FUNNY FACT In the 1500's most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.

NDERF

A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks right to the top, rocks about 2" diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full? They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them in to the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The students laughed. He asked his students again if the jar was full? They agreed that yes, it was.

The professor then picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He then asked the students if the jar was full? They agreed that it was. He proceeded to pour a cup of wine into the jar and shook it as the wine slipped between all the sand.

"Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognize that this is your life. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, your children - anything that is so important to you that if it were lost, you would be nearly destroyed.

The pebbles are the other things in life that matter, but on a smaller scale. The pebbles represent things like your job, your house, your car.

The sand is everything else, the small stuff. If you put the sand or the pebbles into the jar first, there is no room for the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your energy and time on the small stuff, material things, you will never have room for the things that are truly most important. Pay attention to the things that are critical in your life. Play with your children. Take your partner out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal."

Take care of the rocks first - the things that really matter. Set your priorities.
The rest is just pebbles and sand. And remember, there is always room for wine.

As consumers, and especially as Americans, we are brought up to believe that "bigger is better." Now, with all the news about global warming and air pollution, it is time to redo our thinking. I find it hard to believe that a couple needs a 3 to 4,000 square foot home to live in. It is impractical, uses a great deal of energy, and uses resources above and beyond what our needs really are. There is a movement today to move back more closely to the earth, and to use renewable resources and resources readily available for building homes. Recent studies and experiments have proven that an earthbag home is environmentally friendly, energy efficient, and is built from local - and readily available - resources. This article will discuss earthbag homes, how they are built, and their advantages and disadvantages.

What Is An Earthbag Home

An earthbag home is nothing more than a home built out of bags of earth, stacked in certain patterns and on a solid foundation. They utilize local resources - the ground you stand on - for building material. Anything works - sand, gravel, scoria, which is volcanic rock, rice hulls - you name it and it probably can be used. Builders of earthbag homes try not to use wood as much as possible in building their homes, because so many forests have been depleted in the logging industry. Instead, they opt to build their earthbag homes with domes, which require no wood to finish. Where wood must be used, they use wood for such things as balustrades, stairs and railings. The wood is used in its natural shape, instead of being sawn into boards.

How Are They Built?

Simply put, traditional burlap bags or polypropylene bags (stronger and don't rot) are filled with earth. The combinations and textures matter little, as long as you understand that certain materials retain moisture, such as clay. Best mixed with a percentage of sand, the bags arte filled, stapled tightly shut, and stacked to build the outside walls of the home. Because many earthbag builders don't wish to use wood in their homes, a dome is often incorporated into the design so that rafters do not need to be put in place.

Doors and windows are incorporated into the design in several ways. Sometimes, a door is framed in using lumber, but typically the builder uses arched doors and round windows, thus eliminating the need for lumber in the build out. A lot of builders use metal farm machine wheels and culvert couplings for window openings. The options are endless. Nearly every earthbag home I have seen has had round windows. The outside is usually covered with stucco, papercrete, or stabilized earthen plaster. Many times an airlock is incorporated into the design to be more energy efficient. This serves dual purpose - the main door opens onto a room that can be used to store coats and boots, and then egress is made into the interior.

How Energy Efficient Are Earth Bag Homes?

Because of the design, giving thick walls and the insulating qualities of earth, these homes are designed to make good use of passive solar heat, facing south or east, depending on location. They homes are also designed so that sunlight during the day is absorbed by the interior walls, keeping the room warm after the sun goes down. Often, the only source of energy used is either fireplaces or small propane or electric heaters in individual bedrooms. An important step here is to insure that exterior walls are properly finished so that the daily heat from the sun does not leak back out in the evening.

Are There Disadvantages?

Much thought needs to be put into the final design. Material used to fill the earth bags needs to be stable and not contain moisture. Builders will put a small mixture of Portland cement into the bags for increased stability, depending on the composition of the filler.

Some people find the design of an earthbag home to be "heavy" and have the feeling of living in a cave. The earthbag home also requires a great deal of plaster in construction to insure water integrity.

