The Greatest Danger Before You --by Granny D

In the end -- and it will end -- your life will seem to have sped by like a fleeting dream. Much of your story will be the age-old but ever joyful human experience: romance, family, satisfying work, and happy completion. I wish you a great fountain of successes. You will also be provided with all the failures and tragedies necessary to deepen and widen your soul -- sufficient, I hope, to make you wise and forgiving of all human frailties. I pray that these necessary troubles will never long crush your optimism nor your love for this magical life.

The greatest danger before you is this: you live in an age when people would package and standardize your life for you -- steal it from you and sell it back to you at a price. That price is very high.

You have already been selected for this program. You have its credit cards and designer labels already expensively around you. In the months ahead, you will find yourselves working long hours, too exhausted for community life or even good friendships -- too compromised to take a stand against the abuses of the system you serve. A great treadmill has been devised for you, and its operators do not care much if it wears you out or kills you. A system is in place to steal your life from you, if you will let it. Don't let it.

Read, study, meditate and think for yourself. Let your most serious education now commence, if it has not already done so. Refine and hold your own values, and pay the high price necessary to live those values. Decide what is important to you, and hold your ground against all temptations and tortures. From the pink granite of your own values, build a fortress against the world's ethical compromises, or you will soon be among those dead of eye who stand next to you in elevators but who are not alive. Don't let them steal your life. This is the only warning you will receive.

--Granny D

Un-learning the Ways of Un-love --by Swami Chaitanya Keerti

When you are absolutely happy in your aloneness, when the other is not a need, it is then that you are capable of love. If the other is your need, you can only exploit, manipulate, dominate but cannot love.

Because you depend on the other, possessiveness arises -- out of fear. "Who knows? The other is with me today; tomorrow he/she may not be with me. Who knows about the next moment?" [...] Out of that fear of the future, you become very possessive. You create bondage around the person you think you love.

But love cannot create a prison. If love creates a prison, then what is left for hatred to do? Love brings freedom -- love gives freedom. It is non-possessiveness. But that is possible only if you have known a totally different quality of love, one not of need but of sharing.

Love is sharing of overflowing joy. You are too full of joy, you cannot contain it, you have to share it. Then there is poetry, then there is something tremendously beautiful which is not of this world, something that comes from the beyond.

Often I say, learn the art of love. What I really mean is: learn the art of removing all that hinders love. It is a negative process. It is like digging a well -- you go on removing layers of earth, stones, rocks and then suddenly there is water. The water was always there as an undercurrent. When you remove all barriers, the water is available. So with love. Love is the undercurrent of your being. It is flowing, but there are many rocks, much earth to be removed. That's what I mean when I say: learn the art of love. It is really not learning love but un-learning the ways of un-love.

--Swami Chaitanaya Keerti

This World is Perfect --by Swami Vivekananda

Is it not a blasphemy to say that the world needs our help? We cannot deny that there is much misery in it; to go out and help others is, therefore, the best thing we can do, although in the long run, we shall find that helping others is only helping ourselves. […]

Life is good or evil according to the state of mind in which we look at it, it is neither by itself. Fire, by itself, is neither good nor evil. When it keeps us warm we say, "How beautiful is fire!" When it burns our fingers, we blame it. Still, in itself it is neither good nor bad. According as we use it, it produces in us the feeling of good or bad; so also is this world. It is perfect. By perfection is meant that it is perfectly fitted to meet its ends. We may all be perfectly sure that it will go on beautifully well without us, and we need not bother our heads wishing to help it.

