Trakata is the practice of candle gazing, a technique that opens up your third eye, or the pineal gland. It’s a form of meditation, so it’ll improve concentration, stress, and sleep. The pineal gland will also get a better hold on your body clock. If you’re feeling out of touch, the mindfulness of Trakata will encourage inner peace. Even your eyes will become stronger as they learn how to focus. If you struggle with traditional meditation, try candle gazing.
Trakata, or candle gazing, is a meditative practice. It will open up your “third eye”, also known as the pineal gland. This small brain structure is parallel to your eyeballs. Despite its size, the pineal gland is powerful. Sleep and vision are both controlled by this tiny organ. It even directs toxins away from the eyes, helping your peepers stay healthy.1 If you’re feeling stressed, restless, or out of touch with your body – try trakata. Here’s what this easy technique can do for you.
Benefits Of Using The Trakata Technique
1. Trakata Technique Enhances Concentration
Generally, meditation helps you practice focus.2 It’s no different with Tratkata! In fact, it might even be easier, since the flame gives you something to look at. If your mind wanders when you close your eyes, consider candle gazing.
2. Trakata Technique Relieves Stress
Stress management is one of the best perks of meditation. With candle gazing, you can unplug from life and let the mind chill. It will do wonders for anxiety and depression.
3. Trakata Technique Promotes Sleep And Relaxation
Studies have shown that mindfulness-based stress relief doubles as a sleep aid. After all, as you reduce stress, your mind becomes more at ease. Insomnia will finally take a backseat. Plus, the pineal gland regulates your body clock.3 Meditation such as candle gazing, will highly benefit this part of the brain.
4. Trakata Technique Encourages Inner Peace
Managing stress is vital for inner peace. With trakata, you can connect the body and mind, helping you become in tune with yourself. You’ll also experience a moment of silence – a must in today’s busy world.
5. Trakata Technique Improves Eye Health
Trakata doesn’t just help your brain focus. It helps your eyes, too! Candle gazing makes your eyes stronger by forcing them to concentrate. In a way, trakata doubles as an eye exercise.
How To Perform Candle Gazing
Light a candle of any size. If you’d like, use a candle with your favorite scent.
Place the candle on a table, about 4 feet away from you. It should be at eye level.
Sit straight up. Relax the arms and shoulders while holding a good posture.
Direct your gaze to the flame.
Steadily focus on the flame without blinking. Stay completely still.
Once you can’t keep your eyes open any longer, close them.
If you visualize the flame, move this image into the third eye, or in between the eyebrows.
Can’t imagine the flame? Give it another go until you can re-visualize it.
Once it the image fades away, focus on breathing. Keep your eyes closed.
Think of your breath flowing out of your nose. Repeat up to 8 breaths.
Tips To Perform Candle Gazing
Make sure the candle is parallel to your eyes. You shouldn’t have to look down or up.
The flame needs to stay steady. Close all the windows, and turn off fans or air conditioners.
For a more relaxing experience, place yourself in a meditative position.
Concentrate on the flame, not the wick or candle.
If you wear contacts, allow yourself to blink more often. Opening your eyes for too long might be irritating.
Try to ignore random thoughts that cross your mind.
Trakata is appropriate for people of all ages. However, be careful with an open flame. Never leave it unattended, and blow it out before leaving the room.
Spicy food is a lot more than the experience. It reduces the risk of heart attack and strokes. It can dip cholesterol levels and blood pressure. It can also decrease or prevent the growth of cancer cells. People who typically eat spice throughout their life have a reduced risk of dying prematurely. Some studies also reveal it aids weight loss.
Who doesn’t love working up a sweat and sniffling while eating a spicy meal? There’s nothing like getting your taste buds burning for a big glass of water (or milk, as experts suggest). Researchers claim people love spicy food for the thrill. But, spicy food is a lot more than the experience. It’s amazing for your health as well. Foods containing cayenne pepper, jalapeno, habanero, turmeric, cumin, red pepper, or other heat-producing spices are packed with healthy goodness.
