Old Age Home - A Safe Place for Old People

Increasing number of old people is a growing issue in today's world. Due to the nuclear family concept, the number of younger people decreases and the number of old people increases. As a result, the number of people who need to take care old people decreases. Nowadays a family has maximum one or two children and they may be working at different places. So they cannot take care their old parents as they are not available at family. It is not wise to leave their jobs in current recession period to care old people. So who will take care these old people? Is there anyone who can care them like their children? These are two important questions we need to answer.

Old people need more care and love. In current world it is impossible for their children to care their parents much. It may result in depression. In addition to this, old people need others help to go out and full fill their personal needs. In the absence of their children, it will be very difficult for them to maintain their daily routine. In addition to this they may feel loneliness by sitting idle at their home. It is because of their lack of mobility. It affect their relationships with others and things get worst. Their past friends may be moved or passed away and they are not able to generate more friends due to their physical incapability. So in old age every one needs more attention and care.

Old age home concepts started as a solution to the problems of old people. The traditional elderly care is now transferred from family members to organizations. Many organizations are in elder care service with enough facilities to care old people. Now many people enjoy this facility to make sure their parents are in right hands and well protected. In old age homes elderly people have the chances to maintain their relationships with similar aged people.

Restorative Care

Restorative care is given to an elderly person after they have had an accident or need to work muscle groups they do not usually use. More than physical therapy, restorative care is used for emotional well being as well. The goal is to not only help a person recover from a broken bone or pulled muscle, but also to get the person to socialize and want to be part of a group. Many times, elderly people will not want to participate in social activities because they are not able to move around easily or because they are afraid to make new friends.

Walking with an elderly person up and down the hallway for ten or fifteen minutes a day is usually enough for them to stretch muscles and interact with others. For many older people, sitting all day becomes a natural part of life. But this can have negative side effects including muscle atrophy, weight gain, and depression. Simply walking with an elderly person is enough to spark brain activity and keep the muscles alert.

For those who cannot walk, restorative care is given by pushing a person who is in a wheelchair around the facility so that they are visit friends or meet new people. Many times exercises are given which includes moving the leg muscles up and down so that the muscles remain active. The attention paid to residents is very special to them. They will hopefully want to take part in activities and will look forward to spending a few minutes each day exercising and visiting with other residents.

Why Should You Keep A Diary?

Do you ever feel like your life is whizzing by you to little consequence? Do you ever feel like you can't even remember what you did last weekend let alone last year? Do you every worry that your life is moving along - and that nobody, not even you, is really noticing?

I picture myself at the end of my life, living at an assisted living home or with one of my yet-to-be-born adult children, and long after the talking heads and soap operas on television have lost their allure, I picture myself in the emptiness of those moments. What I would most like to remember and reflect on in those hours - in that final twilight of my life - is how much fun I had, who mattered to me and why. I want to remember all the things I did and places I went - I want to feel that my life mattered.

Enter the diary or journal - a great way to keep track of your life now at the midsummer of your life. It's a terrific way to record the little occasions, the anniversaries, the weddings and the kids' birthday parties.

Diaries are a terrific way to record today the things that will matter to you tomorrow as you look back and reflect on the special moments that have been part of your unique and special life.

Diaries and journals across the ages have been used for various purposes from simply recording what happened over the course of a day to a form of therapy where people write their deeper reflections on their spirituality, marriage, family relationships, job aspirations and so on.

Personal journals or diaries have played important roles in human existence from the earliest days of recorded history. The earliest record of personal diaries date back over two thousand years - the pillowbooks of Japanese court ladies and Asian travel journals are some of the earliest surviving examples of this kind of writing. The 9th century scholar Li Ao, for example, kept a diary of his journey through southern China. In more modern times, Lewis and Clark kept a detailed account of their travels across the United States and Charles Darwin's "Beagle Diary" recounts his travels over the course of 5 years around the world. And of course, I would be remiss not to mention the bestselling and ever-popular "Diary of Anne Frank" - the diary of a young Jewish girl whose family was forced to hide from the Nazis in the attic of an Amsterdam apartment.

These important works and many others like them have taught us a great deal about the experiences and struggles of a variety of people across the ages but a personal diary doesn't - and shouldn't - speak to a future generation or an entire society. The greatest value a diary can offer is what it offers to us personally. For more the most important legacy we leave behind is the legacy we leave for ourselves.

Over the months and years, the endless parade of activities, events, parties, conversations, vacations, and news both national and personal can quickly become overwhelming. As such, we really need one place where we can keep track of it all and simultaneously process how we feel about it at the same time. We all need a place to record the significant - and mundane - happenings in our life so that when we look back in one, ten or fifty years, in the haze of our later years, we will have some comfort in knowing that it all did really happen. And that it was amazing.

A Reconciliation - The Bible and Holistic Psychotherapy

The Source of All Good Healing

Psychology and fundamentalism at best have been polite opponents. In recent history, say the last 50 years, this opposition has become vigorous and often less than polite. Many churches, such as Calvary, completely eschew all mental health practitioners (whether social workers, psychiatrists or counselors) and staunchly maintain that all healing comes directly from God or prayer and that all you need in order to develop and maintain a robust mental health may be found in Scripture or a prayer session.

This rejection of psychotherapy may have been a reaction to the "I'm okay, you're okay" generation of therapists who did very little for most people except to allay the anxieties of narcissists and sociopaths by telling them "if it feels good, it is good." In the eyes of both Orthodox Jews and Christians, the field of humanistic psychology took the whole program of self-improvement one giant step too far, putting man in the center of the universe, particularly his own.

Their objections were not wrong. And I say this as a holistic psychotherapist with almost 25 years of experience in the field.

I have seen far too many well-meaning therapists do little more for their patients than make them feel better about being sick. They are loath to challenge or confront negative behavior or unhealthy thinking because they fear being seen as judgmental. As a result of their tentative relationships with the truth, they fail in their relationships with their patients. They do not see what needs to be healed so the patient is left unhealed. This is truly a disservice to the patient because what it ultimately does is feed the pathology and starve the essence of the person.

I think all good and true healing flows from the same Source which means that there can be an alliance-and an important one-between the Biblical and Mental Health communities. But only if we have an understanding of our terms and are actually seeking the same results.

What is Healthy? What is Unhealthy?

According to Samuel Hahnemann, M.D., after whom dozens of medical colleges around the world have been named, physical health presents with a very clear picture which is eternally derived from a healthy spiritual state.

"In the healthy human state, the spirit-like life force (autocracy) that enlivens the material organism as dynamis, governs without restriction and keeps all parts of the organism in admirable, harmonious, vital operation, as regards both feelings and functions, so that our indwelling, rational spirit can freely avail itself of this living, healthy instrument for the higher purposes of our existence."

He goes on:

"The material organism, thought of without life force, is capable of no sensibility, no activity, no self-preservation. It derives all sensibility and produces its life functions solely by means of the immaterial wesen (the life principle, the life force) that enlivens the material organism in health and in disease."

Therefore...health depends on a healthy wesen or life force or spirit. It is a process that proceeds from above down, from the inside out. This is also the philosophical underpinning of a proper holistic psychotherapy and the pivot point of all Scripture on the subject of good health.

Biblical Healing

Let us start with basics. What has the Bible been saying about health (whether mental, emotional or physical) for the past several thousand years? The following is a small sample of references:

"Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear and respect the Lord and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones." Proverbs, 3:7-8

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick; but when hopes are realized at last, there is life and joy." Proverbs, 13:12

"Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. And are you not worth much more than they?" Matthew, 6:26

"This is what the Lord says: 'Your wound is incurable, your injury is beyond healing. There is no one to plead your cause, no remedy for your sore, no healing for you. All your allies have forgotten you; they care nothing for you.... But I will restore you to health and heal your wounds...'" Jeremiah, 30:12-14, 17

"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid." John, 14:27

Even in this cursory perusal, it's easy to see that the biblical concepts of health are the same as those taught to graduate students in counseling: Hope, faith and an acceptance of reality, an understanding that we are not the center of the universe, peace of heart (a release of worry), generosity, service, humility, joy, and love. I am sure there is more, but I believe this is a good core to start with.

Clinical Healing

I have worked with individuals, families, couples and adolescents for almost 25 years. They have been both mandated to see me under duress and crawled in desperate for help. I have seen a wide enough range of people to ask a few pointed questions and hopefully seen enough recovery and healing to offer a couple of observations.

The first question: What are the things that lead to poor health, whether physical or mental/emotional?

In my experience, they are the same things the Bible warns us about over and over and over: Pride, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, Envy, Lust and Wrath.

Almost every single patient I have ever had was doing battle with pride in some way. Some were engaged in battle with nearly all of them at once. And I admit openly that almost every pain I have ever suffered myself had something to do with at least one of those sins or as some people call them, "character defects."

One woman whom we shall call Sonia came to my office about 15 years ago. She was addicted to pain killers. She had some physical symptoms, but they were not the reason for the prescription or the solution for the pain she needed to heal. She complained about her mother, even though she had not spoken to her in many years and was enormously indignant (a combination of pride and wrath) about how she had been wronged. As she spoke of all the things her mother had done to her, she clenched her jaw and her hands.

When later in treatment I offered up the possibility that her continued rage (wrath) at what had been done to her those many years ago was actually only hurting her and that perhaps it was time for her to accept the fact that her mother had failed her and begin to consider forgiveness, she became outraged (pride). In her mind, accepting the reality of her mother's inadequacies (without making them her own) was unthinkable. Her mother had to be shown who was right and who was wrong. Sonia equated acceptance with excuse and could not, would not see it any other way. The end result? She stayed in pain and addicted to pain killers. Her pride would have it no other way. When the choice between being "right" or happy was presented to her, she chose to be right.

