"the universe is listening; be careful what you say in it"

[Aizen]

Be ready to potentially say hello to your brothers and sister across the universe in your lifetime. If that ever happened, some philosophy and/or religion would evaporate, while others would strengthen.

If I'm alive when the great contact happens, I just hope the other life forms are cool, enlightened and honorable. If the other races are hostile, spiritually weak and emit low vibrations in terms of their energy, it would be a big warning to humanity in what not to become. Imagine being light years ahead in terms of technology but having petty personalities, no sense of community and no soul. If other life forms are wise, fun-loving, enlightened and intelligent, it would show humanity what is possible.

This thread is about spirituality but this article made me think of the big question: What if instead of spirituality being a global thing (global consciousness, global sub-culture), spirituality wound up becoming a universal thing (universal consciousness, universal sub-culture)? The stakes in the game of life would exponentially shoot up to levels unforeseen. Being a bad person would not longer just cripple the world, it could potentially ruin the universe.

MIT researcheris sure there are alien life forms out there, not sure why so many people think they've been here

Alien life is almost certainly real, they probably just haven’t visited Earth yet.

That’s according to Sara Seager, a woman described as a “pioneer” in the search for exoplanets — ones that orbit a sun other than our own. She’s also leading the search to use and implement high-powered telescopes to pinpoint planets that could carry life. She described how data extrapolated from telescopic images can offer hints to the presence of life on other planets at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics this week as part of its first Convergence conference.

The Professor of Planetary Science and Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a NASA researcher discussed her work and the search for the truth out there with the National Post’s Ashley Csanady in Waterloo.

Q: You have said previously we’re going to be able to both find and prove the existence of another habitable planet, even one with life on it, within the next 40 years.

A: We try not to over-promise, so I would start by saying that with the next generation of telescopes, we’ll have the capability to find habitable planets. But there’s a bit of a stretch between the portrayal in science fiction, movies like Avatar and Interstellar, where we can go and actually visit the planets and what scientists are doing.

We’re looking for a habitable planet… a Goldilocks planets, not too hot, not too cold, not too big, not too small, just right for life. So far, most things we can measure about planets consistently are their mass and their size, sometimes both, and how much energy they’re receiving from their star. Really, it’s just those three things we have to go by. Sometimes we can measure atmospheric properties.

We have this thing call the habitable zone, it’s the distance from a star where the planets will be heated just enough, assuming they have a thin atmosphere. A number of planets have been found in their star’s habitable zone, most of them are probably too big or too hot, but we don’t really know.

It’s amazing that as soon as astronomers had the tools to find planets in the habitable zone they found one and they they found more. I think it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Now we’re just waiting til we have the next generation of telescopes (such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, both of which have a Canadian connection) so we can more easily access these smaller planets.

Q: How will you know you’ve not only found a habitable planet but signs of life?

A: What we call habitable now is quite simple: all life on earth needs water, so we call a planet habitable if it has liquid water. Now on a planet we can’t get a beautiful image like the Apollo images of Earth, we can’t see an ocean. But what we will be able to see (from telescope images) is vapour in the atmosphere. Water vapour is actually a very strong absorber (of energy from a star). On Earth, it’s our biggest greenhouse gas. We don’t hear about that because we’re not pumping water vapour into our atmosphere, but it’s so strong we can see it literally from far away.

We’re confident we’ll find that: rocky planets with liquid water

So, if we see water vapour on a small rocky planet, that should be indicative of a reservoir. We’re looking for a planet we call “potentially habitable,” if it might be the right temperature for liquid water, we call it “habitable” if it has liquid water. We’re confident we’ll find that: rocky planets with liquid water.

That might not be enough. Some people think you need land and ocean to get life, that if you just have an ocean everything is too diluted, all the ingredients are too spread out. They actually need to be concentrated in little pools… a completely ocean-covered planet might not cut it.

Q: Once you find a small rocky planet with liquid water, how do we detect life from this far away and telescope images?

A: Our search for signs of life, what we’re looking for are gases in the atmosphere that don’t belong. The reason we fixate on this is that we have that on our own planet Earth. We have oxygen, but oxygen is a highly reactive gas. It shouldn’t be in our atmosphere. If we didn’t have life on our planet… we would have virtually no oxygen.