Benefits Of Spicy Food
1. Improves Heart Health
The heart loves spicy food. People who eat spicy food throughout their life were found to have much lower instances of heart attacks and strokes, thanks to capsaicin. This compound typically found in chili pepper and jalapenos can reduce blood pressure and LDL “bad” cholesterol levels – perfect for heart health.1
2. Aids Weight Loss
Some experts claim the sweat you produce while eating spicy food is a sign of burning calories. This is because capsaicin raises your metabolic rate by 8% for a brief period of time. That’s not all. One study revealed people who ate food with hot sauce for an appetizer ate 200 fewer calories than people who didn’t. Also, let’s not forget spicy peppers does add a lot of flavor to food, making eating weight-loss specific food more palatable.
3. Promotes Anti-Cancer Effects
Spicy peppers and herbs can help reduce the risk of developing cancer. Capsaicin in spice was found to destroy leukemic cells and reduce prostate cancer cells. Also, curcumin found in turmeric is packed with anti-cancer properties. Experts reveal turmeric can help reduce the growth of cancer cells and prevent it as well, especially in cancers of the breast, stomach, and cervix.2
4. Increases Your Life Span
An interesting study followed the eating patterns of 500,000 people across China for 5 years. They revealed people who had spicy food 6 times a week had a 14% lesser risk of dying from heart diseases, cancer, infections, and respiratory diseases.3 Doctor’s order? Add spice wherever you can in your diet. Also, black peppers and bell peppers aren’t considered as spicy food.
5. Boosts Anti-Inflammatory Properties
Turmeric and capsaicin in peppers are anti-inflammatory in nature – a property used to tackle several diseases. Rheumatoid arthritis (an inflammatory disease) isn’t very common in countries that eat a lot of spicy food in their normal diet.
6. Treats A Stuffy Nose And Chest
Notice how your nose runs when you eat something spicy? This is because heat is excellent at clearing up your nasal tract and decongesting a stuffy chest.
Make sure to add red pepper and ground cayenne pepper in your diet. If you can’t handle spicy peppers, try milder versions of spice. Add ginger slices to tea and add turmeric to your dishes. Top your salads with red chili flakes as well.
The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the human body. It starts in the brain, circles around our digestive system, and connects to every organ. The vagus nerve is a part of the parasympathetic nervous system and is one of the most important nerves because of the effects it can have on the human body. Nowadays, doctors track the vagal tone of patients who have had a heart attack because of the risk of recurring episodes. Vagal tone is the tone of the vagus nerve and is measured by tracking the heart-rate along with the breathing rate. Higher the vagal tone is, faster the body relaxes after an episode of stress. Lower vagal tone is risky and can cause inflammation, resulting the nerve in underperforming.
When our vagus nerve faces a problem, it can cause brain fog, neurotransmitter imbalance, digestive disorders, and more. Let us see how we can activate our vagus nerve and increase the vagal tone.
1. Meditation
People who meditate have been found to have significantly higher vagal tone as it is associated with increase in positivity. Positive emotions let people increase their social connection. It has also been noted that the chanting of “Om” stimulates the vagus nerve. This is because the term “Om” creates an internal vibration in our throat and stimulates other organs too. This indicates that meditation can help a lot in improving the functioning of our vagus nerve.
2. Body Massage
Massaging several areas in our body can stimulate the vagus nerve effectively. For example, a foot massage or a neck massage stimulates the activities of the vagus nerve. It has been found that a neck massage along the carotid sinus (towards the right of your throat where pulse is checked) can activate the functioning of the vagus nerve to a great extent.
3. Singing, Speaking, And Chanting
Singing makes you feel good, but it does more than that. When you sing loud, at the top of your lungs, the oxytocin secretion increases and the muscles at the back of our throat gets worked out more. This, in turn, activates the vagus nerve. When you sing in unison in a choir group or in an open concert, the HRV and vagus function also increase significantly, thereby activating our vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve also gets stimulated and the vagal tone increases when you engage yourself in humming, chanting, hymn singing, and upbeat energy singing. Speaking too makes it possible for increasing our vagal tone as the vocal cords get connected when we speak.
4. Yoga And Deep Breathing
Yoga has always proved have amazing effects on the human body. When you practice yoga, the vagus nerve’s activity and your parasympathetic system gets stimulated to a great extent. This is because of the increase in the thalamic GABA levels. An increase in the GABA levels improves your mood and decreases your anxiety.
Deep breathing is a great way to relax your body and improve your mood. Deep breathing in certain techniques also helps in activating the vagus nerve in a great way. You can practice yogic breathing or alternate nostril breathing. It can also be done by inhaling deeply, closing the airway while pushing the breath against the inside of your chest, and bearing down with your abdominal muscles, in a way that you are trying to pass the gas. This helps in applying internal pressure from the lungs to the surrounding organs, thereby stimulating the vagus nerve as it is connected to the digestive system, heart, and lungs.
