Self-Mastership: How to Become Your Own True Love

A relationship is never the answer to your loneliness. Any feelings of emptiness, unhappiness, depression or self-hate can exist within you before you meet your partner. Most people tend to create new relationships based not on what they want, but in response to what they perceive to lack. They look outside of themselves, saying, “when I find someone, I will be happy, satisfied, and fulfilled’.

When they do find someone to have a relationship with, it is exciting and fulfilling for a few months, maybe a few years.
When the original feelings come up again, they can start blaming the other person for their loneliness, depression, self-hate and their unhappy life. The other person, in turn, may dim their own light, by demanding your energy, time, and your personality.
It is their fear, their pain and their depression that starts chasing you, sucking your energy and imprisoning your beautiful free soul. You may do the same to them because of your own emptiness.
NOTHING outside of yourself, not a relationship or another person, will ever bring you true happiness, fulfillment or peace of heart if you aren’t already happy with yourself.
You are your own hero, your own lover, your own answer to all of your prayers, and your own TRUE LOVE.
Today is the day to become your own True Love! Start to love every aspect of yourself, including all of your Darkness and your Light. Start to appreciate and love your own personality; become your own best friend.

Find out what nourishes your soul, and find the sacredness in each moment: Take a walk in the forest. Watch funny movies in your bed. Create art, or write from deep inside of your soul.
Start to embrace all that you are in your divinity. Stop waiting for something or someone outside of you.
YOU are what you’ve been looking and waiting for the whole time. Stop searching, stop demanding. Each of us is a free, sovereign spirit, meant only to share and celebrate our true essences together.
Nurture yourself and listen to your inner voice. Get to know YOU! Give yourself all that you need and want as you start to become aware of yourself.

Self-Mastership

You can never be lonely when you actually listen, breathe, talk and feel your own spirit. You must be willing to do some deep soul searching. This means feeling the emotions that are stuck in your energetic field, acknowledging them, and releasing them by crying, breathing, and actually doing introspection into who you are and why you do what you do.
Listen to your own knowing. Make changes in your life to start living your true path, the one that makes you and others come alive! Stop blaming the past, and live in the now.

Find your passion and purpose, and start enjoying every moment you are creating. This is finding your way home to YOU!
An outside relationship will only be satisfying when two people have found themselves and if the two people are willing to see that they are individual souls that came to earth for their own journey, their own insights, and their own lessons.
Do not be afraid that the other person will go away and leave you. Another person can only stay because of free will. A slave cannot be in loving relationship with a free person. Two free people in loving relationship can give each other wings!
If you love a person, and they cannot be free because of your fears, stop the fear now. Stop the thoughts, focus on the now; ground yourself. Stop projecting your fears, past pains and lost hopes on them. Show the other person that you love them by transforming the pain and suffering into bliss and LOVE by doing your work and finding your way home to YOU. Become the energetic master that you are!

Become free In relationships

Let both you and your significant other be free. Let them shine. Let them fly. You are both the transformation the world needs to see. You are both the “one” that can change the world by following your own earthly journey.
You can only love another by giving them soul freedom and by stopping all behaviors of energetic demanding, fearing and draining.
They may be an angel on your path if they have led you to all of this awareness so that now, you can now find your way HOME to YOU. If they are the one with this behavior, you may be the angel on their path that gives them awareness and peace someday.
Everyone is brought together for a reason in this lifetime, although many times it is not the reason you originally thought: to finally “make you happy and fulfilled”. The divine Universe has led you to uncover the LIGHT and LOVE that YOU are through these broken connections, and the resulting awareness.
Resonate with people who vibrate on a higher level to compliment your life
If your significant other is not willing to do their work, acknowledge, or stop their energetic demands on you, the kindest thing you can do for both of you, is walk away. Surround yourself with aware people who listen to and honor their souls and inner knowing.
Surround yourself with people who have a high vibration, who resonate with their heart, who do not energetically pull and demand from you, who let you FLY! These people give off LIGHT and LOVE because of their enthusiasm for their own journey and their passion for themselves!
These are the relationships that will strengthen and nurture you as you step into your own Self Mastery! These are the connections you have always dreamed to have with other humans, all possible now that you have found YOU!
Live the life of your dreams. Now. Today.
You are the biggest love of your life!


About the Author:

Leda is writer, speaker, journalist, singer, and Coach of the New Energy.
She specializes in Add/HSP, twinsoul- and soulmate relationships, Karma cleansing, Regression-therapy, Personalized Meditations, Advisor, New Science, Anti-Aging programmes, sustainability, how to live in a healthy home, heart-activations and healing with new energetic tools.
She is entrepreneur to guide towards a new global shift. Her website can be found at: www.enlighteningmedia.com.

Via (Spiritscience)

6 Universal Experiences Every Old Soul Goes Through

An old soul is a special person – one who lives life a little bit differently. To put it simply, an old soul is one that has reincarnated many times, as opposed to a younger, fresher soul that may be walking this Earth for the first time ever.
Old souls tend to have different attitudes, habits, temperaments and frankly, they’re just old at heart. Because of this, old souls tend to have pretty universal problems in life.

