The four primary components (also known as the components of health related fitness) that are important to improved physical health are as follows:

Cardiorespiratory capacity is the ability of the body to take in oxygen (respiration), deliver it to the cells (circulation), and use it at the cellular level to create energy (bioenergetics) for physical work (activity). In fitness, we also refer to cardiorespiratory capacity as aerobic capacity. This capacity includes aerobic endurance (how long), aerobic strength (how hard), and aerobic power (how fast). Some of the long-term adaptations of cardiorespiratory training are: decreased resting heart rate, decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, improved endurance, increased stroke volume and cardiac output.

Muscular capacity refers to the spectrum of muscular capability. This includes muscular endurance (i.e., the ability to apply force over a long period of time or to complete repeated muscle contractions); muscular strength (i.e., the ability to generate force, or the maximum amount of force that a muscle can exert in a single contraction); and muscular power (i.e., the ability to generate strength in an explosive way). Some of the long-term adaptations of improving muscular capacity are increased strength, improved muscular endurance, increased basal metabolic rate, improved joint strength, and overall posture.

Flexibility is the range of movement or amount of motion that a joint is capable of performing. Each joint has a different amount of flexibility. Some of the long-term adaptations of improved flexibility are decreased risk of injury, improved range of motion, improved bodily movements, and improved posture.

Body composition is the proportion of fat-free mass (muscle, bone, blood, organs, and fluids) to fat mass (adipose tissue deposited under the skin and around organs). Some of the long-term adaptations of improving body composition are decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, improved basal metabolic rate, improved bodily function, and improved BMI.

The secondary components of fitness (also known as the components of performance based fitness) are involved in all physical activity and are necessary for daily functioning. Athletes experience different levels of success depending on how well these secondary fitness components are developed. Although the primary components of fitness are thought to be the most important, we should not ignore the secondary components because of their importance in the completion of daily tasks. The secondary components include the following.

Balance is the ability to maintain a specific body position in either a stationary or dynamic (moving) situation.

Coordination is the ability to use all body parts together to produce smooth and fluid motion.

Agility is the ability to change direction quickly.

Reaction time is the time required to respond to a specific stimulus.

Speed is the ability to move rapidly. Speed is also known as velocity (rate of motion).

Power is the product of strength and speed. Power is also known as explosive strength.

Mental capability is the ability to concentrate during exercise to improve training effects as well as the ability to relax and enjoy the psychological benefits of activity (endorphins).

Health is a dynamic process because it is always changing. We all have times of good health, times of sickness, and maybe even times of serious illness. As our lifestyles change, so does our level of health.

Those of us who participate in regular physical activity do so partly to improve the current and future level of our health. We strive toward an optimal state of well-being. As our lifestyle improves, our health also improves and we experience less disease and sickness. When most people are asked what it means to be healthy, they normally respond with the four components of fitness mentioned earlier (cardiorespiratory ability, muscular ability, flexibility, and body composition). Although these components are a critical part of being healthy, they are not the only contributing factors. Physical health is only one aspect of our overall health.

The other components of health (Greenberg, 2004, p. 7) that are just as important as physical health include the following:

Social health-The ability to interact well with people and the environment and to have satisfying personal relationships.

Mental health-The ability to learn and grow intellectually. Life experiences as well as more formal structures (e.g., school) enhance mental health.

Emotional health-The ability to control emotions so that you feel comfortable expressing them and can express them appropriately.

Spiritual health-A belief in some unifying force. It varies from person to person but has the concept of faith at its core.

Wellness is the search for enhanced quality of life, personal growth, and potential through positive lifestyle behaviours and attitudes. If we take responsibility for our own health and well-being, we can improve our health on a daily basis. Certain factors influence our state of wellness, including nutrition, physical activity, stress-coping methods, good relationships, and career success.

Each day we work toward maximizing our level of health and wellness to live long, full, and healthy lives. The pursuit of health, personal growth, and improved quality of life relies on living a balanced life. To achieve balance, we need to care for our mind, body, and spirit.

If any of these three areas is consistently lacking or forgotten about, we will not be at our optimal level of health. We are constantly challenged with balancing each of these three areas throughout life.

As fitness professionals, we have a responsibility to guide and motivate others to improve their level of health and wellness. We can promote a holistic approach to health (mind, body, and spirit), not just encourage physical activity. As good role models, we should demonstrate positive health behaviours that assist in improving our own health and the health of others. If our focus is strictly on the physical benefits of exercise, we are doing a disservice to our clients and we are not fulfilling our professional obligation.

As fitness professionals, we spend a great deal of time inspiring and assisting others in their pursuit of improved health. Education is an important aspect of this. We must promote the benefits of regular activity and help people understand why they should be active.

Figure 1.2 will help you educate your clients about the benefits of activity and why each of these benefits is important to long-term health.

Health Canada introduced Canadas Physical Activity Guide to Healthy Active Living to help Canadians make wise choices about physical activity as a way to improve health. Scientists say you should accumulate 60 minutes of physical activity every day to stay healthy or improve health. The recommendations in the Physical Activity Guide are as follows:

Endurance-On 4 to 7 days a week, perform continuous activity for your heart, lungs, and circulatory system. Time required for improvements depends on effort.

Flexibility-On 4 to 7 days a week, perform gentle reaching, bending, and stretching to keep muscles relaxed and joints mobile.

Strength-On 2 to 4 days a week, perform resistance exercise to strengthen muscles and bones and improve posture.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has also developed activity guidelines for improving health:

Perform 30 minutes or more of moderate-intensity physical activity on most days of the week for cardiovascular health. The 30 minutes need not be continuous.

Performing 1 set of 8 to 12 repetitions of resistance training for the entire body is necessary to maintain and develop muscular strength and endurance.

Flexibility training should be performed daily, including stretches for all major muscle groups, in order to maintain mobility.

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The importance of health, fitness, and wellness

To be your happiest and healthiest self, we bring you a wide selection of health facts from fitness to food to hydration.

These top tips and random health facts provide you with information to keep you fighting fit.

These health facts cover a range of topics to provide you with knowledge and insights into how you can better take care of yourself and information about health around the world.

Its easy to forget how important our mental health contributes to our wellbeing. Just like all muscles, the brain needs to be exercised and cared for to ensure you are performing and feeling your best.

While swearing, participants reported less pain and were able to withstand the pain longer.

Our bodies need food to survive, but all foods were not created equal. Read through these facts about food and vitamins that you can incorporate into your diet to boost your health.

For a healthy body and mind, general fitness and moderate exercise are crucial. We hope these interesting health facts encourage you to move!

A study of adults over the age of 65 found that walking at least four hours a week reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease hospitalizations.

A similar study at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that moderate intensity walking and vigorous intensity running has similar reductions in risk levels for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and even potentially coronary heart disease.

Water is the bodys natural elixir. Below weve compiled ten good reasons why keeping hydrated contributes to good health.