Earthbag homes are a way for people looking for an alternative to the traditional stick built home. They are earth friendly, and use materials that are readily available. If you consider building one, be sure to check local codes and work closely with local building officials. The results are very pleasing, energy efficient and is kind to the earth.
Alden Smith is an award winning author and regular contributor to DoItYourself.com. He writes on a variety of subjects, and excels in research.

By Anonymousjavascript:iconTag('HEART1');

In 1996, I was assaulted and left in critical condition. I don't remember any of this. It was just a normal Friday afternoon, and then I was on a gurney being held upside down, vomiting blood. I lost consciousness shortly after being put in the ambulance.

That's when I had my Death Experience. I purposely avoid referring to it as a Near Death Experience, because I have done much research on the matter. NDE's are most commonly characterized as feeling one's soul disconnect from one's body, a tunnel of light, seeing heaven, God, lost loved ones, etc.

These sensations are easily explained both medically and psychologically. The soul leaving the body is a result of the combined effects of vivi-mortis and muscle relaxation, which occur when the function of the heart and lungs cease. Blood, like any liquid, naturally flows to the lowest possible point because of the pull of gravity, unless it is moved against gravity by a pump (the heart). When the heart stops, blood flows downward. This is vivi-mortis. People who have NDE's are commonly lying on their back receiving medical assistance, which is why they live to tell about their experience. Thus, the blood flows toward their back, creating a sensation of the flesh or body moving backwards. As the lungs cease functioning and the diaphragm relaxes one exhale, creating the sensation of an inner force moving forward.

The combined sensations (the body moving backward and an inner force moving forward) result in the feeling that the soul is leaving the body. The tunnel of light effect is caused when the muscles relax and the eyes open and the pupils dilate. One sees a blackness or fogginess surrounding a bright point of light, which grows as the irises relax and the pupils dilate further.

At this point, one is aware of one's own demise. We learn though experience and the only way we know of death, beyond the idea of death, is through our experiences of death, i.e. those that we have been close to that have died, and our religious beliefs of what happens when one dies. Hence we see lost loved ones and heaven (or hell), and possibly God.

I experienced none of these things. I was alive one moment and the next I was not. I knew this because I was no longer in my body, though I wasn't floating above it or traveling through a tunnel of light to heaven either. It is impossible to describe what I did experience because there are no words or concepts in the real world that match.

The best I can do is say what I know about it and what it felt like. I was in a place that is no place. It was the center of all places, at once outside the known universe (or our understanding of it) and encompassing the entire universe. There was no time in this place. Every moment of history and the present and the future were unfolded before me as one monumental event starting with the creation of the universe and ending, well that has since been blocked from me in such a way that it hurts to try to remember.

I experienced something entirely impossible and indescribable, sensation without perception, or awareness without sensation. There was no hot or cold, or light or dark, or movement or lack thereof. There was only awareness. Of everything. I knew every thought and every idea that every person had ever had or would ever have. These were like voices (though there was no sound, so how could they be voices) overheard in a crowded restaurant, but I could distinctly hear and follow each conversation all at once without any one distracting me from another. Then all of that faded away, and there was one emotion, the only one I experienced through the whole event: peace. Complete and permeating peace. The total lack of all emotion, sensation, and thought.

All things exist in contrast with their opposites; without darkness, there can be no light and vice-versa. No hot without cold, no pleasure without pain, no love without hate. This is the way we experience the world, through perception of varying degrees of opposites. This is the curse of man, that we enjoy the summer only because we know the winter is coming, we love and are loved because we hate and are hated. And because all thing are known only though contrast, we never know peace unless all these things have been erased, which is only possible through the death of or bodies and the end of our perception and experience and knowledge.

This event (for it wasn't an experience) lasted the smallest fraction of a second and also the entire existence of the universe. I drifted in eternal peace. Then I heard the voice or VOICE of God, at once as relaxing as sleeping late on a Saturday morning and waking to the sound of birds chirping outside the window and the soft scent of lilacs and roses carried on a gentle early summer breeze and the warm sun shining on your naked body and as powerful and frightening as lighting striking the very foundation of the building in which you are standing.