Old souls love spending time alone.

Old souls tend to be more introverted than their younger counterparts. They find strength in solitude and are often very comfortable with themselves.
As a result, they may not enjoy doing things like hitting the bars or going clubbing. This is one area where old souls seem “boring” to younger ones, but they don’t feel boring.

Old souls attract people.

Old souls often attract people to them for their wisdom and good humor, but often times, the consequence of that is that their energies are drained. Old souls tend to be extremely empathic people, meaning lots of attention and interaction tends to drain them.

Old souls tend to be loners.

Old souls like developing meaningful relationships with people.
As a result, you won’t likely see them going to a rager of a party.
Instead, they prefer one on one interactions or small groups of friends together.
They prefer to spend their energy building a tight knit circle.

Old souls are forgiving.

Old souls don’t hold grudges. They realize that staying mad and holding grudges is like drinking a poison and expecting the other person to get a tummy ache. They realize that we’re all connected, we’re all one, and that by being forgiving, they raise the vibration of the world.

Old souls are easy going people.

Sadly, this is one feature of old souls that lets them get taken advantage of the most.
Old souls aren’t usually controlling and mostly they just want to see folks having a good time.
This makes them easy targets of energy vampires and narcissists.

Their decisions aren’t often taken seriously.

Old souls have a powerful intuition, built up over tens or hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives lived since the beginning of mankind.

Their intuition is sharp and they make informed decisions based on it. Some of those decisions may seem to make absolutely no sense, but old souls rely on something beyond simple logic.
There are a lot of differences between young souls and old souls, but always remember that everyone has value, no matter the age of their soul.
Treat everyone with respect and we can shift the vibration of the world.

Via (Spiritscience)

Ancient Rome v North Korea: Spectacular 'executions' then and now

This year saw reports of two executions of high-ranking North Korean officials and an endless stream of speculation about Kim Jong-un and his leadership style. Stephen Harrison, professor of Latin literature at Oxford University, considers the parallels with ancient Rome - as told by its historians.

North Korea's vice-premier Choe Yong-gon was said to have been shot in May, after he "expressed discomfort against the young leader's forestation policy", while Defence Minister Hyon Yong-chol was said to have been executed by anti-aircraft weapons in front of an audience of hundreds, reportedly charged with treason for disobeying orders, falling asleep at a military event and being disloyal to the supreme leader.
These reports evoke some interesting parallels from the darker side of the history of ancient Rome, or at least from the more colourful stories told about it by Roman historians.
The similarities are striking. In both cases, we rely on a small number of reports from potentially biased origins in order to gain a view of a distant and inaccessible society.
Arguably, our sources for ancient Rome, some 2,000 years ago, are at least as extensive as those for modern North Korea, and, perhaps, even more reliable.
The main ancient sources in Latin on the early Roman Empire are the imperial biographies of Suetonius and the historical works of Tacitus.
The two men were friends and officeholders in the Roman state, and shared an essentially pessimistic view of the system of emperors.

Domitian's behaviour could be erratic

In particular, both had lived through and endured the reign of the Emperor Domitian, whose erratic and tyrannical behaviour plainly coloured their views of emperors in general.
For Suetonius, this comes out in his Lives of the Caesars, gossipy and occasionally muck-making biographies that show the emperors as weak human beings.
For Tacitus, his Annals and Histories show how the imperial system put too much power into the hands of one individual or dynasty, with catastrophic effects on the state such as familial infighting, civil war and unsuitable leaders.
The reported fates of the North Korean ministers evoke these pessimistic and sometimes melodramatic accounts of some of the more colourful emperors.

'Trusted' advisers

One of the key issues for Roman emperors was their tendency to be dependent on particular individuals as advisers.
As with similar modern autocrats, one problem for the suspicious and capricious supreme rulers of Rome was how long such advisers could be trusted, and how to get rid of them once the emperor's trust was lost, or once he became tired of them.
A spectacular public end made it clear who was really in charge, and encouraged obedience and servility through vivid intimidation (it could be the spectator next).

Tiberius turned against his trusted ally Sejanus

One example is the Emperor Tiberius, successor of Augustus and the emperor under whom Jesus was executed, who for some years depended on the services of his commander of the guard, Sejanus.
Sejanus was so trusted by Tiberius that the ageing emperor felt able to retire to a life of pleasure on the Italian island of Capri, leaving Sejanus to run things for him in Rome.
But eventually (we are told) the emperor's suspicions won out, and Sejanus was cunningly brought down by being lured to the Roman Senate to hear a letter from Tiberius read aloud before the assembly.
The letter was supposed to bring him promotion and marriage into the imperial family, but in fact contained a complete denunciation and a death sentence.
He was taken to prison, strangled and his body hacked to pieces in the streets by the Roman mob.