Not only that, but a study by the Endocrine Society found that drinking 500ml of water increased the metabolic rate (in both men and women) by 30% within 10-40 minutes of drinking water.

Here are few general hints and tips to keep you feeling healthy and to ensure youre taking good care of your body.

The Academy of General Dentistry recommends waiting at least 30 to 60 minutes.

Elements such as dust, mold or cleaning supplies can contaminate the air, resulting in poor indoor air quality.

As a result of poor indoor air quality or lack of ventilation, irritation to the eyes, nose and throat is common and with long-term exposure can lead to some respiratory diseases.

The final ten facts cover a broad spectrum, but you can use this intriguing information to impress your friends.

Foot pain, ranging from general soreness at the end of a long day, to a more serious condition, is common.

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70 Quick Health Facts: Food, Fitness, Hydration, Random (Fun!)

Health and Fitness Magazines from Amazon.com

From perfecting a headstand in yoga class to learning the tastiest vegetarian recipes and finding the best fitness routines for your needs, health and fitness magazines can help you explore, experiment, and exercise in new and exciting ways. No matter the subject youre looking for, subscriptions to health and fitness magazines can help you improve your techniques, and stay up-to-date on all the trends and changes in your preferred health and fitness zones.

Whether youre looking for health and fitness magazines for men or for women, Amazon.com offers a wide range on a variety of topics. If youre interested in mens or womens health, you can choose from magazines like Mens Health, Womens Health, Shape, Muscle & Fitness, and more. If youre looking for nutrition or alternative medicine options, you can select everything from Vegetarian Times, EatingWell, Spirituality & Health, and more. We also offer a range of magazines about relationships, psychology, beauty and fashion, and weight loss as well.

When you subscribe to health and fitness magazines, you can keep up-to-date on all your subscriptions by using the handy subscription manager Amazon.com offers. Plus, you can even give gift subscriptions, so whether your intended prefers to stay abreast on yoga changes or different diets, you can find magazines like Yoga Journal, Outside, Cooking Light, and more all right here. Simply include the name and address of your intended recipient, and Amazon.com will ensure they get the latest issues of their gift subscription on time.

Our selection of health and fitness magazines can help you do everything from improve your fitness to explore alternative health and fitness styles, and more. With alternative selections like Qi: Journal of Traditional Eastern Health & Fitness, and contemporary favorites like Health, you can find all the news you need for your favorite health and fitness activities.

With health and fitness magazines from Amazon.com, you can find all the articles you need to get your heart rate up and get your brain inspired.

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Amazon.com: Discount Magazines: Health, Fitness & Wellness ...

Health and fitness is the key to a long, active and enjoyable life. It is correctly stated that Health is the actual Wealth that a person can retain. Teachers assign this topic to their students to enhance their knowledge about staying healthy and fit, and create awareness among others as well. It also results in the development of a healthy lifestyle for children.

Students need to realize the importance of staying healthy and fit. Also, being the future generation, they can play a vital role in creating awareness and maintaining a stable health regime.

Here we are providing you some useful articles on health and fitness under various categories according to varying words limits. You can choose any of them according to your need:

Being healthy and fit in simple terms means taking good care of the body. We should remember that a healthy mind resides only in a healthy body. Good health of both mind and body helps one maintain the required energy level to achieve success in life. All of us must strive to achieve wholesome health.

Protecting your body from the intake of harmful substances, doing regular exercises, having proper food and sleep are some of the important instances that define a healthy lifestyle. Being fit allows us to perform our activities without being lethargic, restless or tired.

A healthy and fit person is capable of living the life to the fullest, without any major medical or physical issues. Being healthy is not only related to the physical well-being of a person, it also involves the mental stability or the internal peace of a person.

Generally, a healthy diet consists of taking a proper and healthy food which includes eating green and fresh vegetables, fruits, having milk, eggs, minerals, proteins and vitamins essential for a humans lifestyle. Practicing Yoga including regular exercises in your daily routine also help you maintain your desired fitness, blood sugar and immunity level.

Healthy habits improve your physical appearance, mental stability, ability to perform activities in a better way, which help you lead a stress-free lifestyle, maintaining happy moods, high energy levels, etc. Each individual should take of ones health on a priority; no single day should be skipped for making efforts on maintaining physical and mental fitness. Being happy is directly related to boosting your mental strength and health, so happiness can be considered as the result as well as the part of a healthy and fit lifestyle.

Conclusion: Health is the most important thing that a person should take care of. Leading a healthy lifestyle leads to happiness, success and achievements.

Health can, generally, be measured on major three parameters: Physical, Psychological and Nutritional. Physical health means the physical appearance of a person; Nutritional health means the presence of essential nutrients in the body to fight diseases with immunity. Psychological health means the ability in a person to maintain patience, calm and composure in all circumstances of life.

Health professionals consider cancer, diabetes and several other mental and physical health issues such as depression, lethargic attitude, etc to deficiencies in fitness and well-being of a person. Unhealthy and unfit lifestyle of a person also results in premature death. Obesity and lack of physical fitness in young generation sets the stage for diabetes, heart disease, and other serious health problems.

Walking, running, cycling, playing, swimming, gardening, skipping, weight-lifting and Yoga are some of the important activities which help us maintain fit and healthy lifestyle. A person who is fit both physically and mentally is strong enough to face the ups and downs of life, and is not affected by drastic changes in the circumstances.

One should also spend time outdoors in the sun, inhaling fresh air and taking part in healthy activities. Staying active makes you stay energetic.

Out of the several components that affect ones health, following are the seven key physical components to ensure the overall good health, fitness and mental well-being:

Eating healthy and nutrients rich food, exercising, taking sufficient sleep, avoiding intake of harmful substances are just few simple ways to stay healthy and fit. These are directly related to our mental, physical and emotional health.

Fitness and mental well-being are essential parts of a healthy life. The benefits of an active and healthy lifestyle are undeniable by all means.

Whether you decide to increase your activity levels slightly or develop and participate in a thorough fitness plan, it will pay you off in the long run.Exercise is good for your health of various organs of your body and makes you feel stronger.

Nutrition and fitnessare essential for ahealthy living. Not only we look and feel good, but by eating the right nutritional food and doing the right amount of exercise, we could also lower the chances of getting some pretty serious life-threatening diseases.

Things to be done for maintaining balanced healthy and fit lifestyle:

Conclusion: Sound health not only means keeping a health body but it also includes a healthy mental condition. Our health depends upon several factors such as food, pollution, regular sleeping habits, fresh air, water, sunlight, and healthy mental condition. Morning walks and physical exercises are very helpful for ensuring the fitness of our mind and body.

Good health helps a person to live ones life to its fullest potential without being physically or mentally unfit. Unhealthy lifestyle results in deterioration of ones wellbeing. Staying healthy and fit is very important for each generation. Exercising and eating healthy are the best ways to retain your health both physically and mentally.