"It is not your time to be here, but you may stay if you chose. I have work for you if you choose to return." I didn't want to leave, but when the VOICE speaks, you obey. I know I was given a choice, and I chose the pain and misery of earthly life over the absence of all but peace. I sometimes wonder about that choice, but I think I made that choice long before it was put in front of me. I know I have work to do, that's why I came back.

I woke up on a gurney in the hospital where doctors were explaining to my mother that I would probably die in the coma I was in. They didn't know how I could still be alive. I sat up and was pushed back down because they thought I was having a seizure until I spoke. I was asked a barrage of questions like "Do you know what day it is?" and "Do you know who the president is?" and asked to count to ten numerous times which I did in four different languages. The questions stopped.

My skull had been fractured and my head resembled a large misshapen pumpkin. I had three broken ribs, bruised kidneys, spleen, and liver. I was bleeding internally and the doctors didn't know where yet. I said I was going to go to sleep but not to worry. I said that I would walk out of the hospital in less than twenty-four hours. I then closed my eyes and consciously healed myself. I could feel what was wrong with my body and where. I could redirect blood flow and nutrients to areas that needed it and away from areas that were bleeding. I could will my flesh and bones to grow back together.

When I had a CT scan, the technicians thought there was a mistake and ran another because the readings were so strange. There was no brain damage whatsoever, which was considered impossible given the extent of my injuries and the amount of time my brain had been without oxygen while I was clinically dead. Also there was a never-before-seen high delta wave reading that could only be explained if I in the middle of REM sleep (and even that was a stretch) even though I was conscious and talking the whole time.

That night I woke up at one point to see my doctor sitting in a chair in my room. I told him he could go tend to someone else if he needed, that I was going to be fine. He said, "I know, but what’s happening to you is unbelievable. You should be dead. I can't turn my back on a miracle. God is allowing me the opportunity to witness this and I just can't walk away." I later learned that his daughter had been in a car accident and had experienced injuries similar to mine.

He had been questioning God and he thought what was happening to me before his eyes was God's way of letting him know He was a reality. I was admitted to the hospital at 2:17 PM and released at 1:44 PM the next day. They said there was no explanation for my recovery, but there was no reason to keep me any longer. I was supposed to see my doctor every two weeks for the following six months to track any long term effects of my injuries. After the first physical and the tests, the doctor sat down in the exam room and sighed. I asked him, timidly, what was wrong and he said "Nothing. Just that, nothing. There is nothing in my medical training or experience that can account for your recovery."

He explained to me how bones heal. That the immune system goes crazy making new bone and there is a large knot of bone where there was a break. This is eventually dissolved over time, but the process takes months and sometimes there is a permanent enlargement of a bone that has been broken. He said after two weeks he couldn't tell that I had even had one broken bone, let alone three ribs and two in my skull. "All I can say is 'Do you believe in God?'"

The event drove me crazy. I really believe that. I experienced things completely outside the realm of human understanding. I heard the voice of God, which believe me, human beings weren't made to hear. I looked everywhere for the peace I had experienced. I tried drugs, different religions. I started to study physics and biology to try to find a logical explanation for the things that happened to me. I believed that it was all just some grand hallucination. You see I was raised in a Pentecostal church and when I began to ask questions because I could not accept all the superstitions of that faith, I was turned away, told my faith was weak. And so rather than accepting lies as medical, mathematical, scientific, and historical facts, I had turned to atheism. I had found no truth in religion.

I eventually accepted what happened to me was just a medical and psychological phenomenon for which we had not yet found the explanation. Until September 11, 2001, that belief held. Around six that morning, however, a friend of mine made a remark about how beautiful the sky was. Surprising him and myself both, I remarked, "Yeah. It's a pity so much death will come out of it." Then I went home and watched death come out of the sky on CNN.

There is a way we can know peace in this life. It cannot be found in any religion being practiced today, for they are all to far from the truth. The truth in all religions, the foundations of all religions, the message we choose to ignore no matter how religious we think we are, is that there is one sin that is the root of all sin and three virtues that are the root of all virtues, which are, in fact, the only virtues.

Pride (ego) is the sin and all sin is pride. It is the root of all the suffering and ills mankind experiences. In the name of pride we reduce others to serve our will or we dehumanize others in order to inflate our own worth. Through pride we divide humanity. Though pride we conquer, destroy, and subjugate people and nature. Through pride we kill each other, and through pride we die.