5. Fasting Or Reducing Calorie Intake Therapeutically
As we have seen that the vagus nerve is responsible for digestion, it is important to keep our digestive system healthy. If stress in the body increases, the digestive system may shut itself down and our vagal tone will decrease, resulting in many health problems. So, it is necessary to keep fasting from time to time. In that way, we will help our empty stomach send signals back to the brain that digestion is not necessary and the energy stored in the body can be used for relaxation. Periodic fasting or reduction in calorie intake results in an increase in the high-frequency heart rate variability, and thus increases the vagal tone.
We can see that a healthy life full of happiness can be achieved through yoga, deep breathing, meditation, singing, laughing more often, and also, reducing calorie intake, so that our digestive system stays happy. This, in turn, proves that a healthy and happy lifestyle helps us activate our vagus nerve and in also helps it work effectively.
LATE JULY. New York City. A bedroom on the top floor of a four-story building in which I installed an air conditioner with several thousand too few BTUs. I barely know what a BTU is. The temperature that day reached into the upper 90s Fahrenheit, with humidity just short of actual water. The tiny weak air conditioner struggled to cool the room down while a few feet away I struggled to fall asleep. And yet I was unable to sleep without some sort of covering. In this case it was the barest edge of my lightest sheet, touching the smallest possible part of my torso.
Why this compulsion to be covered, however minimally, in order to sleep?
Blankets are common, but not universal, to humans during sleep, at least in the modern day. But historically, the effort involved in weaving large sheets put blankets at much too high a price point for most to afford. From the linen bedsheets of Egypt around 3500 B.C. to wool sheets during the Roman empire straight through to cotton in medieval Europe, bed coverings were for the wealthy.
By the Early Modern period in Europe, which followed the Middle Ages, production had increased enough so that more middle-class people could afford bedding, though not easily. “The bed, throughout Western Europe at this time, was the most expensive item in the house,” says Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech who has written extensively about sleep. “It was the first major item that a newly married couple, if they had the wherewithal, would invest in.” The bed and bedding could make up about a third of the total value of an entire household’s possessions, which explains why bedsheets frequently showed up in wills.
In place of blankets and sheets, other sources of heat were common at night, usually from multiple people sharing a bed, or often livestock.
Today, there’s minimal anthropological work about bedding around the world. The best is a 2002 paper by Carol Worthman and Melissa Melby of Emory University, who compiled a study of sleeping arrangements in different parts of the world. “Recognition of the paucity of anthropological work on sleep is galvanizing: a significant domain of human behavior that claims a third of daily life remains largely overlooked by a discipline dedicated to the holistic study of the human condition,” they wrote. This passes for outrage in an academic paper.
The paper looked into some foraging and non-foraging peoples who live in hot climates near the equator, and found that only the nomadic foragers regularly sleep without bed coverings. Everyone else uses some form of covering, whether that’s plant matter or woven fabric, even in central Africa and Papua New Guinea, both tropical climates. Much more common than sheets or blankets are some form of padding; basically nobody sleeps simply on the ground as a matter of course.
As one more example of the goodness of blankets, there has also been a decent amount of research about the calming effect of weighted blankets, which can weigh up to 30 pounds. Studies indicate that they can curb anxiety and even be used in the treatment of autism.
A linen bed sheet from the early 1800s. PUBLIC DOMAIN
“The requirement for blankets takes on two components to it,” says Dr. Alice Hoagland, the director of the insomnia clinic at the Unity Sleep Disorder Center in Rochester, New York. “There’s a behavioral component and a physiological component.” The latter is a little more clear-cut, so let’s dive into that first.
About 60 to 90 minutes before a usual bedtime, the body starts losing core temperature. There’s a physiological explanation for that: when the body is heated, we feel more alert. And conversely, when the body cools down, we tend to feel sleepier. Cooler internal body temperatures are correlated with a rise in melatonin, a hormone that induces sleepiness. A bunch of doctors tested this out by making people wear skinsuits—they kind of look like cycling outfits—that dropped their body temperature just a touch, one or two degrees Fahrenheit, to see if they’d sleep better. They did.