People, who take their health seriously and are serious about maintaining their fitness, do exercises on a daily basis, eat a healthy diet, and sleep well on time for adequate duration.

Being healthy and fit allows you to stay active and further increases your confidence and concentration power. By staying healthy and fit, one can set an example for others and slowly help others increase their health, nutrition, knowledge, and consumption of sustainably produced foods.

Major reasons that lead to the deterioration of health are as follows:

Natural phenomena such as pollution, etc also make us unhealthy and unfit. Proper preventive measures must be taken to defend ourselves against adverse natural environment.

Following are the things that lead to maintenance of a healthy and fit person:

Staying healthy and fit is not difficult if taken as the foremost priority. By following the above-mentioned simple steps, each one of us can lead a healthy, fit and fruitful life. Maintaining balance of thoughts, nutritional diet, rigorous exercise, Yoga, optimum level of sleep are actually the main contributory factors for our wellbeing and a healthy and fit lifestyle.

Conclusion: We create the conditions that lead to an unhealthy and unfit lifestyle. Thats a fact. So, we should develop good habits, and become capable of taking the required measures to lead a healthy and fit lifestyle.

Health is a dynamic process. It keeps on changing as we change our lifestyle, our eating habits, our sleeping routine, our thoughts, etc. Each day we should work towards maximizing our level of health and wellness to lead long, full, and healthy lives. Our defined aim should be planning our day in a manner that maintains balance of our physical and mental usage. We can make a huge difference in our lives by staying fit and healthy.

Among the most crucial reasons for decline in health today is the lack of proper amount of vitamins and minerals. Improper intake of vegetables, fruits and dairy products leads to absence of minerals and vitamins in our body. Lack of minerals and vitamins lead to all kinds of diseases as nutrients are essentially required to build and repair the blood, tissues, muscles and bones.

Good health not only means a state of absence of diseases in the body but a complete physical, mental, social as well as spiritual wellbeing of an individual.

Being healthy means having a healthy brain, flexible movements of body, more energetic, happy moods, peace and patience, etc. Fitness does not only mean your physical wellbeing, it is a combination of physical and mental health of a person.

Stress, anxiety, mood fluctuations also represent unhealthy traits of a person. Health refers to the physical, emotional and psychological well-being of a person.

Every generation should take care of their health and fitness. Since childhood, it is easy to focus on this aspect of life as dietary habits of childhood are difficult to change afterwards. For this we should refrain from overfeeding the children. Some important tips of good eating habits that one should follow are:

In children, the requirement of sleep is high, around 12-14 hours and a normal adult requires 7-8 hours of sound sleep daily.

Maintaining healthy and fit regime requires simple efforts, a few of which are listed below:

Health and fitness is determined by what we eat, how we live our lives, our choice of leisure pursuits and what we do to keep ourselves physically fit. Keeping fit is about how we choose to live our lives as individuals and the levels of fitness we aspire to. Maintain your health and fitness to keep your body look and feel good, but also maintain a level of physical fitness which will enable you to manage and enjoy your daily lifestyle.

Conclusion: The way towards Healthy and Active wellbeing is to focus on making the healthy choice at any given moment, rather than postponing the things that are must to be done in the long term.

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Article on Health and Fitness Long and short articles ...

Transhumanism and posthumanism

Transhumanism goes beyond simply crushing death and aims to allow humans to overtake the limitations of their bodies through technology. Slow Darwinian evolution, working through millennia, has very little chance to compete with Moores law in terms of speed (the yearly doubling of computing capacities) and there is a very good chance that technology could allow the human kind to evolve faster than natural selection would.

This rapid change in the transhumanist community will probably give birth to a new humanity which is difficult to imagine today much like it would have been challenging for Turings contemporaries in the Second World War to picture the computing power and capacities of todays smartphones, just sixty years down the road.

As previously stated, predicting and even picturing the result of exponential change through time can be challenging. Todays transhumanists will first look just like the next person, before things fire up exponentially. Besides the prospect of a limitless lifespan, yours truly cannot tell you what other changes might have occurred with your regular transhuman two centuries from now (but maybe we can bring it up again then.)

Some scientists believe that people alive today could end up living for a thousand years a figure commonly used because of its striking effect, and because it is a fair estimate of a regular French person spared by the effects of aging.

On that matter, no scientist can give a definite answer as of today unless Calico, Googles eternal life pet project, or any company versed in biotechnologies are keeping secrets from you. However, just like some organisms dont age because their DNA repair system doesnt get damaged with time, I assume that in the future, humanity will unveil aging mechanisms and stop them. Our 21st century is undergoing such technological convergence and acceleration that it could one day bust open the locks that keep us from living a forever healthy, limitless life. This convergence of technologies is called NBIC convergence (Nanotechnologies, Biotechnologies, IT, Cognitive science).

As for the timing, however, it will be a question of will, financial means and serendipity.

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Transhumanism - Work for human longevity

is elated to Celebrate the Life of this awakened female soul, one who began tracking her own self-evolution at a very tender age of 18. Devoting her life to the universal question of life, What is the meaning of our power that is good? Making an internal decision to trail a path, researching cause and effect, studying all scripture, struggling through depression and more her journey seeking the meaning of life began.

Yet the hunger of Eve awoke in me. I realize now it was the hunger for union with the divine, but that I could not tolerate that image of the Divine as the mythic God.

Born a Jewish agnostic, her father was toy maker Louis Marx. In her youth she attended the Dalton School in New York City. She studied at LEcole des Sciences Politiques at La Sorbonne in Paris during her junior year of college, and received a B.A. cum laude in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College in 1951. I believe my start, born of a Jewish, agnostic secular father, was good.

When I asked him what religion we were, he said, Youre an American. Do your best. I interpreted that to mean that everyone has potential and being an American means finding the way to realize that full potential. He was a Horatio Alger type, and I was imbued with indomitable hope. One of the pressures within me was to find out what I was hopeful about!

After the bombs were dropped on Japan, I asked the question which has guided my life: What it the meaning of our new power that is good? What are images of our future equal to this new power?

I couldnt find the answer in philosophy or religion until I read the New Testament.

Thats IT, I thought. Ill join the church. I went down to the local Episcopal Church in Scarsdale, New York and asked the minister: Is any of this true? Did Jesus really ascend? Will we be able to do the work that he did and greater work, really?

I saw he did not know. He enrolled me in Sunday school!

Learning the Biblical story of the image of the jealous and violent Lord God Yahweh and Eves supposed guilt for wanting knowledge, and even for being attracted to the Tree of Life, the tree of the gods, deeply repelled me. I felt that Eve was right and that this story was fundamentally wrong. I left the church.

Yet the hunger of Eve awoke in me. I realize now it was the hunger for union with the divine, but that I could not tolerate that image of the Divine as the mythic God.

This left a vacuum of meaning.

Then I tried being an existentialist in Paris during my junior year abroad for Bryn Mawr College. I tried to believe that the universe had no meaning except what I personally gave it, and that it was inevitably going down to a heat death. I became depressed.