The second and perhaps more pertinent question: How do we treat these problems in the modern world? What is a psychotherapist to do if the purpose is to facilitate true healing and he or she is not a priest, pastor, or rabbi? We are not preachers. Our job is slightly different and the people who come to us are not always ready for (or necessarily interested in) an extreme spiritual make-over. People who may not be ready to go to a church or synagogue may need to someone objective who will just listen to them and hear their suffering. Many people need to talk before they can learn to pray. And the therapeutic relationship-if it is handled properly-can be the training ground for having other relationships, including one with God.

There is a difference between preaching and manifesting. It is good to inspire others with great thoughts about God. It is also good to manifest God's love through presence and compassion. There are times that a patient may be too angry at God to hear someone say, "God loves you," but not too angry to have God's love quietly demonstrated through patience, understanding, and honest integrity. And this may be the first time he or she has ever experienced it.

In my experience, what we have to do to be healing in psychotherapy is not all that different than scripture prescribes even if it is presented and packaged a little differently.

After working with patients for these 20+ years, I have broken it into five segments or stages, all of which I believe are biblically supported although none of these are dependent on one particular faith or point of view. All the seven deadly sins (or character defects) may be individually or collectively addressed at any point along these five stages. These stages are only clinical observations, not rules and shouldn't be approached legalistically.

I: Hope

All recovery-whether from drugs, depravity, or desperate fear-begins with a promise of hope, that there is "another way" to be, to live, to feel, to love and be loved. This hope is offered in different ways by different people, but I have found it best received by my patients in the form of personal and true stories of redemption (mine or others), of living examples of other people's recoveries, of their emotional, mental and spiritual salvations.

When we see the pain of the other person's struggles, feel the roller coaster of his unfolding temptations and challenges, identify with her frustrations and longings and then witness her release and deliverance...we can begin to hope. If it happened for them, perhaps it can happen for me...? All a good psychotherapist needs is one good perhaps and the work can at least get started.

Most of my initial work with patients is an infusion of hope. Some are so habituated to sadness, to pain, to loss, to deprivation, that they simply cannot imagine anything but the way they've always been. "But you are here in my office, so there must be some small ember still burning," I tell them. But many need quite a bit of tender care-a very careful fanning-for that flame to begin to burn again. So I pace them. (Pacing (*1) is a clinical term meaning that I am walking with the patient rather than running in front of him or dragging behind him.)

II: Surrender

Surrender is a word that gives moderns the shudders. What we are told to want for ourselves is power and control. We are carefully and consistently taught in graduate school to nurture in our patients their "self-empowerment" and imbue in them a solid sense of control. This can be important and necessary in very measured doses, particularly when a person has been abused and even the most personal controls have been denied them. But it can go too far and be endowed too freely.

Even some evangelists have done that with "prosperity gospel." In that philosophy you can tell where a person is spiritually by what he owns and how well his career is doing. Ask and ye shall receive, they remind us. But instead of its focus on the spiritual it has become a modern, media spin on the Doctrine of the Elect and Predestination: How do we know you have found God's favor? Because you're successful. How do you get to be successful? By God's favor. So, the goal is to acquire wealth, prestige, and power. Somewhere along the line even the ministers have forgotten, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

In the beginning of my own rebirth into sanity, the idea of surrender terrified me. I know from my own experience that surrender is at the very least an uncomfortable concept for most people. And some are not just tentative about it, they are panic-stricken, which is only reasonable since they have not yet come to trust that the universe is purposeful, creative, and meaningful. (For me that is God and, again, my surrender only came when I came to believe that God actually loved me.) For many of those just coming into therapy, the universe has been a hurtful, oft-meaningless, chaotic, unfair place. We cannot surrender to the abyss, to a vast darkness, to a deist blob that couldn't care less whether we existed or not, to a universe without love or meaning. I certainly can't imagine doing that. And I didn't. I couldn't. So, I present it in the way it was successfully presented to me-with great care and in small steps: Initial surrender means to accept reality. That's it. Not to like it or excuse it. Just to accept it as real.

Accepting reality is something people can consider even when reality is harsh, even when they are scared, hurt, or confused. Accepting reality is the underpinning of sanity. Denial is the basis for all insanity. When surrender is presented initially in this way, it becomes manageable.

So, what can they surrender to? I keep it simple. They can surrender to the fact that their lives are not working, or the unhappiness they live with at home, or the way they feel and make other people feel when they're drinking. They surrender to the facts first.

Why? We surrender first to reality because as we've been told: "The truth shall set you free.

Surrender in this way, taken in these gentle, baby steps, is what gets us strong enough to make the fuller, sweeter surrender, to take the leap into the love-both human and Divine-that is, as C.S. Lewis and Peter Kreeft call it, our heart's deepest longing.

III: Honesty

If truth is what we need, then honesty is what we must give. Why isn't my life working? Why is my spouse always angry? Why am I so easily offended? Why do I have trouble stepping out of the house? What do I feel? What do I need? What do I stumble over myself again and again and again?

This is a coming-clean, a venting, an admission of wrong-doing, a confession of mistakes and a map of wrong turns. It is what Alcoholics Anonymous has called a Fourth Step, what the Church calls a moral reckoning or examination of conscience, and the Jews a "tikun" or correcting. And it is absolutely necessary, whether one is an alcoholic or not, whether one is in a 12-step program or not, whether one belongs to a religion or not.

It is a brave step, this one. It takes courage to say "I really loused up that relationship," or "I was a coward when it came to my career," or "I was as abusive as she said I was."

Interestingly, it is at this point that the need for hope returns. It is very painful to look at all we've done wrong and terribly hard to imagine that it can ever be any different. In my work, this is a good time to remind someone of what is possible, returning again to the stories-the true stories-of redemption and the view from the top of the mountain.

Some ways back I knew a young woman (details disguised to protect identity) who had been seen by numerous therapists. She'd been diagnosed with PTSD, Bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder. She'd been medicated, treated with a dozen techniques, restrained for cutting, and finally written off as hopeless.

We spoke about her life, current and past. After about a month of piecing together her history, we landed on the issue of an abortion she'd had when she was 15. She had been so afraid: the boy who had father the child had abandoned her, her parents were busy with work and a very high-level social life, and she had no older or wiser siblings to guide her. Her life with the family's church had been cut off earlier because everyone had been simply too busy to bother with it. (She had been raised and baptized Catholic.) Ultimately her support and direction came from the media and from the information available at school.

I asked her about the abortion and how she felt about it. She answered with honest curiosity, "Why are you asking?"

"Because it's a big event, especially for a little girl," I said.

"No one else seemed to think so."

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone else seemed to think it was no big deal. You just go and do it."

"Did you see it as no big deal?" I asked.

She started to cry.

It took some time and many tears, but she was neither borderline, bipolar, nor hopeless. She was guilt-ridden, not by my accounting but her own. In an effort to be what her surrounding culture believed she was supposed to be, she had to lie about how she felt, what she wanted, and what she really needed. Telling the truth was her first step out of the pain and the pathology.

This accountability is a way of owning our mistakes so we can move forward to owning our achievements. If everything is everyone else's fault, then we are the victims of happenstance and there truly is no hope. People are awfully skittish about being accountable because they have been shamed and blamed to excess, but this is not about shame. This is the yellow brick road to freedom.

IV: Service

What does it take to make it better once we know what we've been doing wrong?

This is actually a more controversial question than one may imagine because according to many people in the field one must always focus on the positive. And by in large, they make a convincing point. Noticing what works often works. For some patients, I am the first one in their entire lives to say, "I see you. I see what is good in you. Let us look further to see what else you have that is good and can get better."

However, I think going fully in either direction-focusing only on the positive or focusing only on all the wrongdoing-is a mistake. There must be a balance, an acknowledgment of both aspects or inclinations of our natures. As the first story of Adam and Eve illustrates, we are not wholly good or wholly evil. We have capacities in either direction and to become good or to continue to be good, it takes a conscious effort and awareness of both those inclinations. We must nurture the one and starve the other.

How is that best done?

• First and foremost, through service and good works, even when we don't feel like it. There's nothing better for someone full of self-pity and hypochondria than to get out and volunteer. I had one young woman volunteer at an old age home. I had another at a soup kitchen. It doesn't matter how we give, but in order to grow, we must start somewhere.


• Through humility even when we feel boastful or proud or angry or indignant. We must do for others, like say we are sorry, even when we want to dig in our heels.


• Through patience and generosity even when we feel deprived and impatient.

Service to others is seen by many as a healing of a higher order, which is why it comes later in the 12-Steps of A.A.-we can only offer what we have learned or gained. "If you want to keep it [recovery], give it away," recovering addicts and alcoholics are told. The meaning there is clear-you must first have it to give it.

There is another side to this, though. Some of us call it "Act as if" and contend we only learn what we teach and only get what we give away. I think it works both ways and it is up to a good clinical team (meaning the patient and the therapist) to determine when and how to go about this. I am no Solomon. What I know, though, is that service-at any time it seems possible and right-is beneficial to the mind, the heart, the body, and the soul.

V: Forgiveness

Without forgiveness, we are stuck in the wrongdoing and don't get to move forward into our new lives. My feeling is that pride is usually the blockage on this. We won't forgive because we're right, damn it! And we want to be vindicated even more than we want to be free or happy.

Forgiveness never denies the wrongdoing (Romans 3:10,23). But it forgives the doer, who clearly knows no better or is too sick to ever see the difference.

Forgiveness doesn't mean we need to open our door to thieves. It doesn't ask us to be fools. The irony is that the less one forgives, the more hardhearted, vengeful and angry one becomes and therefore the less one is able to see the truth of any kind. Hatred does not only reject joy, it rejects truth and can't recognize a real threat when it's there.

Forgiveness is often the last step in this small ladder to emotional and spiritual freedom.

As Corrie Ten Boom, a Christian woman who survived a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust, said, "Forgiveness is to set a prisoner free, and to realize the prisoner was you."

One of the best examples of forgiveness is the story of Joseph and his brothers, who had collectively betrayed him and left him to die because of their own envy and greed. He crawled to survive, then was enslaved and thrown in prison. Many years passed. Still, when his brothers came to Egypt many years later, he not only forgave them after he saw that they had changed (and showed true repentance), he rejoiced in them.

Suffering: Is it Necessary?

There is one last issue I'd like to briefly address and that is the notion of suffering. I haven't allotted it its own stage of recovery because it involves all of them.

The worst part of modern psychotherapy is that it does not allow for the existence of suffering. It insists on happiness as a human "right" and promotes its open-throttled pursuit along with everyone else in mass media and entertainment. This is the parting of ways between what is ordinary psychotherapy (and even those preaching the Prosperity Gospel I mentioned earlier who believe they can petition God for whatever worldly goods or emotional rewards they desire, quoting "ask and ye shall receive" as if it offered proof of God as the Great Pez Dispenser) and a holistic psychotherapy that is based in traditional Biblical values.

Part of the problem is that the modern age of psychotherapists see happiness-which is defined as the attainment of some desired goal-as the end goal of healing.

Orthodox Jews and Christians have a different take on this subject. While it is seen as normal to want to be happy, to be healthy, even to have material comfort it is not seen as the purpose of our existence. It is not even seen as terribly important. It is considered far more critical to be good than to get what you [think you] want. Happy is fine. Goodness and purposefulness and joy-they are far better and reach in far deeper.

What is even more troubling to me is that I see people wanting the rewards of happiness without even the minimum of self-sacrifice. Americans particularly believe it is their "right." We have been told so repeatedly by the media and psychologists, and even a whole generation of "hip" preachers. Do what makes you happy. It's all that counts.

The philosophical pinnacle of this thinking is in New Age theology, where sickness, injury and tragedies are defined as self-inflicted manifestations of poor core programming. In that epistemology, Mystery is abolished and we are responsible for everything that happens to us and around us. If abundant health and wealth and beauty are our birthrights, then suffering means we have either done something wrong to deserve it or written bad scripts for our lives.

Given this mental and emotional mulch we are planted in, it is no wonder that we are so worried about our bodies, our bank accounts, and our images. We fret about face lifts more than we do about whether we have a neighbor that needs our help because she has been bed-ridden for a week.

Denying suffering has a price that is incomprehensibly enormous. Because when we deny suffering (which as Buddha said is inevitable in this life), we must also deny death. And to deny death, we must deny life.

Why should it be included in psychotherapy, though? Shouldn't we want to banish it forever? Why shouldn't we want to avoid it altogether? What's in it for us, anyway?

This is the answer I came up with: By being present for suffering, we become present for the whole of life, for the wholeness of another person. And the reward is nothing less than the ability to love-and be loved-fully. We suffer because we love and want to continue loving. It is a poignant irony, I think. In our attempt to avoid suffering, we cut ourselves off from the one thing that can mitigate it: each other.

Cluster Housing Environmentally Friendly, Socially Supportive

For the past fifty years, towns and cities in the state of New Hampshire have worked to impose zoning restrictions on lands within their borders, in large part to protect against overdevelopment. Some towns require building lots of anywhere from a half-acre to five acres for a detached single-family home. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of this regulation has been that real estate developers have subdivided large parcels of land into smaller plots and leveled forested areas, filled in swamps, and generally degraded the ecosystem of the property in favor of rows of houses, all with their own little front and back yards.

Cluster housing, which is beginning to be considered in New Hampshire, uses a different approach. If a town requires that a particular piece of land have a two-acre minimum for building sites, a traditional developer would subdivide the land into ten units and build a home on each unit. A cluster development, however, involves concentrating those same ten houses in a single area on perhaps four acres of the land, leaving 16 acres relatively undeveloped, thus preserving natural wildlife habitats and forested areas that can be enjoyed by the residents.

The Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, a new housing development project in Peterborough, New Hampshire, takes the cluster housing concept one step further. Twenty-nine small single-family homes will be augmented by shared areas on the 113-acre site, which will also include a small working organic farm. The shared facilities offer places where the community's residents can interact. This co-housing concept, which originated in Denmark, offers community support while utilizing the land in an environmentally sustainable way.

The Peterborough project is a great idea, one that will hopefully spread throughout the state. The down side is that the housing units are expensive; according to a June 19, 2006, article in the Keene Sentinel, prices start at $278,000 for an 849-square-foot home and extend to $580,000 for a 1334-square-foot home - very reasonable considering the amenities, but far beyond the reach of many working-class families.

Perhaps as the Nubanusit project succeeds other communities will learn from it and take the cluster and cooperative housing concepts into account when developing new residential projects. Combining low- and middle-income housing, both for families and single people, with elder and assisted living facilities makes sense, for instance, providing a community atmosphere for those who often find themselves isolated because of financial, age-, or health-related circumstances. Ownership of single-family homes could be augmented with small rental units or even a cluster of low-cost single-occupancy rooms with common cooking and living facilities, with the rent going to pay the expenses of the rental units themselves and possibly helping pay general expenses for the community.

Cluster and cooperative housing can potentially offer solutions to a lot of problems. Thoughtful cluster housing development may actually allow New Hampshire to sustain its recent growth while meeting the needs of all its citizens and preserving the natural environment that draws people to the state in the first place.

The Big Questions: If God Isn't God, Then Who Or What Is God?

If God isn't really God, who is God? Well, IMHO, God isn't God, since God is a flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial (ET)!

There are two variations to that possibility.

Here's one of those variations. What if God were in reality a very 'flesh-and-blood' extraterrestrial computer programmer, a computer programmer who has written a software package called, say "Planet Earth"? Maybe it's a computer or interactive video game - maybe a homework assignment for a smart extraterrestrial student.

Anyway, computer software easily explains all the Biblical miracles (virgin births; the resurrection, etc.); or anomalies (like where did all the rain come from vis-?-vis the Biblical Flood, and where did all that water eventually go; how did Jonah survive inside a large fish, etc.) or inconsistencies (like Cain's wife; the discrepancies between Biblical time and geological time). Regarding the Biblical flood, no humans actually died; no animals suffered and drowned, and so on, because the humans and animals were never real to start with, just as you and I aren't real, just part of - for want of a better analogy - a computer game simulation.

Let's suppose, for argument's sake that in the real physical Universe, there exists some tens of thousands of extraterrestrial civilizations which have evolved technology our equal or better (even more advanced). The odds are high that most would have invented computers - hardware and software. Any one civilization, such as our own, have (to date) produced multi-thousands of computer programs, many of which simulate life forms - think of the hundreds, indeed thousands of computer/video games. No doubt these programs will grow, over time, ever more complex and lifelike.

If one advanced civilization produces multi-thousands of individual computer programs that simulate an actual, or imagined, reality, what are the odds that we aren't one of those thousands vis-?-vis being that advanced civilization that actually exists? How could you know if you were real, or imaginary? I maintain there's probably no obvious way of you knowing.

Even if there's only a relatively few actual extraterrestrial civilizations, but untold number of created false realities - what odds we are one of the real ones and not one of the imaginary/simulated many?

Is the idea really so way out in left field that there's not a snowball's chance in hell that it could be right? We have to look to advances in our own terrestrial computing power to determine that. Computer generated simulations are already realistic enough that they are used to train astronauts, pilots and MDs and other humans in professional activities where mistakes in training, if done in real situations, could be disastrous. Our cinema industry has already produced computer generated virtual reality films, bypassing real actors and real scenery. It's entirely possible (legal issues aside) to bring back in a sense dead actors to star again in new productions. We've all been awed by computer generated special effects in films that are so realistic that if you didn't actually know better, you'd swear were real.

Walk into any DVD store and you'll find thousands of video (computer) games and/or simulations that you can run on your PC. Most have 'humans' in various role-playing guises that are software generated and which you interact with. The reality factor is increasing by leaps and bounds. At what point will the software become complex enough that these simulated 'beings' are advanced enough to have self awareness? What happens when the software programming these virtual 'humans' becomes equal to the software (brains) that program us? What happens when the computer software complexity exceeds that of the human brain? Is this far-fetched? Methinks not. Now just replace our virtual 'humans' with ourselves, and maybe, just maybe, we're the virtual reality in somebody (something) else's actual reality.

If we, Planet Earth, and our observable universe are nothing but a simulation, that can explain (or at least rationally account for) any and all anomalies (miracles?) that you care to bring up. Software (be it of the wet-ware [brains] or of the computer variety) can create any sort of simulated reality - it doesn't even have to be logical or explainable. Here are just a few Biblical examples off the top of my head.

Biblical One: Explain the parting of the Red Sea in the Bible! It's easy to do in the movies, on a computer, or in your head.

Biblical Two: Then there's this Biblical bit about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still (at least that's the way I recall it). That's either a tall tale or a myth or the result of a simulation. Whatever, it can't be a physical reality.

Biblical Three: In the Bible we have this tale of the multiplying of loaves and fishes out of virtually nothing. Again, you can imagine it, but that's about it. Likewise with any sort of miracle it's easy to visualize the event, but infinitely harder to explain it. But, as in the case of loaves and fishes, it's easy to write a software package that can do this multiplication feat as a simulation exercise.

Biblical Four: Heaven and Hell can be created as easily as any other sort of place, complete with either fluffy white clouds and pearly white gates; harps and haloes, or devils and pitchforks; fire and brimstone!

Biblical Five: If someone (or something) is calling the simulation shots, you could obviously and easily be resurrected or reincarnated or just allowed to cease to be (that is, deleted from the program).

From the examples above, I conclude that it almost seems as if someone (something) is ultimately responsible for aspects of the Biblical part of the Universe, but he / she / it / they didn't quite think things through sufficiently. Methinks an all knowing, all powerful supernatural God type being wouldn't have stuffed things up. If the Bible isn't a stuffed up piece of literary work, I don't know what is because it was either authored by flawed human beings and thus has nothing to do with the infallible word of God, or it was created stuffed up it's because the creator was a flawed flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial entity, and hardly an all-knowing and all-powerful God. Our flawed creator created a simulated Universe, including all the Biblical baggage we have to try to reconcile with a perfect creator God (who, in my version, doesn't exist).