Patience, humility, and compassion are how we know and spread peace. Patience is the way through which all things come to pass. Humility is the truth that we each are no greater than any of God's works, no matter how small. Compassion is the light of peace shining through us, illuminating the way we see and interact with the world.

God created us, and he gave us the ability to create. But, what have we created? We have created murder and suffering and pain. We have created hell.

We can continue along this path or we can abandon pride (ego) and learn to act with patience, humility, and compassion and thus create heaven on earth, experience peace in this life and in the next, rather than subjugating ourselves to an eternity of rebirths in this hell we have made for ourselves.

This is our choice. We make it each day. Just as a recovered alcoholic chooses each day not to drink or to become a practicing alcoholic again, we can choose patience, humility, and compassion over the consequences of pride/ego. You can test the influence of pride/ego. When you next find yourself angry, offended, say: now this situation still exists, butI will take my ego out of this situation. When you do that, you will find that your anger disappears. Anger is nothing more than wounded pride, wounded ego. It can be removed and with its removal, one sees so clearly the awful influence it exerted on how one interpreted a situation.

Time marches on, time stands still
Time on my hands, time to kill
Blood on my hands, and my hands in the till
Down at the 7-11 - Warren Zevon

Time Out of Mind

I've always been dismayed by the thought of reincarnation, so its unlikelihood has always been a comfort. Which is why it saddens me to consider that oblivion may have been as much wishful thinking as paradise.

But if the occult is on the table in these times then we need to talk about this, too, since reincarnation is the "great fundamental doctrine" of the Mystery Schools, as Dion Fortune writes in Sane Occultism. And more to the point, the emerging holographic model in which our minds are seen to both extend beyond our material bodies and to have emerged from a common consciousness provides the theoretical construct in which reincarnation becomes scientifically credible, if not inevitable.

Before we go much further, let's recall again the congruities of boundary experience, which are all manifested in part by higher frequencies of electro-magnetic vibration. Remote viewing may be regarded as a subset of astral projection, or out-of-body experience, while an OBE could be called a Near-Death Experience before its time. And the phenomenology of NDEs is remarkably similar to that of UFO encounters, as detailed in Dr Kenneth Ring's The Omega Project. And cords of each lead us to Fortune's fundamental doctrine.

Psychoactive research, too. In Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule he recalls the chill along his spine when he noted for the first time that it took 49 days from conception to the first signs of the human pineal gland, the same span recorded in the Tibetan Book of the Dead from death to reincarnation. (Forty-nine days is also the time of gender differentiation.) Strassman contends that endogenous DMT, produced in the pineal near death, may act as a "scout" for the non-corporeal realm.

Strassman writes:

As we die, if near-death experiences are any indication, there is a profound shift in consciousness away from identification with the body. Pineal DMT makes available those particular non-embodied contents of consciousness. All the factors previously described combine for one final burst of DMT production: catecholamine release; decreased breakdown and increased production of DMT; reduced anti-DMT; and decomposing pineal tissue. Therefore, it may be that the pineal is the most active organ in the body at the time of death....

The consequence of this flood of DMT upon our dying brain-based mind is a pulling back of the veils normally hiding what Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo, or intermediary states between this life and the next. DMT opens our senses to these betwixt states with their myriad visions, thoughts, sounds and feelings. As the body becomes totally inert, consciousness has completely left the body and now exists as a field among many fields of manifest things.

Bruce Moen - who received his training in altered-state projection at the Monroe Institute - describes in his book Voyages into the Unknown OBEs spent as a "first responder" guiding the shocked dead of Oklahoma City towards the souls' "reception centre." He notes he saw a Monroe associate, named Rebecca, doing the same, "her arms spread out in love...providing a portal," and that they acknowledged each other with smiles. Later, in this world, by telephone, they compared notes. ("Oh Bruce, the babies" were her first words.)