In 1952 she was invited to the White House (through her fathers connections) where she famously asked President Eisenhower: What can I do for you, young lady? he asked casually. Mr. President, I said, I have a question for you. What is the meaning of our new powers that is good?

He looked started, shook his head, and said, I have no idea.

Then we better find out, I thought.

I realized later that every religion is coded with such an image of a radical new quality of life, but it had to be encoded in the metaphysical or mystical realm. With the advent of awareness of our new capacities and our potential for conscious evolution, I see now that what has been intuited, as life after death, may indeed be life after this stage of evolution.

Not as some perfect Utopia, but as a state of being that normalizes direct apprehension of the divine, of the implicate order, and that sees ourselves as expressions of that unfolding pattern of creation, cocreative with it.

(The Flower of Life)

When you put together our full potential spiritual, social, and scientific/technological you see a quantum jump, a new species, a universal humanity that in fact may embody many of the characteristics of spiritual visions of life beyond this world a new heaven and a new Earth, a new Jerusalem, beyond sorrow, beyond death, the former things passed away

Perhaps we are indeed coming to the end of this world, to the end of civilization, the end of separate self consciousness as we have known it. And this is good. We are being instructed by Failure the failure of war to win, the failure of consumerism to satisfy, the inevitable rise of the seas in response to global warming brought on in part at least by human destruction of nature. All of these evolutionary drivers may indeed be the impulse needed to jump our species to a higher order, or to self destruction.

But this is getting ahead of my developmental path.

Gradually, I began to realize that our image of reality and of the future affects our reality, affects what we do. I began another study of images of the future and their effect on cultures. This made of me an active meme seeker.

She married the artist Earl Hubbard, whom she met while in Paris, that same year. I had five children and felt lost and depressed until I found the memes I needed to awaken my evolutionary consciousness. As of 2012, she is the mother of five and grandmother of six.

The Voice: The combination of frustration, depression, innate hope, and a profound yearning for life purpose, for what to do my best at, pressed me forward. I began to hear an inner voice.

Its first signal was: I wont let you die. (I have 162 volumes of Journal tracking self-evolution, started at the age of 18.).

It started with reading Maslows Toward a Psychology of Being. He said that every self-actualizing person has one thing in common: chosen vocation they found intrinsically self-rewarding. Here was a great clue to conscious evolution. It is the need to find innate life purpose that transcends mere selfish desire to prevail. Vocation is a vital way of directly experiencing the Life Force of evolution.

Then came Teilhard de Chardin. This was the real opening. I could tell from his Law of Complexity/Consciousness the understanding of God in evolution rising to higher consciousness, freedom and more complex order, that my own impulse to grow, to be more, to realize my potential was not the musings of a neurotic housewife, but rather, it was the universe unfolding in me as me.

This was the next key. Our own impulse to create and evolve is the direction of God in evolution, not just a human need, not just a blind effort to survive or reproduce, but in fact an implicate order of growth, the urge to self-evolve.

I realized that each of us is the universe in person. Our motivation to evolve is the soul of evolution experienced as our subjective desire for self-evolution, for communion with others, with nature and with Spirit.

Then came Buckminster Fuller who told us that we have the resources, technologies and know-how to make of humanity a 100% physical success without destroying our environment.

I began to develop a vocation. At that time I called it An Advocate for Humanity. I felt that the current philosophical and art worlds (in the 1960s) were giving us a deathly image of our self that could in fact destroy us. My husband was an artist. And together we began breakfast dialogues seeking our new story and a new image of humans that comes forth out of the evolutionary story.

Then I read Sri Aurobindos great work, The Life Divine. He was the great Indian sage that fixed evolutionary consciousness within me. I realized that what he called the Consciousness Force is the dynamic, progressive aspect of God, or the supramental intelligence of the universe, leading to a new kind of human, a gnostic human, he called it. He saw that man is a transitional species.

I remembered Teilhards description of Homo progressivus. He wrote that some of us had a mysterious sense of the future, a flame of expectation, a sense of the future progressing toward the unknown. He said if even one person had that flame in a crowded room he would be drawn to that person, and no difference of age, background, color, religion, or class could keep them separate.

I realized that I was a Homo progressivus. But I had never met another. I felt so lonely.

Then I got a call from Dr. Jonas Salk. I had written something to Jerry Piel, editor of the Scientific American about Jonass idea of a Theater of Man. Jonas had read an article I had written and was moved to meet with me. He explained that he felt I was among several visionaries of the postWorld War II generation who were filled with a mysterious sense of the future and a desire to give their best for the good of all. Jonas was emphatic that people like me were needed for humankind to evolve to its next level. This recognition from Jonas started me on my path as an evolutionary woman, learning that we are all part of the greater process of creation.

He said to me, Mrs. Hubbard, you and I are two peas in the same genetic pod. May I take you to lunch?

Those words reverberated in my soul. It was the first voice of an evolutionary that I had ever heard, and I knew intuitively that something momentous was about to happen.

As we talked I told him all the things that were wrong with me. My desire for the future, the sense of something great coming, the yearning to connect, etc. Barbara, he said, That is not what is wrong with you. That is what is right about you. You combine the characteristics needed by evolution now. You are a psychological mutant. I will introduce you to a few others.This started me on the path.

Within a few months I was transformed. My daughter drew a picture of me as a horse hit by the lightening of inspiration!

This led to many things, but the key next step was the next question I asked.

It came from all my reading but it had not yet become a gestalt within me.

It was February 1966.

I asked the universe a question: What is Our Story? What on Earth is comparable to the birth of Christ?What I meant by that is the Gospels were such an amazingly effective story. What could be our story comparable in power to that?

In one instant my minds eye shot up into outer space, I become a universal being for a moment. I had an out-of-earth experience and saw us all as members of one living body.

The planet was like a Disney film, speeded up. We were struggling to coordinate, running out of energy, etc. Suddenly there was a moment of shared pain. We all paid attention, and there was a mass opening of the heart. Resonance. Love flashed through our nervous systems, like pent-up love in the heart suddenly released. People poured into the streets, like on VJ Day at the end of World War II.

I felt mass healings occur. It was ecstatic. The media was healed by covering people being healed.

Suddenly, all systems were shifting political, economic, education, etc. All the innovations now under the surface of the current systems were being coordinated by the same power that brought atoms with atoms and cells with cells. I saw a few frames ahead in the movie of creation. I felt the coming together of the planet as one living body. I felt light surround the planet the light that mystics see. The light was both beyond us and within us. I heard a tone, a harmonic. I felt that the light was intelligent, but that we were still too young to understand it.

It was a kinaesthetic imprint of a planetary birth experience, a collective awakening.

I heard the words coming forth from the cosmos:

What Christ and all the avatars came to Earth to reveal is true.We are all members of this one body.