Your body’s ability to regulate its own heat gets way more complicated than that at night, though. Say you sleep for eight hours each night. In the first four hours, plus the hour or so before you fall asleep, your body temperature will drop a bit, from around 98 degrees Fahrenheit to around 96 or 97. But the second four hours are marked by periods of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a phenomenon in which most of our dreams take place, along with a host of physical changes.
One of those physical changes is an inability to thermoregulate. “You almost revert to a more, and this is my word, reptilian form of thermoregulation,” says Hoagland. She says “reptilian” because reptiles are unable to regulate their own body temperature the way we mammals can; instead of sweating and shivering, reptiles have to adjust their temperature through external means, like moving into the sun or into cooler shadows. And for those brief periods of REM sleep, we all turn into lizards.
Even in perpetually hot climates, nighttime temperatures drop, and the night is coldest, coincidentally, right at the time when our bodies are freaking out and unable to adjust to it. (The night is coldest right after dawn, in direct contradiction to aphorism.) So, like lizards, we have to have some way to externally regulate our body temperatures. You may think it’s unnecessary to use a blanket at 10 p.m., when it’s still hot, but by 4 a.m., when it’s colder and you’re unable to shiver? You might need it. So we may know from past experience that we’ll thank ourselves later for having a blanket, and thus force ourselves to use one (or at least have one nearby) when going to bed.
There’s more to it than that, though. Another strange thing that happens in the REM periods of sleep is that our bodies drastically lower their levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter most associated with feelings of calm, happiness, and well-being. You know what’s associated with higher levels of serotonin? Blankets. Various studies have indicated that sleeping with a weighted blanket can trigger an uptick in the brain’s production of serotonin. So yet again, the blanket might be filling a need that our REM-addled brains create.
The other element that might explain our need for blankets is what Hoagland refers to as “pure conditioning.” “Chances are you were raised to always have a blanket on you when you went to sleep,” she says. “So that’s a version of a transitional object, in sort of Pavlovian way.” Basically, our parents always gave us blankets to sleep with—babies are a bit worse than adults at thermoregulation, meaning they get cold easily, meaning well-meaning adults put blankets on them—and so getting under a sheet or blanket is associated with the process of falling asleep. Instead of Pavlov’s dogs drooling at the sound of a bell, we get sleepy when covered with a sheet.
If you Google around for this question, you’ll end up with a bunch of theories about blankets simulating the warm, enclosed feeling we had in the womb. There could be some element of theoretical protection or security imbued by the blanket, which might be another bit of conditioning, but Hoagland thinks the womb comparison is pretty unlikely. “I’m very suspicious of anyone who implies that this goes back to the feeling of being in the womb,” she says. “I think that’s very far-fetched.”
Another possible reason is that blankets are soft and feel good. I could not find any studies that examine the question of whether people like blankets because they’re soft and feel good, so this may remain a great unanswered question.
Indoor plants can add beauty, peace and serenity to your home. However not all plants are as harmless as they seem. While most species of the plant kingdom are safe, some of them are poisonous and can cause severe reactions in both humans and animals. Keeping poisonous plants indoors is even more dangerous if you have young children and dogs as they could eat them without realizing. These ten plants are best kept outside your home if you want to keep your home toxin-free.
1. Dieffenbachia Or Dumb Cane
Dieffenbachia is a tropical flowering plant which belongs to the family of Araceae. There are 56 species of Dieffenbachia which are found all over the world. The cells of this plant contain raphide which, if chewed, causes a burning sensation and sometimes, temporary dumbness (giving rise to its other name, ‘Dumb Cane’). If a child chews a leaf of Dumb Cane, it can cause temporary numbness, irritation in the throat, excessive dribble and swelling in some parts of the neck. However, these effects are seldom life-threatening. If a person has accidentally chewed a leaf of it, wash their mouth out with cold water. Drinking milk also reduces the poisonous effects as it acts as antidote to raphide.
2. Caladium Or Heart Of Jesus
Caladium is a flowering plant from the family Araceae. It is also known by other names such as Elephant’s ear, Heart of Jesus and Angel Wings. It is noxious due to the presence of high levels of calcium oxalate and asparagine. If the parts of the plants are consumed in large quantity or comes into direct contact with the eye, it results in a burning sensation in the throat, corneal damage, diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting. Large blisters can also form in the mouth, affecting speech. Wash your mouth out with cold water and drink milk if you have accidentally swallowed a part of the plant.