Could there be an afterlife without a God? I suggest that if there is an afterlife, there has to be a natural as opposed to a supernatural mechanism, and that we'd be hard pressed to come up with one. While I can't think of a completely natural explanation to account for any plausible transition from life to afterlife, I can think of a non-supernatural one, albeit it's not totally natural. Just as it's within the realm of possibility that we exist as software in a computer program called "Planet Earth", so too might there be another computer program with associated software called "The Spirit World" or "The Abode of the Afterlife". When you reach your termination as a simulated living being in "Planet Earth", you get resurrected in "The Spirit World". Of course in that sense there's still a god, but a 'god' who just happens to be an extraterrestrial computer programmer, who could be flesh and blood, or maybe an artificial intelligence in its own right. Either way, it's not 100% natural, but it's certainly not supernatural. Of course for all I know there maybe other software programs with names such as "Hell" and "Heaven" or "Valhalla" or maybe dozens, hundreds even thousands of others we've never even conceived or heard of. I mean the virtual beings in one of our terrestrial computer or video games wouldn't be aware that there was thousands of other computer or video games in existence with dozens more being produced and brought out each and every month.

It all makes a sort of sense albeit in a weird or strange sort of sci-fi way. I mean, to paraphrase a rather famous observation, "the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine". If there's anyone who can give a definitive proof that we're not a creation of someone's (something's) virtual reality (computer simulation) then I'd like to hear it so I can cross the scenario off my list of things to have to worry about!

That specific aside, if there is any historical evidence for a god, gods or The God, then that evidence could just as easily be equally interpreted as evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence(s), whose purpose(s) or objective(s) may not be all that benign.

So my second and more likely possible answers to 'if God isn't God, then who is God?' are summed up by the well known phrase 'ancient astronauts'. God is, or was, an extraterrestrial, but not in this case the creator of a simulated universe. Rather, a being within a really real universe. Recall (the late) Arthur C. Clarke's third law, "any sufficiently advance technology is indistinguishable from magic", or in this context, an advanced extraterrestrial technology and alien being welding same is indistinguishable from the supernatural or a supernatural God.

If the above argument is valid, then I conclude that it's easy to explore the nooks and crannies of our galaxy, and seeing that we have no place to run and hide, that then we indeed have been discovered by extraterrestrials. Since one or more extraterrestrial technological civilizations have already done their boldly going exploring thing, it stands to reason that at various times in our geological and historical past we would have received visitors from the stars. If one or more such occurrences happened in our historical past, there might be some suggestive evidence of same; and thus the concept of the 'ancient astronaut' has come to pass.

Erich Von Daniken, including those of a similar point of view who came before and after him, collectively had the germ of a good idea, but he, and they, IMHO got rather carried away with the concept and started seeing ancient extraterrestrial astronauts behind every pyramid and megalith in existence. Now I don't believe for a moment that aliens, or humans assisted by aliens, built the pyramids or the statues at Easter Island or any other type of archaeological monument. Evidence suggestive of ancient astronauts will probably best be found in myths and legends, including the myths and legends central to our major religions, perhaps in advanced human knowledge of scientific concepts out of sync with that particular culture so hosting that knowledge, or in art works, or other archaeological works that are suggestive of an awareness of sky beings.

Firstly, nearly all cultures have stories and pictograms about or of sky beings, including the Australian aboriginals and American Indians. Myths and legends surrounding, say, the Greek / Roman / Norse gods can be interpreted in an ancient astronaut context (ditto for other religious beings or gods), or perhaps the Biblical 'Wheel of Ezekiel' is suggestive. While the etchings on the Plain of Nazca were certainly not runways, for flying saucers, they can easily be interpreted as mammoth human constructions designed to be viewed by sky beings. Why go to the trouble if sky beings weren't really around to appreciate your efforts?

Then there's a whole pot-full of mythological creatures - the Centaur, unicorns, the Sphinx, the Griffin, Pegasus, the Minotaur, mermaids, dragons, etc. which might be non-humanoid extraterrestrial life forms. Or, more realistically, perhaps in light of the UFO abduction and Roswell greys, are the myths and legends shared by many cultures dealing with elves, dwarfs, gnomes, the fairy-folk, the wee-people, and other smallish beings that aren't quite human. It strikes me as more logical that these 'wee folk' actually exist, and that's why all the references to, and belief in, them, exist. That is, they are really real vis-?-vis references to, and belief in them, because there is some psychological, sociological or cultural necessity to invent imaginary beings, calling it mythology (as opposed to literary fiction), or perhaps calling it religion.

In conclusion, the 'ancient astronaut' field is a subject ripe for detailed academic study, and the concept of the 'ancient astronaut' shouldn't be dismissed by scholars are readily as it has been. Unfortunately, it's unlikely any academic would put his or her career on the line by pursuing such a controversial, 'pseudo-scientific, topic because of the 'giggle' factor - Pity that.

Successfully Approaching Marketing Professionals - How to Market a New Consumer Product or Idea

Many inventors and entrepreneurs are so excited about their concept that they neglect to learn, or practice proper business etiquette when soliciting marketing or investment assistance. This can ruin their opportunity, or at the least set prospects back sharply. The following are some simple rules to follow when making initial contact or presentation of your exciting new product or marketing concept.

Never Utilize Mindless Platitudes
My Company has been developing consumer products and marketing consulting for almost four decades. There is no bigger turn-off than to just meet a potential new client and hear something like: "I am going to put the Mattel Toy Company out of business with this new plush toy (or board game, or articulated doll, etc.)".

Another golden oldie cold shower is, "This is a multi-billion dollar opportunity".

We see this tried every day and it is a disqualifier.

Be realistic, humble and factual about the opportunity you present. Professional marketers and venture capitalists will appreciate and are more likely to reward the sober tone.

Always Tell the Truth, Never Embellish
The marketplace of ideas and new product ideas is huge, uber-competitive and non-forgiving. If you stretch the truth, embellish facts, or omit important facts that will affect your proposition two things will surely occur, they always do: You will be discovered. You will be dismissed.

Be absolutely clear and truthful about everything you represent as factual. I cannot tell you how many times we have met entrepreneurs with great product ideas and we dismiss them out of hand because of obvious methane in their story. It is far better to detail a competitive disadvantage your product might possess and offer a solution to overcoming the handicap than to gloss over and try to mitigate the flaw.

You Get One Chance to Make a Great First Impression!
I interview entrepreneurs for a living. I have certain screening questions that I use to separate the wheat from the chafe. Every venture capital firm, investment banker, consumer product marketing professional and licensing agent I know utilizes the same verbal qualifiers, or disqualifiers depending on how they are answered. The goal of your first contact is to get a face to face meeting with decision makers.

Do not try to close a deal on the first call. Do not hard or over-sell. Never attempt any type of sale or screening technique on an e-mail if you wish to be considered serious. Present yourself as a professional person who has a project that is well-vetted, serious, offers unique product features and benefits that will benefit consumers and retailers and that you would be appreciative of a meeting that should be of interest to all parties.

Do Not Detail Your Perceived Value of Your Project
Why? Because you do not have a clue what the REAL value of your project is. I have never read a non-professionally written business plan that offered an inkling of an iota of the true value, if any, ensconced in the project. You may have a wonderful idea. But without Execution, Cost of Goods balance, a customized Marketing Strategy that employ's unique Branding concepts and Consumer Product Features and Benefits that can easily be conveyed to consumers in a cluttered marketplace even the best product will not succeed.

Have a Great Elevator Speech
You will need to be able to excite decision makers in a brief few minutes of time. An initial call is always cold. This is the time to plant seeds of interest, not reap a harvest from a virgin field. The same principles that apply to the Executive Summary section of your Business Plan should apply to the Elevator Speech. Respect the time of the decision maker. Interest him (or her) with product features and benefits, a very brief summary of your due diligence and be prepared to answer questions, hopefully, if you have excited a level of interest from you target these will come. Remember, your goal should be to meet.

Ask Questions
After an introduction and a short, tight Elevator Speech, you will be asked questions if there is any level of interest from your target. Assuming you have done your homework and pass the screening exam you will have the opportunity to ask questions of your target. Do not get too detailed and specific. Save that for the time when negotiations commence, and that is still a long way off.

These are only a few of the most egregious flaws and shortcomings we see every day as our Marketing Consulting firm reviews projects. We get very interested in unique products. We only get truly excited when the entrepreneur is as good, or better, than the product they present.

by: Geoff Ficke

Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Raise Strong Emotions

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are emotive subjects. Our fears about death and dying and the laws, both religious and state, which control the legality of death, are powerful influences on all of us.

Staying alive is one of the strongest drives any animal, humans included, has. At the same time, those who are carnivorous in their diet expect animals to die to feed them. This is part of the food chain and is echoed by the animals who hunt for food as opposed to non carnivorous animals.

Society does not expect anyone to kill another person; yet we execute people we deem to have committed certain crimes. We send our children to fight wars for our countries, knowing they can be killed or maimed. These concepts are accepted are normal. Man is an aggressive creature and very muddled in how it thinks.

The danger for most of us with euthanasia and assisted suicide is that someone will die because they are rich, in the way, getting old and being a nuisance or some other idea. Yet when our pets become distressed with disease and old age, after consulting a vet, we give them the mercy of releasing them with a quiet injection and call it putting the animal to sleep. The grief is no less but we feel it is a kind thing to do.

When humans suffer from dreadful diseases like the end of some cancers, motor neuron disease and diseases which take away the independence and dignity of the individual, those who have nothing to do with the person dictate they should live and suffer. They seem to be devoid of imagination of what it is like to suffer unbearable pain or suffocate slowly because the body cannot get air.

Suicide is frowned upon as a cowardly act. For someone who is desperately disfigured it is seen as the only answer. The only person who can know what it is like, is the individual who is suffering. Their family and friends can have some idea because they see the results every day but they cannot know. When you love someone you do not want them to struggle with survival which is traumatic.