GO TELL THE STORY OF THE BIRTH OF A UNIVERSAL HUMANITY, BARBARA.

That was it. The vocational signal I needed. The experience I longed for.In the next few minutes I saw conscious evolution as the next stage of evolution itself. It is the evolution of evolution from unconscious to conscious choice. I realized that we are literally in a crisis of birth of the next stage of our evolution. We are outgrowing the womb of self-conscious humanity and planet-boundedness.

We can learn to restore the Earth, free ourselves from scarcity and move forward into an immeasurable future as a co-evolutionary cocreative species.

Like a newborn infant, we innately know how to do this. when we have the right story to guide us.

Once we know that our crisis is potentially the birth of a new human and a new humanity, we can move forward through any difficulty.

This wonderful experience transformed my life.

I dedicated myself to learning the story and to telling it in every way that I could.

Maslow is right.

A true vocation is a key to participation in conscious evolution.I see vocation as the enfolded implicate order, the process of creation localizing and unfolding in each of us as our own passion to create. Once that happens the Consciousness Force internalizes and we enter the process of conscious self-evolution. We become conscious evolutionaries.

I call it the birth of the universal human. This is a human connected through the heart to the whole of life, and awakened from within by Spirit to express unique creativity for the good of the self and the whole community and the whole world. This human has been gestating for thousands of years, but the crisis we are facing is bringing us forward en mass. Each of us is coded with some image of the future, and some impulse to express unique creativity.

This motivation is as powerful as the drives for self-preservation and self-reproduction. It is the drive for self-evolution. It is suprasexuality, the yearning to express our unique creativity out of love, through joining not our genes to have a child, but our genius to give birth to our full potential self and our work in the world. This passionate drive to self express, to fulfill lifes potential within us, is, I believe, the wellspring of the life force on earth, the passion that, in response to the crises and opportunities we face, will carry us toward the next stage of our evolution.

Many wonderful events follow which I wont describe in detail here, many of which are recorded in The Hunger of Eve, my autobiography.

We formed the Committee for the Future in Washington, DC, and invented a new social synergy conferencing process called SYNCON for synergistic convergence. People meet in a wheel-shaped environment based on functional interests, such as Health, Education, Environment, Government, seeking common goals and matching needs and resources in the light of the growing new potentials of the whole system. We took walls down between sectors. Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, who attended one of the SYNCONs, said that if we had had a spiritual Geiger-counter, it would have gone off the charts. The experience felt like a mini-version of the actual experience of the planetary birth, in that it allowed the coordinating process of nature to connect us in a new whole system as we sought common goals and matched needs with resources.

I ran for vice president on the Democratic ticket in 1984 on the themes given by Fuller, Maslow, and Teilhard, calling for the establishment of a new social function in the office of the VP a peace room as sophisticated as our war rooms to scan for, map, connect, and communicate what is working in America and the world. Over 200 delegates signed a petition to have my name placed in nomination for the vice presidency along with Geraldine Ferraro.

I discovered a plan as to how to run a political campaign, which can model synergistic democracy, and work for the transformation of the American presidency. I believe this is possible by 2012 and am seeking to give this idea to the next VP candidate on the Democratic ticket.

I co-founded The Foundation for Conscious Evolution with Sidney Lanier, and become an evolutionary educator with a myriad of projects to bring forth the templates and practices of conscious evolution now. See Gateway to Conscious Evolution at http://www.evolve.org.

I am developing a Chair in Conscious Evolution for Wisdom University, in an effort to cocreate the new field of conscious evolution.

I am producing a series of DVDs called Humanity Ascending: A New Way through Together. The first is called Our Story and is now being sold all over the world, a seed story of our emergence as a universal humanity (www.humanityascending.com).

My own cutting edge is in the realm of evolutionary spirituality. I have co-founded a Communion of Pioneering Souls and have co-produced with Carolyn Anderson a new book called 52 Codes for Conscious Self Evolution taken from the universal consciousness, to guide us on the new developmental Path of the cocreator.

It feels as though evolutionary consciousness itself is deepening and that the unfolding Implicate order is arising as our own intuitive guidance as to how to navigate though the great period of transition to the next stage of human evolution.

(Its made available by permission from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious; the full video is available here.) This weeks inspiring video excerpt above is just one example.**

As I look around our movement, it is clear to me that many of our leaders who are birthing a transformed world are feeling a new sense of passion.

Every now and again messengers come to us, and they leave us with a profoundly different way of thinking. Letting all of us know that Something will effect our lives for the duration, and gives us hope that we will do just fine in this breakthrough..This is nice.Andrea

In 1945 the United State dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and the world caught its breath.This pivotal event deeply impacted the young Barbara Marx Hubbard, who found herself asking President Eisenhower, What is the meaning of our power that is good? Barbaras 40+ year inquiry, and the answers she has found, offer invaluable assistance to us all at this time in our history. Despite the state of the world, we are truly on the threshold of great possibility, of our own conscious evolution.

ACE Mentor Retreat was yet more evidence of leadership arising, as Stephen Dinan notes below, as are the new weekly Hub Support Calls announced in this issue which represent a new level of leadership and collaboration.. And all this has inspired us to improve our hub support for you as you will discover in the coming weeks!

She was also featured in the 2011 film Thrive.

RELATED

In the wake of the Vaticans harsh rebuke of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), we talk with Barbara Marx Hubbard, the keynote speaker at the LCWRs recent Assembly.

In The Book of Co-Creation she writes: Out of the full spectrum of human personality, one-fourth is electing to transcend . One-fourth is destructive [and] they are defective seeds. In the past they were permitted to die a natural death. Now as we approach the quantum shift from the creature-human to the co-creative human the human who is an inheritor of god-like powers the destructive one-fourth must be eliminated from the social body . Fortunately, you are not responsible for this act. We are. We are in charge of Gods selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death.

Lord help us all if this de facto Brain Trust of diabolical misfits, murderers, megalomaniacs, terrorists, and tyrants succeed in establishing their new world order, their new global civilization. Source

Barbara states today As you know, I have intuited all these years that our crisis is a birth and that we are called to gentle the birth toward a planetary culture, or undergo even worse catastrophes. It has always seemed to me that an actual Planetary Birthing Experience,celebrating what is working, loving and innovative is vital to our emergence now. Finally, the time has come. I am working with Stephen Dinan of the Shift Network to celebrate this process by convening, Birth 2012 on December 22, 2012, a live multi-media global celebration of what is working that we would like to invite everyone to contribute their energies and creativity toward to help create a new civilization. Please join me tonight for this Activation Day call.

Continued here:
Barbara Marx Hubbard WOMAN of ACTION

Osho! (Photo from Wikimedia Commons, CC-By-SA http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D8%A7%D9%88%D8%B4%D9%88.jpg)

Here are 250 Osho quotes on love, life, meditation, marriage and more. Osho, also known as Bhagwan Rajneesh, was a spiritual master and enlightened being who created quite a wave in the twentieth century. You might also be interested in some of the Osho Books available as free downloads.

