Great Remodeling Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Great Remodeling. Here they are! All 34 of them:

My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth.
Vincent van Gogh (The Letters of Vincent van Gogh)
Rachel read what she chose, reading with the curious literalness of one to whom written sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made of wood, separately of great importance, and possessed of shapes like tables or chairs. In this way she came to conclusions, which had to be remodelled according to the adventures of the day, and were indeed recast as liberally as any one could desire, leaving always a small grain of belief behind them.
Virginia Woolf (The Voyage Out (The Virginia Woolf Library))
The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night's hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell's wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodeled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he know all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances--which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork--were of the right measure.
Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)
Everybody wants to a great bathroom, FairTradeWorks discover fresh bathroom makeover ideas and tips to renovate your bathroom at lowest prices.Now, Get Hassle Free Bathroom Renovation at FairTradeWorks.
shain cruz
Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point–an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a pink overlay when the light is just so, and little cloud shadows slide along its face, blue-gray as evening sets in. Sleeping Bear looks eternal, although it is not; this lake took its present shape no more than two or three thousand years ago, and Sleeping Bear is slowly drifting off to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand, swirling them up one side and dropping them on the other; in a few centuries it will be very different, if indeed it is there at all. Yet if this is a reminder that this part of the earth is still being remodeled it is also a hint that the spirit back of the remodeling may be worth knowing. In the way this shining dune looks west toward the storms and the sunsets there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance. A woman I know says that to look at the Sleeping Bear late in the day is to feel the same emotion that comes when you listen to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and she is entirely right. The message is the same. The only trouble is that you have to compose a planet, or great music, to say it persuasively. Maybe man–some men, anyway–was made in the image of God, after all.
Bruce Catton (Waiting for the Morning Train)
the hippocampus is perhaps the central organ in the brain responsible for processing sensory data and acting as a gateway for inflows. As Kisley et al. note: “The cholinergic innervation of the hippocampus, which is crucial for intact sensory gating, exhibits extensive remodeling during pre- and early postnatal development.”4 It displays a great deal of plasticity in response to incoming sensory flows; the more it works with meaning and the more sensory input it is sensitive to, the more it shifts its neural structure as it sensorally interacts with the world.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
To summarize all of this, we have the following: (1) Archaeologists discovered 7 pits for boats around the Great Pyramid. (2) The longest of which is 44 meters; it is called the solar barque. (3) That boat (hypothetically speaking) needs [230/44]*4 steps to complete one single rotation (which looks like a square around the pyramid). (4) It therefore covers a distance which equals to the pyramid's height if it completes seven full rotations around the pyramid's base. (5) This mimics the application of Kaaba; even though the Kaaba has no dimensional merit for its structure (according to pure orthodox Islamic tradition) but the number seven is dominant and serves as an evidence that Egypt tried to plagiarize Adam's heritage and remodeled its theology accordingly.
Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Mill of Egypt: The Complete Series Fused)
For centuries, Eastern religions have been telling us that it’s our egos that trap us in suffering. In the 5th century, Indian adept Vasubandu wrote, “So long as you grasp at the self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.” These spiritual traditions emphasize meditation, contemplation, altruistic service, and compassion as ways to escape the ego. Our emotions and thoughts become less “sticky” and “I, me, mine” “lose their self-hypnotic power.” That’s how we stop selfing. Once we drop our identification with the ego-self enshrined in the prefrontal cortex and enter Bliss Brain, we make the subject-object shift. We can ask ourselves, “If I’m not my thoughts, and I’m the one thinking those thoughts, then who might I be?” This perspective takes us out of selfing and into the present moment. In the meditative present, we can connect with the great nonlocal field of consciousness. Different traditions have different names for it: the Tao, the Anima Mundi, the Universal Mind, God, the All That Is. We then see our local self as the object. With this view from the mountaintop, we’re able to perceive new possibilities of what we might become, this time from the perspective of oneness with the universe. Free of the drag of the ego, uncoupled from the chatter of the demon, the conditioned personalities we inherited from our history and past experiences no longer confine our sense of self.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
the bourgeoisie wanted to insert something more than just the negative law of “this is not yours” between the worker and the production apparatus he had in his hands. A supplementary code was needed that complements this law and gets it to work: the worker himself had to be moralized. When he is told: “You are only your labor-power and I have paid the market price for it,”‡ and when so much wealth is put in his hands, it is necessary to inject into the relationship between the worker and what he is working on a whole series of obligations and constraints that overlay the law of wages, which is apparently the simple law of the market.§ The wage contract must be accompanied by a coercion that is like its validity clause: the working class must be “regenerated,” “moralized.” Thus the transfer of the penitentiary takes place with one social class applying it to another: it is in this class relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that the condensed and remodeled penitentiary system begins to function; it will be a political instrument of the control and maintenance of relations of production. Fourth, something more is needed for this supplementary code to function effectively and for the delinquent actually to appear as a social enemy: the actual separation of delinquents from non-delinquents within those lower strata practicing illegalism. The great continuous mass of economico-political illegalism, going from common law crime to political revolt, must be broken up and the purely delinquent must be placed on one side, and those free of delinquency, who may be called non-delinquent, on the other. Thus, the bourgeoisie has no great wish to suppress delinquency.18 The main objective of the penal system is breaking this continuum of lower-class illegalism and the organization of a world of delinquency. There are two instruments for this. On the one hand, an ideological instrument: the theory of the delinquent as social enemy. This is no longer someone who struggles against the law, who wishes to evade power, but someone who is at war with every member of society. And the suddenly monstrous face the criminal assumes at the end of the eighteenth century, in literature and in penal theorists, corresponds to this need to break lower-class illegalism
Michel Foucault (On the Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973)
Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time—and has been since—to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur—forming a goodly half of the polite company—would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world—which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother—there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
You can remodel yourself to anything you want to become.
Sunday Adelaja (How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?)
Roof Rite Remodeling is serving the metro Atlanta area with superior new roof installations and high quality customer service. We are one of Atlanta's most experienced interior remodelers and full-exterior home renovator. Roof Rite specializes in roofing, home improvements, roof repairs, kitchen remodeling, siding replacement, bathroom renovations, windows & doors, cabinet installs, painting and decks. Our professionals are here to provide a great customer experience with top workmanships. Roofing contractors that care about you whether the job is small or large. Our remodeling company puts emphasis and attention to detail. Roof Rite construction professionals are ready for your home improvement projects. Our customers would rank us as one of the top roofers in Georgia. We offer our services in Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Roswell, and Duluth GA. As a general contractor we mainly services Gwinnett and Fulton County.
Roofing and Remodeling Company in Georgia
Welcome To ROCHESTER NY Kitchen Remodel. We offer a great service at an affordable price. We are a family owned and operated business that has been serving Rochester and the surrounding area for over 10 years. We use state of the art equipment and provide outstanding service and customer satisfaction. We are committed to 100% customer satisfaction!
ROCHESTER NY Kitchen Remodel
Uh, Mom, do you think in the future, you could let me know when we’re going to have company in the morning?” I asked. She finally looked at me then. Really looked at me. “Was there a problem?” “Only running into someone I didn’t know before I was ready to be presented to the world.” She smiled wryly. “Sorry. Mr. Wynter finished up a project earlier than expected, so he had time this morning to drop by to discuss some of the remodeling I want done. They’re going to start tomorrow.” “They?” My stomach knotted up. “He and his son.” She looked back out the window. “I can’t believe how pristine the snow is.” She wanted to talk snow and I wanted to talk… “So what do you know about his son?” Mom shook her head. “Not a lot. His name is Josh. He goes to school here.” Great. That was so not what I wanted to hear. “Do you know what grade he’s in?” “No, we didn’t really discuss personal things.” She studied me. “Are you sure everything is all right?” “Yeah. Sure.” “He seemed nice.” “He was. I wasn’t.” “That doesn’t sound like you.” “I wasn’t awake yet.” It was a lame excuse. I knew it. Mom knew it. “I’m sure you’ll get a chance to apologize,” she said, moving away from the counter. That’s what worried me. Seeing him again, trying to figure out what to say. I never had a problem figuring out what to say to guys. This was so weird, so unlike me. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it had killed off some brain cells. “I noticed it snowing last night. I guess I need to shovel the snow off the walk.” Mom gave me another wry grin. “No. Josh already did it. See? Nice guy.” Totally nice guy. Maybe too nice. My instincts were sending out some sort of warning. Too bad it was sending it out in a secret code that I couldn’t decipher.
Rachel Hawthorne (Snowed In)
My Home HandyMan is a Calgary based handyman service. We specialize in small and medium-sized jobs that other contractors aren’t interested in. We’ll do anything from changing light bulbs to completely re-modelling your house. We are known for doing quality jobs at a great price—Guaranteed. We stand behind every job that we do.
My Home Handyman
Tell him that I adore the figures by Michelangelo though the legs are undoubtedly too long, the hips and the backsides too large. Tell him that, for me, Millet and Lhermitte are the real artists, for the very reason that they do not paint things as they are, traced in a dry analytical way, but as they - Millet, Lhermitte, Michelangelo - feel them. Tell him that my great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth.
Vincent van Gogh (The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Chinese Edition))
THE PRIORITY THAT TRANSFORMS ALL OTHER PRIORITIES That revolution begins with consciousness. Transform your consciousness, direct your attention wisely, and the transformation of your material circumstances immediately begins. According to most traditions, the time when meditation is most potent is in the morning. The delicious state of Bliss Brain is like a broadcast channel. You can decide to tune your awareness to it anytime. When you make this choice first thing in the morning, when your brain is in high alpha and you’re moving from sleep to wakefulness, you align your experience with the energy of this channel as the first act of your day. This is a powerful statement of intention. You are saying to the universe, “My first priority today is to align with you. I choose to live in synchrony with nature and the cosmos the whole of this day, starting now. Nothing is more important to me than this alignment. I surrender my local mind to the greatness of nonlocal mind, and I open the whole of my existence to love, joy, and peace.” Get this priority straight, and all your other priorities line up behind it. By getting in tune with the universe, you step into synchrony with all of nature. You enter a flow state, your life becomes easier, and the challenges you face are placed in the context of the love, joy, and peace found in Bliss Brain.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
BROADCASTING RESONANCE Anchored in nonlocal consciousness, your local life begins to change. As you resonate with the cycles of nature, as your heart’s coherence conditions the energy space around you, as you vibrate to the signal of love and joy in your consciousness, you attract people and conditions that match your states and traits. Without effort, as your magnificent new signal broadcasts out around you, resonating with the music of the universe, you’ll come into synchrony with people and events that bless and delight you. You’ll discover that you’re not alone. As you tune to the great symphony of life each day, you’ll find that you’re tuned to millions of other people who are likewise attuned. With no effort at all, you’ll discover wonderful new friends and companions wherever you travel. As the light shines from your eyes, it meets the light in the eyes of others. When you’re awake, you naturally enjoy others who are awake. 9.3. Coming into synchrony. LOVING THE SLEEPER Not everyone is awake, and that’s fine. Sometimes your friends and family members are tossing in their sleep, suffering unnecessarily. Their plight touches you. You feel their misery. You would love to see them wake up, and shed those beliefs, thoughts, and habits that drag them down. You can’t force them to do so, no matter how much you love them. Everyone makes their own choice. What you can do for people who are suffering is shine brightly yourself. If they’re ready, they’ll wake up. If they don’t, trust the universe. We each wake up when the time is right. Their time might come later; it’s not up to you. You can share this book and other resources with them. You can share your story as I have shared mine, and perhaps these examples will inspire them. If and when each of us wakes up is our choice. UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL As you live in synchrony with the universe, enjoying the community of other Bliss Brainers, you find new possibilities opening up. You start to unlock potential that’s been trapped inside the suffering, selfing self. Increasingly, you’re not just in Bliss Brain during meditation. You’re in the Awakened Mind state with your eyes open, going about your day. All kinds of possibilities that were previously unavailable to you now become available.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
