Inner Worship

"Q: What is that which is called the inner worship or the worship of the attributeless?

A: In sacred texts, the worship of the attributeless has been elaborately explained (as a separate discipline). Yet, all disciplines such as sacrifice, charity, austerity, observance of vows, mantra repetition, yoga, ceremony are, in effect, modes of meditation of the form 'I am Universal Consciousness'. So, in all the modes of discipline, one should see to it that one does not stray away from the thought 'I am Universal Consciousness'. This is the purpose of inner worship."

- Ramana Maharshi

The Power of Thought - Mark Griffin

"The power of thought and the impact it has on the nature of one's life and death cannot be stressed enough. The quality of one's thought is the event. This is not an abstraction. All of the components of life and death arise within your own thought constructs.

People think they can choose the kind of thoughts they will have when they die, but this is not the case. Your life and death are the same, they mirror each other, and the thoughts you hold in your heart and mind during life, are the thoughts that will be present at death.

It is because of this all-important understanding that we engage in spiritual training. We learn to meditate because when meditation is strong, it is like a trip between life and death traveling through the bardo of our own nature.
" -- Mark Griffin

String Theory in Two Minutes - A video of a friend of mine

My friend and colleague Adam Walsh contributed the following video to the Discovery channel contest "String Theory in Two Minutes"

High-Res and
Low-Res
Click on the picture - the graphics move.

I also found this in my internet travels:
http://members.wri.com/jeffb/visualization/stringtheory.shtml


"String Theory predicts the existence of more than the 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension we are all familiar with. According to string theory, there are additional dimensions that we are unfamiliar with because they are curled up into tiny complicated shapes that can only be seen on tiny scales. If we could shrink to this tiny, Planck-sized scale we could see that at every 3D point in space, we can also explore 6 additional dimensions. This animation shows an array of Calabi-Yau spaces which are projections of these higher dimensions into the more familiar dimensions we are aware of.

Brian Greene's book, The Elegant Universe, was made into a documentary and has a chapter that does a good job of explaining this concept. See Chapter 7 of Hour 2, titled "Multiple Dimensions", to watch a 7 minute Quicktime movie that describes this in more detail.

Visualization by Jeff Bryant and based on concepts from A.J. Hanson.

A.J. Hanson, "A Construction for Computer Visualization of Certain Complex Curves," in "Computers and Mathematics" column, ed. Keith Devlin, of Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 41, No. 9, pp. 1156--1163 (American Math. Soc., Providence, November/December, 1994)."

Life should be used to prepare for death.

"Death, like life, is highly complex, subject to ignorance, superstition, fear, confusion, all of which can lead to errors in judgment. We have a desire within ourselves that mixes with a set of conditions, and we make a choice which can be the fruit of clear perception or, more likely, our desire for what we want to have happen. We see what we want to see; our choice is not based on the reality of a situation, but rather a hope. Depending on the quality of the choices we make, our lives can go fairly well or can seem to be nothing but a journey from one disaster to another.


Death is just like this, only much more dramatic; life seems to be spread out over a phase of time, but the event of death unfolds very swiftly. What is most important at the moment of death is the ability to recognize what is happening. Unfortunately, most often the event of death is unprepared for because our lives are designed to keep the subject of death as far away from us as possible. The basic theme of spiritual life, of all yoga, of the Bardo Thodol, is that life and death are the same; life should be used to prepare for the inevitable encounter with death." -- Mark Griffin

a quote from Yajnavalkya on the nature of the self

Now, the Self does not percieve anything in deep sleep. Although the self does not percieve anything there, it is seeing. The seeing inherent in the perciever has no cessation, since it is imperishable. However, there is no object second to the self that could percieve something distinct and separate from itself.

Yajnavalkya 1000 BCE

Great Peace

"Rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind,

Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts

Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves

In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace."

Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche

The Evolution of the Intersubjective Field

"The human mind develops only through relationship. If you leave a little baby to grow up with the wolves, he or she is not going to develop in the ways other children do. The evolution of our own consciousness is entirely dependent upon how profound is our capacity for relatedness, for creative relationship with other individuals. So in an evolved spiritual context, the nature and purpose of human relationship would be a creative engagement at the highest level that would mutually ensure evolution and development. The quality and content of our relationships is really the ground in which the evolution of consciousness can occur.

"Consciousness is One, not two. It's an infinite singular field that we are all sharing—a field that has no beginning and no end. So the evolution of consciousness is the evolution of that field itself."

"And it is only through the conscious cultivation of this intersubjective field, which occurs in the creative friction of intentional, awakened, focused human engagement, that consciousness evolves at the leading edge." -
Andrew Cohen