You may also be interested in the Spiritual Quote of the Day Android App, which includes quotes from Osho, Sadhguru, Gautama Buddha and many more great beings.

Be like an alone peak high in the sky. Why should you hanker to belong? You are not a thing! Things belong!

Relationship is the need of those who cannot be alone. Two alone persons relate, communicate, commune, and yet they remain alone.

It is a strange experience, that those who have left me have always left places for a better quality of people. I have never been a loser.

I love this world because it is imperfect. It is imperfect, and thats why it is growing; if it was perfect it would have been dead.

Wherever you are afraid, try to explore, and you will find death hiding somewhere behind. All fear is of death. Death is the only fear source.

Take life easily, lovingly, playfully, non-seriously. Seriousness is a disease, the greatest disease of the soul and playfulness the greatest health.

Never ask, Who is my real friend? Ask, Am I a real friend to somebody? That is the right question. Always be concerned with yourself.

It does not matter if you are a rose or a lotus or a marigold. What matters is that you are flowering.

Discover yourself, otherwise you have to depend on other peoples opinions who dont know themselves.

Just get out of your own way.

Only idiots are not controversial.

It is because nobody has been teaching you about hate; hence, hate has remained pure, unadulterated. When a man hatesyou, you can trust that he hates you.

Mind is the illusion that which is not but appears, and appears so much that you think that you are the mind.

Respect your uniqueness, and drop comparison. Relax into your being.

No, I dont want to give my people sticks. I want to give them eyes.

Love cannot be taught, it can only be caught.

Love is happy when it is able to give something. The ego is happy when it is able to take something.

The knowledgeable person lives with a question mark ? and the man of awe and wonder lives with an exclamation mark.

A serious person can never be innocent, and one who is innocent can never be serious.

Man is born only as a potential. He can become a thorn for himself and for others, he can also become a flower for himself and for others.

Desire disappears as you become more and more aware. When awareness is one hundred percent, there is no desire at all.

Hell is our creation, and we create hell by trying to do the impossible. Heaven is our nature, it is our spontaneity. It is where we always are.

Real love is not an escape from loneliness, real love is an overflowing aloneness. One is so happy in being alone that one would like to share.

When you are different the whole world is different. It is not a question of creating a different world. It is only a ques of creating a different you.

That which makes you miserable is the only sin. That which takes you away from yourself is the only thing to be avoided.

Dont be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing the chapters that you have read; there is no need to go back again and again.

Accept yourself as you are. And that is the most difficult thing in the world, because it goes against your training, education, your culture.

Sharing is the most precious religious experience. Sharing is good.

You can go on changing the outer for lives and you will never be satisfied. Unless the inner changes, the outer can never be perfect.

It is imperfect, and thats why it is growing; if it was perfect it would have been dead. Growth is possible only if there is imperfection.

Accept yourself as you are. And that is the most difficult thing in the world, because it goes against your training, education, your culture.

Life exists without rules; games cannot exist without rules. Only false religion has rules, because false religion is a game.

If you work without love, you are working like a slave. When you work with love, you work like an emperor. Your work is your joy, your work is your dance.

The only authentic responsibility is towards your own potential. Values have not to be imposed on you. They should grow with your awareness, in you.

Truth is not something outside to be discovered, it is something inside to be realized.

A comfortable, convenient life is not a real life the more comfortable, the less alive. The most comfortable life is in the grave.

Love is authentic only when it gives freedom. Love is true only when it respects the other persons individuality, his privacy.

Man is always exploited through fear.

If whatsoever you have been living can be conveyed by words, that means you have not lived at all.

Its not a question of learning much. On the contrary. Its a question of unlearning much.

If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others. In relationship with others, it is only you mirrored.

If you love a flower, dont pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.

Bravery does not mean being fearless. It means to be full of fear but still not being dominated by it.

God is a person; godliness is a quality. You cannot become God, but you can be godly.

When your ego is no more, only then will you know who you are.

To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.

Anywhere everywhere! Anything anyhow! just dance!

The word devil is very beautiful, if you read it backwards it becomes lived. That which is lived becomes divine and that which is not lived becomes the devil.

In relationship, be blissful, in aloneness be aware and they will help each other, like two wings of a bird.

Nobody else can destroy you except you; nobody else can save you except you. You are the Judas and you are the Jesus.

The less the head, the more the wound will heal. No head there is no wound. Live a headless life. Move as a total being, and accept things.

When you really laugh for those few moments you are in a deep meditative state. Thinking stops. It is impossible to laugh and think together.

Your real being only flowers with unconditional love. Ambition is against love. Anything that is against love is against you and your real life.

Dont be bothered by perfection. Replace the word Perfection by Totality. Totality will give you a different dimension.

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

Get out of your head and get into your heart. Think less, feel more.

The only thing that matters in life, is your own opinion about yourself.

All your knowledge is dust. Knowing is your purity, knowledge is dust.

Dont be angry at life. It is not life that is frustrating you, it is you who are not listening to life.

Life is not logic, life is not philosophy. Life is a dance, a song, a celebration! It is more like love and less like logic.

Celebration is my attitude, unconditional to what life brings.

Life in itself is so beautiful that to ask the question of the meaning of life is simply nonsense.

Life is a mirror, it reflects your face. Be friendly, and all of life will reflect friendliness.

Whatever you are doing, dont let past move your mind;dont let future disturb you. Because the past is no more, and the future is not yet.

Fools are more healthy then the so-called wise. Thy live in the moment and they know that thy are fools, so thy are not worried about what others think about them.

Dont be serious about seriousness. Laugh about it, be a little foolish. Dont condemn foolishness; it has its own beauties.

It cannot be called freedom, a freedom which can choose only the right and not the wrong; then that is not freedom.

Only silence communicates the truth as it is.

Be. Dont try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

If you love yourself, you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself.

Lovers have known sometimes what saints have not known.

Love is not manageable, it is simply something that happens, and the moment you try to manage it everything misfire.

Your honesty, Your love, Your compassion should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures.

If you clean the floor with love, you have done an invisible painting. Live each moment in such delight that it gives you something inner.

Never obey anyones command unless it is coming from within you also.

Thats why children look so beautiful because they are yet full of hope, full of dreams, and they have not yet known frustration.

You will come closer and closer to perfection, but you will never be perfect. Perfection is not the way of existence. Growth is the way.

Dont analyze, celebrate it.

NOW is the only reality all else is either memory or imagination.

The Mind: a beautiful servant, a dangerous master.

Whatsoever you hide goes on growing, and whatsoever you expose, if it is wrong it disappears, evaporates in the sun, and if it is right it is nourished.

Love brings freedom. Loyalty brings slavery.

Misery comes the moment you become clinging, attached. The moment you put conditions on life.

Die each moment so that you are renewed each moment.

Instead of pleasing, learn the art of happiness.

