Well-known voice of occult and esoteric ideas, Mitch Horowitz, carried the spirit of Thanksgiving into the night with an inspiring discussion on the power of expressing gratitude for cultivating happiness and well-being. If you can incorporate a sense of appreciation and forward-looking possibilities into your daily attitude, "you become a nobler, stronger person," he cited. On a metaphysical level, he continued, this could be considered tapping into the process of "thought causation." Outlining a gratitude game plan, he suggested thinking of three things you appreciate as soon as you wake up each day; taking at least three "gratitude breaks" during the day; thanking three people (preferably new ones) every day; and conducting a daily prayer in which you express thankfulness and appreciation.
A potent time to engage in affirmations, he noted, is just before you fall asleep, as the mind is particularly open at this 'hypnagogic' juncture. The sense of linear time as we go through the day is just a device, but the greater reality of the cosmos is that everything is going on all at once, Horowitz said, and we live in a world of infinite possibility. "Our minds don't manifest things as much as select things," so if we use tools like gratitude, visualizations, and affirmations, we can play a part in what we'll experience, he contended. Sometimes something that is wished for may reach you in an unexpected way, so be open to all possibilities and destiny's helping hand, he added. For more, see this related article.
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Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He is a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and also the president of the Royal Society in London. During the latter half, he talked about his work on the ribosome —an enormous molecular machine made up of a million atoms— that makes DNA come to life, turning our genetic code into proteins and therefore into us. A person's genetic makeup or DNA, he explained, is best thought of as a recipe rather than a blueprint. It's a set of instructions that are not 100% precise and depend on our interactions with the environment.
The ribosome dates back to a very ancient world, closer to when life first started-- when everything was made of a molecule called RNA that existed as a predecessor to DNA & proteins, he further detailed. Ramakrishnan also touched on the field of molecular biology, the possibilities of expanding human longevity, new methods to combat cancer, and how science has become a global endeavor with countries like China rising to the forefront.
In the last half-hour, George replayed a segment from a 2007 debate between Michael Shermer and Stanton Friedman.
News segment guests: L.A. Marzulli, Howard Bloom, Peter Davenport