3. Philodendron
It is the second largest member of the Araceae family. They are mainly found in America and West Indies. They are less poisonous compared to the other plants. They possess glands which secrete nectar in order to attract ants. They contain small amount of raphide in them, which if consumed in large quantities could cause swelling and irritation in the throat.
4. Pothos Or Devil’s Ivy
Pothos is yet another plant from Araceae which is found in temperate regions and can cause ecological damage in some cases. It has many common names but mostly it is known as Devil’s Ivy because it cannot be killed by anyone. While certain compounds in Pothos might have cancer-fighting properties, it can cause numbness and swelling in the throat if consumed raw.
5. Peace Lily Or Spathe
It is an evergreen perennial plant with large leaves. It is poisonous if the leaves are eaten raw as it contains many of the same compounds as Pothos does. Eating large amounts of it causes swelling and irritation in the throat. The plant also secretes poisonous liquids which can cause a rash if they come into contact with skin.
6. Oleander
It is one of the most harmful shrubs and belongs to the dogbane family Apocynaceae. Like olive plants, the leaves of the Oleander plant grow in pairs and the flowers in clusters. It contains a poisonous compound named cardiac glycosides which affects the gastrointestinal tract, CNS and the heart. The symptoms are eye inflammation and dermatitis which can only be treated by a medical professional.
7. Daffodils
It is a spring perennial plant from the amaryllis family. It contains an alkaloid poison called lycorine which can have an adverse effect on the body. The symptoms are acute stomach pain followed by vomiting and sometimes, cardiac arrest. In very rare cases, if huge quantities of it are consumed, it could even be fatal. Florists stand the risk of developing dermatitis if they handle the bulbs without proper protection first.
8. English Ivy
It is a flowering plant from the family Araliaceae. Ivy’s are climbers which are widely used to cover walls which could help control the temperature fluctuations in the house. The liquid secreted from a damaged ivy contains falcarinol and polyacetylene which can cause blistered hands, a fever and in more serious cases, convulsions, hallucinations and respiratory problems. Visit a medical professional immediately to get it treated before it becomes more serious.
9. Tulip
It is a bulbous plant from the Lily family. They are widely grown in gardens or in pots. Tuliposides and tulipalins are the two chemicals present which are responsible for allergic reactions in the body. If it comes into contact with bare skin it could result in dermatitis, which must be treated by a dermatologist. Consuming tulip bulbs may result in nausea and diarrhoea.
10. Hyacinth
It is a sweet-scented flowering plant from the Asparagaceae family. The bulbs of hyacinth contains oxalic acid which is poisonous when it comes into contact with bare hands. Always use protective gloves when you’re handling them if you want to avoid a skin infection.
Goddess Kali (pronounced Kaali) baffles the modern mind. The image of Kali would probably give a nightmare to a tender mind or even appear grotesque. But for centuries, India has known Kali as raw feminine energy and as a manifested Goddess. Though she is fierce, no child growing up in India fears Kali. So, what’s in this fierce female form of Kali that makes her a Divine mother in India? Or is Kali yet another tool in the ancient Indian pedagogy to communicate quantum truths to lay intelligence?
Face to face with Kali…
If Goddess Kali was to come face to face to us, this is how she would show up – She would be ferocious, dark, wild-haired, wearing a mala (garland) of skulls around her neck (Kapalini), having several hands with many weapons in them but one hand with the cut-head of a demon. Her blood-lust tongue will be protruding from her mouth, her eyes would be red and her face and breasts sullied with blood. Well, this is how she is described in the scriptures.
This form though wild may not be so dissimilar to an exploding star in the cosmos or even a tsunami. What is a supernova in the cosmos is Kali to the human mind. Kali is said to be the manifestation of the terrible function of matter. Meeting Kali could be akin to a tsunami from the very same ocean that was gentle a minute ago – lashing smoothly onto the beaches. That’s the Kali experience according to the scriptures. India knows Kali, hence her form doesn’t scared anyone in India. Kali is ultimately understood to be the very dynamic, expressive and concretized force of the unmanifest reality.