Happiness is an art that one has to learn. It has nothing to do with your doing or not doing.

Friendship is a relationship, friendliness is a state of your being. You are simply friendly; to whom, that is not the point. . .

Anger transformed becomes compassion. Sex transformed becomes prayer. Greed transformed becomes sharing.

Life is a mystery, and there is nothing to explain everything is just open, it is in front of you. Encounter it! Meet it! Be courageous!

Sadness comes, joy comes, and everything passes by. What remains always is the witness. The witness is beyond all polarities.

Freedom is our most precious treasure. Dont lose it for anything. . . .

Forget about getting, simply give; and I guarantee you, you will get much.

If you cannot love yourself, you dont know even the taste of love or what love means.

Freedom is a ladder: one side of the ladder reaches hell, the other side touches heaven. It is the same ladder; the choice is yours.

Drop the idea that attachment and love are one thing. They are enemies. It is attachment that destroys all love.

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250 Osho Quotes on Love, Life and Meditation | Sunil Daman

Born in a small village in Bareli, Madhya Pradesh, as Chandra Mohan Jain, Oshos transformation from a young man drawn to hypnosis led him to believe in a transcendental life. As a powerful leader, he managed to influence, control and secure a god-like devotion from billionaire heirs, celebrities, lawyers and farmers alike.

In Charisma and Control in Rajneeshpuram: A Community Without Shared Values, author Lewis F Carter mentions that in the years between 1960 and 1968, Osho held several academic positions, even teaching philosophy at a few universities such as Jabalpur University. However, through this period, he began to grow more disillusioned with existing philosophies propelled by Hinduism and even socialism, calling out their hypocrisy.

He began to cultivate his own philosophy one that would later become enshrined in the pages of the Rajneeshee manifesto and would be followed for decades after his death in 1990. A simplified way to sum up Oshos philosophy would be to refer to one of his most famous quotes:

Carter mentions that by 1970, he had rounded up his first batch of disciples, the Neo-Sannyasis, and took under his wing, Laxmi Kuruwa. Later known as Ma Yoga Laxmi, she became his personal secretary and managed to procure funds strong enough for him to settle in Mumbai and receive visitors.

Four years and several hundred followers who were now calling themselves Rajneeshees later, he moved to a property purchased in Koregaon Park, Pune, by one of his disciples who was a Greek heiress, which later became his core ashram from 1974-1981.

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All You Need to Know About Osho, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in ...

Zig Ziglar Quotes

Our latest collection of Zig Ziglar quotes on Everyday Power Blog.

Zig Ziglar was known as one of the best motivational speakers in the world. A World War II veteran, Zigs talks wererepresentativeof his Southern upbringing and Christian values. Regardless of region or religion, Ziglarsimpact was worldwide with both businesses and families of all demographics! We hope you love some of our favorite Zig Ziglar quotes!

Enjoy!

1.) Remember that failure is an event, not a person. Zig Ziglar

2.) There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic. Zig Ziglar

3.) Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude. Zig Ziglar

4.) It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through. Zig Ziglar

5.) You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win. Zig Ziglar

6.) People dont buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons. Zig Ziglar

7.) People often say motivation doesnt last. Neither does bathing thats why we recommend it daily. Zig Ziglar

8.) I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You cant truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles. Zig Ziglar

9.) You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people. Zig Ziglar

10.) You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations. Zig Ziglar

11.) If you want to reach a goal, you must see the reaching in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal. Zig Ziglar

12.) Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business. Zig Ziglar

13.) If you treat your wife like a thoroughbred, youll never end up with a nag. Zig Ziglar

14.) If you go looking for a friend, youre going to find theyre very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, youll find them everywhere. Zig Ziglar

15.) Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes. Zig Ziglar

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15 Zig Ziglar Quotes To Become The Best Version Of You ...

Evagrius give us 3 trinitarian interpretations:

a) practice of the virtues, contemplation of the divine in nature, and spiritual knowledge of God

b) faith, hope and love

c) gold, silver, and precious stones

II. Is the Enneagram ancient wisdom?Evagrius expresses the purpose of his spiritual practice in Verse 51 of Chapters on Prayer:

We seek after virtues for the sake of attaining to the inner meaning of created things. We pursue these latter, that is to say the inner meanings of what is created, for the sake of attaining to the Lord who has created them. It is in the state of prayer that he is accustomed to manifest himself.

This verse on the purpose of prayer expresses a spiritual method and goal unfamiliar to most modern Western notions of religion, which, as Alfred North Whitehead states, is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. (Science in the Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925, p. 223).

Why do phrases such as seek after virtue and attain to the inner meaning of created things seem strange to us? To partially answer this question, a look at the history of Evagrius teachings is helpful.

Evagrius wrote these texts in the fourth century, a critical period in the development of the Christian Church. In 324 AD, Constantine declared Christianity the Roman state religion and as Rome was Christianized, Christianity was Romanized. In a twist of history, as the Pagans had persecuted the Christians, now the Roman Christians were persecuting the Pagans and many heretical Christians as well. To Christians motivated to solidify the temporal power of the early church, the danger of contamination of the faith by Pagan ideas was of paramount concern (for a historical account of the political forces that shaped Christianity see Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Gospels).

Evagrius was considered by his disciples to have attained a rare degree of harmony in his personality through his ascetic practice and through his pure prayer. (Bamberger, J.E., The Praktikos, p. XXV) Yet in 399 AD, the same year as his death, his followers were persecuted as heretics and forced into exile. Evagrius was condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 and also by the following 3 Councils. Fortunately, Evagrius followers managed to take some of his works with them into exile, into areas outside the Roman Empire including the Arabic world where he influenced the Persian Sufis and Armenia where his works exerted a great influence on Byzantine theologians.

However great the efforts of the early Christian church were to cleanse itself of Hellenistic influence, a residue remained. As George Sarton states, (the Greeks) created theological instruments that were needed for the development of the three dogmatic religions of the WestJudaism, Christianity, and Islam. In each of these religions there is a woof of scripture and tradition, but the warp in Greek (Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece, p. 198). The symbolic use and interpretation of number was a prevalent element in the fabric of Hellenistic philosophy and is evident in the theology of the early Christian theologians. Two of Evagrius contemporaries, St. Jerome (died 420) and St. Augustine (354-430), have also interpreted the number of fishes in Simon Peters net.

Perhaps it was St. Jerome who provided the right solution to the meaning of the 153 fish of great size when he observed that, according to the opinion of Oppianus of Cilicia, there are 153 species of fishthus the passage refers symbolically to the universality of the Church. (Bamberger, Chapters on Prayer, footnote 11, page 54). Here the symbolism is concrete, single, correct, and is quantity rather than quality.

