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हॉरर धारावाहिक, हमारी जिंदगी और मृत्यु का रहस्य Tv पर चाहे खबरों हो, बहस हो या चैनल पर आने वाले धारावाहिक हो हर तरफ हॉरर ही हॉरर है .. देख कर डर ही लग जाता है… इसलिए सोचा कि थोडी देर मणि से मिल आती हूं… मणि अपने पडोस के घर से अभी लौटी थी. […]

The post हॉरर धारावाहिक, हमारी जिंदगी और मृत्यु का रहस्य appeared first on Monica Gupta.

The Supreme Court’s much-anticipated decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage case, is pretty much what most people expected: a 5-4 decision, with Justice Kennedy -- the swing voter between the Court’s four liberals and four conservatives -- writing a majority opinion that strikes down state prohibitions.

The post Incoherence of Court’s dissenters in same-sex marriage ruling appeared first on OUPblog.

Dreams: A Pathway to the Soul Image via Pertash Koul

Do you feel out of touch with yourself? Do you feel that your culture is shallow and vapid? You are not alone. In 20 Diagnostic Signs That You’re Suffering From “Soul Loss,” Lissa Rankin, M.D., states that this is a very common malady in today’s world. She says not only individuals suffer from this but so do cultures. In my opinion, religions, and in particular, churches can also suffer from it. Whenever we, whether individually or collectively, have lost sight of what animates us, what makes us come alive or what drives us, we suffer from a form of soul loss.

Dreams and holding on to a dream are some keys to recover the soul’s enlivening power in our waking life. Dreams come from the soul itself and speak for the soul and its needs. It is no wonder that so many individuals suffer soul loss when they don’t value their dreams and don’t make an effort to remember them or work with them. Institutions lose soul when they lose sight of the founder’s vision or dream for that organization. This is particularly true of religions and churches which become social clubs or babysitting stations for kids when the ties to a deep spiritual connection have been broken or not promoted among the followers.

Therefore, a remedy for recovering from soul loss is studying about dreams, learning both how to work with them and learning from them:

Individually, this means keeping a dream journal and doing dreamwork on an on-going and consistent basis.

Collectively, this means studying and learning from the dreams and visions of the founders. Institutions can recapture their original dynamism by going back to the basics, to be once again inspired by the founders, learning what defined the organization and why it was started in the first place.

Dreams and visions are all about purposes of soul and how soul presents itself in the world. What is your true dream? In that you will find your true inspiration.

“If you wish to know someone’s heart, look into your own.” Heart Art by Henry Reed, Ph.D.

After doing the Inspired Heart Meditation and the short Memory Divination that followed this is what transpired for me in the Intuitive Heart Soul Reflection Experience which is explained in the previous post at http://wp.me/p45aiq-4J.

My Memory Which Surfaced:

I am in the dental chair in my dentist’s office. My dentist has just finished putting in two new inlays which has been part of a several-years-long effort to gradually replace my 45-year-old worn out gold and silver fillings with new fillings and inlays. It has been a long and drawn out, costly restorative work, but the end result is that all my teeth are now in excellent shape with fillings the exact color of my teeth, making my smile look beautiful and my dental health great. My dentist makes the comment, “Now that you have gotten through all this with good results and no major mishap, it is up to you to keep your teeth in good shape by cleaning them regularly.” I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment for having gone through this long and arduous process. Also, I do get complimented on how great my teeth look—a real blessing at age 66 which few people even today can have or afford! I also realize the importance of what the dentist says about it being up to me to keep my teeth in great shape. The simple but important practices of brushing and flossing are things I need to do every day.

My Reflection on the Memory:

The memory reminded me of my long kundalini clearing process which began about seven years ago and was a real challenge to deal with at all levels, spiritual, psychological and physical, especially during the first several years. The last four years have been challenging at a values level: making choices that reflect the new “real me” despite the fact that I need to take bold risks, especially financial ones, to get where I want to go. Like my dental restoration process, it has been long and arduous but I am now starting to realize some of the kundalini lore benefits such as my good health getting even better while giving me a youthful appearance that belies my age. The major clearing away of the old has been done, as even my dreams have told me, but it is up to me to keep it all clean now: eat healthy food, think positive thoughts, make good choices, brush away any negativity, etc.

Lesson for Me:

Be grateful for the amazing blessing I have undergone. I should be more aware of the simple but important ways of keeping what the Buddhist call the “mirror” clean by brushing away negative thoughts. I need to keep my body healthy by avoiding as much as possible foods and substances that could be harmful or de-energizing. I need to make choices which reflect the integrity of who I am.

Hidden Question: How can I enjoy my life more comfortably, with less effort and more confidence?

My soul’s reflection on this question: By doing the simple daily “polishing of the mirror,” eating right and making what the Hawaiians’ call pono or right choices; I can enjoy life more because it will be easier to stay healthy and happy, without any kind of negativity dragging me down. Removing negativity at the get-go is a lot easier than dealing with it after it has grown from an idea or a bad choice to an embedded feeling or disease in the body. Feeling positive will also promote a greater sense of confidence in what I am doing and where I am going.

Yes, yes I can never resist a good pun. This weekend ... NV SCBWI mentor programme and conference in Virgina City. I have been looking forward to getting here, and it is so much more than I hoped for. First ... the location. Never dreamed I would be out in the Wild West. And Virginia City has more than enough charm and authenticity left. It's a little rough a round the edges, but so much the better. It was worth the 3 plane hop to get here. It was even worth the anti-English abuse from a lady of the 'Southern' persuasion, who informed me on the plane in Los Angeles that 'You will find in THIS country we do things a little differently', (This because I was already in the aisle of the plane disembarking, and hadn't immediately thrown a cloak in front of me so she could join the queue. Not at all sure why she chose to berate me in particular when about 1,000 Americans had already walked past her. Perhaps a grudge from the revolutionary war?)

This is a special weekend, and one I will remember for a long time during the cold winter months to come in Maine. On Friday the group of 30 mentees gathered in an historic old hospital, (now an arts center) and met with our mentors. Great energy ... laughter, sharing, it is totally like coming home. The faculty is wonderful - Harold Underdown, Priscilla Burris, Emma Dryden, Terri Sloat, Emma Hopkins, amongst others.

Such fun to just sit at the big old kitchen table and chat with aspiring and published authors and those with such a knowledge of children's books. For me this feels like a home coming. I have been to several conferences this year, and all have been inspiring. But this is truely like being with family and I know that there will be friendships forged here that will last for a lifetime.

The city wraps you up in it's old charm, and good humor prevails. In between meetings and lectures we have wandered up and down the wooden-sidewalked streets, giggled at the shop window displays, popped into bars that have seen gunfughts and bawdy dancing (but none of that this weekend right!) ambled around the tombstones in the cemetry on the top of a hill, gazed over the ranges of sienna frosted mountains into the aquamarine distance. We have considered our dreams and desires for the future. In the morning the sun shoots up surprised and blazing and pierces the soul. It feels good to be alive and part of something that takes no account of money or position.

Today the conference begins proper with workshops and so forth. Portfolio showcase this afternoon, and tonight an evening of reading and music. After the last few weeks with nose to the grindstone it's nice to relax, be away from the computer and have a real good laugh!

Yesterday I had my first mentor session with Priscilla Burris. Really helpful. She is very intuitive and I feel she really understands were I am at right now. It is so amazing to have someone to talk to about all the niggly questions and fears.  My main question at the moment was whether it is timely for me to seek an agent. With everything that I have going on right now, and after discussion, that's going to be my main coal when I get back to real life. Exciting!!

Also an informative and validating portfolio review with Terri Sloat. I put the pieces I most like in my portfolio and I think it showed. So I felt really validated with her critique and ready to stop worrying about my style amd have more confidence. I am going in the right direction. Just what I needed. Sometimes you just need to hear it from the mouths of others! Also great advice was to give myself a 'retreat' occasionally and create art just for me with no purpose other than exploration and to feed my soul. Thanks to both Priscilla and Terri.

So there we are, it's all about feeding the soul. Otherwise we all whither inside.

Did I tell you my good news? Email last week with the offer of a book to illustrate for a Boston publisher. Whee!! I am excited ab

They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. I went to the opticians today and came back with these pictures of mine:

The yellow dots in the middle are my optic nerves. You can see the dominant colour is green (a little like Johnny Mackintosh), but I have darker, brown areas while Johnny has silver flecks. I love the detail, that these look like the landscapes of strange alien worlds. The strange black lines on the right eye, like death spikes of an Andromedan Star Destroyer, are my overlong eyelashes.

