18 Spiritual Teachings that Blew my Mind Wide Open. After rejecting the Catholic Church around age 10, I stumbled upon the love of my life—yoga-—at the critical age of 12-going-on-13. I started reading New Age self-help books in college and met the Buddha in the San Francisco Bay area at 23. Each stage along the way has been illuminating and necessary to move to a higher level of consciousness. I am thrilled to continue learning and practicing throughout this lifetime, at least. At certain points in the past, I have wished for epiphanies, signals and sudden enlightenment. So, although I would like to gift you with these 18 teachings that have altered my mind and improved my life, they may not resonate with you. My dear friend Liz has a tattoo that reminds her, “This too shall pass.” What would you put on your list?
How the Invention of the Alphabet Usurped Female Power in Society and Sparked the Rise of Patriarchy in Human Culture by Maria Popova A brief history of gender dynamics from page to screen. The Rosetta Stone may be one of the 100 diagrams that changed the world and language may have propelled our evolution, but the invention of the written word was not without its costs. As Sophocles wisely observed, “nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” “By profession, I am a surgeon… I am by nature a storyteller,” Shlain tells us, and it is through this dual lens of critical thinking and enchantment that he examines his iconoclastic subject — a subject whose kernel was born while Shlain was touring Mediterranean archeological sites in the early 1990s and realized that the majority of shrines had been originally consecrated to female deities, only to be converted to male-deity worship later, for unknown reasons. Illustration by Giselle Potter for Gertrude Stein's posthumously published 'To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays.' Shlain frames the premise: Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
Reboot Your Life: 20 Mental Barriers You Should Let Go Of Source: www.myscienceacademy.org | Original Post Date: December 16, 2014 – You are in an imaginary hot air balloon. It’s just you and all of your belongings in the wicker basket. Something went wrong and you are losing altitude fast. You will hit the ground in less than ten minutes if you don’t come up with something quick. The only immediate solution is to get rid of excess weight and throw off at least half of your belongings. This happens to all of us in less dramatic circumstances. Our mental life follows the same fate. Some of them are useless ideas that drag us down considerably. So if you were in the hot air balloon situation, which of these mental barriers should we let go? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Written by Gilbert Ross of www.myscienceacademy.org
7 Must-Read Books on Time by Maria Popova What the second law of thermodynamics has to do with Saint Augustine, landscape art, and graphic novels. Time is the most fundamental common denominator between our existence and that of everything else, it’s the yardstick by which we measure nearly every aspect of our lives, directly or indirectly, yet its nature remains one of the greatest mysteries of science. Last year, we devoured BBC’s excellent What Is Time? and today we turn to seven essential books that explore the grand question on a deeper, more multidimensional level, spanning everything from quantum physics to philosophy to art. It comes as no surprise to start with A Brief History of Time — legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s 1988 masterpiece, which is commonly considered the most important book in popular science ever published and one of our 10 essential primers on (almost) everything. Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:
the-8-habits-highly-productive-people-2 So I thought that I might write a quick review of every self-help book ever written all right here in this one little article. Simple enough. I love the easy jobs. Surely it couldn’t be that hard, could it? John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative by Maria Popova “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines “the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative”: The lecture is worth a watch in its entirety, below, if only to get a full grasp of Cleese’s model for creativity as the interplay of two modes of operating — open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to ponder possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision. A few more quotable nuggets of insight excerpted below the video. Creativity is not a talent. We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! Thanks, Simon
25 Things You Should Remember To Do Every Day 1. Nourish yourself. Put things into your body that it needs. Skip that soda and grab a Naked Juice or buy a blender and make your own juice! 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. KNEE JOINT - ANATOMY & FUNCTION The knee is essentially made up of four bones. The femur, which is the large bone in your thigh, attaches by ligaments and a capsule to your tibia. Just below and next to the tibia is the fibula, which runs parallel to the tibia. The patella, or what we call the knee cap, rides on the knee joint as the knee bends. When the knee moves, it does not just bend and straighten, or, as it is medically termed, flex and extend. Figure 3: Cross Sectional View of Right Knee The knee joint also has a structure made of cartilage, which is called the meniscus or meniscal cartilage. To function well, a person needs to have strong and flexible muscles. For Additional Information on Meniscal Injuries: Figure 4: Right Knee There are two cruciate ligaments located in the center of the knee joint. For Additional Information on Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries: For Additional Information on Knee Injury Statistics: Knee Injury Statistics
Men Not Great at Estimating Female Desire -- Science of Us The science of sexual desire is complicated — as it should be, because sexual desire itself is complicated. Sex researchers, for example, have in recent years begun to reconsider the way arousal is conceptualized: Instead of spontaneous desire, in which the urge to have sex strikes seemingly out of nowhere, many people experience responsive desire, where arousal happens in response to some sort of pleasurable scenario. If sex scientists have only recently upended this conventional wisdom regarding the way desire works, maybe it’s not so surprising that some of us nonscientists are still rather confused. When men and women meet for the first time, for example, previous research has shown that men tend to overperceive women’s sexual interest. No, is the answer, at least for the heterosexual men partnered with women that Muise studied. There are a few things that could be going on here.
The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You Really Are by Maria Popova The cause of and cure for the illusion of separateness that keeps us from embracing the richness of life. During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective on inner wholeness in the age of anxiety and what it really means to live a life of purpose. We owe much of today’s mainstream adoption of practices like yoga and meditation to Watts’s influence. Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection) Though strictly nonreligious, the book explores many of the core inquiries which religions have historically tried to address — the problems of life and love, death and sorrow, the universe and our place in it, what it means to have an “I” at the center of our experience, and what the meaning of existence might be. Watts considers the singular anxiety of the age, perhaps even more resonant today, half a century and a manic increase of pace later: