Smells and Bells

I saw maia's Post about campfires and it really made me excited for the summer, because that is what me and my friends do most nights after work just to shoot the shit and have a couple beers. There is something about a fire that just seems very right when you are there with people in your community. On a base level you can definitely say that we get this good feeling because fire had been life for since the begging of people, it is what allowed humans to differentiate themselves from the rest of the animal word in a big way. So on that level you would have to imagine on a neurological level there are definitely senses telling us to stay near fire, and use it. I want to think of it more on a religious spiritual level though. Why do all religions have so much fire involved in their ritual. I first think of it as the religious people using the fire just as a symbol for life, the eternal flame that is always burning. It can give us life, but also cause epic destruction and death. It ...

One of the things i have always found way to funny is the genius marketing ploy done by the candy industry to name them all after fruits. Id say almost 99% of candies really taste nothing like the actual fruit that they are trying to imitate. And we get crazy fruit flavors like blue raspberry, what the hell is a blue raspberry. I think it is sad that we have been so brainwashed that when we want to have something sweet we ingest something that is so bad for us on so many levels. Now i am not going to sit here and say i don't enjoy candy every once in a while i love it. The problem is that there are people who never even try fruit because of their ignorance of just how great good fresh fruit can be. Not only is are fruits the best things we can be eating for our health when they are fresh and grown without all the gmos they are grown with today, they taste better than anything you can imagine. Sad thing is that the way our food industry is set up these days most people never get far...

I have always found it amazing how when my grandma cooks that she never uses measuring cups or anything like that to cook her food it is all done by sight touch and mainly smell. She never messes up a meal even in her older age, and she is never cooking anything simple, and sometimes it is for hundreds of people. It is truly a sight to behold watching her in the kitchen I will never forget watching her cook and i cherish everyday that i still get to enjoy watching her and tasting her perfect food. Now I don't mean to brag when I say my grandmas food is the best but it really is the best indian food around she's a professional and her recipes have been published in her own cook book, so when I say she's the best I mean it. This brings me to the amazing part of her cooking, and what made her cookbook so hard to publish. As i said she never uses any measuring when using the array of spices she uses in her spice box, just some of this and a dash of that. She can tell as thing...

yesterday they had the therapy dogs at school today, and I couldn't help but think about how important dogs are to humans. They bring them in for us just to pet them and relieve our stress, and it certainly seems to help. Many people like to think that dogs need us, when in reality that is far from the truth. Before we genetically modified them to fit our own selfish needs dogs were just fine by themselves, they were just smart enough to notice an easy meal when they can get it. Now that we have been around dogs for so long it is impossible to denied that some people really do need them. As we saw yesterday they are one of the best stress relievers in the whole world. Most people can't go past a dog without recognizing it, and feeling as if they need to pet them. When they do pet them it is rare u don't see someone get a huge smile on their face. I personally know some people need dogs from my experience working in my fathers veterinary hospital. I've seen people morn...

So if u wanted to hear a funny coincidence i got one for you. I walked outside my door just now to go do some work outside, and I chose to go outside barefoot again. Well that didn't work so well, I just spent my last 10 minuets picking glass out of my foot and stoping my foot from bleeding everywhere. See the thing is i probably should have learned my lesson about this a few times now, and it definitely hurts. But i don't think it's enough pain to make me change my ways. Plus if i wasn't forced to wear shoes all the time my feet would probably be tougher and the glass wouldn't go in my foot quite as easy. Unfortunately no shoes no service, and a lot of people find it dirty to walk around barefoot all day. point is it's definitely a really funny coincidence that I made that other post not more than an hour before cutting my foot.

Seeing with our eyes closed. When we did our presentation on the sixth sense we showed the video trying to have us see a ghost. What was interesting about this video to me though is the whole time we had our eyes closed, we were supposed to SEE with our eyes closed how on earth can that possibly work? Apparently it does, not in that particular instance, but there are people who are capable to such tasks, more than us just feeling a possible presence in the room. I am thinking particularly of bling people, who are able to "see" using sonar. I saw a video a few years back about people who can use clicking noises in order to navigate themselves around the world. Some people are able to even paint complex pictures of what rooms look like just using their sonar abilities. This makes me think about how much more we actually see in a particular day. As we've discussed our brains are constantly filtering things out in order for us to get our perception of any particular moment.  ...

On april 24th i got to go visit the buddhist temple in Raynham Ma, and it was quite an experience to say the least. My first impression of the place was that it was absolutely massive, and a lot more flashy than I would have expected from a buddhist temple.  However as I learned it was made in honor of king Rama the 9th and is the largest buddhist temple outside of Thailand. The most interesting part of the experience for me is when we given blessings from the head monk their at the temple. The blessings we got were done with chanting and by splashing us with water.  This was a very unique experience for me first of all because just being hit with the water when my eyes were closed gave me an incredibly vibrant feeling that i cont quite explain. But it truly felt cleansing. I have felt similar experiencing when getting puja in india. I find it very interesting how cleansing water can be, obviously when we use it to clean ourselves. But Mostly in ritual, it really does seem t...

Yesterday was a beautiful day and finally I got to be outside all day. When its nice out i love to walk around barefoot all day and yesterday for the first time this year i was able to do so. It got me thinking though a lot about touch, and the fact that we always have shoes or socks on our feet, especially when we are outside. I wonder if this has effected us in any ways at all. Think about it most animals walk on all fours, and even monkeys use their paws a good deal of the time to walk. Are we denying ourselves the ability to feel the world to its fullest extent by constantly blocking our feet from touching the earth? are we depriving ourself of a more spiritual connection to the world by not allowing our feet to connect with the earth?  This makes me think of how good it feels to have your feet in fresh grass, or in sand, there is definitely something calming about it, and i think we should do it more.