Meditation = Brain Sit Ups

Yesterday I read that meditation can increase your brain size. At first I thought that was amazing, and that if you meditated every day, your brain might get thicker and heavier, causing you to become brilliant. But when I read the full article, it turns out that meditation only enhances a small portion of the brain.

It’s like doing an exercise and focusing on one particular muscle. In the brain, the location where meditation mainly occurs will over time accumulate more cells, and become thicker (barely, but that is still significant). However, the benefit is pretty much contained therein.

The results aren’t to be written off entirely. I was pleased to read that the simple form of meditation that was practiced by monks could be used by anyone to enhance a certain aspect of their lives, as well as the brains.

It’s called insight meditation. Apparently, you lie down and close your eyes, and think of nothing, while focusing your attention on sensory input -- “whatever’s there.” So if you feel some tension in your neck, you focus on that. If you feel an odd tingling in your side, you focus on that. If you don’t experience any sensory input, you simply focus on your breathing.

This technique relies on areas in the brain responsible for focus, attention, and memory. Monks that been doing this for years have a great deal of skill built up in that area. An average person who has been doing this for a little while typically seems to report greater ease handling complicated situations that might have seemed overwhelming before. So maybe if you practice insight meditation, you’ll be able to keep focused on an urgent task, even when all hell breaks loose around you. Pretty cool.

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Immortality And Relationships

Today I wondered about what it would be like to live forever, and not be tied down by sterility. In the Highlander movie saga, our heroes usually couldn’t bear children. I realized that this makes a lot of sense. If you still have the urge to reproduce, and are fertile, you run the risk of dating your great, great, great grandchild in a few hundred years. That did not appeal to me.

Then I realized that’s where marriage comes In. If you can find a suitable partner who happens to be a mortal, marry them and make sure your relationship lasts forever, in fact as long as you both shall live. Even if that’s 100,000 years.

That way, if you produce offspring, you don’t necessarily need to keep track of bloodlines in order to avoid the risk of unwanted intermingling.

The show New Amsterdam was in my thoughts when I contemplated this issue, because the protagonist had obviously sired more than one child. So who’s to say he doesn’t have great grand children running around? It could become a very complicated situation if an immortal had many, many children. At least marriage offers a sort of solution.

And then, for those of us who die, what happens if in a thousand years you meet a soul in the afterlife who you find to be attractive? What if the soul is that of your deceased great, great (etc.) grandchild? I guess the rules are different for souls. Maybe there’s a sort of fusion that happens there, a combination of souls, as opposed to a creation of “offspring” souls. That seems to make more sense to me, although I’ll bet it’s far more complex.

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UFOs vs Abductions

Stories about UFOs and abductions seem to differ depending on what category they are in. If you see a UFO, maybe you see brilliant technology, and it leaves you alone. If you get abducted, maybe you see weird shenanigans, and it bothers you tremendously. I know that the mere idea of being taken aboard a ship and abused is frustrating.

But the idea of being able to harness advanced technology for the betterment of mankind seems pretty cool. What if Microsoft were to capture a downed, unmanned ufo, and reverse-engineer the tech there? Or, if you think Microsoft would use it to their own ends, what if some sort of philanthropic project got the tech instead?

I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather think about the good that might come from contact with ufos.

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The Voyage of Life Series by Thomas Cole

I recently saw Thomas Cole's "Voyage of Life" painting series. It includes four paintings depicting a man's life.

In the first one, he arrives in a boat as a baby, with an angel steering the boat toward a pleasant place.

In the second one, the man is a child, steering the boat himself toward a ghostly castle in the sky, while the angel watches from shore.

In the third one, the man is an adult, praying for help while the boat steers itself through a dark and dangerous course. There appear to be dark faces above, in the clouds.

In the fourth and final one, the man is elderly, and the angel guides him toward Heaven.

According to Wikipedia, the paintings represent life and earthly ambition, and not so much otherworldly existence. The castle in the sky is the boy's dream of success and a better world, and the faces in the clouds during adulthood simply represent bad weather.

But my first take on it was a little different. I saw the ghostly castle as being the boy's vision of heaven. Children are thought to be more connected with heaven than adults. So I figured when the guy became an adult, and the view of the sky become mean faces instead of a cool castle, that meant that he was bound mentally and spiritually to earthly things, and manipulated by demonic forces.

Either way, whether the castle represents pure ambition, or the palace of God, it still looked pretty cool.

Looking at the adulthood picture again, maybe there's only one face in the clouds -- a creature blowing a gust of wind toward the man.

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Galactic Federation of Light

I read a little bit about the Galactic Federation of Light (GFL) recently. One version of the story of the GFL is that it is a race like humanity, but with highly evolved people who glow, and are powerful. This race may have altered ape DNA to make humans. This functions as an explanation for our evolutionary missing link.

If glowing human-like aliens exist, they could be an explanation for angels. There might even be an explanation for Jesus that doesn't rely on pure faith.

One of the GFL theories is that they'll be visiting the earth soon. Maybe in a large spaceship. That could explain parts of the Bible in which people will one day look up and see the kingdom of Heaven made manifest in the sky.

It's interesting to consider a highly advanced race that dwarfs us by comparison, especially when we're living in a pretty advanced age ourselves. In just a few decades, even without overt alien influence, we'll have made some pretty impressive strides.

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On The Verge Of The Truth, Thanks To The iPhone

...And devices like it.

If human eyes can see aliens and ghosts, then shouldn't camera footage be able to capture them too? I think so.

Sure, one might argue that the human brain is capable of perceiving much more than just light with our eyes, but I think that just light is enough.

How long will it be until a sighting of some creature will be captured via cell phone, hand-held camcorder, digital device, or whatever?

Post it to YouTube, get a few million hits, and BAM! Mass hysteria!!

People have been trying to share the truth (I'm assuming not all of those videos are hoaxes) for some time, and there hasn't been mass panic yet. Maybe the government/corporations/corporate government has to give the media permission first, and then Fox News will air its Extreme Alien Close-Up report -- tonight at 11!

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Which People Know The Truth?

I saw a story posted in a forum about the apparent 6th astronaut to come forward and speak openly about the existence of aliens. He says they are real, and the government has been keeping a tight lid on the issue for 60+ years.

I wonder how high a normal person would have to rise through the military or government ranks before he or she could confirm (to himself or herself alone) that piece of information.

I would imagine that the higher you rose, the more of the picture would be made clear. But no matter what level you were at, there would probably always remain dark areas that you didn't really have a clue about. Like you might know there's a ship that crashed from space, but you don't know what kind of technology was found or salvaged, or whether the ship's pilots or inhabitants were found.

It would be pretty lame if the reason we're being kept in the dark is because if we all knew the truth, we'd no longer see the point in living.

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