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Over time, animals adapt to the foods they regularly consume.  This is how archaeologists can, for example, determine that Triceratops was an herbivore and Tyrannosaurus was a carnivore just by looking at the structure of the skeleton.  Adaptations to diet extend beyond skeletal structure, into digestion, metabolism, the brain, musculature, and other aspects of physical function.  What is our evolutionary history with meat? Human Evolutionary History with Meat: 200 to 2.6 Million Years Ago Mammals evolved from ancestral "mammal-like reptiles" ( therapsids , then cynodonts) approximately 220 million years ago (Richard Klein.  The Human Career. 2009).  Roughly 100 million years ago, placental mammals emerged.  The earliest placental mammals are thought to have been nocturnal shrew-like beasts that subsisted primarily on insects, similar to modern shrews and moles.  Mammalian teeth continued to show features specialized for insect consumption until the rise of the primates. 65...

A friend wrote to me a few months ago saying that after reading the teachings of Sri Ramana and Nisargadatta he was confused about whether the ‘I’ we should investigate in ātma-vicāra (self-investigation) is the ego (the jīvātman or finite individual self) or our real self (the ātman or infinite self), and he asked whether there is any difference between their respective teachings, and whether perhaps Sri Ramana refers to the jīvātman whereas Nisargadatta refers to the ātman . The following is adapted from the reply I wrote to him: Your comment that you are a little confused about the ‘I’ referred to in ātma-vicāra suggests that there could be more than one ‘I’, which is obviously not the case. As we each know from our own experience, and as Sri Ramana repeatedly emphasised (for example, in verses 21 and 33 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu : ‘தான் ஒன்றால்’ ( tāṉ oṉḏṟāl ), ‘since oneself is one’, and ‘தனை விடயம் ஆக்க இரு தான் உண்டோ? ஒன்று ஆய் அனைவர் அனுபூதி உண்மை ஆல்’ ( taṉai viḍayam ākka iru tāṉ...

 This is how Matthew Manning described this series of Polaroid photos taken during his stay with Professor George Owen and his wife in autumn 1977: "The first image . . . is a perfectly normal shot of me looking into the camera lens.  In the second shot mistiness is forming around me as I begin to meditate and feel tingling in my hands.  By frame four white concentric rings of light have virtually obscured everything in the room, including me."     One Foot in the Stars (1999) is the autobiography of Matthew Manning, who wrote the book with Tessa Rose.  Matthew's account of incidents encompassing 'unexplained phenomena' reflect occurrences in the life of an individual person that form patterns of experience making perceptible a Force interacting with living creatures.  This Force encompasses a shared subconscious and Superconscious Mind.   In Matthew's life, the sequence of unexplained phenomena that began with 'poltergeist events' enco...

This week's lucky "winner"... the pumpkin spice latte!! Read more »

Introduction At Dr. McDougall's Advanced Study Weekend, I had the opportunity to hear a number of researchers and advocates make the case for a "plant-based diet", which is a diet containing little or no animal foods.  Many of them voiced the opinion that animal foods contribute substantially to the primary killers in the US, such as heart disease and cancer.  Some of the evidence they presented was provocative and compelling, so it stimulated me to take a deeper look and come to my own conclusions. No matter what the health implications of meat eating turn out to be, I respect vegetarians and vegans.  Most of them are conscientious, responsible people who make daily personal sacrifices to try to make the world a better place for all of us. My Experience with Vegetarian and Vegan Diets Read more »

In one of my earlier articles, Ātma-vicāra : stress and other related issues , I wrote: You also ask: ‘when you are doing self-inquiry should your concentration be so good that you are not even aware of what’s going on around you, like the ceiling fan running, a baby crying etc. or is it OK if you are aware of the background noises like that?’ Yes, ideally you should not be aware of anything other than ‘I’. For example, if you were absorbed in reading a book that really interests you, you would not notice the sound of a fan or any other background noises, and if you did notice some sound such as a baby crying, that would mean that your attention had been distracted away from the book. Likewise, if you are absorbed in experiencing only ‘I’, you will not notice anything else, and if you do notice anything else, that means that your attention has been distracted away from ‘I’, so you should try to bring it back to ‘I’ alone. Referring to this, a friend wrote to me in June saying: In a rec...

  An account of Matthew Manning's experimentation with EVP ('Electronic Voice Phenomena') is included in The Link (1974).     Soon after my 1995 trip to Oklahoma to investigate "America's Talking Poltergeist" I discovered that unattributed sounds and 'spirit messages' were audible while listening to the microcassette recordings of my interviews with members of the Oklahoma family.  At that time, I wasn't aware that these manifestations had a history and had been given a categorical name in the annals of 'unexplained phenomena.' I first learned about 'EVP' in brief Internet articles.  The first books to chronicle the phenomena are two books by Freidrich Jürgenson: Rösterna från Rymden (Swedish/Voices from Space 1964) and Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen: Praktische Kontaktherstellung mit dem Jenseits (German 1981) with an English edition Voice Transmissions With The Deceased  (2001) translated by Tom Wingert and George Wynne; an...

A new study adds to the evidence that the prevalence of type 2 diabetes is rapidly increasing in the US, and our national weight problem is largely to blame. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) currently estimates that a jaw-dropping 33 percent of US men, and 39 percent of US women, will develop diabetes at some point in their lives ( 1 ).  Roughly one out of three people in this country will develop diabetes, and those who don't manage it effectively will suffer debilitating health consequences.  Has the risk of developing diabetes always been so high, and if not, why is it increasing? In the same issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine as the low-carb vs. low-fat study, appears another study that aims to partially address this question ( 2 ). Read more »

A friend wrote to me recently saying, ‘My humble opinion with total respect: far far too many words. Can you indicate where in your web page is your essential succinct truth’, to which I replied trying to give a simple summary of the essential teachings of Sri Ramana as follows: You are probably right: far too many words. Sri Ramana’s teachings are actually very simple, and can therefore be expressed in just a few words, but our minds are complicated, so sometimes many words are necessary in order to unravel all our complex beliefs and ideas and to arrive at the simple core: ‘I am’. ‘I’ is the core of our experience (since whatever we experience is experienced only by ‘I’), and is also the core of his teachings. Everything that we experience could be an illusion, and everything that we believe could be mistaken, so it is necessary for us to doubt everything, but the only thing we cannot reasonably doubt is ‘I am’, because in order to experience anything, to believe anything or to doubt...

 There are detailed case study books about some famous so-called 'talking poltergeist' cases: the 'Bell Witch' case, the Mary Jobson case, the Isle of Man 'Gef' case, and the 'Enfield Poltergeist'; while many details of the contemporary Centrahoma case are included in  Testament  (1997).  In each case, the manifestations show responses to the actions and mentality of the human observers.   Many cases of 'unexplained phenomena' encompass incidents similar to those found in poltergeist case studies — consider for example some of the events chronicled in Andrija Puharich's case study Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller (1974).  Using the term 'poltergeist' to differentiate cases from mediumship and Direct Voice phenomena categorizations of 'unexplained phenomena' may be most appropriate as a historical frame of reference upon understanding a context and the significance of the phenomena , the topic of the preceding...