Every kid has learned in school that our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, 80 per cent, mostly oxygen, 20 per cent, with maybe a per cent of Argon. That’s very important for exoplanets; if there’s an alien civilization around a nearby star with the kind of space telescope we’re trying to build, they’ll see oxygen, they may not 100 per cent know that’s caused by life, but they’ll know that shouldn’t be there.

Q: So it wouldn’t necessarily need to be oxygen though, right?

A: Right, then the question is the list of gases, which raises a bit of a problem. Because what we end up finding is pretty much any other gas, including oxygen at some level, though it’s produced by life, it usually has another source.

We’re actually in a bit of a limbo right now, because there are gases produced in large quantities but they are created by geophysics and atmospheric chemical reactions as well; there are gases produced in small quantities specific to life on Earth (but there isn’t enough to detect them from this far away).

So we’re looking for gases that are present in quantities that can’t really be explained any other way.

Q: They say theoretically one in six stars has something in that Goldilocks zone, what does it take to prove we think this is habitable? Are there any planets we think hold life already?

A: Not a single one right now. And that one in five, one in six number is still a bit speculative actually. It’s sort of an extrapolation after a very long scientific inquiry.

We know that exoplanets are extremely common… evidence is showing that every star has planets and rocky planets are common also.

Q: Is it possible life could be on a moon?

A: It could but planets are so hard to see themselves and moons are even harder. It’s possible we could see the moon of a giant planet. But we’re not ready yet. We just have this tantalizing evidence that those planets are out there. We’re sure they’re there; we see small rocky planets. We know they’re out there but we have to look at their atmosphere, assess their greenhouse power (by extrapolating data from telescope images) to look for water vapour and signs of life to know anything more.

We don’t have any for sure yet, we just have a lot of possibilities.

We’re not necessarily talking about little green people waving their hands at us

Q: People talk about these exoplanets circling ‘nearby’ stars, but what does that actually mean?

A: We think our Milky Way looks like a spiral galaxy (with) hundreds of billions of stars, and in our universe we think there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. But the only region we can search for habitable planets are the very nearest stars to us in our galaxy.

If you took an image of the entire Milky Way with all its spiral arms and you just used a pin or the tiniest circle you could draw with a pencil, that’s where we’d be searching for planets that could be like Earth. Even with the biggest telescopes we could construct today, planets are just so tiny, their signal is so weak that we need the biggest power that we can have, so we can only look very nearby.

Q: So how far away is that?

A: Our nearest star is about four light years away. The planets we have found so far range anywhere from 10 to 20 light years away to thousands of light years away.

Q: Do we need to send satellites to be closer to these stars to definitively prove the existence of life on other planets?

A: We’d like to… if we could.

We do not know how to send interstellar spacecraft to other stars. It’s sort of a dream actually of the whole community of space enthusiasts that one day we will be able to send a probe there, if not human beings.

Our fastest Voyager 1 spacecraft has left our solar system, it’s billions of kilometres away now. If it were on its way to the nearest star, it would still take about 50,000 years to get there.

If we could figure out how to go even faster — that one’s going 20 kilometres a second — then maybe we send a probe sooner
Some people think they could find a way to travel a tenth of the speed of light, and that way it would still take 40 years to get there.

Q: So do you think we’ve had visitors from other planets here?

A: I don’t actually. People love believing that; I’m not quite sure why so many people believe actually, even the number of people who write to me telling me that we have been visited or they have personal evidence, it’s just unbelievably huge numbers of people.

I have not seen any evidence that it’s real actually, but when I say this, then it just suddenly unleashes a bunch of new emails that they definitely have evidence.

But no, the distances are so vast and that’s not why (I don’t believe), but because there’s no hard evidence. None of the arguments are very helpful or offer any kind of proof.

Most likely when we see signs of life we won’t know if it’s created by intelligent life or just by single cell bacteria or a slime covered world

Q: But you believe it’s out there?

A: It’s gotta be out there.

Just to make sure it’s clear, we’re not necessarily talking about little green people waving their hands at us. Most likely when we see signs of life we won’t know if it’s created by intelligent life or just by single cell bacteria or a slime covered world.

Like on our own world, if the aliens are looking at us, and they see oxygen in our atmosphere, we didn’t produce that. We’re using oxygen. We’re producing carbon dioxide.