Living wills have been designed so that in the event of an unexpected disaster, the wishes of the person are known. Who knows what is happening inside the head of someone who has been in a coma for years. Who knows what quality of life they have. Why is it so terrible to allow someone to die in peace.

In some countries these elements have been considered and thought through. There are legal controls and nothing is done without the criteria being covered. A person cannot just be disposed of as a whim. Surely this is a humane way to treat people who have gone as far as they can. For the religious, dying means getting the reward they have worked for during their lifetime, a positive thing surely.

There is a strong case for euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Feng Shui Tips to De-Clutter and Downsize

One of the highlights of my summer 'vacation' was to downsize!!! Many of my real estate clients are downsizing in order to, for example: 1) hang up the lawnmower and spend less time on yard maintenance, 2) move into a smaller home, town home, or condo with a master bedroom on the main level - for stair-free living, or 3) move to some type of assisted care facility - for an easier, less-stressed lifestyle.

For a number of different reasons, I decided to move from my approx. 1650 sq. ft. home into a 1-BDR apartment! Wow - for sure, this would be an "extreme makeover" - not to mention an "extreme exercise" in downsizing and de-cluttering! However, moving into a new space became a perfect opportunity for me to employ Feng Shui guidelines for de-cluttering.

Here are 7 questions I asked myself - to help de-clutter and downsize in to my new, much smaller digs! And to acknowledge the source of these 'Seven "Clear the Way" Questions,' they are listed on p. 21 in the book written by Terah Kathryn Collins, The Western Guide to Feng Shui - Room by Room. For all the items that I was about to move (or get rid of), I asked:

1 - Do I love it?

2 - Do I need it?

3 - Does it reflect who I am and who I'm becoming?

4 - Does it act as an energy-boosting affirmation for me?

5 - What positive and/or negative thoughts, memories, or emotions do I associate with it?

6 - Does it need to be fixed or repaired, and am I willing to do so now?

7 - If it's time to let it go, am I going to sell, lend, or give it away, and when?

The reality of the situation was that I had to be moved in by August 1st - so I had a specific deadline I had to meet. This was a good thing, of course - because now I was forced to face all of that stuff - in my closets, drawers, attic, and, garage.... boxes of paper, items of clothing I had not worn in years, multiple sets of dishes, old pieces of furniture that I will paint "someday," etc.

My good friend and professional organizer, Katrina Solomon, has a favorite definition of clutter that I have adopted: clutter is postponed decisions and delayed action. And all of the clutter that I had accumulated over the years had become invisible - until now!

One of the reasons I embraced the challenge of moving to a much smaller space was because - like so many of us today - I had begun to feel very overwhelmed and stressed with trying to keep up with a variety of personal and professional obligations and commitments. And I knew intuitively that when I began the process of simplifying and organizing that the net effect would be a feeling of being more in control, less stressed, more inspired - and there would be more time and energy for new projects and creative initiatives. Well, it has all worked out beautifully! I have new-found energy, excitement - and truly feel re-energized and rejuvenated.

Alternative Cellular Energy Pigments: A Unifying Concept for Energy Medicine

Summary

Complex intracellular inclusions were identified in brain cells of patients with non-inflammatory stealth virus encephalopathy. The cells showed extensive disruption of mitochondria leading to the suggestion that the inclusions were providing an alternative (non-mitochondria) source of cellular energy. Pigmented intracellular inclusions and extra-cellular materials were similarly identified in stealth virus cultures.

A characteristic feature of these cultures is the progressive lessening of the cytopathic (cell damaging) effect that coincides with, and is dependent upon, the accumulation of these pigmented materials. Tissue culture and direct patient derived materials exhibit various qualities consistent with their functioning as energy transducers. Specifically, they are composed of conglomerates of finer particles that can display fluorescent, electrostatic, sound resonating and variable magnetic activities. Individual particles contain various combinations of different minerals. They can act as both electron donors and electron acceptors in redox reactions and can also generate gas bubbles from water.

The viability of cells in cultures containing alternative cellular energy pigments (ACE-pigments) can be influenced by exposure to external electromagnetic, magnetic and sound frequencies that have no discernable effects on normal cell cultures. Enhanced cell growth and survival occurs upon exposure to relatively low intensities, while cell destruction occurs at higher intensity external energy exposure. Various natural products show ACE-pigment like activities, including a capacity of protecting cell cultures from the cytopathic effect of stealth viruses. These products are suitable for double blind clinical studies.

Introduction

Plants and certain bacteria derive energy in the form of sunlight to covalently link hydrogen and carbon atoms to form carbohydrates. This photosynthetic process is mediated by chlorophyll molecules that can specifically absorb photons corresponding to the blue and red components of sunlight. The photons elevate the energy levels of particular electrons within the chlorophyll molecules that can then be used in an electron donating (reducing) reaction between carbon dioxide and water to yield carbohydrates, such as glucose.

Electrons can subsequently be withdrawn from carbohydrates in the form of chemical energy for synthesis of other types of life sustaining organic molecules and for the generation heat. Protons typically accompany electrons in electron donating (reduction) and electron capturing (oxidation) reactions. The term oxidation is used since oxygen plays a major role as an electron acceptor to form water.

Chlorophyll utilizes only a minor fraction of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Not only does this seem rather inefficient but the question can also be asked what was the energy used to synthesize the original chlorophyll molecules. Energy could conceivably be derived from other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and/or from other less well understood forms of energy.

Viruses can cause cell damage by various mechanisms including simple competition for the metabolic resources available to the cell. I have defined a grouping of cytopathic (cell damaging) viruses, termed stealth viruses, that fail to evoke an immune mediated inflammatory reaction (please refer to http://www.s3support.com for a complete list of publications). The best characterized stealth virus originated from the cytomegalovirus of African green monkeys. The virus was isolated from a patient with the chronic fatigue syndrome, with a similar but not identical virus isolated from a patient with a manic depressive, bi-polar illness.

The virus induces a severe acute disease in cats followed by considerable clinical recovery in spite on an absent inflammatory response. Similarly, the cytopathic effect in tissue culture tends to abate over time, especially in infrequently fed cultures. The mechanism of this striking recovery process is attributed to materials that accumulate in tissue culture supernatants since reactivation occurs upon replacing the tissue culture medium with fresh medium. Reactivation can be prevented by including supernatant materials from repaired cultures into the re-feeding medium.

Unusual intracellular and extra-cellular materials were previously noted in the brains of stealth virus inoculated cats and in the brain biopsies of various patients with stealth virus encephalopathy. They were periodic acid Schiff (PAS) positive and also readily seen using the cationic Stains-all dye.

Irregularly shaped inclusions were also noted on electron microscopy of both animal and human brain biopsies. The highly ordered complex structures of some of these inclusions suggested that they were fulfilling some cellular function. Given the marked disruption of the cells' mitochondria, it seemed reasonable to postulate that the inclusions may be providing an alternative (non-mitochondria) energy source. The following data support such a conclusion.

Complex Inclusions in a Brain Biopsy from a Stealth Virus Infected Child

The child's illness evolved over seven months from what was initially considered to be a conduct and attention deficit disorder to an apparent neurological disease. In spite of markedly abnormal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), his early neurological examination was essentially normal. A brain biopsy showed lipid accumulation within glial cells without accompanying inflammation, and was considered non-diagnostic by the attending and referral neuropathologists.

After extensive clinical reviews in major medical centers, a second brain biopsy was performed at Stanford University , this time with sections prepared for electron microscopy. Apart form the lipid vacuolization and mitochondria damage, the attending neuropathologist failed to report on any of the inclusions shown in Figures 1-8 of the article posted on the s3support.com web site.

Pigmented Particles, Threads and Ribbon-like Structures in Stealth Virus Cultures

Representative photographs of the cytopathic effect occurring in stealth virus cultures are also available on the web site. The repair and reactivation processes are illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 of the published article "Stealth virus culture pigments: a potential source of cellular energy." Exp Mol Pathol. 2003: 74:210-23 . Many of the cell clusters become pigmented and the pigmented material can coalesce into discrete particles, some of which are extruded into the tissue culture medium. Various threads and ribbon-like structures can also develop in stealth virus cultures.

They can show intricate patterning and can exist as either hollow tubes or flat bands. Both by scanning electron microscopy and auto-fluorescence microscopy, the particles can be seen as conglomerates of finer particles. The tread and ribbon-like structures are also auto-fluorescent with wide excitation and emission spectra. The particles can occasionally show magnetic activity which is characterized by a degree of variability in sensitivity and responsiveness that is not seen with inorganic metallic objects. Electron dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis shows that the particles contain various minerals with individual particles displaying quite distinctive patterns of mineral composition.

The particles can show both electron donating (reducing) and electron accepting (oxidizing) reactions. The former is readily demonstrated using the chromogen MTT as an electron acceptor. It can also occur with reagents such as iodine in alcohol. Oxidation is seen with the appearance of calcium oxalate crystals following the addition of ascorbic acid to medium containing ACE pigments. The particles can also generate gas bubbles when placed in water. A remarkable feature is the variability seen over time with many of these properties. The particles appear to exist in both a "charged" and a "discharged" state. Individual particles will also commonly resonate when exposed to wide band sound frequencies.

Using a sound generator, each particle will commonly exhibit a rather narrow range of movement activating frequencies. Externally applied electromagnetic, fixed and pulsating magnetic energies, and sound waves can show effects on isolated ACE-pigments and on the viability of stealth virus cultures. It is easier to demonstrate cell destructive effects using light, X-ray and magnetic energies, but low intensity energy exposures have clearly benefited some cultures. Both sound and magnetic energies can induce considerable movement of freely floating cell clusters.

ACE Pigments Derived from Stealth Virus Infected Patients.

Similar mineral containing particles have been found in dried perspiration from stealth virus infected patients. They can exhibit rapidly reversible electrostatic properties suggesting internal movements of electrical charge. They are auto-fluorescent and can be both reducing (electron donating) and oxidizing (electron accepting). They can also generate gas bubbles from water.