Kali as in the source books…
It’s no surprise that the modern mind scoffs at such imagery. The scientific mind thinks this is mumbo-jumbo-voodoo stuff without making any attempt to learn more. The very sourcebooks where Kali is mentioned is almost never looked at. But its not their fault. Subjective stuff cannot be put under the microscope. After all spiritual things are best understood spiritually not scientifically. Just as we have freakish looking nebulae in the text books of astronomy, so is Kali in the books of Indian spirituality as a burst of energy. Yet in the source-book on Kali , she is the “Achintya rupa charite sarva shatru vinaashini” meaning “You of unimaginable beautiful form and energy, destroyer of all obstacles…” and she is ‘Jayanti’ (Ever-Victorious) and ‘Mangala Kali’ (Ever-Auspicious).
The imagery of Kali that comes from a spiritually advanced and mature Indian civilisation has to but sublime and sophisticated. The treatment is transformational. The spiritual teachers suggest that to understand Kali is to give way to insightful knowledge that is the culmination of a subjective self discovery. The deeper level of understanding required to understand Kali seems to be in the realm of a quantum subjective experience rather than an intellectual one. After all the suggestive name Kali comes from the word “kaal” or time which is a subjective concept. Primarily Kali projects herself as the power of “Time” that devours all. Kali also means “black”.
The Mahanirvana Tantra says,
“Just as all colours disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in Kali.”
The authoritative classic ‘Devi Mahatyam’ in the Maarkendeya Purana invokes Kali to:
“Please endow this self with knowledge….You who destroy negative thoughts, You who tears apart ignorance, to this self who bows to you…….She with the gloriously resplendent countenance, the destroyer of the great ego, is seated upon the lotus of peace.”
A cosmic power of destruction is thus depicted in this imagery of an awe-inspiring and renewing aggression. The Indian sourcebooks declare that the ferocious Kali is actually the divine mother whom no devotee fears, rather with whom millions of worshipers have a very loving bond.
Insights on Kali…
Kali as we understand from the Indian scriptures is a manifestation of Shakti -the personification of the universal creative energy. In typical Vedantic explanation, Kali is the fiery manifestation of the unmanifest which has in itself all powers – just as the earth shows her power in a volcano. This is further explained by the experiences and insights on Kali by today’s spiritual teachers and scholars.
Spiritual teacher Bob Kindler, in his insightful book ‘Twenty-Four Aspects of Mother Kali’ writes,
“Kali, the boundless ocean of spiritual wisdom is the Divine Mother of the Universe. She manifests countless beings abiding in an infinite set of worlds, seen and unseen, gross and subtle, hidden and exposed. Ultimately, she is realised as the sense of limitless Consciousness, Infinite, indivisible, all pervading and absolute“.
Elizabeth U.Harding in her book ‘Kali: The Black Goddess’ explains
“As the Master of Time, Kali consumes all things. Everyone must yield to her in the end. Kali confronts man with his pitiful finite attachments, devours them, and then spits them back out in a different form in a different time. Thus the wheel turns…”
David Kinsley, the Canadian Professor of religion, in his book ‘The Sword and the Flute — Krsna and Kali’, notes
“the tumultuous, wild, uncontrollable aspects of the divine… are elaborated and pushed to extreme lengths in Kali.”
The Indic scholar David Frawley in his book “Tantric Yoga and the Wisdom Goddesses’ explains
“Kali teaches us that if we give up our attachment to the events of our lives, we gain mastery over time itself… the resurrection of the Divine Self within us.”
The episode of Raktabheeja and Kali…
A despot named Raktabheeja (a personification of toxic-negativity and tyranny) had a boon that every drop of his spilt blood would clone him. So in the battle with Goddess Durga, every time he gets killed he multiplies. Kali is summoned out of an impulse by Goddess Durga appears and devours him to deactivate his boon. About the slaying of Raktabheeja, the Devi Mahatmyam says gives out the hidden meaning of this episode thus
To you who slew (vadhe) the seed of desire – Raktabheeja, Oh Goddess, destroyer (vinashini) of the demons of passion and anger (chanda and munda) Grant us your form (rupam), Grant us victory (jayam), Grant us glory (yash), remove all hostility (disho jahi)
Symbolically for those in the path of knowledge and meditation, Raktabheeja is the untiring multiplicity of desires. To the seeker, who develops the ability to decode the suggestive language of the devouring of Raktabheeja, understands that the Kali symbolism stresses a radical self effort to achieve peace. Indian spirituality uses such imagery and symbolism to present negative qualities as demons and annihilates their imagined egos. The contemplative seeker is also asked to to the same.