If there are intelligent aliens somewhere else probing our world, they wouldn’t know about us, they would just know there’s something out there producing oxygen.

Q: What about the suggestion there was, or maybe still is, life on Mars?

A: It’s very similar actually, (to planets in the Goldilocks zone). There’s evidence of very tiny variable methane that appears to come and go, and it’s in much smaller quantities than we could observe on an exoplanet, but it’s the same thing: could this be produced by geophysics or there actually possibly some subsurface bacteria?

Mars has no water on the surface now, but there’s plenty of evidence that water once flowed on the surface, and I think there’s some dream or hope that there are these subsurface pockets where actually there could still be life.

But it’s tempered by the problems we have for exoplanets: that methane could be produced by life like it is on Earth or it could just be produced by geochemical reactions.

— this conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length

 

[TheBeigeBomber]

Aren't u a nice guy op

Be careful playing with fire

no not at all. im the opposite. just a horrible person all round really.

 

[Aizen]

Weekend fix for the soul: We are all connected to each other

The power of verbal communication and its effects on individuals is well known. However, mere words in the human language are not adequate enough to express the energetic and cosmic processes simultaneously going on in our universe. It is important to know, and be known, in a language far beyond ordinary words, to discover the hidden depth and wholeness at the heart of things.

When we are born, we are in complete sync with the universe and its language of energies. As we grow, we are prepared and trained to understand only words and all its complexities, and are made to forget the magic of energies that we were born with, that go beyond languages, to that wordless space within us. I say magic, because words may say one thing, but energies tell a whole story.

Thought energies can be transmitted instantaneously, like a radio station to a receiver. I truly understood the profundity of energetic communication after the birth of my first child. I was nervous about how I would understand her needs- it was a first for me. I was mortified of doing something wrong. But the minute I held her for the first time, there was this strong wordless connect - I just knew.

As Peter Drucker said, "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said." A person's energy can tell you much more about them, and can shout out the truth far louder than words. Sometimes when you have a strong connect with people in your immediate circle, you can immediately 'feel' when they need you or are in trouble or are thinking of you. Even among strangers, very often we can 'feel' that something isn't right in their interactions - we feel uneasy as we are able to pick up the 'vibes' that the person has sent out. Always always trust the vibes you get. Energies don't lie. This is precisely how we create our experiences in the physical world, which is nothing more than a manifestation of what is done on an energy level.

Everything comes from within. We are all connected to each other energetically. So whenever you think of someone, you instantly activate the energy cords that connect you both, forming a connection. This connection enables you to plant thoughts, share ideas, send love, express emotion, and spread positive (or negative) energy and much more, wordlessly. We constantly share ourselves with all the people that we encounter. If we come from a place of peace and harmony then that is what we share with the world. If we judge others or are angry, we are sending out negative energies into the world. We will in turn, attract people who judge us and we will find more angry people in our midst. All of us are collectively responsible for the energy of the world today. Since energy is contagious - be it positive or negative - one has to be forever mindful of whom we allow in our space and also be responsible for the kind of energy we bring to any space. Each time we put something positive into the universe, the world changes. Our kindness invites good things not just in our own world, but the whole world…and vice versa.

So, in short, you simply cannot have an attitude and keep it a secret! You cannot secretly dislike a person and expect to succeed with that person. You can forgive someone or ask for forgiveness in your mind, and that person will catch it. People pick up the signature of the energies radiating from within you, which convey the emotional text of the message.

Eventually it's all in the connection - the vibe - and one simple, infinitesimal positive shift in attitude will yield an entirely different positive result.

 

[Aizen]

Some physicists believe we're living in a giant hologram - and it's not that far-fetched

Some physicists actually believe that the universe we live in might be a hologram.

The idea isn't that the universe is some sort of fake simulation out of The Matrix, but rather that even though we appear to live in a three-dimensional universe, it might only have two dimensions. It's called the holographic principle.

The thinking goes like this: Some distant two-dimensional surface contains all the data needed to fully describe our world — and much like in a hologram, this data is projected to appear in three dimensions. Like the characters on a TV screen, we live on a flat surface that happens to look like it has depth.

t might sound absurd. But if when physicists assume it's true in their calculations, all sorts of big physics problems — such as the nature of black holes and the reconciling of gravity and quantum mechanics — become much simpler to solve. In short, the laws of physics seem to make more sense when written in two dimensions than in three.