Reincarnation was the core tenent of Robert Monroe's philosophy, which he said he learned over decades of astral travel. Remember his "I/There"? Monroe taught that the self we know is merely the fragment of the "Total Self" which is currently living a physical life. The total self is a cluster of many beings who each live many lifetimes. (Since Monroe's death in 1995 Skip Atwater, former Operations and Training Officer of the US military's remote viewing program, has served as the institute's Director of Research.)

Where Life and Death are Memorized

Dr Joel Whitton is a Toronto psychologist who, in 1972, participated in the "Philip" experiment which allegedly created a fictional ghost by the power of a group's applied will (not unlike making a tulpa). In the decades since he has researched reincarnation, and his 13-year work with 30 individuals published in the book Life Between Life.

Of Whitton's subjects, Michael Talbot writes in The Holographic Universe that many "gave uncannily accurate historical details about the times in which they had lived":

Some even spoke languages unknown to them. While reliving an apparent past life as a Viking, one man, a 37-year old behavioral scientist, shouted words that linquistic authorities later identified as Old Norse. After being regressed to an ancient Persian lifetime, the same man began to write in a spidery, Arabic-style script that an expert in Near Eastern languages identified as an authentic representation of Sassanid Pahlavi, a long-extinct Mesopotamian tongue that flourished between A.D. 226 and 651.

Perhaps we should ask now, if we are confident that the subjects are not inventing a past life, can we assume that they are always recalling one? There are endless signals in the superhologram. Could it be that, when tuning in the higher vibrations, their brains-as-receivers instead pick up the cross-talk of disembodied consciousness? Rather than a transmigration of souls, this would mean a certain entanglement. Possibly. Entanglement could account for certain manifestations of mental and spiritual illness, including "possession." But the distinction may be chiefly rhetorical if we all partake of the same consciousness, and it fails to account for the alleged physical footprint of past lives upon the present.

Dr Ian Stevenson, head of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, published an article in 1993 entitled "Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons." He found that 35% of children who claim to recall past lives bear a birthmark or defect they attribute to a wound suffered in an earlier incarnation.

Stevenson writes:

The cases of 210 such children have been investigated. The birthmarks were usually areas of hairless, puckered skin; some were areas of little or no pigmentation (hypopigmented macules); others were areas of increased pigmentation (hyperpigmented nevi). The birth defects were nearly always of rare types. In cases in which a deceased person was identified the details of whose life unmistakably matched the child's statements, a close correspondence was nearly always found between the birthmarks and/or birth defects on the child and the wounds on the deceased person. In 43 of 49 cases in which a medical document (usually a postmortem report) was obtained, it confirmed the correspondence between wounds: and birthmarks (or birth defects). There is little evidence that parents and other informants imposed a false identity on the child in order to explain the child's birthmark or birth defect. Some paranormal process seems required to account for at least some of the details of these cases, including the birthmarks and birth defects.

Talbot notes that Stevenson has escorted many children to the locales of their past lives, and observed them effortlessly navigate what should have been strange neighbourhoods as they "correctly identified their former house, belongings, and past-life relatives and friends."

Interestingly, and contrary to the presumptions of religion, Stevenson and most NDE researchers find no evidence of "retributive karma" or judgement of "sin" or uncharitable conduct.

Talbot writes that Stevenson has found that:

...although a person's material conditions can vary greatly from one life to the next, their moral conduct, interests, aptitudes, and attitudes remain the same. Individuals who were criminals in their previous existence tend to be drawn to criminal behavior again; people who were generous and kind continue to be generous and kind, and so on. From this Stevenson concludes that it is not the outward trappings of life that matter, but the inner ones, the joys, sorrows, and "inner growths" of the personality, that appear to be most important.

This is the most loving act I have ever witnessed.......I cried watching it because I saw in his expression of love a measure of the heartache and loss he must have felt when she took him to the zoo. I have actually heard people say "animals don't have souls." No one can watch this video and believe that. Bush just eliminated protections for wolves so it is legal to shoot them from helicopters. I only Bush had the soul of this lion..........



http://www.telestereo.com/Archivos/video.html

Several years ago this woman found a sick, malnourished lion cub in the jungle.

She took the cub home and fed him and brought him up until he was too big to keep anymore. She then made arrangements with a zoo in Colombia to take the him. Here's a video of what happened when she went to visit him in the zoo for the first time: