Day 329

Thoughts: Food for thought!

Some objective information about other occupants on earth: and how similar we are to insects and animals - like a horse who will eat themselves to death given the chance, there are also people on this planet who eat themselves to death.

-The average caterpillar has 2000 muscles. The average human has 700.

-The queen of a termite colony may lay 6,000 to 7,000 eggs per day, and may live 15 to 50 years.

-After eating, a housefly regurgitates its food and then eats it again!

-Queen bees lay over 1,000 eggs a day; queen termites lay over 30,000 eggs a day.

-About 80% of the Earth’s animals are insects!

-There are grasshoppers that can draw blood with a kick.

-A dragonfly has a lifespan of exactly 24 hours.

-Each year, insects eat 1/3 of the Earth’s food crop.

-Dragonflies can fly 36 miles (58k) an hour.

-For more than 3,000 years, Carpenter ants have been used to close wounds in India, Asia and South America.

-There is only one insect that can turn its head -- the praying mantis.

-Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can't find any food.

-A cockroach will live nine days without it’s head before it starves to death.

-Butterflies use their feet to taste things.

-Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.

-The average garden variety caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.

-Cockroaches can survive underwater for up to 15 minutes.

-Spiders eat only prey they have killed themselves



There is a theory that we have 3 brains...

Hunger comes from the most basic parts of our brain, but our awareness of it is controlled by the newest part.

Actually, you already know this from your experience: for example, remember a time when you really wanted to do something, but you knew you shouldn't? The most illogical or irrational "wants" we have probably derive from older parts of our brain, while the understanding of smart versus dumb choices comes from the newest part.

The three brain theory is a theory created in order to realize why we do the things we do, even though they often seem completely illogical at times. The premise of the theory is that human brains have not simply evolved to the next level from our animal ancestors, but instead simply built more evolved brains on top of each other.

The first brain is the physical brain, this is essentially the fight or flight response found in everything from ants to lizards to humans, basically your most basic core survival mechanisms: surviving and replicating.



The second brain is the emotional brain, it is found in most mammals and allows us to emotionally connect to things and do more than simply having fight or flight responses. The emotional brain is found in everything from cats and dogs to other larger brained mammals such as cows and horses. Of course these brains are common and illogical, most of us hardly even know how they work and how they make us to stupid illogical things from time to time.



The third brain is the brain that only humans on this planet completely have (apes and our close ancestors have very small versions) and is what really separates us from the animals, it is the logical brain. The logical brain is the most understood brain as it is often thought of as the most important and does most of our thinking. However what most people don't know is that the other 2 brains are actually more powerful and a lot of the time make our decisions for us rather than the logical brain, then simply through the process of backwards rationalization they make us feel as if we had made a logical decision.



Gurdjieff’s basic idea is that we have three brains, he called them. I think “brains” was, you know, a good scientific-sounding word to pass muster in those times, but we can call it three processes if we don’t want to physiologize it and run down the physiological correlates of it.

So let’s say you’ve got three distinctive processes. The analogy I like is that each one of us is a ruler, and we have three advisers who give us advice about what’s happening in the kingdom and how to do something about it.

But, according to Gurdjieff, practically all human beings’ development was warped such that they basically only really listen to one adviser, and they didn’t pay much attention to the other two advisers. The one adviser might be very smart, very glib, but this was a person who saw things through their particular biases. The other two advisers, because they’d been neglected and ignored, and often actively suppressed, tended not to be heard or had gotten kind of neurotic about their views.

Now ideally, all three of these processes are well developed. They’ve been nourished. They’ve been educated. They’ve been experimented with to know how to use them best. So we’re all great rulers, because we have three smart advisers giving us three different perspectives on every situation, from which we then make some kind of final decision.

But the problem that Gurdjieff said is, again, that one of these advisers has risen to prominence, and that’s the only one we listen to. Some people live life through their emotions. What they feel is 99% of what matters in a situation, and they don’t give it much verbal thought, and they don’t pay much attention to their body.

In G.I. Gurdjieff's Fourth Way teaching, also known as The Work, centers or brains refer to separate apparatuses within a being that dictate its specific functions. There are three main centers: intellectual, emotional, and moving. These three centers in the human body are analogous to a three story factory: the intellectual center being the top story, the emotional center being the middle story, and the moving center being the bottom story. The moving center, or the bottom story is further divided into three separate functions: sex, instinctive, and motor.

Gurdjieff classified plants as having one brain, animals two and humans three brains. In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff greatly expanded his theory of humans as "three brained beings".

In the book The Fourth Way, Ouspensky refers to the "center of gravity" as being a center which different people primarily operate from (intellectuals, artists, and sports enthusiasts, for example, might represent each of these centers).

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_%28Fourth_Way%29
http://scienceray.com/biology/violent-death-in-the-insect-world-stunning-photography/#ixzz11PBvSN6l
http://insectinterest.blogspot.com/
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/archives/385
http://www.psycheducation.org/emotion/triune%20brain.htm
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Three-Brain-Theory&id=719704

Quotes: “Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.” – Epicurus

What I Ate Today:

Meal 1: A nectarine.

Meal 2: A lemon and ginger tea. Boiled water, squeezes of lemon and chunks of ginger :)

Meal 3: Another nectarine.

Meal 4: A avocado.

Meal 5: More lemon and ginger tea with Chocolate Peanut Butter Balls and Almond Vanilla Balls.



Meal 6: Brazilian Black Beans. Created with bay leaves, dried black beans, white onion, garlic cloves, parsley, salt and pepper, olive oil, paprika and rice!



Recipe: Peanut Butter Balls, Almond Vanilla Balls and Brazilian Black Beans are available free on The Earth Diet website www.TheEarthDiet.Org

Exercise: Practicing peace, stillness and presence. I wanted to be in the state of love and grace today so made a conscious choice to re-choose this state over and over again all day :)

36 days to go!!!