Caligula and Nero

Tiberius's successor Gaius, better known as Caligula, was more overtly sadistic.
His executions were often public events: he is said to have burned a comic playwright alive in the middle of the amphitheatre, because of a humorous line of double meaning in a show.
And when a Roman aristocrat who was being thrown to the wild beasts in the public arena loudly protested his innocence, Caligula had him taken out, had his tongue cut out, and then sent him back to be finished off.

Caligula often carried out his executions in public

Nero, a generation later, was little better. Again getting rid of ministers was an issue: all the four advisers who helped him most on his route to the throne died on his orders within eight years.
One of them, Burrus, was sent a poison that Nero pretended was a throat medicine, while another, the philosopher Seneca, was forced to kill himself by opening his veins in a hot bath.
But his most famous public executions were those of the early Christians, who, as the historian Tacitus tells it, were blamed by Nero as convenient scapegoats for the great fire of Rome, which destroyed the city in AD64.
A mass of them was dispatched by being covered with wild beasts' skins and torn to death by dogs in the arena, or by being fastened on crosses in his public gardens and set alight to serve as novelty lamps by night.

Biased motives

These stories all come - like the South Korean reports - from hostile sources.
Modern historians are sceptical about many of them, and in some ways they show how some Romans felt about the potential dangers of hereditary autocracy rather than reliably retelling the details of history.
Just like North Korea, Rome could be presented by interested parties as presided over by a youthful ruler who had been brought up without normal moral boundaries, who felt acute suspicions of those close to him, and who could exercise absolute power of life and death, backed by the might of a highly militarised state.
In both cases, there are clear motivations for bias: Suetonius and Tacitus were in some ways in conflict with the imperial system, just as South Korea and North Korea are still in some sense at war with each other.
In such an environment, traditional stereotypes about tyrannical rule are likely to emerge, especially where one side maintains rigorous restrictions on information, creating a vacuum which the other is keen to fill for the benefit of a more "liberal" global audience.
As with ancient Rome, we need to be aware of the potential unreliability of biased reporting, and the natural tendency to demonise political opponents.
Melodramatic colouring of events is just as manipulative as controlling and limiting what is disseminated to the world.
Stephen Harrison is professor of Latin literature at Oxford University.

Via (BBC)

This Man Built A Motorbike That Runs Only On Water

I have heard many stories about vehicles that run just on water but this is the first time I have actually seen one of these vehicles in action.
The T Power H20 motorbike was developed by Ricardo Azevedo in Sao Paulo, Brazil.



The motorbike works by combining a battery with a water combustion system that helps to generate electricity.

In a video released on the RT news channel you can see Azevedo demonstrating his invention. He uses clean water to power the bike and drinks it on camera to show that it is not fuel.

“The advantage of this motorcycle, which works with the hydrogen that comes from the water, is that the result that comes out of the exhaust is water vapour. This is different from gasoline, which the result is carbon monoxide,” Azevedo said.

This is truly a revolutionary invention and it could and should change the entire transportation industry. My only concern is the power of large multi-national corporations who may seek to intervene and stall or even halt this invention going to market. That is why the power of social media is so important because if we can spread word about it then it will be impossible for it to  be suppressed. You cannot kill an idea.

 There have been some concerns about the accuracy of the reports surrounding the mechanics of this bike.   Some claim the battery used for the electrolysis process could simply not keep this bike running for the full 310 miles.

Azevedo answered these critics by saying that he uses a system similar to the Kinetic Energy Recovery System used in Formula 1 to recharge the battery on the go. While this does not eliminate the need for an eventual recharge, it increases battery life significantly. Thus the bike can run for approximately 10 hours.

There were a number of other questions brought up, but so far it seems Azevedo has answered them all. He has even offerred to take the motorbike to an official  motorcycle dealer where proper tests can be performed in order to justify his claims. “I’ve made contact with the dealership and a qualified mechanic will conduct and assess the tests. I am also willing to explain and demonstrate the system for those who are interested,” he said.

If this bike does what it says on the tin then there is hope yet for us all.  Because the implications behind this are huge and would affect not only the motoring industry but the oil industry in a HUGE way.

Keep your eyes open and you can rest assured we will keep you posted if there are any major developments.

Baby born without a complete skull defies the odds

• Jaxon Buell was diagnosed with microhydranencephaly, a severe brain malformation for which there is no known cure
• Jaxon Strong Facebook page garnered more than 200,000 "likes" and global attention

Brittany and Brandon Buell were told their son would only live a few weeks.

Jaxon Buell was born on August 27, 2014

(CNN)Jaxon Buell was born without a large part of his skull and brain. Doctors told Brandon and Brittany Buell their son wouldn't live past a few weeks. In August, the family celebrated his first birthday.

Jaxon Buell

After many months of tests and misdiagnoses, doctors finally diagnosed Jaxon with microhydranencephaly, a severe brain malformation for which there is no known cure.

Jaxon's short life has not been without struggle, and his parents' candid accounts on social media have garnered global attention. 

