excerpts

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

John 8:1-11 (NIV)

The Sun Never Says

Even after all this time The sun never says to the earth, “You owe Me.”

Look what happens with A love like that, It lights the Whole Sky.

• Hafiz, from The Gift

Dear Reader,

As practitioners of the six heart virtues, our focus is on the expression of appreciation, compassion, forgiveness, humility, valor, and understanding. Sometimes, though, the outflow is diminished or our attention wanders and we can find ourselves depleted and discouraged, unable to express or radiate the virtues within us with vitality and genuineness.

When you feel a bit drained or dispirited, often it is because you feel that the balance between the inflow of love, appreciation, understanding, and forgiveness does not measure up to your outflow. In other words, what we give out to our family, friends, work associates and strangers, seems to be more in some cases, far more than what we get in return.

This perception can rapidly lead to discouragement; a sense that life is not working or is even unfair and unresponsive to our practice of the six heart virtues. There is a technique called the Neutral Heart that is an excellent method to refresh and balance your energy system especially when the feelings of depletion and discouragement overtake your expression of the heart virtues in your daily life.

Within the energetic heart is a place of neutral feelings; a place where energy-draining perceptions can shift and transform with a gentle nudge. It may seem paradoxical, but neutrality is the pivot of transformation. It is here that you can take the stubborn, concretized energetic densities that have become rooted in your personality, and realign them with the advanced energetics of the six heart virtues.

While these densities are familiar to you, they can operate as obstacles to the new patterns and new energies that are coming to the planet and potentially to each of us individually, especially as practitioners of the six heart virtues. These densities are like plaque to the energetic grid that surrounds you, restricting the flow of intuition and creating a dissonance to the incoming cosmic rays, which makes it harder for you to operate in the state of Oneness and accelerated virtuous cycles that are the hallmark of these new energies.

Between now and 2012 our solar system is undergoing a migratory orbit that will take it within a current of empowering rays or cosmic frequencies that issue from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. It is recommended that you devote a portion of your time to realign the blockages or densities within your energetic body during this time in order to align yourself to these new energies. Doing so will empower you to embody these frequencies and transmit them with greater potency.

The Neutral Heart technique has three steps, which are designed to help you transform the stubborn energetic densities that have concretized in your energetic field and align them to the new energy-flow in which you are learning to live.

Step One: The Smiling Heart

The first step is to center yourself in your heart by imagining that your heart area is smiling. If you imagine it is smiling outward it opens the door of neutrality into which you can bring densities you wish to transform and realign.

It is essential that your heart-smile expresses the genuine quality of the neutral heart, which is contemplative, with deep chords of intuitive knowing and the soft hush of divine love. This is the attitude that you can hold in your heart area. When you settle into this attitude, you are ready for the second step.

Step Two: Invite the Densities Inside

Next you invite these stubborn energetic densities into your neutral heart. For example, suppose you are feeling discouraged, and you have identified its source as feeling unappreciated at work. The feeling of discouragement is only wearing a new face, the true energy of discouragement has been with you all of your life. When you were an infant you were discouraged when your mother went away from you. As a toddler, when you did not get your way. As a child, when you were scolded. As a teenager, when you were put down by your peers. As an adult, when you were unappreciated for your contributions.

This energy signature of discouragement, within your energetic field, is calcified every time you feel it, regardless of what the temporary source may be. Most of us have a strong energetic density around this feeling of discouragement. This is what you invite into the neutral heart, not the temporary disguise that discouragement is wearing today or yesterday, but rather the collective of discouragement that is the foundational energy for this feeling.

Each of the emotions that cause depletion of energy, creativity, intuition, mental acuity, and sense of well being can become calcified to the point that they interfere with your energetic field and its connection to the Oneness we all share. The negative emotions, like anger, envy, depression, chronic anxiety, and hopelessness, are like fundamental chords that we strike in our energetic field every time we feel them, and these chords resonate and activate other negative emotions, which can be our ruin.

Inviting these densities inside our neutral heart requires that we invite the fundamental chords. Here's what I mean. Imagine that anger is a chord that is played with three fingers. Each time you feel anger; these three fingers strike the chord. The chord resonates throughout your energetic field. It finds sympathetic chords that resonate with it and together they form a dissonance within your energetic field.

The fundamental chord is triggered by the three fingers, and what are the three fingers? They are the day-to-day events and experiences that strike the chord. And every time the chord is struck, it is welded tighter to your energetic field and your field becomes a little more rigid and less adaptive to the new energies of the six heart virtues.

Negative emotions, at their fundamental level, are packages of history like balls made out of rubber bands. It is to these “packages” that you extend the invitation, and by inviting them into the neutral heart, you are, in a sense, awakening them to their pointlessness in your present reality. In this step you are not trying to force them to change or remove them, but rather you are allowing them to feel the new perspective and energy field you are assembling.

You are creating a new discernment process with this approach, and this new process is “heard” by all parts of your system, including your energetic densities at their most fundamental level. You are accessing the intuitive guidance of your heart and asking it to realign the energetic blockages or stubborn energies that create the sense of imbalance, discouragement, and depletion that you feel. It is a gentle reminder to these old behaviors and stubborn energies that change is stirring and that they need to be aware of this change and either align to it or let go.