And a million other distractions. Whenever that happens, I return my attention back to center. It’s like tuning to a radio station. I can easily lose the signal and let the dial wander to a different station, one filled with anxiety and stress. But I know what the bliss station feels like. I know the music it plays and how my body feels when I’m absorbed in it. Because I’ve been to the center so many times, I can usually find that station just a few minutes after I close my eyes. So I tune in there again now. I feel an immediate expansiveness in my consciousness, a sense of connection with the entire universe. I feel a sense of welcome, as though I’ve come home. I’m living at the address in consciousness where perfect well-being is the only reality. As I retune myself to center, another wave of bliss floods through my brain, mind, and body. I feel my consciousness lift out of my normal state, like a balloon rising in the wind, to meet and merge with a consciousness so vast and expansive that it has no end. I know that this is the same intelligence that runs the universe in such perfect order. It has a sense of rightness to it that all the cells in my body respond to. Every cell knows it’s come home, that it’s connected to the universal consciousness with which my mind has merged. The local reality field of my mind and body surrenders to union with the great nonlocal reality field of the universe. There is no room in this consciousness for worry, doubt, or fear. The anxious thoughts with which I began the meditation session are now left far behind me, as the balloon soars high above the world of ordinary local reality. My breath slows and deepens. Every breath is a connection with that great universal consciousness. Every inbreath flows out of that consciousness, while every outbreath flows into that consciousness. A warm feeling of well-being floods my body. Though the cool morning air felt chilly when I began the meditation, my body is now infused with the glow of connection. As I center myself again and again, I notice an intense glistening silver-white vortex of light above my head. I drift up through the portal. I find myself in a level of undifferentiated light. I look down at my mind, and it is flooded with that same white light. I am in Bliss Brain. Everything dissolves into the light. There’s no body, no me, no mind, no universe. Only the light. The light simply is. It has no beginning and no end. It stretches to infinity. It’s all there is; there’s nothing else in this real world of light other than the light. I lose myself in oneness with the light. 2.1. Entering Bliss Brain. There’s a tingling pressure in the center of my forehead where the connection to the light tunnel is strongest. Angelic music echoes in my brain, sound adding itself to light. My
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
My experience in meditation is not unique; it’s common to meditators throughout history. A 14th-century Tibetan mystic, writing about his experience deep in meditation, described it as: . . . a state of bare, transparent awareness; Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootless wisdom; Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without the slightest reference point; Spacious empty clarity, a state wide-open and unconfined; the senses unfettered . . . The mystical experience isn’t the property of Buddhists or Catholics or Taoists or Hindus. It’s the common root of all religions. The great spiritual teachers entered these experiential states, and when they “came back from the mountaintop,” described them to their followers in the idiom of their cultures.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
Feeling of deep and profound peace Certainty that all things will work out for the good Sense of my own need to contribute to others Conviction that love is at the center of everything Sense of joy and laughter An experience of great emotional intensity Great increase in my understanding and knowledge Sense of the unity of everything and my own part in it Sense of new life or living in the world Confidence in my own personal survival Feeling that I couldn’t possibly describe what was happening to me The sense that all the universe is alive The sensation that my personality had been taken over by something much more powerful that I am As we escape the subjective self and rise above our suffering to view our experience objectively, we abandon the limitations of our local minds in the embrace of nonlocal consciousness.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
Feeling of deep and profound peace Certainty that all things will work out for the good Sense of my own need to contribute to others Conviction that love is at the center of everything Sense of joy and laughter An experience of great emotional intensity Great increase in my understanding and knowledge Sense of the unity of everything and my own part in it Sense of new life or living in the world Confidence in my own personal survival Feeling that I couldn’t possibly describe what was happening to me The sense that all the universe is alive The sensation that my personality had been taken over by something much more powerful that I am As we escape the subjective self and rise above our suffering to view our experience objectively, we abandon the limitations of our local minds in the embrace of nonlocal consciousness. Later researchers built on Greeley’s initial findings. They found seven commonalities, including a sense of unity, enlightenment, awe, and bliss. The sensory vividness of the “enlightenment” experience exceeded that of everyday life. In his 1954 classic The Doors of Perception, philosopher Aldous Huxley called this “the sacramental vision of reality.” All mystics have similar experiences, whether they are Hindu sadhus begging as they wander the countryside, Buddhist monks isolating themselves in caves high in the Himalayas, or Christian nuns engaged in contemplative prayer. Harvard University’s first professor of psychology, William James, after his own transcendent experiences, observed in 1902 that “our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” He said that no account of the universe would be complete without accounting for these states.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior. They “felt they had more time available . . . and were less impatient . . . more willing to volunteer their time to help others . . . preferred experiences over material products . . . and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.” A quiet parietal lobe promotes empathy, compassion, relaxation, appreciation, connectedness, and self-esteem.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