Hence,
‘There must be a deep, determined, adamantine resolve, and a fight royal within, as sanguine as Kali’s ferocious sword dripping with blood; and unless the seeker of truth is ready to wear about his neck the skull-mala of these murdered false values there can be no peace or order within’,
as the world renowned Vedanta Teacher Swami Chinmayananda puts it. Kali is ultimately the antidote to the false values that create chaos.
Explosive: psychiatric diagnosis, Surveillance State linked
By Jon Rappoport
Pay close attention to this one. It’s the future coming at you like a strong wind.
First, a bit of background. As my readers know, I’ve assembled conclusive proof that psychiatric diagnosis of mental disorders is a fraud. It’s pseudoscience. There are no defining lab tests. No definitive blood, saliva, hair, brain, genetic tests.
Instead, committees of psychiatrists meet and discuss arbitrary clusters of behaviors, group them and label them with “mental-disorder” names.
But diehards insist that one of the earliest and oldest disorders, schizophrenia, is the exception. That one is solid. That one isn’t pseudoscience. That one is the “gold standard.”
Wrong.
As fiercebiotech.com reports, “…Diagnosing schizophrenia relies on subjective methods…There is no single test for schizophrenia, so diagnosis typically involves observing symptoms and ruling out other potential causes for them…”
Want more? Fiercebiotch: “And while scientists have observed differences in brain scans of healthy people and those with schizophrenia…these are not currently used to diagnose the neurological disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).” Not used because the brain scans aren’t precise or definitive.
Same old, same old. Committees of psychiatrists “observe symptoms” (behaviors) and invent rules for diagnosis of schizophrenia.
As usual, the public is the last to know.
Now, there is a new project afoot that aims to change the non-objective diagnosis, using MRI images of the brain. IBM and the University of Alberta are working on it:
Fiercebiotech: “The team used machine learning to create a model that identifies schizophrenia based on connections in the brain, IBM said. The fMRI data was taken from different sites, using different machines, but the algorithm could differentiate between the patients with schizophrenia and without 74% of the time.”
No one is popping champagne corks. This was a small pilot study using 95 volunteers. Typically, these projects die out when larger studies are done, because the results aren’t specific enough.
That’s why NO brain tests, for ANY so-called mental disorder, are labeled definitive in the psychiatric bible, the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
However, the computer boys and medical pros keep trying—and here is where the Surveillance State enters the scene in an ugly way.
Fiercebiotech: “Mindstrong Health, cofounded by former NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health, a federal agency] chief Tom Insel, is working on technology that analyzes smartphone data to determine a person’s mental state.The company’s tech collects information on which words are used, or a person’s location when using certain apps, for example, and turns them into objective measures of brain function. The company recently raised $14 million…”
“Meanwhile, Boston-based Akili Interactive and Pfizer reported data last year showing that a video game-based diagnostic test could distinguish between people with and without brain amyloidosis, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. And PureTech’s Sonde Health is working on the analysis of ‘vocal biomarkers,’ or changes in nonlinguistic characteristics of a person’s voice, to indicate changes in health.”
To make a long story short: spy on everybody through their cell phones and computers, in order to diagnose them with ANY mental disorder.
The Surveillance State gets a new justification, and the psychiatric establishment gets to play Big Brother, “to protect us all” from mentally ill persons.
This research was kicked into a higher gear by Obama’s Brain Mapping Project, which he announced in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting. The Project is necessary, he claimed, to help prevent such future tragedies.
No, the Project is necessary to expand surveillance of the population, for the sake of control.
Psychiatric diagnosis, and the toxic drugging that follows, IS a form of control.
“Well, we have a red-flagged subject in Boston who’s been using key words in his cell phone calls, and the non-linguistic pauses and voice inflections indicate he’s demonstrating a schizoid pattern. According to outlined procedures, we need to step up surveillance on him, do a deep check on his financials, quietly interview a few of his friends and co-workers, determine his voting record, find out what groups he belongs to. He’s a college professor. He teaches American history. Do we have anything on how he interprets the Founding Fathers, the Constitution…oh look, he seems to be making statements about the need to return to limited central government…we’ve got a live one, guys. Get busy…”
Diagnose the prof with schizoid tendencies and put him on an anti-psychotic drug, which will sink him into a brain haze and slow down his motor reflexes, at minimum.