"It's not considered some wild speculation among most theoretical physicists," says Leonard Susskind, the Stanford physicist who first formally defined the idea decades ago. "It's become a working, everyday tool to solve problems in physics."

But there's an important distinction to be made here. There's no direct evidence that our universe actually is a two-dimensional hologram. These calculations aren't the same as a mathematical proof. Rather, they're intriguing suggestions that our universe could be a hologram. And as of yet, not all physicists believe we have a good way of testing the idea experimentally.



Where did the idea that the universe might be a hologram come from?

The idea originally came out of a pair of paradoxes concerning black holes.

1) The black hole information loss problem

In 1974, Stephen Hawking famously discovered that black holes, contrary to what had long been thought, actually emit slight amounts of radiation over time. Eventually, as this energy bleeds away from the event horizon — the black hole's outer edge — the black hole should completely disappear.

However, this idea prompted what's known as the black hole information loss problem. It's long been thought that physical information can't be destroyed: All particles either retain their original form or, if they change, that change impacts other particles, so the first set of particles' original state could be inferred at the end.

As an analogy, think of a stack of documents that are fed through a shredder. Even though they're cut into tiny pieces, the information present on the pieces of paper still exists. It's been cut into tiny pieces, but it hasn't disappeared, and given enough time, the documents could be reassembled so that you'd know what was written on them originally. In essence, the same thing was thought to be true with particles.

But there was a problem: If a black hole disappears, then the information present in any object that may have been sucked into it seemingly disappears, too.

One solution, proposed by Susskind and Dutch physicist Gerard 't Hooft in the mid-'90s, was that when an object gets pulled into a black hole, it leaves behind some sort of 2D imprint encoded on the event horizon. Later, when radiation leaves the black hole, it picks up the imprint of this data. In this way, the information isn't really destroyed.

And their calculations showed that on just the 2D surface of a black hole, you could store enough information to completely describe any seemingly 3D objects inside it.

"The analogy that both of us independently were thinking about was that of a hologram — a two-dimensional piece of film which can encode all the information in a three-dimensional region of space," Susskind says.

The entropy problem: There was also the related problem of calculating the amount of entropy in a black hole — that is, the amount of disorder and randomness among its particles. In the '70s, Jacob Bekenstein had calculated that their entropy is capped, and that the cap is proportional to the 2D area of a black hole's event horizon.

"For ordinary matter systems, the entropy is proportional to the volume, not the area," says Juan Maldacena, an Argentinian physicist involved in studying the holographic principle. Eventually, he and others saw that this, too, pointed to the idea that what looked like a 3D object — a black hole — might be best understood using only two dimensions.

How did this idea go from black holes to the entire universe?

None of this was proof that black holes were holograms. But early on, Susskind says, physicists recognized that looking at the entire universe as a two-dimensional object that only looks three-dimensional might help solve some deeper problems in theoretical physics. And the math works just as well whether you're talking about a black hole, a planet, or an entire universe.

In 1998, Maldacena demonstrated that a hypothetical universe could be a hologram. His particular hypothetical universe was in what's called anti-de Sitter space (which, to simplify things, has a curved shape over huge distances, as opposed to our universe, which is believed to be flat):

What's more, by viewing this universe in two dimensions, he found a way to make the increasingly popular idea of string theory — a broad framework in which the basic building blocks of the universe are one-dimensional strings, rather than particles — jibe neatly with the well-established laws of particle physics.

And even more importantly, by doing so, he united two hugely important, disparate concepts in physics under one theoretical framework. "The holographic principle connected the theory of gravity to theories of particle physics," Maldacena says.

Combining these two fundamental ideas into a single coherent theory (often called quantum gravity) remains one of the holy grails of physics. So the holographic principle making it possible in this hypothetical universe was a big deal.

But could our universe actually be a hologram — or does the idea only apply to hypothetical ones?

That's still a matter of active debate. But there's been some recent theoretical work that suggests the holographic principle might work for our universe too — including a high-profile paper by Austrian and Indian physicists that came out this past May.

Like Maldacena, they also sought to use the principle to find a similarity between the disparate fields of quantum physics and gravitational theory. In our universe, these two theories typically don't align: They predict different results regarding the behavior of any given particle.

