Meditative Seat Cushion

Friends,

Fall is the time to buy a meditative cushion that you can take with you when you meditate outside. You can buy a clip and attach it to your belt loop. You can also use the cushion when you meditate in the house.

Go to a large box store or a sporting goods store such as Dicks and ask for a Sportsman's Cushion. They usually are colored camo and are priced $5 to $10. I have a link to Amazon below as well.

I would be a flexible one that retains your body heat and is plasticized so it is not affected by rain.

Here are a few examples:

 http://www.amazon.com/Allen-Company-Nylon-Thermo-Seat/dp/B003TWUXFI

 
 http://www.cheaperthandirt.com/product/6-2012286

 http://www.eders.com/products/allen-thermo-seat-brkup.html

There are many other types:

http://www.tractorsupply.com/outdoor-living/hunting-fishing/sportsman-series-camo-seat-cushion-1031102http://www.tractorsupply.com/outdoor-living/hunting-fishing/sportsman-series-camo-seat-cushion-1031102

 http://www.walmart.com/ip/Mossy-Oak-Camo-Foam-Cushion/15435980

 http://www.walmart.com/ip/Realtree-Camo-Seat/21501729

 madis senner
 www.motherearthprayers.org

Swami Vivekananda’s cottage in the Thousand Islands:

Friends,

I just posted this YouTube Video on Swami Vivekananda’s cottage in the Thousand Islands:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cm97x5CE6U&feature=youtu.be

The cottage will be open for a few more weeks this summer and I suggest you go visit and participate in the satsang at 5PM.

Madis

www.motherearthprayers.org

SWami Vivekananda's Thousand Island Cottage Is Open for the Summer

Friends,

For those that meditate, do yoga and or are drawn to Hinduism (Vedanta in particular) one of the great things to do over the summer is to visit Swami Vivekananda’s cottage on Wellsley Island in the Thousand Islands. He was a devotee of Sri Ramakrishna and is credited for introducing Eastern religions to the west.

They have a satsang each day around 4 or 4:30 where the sing and chant followed by a meditation. Lovely. Make sure to bring a meditation cushion. Call in advance for the time. If you want to go sor the satsang I suggest not going when a large group from metro NYC will be there.

Madis Senner
www.motherearthprayers.org

Here is my review of Swami Vivekananda’s cottage: http://www.jubileeinitiative.org/sacredvivekananda.html

Article in the Thousand Islands Magazine:. http://www.thousandislandslife.com/BackIssues/Archive/tabid/393/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/199/Swami-Vivekananda.aspx