If Bliss Brain is so desirable and pleasurable, why is it so fragile? Why can our brains be distracted from happiness by the slightest hint of a thought? Why is the demon’s slightest whisper enough to drag us out of bliss? Why are our brains hardwired for negativity? The answer is simple: That’s how our ancestors survived. Those who were the most responsive to danger lived. If your ancestor’s brain had a genetic mutation that heard the rustle of the tiger in the grass a nanosecond earlier, he started running a moment sooner. Genes that paid close attention to threats conferred an enormous survival advantage, as I illustrate in my book The Genie in Your Genes. People who were less responsive to potential threats died, and their genes were lost to the gene pool. Those who reacted to the smallest hint of danger survived, passing their paranoid genes to the next generation. In contrast, happiness provided little or no survival value. Fail to notice a beautiful sunset, ignore the sound of children singing, walk by a rose bush without smelling the blooms? Nothing bad happens. But miss the rustle of the tiger? That’s fatal. So thousands of generations of evolution have honed our ability to respond to even the most minuscule whisper of the remotest possibility of threat, and abandon happiness at the drop of a hat. Mother Nature cares greatly about your survival—and not at all about your happiness. That’s why the DMN defaults to worry, instead of to bliss. Mentally rehearsing future stuff that might just possibly hurt us, past stuff that definitely hurt us, and present stuff that might signal danger—all these are signs of a brain that is successfully practicing the strategies that ensured our ancestors’ survival. This isn’t bad. It’s just excessive for the safe modern world in which we live. If you’re at a construction site where a skyscraper is being built, you wear a hard hat and safety goggles. Such an outfit is entirely appropriate for that context. As attire for tea with the queen? Not so much. Although the DMN interrupts meditation, it plays a useful role in our lives. It is active when we are thinking about others, considering our safety, remembering the past, and planning for the future. It is also active in self-oriented and social tasks, including memorizing the experiences we collect during task-oriented activities. The path of your inner mystic will elevate you to enlightenment. The goal of your inner demon is to keep you safe. You can’t get enlightened if you’ve been eaten by the tiger.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
Tackling difficult problems requires holding many ideas at once, and not being rigidly attached to any of them, as we saw in Chapter 3. Some may even be mutually exclusive. When we gain distance from our local minds in meditation, this opens up perceptual space. People in flow states can consider many options. Kotler notes that this “knocks out the filters we normally apply to incoming information” and loosens up our identification with a single fixed reality. This greatly expands the range of possibilities our minds can juggle, opening up our creativity and productivity. Meditation produces a high-performance brain, able to solve wicked problems, as we’ll discover in Chapter 8. Take a deep breath, and think for a moment about your life. Imagine being 500% more able to solve knotty problems. Picture yourself being 490% better at acquiring new skills and eight times better at conceptual tasks. That’s mental superpower! What might your health, your work, your love life, and your finances look like if you had that superpower? Probably a whole lot better than they do now.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
The top 1% of the world’s wealthy control more than 50% of all wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. In the United States, the 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. The number of millionaires in the world has tripled in the decades since 2000. And the amount of the world’s wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the global population? Under 3%. These inequalities are more than numbers. They are fuel for high emotions and mass social change. They have led to the rise of populist political movements and propelled a variety of unlikely candidates into power. The difference between the top 1% and all the rest gets our attention. So much for money. Let’s now consider something infinitely more valuable: happiness. Specifically, the happiness found in Bliss Brain. Here we also find huge inequalities. Historically, Bliss Brainers are a tiny percentage of the population. Few even attempt the journey to enlightenment, and of those who seek Nirvana, even fewer attain it. When a rare spiritual genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, reached that pinnacle, the event was so significant that it changed the entire course of world