One Bowl

All the books I’ve read on healthy food have left me wondering what to eat because there is so much contradictory advice – meat/vegetarian, milk/no milk, acid/alkaline, etc. So here is a book that solves this: One Bowl: A Guide to Eating for Body and Spirit.

One Bowl proposes a simple but extraordinarily powerful idea: By adopting a single bowl as the vessel for your meals, you will become more aware of the food you eat, how you eat, and the effects (large and small) of particular foods on your body and your spiritual and physical well-being. Author Don Gerrard guides us through every process of adapting to the one-bowl philosophy of eating, including choosing a bowl, deciding what to fill it with, and being attentive to every stage of eating and digestion. Although not rooted in any single spiritual tradition, One Bowl is certain to resonate with everyone who can appreciate that the Buddha, for example, ate out of one bowl, in silence, whether eating by himself or in a group.

I stayed at Aio Wira health retreat one time and I asked the long time manager who were the healthiest people based on her observations: vegetarians, vegans, frutarians, raw foodists, omnivores etc. She said all groups had very healthy people and it was more about what they didn’t eat than what they did. They did not eat processed or junk food, they did not eat too much, they did not eat when they were not hungry and above all, they listened to their bodies.

The Seeing Tongue

Blind since birth, Marie-Laure Martin had always thought that candle flames were big balls of fire. The 39-year-old woman couldn’t see the flames themselves, but she could sense the candle’s aura of heat.

Last October, she saw a candle flame for the first time. She was stunned by how small it actually was and how it danced. There’s a second marvel here: She saw it all with her tongue.

The tongue, an organ of taste and touch, may seem like an unlikely substitute for the eyes. After all, it’s usually hidden inside the mouth, insensitive to light, and not connected to optic nerves. However, a growing body of research indicates that the tongue may in fact be the second-best place on the body for receiving visual information from the world and transmitting it to the brain.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison are developing this tongue-stimulating system, which translates images detected by a camera into a pattern of electric pulses that trigger touch receptors. The scientists say that volunteers testing the prototype soon lose awareness of on-the-tongue sensations. They then perceive the stimulation as shapes and features in space. Their tongue becomes a surrogate eye.

Earlier research had used the skin as a route for images to reach the nervous system. That people can decode nerve pulses as visual information when they come from sources other than the eyes shows how adaptable, or plastic, the brain is, says Wisconsin neuroscientist and physician Paul Bach-y-Rita, one of the device’s inventors.

“You don’t see with the eyes. You see with the brain,” he contends. An image, once it reaches an eye’s retina, “becomes nerve pulses no different from those from the big toe,” he says. To see, people rely on the brain’s ability to interpret those signals correctly.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010901/bob14.asp

Climate Change is No Problem

Don’t worry about global warming. According to a documentary I just watched (A Crude Awakening), we are fast running out of oil. Soon there will be no more fossil fuels to burn and thus no more air pollution.

The demand for oil is ever increasing, but the production of oil is ever reducing.

Perhaps America (which currently consumes 25% of the Earth’s oil production) will collapse just like the Soviet Union.

Franklin Road

Tonight I went for a walk down Franklin Road with my brothers, Mark and Stephen, and Stephen’s girlfriend Kim. Franklin Road was filled with people because many of the residents have put Christmas lights on their houses.

Ray and Erica’s Wedding

Ray and Erica were married in Panama recently. Erica is from Columbia and Ray is from Christchurch. Congratulations to Ray and his beautiful wife!

Funny Pictures

Tom Cruise v’s Santa

It’s enough to bring you to tears. This week’s New Idea breaks the heart-wrenching news of a Santa ban in the Cruise household.

According to the mag, the notorious eccentric, I mean devout Scientologist, Tom Cruise, has declared his vast compound a Claus-free-zone. It’s a sad state of affairs for 20-month-old Suri Cruise, who has been told that hell will freeze over before any fat geriatric in a red suit stuffs so much as a single Barbie down her chimney.

“Not only will there be no lit tree or expensive wrapped presents to be opened, there’ll be no decorations and cards on the walls or Christmas music piped through the house,” New Idea reports sombrely.

“Instead of playing with a new doll or cuddling a teddy, sources say Suri will have to endure a lecture on why Scientology turns its back on the festive season.”

Officially, the Cruises are cracking down on Christmas because they do not hold to the belief that Christ is the son of God, the mag says. But we are not buying it. That’s far too level-headed a reason for Cruise.

The more likely scenario is that Scrooge, I mean Cruise, has discovered some secret intelligence relating to Mr Claus, obtained from the same agency responsible for locating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which involves his association with various alien warlords who have convinced the old man to allow them to use the North Pole as their HQ on Earth.

In camp Pole the aliens are drugging the reindeer and elves and implanting their brains with microchips instructing them to kill all the kids in the world on Christmas morning.

Suri’s life may be saved but it is small consolation for her heartbreak. “It’s a time of great sadness,” New Idea says. “Katie [Mrs C] has even been told to tell her parents they can’t send gifts to Suri.”

Trust bloody aliens to spoil all the fun.

Funny Interview

In a no-holds-barred interview with the UK Independent, movie star Rupert Everett lets loose on some of Hollywood’s biggest names. Everett, the break out star of 1997’s “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and a great friend of Madonna, insulted everyone from Diane Keaton to Al Pacino. But the Brit, who is gay, had the most venom for George Clooney:

“[George] Clooney thinks that, provided he does films which are politically committed, he’s allowed to do Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13″, he says. “But the Ocean’s movies are a cancer to world culture. They’re destroying us.”

And Clooney the man? “He’s not the brightest spark on the boulevard. He’ll be president one day. Mark my words, if he’s straight, he’ll be president.”

Meditation

This is the seat that I sat in for nine hours a day meditating for the last six weeks. I’m back in Auckland now.