In a September Facebook post, Brandon Buell explained the couple's decision to continue the pregnancy after learning at a 17-week untrasound their son had something wrong.

"When we first learned there were concerns for Jax during the pregnancy, we were given the options of carrying him to term or having an abortion because there was the unknown issue. No doctor could tell us exactly what was wrong or what to expect, but we did make sure to ask if Jaxon was in pain or was suffering, and we asked if there were any added risks for Brittany during the pregnancy or potentially at time of delivery. Since the answer to both questions was "no," we never came close to considering abortion. Yes, we are Christians, and our faith has certainly been vital during this entire journey for our family, but we're still realists. Had there been any suffering in the womb or a danger involved other than Jaxon possibly not being able to live outside the womb because of the concern for his head and brain, then we certainly would have had a different discussion. However, that wasn't the case, and it was our choice, and only our choice." 

A Facebook page, Jaxon Strong, has over 200,000 "likes," and a GoFundMe page has received nearly $100,000 in donations, which go toward the family's monthly expenses, including Jaxon's medical bills. 

Jaxon cannot eat on his own and relies on a feeding tube for nutrition but his dad tells CNN it's one of the only differences between him and most other children.

"He's going to always to be very small. At this point he's 13 months old and he weighs just over 12 pounds. He's certainly not suffering whatsoever, he's actually still thriving. He really is a normal baby in so many ways: He cries, he goes to the bathroom, he wants his dirty diaper off... Jaxon is virtually perfect."

Brandon, Brittany, and Jaxon Buell

The parents know that Jaxon will need a miracle in the long term, but are taking each day as it comes and relying on faith to help them through. 

"We had a faith that we will continue the pregnancy and hopefully we wouldn't lose him. And now we are today where he's not showing signs of going anywhere. He is -- you can tell -- so loved, he has the brightest eyes, he recognizes so many things, he's so alert. We are just aware of the miracle of what he's doing and also the reality of what may happen tomorrow," Brandon Buell told CNN.

Via (CNN)

Did An Extraterrestrial Spaceship Crash On Earth 12,000 Years Ago?

 

In what is purported to be one of the most covered up stories regarding alien discovery, aliens are reported to have crash landed on Earth 12,000 years ago and, before being killed off by humans, left evidence of their existence for future generations of our species to discover.

Image: www.messagetoeagle.com

As the story goes, the evidence was found amongst rows of graves in the prehistoric caves of Baian Kara Ula on the border of China and Tibet by Chinese professor Chi Pu Tei in 1938.
The skeletons found were incredibly fragile and had large, over developed skulls. The graves were accompanied by intriguing drawings on the cave wall as well as 716 of what appeared to be gramophone record-like objects made of stone buried in the cave.
The object contained alien writing in a never before seen language that researchers attempted to decode for over 20 years until Chinese Dr. Tsum Um Nui decoded the message in 1962.

Image: www.otherworldmystery.com

After he did, the Prehistory Department of the Beijing Academy in China reportedly refused to publish his paper or even acknowledge his findings.
Tsum Um Nui persisted and his work was eventually published, leading the world to hear of what is now known as the Dropa stones.

Understandably, there is quite a bit of skepticism regarding this story – as there should be. However, one good question the whole thing does bring up in my mind is how humans would react if the story did actually play out the way it is suggested to have; what would happen if aliens really did crash land on earth?

My guess is that we’d react in exactly the same way the humans in this story are purported to have, either killing the beings off or subjecting them to inhumane tests.
All in all, I believe this story should be approached as any other theory regarding aliens should be – with a bit of skepticism on both sides of the coin… or stone?
Check out this video for even more information on the Dropa stones!

Via (Spiritscience)

18 Signs That Prove You Are Stronger Than You Think

We tend to give ourselves less credit than we deserve. Always expecting more from ourselves and judging our self-worth by the material possessions that we hold. When in fact, true richness is richness of soul. Happiness comes from freedom and freedom is a gift that you give to yourself.

There is subtle strength that lies within us all. A higher consciousness that never gives up and is always seeking for the upheaval from the darkness into the light. A raising of our vibration and the constant forming and reforming of our mind, bringing us back to that in which we ultimately seek.
We are all here together on this wonderful journey and it takes strength and courage to follow this path to freedom.

There will always come times, when we do not remember how strong we truly are and so, here is a simple reminder to shine a little light on the way.

1. You embrace life as a journey
You know that life is an experience and one to be lived to its fullest. Every moment is precious opportunity to learn, grow and evolve. Even through the darkest of times, we know that the light is surely to follow and we hold our strength until the light beams from within us once more.


2.You are aware of your weaknesses
You understand that no one is ‘perfect’, and you don’t dwell on the things that you can’t change about yourself. Instead, you embrace your strengths and nourish your weaknesses as sometimes our greatest weakness, can be our greatest strength.

3.You change what you can change
You know that you can’t change the world, but you can change your world and so you work from the inside out; positively affecting anyone who comes into contact with you.
Radiating your light as far as you can, like a candle in wind flickering for all to see as you beam brightly in this world.