Step Three: Marinate with Conviction

The final step is to let these negative emotions “marinate” in the neutral space of your heart. Imagine these obstinate energies are like rigid knots when they enter your heart, and as they soak in the wisdom of its neutrality, they loosen up and begin to relax as they begin to understand your new plan. They do not magically disappear, but rather as they relax they choose to realign to the energetic grid you are consciously engineering.

What is stubborn and unwanted within you is not something you want to evict like an unwanted tenant or exorcise like a demon; rather it is a part of you that has served you in the past, and once aligned to your new plan, can continue to serve you in the future. Nonetheless, your heart within the wisdom of its neutrality entrains these stubborn energies to its plan and you must feel the certainty of this plan. Step three is focused on this certainty because it is in the crucible of conviction that old energies can realign and entrain to your new energetic grid.

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The six heart virtues are the instruments we use to re-engineer the energy grid upon which we live. The old densities that exist in all of us are based on the history of our belief system and experiential world. In a sense, they are the bridge we crossed over to get to where we are in this very moment, but our learning must be constantly realigning itself to our present comprehension our present learning needs. The Neutral Heart technique helps our historical learning and the behaviors and attitudes that arise from them to have less resonance and therefore cause less dissonance within our energetic field.

The Neutral Heart technique can be used for any set of emotional disturbances or imbalances, and it is ideal as a method of discernment for decision making; regaining your sense of empowerment; rebalancing your energetic field, or rejuvenating your attitudinal buoyancy.

As with any technique, the Neutral Heart is a framework. You can experiment with it, add your own ideas to it, and modify it to your own personality. If you find a better way to perform the steps in the process that helps you dial-in to the core purpose of the technique, then feel free to utilize these adjustments.

The Neutral Heart technique is not a universal remedy for emotional ills. Everyone feels depleted and discouraged from time-to-time. I'm not suggesting that if you practice this technique you will be free of these feelings, but rather if you apply it when you do feel these negative emotions, it will accelerate your movement through them, and you will feel that your energetic system has been refreshed and is able to take on the next challenge of life with greater ease and grace.

You do not need to practice the Neutral Heart technique in private or in a quiet room free of distractions. When you become adept with the technique you can use it at any time and in any place. It only takes a minute or two. Think of it like an energetic body maintenance program, not unlike the grooming you provide your physical body each time you take a shower or brush your teeth.

Your energetic (quantum) body is the connection you have to the universe of Oneness and the creative empowerment of virtuous cycles. Whatever care and maintenance you provide it returns a hundred-fold. It's truly one of your best investments.

From my world to yours,

James

Crutches are tools.

You use them to move forward until you don't need them then you throw them away.

Symbolism is art of making crutches.

Number 15: Burger king foot lettuce. The last thing you'd want in your Burger King burger is someone's foot fungus. But as it turns out, that might be what you get. A 4channer uploaded a photo anonymously to the site showcasing his feet in a plastic bin of lettuce. With the statement: “This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King.” Admittedly, he had shoes on.

But that's even worse.

The post went live at 11:38 PM on July 16, and a mere 20 minutes later, the Burger King in question was alerted to the rogue employee. At least, I hope he's rogue. How did it happen? Well, the BK employee hadn't removed the Exif data from the uploaded photo, which suggested the culprit was somewhere in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. This was at 11:47. Three minutes later at 11:50, the Burger King branch address was posted with wishes of happy unemployment. 5 minutes later, the news station was contacted by another 4channer. And three minutes later, at 11:58, a link was posted: BK's “Tell us about us” online forum. The foot photo, otherwise known as exhibit A, was attached. Cleveland Scene Magazine contacted the BK in question the next day. When questioned, the breakfast shift manager said “Oh, I know who that is. He's getting fired.” Mystery solved, by 4chan. Now we can all go back to eating our fast food in peace.

B.J. Fogg may not be a household name, but Fortune Magazine calls him a “New Guru You Should Know,” and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design. As Forbes Magazine writer Anthony Wing Kosner notes, “No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg.”

UX designers come from many disciplines, including psychology as well as brain and computer sciences. However, the core of some UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities. That’s particularly pernicious when the targets are children. As Fogg is quoted in Kosner’s Forbes article, “Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, these companies have been using computers to influence our behavior.” However, the driving force behind behavior change isn’t computers. “The missing link isn’t the technology, it’s psychology,” says Fogg.

UX researchers not only often follow Fogg’s design model, but some may also share his apparent tendency to overlook the broader implications of persuasive design. They focus on the task at hand, building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line. Less considered can be how the world’s children are affected by thousands of UX designers working simultaneously to pull them onto a multitude of digital devices and products at the expense of real life.

According to B.J. Fogg, the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers. Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.” Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use. Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications urging users to view friends’ pictures, telling them they are missing out while not on the social network, or suggesting that they check — yet again — to see if anyone liked their post or photo.

Fogg’s formula is the blueprint for building multibillion dollar social media and gaming companies. However, moral questions about the impact of turning persuasive techniques on children and teens are not being asked. For example, should the fear of social rejection be used to compel kids to compulsively use social media? Is it okay to lure kids away from school tasks that demand a strong mental effort so they can spend their lives on social networks or playing video games that don’t make them think much at all? And is it okay to incessantly trigger kids to use revenue-producing digital products at the expense of engaging with family and other important real-life activities?