Here are the details for the event being held the weekend of July

http://india.nydailynews.com/politicsarticle/d20a6b5c5379ce03462a6a6c3628065e/thousand-island-park-celebrates-swami-vivekananda
Monday, July 9, 2012
· NYDailyNews.com /
New York Daily News
Thousand Island Park celebrates Swami Vivekananda
By Chris Brock Monday, July 9th 2012, 11:57 AM
July 09--THOUSAND ISLAND PARK -- Wellesley Island will play a role in a yearlong commemoration noting the 150th birthday of a noted religious figure of India with concerts, a lecture and an interfaith service here this month.
Swami Vivekananda's teachings are known to millions worldwide and his name is a household word in his native India. That country's greatest leaders of the 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, paid homage to him for the inspiration that his life and work had on their patriotism.
His connection to the north country began in Chicago.
In 1893, Swami Vivekananda, a 30-year-old monk from Calcutta, took the podium at the World's Parliament of Religions, an interfaith gathering in Chicago, and declared the faith he followed emphasized toleration and accepted all religions as true as he spread the word of his mentor, Sri Ramakrishna.
Two years later, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) brought his message to Wellesley Island at the invitation of one of his students, Oswego native M. Elizabeth Dutcher. She invited the swami to rest from his labors at her cottage on a secluded hill behind the Thousand Island Park tabernacle.
The cottage he stayed at is now called Vivekananda Cottage, run by the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York, an accredited branch of the Ramakrishna Order of India. The building was rediscovered and restored by the center in 1947.
The Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center bases its teachings on the "system of Vedanta," which combines both the religion and philosophy of the Hindus.
The government of India has established a national committee on the commemoration of the 150th birthday of Swami Vivekananda, under the chairmanship of prime minister Manmohan Singh. Events are being held throughout India.
This year and next, the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York will hold a series of events in observance of the swami's birthday, beginning this month at the Wellesley Island retreat. Events will continue in New York City in November, February and April.
All events at the open-air Thousand Island Park tabernacle are free and open to the public. They are:
8 p.m. July 27: Concert by Cantabile Choirs of Kingston, Ontario. The organization's men's and women's choruses will perform. Last year, both traveled to England and Scotland.
The concert will feature classics, folk songs, Celtic music, contemporary tunes and Broadway hits.
3 p.m. July 28: A lecture and discussion on J.D. Salinger at Thousand Island Park by Kenneth Slawenski, author of "J.D. Salinger, A Life."
Mr. Slawenski, of New Jersey, is an expert on Mr. Salinger, the author of the classic novel "The Catcher in the Rye." Mr. Salinger was closely associated with Swami Nikhilananda and the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center. In the 1950s he attended summer retreats held at Vivekananda Cottage at Thousand Island Park.
Mr. Slawenski will discuss the life of Mr. Salinger, his association with the park and the influence the teachings of Vedanta had upon his writings.
8 p.m. July 28: Performance by sitar maestro Kartik Seshadri with Vineet Vyas on tabla (percussion).
As a sitarist, Mr. Seshadri attracted widespread attention when he began performing full-length solos at the age of 6 in India. This past March, his latest album, "Sublime Ragas," was selected by Songlines magazine for its "Top of the World" chart.
As an educator, Mr. Seshadri heads one of the largest programs of Indian classical music in America at the University of California, San Diego.
Noon, July 29: The interfaith service, "The Spiritual Unity of Mankind."
This service will feature Swami Yuktatmananda, spiritual leader of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York; the Rev. James Brown, minister emeritus, Market Square Presbyterian Church, Harrisburg, Pa.; Mr. Slawenski; Clayton Butler, author of "Thousand Island Park: The Story of an American Eden"; and musical offerings by the choirs of the Thousand Island Park Tabernacle and the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center.
Read more: http://india.nydailynews.com/politicsarticle/d20a6b5c5379ce03462a6a6c3628065e/thousand-island-park-celebrates-swami-vivekananda#ixzz20BEjVHEZ

Hedges--America's Decline and Separation from Nature and Each other.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_the_asylum_20120430/?ln



Welcome to the Asylum
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_the_asylum_20120430/
Posted on Apr 30, 2012
By Chris Hedges
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation. Descartes argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes, became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”
The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster” Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.
The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”
All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.
Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together.
AP/Mahesh Kumar A.
People collect scraps from a garbage dump in Hyderabad, India.