4. You’re not afraid of failure
You understand that failure is an opportunity for growth and failure puts us in the prime position to evolve and become wiser.

5. You do things your own way
You know that life’s greatest treasure is to learn and learning in your own unique way. You don’t follow the crowd and you choose to create your own masterpiece.

6. You are vulnerable
You understand that being vulnerable doesn’t mean being weak and you are humble and balanced enough to see this.

7. You don’t hold a grudge
You understand that holding a grudge only hurts you. Everyone has their own reasons and everyone has their own perception of life; everyone has their own path to follow.

8. You let people judge you
When you let people judge you it gives you insight into their internal state and puts you in a position to advise them. Also, when judged you are able to find something within yourself that you may not have yet resolved. Everyone is your mirror in life, and just by letting someone else judge you, it gives you great depth of perception.

9. You have patience
You understand that patience doesn’t mean waiting and you continually work hard on your dreams. Just because something isn’t happening for you right now in this very moment that you want to, doesn’t mean that it will never happen.

10. You don’t wait for tomorrow
You know that the next moment in your life is not more important than this moment now and so you do today what you dream of later and you live today like it was your last.

11. Challenges excite you
We all have to admit that life without challenge would be pretty dull and so you embrace these times as an opportunity to strengthen your abilities.

12. You give love
We’ve all been through hard times, had our hearts broken, dreams fallen apart and watched as everything we had built crumble to the ground and still, we are capable of love. That, is a miracle in itself.
Among st all of the trials and tribulations of life we are still able to give, accept and love with all of our hearts. This capacity of love that we all have is what will bring us into the new era, the golden age of light.

13. You embrace your fears
You understand that fear is a product of a thought-form and treat it as such. Constantly seeking to reorganize your mind in the knowing that the only thing to fear, is fear itself.

14. You stand up for what you believe in
You are in tune with yourself and trust your heart. When something doesn’t resonate with you, you have the courage to voice it.

15. You speak your mind
You trust yourself and are confident in knowing that your thoughts are just as valid as anyone else.

16. You follow your heart
You know that your heart is your greatest teacher and are wise enough to respect its wishes no matter how far, how wild and how far off the beaten trail it will lead you.

17. You never give up
As the sun rises and falls each day, you too hold the strength and courage to rise, each time you fall.

18. You have the strength to surrender
Sounds like a contradiction to 17 right? But..
There will come a day when you have exhausted your heart, risen and fallen many of times and finally when you surrender to yourself, you will know that it was heart that led you to your surrender. Upon this surrender you will find new strength and peace in knowing that you are eternity ;  you are the creator and the created.

Life can be a wonderful journey. We are always learning, evolving and growing with each other– until the end we will stand strong and when we surrender, it will be only to ourselves and in that moment we will find peace.

Via (Spiritscience)

How much would you pay to live for an extra year?

We all strive to forestall death – but at what cost does it become too expensive? BBC Future explores the attempts to value the price of life.

Human life is so precious, it seems crass to put a price on it. How can a pile of coins, paper or gold bars match a year on Earth? Life should be, quite literally, invaluable.

Yet that is the morbid question that health services, everywhere, inevitably have to ask. They have limited money to spend on sick and dying people, and whenever a new drug becomes available, they have to make a choice: will the few stolen months, or years, be worth the money it costs?

Our gut instincts may seem obvious: we should do all that we can to buy more time for the people we love. Yet Dominic Wilkinson, an intensive care doctor and ethicist at the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics recently wrote a thought-provoking article questioning these assumptions and asks us all to consider just how much we should be willing to pay for a longer life.
Intrigued, BBC Future phoned him to explore his argument, and to better understand the ways we currently calculate the price of life.

Hi-tech treatments mean that we can survive many of the diseases that would have killed our ancestors - yet they come at a huge cost (Credit: Getty Images)

At the moment, drugs for terminal illnesses tend to be judged on two things – by how much they extend the lifespan, and the quality of life of the patient, using a scale known as the Quality Adjusted Life Year-saved (QALY). A drug that helps you live for an extra year, at half your general quality of life, would score about 0.5 years on this scale, for instance. “Alternatively, a drug that improved your quality of life for a year from a level of half normal, to full health would also score 0.5,” explains Wilkinson.

The UK recommends paying about £20,000 to £30,000 for each additional year of good health

From these calculations, a health service can then start to set a price on whether a drug is worth the cost. The UK’s recommendations, for example, are about £20,000 to £30,000 ($30,000 to $45,000) for each additional year of good health, once it has been adjusted to take into account the quality of life. So a drug that achieved 0.5 on the QALY measure would only merit £10,000-15,000 ($15,000 to $22,500).

This inevitably means that some drugs have been rejected by the National Health Service (NHS), because they are simply too expensive: the breast cancer drug Kadycla, for instance, only extends the lifespan by about six months for a cost of £95,000. Even if the quality of life during those few months is equal to that of a healthy person, it still hugely overstretches the limit. (Other healthcare providers may have different criteria, of course – but they all have to weigh up the costs and benefits in some way, before offering to fund a treatment.)