'Punk'd' revived on Ustream (after proving his virtual pull last week with a call — and response — for 1m Twitter followers, Ashton Kutcher relaunches the popular prank show online. Plus, on TV Justin Timberlake's new MTV game show "The... Read the rest of this post

Hi Everyone!

I'm thrilled to be here, sharing some thoughts with you. I'm just back from Boston, where I was honored to received an award for my latest book, Where in the Wild? Camouflaged Creatures Concealed... and Revealed, which I co-authored with my wife, Yael Schy. (Our book was awarded the 2008 SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the category "Children's Science Picture Book."  The award is sponsored by Subaru and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and it was shared between the two authors and photographer Dwight Kuhn.) I was planning to write about the award ceremony and the four books that received the prize in different categories (see www.sbfonline/prizes) but I have decided to save that for another day, 

except to give you a glimpse of our book's cover and to share one detail about the ceremony. The sponsors of the SB&F Prize arranged to have several local children present the awards to the winning authors. The kids told the audience (and the authors) what they liked about the books. Some of them spoke with passion about questions the books had raised in their minds. To these readers, a book that raises interesting questions is a good book indeed. Then the young book reviewers shook our hands while handing us our award plaques.

The opinions and questions of children often fascinate and delight me. I get a lot of great letters from children and I would be hard-pressed to pick a favorite, but one letter that stands out in my mind came from a nine-year old girl who wondered about the accuracy of various statements in my first book. I'm going to remove her name and address to protect her privacy, but we can call her by her first name, Lisa. Here is what she wrote. I apologize that the letters are small and a little hard to read. Lisa's message is summarized in the last two sentences:

In my presentations at schools, I often tell children, "Wondering is wonderful." I find it wonderful that Lisa is wondering about the statements in my book and whether or not they are true. These musings give her "mixed up feelings," which may sound uncomfortable, but she quickly goes on to reassure us that she finds these feelings magical. Her letter ends with a sentence I find truly memorable. To Lisa, the magic in books is wondering whether the "facts" are true or not! 

I wish readers of my books -- or all books -- would wonder about them the way Lisa does. Active minds read critically, questioning what they read as they blend their own experiences, knowledge and observations with the author's raw ingredients. They create a nourishing stew that is more than a bowl of information.

I have been lucky enough to see see many examples of readers extending or challenging statements in my books. The 2rd and 3rd graders of one class doubted that the average height of elementary school students was truly 4'8", as I reported in the backmatter of How Much Is a Million? I used that figure to estimate the height of a million children standing on one another's shoulders. To find out if I was right, this class set about measuring every child in their elementary school. They determined the median, the mode and the mean, and they graphed their data. Finally, they declared that the average height was only 4'4".

But they didn't quit there. They proposed several possible explanations for the discrepancy between what I had written and what they had found. For example, their school has grades from K-5. Maybe my school went up to 6th or 8th grade. If so, that could explain the difference between their answer and mine. Or, they speculated, their school might be shorter than normal... or perhaps mine was taller than normal. Or maybe I just measured a single child with a height of 4'8" and I said, "He's normal!" In a scientific paper, this section of their report would have been the "discussion" section.

I'll give just one other example of children wondering about what they have read.

In If You Made a Million, I wrote that a million dollars would be equal to "a whale's weight in quarters." A group of schoolkids wondered about that. They looked up the weight of a blue whale (60 tons) and calculated that it is the same as the weight of 10 million quarters, or 2.5 million dollars -- not one million dollars as the book said. When they wrote to me about it, I pointed out that the book did not specify a particular species of whale. And in the backmatter, where I explained the math, I showed that the weight of a million dollars in quarters is about 50,000 pounds, which is "the approximate weight of many kinds of whales, including the sperm whale." Then, as if anticipating their objection, I added that blue whales can be much heavier than that. I thought I had covered my bases and I said so (nicely) in a letter to my challengers, but they were not convinced. Here is a copy of the page that they sent back to me, bearing their comment upon the situation:

Don't you love it? I sure do. I told them they would have to take it up with the illustrator, Steven Kellogg. And I even provided his address! 

To me, the point isn't who is right and who is wrong. The point is that they wondered about something they had read in a book ... and they pursued their wonders through research and mathematics. It's magical. As nine year-old Lisa said,  "The magic of books is not knowing whether the facts are true or not."