Inflammation, Illness & Mother Earth

http://wisdom-magazine.com/Article.aspx/2620/


Inflammation, Illness & Mother Earth
by Madis Senner
Over the last decade the medical world has begun to realize that inflammation is behind many chronic diseases from heart disease, to cancer to diabetes. In other words chronic inflammation contributes to or is the cause of many of the diseases that we suffer from. A plethora of books and prescriptions have come out with recommendations on which foods to eat and to avoid, which supplements to take and what lifestyle changes to undertake to reduce our risks for getting chronic inflammation. One preventative not garnering much attention is the therapeutic affects of Mother Earth’s geomagnetic field. Research has shown that being connected to Mother Earth can help reduce and even eliminate inflammation and in doing so provide relief and even cure certain chronic diseases. .
Inflammation
Inflammation is our body’s immune system response to deal with harmful stimuli and to help heal and repair tissue. Some of the characteristics of inflammation are capillary enlargement, the accumulation of white blood cells in the injured area, redness, localized swelling and a partial reduction in cell production.
Inflammation is a natural and beneficial response. The problem with inflammation is when it becomes chronic and does not go away. One of the markers for inflammation is C-reactive protein (CRP) in the blood. Medical research has found that high levels of CRP are associated with many chronic illnesses.
Nancy Appleton, Ph.D, in her book Stopping Inflammation, Relieving the Cause of Degenerative Disease provides an extensive list of the illnesses caused by or associated with inflammation. Alzheimer’s Disease, Blood Sugar Problems/Diabetes, Cancer, Candida Albicans, Canker Sores and Mouth Ulcers, Cystic Fibrosis, Epilepsy, Food Addictions and Eating Disorders, Headaches (Cluster, Migraine, Sinus & Tension) Heartburn, Heart Disease including Stroke, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Kidney Disease, Obesity, Parkinson’s Disease, Periodontal Disease, Pregnancy and Childhood Diseases, Respiratory Diseases (Asthma, Chronic Bronchitis, Emphysema), Rheumatic Diseases (Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, Lupus.)
Such an extensive list seems almost unfathomable, but Appleton says “I believe that when all the research is in, inflammation will be the root of all diseases.” She is not alone, William Meggs, M.D., Ph.D. says that inflammation may turn out to be the elusive Holy Grail of medicine—the single phenomenon that holds the key to sickness and health.
Mother Earth to the Rescue
If inflammation is the root cause of illnesses then dealing with it becomes critical. Most books on treating inflammation provide lifestyle suggestions, dietary recommendations and a list of supplements. Only one book that I know of places the cause of inflammation squarely on our disconnect from Mother Earth; Earthing, The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?, by Clinton Ober, Stephen Sinatra (M.D.) and Martin Zucker.
The authors feel that one of the factors missing in the cause of inflammation is “the lost connection to our planet’s natural flow of surface electrical energy and the electron deficiency in our bodies that this creates. Our investigations strongly suggest the incidence of soaring chronic diseases during our lifetimes has occurred during a period in which more and more people have become increasingly disconnected from the Earth.”
They have found that walking barefoot or employing one of their earthing pads with a wire that attaches to the earth can help reestablish a good connection to Mother Earth and bring about improvement and even eliminate chronic diseases. They cite several successes.
They believe that by grounding the body to the earth electrons from the geomagnetic field flow into the body and vice versa. This allows the body to maintain the same negative charge electrical potential as Mother Earth. They hypothesize that “this flow of free electrons into the body is the mechanism by which inflammation is brought down.”
The authors point out that positively charged free radicals are at the core of inflammation, tissue destruction and disease. “Big negative-charged Earth overwhelms little, positive-charged free radicals.”
One of the other benefits of grounding is that it “powerfully reduces electromagnetic fields (EMF’s) on the body.”
Energy Medicine
To anyone that practices energy medicine (Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Body Talk, etc.) or has experienced such healings is well aware of the healing power of Mother Earth. When hands on healers do their work one of the things that they are doing is pulling energy into you from Mother Earth. (To see a demonstration go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJaYtjBEaVM&feature=channel.)
We are beings of energy and consciousness. Our energy body is behind our physical body and its source of energy is Mother Earth and her geomagnetic field. When we are disconnected from her we are not being properly nourished.
Getting connected may not be an easy feat. The earth’s magnetic field has been weakening for 2,000 years. You may be living in an area with geopathic stress. Your energy body may also not be properly processing, or at least not efficiently processing Mother Earth’s energy. Technology from cell phones to computers ravages Mother Earth and her field and could be doing serous damage to your energy body. So getting connected is a little more complicated.
Get Healthy, Reconnect
Following the recommendations of the Earthing group, walking barefoot on the earth or employing an earthing pad may or may not work for you. Or you may find it too cumbersome.
I would suggest personally reconnecting with Mother Earth by developing a relationship with her; as the Law of Attraction teaches we bring into our life what we think about. This involves a mind change and effort. The goal is to gain sentience of her. When you can feel her you will be tapping into her 24/7. You will also be increasing the quantity and quality of what you are absorbing.
If you are serious about gaining sentience of Mother you need to get rid of your cell phones and other digital devices and seriously reduce technology in your life overall. Technology kills.
You also need to begin to refocus your life towards Mother Earth. Honor her, give thanks to her. Begin to see her and not the accoutrements of our modern world. This is the key.
How much you will benefit from reconnecting with Mother Earth will depend upon a variety of factors, most of all your effort and sincerity.
Make rekindling your relationship with Mother Earth a quest. Good things are sure to follow.
Some Suggested Further Reading:
Reconnecting with Nature, by Dr. Michael Cohen
The Way Home, Making Heaven on Earth by Madis Senner. Has a section on Mother Earth.
www.motherearthprayers.org
References
Duke Johnson, MD; The Optimal Health Revolution, Benbella Books, Dallas, Texas, 2008
Nancy Appleton, Ph.D, Stopping Inflammation, Relieving the Cause of Degenerative Disease, SquareOne Publishers, Garden City Park, NY, 2005
Earthing, The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?, Basic Health Publications, Laguna Beach, California, 2010
Madis Senner is author of The Way, Home Making Heaven on Earth. He maintains a website www.motherearthprayers.org that details Mother Earth’s cosmology and contains a listing of sacred sites in upstate NY where he believes her soul resides. He is working on a book about Vortices and Spirals.
Article Archives This Month's Articles Click Here for more articles by Madis Senner

Friends,

I have started a web page Mother Earth Prayers’ Health Pantry http://www.jubileeinitiative.org/health.html containing articles about Mother Earth’s affect upon our health.