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, interprets the meaning of the 153 fishes in Simon Peters net in his Letters (Letter LV to Januarius, Chap. XVII 31):

Hence also, in the number of the large fishes which our Lord after His resurrection, showing this new life, commanded to be taken on the right side of the ship, there is found the number 50 three times multiplied, with the addition of three more [the symbol of the Trinity] to make the holy mystery more apparent; Then [in this new life] man, made perfect and at rest, purified in body and soul by the pure words of God, which are like silver purged from its dross, seven times refined, shall receive his reward, the denarius; so that with that reward the numbers 10 and 7 meet in him. For in this number [17] there is found, as in other numbers representing a combination of symbols, a wonderful mystery. Nor is it without good reason that the seventeenth Psalm is the only one which is given complete in the book of Kings, because it signifies that kingdom in which we shall have no enemy. .... And when shall this His body be finally delivered from enemies? Is it not when the last enemy, Death, shall be destroyed? It is to that time that the number of the 153 fishes pertains. For if the number 17 itself be the side of an arithmetical trianglethe whole sum of these units is 153.

St. Augustine gives us 2 interpretations of 153. One is Trinitarian and is similar to that of Evagrius.

Like St. Jerome and St. Augustine, there were most likely many early theologians who found symbolic significance in the numbers of the Scriptures. This interest in symbolic number was pervasive at the time of the early Christian Church and was rooted in pre-Christian thought at least since the time of Pythagoras and probably even earlier.

Today, of course, we tend to look upon number symbolism as a confused, pre-scientific form of thought. Numbers in the Bible may mean nothing, just selected at random to indicate quantity or comparison; or they may have had some superstitious or self-referent meaning for the authors of the Scriptures. Another possibility, however, is that some Biblical numbers and possibly the structure of some of the Scriptures encoded information or indicated other sources of knowledge (c.f. legomonism, Anthony Blake, The Intelligent Enneagram of Gurdjieff, Shambhala 1996, in press).

That symbolic number and sacred geometry were indicative of the divine structure of the universe was self-evident to many early philosophers and theologians. Although this qualitative understanding of number which had its roots in Hellenistic philosophy was almost entirely purged from Christianity during its early development, it appears to have left its trace in the Scriptures whose authors, as educated people of their day, were probably versed in the sacred science of number and proportion. Most of the symbolic meaning of this sacred canon of number is lost to us but this may not be irrevocably so as interest in ancient more holistic forms of thought is growing as the limitations of our fragmented, technological rationality become ever more apparent. There is reason to believe that the enneagram may be a fragment of an early sacred cosmology.

3. Did Evagrius Ponticus combine the evil thoughts with the enneagram?In John Bambergers double text (The Praktikos, Chapters on Prayer, Cistercian Publications, 1970) we see that Evagrius knew both a psychology based on 8 evil thoughts and a cosmology symbolized by a hexagon plus triad. Can we therefore conclude that the Enneagram of Fixations originated in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD?

For several reasons, I think the answer to this question is No. One reason lies in the structure of the text. Although we find both systems in a single text in Bambergers translation, this text is comprised of two books which were written at different times for different purposes. The first book, Praktikos, describes the evil thoughts. The enneagram-like symbol is described in an introductory letter to the the second book, Chapters on Prayer. As the purification and codification of Christian thought was in progress during Evagrius entire lifetime, he was no doubt aware of the heretical nature of Pythagorean philosophy and was, therefore, prudent to restrict his number symbolism to an introductory dedication. The proto-enneagram and the evil thoughts are not combined in his work.

A second reason to conclude Evagrius considered his psychology separate from the symbolic cosmology is that in his 3 interpretations of the number 153, none include the number 8, his number of evil thoughts. In other words, the two systems dont coincide numerically. His hexagon plus triad would be a 3, 6 or 9-term system and he does not adjust the number of his evil thoughts to fit.

A third reason to believe that to Evagrius these 2 systems were disparate is that as a contemplative, Evagrius would understand the passions to be obstacles to gnosis of the divine. That is, the passions would not participate in or in any sense determine the logos or sacred order of the cosmos but would be obstacles to its perception. The purpose of the contemplative life is to purify or eliminate obscurations to gnosis.

4. Was Gurdjieff influenced by Evagrius Ponticus?Gurdjieff, a Greek Armenian, was raised in the border area between Armenia and Georgia where, to this day, Evagrius, a Greek native of Georgia, is accorded great honor. The teachings of Evagrius and the Desert Fathers were an intrinsic part of the Eastern Orthodox culture and would have certainly influenced Gurdjieff during his childhood and early intellectual development.

Gurdjieff, who described himself as a Pythagorean Greek and Gnostic Christian, is infamous for having gone to great lengths not to divulge the sources of his teachings to even his closest pupils. This has given rise to much speculation about the sources of Gurdjieffs teachings. J.G. Bennett recounts Gurdjieffs ongoing rewriting of his magnum opus, All and Everything, each time with increasing obscurity. Gurdjieff explained this as burying the dog deeper. Bennett recounts, When people corrected him and said that he surely meant bury the bone deeper, he would turn on them and say it is not bones but the dog that you have to find. (J.G. Bennett, Making a New World, p. 274)

Yet, in the teaching of the Desert Fathers of the 4th century students of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky will recognize a root source for many of the inner exercises of the Fourth Way. Mt. Athos, a Russian Orthodox monastery in Greece where the esoteric Christian tradition of the Desert Fathers was practiced in the early twentieth century is cited by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous. Gerald Palmer who translated The Philokalia was a student of Ouspensky. E. Kadloubovsky, who also translated writings of the Desert Fathers, was Ouspenskys secretary from the mid-1930s until Ouspenskys death in 1947. Both J.G. Bennett and P.D. Ouspensky used The Philokalia as a primary spiritual text in their work with students. The teaching of Evagrius Ponticus and the Desert Fathers must be considered as a major source of the Gurdjieff Work, which Gurdjieff himself called esoteric Christianity.

ConclusionIn the 4th century writing of Evagrius Ponticus we find a highly developed contemplative psychology which has become all but extinct in the West. We also find a Pythagorean interpretation of an important Biblical symbolic number. Fragments of both the psychology and symbolism are found in the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. As these ideas were part of the Hellenistic warp of the fabric of Christian and Islamic religions, we find striking similarities between early Christian thought and the later Sufi spirituality and cosmology.

In our search for ancient wisdom it is important to keep in mind our natural tendency to reinterpret what we find through our own preconceptions, according to our own cultural and historic context. In this way, symbols of other cultures and contexts become invested with our own meaning and in the process become a mirror which reflects our own contemporary interests. The writings of Evagrius and the Desert Fathers, now 1600 years old, are an inspiration to seekers in a technologically bright but spiritually dark age, to open our hearts and minds to the greater possibilities that lie in each of us. __________Lynn Quirolo is a 1972 graduate of J.G. Bennetts International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne, England. Since 1976 she has occasionally taught the Enneagram. __________ Enneagram Monthly, Issue 14 & 15, April & May 1996

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Pythagoras, Gurdjieff and the Enneagram - Enneagram Monthly