Erratic movements of the particles in liquid suspensions may account for what earlier investigators have termed pleomorphic microorganisms. The occasional transformation of the particles into thread-like forms is also consistent with the mistaken belief that the supposed bacteria could transform into fungal forms. It is likely that ACE pigments are also responsible for so called delusional parasitosis or Ekbom's syndrome experienced by occasional patients with severe psychiatric illness. They may also explain mistaken reports of head lice in stealth virus infected patients.

Natural Products and Subtle Energies

An assay for the electron shuttling activity of ACE-pigments has been developed and applied to a number of natural products, including a Japanese plant extract and a material designated Enercell. Interesting patterns develop during these reactions that appear to be subject to environmental influences. These reactions are currently being used as a potential sensor for non-conventional forms of energy that may influence their physical and/or chemical properties. Other highly energized natural products can contain microscopic energy rich particles that show remarkable motility and that could easily be mistaken for bacteria.

Although not as well characterized as electromagnetic radiation, most physicists realize that other radiating forms of energy do exist. Included in this category are so called dark energy, phonons, biophotons (chi, orgone) and what is variously referred to as the ether, subtle energy, or zero-point energy. Understanding the potential reciprocal interactions of living organisms and the ether is rendered difficult because of the lack of suitable detection methods.

The restricted patterns of the minerals in individual ACE pigment particles suggested the existence of selective mineral affinity forces that favor the attraction of like substances. Minerals have mainly been studied in inorganic forms. Increasingly, it appears that minerals can exhibit quite different properties when either single atoms or small microclusters. Minerals can also behave differently when incorporated into organic and even silica based complex molecular lattices.

The concepts of orbitally-rearranged monoatomic element ( ORME ), molecular energy transduction with superconducting coherent energy emissions, and gravity defying elements, have been proposed to explain some of the unique features of these altered states of mineral existence. The field of biophysics is currently addressing the potential harmonization of energy patterns within living organisms and even between organisms separated by considerable distances. The experience of various healers would also suggest that conscious thought may be able to alter these harmonizing energy patterns.

Clinical and Agricultural Studies

Given their strong activity in the electron transferring assay system and testimonial evidence for efficacy in various disease states, a number of these natural products have been selected for detailed double blind, placebo controlled studies. Subjects with illnesses potentially attributable to stealth virus infections, and subjects who manifestly are lacking in energy production would be selected. Among the latter group plans are underway to test patients with various wasting syndromes (including cancer cachexia), children with severe diarrhea and asphyxiated newborn infants. Studies on both experimental and livestock animals can similarly be performed.

An advantage of the energy based approach to therapy is that it removes the focus away from using products as a means of enhancing the immune system. The new approach allows for a two way extension of studies to be conducted in an agricultural setting. Thus many products destined for evaluation in human and animal studies can be objectively assessed for their growth enhancement of various plants and crops. Conversely, natural materials that promote the quality of agricultural products may find usefulness in both animals and humans.

Co-ordination of Effort

It would be desirable to have an organizational structure that would encourage open communication among individuals contributing products, performing efficacy assessments and conducting basic research. Sound financial management and good public relations are also essential. The Government, Industry and Major Academic Institutions have, unfortunately, tended to put money-driven self interests above that of the public.

A fledgling non-profit organization termed S3Support has been joined by an Applied BioPhysics Foundation to form the Progressive University and BioPhysics Institute. Its primary goal is to develop and promote a nationwide endeavor to more rapidly bring the enormous benefits of energy based clinical and agricultural science to mankind. This effort can be assisted by increasing the membership of health care providers, farmers, researchers, administrators, public spokespersons, patients and their family members, etc., in the Applied BioPhysics Foundation.

The Services Offered by Assisted Living Concepts Inc

This article focuses on the services provided by Assisted Living Concepts Inc., which provides assisted living accommodations to the elderly who want to maintain as much of their independence as possible. These retirees may have lost some of their physical ability to do certain things that are necessary for daily living, such as taking a bath, dressing, eating, cooking or even toileting but they do not want to lose too much of their independence. This usually happens in nursing homes but assisted living residences offer an alternative lifestyle whereby the residents have more freedom to do what they want and are assisted only when they need it. But how do you evaluate the quality of the services that are offered by a company like Assisted Living Concepts?

Some of the factors that you can check when assessing assisted living programs include the safety features, services, equipment and amenities, financial issues, atmosphere and comfort level. Do not forget to examine the different amenities and equipment that are made available based on the fees that are being charged. Some of the features that you may want to check with regards to amenities in Assisted Living Concepts and compare them with the features of others include whether they have the capacity to accommodate the specific needs of a resident, the availability of religious facilities, the provision of a telephone and television unit in every unit, the presence of exercise equipment, the presence of a kitchen unit and refrigerator, and the availability of additional storage. It is also important to check whether shopping and entertainment centers can easily be reached.

Of course, you will also need to check on the monthly expenses and if there is a deposit requirement. Other issues that you need to check include the rules of refund in the event that you want to terminate the services, credit policies, whether the housing units are furnished, the types of housing that are available, the actions taken by management in case the resident is unable to make the monthly payments, the kinds of services that are covered in the fees that are charged, and the possibility of changing the kind of care when the need arises in the future.

When checking the services offered by retirement living providers such as Assisted Living Concepts, it is also advisable to inquire as to the types of activities that are allowed. These include whether socialization is encouraged, the availability of a common dining room, whether there are plenty of chances to socialize with the neighboring communities, the presence of a lounge area and other ways that make it easier to interact with other community members. Safety features are also essential and these include the presence of hand rails, door alarms in each unit, an intercom in each unit, air conditioning, heating and ventilation, the availability of staff at any time, the availability of a doctor in the community, the presence of a hospital nearby, and the availability of a way to communicate with staff if there is an emergency.

It Doesn't Have to Be Yoga

Yoga is a wonderful practice. I want to begin this article with nothing but praise for the people fortunate enough to be daily practicing Yogis. I aspire to be like you! However, for the sake of researchers, seekers, and stiff people out there, I'd like to offer them a personal training session merely focused on their stiffness, and pre-exercise-begin-exercising-at-all, assisted flexibility program.

The purpose of yoga practice is to prepare the body and mind for meditation. This requires complete silence and stillness. There are various traditions, beliefs, postures, hand postures, breathing techniques, and words from Sanskrit that pass before you in your journey, and if you happen to drop in to a beginner yoga class, it appears that all of the other "beginners" already know the Vinyasa flow that goes with the Sun Salutation sequence, AND can already touch their toes.

After 30 years in the fitness business, I've read the Bhagavad-Gita, and all of the traditional required reading yoga books. I've attended the various styles of yoga presentations, and I have just recently come to a new awareness about me and flexibility. I have discovered that for me and many of my clients, becoming proficient in gentle stretching, while maintaining good posture, breath, and taking time to completely relax is a task of its own.

The trend in clubs and studios the world over is Yoga and Pilates. Everybody is doing it! That still doesn't mean that it is the right program for all of us. My solution to those that have been embarrassed in a beginning yoga class, but still have the desire to be relaxed and meditative like Yoga People is to follow a basic plan as your starter.

It's true that yoga postures or Asanas are designed to cleanse the body while bringing energy to certain centers. These concepts can begin with the following guidelines;

Breathe in slowly, expand the abdomen, then the ribcage, and finally the upper portion of the lungs. Then, breathe out in the same manner, letting the abdomen cave in as you exhale. I prefer to breathe in and out through my nose, although there are no specific rules about it, nasal breathing is considered better for several reasons. The health benefits include filtering the air from the external environment through the sinuses to the lungs. The sinuses do their natural job of filtering the air as it enters the lungs while the smaller diameter of the sinuses create pressure in the lungs during exhalation. This allows the lungs to have more time to extract oxygen from them. When there is proper oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange, the blood will maintain a balanced pH. If carbon dioxide is lost too quickly, as in exhaling through the mouth, oxygen absorption is decreased. Also, by breathing through the nose as opposed to the mouth, thirst and dehydration are decreased.

There's no need to breathe so deeply (in the beginning) that you feel like passing out, but if you are just beginning to incorporate a breathing routine into your day, pay attention to how often you are holding your breath. Your normal breathing should include an even inhalation of 1 count, hold for 3-4 counts, exhale for 2 counts. This should be a constant, even cadence all during your day.

When exercising, whether it be stretching, or picking up a package, always exhale on exertion. Inhale, then lift, and exhale. Or, if you are stretching, breathe evenly, and perform your stretch on the exhale, then keep breathing evenly. You will build your breath and movements into a rhythmic sequence. There will be no Sanskrit words to memorize, no postures that hurt your knees, just breathing and stretching being sure to include the four basic movements. They are, forward bending, back bending, side bending, and twisting.

Once you have developed a comfortable breath, it doesn't matter if you are standing, kneeling, or sitting in a chair, you will begin by lengthening your spine. This is done by expanding the rib cage through breathing, reaching up over your head to become taller, or on your hands and knees, pulling back or raising like a cat. However you go, the spine should be safely warm and long before you begin side bending or twisting.

Once the spine is lengthened and warmed, forward bending is an easy move. Again, this can be done while standing, sitting, or kneeling. You will advance this move as you become more flexible, but don't push it if you're not.

The next natural move would be backward bending. As a beginner, simply leaning backward while standing will be good enough. Place your hands at the back of your rib cage, inhale, then exhale as you lean back.

Now, you are ready for some bending at the waist. This shouldn't be anything too aggressive, just enough of a stretch that you can comfortable breathe with and hold for at least 30 seconds. Save the twisting for last, and again, begin with enough of a twist to feel a stretch, but not to torque your back.

Now that you have begun to breathe properly into the exertion, you are ready to design a full routine including all of the basic moves holding each for 30 seconds, while breathing properly throughout.
For the first several sessions, you should go through this routine which includes each of the directional stretches that are included in the Yoga Asanas. Become comfortable with the stretches, as well as your breathing. End with breathing only and sitting quietly for 5 minutes.