Here is the first article:

Amish Farm Kids Have Lower Asthma, Allergy Risk: Study The Study found that farm children particularly Amish children had a much lower rate of asthma and allergies. Scientists hypothesized that the ‘Hygiene Hypothesis,” that our too clean environment and lack of exposure to a variety of germs at an early age was the reason for lower rates of asthma and allergies among Amish children, who do not recieve anitbiotics and are exposed to farm animals. No consideration was given to the fact that farm kids are more connected to Mother Earth and Amish children have a much lower exposure to technology (computers, cell phones, electronics...) which wreaks havoc on Mother Earth and disconnect us from her.
Are You Connected To Her?
Madis Senner
www.motherearthprayers.org

HIppocrates on Mother Earth

“Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are developed from small deadly sins against nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illness will suddenly appear.”
Hippocrates

talk--New Consciousness Rising

A New Consciousness Rising

Cazenovia Library http://www.cazenoviapubliclibrary.org/ Wed March 7th 7PM

Liverpool Library http://www.lpl.org/ Thursday March 15th 7PM

Rochester, Lori’s http://lorisnatural.com/ Wed. March 21st 7PM


A New Consciousness Rising—the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Earth Changes: 2012 indicate that significant changes are ahead for the world. Join faith based activist and author Madis Senner for a talk about these changes and why he feels that our focus needs to be on how we can we can facilitate them. He will talk about his Earth Keepers program and our dynamic relationship with Mother Earth. He will also be leading his Heaven on Earth meditation that he calls a collective thought form, an archetype, which can help bring about a more peaceful world.

Madis Senner is a former global money manager turned faith based activist. He is author of The Way Home—Making Heaven on Earth and has written for the NY Times, Barrons, Counterpunch, Wisdom http://wisdom-magazine.com/ArticleArchives.aspx?author=Madis+Senner and host of other progressive and spiritual magazines. He maintains a website on Mother Earth www.motherearthprayers.org .

Northern Lights

There is a possibility that we may be able to see the northern lights tonight

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/geomagnetic-storm-to-enhance-n-1/60519

Peacemakers’ Sanctuary--Where Prayers are Answered

I took a walk on the west shore trail of Onondaga Lake on New Years’ eve and stopped by the Peacemakers’ Sanctuary (http://www.jubileeinitiative.org/sacredpeacemaker.html ) to contemplate and meditate. I had not been there in years.

It is a special place for me. My prayers were once answered there. When I came back to Syracuse in the fall of 2000 I was struck by the number of murders in the city and asked God for guidance in helping to reduce the murder rate. I was told me to pray at the Peacemakers Sanctuary in 2002. We had a ceremony there on a snowy and cold day after Thanksgiving, followed up by my praying there each day for several months. There were no more murders in 2002 and they steadily began to decline in the following years.

Reeds have overgrown much of the area. The bench was moved further up the shoreline away from the lake. I spent much time in 2002 and 2003 praying and meditating on that bench.

A vortex http://wisdom-magazine.com/Article.aspx/1355/ has formed near the bench. I marked it with a large stone. This would be an excellent place to meditate on or to try and feel and experience the consciousness emanating from there—the vortex increases the draw of consciousness. Although I must admit that while there is a very powerful positive consciousness there one also experiences an underlying negative or toxic consciousness from all the chemicals dumped in and around the lake—one that most of you will not feel.

The Peacemakers’ Sanctuary taught me that praying at Mother Earth’s Soul http://www.jubileeinitiative.org/gaiassoul.html (on her fields of consciousness) can be powerfully transformative. 25 people gathered for a ceremony followed up by one going there each day for prayer for several months put a big dent in the murder rate in Syracuse. What else is possible? If enough of us gathered could we reduce violence in New York State, the USA or even the world?

2012 is upon us. People are talking about earth changes and the transformation of humankind. You can help that transformation by praying at Mother Earth’s soul and her many fields of consciousness in upstate NY. See my listing of sacred sites for some possibilities: http://www.jubileeinitiative.org/sacredsites.html

Help Bring about the change.

Peacemakers’ Sanctuary (http://www.jubileeinitiative.org/sacredpeacemaker.html )

Peace,
Madis