of course, this does not mean that the baboons can read. They cannot look at the word book and connect it to the object book. That kind of abstract thinking separates humans from any other species. We see the word scissors – which has nothing whatsoever to do with the object – but our mind conjures a picture of scissors, a project that we’ve done with scissors, and many other memories. This also applies to predictive thinking. When we see the word tomorrow, we think about what we will make for dinner or whether it will rain. These abstract concepts define our species.

However, this evidence does prove that non-human primates can recognize letter patterns, which may be the evolutionary precursor to reading. Our brains are inclined recognize letters, like patterns on a piece of ripe fruit.

This also makes us wonder: what is language? It is not merely the words on the page or the sounds that you hear. Language only becomes language when it’s understood by a brain.

Health and Language

Would you learn a new language if it would help your health? You may have heard that bilingual children actually have more brainpower than kids who grow up speaking only one language.

But could speaking multiple languages help you at the other end of life as well? Neuroscientists now say yes. Bilingualism appears to protect against dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. In a recent study, Dr. Ellen Bialystok at York University found that in bilingual patients with dementia, the disease had a later onset than in monolingual patients. On average, being bilingual delayed the disease by four to five years.

Why does being bilingual protect against dementia? Regularly speaking two languages strengthens different parts of the brain. This exercise helps what neuroscientists call “executive control,” which refers to complex cognitive skills like planning, working memory, mental flexibility, and many other important functions. These skills are the first to disappear as we age, but some activities (like eating well, exercising regularly, and doing word puzzles) have been shown to stave off mental decline in old age. Apparently, being bilingual has a similar impact.

Does your high school French class count? Sadly no. How often you speak a second language, and how well you know it, both influence to what degree being bilingual can protect against dementia. Other variables, like when a patient learned the second language, have not been examined.

Are you more likely to learn another language because it has positive health impact? Do you realise the potential you have to improve your life?