Once you have perfected this basic stretch sequence and become comfortable with your breath, sitting quietly, and moving slowly, you will be ready to move forward to learn more about Yoga. If Yoga is not what you're looking for, you might find a Personal Trainer to lead you into a more aggressive flexibility program. Once you have perfected this preliminary program, you will be ready for more!

Gaia: The Mother Of All Aliens

The asexual and sexual reproductive biological skills of the ancient Greek Mother Goddess Gaia is impossible as related. Her reproductive skills are akin to a human female giving birth not only to humans but to all sorts of other animals and even numerous monstrosities. No writer of mythology as fiction even back then would make such a fundamental error if he wanted his fiction to be credible. And that's just the point - it wasn't written to be read as fiction. The ancient Greeks didn't interpret Mother Goddess Gaia and her offspring as make-believe. What did they know that we don't today? What's the alternative? Aliens - a misinterpretation of what was actually extraterrestrial activity. The ultimate stories behind Mother Goddess Gaia's reproductive abilities centre around two rival alliances of various extraterrestrial races battling over Planet Earth, or at least their allocated part of it - Italy, Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea.

In the beginning there was Chaos according to ancient Greek mythology. Chaos was neither a deity nor a personality, just an all encompassing dark void, lifeless matter with no distinguishing features which is as good a view of the cosmos as any by the ancients. Chaos might just as well have been their shorthand for explaining life, the universe and everything; the creation of life, the universe and everything, and probably was.

Chaos gave rise to Planet Earth, among other cosmic attributes, like darkness and energy. Planet Earth was known as Gaia (or Gaea). Gaia as Planet Earth is obviously a physical product, a natural creation of the cosmos. However, Gaia (Terra in the Roman pantheon) was also considered to be the daughter of Chaos, a mother goddess. We need to separate the two concepts (Gaia as Earth (the planet) and Gaia the Mother Goddess). Chaos as a formless void would have to via natural physical processes form independently Planet Earth first before the arrival of the Mother Goddess that would represent Planet Earth, Tellus or Terra, alternative names by which Planet Earth is known.

On the biological as opposed to the planetary side of things, Mother Goddess Gaia (representing the Earth, or of the Earth) had siblings called Nyx (which represented night), and Erebos (representing underground darkness). Later on down the track Chaos formed other siblings in the form of Eros (representing desire/energy) and Tartarus (the underworld).

Asexually, Mother Goddess Gaia gave rise to her two sons Uranus (Ouranos) and Pontus and the ten Ourea (Aitna, Athos, Helikon, Kithairon, Nysos, Olympus 1, Olympus 2, Oreios, Parnes, and Tmolus). Asexual reproduction is reproduction without benefit of a partner, usually termed parthenogenesis.

Mother Goddess Gaia does however ultimately take a husband and sexually mate - with her son Uranus (representing the sky or of the sky). From that union comes:

*The three elder and original Cyclopes: giants with one eye: Brontes, Steropes, and Arges.

*The original first generation six male Titans (Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus) and the original first generation six female Titanesses (Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys): all human looking. [Now the original Titans then did their 'be fruitful and multiply thing' and produce the second generation of Titans, making Mother Goddess Gaia a grandmother. These second generation Titans included Atlas and Prometheus - in case you were wondering if I had forgotten these important figures.]

*The three Hecatonchires: giants with 100 arms and hands and fifty heads apiece: Cottus, Briareus and Gyges.

Mother Goddess Gaia's son and hubby, Uranus, then met an uncomfortable fate at the hands of his son Cronus when the latter castrated the former!

Mother Goddess Gaia then, via a not-so-immaculate conception, being splattered with blood from the severed genitales of her son/husband Uranus, conceived:

*The three Furies (Erinyes): Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone though their actual number maybe however indefinite. The Furies were winged hags with snakes intertwined in their hair.

*The Gigantes: a race of giants born in full armour with spears.

*The Meliae: the ash tree nymphs. Nymphs tend to be beautiful eternally youthful amorous maidens (sounds like my kind of aliens) who attend to the needs of more senior deities. Nymphs are a sort of yeoman figure.

Mother Goddess Gaia mates sexually with her other son Pontus (representing the sea or of the sea). From that union came Nereus, Thaumas, Phorcys, Ceto and Eurybia, all relatively minor sea gods and goddesses. They appear pretty human looking.

However, later generation descendents of Mother Goddess Gaia's and Pontus's minor sea god and goddess were not quite so humanoid appearing. They include:

*The Harpies, predatory monsters; a woman's head on top of a vulture's body, wings and claws.

*The Graeae, a trio of swan-like women with grey hair who shared one eye and one tooth between them.

*The 50 Nereids who at least retain their maritime heritage being nymphs of the sea.

*The Gorgons, who on the other hand, were monstrous sisters with wings, claws and serpent hair, the most famous being the Medusa.

*The Muses, nine human-looking goddesses of the arts.

*Chiron - a centaur.

Mother Goddess Gaia also mates with Tartarus to produce the mother of all monsters, the Typhon (which Zeus later defeated in battle).

Mother Goddess Gaia mates with her first generation Titan offspring Oceanus. That union gave rise to Reousa/Creusa (a naiad or type of water nymph) and Triptolemus (a primordial man who flew across the land in a winged chariot and educated the whole of Greece in the agricultural sciences after being instructed himself by the goddess Demeter or Ceres if you're Roman).

Mother Goddess Gaia mates with Zeus (her grandson). Their offspring became Manes, the first king of Maeonia otherwise known as Lydia in western Asia Minor. The odd bit here is that two deities apparently have produced a mortal and not another deity!

Mother Goddess Gaia also mates with Poseidon (also her grandson). That produces offspring we know as Antaeus (a half-giant) and Charybdis (a sea monster).

The Python, that earth-dragon of Delphi is alleged to have a genetic type relationship with Mother Goddess Gaia - mother being the operative word. The daddy is unknown; perhaps this is another example of parthenogenesis in action. Python, as you'd guess from the name, is a serpent. The Greek Olympian deity Apollo did Python a mischief in mortal combat. Alas, Python is no longer among the living! Neither were the original Cyclopes as Apollo bumped them off which didn't please Zeus one little bit as the Cyclopes assisted him and his fellow Olympians in their war against the Titans, providing the high-tech necessary for victory (see below).

While that's not the absolute end of Mother Goddess Gaia's bedroom romps (actual or suspected), the above covers the basics and shows that Heinz has no monopoly on varieties, 57 or otherwise. Now Mother Goddess Gaia is not the be-all-and-end-all of the varieties of presumably extraterrestrial species that are part and parcel of Greek mythology, but I think it's safe to now at least conclude this segment on Mother Goddess Gaia remarkable reproductive prowess!

So how can there exist a whole multitude of species of deities, from those appearing human or humanoid, to the hideously monstrous, and yet are all genetically related to Mother Goddess Gaia?

Now I maintain that if you (or any other animal) produce offspring, while they would not of necessity all be identical, they will be fairly similar in appearance and conform to your own basic body plan. You're not going to produce one kid that will grow up to be ten feet tall while another attains only four feet. One kid won't have two eyes, the next three. The odds that your first born will have one head and two arms, but that your second born will have ten heads and twenty arms, is unlikely in the extreme. As this like-begets-like reproductive rule of thumb applies to you, I strongly suggest it should have applied to Mother Goddess Gaia.

IMHO, the ancient Greek Hesiod, who wrote up the origins of the Greek deities including Mother Goddess Gaia, and the world in his tome "Theogony" ["the birth of the gods"], should have and would have known better that to invent such outlandish sexual tales producing such an outlandish diversity of offspring. Presumably the people who read all of this also knew better - they knew that like-begets-like - just like the Norse hero Siegfried knew the dwarf Mime was lying to him about being his father because they didn't look anything remotely alike. Siegfried knew from observations of animals and their babies in the forest that like-begets-like. Mime got his comeuppances!

I conclude from all of this that Hesiod and whoever else came up with all this mythological reproductive nonsense was warped in the extreme; really puffing on the good stuff. Or perhaps, as in all mythology, there's a true kernel of corn in the mythological haystack waiting to be uncovered. Perhaps both Hesiod and his readers couldn't think of any other interpretation of reality but that Mother Goddess Gaia really did mate and produce offspring as wildly divergent as nymphs, 50 headed giants and the Cyclopes. Perhaps they had no concept of the extraterrestrial!

All of these collections of beings (Titans, Cyclopes, Meliae, etc.) are so different that each is unlikely in the extreme to be related to each other. Each is probably an alien race in its own right - alien as in various extraterrestrial intelligences.

So here's my alternative scenario. Chaos (the void, the cosmos) ultimately formed our Sun and solar system including 'Gaia' as Terra/Tellus, the Planet Earth. Eons ago that other but biological flesh-and-blood Mother Goddess Gaia and her sons (Uranus and Pontus) along with a host of her species (probably the Titans) arrived on Planet Earth as part and parcel of their boldly going, exploring the Milky Way Galaxy exercise. Liking what they found, they settled down, perhaps thinking of Planet Earth as an R&R spot, perhaps as a colony planet. Things then proceed pretty much according to Hesiod's mythology, except for one incorrect translation. There were no real acts of Mother Goddess Gaia reproducing which resulted in the creation of a high and unlikely diversity of other biological species. There were only those like-with-like sexual reproductions as in the original Titans creating the next generation of Titans (Atlas, Prometheus, etc.). Mother Goddess Gaia wasn't so much a mother of extreme biological diversity as a hostess (with the mostest) to that rather wide diversity of extraterrestrial species.

Mother Goddess Gaia threw out the welcome mat for other alien species that came to visit, or were invited to visit, just like parents might play host to a much broader diversity of humans than their offspring would typify. Their dinner party might include guests short and tall, old and young, black and white, normal and handicapped, as well as other species - cats, dogs and aquarium fish - for the sake of wide-ranging diversity, etc. In the case of Mother Goddess Gaia however, things got a bit more serious as Mother Goddess Gaia and the various extraterrestrial races she's associated with IMHO formed a block of allies against another block of allies - the Olympians (offspring of the original Titans and thus related to [Grand] Mother Goddess Gaia. The 'War of the Titans' was on the horizon and inevitable in a power struggle of epic proportions.

