my article

This week's lucky "winner"...  Kirkland Signature Cashew Clusters!!      WHS reader Brad Dieter mentioned these on Facebook the other day: Nutrition tip of the day. Do not buy Cashew Clusters from Costco. You will eat an entire bag in one fell swoop. Sweet, salty, crunchy, and calorie dense, the perfect storm in Stephan Guyenet's model of overeating. I have n=1 data as proof. n=1 quickly turned into n=6 as other people chimed in, including myself.  I can attest to the fact that Cashew Clusters are like crack.  Here's more evidence from their  Amazon reviews : " Addiction with less guilt!"  These things are SO freaking good!!!... I'm eating some right now and I am having trouble keeping my hand out of the bag long enough to write this review! "Delicious".  I gave this as a gift to my girl friend... She loved it ! Heard there wasn't much sugar either. Seems the nuts were crispy and the clusters were very addicting , in a nice way. I...

Here is a photo of all visible food in my kitchen:     Along the back wall, we have glass containers of raw nuts, unsalted roasted nuts, grains, and legumes.  It's easy and attractive to organize your dry foods using inexpensive  2 quart Ball jars .  They also have the advantage of being moth-proof.  On the left, we have fresh fruit and a few onions.  On the far left in the background is our hand-cranked conical burr grinder, for occasional coffee ( Skerton ).   If I walk into my kitchen between meals, the only food available to eat without doing any cooking or reheating is unsalted nuts and fresh fruit.  There is no other snack food in the kitchen.  No chips, cookies, bars, popcorn, snack mix, candy, or anything else that's tempting and easy to grab and devour.    When it's mealtime, we eat good home-cooked food.  When it isn't mealtime, we don't have anything available that w...

Each of the four Vēdas contains a mahāvākya or ‘great saying’ that asserts that ‘I’ is brahman , the one infinite and absolute reality. The mahāvākya of the Ṛg Vēda is ‘ prajñānaṁ brahma ’, which means ‘pure consciousness is brahman ’ ( Aitarēya Upaniṣad 3.3); that of the Yajur Vēda is ‘ ahaṁ brahmāsmi ’, which means ‘I am brahman ’ ( Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10); that of the Sāma Vēda is ‘ tat tvam asi ’, which means ‘it [ brahman ] you are’ ( Chāndōgya Upaniṣad 6.8.7); and that of the Atharva Vēda is ‘ ayaṁ ātmā brahma ’, which means ‘this self is brahman ’ ( Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad 2). For hundreds of years a widely prevalent belief among those who have studied advaita vēdānta has been that meditating on these mahāvākyas , particularly ahaṁ brahmāsmi (I am brahman ), or on words that convey the same meaning, such as sōham (he is I), is the means by which we can experience brahman . However Sri Ramana repudiated this mistaken belief, and explained that when these mahāvākyas ass...

This photo circa 1922 is from Edgar Cayce's Photographic Legacy (1978) compiled by David M. Leary.  David Kahn was inside his new Marmon touring sedan as Edgar Cayce kept his foot on the running board near San Saba, Texas.  The photo was taken by Hugh Lynn Cayce.     David Kahn (1893-1968) was in his mid-seventies when he worked on chronicling a memoir of his experiences with Edgar Cayce, resulting with My Life with Edgar Cayce (1970) by David E. Kahn as told to Will Oursler.  Kahn's wife Lucille also participated in a series of interviews for the book.  Will Oursler commented in the Preface: Kahn was closer to Edgar Cayce and his family, over a longer span of years, than any other human being.  He personally brought many individuals to Cayce for readings; he himself helped to take down hundreds of readings in the early days.  He knew Cayce as friend and fellow adventurer across the Texas prairies and oil fields—and...

  The first article in the January 1973 issue of The A.R.E. Journal is "The Second Coming" by Cora Scott.  The A.R.E. Journal was published by the organization founded by Edgar Cayce in 1931, the Association for Research and Enlightenment.  Some years ago, I was able to obtain a collection of issues of The A.R.E. Journal and noticed Scott's analysis of "The Second Coming" among them.  The article offers an example of how a researcher of the Edgar Cayce channeled readings interpreted the transcendental communication pertaining to the Second Coming.  The readings are also the topic of the preceding  blog article .  Here is the beginning of Cora Scott's article "The Second Coming." In 1944, Edgar Cayce gave the following reading for a fifty-three-year-old woman: For He will one day come again, and thou shalt see Him as He is, even as thou has seen in thy early sojourns the glory of the day of the triumphal entry and the da...

In the second sūtra (aphorism) of his Yōga Sūtra Patanjali famously defines yōga as follows: योगश्चित्तवृत्तिनिरोधः yōgaś-citta-vṛtti-nirōdhaḥ . Yōga is nirōdha [obstruction, stopping, restraint, constraint, confinement, control, suppression or destruction] of citta-vṛtti [mental modification or thought]. Citta means mind, and vṛtti is a noun derived from the verb vṛt , which means to turn, revolve, roll, move about, act, happen or occur, so whatever happens in the mind is a citta-vṛtti . In other words, citta-vṛtti means any type of thought, mental activity, mental modification or change that takes place in the mind, and encompasses all mental states, including (according to the sixth sūtra ) even nidrā or deep sleep (though this view that sleep is a vṛtti or mental modification does not accord with Sri Ramana’s view of it, which is that it is a state that is devoid of mind). Therefore citta-vṛtti-nirōdha (or chitta-vritti-nirodha as it is often imprecisely transcribed in...