London city is alive....

I've just returned from a day in the centre of London. I find people watching so fascinating. If you believe like I do in re-incarnation then at some time or another I have had each of their lives and they have had mine. This is just awesome and requires a huge stretch of the imagination to see how it might be possible. One result of this kind of thinking is that I feel an automatic connection with people. I see the soul and not the personality. As the soul is one, then everyone I see is one. I don't always remember feeling like this. I knew the theory that there is no separation but to realize it as more than a theory is something that happens at a bodily level.

I went to see the film 'The Painted Veil' with a friend. The story-line was pretty predictable but the scenery was spectacular. Filmed in China the landscape which was shown was so awesome and left me so humble. The magnificent of nature compared to the littleness of me. The beauty of memory is that once a moving scene is captured in memory it can always be re-discovered by bringing it up in the memory. And the amazing thing is that the brain is not clever enough to tell the difference between a picture in the imagination and a real picture. I remember when I saw the MRI scans to demonstrate this. The same areas of the brain lit up when I imagined someone I knew as did when that person was standing in front of me. This explains why coaches make athletes run the race in their mind. The brain cannot distinguish between fact and fantasy. I think this lies at the root of positive thinking. So what is that tells me the difference between my imagination and reality. This is my mind which is separate to the brain. Some psychologists have said that the mind is 10% of the brain but I consider brain and mind to be separate.

I felt so good this morning after the acupuncture I had yesterday. I noticed that the pictures that were displayed on the walls of the gym seemed to have brighter, sharper colours. I am sure that they were the same pictures that were there last week but I don't remember noticing them as beautiful as they were today. Or even noticing them at all.

For many years I was quite dismissive of such treatments like acupuncture. I thought that everything was in and resulted from, the mind. If the mind is calm the body will be healthy. What I have learned from my acupuncture treatments is that the body has an intelligence of its own. Energy gets blocked in the body. Why it gets blocked is not important. Blocked energy restricts the blood flow. Intervening, whether that is with acupuncture of some other body therapy frees up the blocked energy and as a result perception is sharpened. So now I don't attribute everything to the mind. It is a partnership with both requiring equal attention.

I also found my group cycling class was more effective. I had loads of energy and that is in spite of not going to bed until late and getting up early.

Today I had to plan my advanced speech for Toastmasters for Tuesday night. It is the first speech from the advanced communication manual. My objective is to re-tell an old folk tale. I have decided to tell the story of Beauty and the Beast. This appeals to me because it is a story with a moral that things are not what they seem. This fits with my spiritual thinking and it's a nice story. I found a number of versions of the story on the internet so I can make it nice and long. I am looking forward to giving it because I can tell a good story.....