How Quantum Physics Relates to the Awakening Process

Below is an email by Dr. Stanley Sobottka, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia, upon the end of his tenure as Leader of a Yahoo! Group called Open Awareness Study Group. Dr. Sobottka's website is A Course in Consciousness.

The email came my way by my blogosphere friend, psychiatrist, Dr. Colleen Loehr (see her blog A Window is Where the Wall is Absent).

Dr. Sobottka explains in the most basic of term the difference between classical physics and quantum physics and what the latter has to say about consciousness and the awakening process. It is reprinted by permission.

Sleep Poll Reveals Wives' Tales

This article was first published by Technorati on 8 March 2010. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

The National Sleep Foundation released its 2010 Sleep and Ethnicity Poll results today, uncovering unexpected findings that will forever stand in the way of some much beloved wives tales vis-a-vie sex and good sleep.

The poll, conducted by telephone with over a thousand participants, seems to be completely legit, with a nice PDF brochure of its "Summary of Findings," which contains lots of graphs and charts.

Word of warning: please consult that brochure yourself, because I stand behind none of these conclusions.

One of the stated goals of this research effort was: "To investigate attitudes and behaviors about the relationship between sleep and health across different ethnic groups." Last on the Foundations list, first on mine.

The Joy of Being, Explained

The Endorphin Effect: A Breakthrough Strategy for Holistic Health and Spiritual Wellbeing is a book by British psychologist William Bloom, published back in 2001. It is an Aristotelian approach to the Platonic (and pre-Socratic) mode of being called joy.

Take a look at this three-minute video. By way of contrast, it's a great tool for the understanding of the joy of being.

Bloom recommends five strategies to boost your body's production of endorphins: "rest"; "exercise"; "positive triggers"; "attitude of the inner smile"; and "connection with the natural world."

"Positive triggers" would be just about anything that makes you feel good--the thought of one's children, a beach in Hawaii, and ace in tennis, anything.

Exercise provides the best example as to the real essence of these strategies. Imagine the guy (or woman) who has to log sixty miles running per week. No one can care that much about running, can they? What he cares about is the endorphins that the running releases, the "runner's high," as it's called. He's become addicted to the endorphins, which are, in fact, a thousand times more powerful than morphine.