But in the new paper, the physicists calculated how these theories would predict the degree of entanglement — the bizarre quantum phenomenon in which the states of two tiny particles can become correlated so that a change to one particle can affect the other, even if they're far away. They found that by viewing one particular model of a flat universe as a hologram, they could indeed get the results of both theories to match up.

Still, even though this was a bit closer to our universe than the one Maldacena had worked with, it was just one particular type of flat space, and their calculations didn't take time into account — just the other three spatial dimensions. What's more, even if this did apply directly to our universe, it'd only show that it's possible it could be a hologram. It wouldn't be hard evidence.

How could we prove that the universe is a hologram?



The best type of proof would start with some testable prediction made by holographic theory. Experimental physicists could then gather evidence to see if it matches the prediction. For instance, the theory of the Big Bang predicted that we might find some form of remnant energy emanating throughout the universe as a result of the violent expansion 13.8 billion years ago — and in the 1960s, astronomers found exactly that, in the form of the cosmic microwave background.

At the moment, there's no universally agreed-upon test that would provide firm evidence for the idea. Still, some physicists believe that the holographic principle predicts there's a limit to how much information spacetime can contain, because our seemingly 3D spacetime is encoded by limited amounts of 2D information. As Fermilab's Craig Hogan recently put it to Motherboard, "The basic effect is that reality has a limited amount of information, like a Netflix movie when Comcast is not giving you enough bandwidth. So things are a little blurry and jittery."

Hogan and others are using an instrument called a Holomoter to look for this sort of blurriness. It relies on powerful lasers to see whether — at super-small, submicroscopic levels — there's a fundamental limit in the amount of information present in spacetime itself. If there is, they say, it could be evidence that we're living in a hologram.

Still, other physicists, including Susskind, reject the premise of this experiment and say it can't provide any evidence for the holographic principle.

Let's say we prove the universe is a hologram. What would that mean for my everyday life?

In one strict sense, it'd mean little. The same laws of physics you've been living with for your entire life would seem to remain exactly the same. Your house, dog, car, and body would keep appearing as three-dimensional objects, just like they always have.

But in a deeper sense, this discovery would revolutionize our existence on a profound level.

It doesn't matter much for your day-to-day life that the universe was formed 13.8 billion years in a sudden, violent expansion from a single point of matter. But the discovery of the Big Bang is instrumental for our current understanding of the history of the universe and our place within the cosmos.

Likewise, the bizarre principles of quantum mechanics — like entanglement, in which two distant particles somehow affect each other — don't really change your daily life either. You can't see atoms and don't notice them doing this. But these principles are another basic truth that tells us something utterly unexpected about the fundamental nature of the universe.

Proving the holographic principle would be much the same. Living our normal lives, we probably won't think much about the peculiar, counterintuitive fact that we live in a hologram. But the discovery would serve as an important step toward fully understanding the laws of physics — which dictate every action you've ever taken.

 

[Aizen]

How To Slow Down Time: Meditation And The Theory Of Relativity

If asked what meaningful accomplishment one could achieve in just 10 minutes, most of us would be hard-pressed to come up with an answer. Ten minutes is nothing! But ask the average person to sit quietly and focus only on mindful breathing meditation for those same ten minutes and be prepared to be met with an incredulous scowl and an unwillingness to participate. Ten minutes, in the latter scenario, may as well be a lifetime. It's all relative.

Meditation can be scary. In an age where the demand for our attention is greater than ever - Psychology Today estimates that the average person has [url=https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200308/depression-doing-the-thinking]25,000-50,000 thoughts per day[/url] -- the idea of sitting alone with one's thoughts can be understandably daunting. We're used to being at the beck and call of our smartphones, each notification supplying a very real hit of dopamine that validates our desire to be needed, liked, or even just noticed by the outside world. What most people fail to realize is that we've created a vicious cycle of false and unsustainable gratification.

Next time you sit down to meditate, think of it this way: You're giving yourself the gift of time and attention, indeed a commodity that becomes scarcer every day. Sure, meditation can make 60 seconds feel like an hour, but as human beings we have the power to choose whether that seemingly endless minute is ridden with debilitating anxiety or a blissful calm. We all have a choice, in any moment, to tune into our best self.

