Outstanding video which depicts that consciousness is what drives and shapes everything. This means ultimately everything in the universe and that even matter is consciousness in the most subtlest and dense form.
State-supported exemptions to the laws of England and Wales based on a biblically-justifiable “deeply-held” christian conviction
| Biblically-justifiable action |
State-supported exemption
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Slavery |
no
|
|
| Poligamous marriages |
no
|
|
| Marital rape |
no
|
|
| Death penalty for… | ||
| infidelity |
no
|
|
| homosexuality |
no
|
|
| rape |
no
|
|
| being raped |
no
|
|
| blasphemy |
no
|
|
| prostitution |
no
|
|
| witchcraft |
no
|
|
| kidnapping |
no
|
|
| apostasy |
no
|
|
| parental disrespect |
no
|
|
| Discrimination against… | ||
| cross-dressers |
no
|
|
| witches |
no
|
|
| other ethnic groups |
no
|
|
| other religions/no faith |
yes
|
|
| homosexuals |
yes
|
|
Hmmm…
Possibly related posts:
I realize that this blog really isn’t about martial arts, but they are a huge part of my life and there are many lessons to be learned about life from them. If you want to be good at something, it has to become a constant part of you. Training your craft has to become automatic habit. Young up and coming basketball stars can rarely be seen without a ball accompanying them in their day to day lives. Likewise, a martial artist needs to be constantly improving his game, regardless of whether he is at a training session at that moment. Mental practice is one way to be constantly improving. Imagining yourself in different positions and how you might attack or defend from each position is a great exercise. Before a fight or tournament, visualizing how you want to win can have a huge impact on the outcome. Stretching while watching tv, hitting your shins with a hard object to make them harder, or even sitting on an exercise ball to improve core strength are all ways to improve your body for martial arts. Eddie Bravo talks about work ethic and how it can affect your grappling game:
No, CERN hasn’t started slamming protons into each other at the Large Hadron Collider early. And no, a top secret warp drive hasn’t been test-driven in Earth orbit (not that we know of anyway). In reality, an electromagnetic black hole has been fabricated in the laboratory for the first time.
Before you start getting concerned that the planet will soon be swallowed up by a rampaging singularity, the black hole in question isn’t the gravitational behemoth you might find after a supernova or in the center of the Milky Way. This particular table-top black hole mimics the curvature of space-time, creating a fabricated event horizon that swallows electromagnetic radiation at microwave wavelengths.
The best thing is that this experiment isn’t just for curiosity-sake, it has a practical application that could revolutionize future solar panel design, making the production of solar energy a lot more efficient than it is currently.
According to previous theoretical studies, mimicking the curvature of space-time around an analog black hole should be possible, guiding electromagnetic radiation around a cylindrical structure “consisting of a central core surrounded by a shell of concentric rings” (as explained by the New Scientist article). The theory is that a material of increasing permittivity (a characteristic of the medium electromagnetic radiation travels through, influencing the electrical component of the photons) could be used between the outer and inner surface of the cylinder. If the transition is smooth enough, and the permittivity eventually matches that of the cylinder core, the photons should be absorbed by the core, rather than reflected.
Although the physics sounds complicated (and I think I’d have to see the apparatus up-close to fully appreciate what is going on), the result is astonishing. What’s more, theory has just been turned into a working model by Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China. This is the world’s first working black hole.
By designing a printed circuit board with an intricate pattern of “meta-materials” (i.e. a man-made material that can alter the characteristics of the passage of electromagnetic radiation), a steady permittivity gradient was created, ensuring the photons’ absorption by the core. The physicists used microwaves, not optical light, in this set-up as the wavelength of microwaves is easier to manage (the wavelength of microwaves in the electromagnetic spectrum is longer than optical light, so larger scale meta-material patterns could be made).
“When the incident electromagnetic wave hits the device, the wave will be trapped and guided in the shell region towards the core of the black hole, and will then be absorbed by the core,” says Cui. “The wave will not come out from the black hole.”
However, the microwave energy has to go somewhere (this black hole is still bound by physical laws), and in Cui and Cheng’s black hole, microwave energy is converted into heat.
This sounds like fun, but how can this technique be used in solar panels? Although optical light can’t be manipulated so easily, Cui is confident that by the end of this year that he will be able to manufacture an optical black hole. If this can be done, then it isn’t such a stretch of the imagination to think that a meta-material surface could replace traditional photovoltaic cells to literally suck sunlight into an array of tiny black holes printed in a circuit board.
Source: Discovery Blog
By directly manipulating the activity of individual neurons, scientists have given flies memories of a bad experience they never really had, according to a report in the October 16th issue of the journal Cell.
“Flies have the ability to learn, but the circuits that instruct memory formation were unknown,” said Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford. “We were able to pin the essential component down to 12 cells. It’s really remarkable resolution.” Those dozen cells are sufficient to manage what is a difficult cognitive problem: learning to associate a particular odor with something bad, like an electric shock. In essence, these cells create memories that the fly then uses to avoid that odor.
To pinpoint the exact neurons responsible for this memory among thousands in the fly brain, the researchers used a clever technique they developed, called optogenetics, in which a simple flash of light is used to release caged-molecules present in selective neurons that then stimulate the activity of those neurons. An analogous situation, says Miesenböck, is if you wanted to send a message only to certain inhabitants of a city, you would give those you wanted to reach a radio tuned to the right frequency and send the message publicly, over the airwaves.
Miesenböck said his team made some educated guesses about the parts of the brain that would be important for the flies’ learning task. From there, they were able to narrow it down through experimentation to the 12-neuron brain circuit. Remarkably, stimulating just these neurons gives the flies a memory of an unpleasant event that never occurred.
“We like to take seemingly lofty psychological phenomena and reduce them to mechanics, to see for example how the intelligence needed to adapt to a changing environment can be reduced to physical interactions between cells and molecules,” he said. “The question is: how do you get intelligence from parts that are unintelligent?”
Using their approach to “write directly to memory,” scientists can now obtain a level of evidence about brain function that was impossible before, Miesenböck emphasized. He notes that neuroscience for a long time depended primarily on recording neural activity and attempting to correlate it to perceptions, actions, and cognition. “It’s more powerful to seize control of the relevant brain circuits and produce these states directly,” he says.
Miesenböck adds that the simple brain of a fly likely can tell us much about how more complex brains work. “As a general rule, biology tends to be conservative,” he said. “It’s rare that evolution ‘invents’ the same process several times.” And, he says, even simple organisms may turn out to have a “surprisingly rich mental life.”
Source: www.physorg.com
Stephen Laberge is respected as an expert in the skill of lucid dreaming and has pioneered much of the scientific research available in the field. Covered in this video are techniques to induce a lucid dream, self control, dream control, dream memory, as well as accessing a higher cognitive and spiritual capacity.
I myself have had several lucid dreams, and am looking into training the skill so as to experience them more often, as well as out-of-body experiences (OBE’s). I am making no comment as to whether OBE’s are actually you out of your body, or if it is all in your head. I think a good experiment for figuring that out would be to have someone have an OBE in one room, and have something completely random going on in the next room that they wouldn’t have expected to be going on. If they claimed to have gone in there during their OBE, they should be able to describe what was going on. LaBerge actually discusses this, and says that there have been mixed results. I think I’ll try it myself once I become proficient at lucid dreaming and OBE’s. Enjoy this fascinating interview!