Campaigners argue that the pharmaceutical companies should lower the costs of such treatments, and that health services should also invest more and more money in drugs that will buy terminally ill patients some more precious time. Given these strong and emotive arguments, the UK recently considered increasing the threshold for terminal illnesses – to as much as £80,000 ($120,000) for each “quality-adjusted year saved”.

Should we pay more for drugs that will extend a life, if it means cutting off treatment that could improve the lives of those not in danger (Credit: Getty Images)

As doctors looking after patients, we are ethically driven to say that ‘I know it is expensive but my first duty is to help my patient – Dominic Wilkinson

Wilkinson says this attitude is completely understandable – and it’s often the doctors, as well as the patients themselves, who argue the case. “As doctors looking after patients, we are ethically driven to advocate for patients, to say that ‘I know it is expensive but my first duty is to help my patient,’” he says.

But the inevitable sacrifice is that this money will be taken away from other areas of care, such as mental health services or help for people with disabilities – measures that may be crucial for improving the quality of life for people at the start or middle of their lives.
Is it worth forfeiting one person’s comfort to buy another a few more months at the end of their life? When making these decisions, it’s important to gauge public opinion. And although you might assume that most people would pay infinite sums to buy a few extra years, recent research suggests we do not all place such a high value on the sheer length of the lifespan.

When surveyed, many people said they would prefer to pay for treatments that improve palliative care, rather than new drugs that would buy extra years (Credit: Getty images)

Wilkinson points to a detailed UK study of 4,000 people that clearly explained the different ways the health service’s limited resources could be spent, and asked the participants for their preferences.  “They clearly indicated that they weren’t comfortable with giving more money to people who were terminally ill, compared with people who might benefit at other stages of their lives.”

Perhaps most surprising were the results from a study in Singapore, which questioned elderly, but otherwise healthy, citizens as well as those suffering from terminal cancer. “The striking thing from that is that they were prepared to pay an awful lot more money for palliative care so they could be treated in their own home, than drugs that would extend life,” says Wilkinson.

Many participants would pay just £5,000 to extend life by a year

On average, the participants would pay £5,000 ($7,500) for a treatment to extend life by a year. But they were willing to pay about twice that amount – £10,000 ($15,000) – on better palliative care, such as better nursing that would allow them to die in the relative comfort of their homes, rather than a hospital. “It seemed to provide a fresh way of thinking about difficult decisions.”

Doctors are increasingly arguing that we should maximise the quality of our time on Earth, rather than extending the length of the lifespan (Credit: Getty Images)

Clearly, these studies are not the final answer; it is hard to know if these opinions are shared among different people in different cultures and facing different illnesses; there are also questions about just how effectively a calculation like the QALY scale can really, objectively assess a treatment’s potential. But Wilkinson thinks that we should at least consider these different opinions before devoting more and more money to extending lifespans.

“Although it’s very understandable to want to buy more expensive drugs for the terminally ill, I don’t think it reflects the view of the general public or those of the patients,” he says. “Nor is it clearly the right ethical approach.”

As the population ages, and healthcare grows ever more advanced, and expensive, these issues will only become more pressing. The eminent American surgeon Atul Guwande has long questioned whether it is better to stretch out the lifespan, instead of increasing the comfort of our available years. Ezekiel Emanuel, the former director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health, has even claimed that he would refuse all life-extending healthcare at the age of 75, rather than entering a cycle of ever more intense treatments to draw out his last few years.
Few of us may decide to take such a drastic decision, but anyone, at any age, may do well to consider the value of their time on Earth and what we are doing to make the most of it.

Via(BBC)

Are You the Cause or Effect of your Life?

Think back to some key points in your life. You have probably had some pretty big things happen to you that shaped who you are today, wouldn’t you say?

Maybe you’ve even done something big and important. Oh, you and I both know that’s true, even though you might like to downplay it, as if you’re not ridiculously special inside.

At what point do you become the cause of something, and cease to be to be the effect? Is there also a point when you cease to cause something, and are affected instead? 

Truth be told, the answer lies in the synergy of the two. You can’t have one without the other… and you can’t have the other without the One.

Obviously this is sort of a universal answer that I think that most people, philosophers, scientists, and even religious people could rationally come to as a fundamental law of the cosmos. It cannot be disproven.

To write it tangibly, in short, would sound, I think, something like this.

Every Cause has its Effect; and every Effect has its Cause; Everything happens happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law.

That came from a quote written in the Kybalion, a book on Hermetic Philosophy spanning back to Ancient Egypt and Greece, in the days of the Library of Alexandria.

What I’d like to propose here is that by personally embodying this principle, you gain the God-Given Right to be the creator of your life. You are the observer of causes, and the observer of effects. You are the creator of what you decide to Cause, and the creator of what you Effect.

You are affected by the world around you, you become literally moved into cause by your affections.