The extraterrestrial Cyclopes and that alien race, the Hecatonchires, which were once allied with Mother Goddess Gaia and the Titans, changed sides and supported the Olympians led by Zeus in their war against the Titans (the Titanomachy). Some Titans like Prometheus also switched sides and supported Zeus. In fact only about five of the original dozen Titans took up arms against Zeus and company. The Titans were actually led mainly by second generation Atlas (as first generation Cronus, Zeus's daddy, proved not to be so invincible when Zeus freed his swallowed brothers and sisters, and therefore wasn't really available for a leadership position). Zeus, as leader of the winners, however reserved a special punishment for Atlas as we all know. Atlas ended up with the weight of the world on his shoulders. As an aside, the 'War of the Titans' apparently happened in that region of Greece known as Thessaly.

It should be noted, in support of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, that the Titanomachy was a high-tech war, at least high-tech relative to what the ancient Greeks had. It was not a war fought with bows and arrows, slingshots, spears and swords, even though it did last an entire decade plus. Zeus had his thunderbolts - lightning, or perhaps in today's terminology, lasers or particle-beam weaponry. Hades had a 'magic' helmet providing invisibility - the ultimate form of stealth technology and camouflage. Poseidon had his 'magic' trident which he could use to produce storms (weather modification), earthquakes, tidal waves/tsunamis, floods and all manner of 'natural' disasters - and he was noted for having a very bad temper with a very short fuse attached.

The Titanomachy was also noted for the hurling of massive boulders (missiles?); the rumbling earth which became scorched with flame and the vast forests that were levelled. The oceans and rivers, probably courtesy of Poseidon, swelled and steamed and boiled. And of course the heavens shook as well. If extraterrestrial, I'm sure the Titanomachy was as much a 'star wars' as a terrestrial one.

Now all of this probably happened in Planet Earth's pre-human era. That's because 'humans' back then probably weren't the Homo sapiens we know today. Our modern species was created out of clay (as the ancient Greeks had no concept nor phrase for 'genetically engineered') by Prometheus (of gift of fire fame), a second generation Titan, and that 'clay' event probably happened way after the original extraterrestrial 'gods' (like Uranus) and 'goddesses' (like Gaia) arrived to set up shop. Thus, we probably have no actual eyewitnesses to what actually happened regarding the Titanomachy, as well as no real first hand accounts of Mother Goddess Gaia's reproductive prowess, only what happened can not be taken literally as it violates fundamental principles of reproductive biology. The tales were probably all handed down way after-the-fact to the ancient Greeks by the Olympians - the winners - with a lot of understandable mistranslation and misunderstanding in the nitty-gritty details eventuating.

But that's not quite the end of the story. Mother Goddess Gaia had another go at dethroning Zeus and his Olympians, the location allegedly shifting to Italy and the Phlegraean Fields. This time she threw the Gigantes (Giants) against them (the Gigantomachy). So, round two - it was Mother Goddess Gaia and the Gigantes versus Zeus and the Olympians, but with a little help from the demigod Hercules, the Fates and even Helius (the sun-god), Selene (the moon-goddess) and Eos (the goddess of the dawn, known to the Romans as Aurora). Now since Hercules was the offspring of a deity (Zeus) and a mortal, humans had to have been around to witness round two. What was the upshot of Mother Goddess Gaia's second attempt to grab power? All of the Gigantes became the late Gigantes, and nothing was ever heard from Mother Goddess Gaia ever again! In my version of the tale, Mother Goddess Gaia and those Gaia supporters who survived the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy tucked tail (if they had one) and headed back to whatever planet(s) they originally came from. Eventually, for reasons unrecorded and unknown, Zeus and company ultimately did the same, or at least boldly went elsewhere.

One other observation is required. Normally, sexual relations between mother and son; mother and grandson; mother and just about anyone and anything else without benefit of a wedding ring, is considered taboo. That's of course according to human morals and ethics. However, if my premise is correct, and all and sundry belonged to various species of extraterrestrials, then we can't hold them to, or impose on them, our standards.

Jewish Wisdom on the Afterlife

Scattered throughout the large body of Talmudic and later writings, one can construct a comprehensive picture of the Torah's (Bible's) understanding of the hereafter.

Immortality of the soul, Resurrection, and the concept of Heaven are all featured prominently in Jewish tradition, but they are not explicitly stated in the Torah. For this reason, a careful analysis of Jewish texts and commentaries is needed in order to create a clear picture of what happens to the soul after the body has died.

THE SOUL

According to rabbinic material the soul goes on a journey after it departs the body. Along the way it may encounter such things as 'pains of the grave' (Hibbut ha-kever), the 'angel of silence' (Dumah), the 'angel of death' (Satan), 'catapult of the soul' (Kaf ha-Kela), 'purgatory' (Gehinom), and 'paradise' (Gan Eden). These concepts are often expressed via analogies and parables by the Jewish sages, as they felt that these concepts were beyond average human understanding.

According to the Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism), after a person passes on and sheds the physical form, the soul continues to be quite conscious of the people and the universe it has left behind. But as time goes on, the soul ceases to dwell in the physical universe as we know it and journeys into a non-dimensional reality.

Existence in the afterlife is a continuation of this life, organically flowing from this life into the next, minus one's physical form. A person's individuality, contained as a memory unit, lives on after death. The entire personality, which is the cumulative selfhood of the soul-type, survives, including all life experiences that have been imprinted on the soul.

The measure of survival and immediacy of "soul memory" capable of attaining reintegration with "gan eden" (heaven/paradise) is commensurate with the level of soul actualization manifested during life. If we have lived in complete harmony with our soul, the transition is immediate, while those who have lived a more disharmonious and misaligned existence may need to trek a longer route in order to reach their destination. Eventually all souls get there, completing full circle and returning to their Source.

REINCARNATION

According to the sages, the 'sparks' that were one's soul in this life remain part of the soul in the afterlife, while other sparks reincarnate and gradually become individualized souls for other people. The unifying factor between all these incarnations is that, collectively, they constitute "one soul."

Just as a tree has one root, but also has multiple branches extending in all directions, so too does each individual soul share the same root but unfolds and unravels and becomes apparent throughout many lives as individual spiritual soul energies for different people. Although the soul keeps on dividing and subdividing itself in each incarnation, it retains wholesomeness and a sense of completion.

Even after the first possesssor of the soul passes away and elements of soul that became exclusively that person's remain his or hers, and only the remainder of the soul reincarnates, this "remainder" is also complete.

Contrary to popular belief, souls do not reincarnate to rectify previous misdeeds or to complete someone else's story. Rather, they exist to reach their own actualization and individuation. In each evolving incarnation, the soul articulates another element of its nature.

Reincarnation from one human being to the next is for the purpose of self-elevation, not so much for the correction of past life errors. Errors are amended for and fixed in the afterlife, not on earth. When souls descend for rectification in this world, they mostly do so as other forms of life, not within the human form.

Another, more unique form, of reincarnation is discussed by the Sages: the reincarnation of the perfected soul...or a soul belonging to that of a "tzaddik" (righteous person). Normally a soul will return to attain a deeper, more expansive level of articulation. Yet from time to time, souls settle in this realm of existence, not for themselves per se, but to help those around them attain their own "tikkun" (restoration or repair) and reach their soul destiny.

There are clusters of souls that gravitate toward each other physically as they are spiritually linked, sharing the same soul roots. Occasionally, a "perfected" soul will descend to assist those souls to which it is connected, in order to help them reach their maximum spiritual potential.

Ultimately, the purpose of a soul's descent into various forms of existence is for lessons it can acquire, and once these are achieved the soul re-attains its purity and is able to enter "Gan Eden" (paradise/heaven).

HEAVEN

In Judaism, Heaven and Hell are not physical places - they are better described as 'states' in which the soul can reside. The blissful feeling of heaven or the agonizing dread of hell is based on the choices we make. Throughout life, we can either pick heaven or choose hell. Heaven is inclusive, hell is exclusive. In the heavenly paradigm, it is me and you. In hell there can only be me or you.

To exist in heaven is to live in an embracing condition of openness and transcendence, whereas living in hell is where every person we meet is suspected as an enemy, and every experience we have is potentially threatening.

To live in a heavenly manner is to experience a self devoid of opaque ego, aggression, or resentment. The converse of this state is considered hell. With regard to the afterlife journey, in a manner of speaking, one soul's heaven is another's hell. To some degree, all souls return to the same place: for some souls, merging with the light is a transcendent elation, while other souls - those accustomed to being ego oriented, self centered, and selfish - experience the very same encounter as hell.

Movement into the afterlife is determined by the soul's success in developing in this life. As in this life, what we are when er are older is generally, though not necessarily, a reflection of who we were when we were younger. Similarly, in the afterlife, what is experienced "there" is a reflection of what was accomplished "here." The soul advances from one level of awareness to a higher one in accordance with the life it led. Souls can also be assisted in their afterlife journey by the actions performed in their memory by the living.

Although "Gan Eden" (Heaven or Paradise) is the ultimate destination for souls, infinite levels exist within this destination. Most broadly, higher/deeper gan eden us dedicated to the expansive pleasure of divine contemplation; the less intense level of gan eden is more an emotional form of delight. The level the soul attains immediately following death depends on the measure of spiritual attainment it has reached here on earth.

A soul that finds itself too confused or bewildered to enter higher/deeper dimensions within gan eden may first experience lower grades, until it becomes fully acclimated. The lower levels of gan eden serve as an orientation, allowing the soul to become accustomed to its new bodiless existence, until it becomes able to reintegrate with the infinite light and join with eternal goodness.

Heaven is the spiritual culmination of our work here in this world. While for some people this is the glorious end of life to a mediocrity of life's middle, for others this evolved spiritual condition is attained, partially or even fully, in the present world.