Your Invisible Source
“Having access to that formless realm is truly liberating. It frees you from bondage to form and identification with form. It is life in its undifferentiated state prior to its fragmentation into multiplicity. We may call it the Unmanifested, the invisible Source of all things, the Being within all beings. It is a realm of deep stillness and peace, but also of joy and intense aliveness. Whenever you are present, you become ‘transparent’ to some extent to the light, the pure consciousness that emanates from this Source. You also realize that the light is not separate from who you are but constitutes your very essence.”
–Eckhart Tolle (German-born Author and Spiritual Teacher, 1948-)
Finding Your Inner Treasure
“When the green scum is taken away, immediately the water shines forth pure, taking away thirst and heat, straightway becoming a source of great joy to man.”
–Shankara (a.k.a. Adi Shankaracharya, Indian Sage, Spiritual Teacher and Author of the Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, Dates Uncertain, but c.A.D. 686-718 or 788-821)
Your Personal Essence
“Every being…has its own particular essence crowned by a certain quality, a certain form (common to all) which makes it an integral, rightly adapted, part of the single Whole with which it shares a natural harmony.”
–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (French Jesuit Priest, Mystic, Paleontologist and Author, 1881-1955)
Peace Originates With the Flow
“Peace originates with the flow of things – its heart is like the movement of the wind and waves. The Way is like the veins that circulate blood through our bodies, following the natural flow of the life force. If you are separated in the slightest from that divine essence, you are far off the path.”
–Morihei Ueshiba (Japanese Martial Artist and Founder of Aikido, 1883-1969)
The Law of Correspondences
“The law of correspondences is the foundation of all symbolism and by virtue of it every thing proceeding essentially from a metaphysical principle, which is the source of its reality, translates and expresses this principle in its own way and according to its own level of existence, so that all things are related and joined together in total, universal harmony which is, in its many guises, a reflection of its own fundamental unity.”
–René Guénon (a.k.a. Shaykh `Abd al-Wahid Yahya, French Intellectual, Metaphysician and Writer on the Perennial Philosophy, 1886-1951)
Honey Bees, Blue Tits and Canaries
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”
–Albert Einstein (German-born American Physicist and, in 1921, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1879-1955)
Anyone interested in Integrated Medicine should also be interested in trends that may have a major impact on our health and our potential to grow.
Over the last year the sparrow population of England has been declining, and now there is something new. In recent weeks there have been reports from bird watchers in Southern England that some species of birds have suddenly started become obese. The birds most affected seem to be blue tits. There is no suggestion about why it is happening, or what they are eating. Or whether something else in the environment is changing and causing the problem.
Second, British Government inspectors are investigating reports of unusually high numbers of honeybee deaths. Beekeepers all over Southern England are reporting that their hives have been decimated. This is a serious matter. Not just to the bees, but because bees pollinate fruit trees and other crops, the consequences for British farmers of a collapse in honey bee numbers could be devastating. The total contribution of bees to the British economy has been estimated at somewhere around 2 billion dollars.
No one yet understands the cause of these widespread honey bee colony deaths, and it is not just in the England: unexplained, severe colony losses with bees failing to return from their searches for pollen and nectar in Poland, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal.
But here in the United States the situation is even worse: Beekeepers in 25 US states have lost 50 to 90 per cent of their colonies to a mystery condition being called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) – in which bees suddenly abandon their hives and disappear to die. It is having a major effect on the mobile apiaries (Bee farms) that are transported across the US to
pollinate large-scale crops, such as oranges in Florida or almonds in
California. Some have lost up to 90 per cent of their bees.
The cause of CCD is unknown, but some of the suspects include pesticides, malnutrition, antibiotics, mites and increased solar radiation due to ozone thinning. There has also been a theory that it might have something to do with all those towers that support the cell phone network, or the introduction of genetically modified crops.
In the 1990s, honeybee populations were badly affected by the varroa mite – a parasite that makes colonies more vulnerable to viruses. Some experts believe the recent deaths could be caused by the parasite becoming resistant to drugs used against it.
Like most things in nature, animal populations go through regular cycles: there is a sophisticated mathematics that can be used to describe fluctuations in populations. But when we see several odd things at once, that don’t fit the mathematical models, it is time to ask the question whether the obese blue tits and the disappearance of sparrows and bees are a harbinger of further changes in our environment.
Are the bees and blue tits the “Canaries in the Coal Mine”?