Try it right now by following these instructions: Close your eyes and take a deep breath for a count of four, and then exhale for a count of eight. As you inhale, really feel the cool air flowing in through your nose. Visualize the flow of oxygen through your respiratory system, traveling to all of the nooks and crannies of your body. As you exhale, imagine all of the stress you've been holding float away with your out-breath. Repeat five times. You've just activated your parasympathetic nervous system (ie your relaxation response) and all it took was one minute.

Congratulations! You just meditated. Didn't it feel nice?

I have great news for you -- that gift of serenity that you just gave yourself is available in infinite abundance and is instantly accessible anytime, anywhere. And if that minute of calm felt like much longer, you've just made the theory of relativity work in your favor, effectively enabling yourself to slow down your own perception of time and experience it at its best. In other words, you're learning how to manipulate the very concept of time (#mindblown) using breath-based meditation.

So next time you're feeling one of the many natural but unpleasant emotions that human beings face every day, just close your eyes, focus on your breath and give yourself a minute of relaxation that feels like an hour.

 

[The Jewnited States]

Subs

I needed to see this thread today when I did

 

[thirdeye]

I've been seeing a ton of angel numbers and honestly, I'm starting to manifest different parts of my life now.

 

[The_King_of_Everything]

Man I swear sometimes I'm on the truman show like Jim Carey.

The law of attraction is def real brehs

Every time I put energy into something and then I completely forget about it, it will pop up out of nowhere later.

It happens every single time. Almost as if the universe has a delayed signal or something.

 

[Aizen]

CERN Experiment Confirms Matter-Antimatter CPT Symmetry For Light Nuclei, Antinuclei

Days after scientists at CERN’s Baryon-Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) measured the mass-to-charge ratio of a proton and its antimatter particle, the antiproton, the ALICE experiment at the European organization reported similar measurements for light nuclei and antinuclei. The measurements, made with unprecedented precision, add to growing scientific data confirming that matter and antimatter are true mirror images.

“The measurements by ALICE and by BASE have taken place at the highest and lowest energies available at CERN, at the LHC and the Antiproton Decelerator, respectively,” CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said in a [url=http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/08/alice-precisely-compares-light-nuclei-and-antinuclei]statement [/URL]Monday. “This is a perfect illustration of the diversity in the laboratory’s research program.”

Antimatter shares the same mass as its matter counterpart, but has opposite electric charge. The electron, for instance, has a positively charged antimatter equivalent called positron. Scientists believe that the Big Bang created equal quantities of matter and antimatter 13.8 billion years ago. However, for [url=http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/antimatter/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem]reasons yet unknown[/URL], matter prevailed, creating everything we see around us today -- from the smallest microbe on Earth to the largest galaxy in the universe.

[url=http://www.ibtimes.com/matter-antimatter-are-true-mirror-images-cern-experiment-shows-2051904]Last week[/URL], in a paper published in the journal Nature, researchers reported a significant step toward solving this long-standing mystery of the universe. According to the study, 13,000 measurements over a 35-day period show -- with unparalleled precision -- that protons and antiprotons have identical mass-to-charge ratios.

The experiment tested a central tenet of the [url=http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/standard-model]Standard Model[/url] of particle physics, known as the Charge, Parity, and Time Reversal (CPT) symmetry. If CPT symmetry is true, a system remains unchanged if three fundamental properties -- charge, parity, which refers to a 180-degree flip in spatial configuration, and time -- are reversed.

The [url=http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3432.html]latest study [/URL]takes the research over this symmetry further. The ALICE measurements show that CPT symmetry holds true for light nuclei such as deuterons -- a hydrogen nucleus with an additional neutron -- and antideuterons, as well as for helium-3 nuclei -- two protons plus a neutron -- and antihelium-3 nuclei. The experiment, which also analyzed the curvature of these particles' tracks in ALICE detector’s magnetic field and their time of flight, improve on the existing measurements by a factor of up to 100.

A violation of CPT would not only hint at the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model -- which isn't complete yet -- it would also help us understand why the universe, as we know it, is completely devoid of antimatter.

Meditation and the Spiritual Life of Children

When they become parents, many people wonder how to impart spiritual values to their children. The traditional model of sending them to Sunday school is one alternative; another is to draw the entire family into the personal spirituality of the parents, as more people turn away from organized religion to carve their own path. Children grow up to reflect how they are raised, which makes this an important issue.