history. WITHDRAWING FROM EVERYDAY LIFE The lives of the great spiritual masters of history inspired others to follow their example. But like the saints, these aspirants could not reach enlightenment in the everyday world, with its demons and distractions. So for thousands of years, those committed to the spiritual path went to special places such as hermitages, wilderness retreats, monasteries, and convents. They exiled themselves from ordinary society in order to pursue nonordinary states of consciousness. They couldn’t achieve Bliss Brain amid the hubbub of society, so they turned their backs on it. The rest of society stayed in ordinary consciousness, driven by the desires and demons of the Default Mode Network (DMN). In my book Mind to Matter, I call this survival orientation “Caveman Brain.” It’s hard to find Bliss Brain when surrounded by Caveman Brain, and pulling yourself out of that environment and into a sacred space is usually a prerequisite for enlightenment. What percentage of the population undertook the journey? No census of enlightenment seekers is possible, but one proxy is the number entering religious seclusion. In the early 1300s, England had a monastic population of about 22,000, with another 10,000 in other religious occupations.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
CHAPTER 4 THE ONE PERCENT The top 1% of the world’s wealthy control more than 50% of all wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. In the United States, the 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. The number of millionaires in the world has tripled in the decades since 2000. And the amount of the world’s wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the global population? Under 3%. These inequalities are more than numbers. They are fuel for high emotions and mass social change. They have led to the rise of populist political movements and propelled a variety of unlikely candidates into power. The difference between the top 1% and all the rest gets our attention. So much for money. Let’s now consider something infinitely more valuable: happiness. Specifically, the happiness found in Bliss Brain. Here we also find huge inequalities. Historically, Bliss Brainers are a tiny percentage of the population. Few even attempt the journey to enlightenment, and of those who seek Nirvana, even fewer attain it. When a rare spiritual genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, reached that pinnacle, the event was so significant that it changed the entire course of world history. WITHDRAWING FROM EVERYDAY LIFE The lives of the great spiritual masters of history inspired others to follow their example. But like the saints, these aspirants could not reach enlightenment in the everyday world, with its demons and distractions. So for thousands of years, those committed to the spiritual path went to special places such as hermitages, wilderness retreats, monasteries, and convents. They exiled themselves from ordinary society in order to pursue nonordinary states of consciousness. They couldn’t achieve Bliss Brain amid the hubbub of society, so they turned their backs on it. The rest of society stayed in ordinary consciousness, driven by the desires and demons of the Default Mode Network (DMN). In my book Mind to Matter, I call this survival orientation “Caveman Brain.” It’s hard to find Bliss Brain when surrounded by Caveman Brain, and pulling yourself out of that environment and into a sacred space is usually a prerequisite for enlightenment. What percentage of the population undertook the journey? No census of enlightenment seekers is possible, but one proxy is the number entering religious seclusion. In the early 1300s, England had a monastic population of about 22,000, with another 10,000 in other religious occupations.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
That meant my body was becoming convinced by my mind. It was no longer repeating the story that death is imminent unless we’re on full alert at 12:45. The same thing happened the following night. That’s a positive change! It’s important to love our bodies. So often when they don’t behave, by getting sick or developing patterns like insomnia, we want the problems to go away. We ignore them, deny them, suppress them, get mad at them, or medicate them. If instead we can strive to understand our bodies and accept them just the way they are, we open the door to healing. Carl Rogers, the great client-centered therapist of the 20th century, called this the paradox of growth: We need to love ourselves just the way we are, with all our problems and limitations. When we do that, we start to change. When your body knows it will be listened to, it can speak quietly. A little rumble here. A slight pain there. We hear the message and take care of its needs. When I teach live workshops, I often work with people who’ve been ignoring or even hating their bodies for many years. They aren’t attuned to the body’s messages. They aren’t picking up those subtle signals. When its soft communications are ignored, the body has to speak more loudly. The small pain might become arthritis. If ignored, it might become a full-fledged autoimmune disorder. So many people are at war with their bodies, trying to mute their messages with medication or addictive substances. Growth begins with self-love. Healing begins with self-acceptance, even when circumstances seem unacceptable. Practicing self-love lowers our stress levels and opens our awareness to the potential of our lives. Through that window of possibility, the love, peace, and beauty of the universe can shine.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