Yet we must do good; the desire to do good is the highest motive power we have, if we know all the time that it is a privilege to help others. […]

[And] one must first know how to work without attachment, then one will not be a fanatic. When we know that this world is like a dog's curly tail and will never get straightened, we shall not become fanatics. If there were no fanaticism in the world, it would make much more progress than it does now. It is a mistake to think that fanaticism can make for the progress of mankind. On the contrary, it is a retarding element creating hatred and anger, and causing people to fight each other, and making them unsympathetic. We think that whatever we do or possess is the best in the world, and what we do not do or possess is of no value. So, always remember the instance of the curly tail of the dog whenever you have a tendency to become a fanatic. You need not worry or make yourself sleepless about the world; it will go on without you. When you have avoided fanaticism, then alone will you work well. It is the level-headed man, the calm man, of good judgment and cool nerves, of great sympathy and love, who does good work and so does good to himself.

--Swami Vivekananda, From "The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda," Vol. 1

Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves.
We must learn to respect them.
We must learn to listen. --Sarah Ban Breathnach

No Illusions, No Resistances

10. Can you coax your mind from its wandering

and keep it to the original Oneness?

Can you let your body become

supple as a new born child’s?

Can you cleanse your inner vision

until you see nothing but the light?

Can you love people and lead them

without imposing your will?

Can you deal with the most vital matters

by letting events take their course?

Can you step back from your own mind

and thus understand all things?

Giving birth and nourishing,

having without possessing,

acting with no expectations,

leading and not trying to control,

This is the supreme virtue.

63. Act without doing,

work without effort.

Think of the large as small,

and the few as many.

Confront the difficult

while it is still easy;

accomplish the great task

with a series of small acts.

The Master never reaches for the great:

thus she achieves greatness.

When she runs into a difficulty,

she stops and gives herself to it.

she doesn’t cling to her own comfort:

thus problems are no problem for her.

50. The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.

He knows that he is going to die,

and he has nothing left to hold on to;

No illusions in his mind,

no resistances in his body.

He doesn’t think about his actions;

they flow from the core of his being.

He holds nothing back from life;

therefore he is ready for death,

as a man is ready for sleep

after a good day’s work.

--Lao Tzu (Translated by Stephen Mitchell), From Tao Te Ching

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. --Philo

Does Earth harbour a 'shadow biosphere' of alien life?

A 'shadow biosphere' of 'weird life' – unrelated to life as we know it – might exist on Earth, giving new insight into how common life is elsewhere in the universe, astrobiologists say.

Finding life that doesn't fit with the types we already know would be a strong indication that life developed more than one time here on Earth, increasing the chances of finding it elsewhere, said Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

But nobody has ever seriously searched for microorganisms - or any form of life - different from the carbon-based, DNA-centred type of life about which we have long known.

Unique biochemistries

If we do look, Davies said, "It's entirely feasible that we'll find a shadow biosphere," he told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago.

"Our search for life [has been] based on our assumptions of life as we know it. Weird life and normal life could be intermingled, and filtering out the things we understand about life as we know it from the things we don't understand is tricky."

The tools and experiments researchers use to look for new forms of life - such as those on missions to Mars - would not detect biochemistries different from our own, making it easy for scientists to miss alien life, even if was under their noses.

"When you don't know what you're looking for or what it'll look like, you have to come up with a whole scientific method for how to go about [looking for] it," added Steven Benner, a Fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution and The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Gainesville, Florida.

Scientists are looking in places where life isn't expected - for example, in areas of extreme heat, cold, salt, radiation, dryness, or contaminated streams and rivers. Davies is particularly interested in places that are heavily contaminated with arsenic, which, he suggests, might support forms of life that use arsenic the way life as we know it uses phosphorus.

Piggybacking on a meteorite

If we do discover exotic life unrelated to ours, it might not have developed here, Davies said. Instead, it might have originated elsewhere, then hitchhiked to Earth by piggybacking on a meteorite.

But it doesn't matter where it originated, Davies argued, because it's still an indication that life has cropped up from scratch in more than one place.

"If it's happened more than once in the Solar System, then the Universe will be teeming with life," said Davies.

Scientists assign a probability to the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe on a scale of 0 to 1, with 0 being no chance to 1 being a 100 per cent likelihood. "We'd like to think it's 1, but who knows," said Davies.