When you observe the transition of energy from “Someone did something” to “I feel this way” to “Now I do this”, you basically start to active the central portion of your brain, (your higher awareness), to be more aware of your actions in every physical moment. Thus, you become more present, more clear, more focused.

Not only do you become more present, you become a better creator… and who decides what you create? That would entirely depend upon you. You are free to be the cause of the effect of your mind changing.

Good luck,
Jordan & Ray

Oh, and just for fun!

 

 Via(Spiritscience)

Are You In Control Of Your Mind

Free will experiments may not explain whether we are in charge of our destinies – but they can nevertheless reveal just how little we know about our own minds, says Tom Stafford.
 
It is perhaps the most famous experiment in neuroscience. In 1983, Benjamin Libet sparked controversy with his demonstration that our sense of free will may be an illusion, a controversy that has only increased ever since.

Libet’s experiment has three vital components: a choice, a measure of brain activity and a clock.
The choice is to move either your left or right arm. In the original version of the experiment this is by flicking your wrist; in some versions of the experiment it is to raise your left or right finger. Libet’s participants were instructed to “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act”. The precise time at which you move is recorded from the muscles of your arm.

The measure of brain activity is taken via electrodes on the scalp. When the electrodes are placed over the motor cortex (roughly along the middle of the head), a different electrical signal appears between right and left as you plan and execute a movement on either the left or right.

You may think you are in charge of your actions, but is that just an illusion? (Credit: Getty Images)

The clock is specially designed to allow participants to discern sub-second changes. This clock has a single dot, which travels around the face of the clock every 2.56 seconds. This means that by reporting position you are reporting time. If we assume you can report position accurately to 5 degree angle, that means you can use this clock to report time to within 36 milliseconds – that’s 36 thousandths of a second.
Putting these ingredients together, Libet took one extra vital measurement. He asked participants to report, using the clock, exactly the point when they made the decision to move.

The brain activity showed that the decision had often already been made, before the participants were aware of having taken action

Physiologists had known for decades that a fraction of a second before you actually move the electrical signals in your brain change. So it was in Libet’s experiment, a fraction of a second before participants moved, a reliable change could be recorded using the electrodes. But the explosive result was when participants reported deciding to move. This occurred in between the electric change in the brain and the actual movement. This means, as sure as cause follows effect, that the feeling of deciding couldn’t be a timely report of whatever was causing the movement. The electrode recording showed that the decision had – in some sense – already been made before the participants were aware of having taken action. The brain signals were changing before the subjective experience of taking a decision occurred.

We struggle to describe our thoughts and feelings accurately, making it difficult to tell when we have made a decision (Credit: iStock)

Had participants’ brains already made the decision? Was the feeling of choosing just an illusion? Controversy has raged ever since. There is far more to the discussion about neuroscience and free will than this one experiment, but its simplicity has allowed it to capture the imagination of many who think our status as biological creatures limits our free will, as well as those who argue that free will survives the challenge of our minds being firmly grounded in our biological brains.
Part of the appeal of the Libet experiment is due to two pervasive intuitions we have about the mind. Without these intuitions the experiment doesn’t seem so surprising.

The first intuition is the feeling that our minds are a separate thing from our physical selves – a natural dualism that pushes us to believe that the mind is a pure, abstract place, free from biological constraints. A moment’s thought about the last time you were grumpy because you were hungry shatters this illusion, but I’d argue that it is still a persistent theme in our thinking. Why else would we be the least surprised that it is possible to find neural correlates of mental events? If we really believed, in our heart of hearts, that the mind is based in the brain, then we would know that every mental change must have a corresponding change in the brain.

The second pervasive intuition, which makes us surprised by the Libet experiment, is the belief that we know our own minds. This is the belief that our subjective experience of making decisions is an accurate report of how that decision is made. The mind is like a machine – as long as it runs right, we are happily ignorant of how it works. It is only when mistakes or contradictions arise that we’re drawn to look under the hood: Why didn’t I notice that exit? How could I forget that person’s name? Why does the feeling of deciding come after the brain changes associated with decision making?

There’s no reason to think that we are reliable reporters of every aspect of our minds’ contents

There’s no reason to think that we are reliable reporters of every aspect of our minds. Psychology, in fact, gives us lots of examples of where we often get things wrong. The feeling of deciding in the Libet experiment may be a complete illusion – maybe the real decision really is made ‘by our brains’ somehow – or maybe it is just that the feeling of deciding is delayed from our actual deciding. Just because we erroneously report the timing of the decision, doesn’t mean we weren’t intimately involved in it, in whatever meaningful sense that can be.

More is written about the Libet experiment every year. It has spawned an academic industry investigating the neuroscience of free will. There are many criticisms and rebuttals, with debate raging about how and if the experiment is relevant to the freedom of our everyday choices. Even supporters of Libet have to admit that the situation used in the experiment may be too artificial to be a direct model of real everyday choices. But the basic experiment continues to inspire discussion and provoke new thoughts about the way our freedom is rooted in our brains. And that, I’d argue, is due to the way it helps us confront our intuitions about the way the mind works, and to see that things are more complex than we instinctively imagine.

