I AM

When you actually enter the path of a meditation practice and go down the road a little way, you wake up one day and realize, to your surprise, that you’re actually committed to this. When that happens, a whole other life comes into view.

You find that you have formed your life, literally, around the practice, and you actually begin to forget about the life you thought you wanted, the life you thought you were making, the life you were hoping for, or the life you thought you should’ve been having. Instead, the practice becomes your life and life becomes your practice. Practice is no longer something you do to enhance your life or help it along, it is just your life.  One day, you kind of realize this.

So you end up losing the life you thought you wanted, or the life you thought you had. But this is actually very liberating - this is really great - it’s wonderful to disappear into your practice. It’s wonderful not to have to worry anymore about being somebody, or something, which is such a struggle. And you no longer have to work overtime to avoid life’s difficulties. People work their entire lives to avoid life’s difficulties, and they are never successful at that. They never will be. So you can give up that effort altogether. You don’t have to defend or protect yourself anymore.  This is great; I can’t tell you how great this is. It’s not dramatic. It’s not colorful. It’s not a big deal. It’s very subtle; maybe nobody even notices.

It’s only January 5th and NASA is already blowing our minds in 2016. That right there is a photo of two galaxies colliding, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. 

“All food contains consciousness at some point in its own development, whether you fry it, boil it, or pick it from the garden; you ingest it to keep yourself nourished. Your emotions are food for others. When you are controlled to bring about havoc and frenzy, you are creating a vibrational frequency that supports the existence of these others because that is how they are nourished.”

Realize who you are. Each and every morning. Do this now. No matter how many seemingly horrible, vile things have happened on this earth, the beautiful sunrise appears every morning. There has never been a morning when the sun did not rise. What compassion this is. What beauty. What forgiveness. This is the nature of unfoldment. Accept this opportunity to use the short time you have on this earth to rise with the sun within. Silently. Humbly. Gloriously.- Robert Adams

Terence McKenna

Happy New Year from all of us at Penny4NASA!

The Cartwheel Galaxy is a ring galaxy located about 500 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. It was once a normal spiral galaxy until it experienced a head-on collision with a nearby galaxy approximately 100-200 million years ago. “Usually a galaxy is brighter toward the center, but the ultraviolet view (blue) indicates the collision actually smoothed out the interior of the galaxy, concentrating older stars and dust into the inner regions. It’s like the calm after the storm of star formation,” according to Phil Appleton of the California Institute of Technology.

The collision created waves of brief star formation rippling out from its center, the first being the bright blue outermost ring composed of many young massive stars. The second wave is the yellow-orange inner ring where less star formation is taking place. “It’s like dropping a stone into a pond, only in this case, the pond is the galaxy, and the wave is the compression of gas,” Appleton explained. “Each wave represents a burst of star formation, with the youngest stars found in the outer ring.”

Read more about the Cartwheel Galaxy here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/galex/galex-20060111.html#.U7cMEf5LtFs http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/images/2307-sig06-005-Cartwheel-Galaxy-Makes-Waves