To begin with, a child’s spiritual life should be age appropriate. A very young child’s brain hasn’t matured enough to absorb adult beliefs, and the overall development of every child is unique. Before age ten or so, I feel that spiritual parenting will have the most lasting effect if it builds a foundation in the self rather than focusing on principles. As a practical matter, every young child should feel that

• They are loved and lovable.
• They are worthwhile in their parents’ eyes.
• Being a good person comes from within.
• Happiness and fulfillment are natural.

At this stage, the role of caretaker is all-important. Young children have their own predispositions that show up early on. A child starts to show personality traits very soon in life. Yet no matter how different they are, children need to feel worthy and loved.

The next phase of spiritual parenting is about values. Child psychology studies have shown that babies as early as six months old want to help their mothers, and even infants react positively when they see good behavior and shy away from bad behavior in others. So there is reason to feel that children have a moral nature.

With that in mind, parents should develop a child’s inner values all the time while keeping in mind that grasping these values mentally, in terms of abstract ideas, isn’t going to happen early on. Instead, children internalize what they see and how they are treated. Saying “Be nice to your little brother” makes an impression the first time, with decreasing meaning as it gets repeated. But seeing parents who are fair and kind literally trains a child’s brain in that direction.

Lifelong values are not instilled through negative lessons and punishment. What a child takes away from these experiences is guilt, shame, and resentment. The same is true if parents instill fear and doubt by telling children such things as “Life is unfair,” “If you don’t look out for number one, no one else will,” and “If you want anything in this world, you have to fight for it.” Remember, what we all grow up remembering most vividly from our childhood is the emotional tone of family life. Children raised in a tense, stressful, or difficult home environment will adapt to it, because it’s in their nature to adapt, but that doesn’t mean that they will emerge undamaged.

And now to the question of meditation and the inner life. Meditation can add to a sense of a child’s self-worth and even a sense of power, because it’s an activity that belongs just to them. The childhood brain is a factor here. Where it has been shown that introducing meditation in the schools leads to behavioral improvements in older ages (middle school and later), younger ages benefit, I feel, when meditation fulfills the following criteria:

• It feels like fun.
• The child expresses enjoyment.
• Nothing is forced or turned into a chore.
• The whole family participates.

Looking back, many adults feel turned off by the religious lessons their parents tried to impart because of an air of strict morality or pressure to be good. The beauty of meditation is that everything comes from within, but “within” means different things at different ages.

Starting at age six or seven—each parent will have to play this by ear—the parents can sit down to meditate with a child, using a simple technique: Sit quietly with eyes closed and follow the breath. Don’t ask the child to meditate for more than 5 to 10 minutes. Make it clear that if they stop enjoying it, they are free to get up and go play. But the parents should continue their own meditation for the usual time.

By being invited in and yet given the freedom to choose, a child will associate meditation with something they have control over. The worst lesson is to feel that meditation is a way for them to be controlled, forced to settle down and “be good.” In other words, don’t make meditation the equivalent of sitting in the corner or taking time out. A child who is running around or acting out needs a nap, a talking to, or some other corrective. Meditation isn’t one of them.

The greatest benefit of meditation comes when a child is able to notice actual changes themselves. They feel calmer, more centered, less troubled, less tempted to act out. A parent can coax these realizations, but gently, by pointing out a positive change. But be careful not to intrude. Everyone’s inner life is private, no matter how young they are. Taking note of inner changes probably won’t happen consistently until age twelve or later, and the attraction of major changes probably won’t happen until mid to late adolescence, at a time when discovering who they are comes naturally to teenagers.

I hope these points are useful, but the most important one became the theme of a book I wrote, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Parenting, which is this: If you want your child to lead a fulfilled and successful life, the best route is through spiritual parenting. The child learns the value of their own inner world, and as the years pass, this value increases until the realization dawns that all of existence originates “in here,” at the level of the soul.

 

[True Blue Moon]

What's real with everybody right now. Y'all good?

 

[PinotNoir]

This is so true, what you put out in thoughts will come to you.

 

[The_King_of_Everything]

What's real with everybody right now. Y'all good?

Just trying to stay consistent with a positive mindset

 

[So-Chi]

You are creators in YouTube and on instagram keep me focused and meditating ....you are what you think you are

 

[True Blue Moon]

Up

 

[The_King_of_Everything]

You can do it.


I know someone needs to see this.