If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in these columns please get in touch with 

Via (BBC)

The best (and worst) ways to spot a liar

Forget body language or eye movements. There are much better ways to identify the deceitful.

Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans. Ormerod had planted a handful of people arriving at security with a false history, and a made-up future – and his team had to guess who they were. In fact, just one in 1000 of the people they interviewed would be deceiving them. Identifying the liar should have been about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack.

Using previous methods of lie detection, you might as well just flip a coin

So, what did they do? One option would be to focus on body language or eye movements, right? It would have been a bad idea. Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance. According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin.
Ormerod’s team tried something different – and managed to identify the fake passengers in the vast majority of cases. Their secret? To throw away many of the accepted cues to deception and start anew with some startlingly straightforward techniques.

When it comes to spotting liars, the eyes don't have it (Credit: Thinkstock)

Over the last few years, deception research has been plagued by disappointing results. Most previous work had focused on reading a liar’s intentions via their body language or from their face – blushing cheeks, a nervous laugh, darting eyes. The most famous example is Bill Clinton touching his nose when he denied his affair with Monica Lewinsky – taken at the time to be a sure sign he was lying. The idea, says Timothy Levine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was that the act of lying provokes some strong emotions – nerves, guilt, perhaps even exhilaration at the challenge – that are difficult to contain. Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “micro-expressions” that might give the game away, they claimed.

The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour – there is no universal dictionary of body language

Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues appeared to be. The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour. With familiarity, you might be able to spot someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but others will probably act very differently; there is no universal dictionary of body language. “There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.” Levine agrees: “The evidence is pretty clear that there aren’t any reliable cues that distinguish truth and lies,” he says. And although you may hear that our subconscious can spot these signs even if they seem to escape our awareness, this too seems to have been disproved.

Despite these damning results, our safety often still hinges on the existence of these mythical cues. Consider the screening some passengers might face before a long-haul flight – a process Ormerod was asked to investigate in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. Typically, he says, officers will use a “yes/no” questionnaire about the flyer’s intentions, and they are trained to observe “suspicious signs” (such as nervous body language) that might betray deception. “It doesn’t give a chance to listen to what they say, and think about credibility, observe behaviour change – they are the critical aspects of deception detection,” he says. The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance. “The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says.

If only body language revealed deception (Credit: Getty Images)

Clearly, a new method is needed. But given some of the dismal results from the lab, what should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.

Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:
Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.

Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade.
Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work. If you do find a contradiction, though, don’t give yourself away – it’s better to allow the liar’s confidence to build as they rattle off more falsehoods, rather than correcting them.

Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control.

Liar vs liar

It takes one to know one

Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors. Geoffrey Bird at University College London and colleagues recently set up a game in which subjects had to reveal true or false statements about themselves. They were also asked to judge each other’s credibility. It turned out that people who were better at telling fibs could also detect others’ tall tales, perhaps because they recognised the tricks.

The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation. Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses. “The important thing is that there is no magic silver bullet; we are taking the best things and putting them together for a cognitive approach,” says Ormerod.

A psychological experiment in an airport revealed new tricks to spot liars (Credit: Thinkstock)

Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense. “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says. But the results speak for themselves. The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents. They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine passengers at airports across Europe. Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70% of the time.

“It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not involved in this study. He thinks it is particularly important that they conducted the experiment in real airports. “It’s the most realistic study around.”
The art of persuasion

Levine’s own experiments have proven similarly powerful. Like Ormerod, he believes that clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a liar’s story are far better than trying to identify tell-tale signs in body language. He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates played in pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave. Unknown to the students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left the room, the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to cheat on the game. A handful of the students took him up on the offer.

One expert was even correct 100% of the time, across 33 interviews

Afterwards, the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they had cheated. Using tactical questions to probe their stories – without focusing on body language or other cues – they managed to find the cheaters with more than 90% accuracy; one expert was even correct 100% of the time, across 33 interviews – a staggering result that towers above the accuracy of body language analyses. Importantly, a follow-up study found that even novices managed to achieve nearly 80% accuracy, simply by using the right, open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how their partner would tell the story.

Are police any better at spotting lying suspects than anyone else? (Credit: Thinkstock)

Indeed, often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed. “The experts were fabulously good at this,” says Levine. Their secret was a simple trick known to masters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the students how honest they were. Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be more candid later. “People want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being cooperative,” says Levine. “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to be cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.”

Another trick is to ask people how honest they are

Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language. Despite their successes, Ormerod and Levine are both keen that others attempt to replicate and expand on their findings, to make sure that they stand up in different situations. “We should watch out for big sweeping claims,” says Levine.
Although the techniques will primarily help law enforcement, the same principles might just help you hunt out the liars in your own life. “I do it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says. The main thing to remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies.

There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out.

Via (BBC)