Sitting in your favorite position and closing your eyes, you tiptoe over the threshold of experience and into the mystery. You drop into the heart of the universe. You’re there. The cascade of SONDANoBe floods your brain. You’re hooked, drawn up into the light. When you emerge from meditation, you’re more compassionate, emotionally balanced, mentally coherent, effective, kind, creative, healthy, and productive. The effects ripple through the whole community around you. At the center of that circle is a great-feeling you. The Gregs of this world go for heroin, weed, or alcohol to make themselves feel good. That’s simply because they don’t realize that a far better drug is available. SONDANoBe is what addicts are really craving. They want to feel good, but they’re looking for exogenous chemicals to meet their needs. They don’t understand that what they’re searching for is right inside their own brains. The only reason those drugs feel good to the Gregs of this world is that they’re facsimiles of the substances that their own brains produce. Bliss Brain is a formula, just like the World’s Best Cocktail. It’s the World’s Best High, and it’s just as addictive. The brain that experiences SONDANoBe once can never go back to its old state. By remodeling neural tissue, SONDANoBe consolidates learning and hardwires bliss. While street drugs shrink and damage vital brain regions, SONDANoBe does the opposite. It grows your brain. It expands the brain regions that regulate your emotions, synthesize great ideas, stimulate your creativity, acquire new skills, heal your body, extend your longevity, improve your memory, and boost your happiness. The next chapter shows how a brain bathed in the chemicals of ecstasy starts to change its fundamental structure, as the software of mind becomes the hardware of brain.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
Are you looking for Home Builders in Chattanooga Custom Home Builder Chattanooga Serving Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain & Surrounding Areas We love to build homes for people. Our approach to each job is as unique as the individual. We truly are a custom home builder Chattanooga and you will never get an A, B or C selection from us. Our homes are as unique as our clients. Our goal in every project is to produce a timeless and personal expression of our client's dreams. We hope to enhance the lives of those who inhabit each home we build. You can structure and make, and manufacture the most superb spot on the planet. In any case, it takes individuals to make the fantasy a reality. This home is drywall complete, now ready for tile, hardwoods, and trim! Cole Construction is building the largest home under construction in Chattanooga! We are excited to be starting interior finishes as the selections vary greatly from shiplap to reclaimed weathered barn wood, rough sawn beams, tile, stone and more. Follow along with us as we detail this beautifully crafted home! Are you following our 5 months build? 100% completely custom, no A, B, or C options. We are aiming to compete with the cookie-cutter residential build timelines while executing completely unique new projects every time. This means new plans, new land, and unknown materials. Chattanooga’s premier custom home builder Chattanooga- Cole Construction has been a leading the way since 2009, specializing in new builds and home remodels." For more info, Please visit our website.
Warren Cole
Since my wife ran off with a lesbian basketball coach, in October of 2007, I had to raise my three youngest children as a cowboy single dad. This has made it impossible for me to travel and run my hotel jobs. I hired Jim Rossi to run my out of town work for me and Jim had done a great job for the first year. As time had progressed, Jims drinking and greed seemed to be taking a toll on what was in October 2007, the largest hotel remodeling business in the Midwest. If I’m able to get the Palace up and running, I can shut down the hotel road work and personally run The Palace. Making the Grand Palace as successful as my hotel business was when I ran all the hotel renovations road work myself.
Paul M. Dunn (The Grand Palace Battleground Branson Missouri)
The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodyguards and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends. Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them. In a TV interview a few years ago, the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions. But as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.’ Something of the same anatomizing fascination can be seen in the present pieces, which also show, I hope, the reductive drive of the scientific text as it moves on its collision course with the most obsessive pornography. What seems so strange is that these neutral accounts of operating procedures taken from a textbook of plastic surgery can be radically transformed by the simple substitution of the anonymous ‘patient’ with the name of a public figure, as if the literature and conduct of science constitute a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.
J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)