The toxic behavior no one really wants to talk about but should

"Even now, it's hard to use the word 'jealous' about my mother. The idea that a mother would be, could be, jealous of her own kid paints a picture of a monster. Better cruel or uncaring than jealous, I'd say. It's just so damning."

Those are the words of a woman now in her fifties and a mother herself but they don't surprise me. Talking about maternal jealousy is perhaps the ultimate taboo, inimical to all we hold dear about motherhood and want to believe about mother love, especially that of a mother for her daughter.

Pema Chodron tells the story of when, having hit rock bottom, she asked her teacher what to do.

I thought I would tell you this little story about Naropa University's founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and my very first one-on-one interview with him. This interview occurred during the time when my life was completely falling apart, and I went there because I wanted to talk about the fact that I was feeling like such a failure and so raw.

But when I sat down in front of him, he said, "How is your meditation?"

Consumerism is Heavily Nurtured by Corporations

Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public's penchant to be frivolous with its spending, and in the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist shows just how easy it is to increase sales by targeting nagging children, and the effect that nagging has on the parents' spending.

"You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying your products. It's a game," says Lucy Hughes, co-creator of "The Nag Factor."

This is only one small example of something prevalent in our culture, that companies don't make sales by promoting the virtues of their products, but by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy pointless stuff to chase away dissatisfaction. This is reminiscent of the analogy of culture as "hungry ghosts"; a culture of people who constantly want and need, but are never satisfied.

Juliane Koepcke was 17 years old on Christmas Eve 1971, when the plane supposed to fly her and 91 other passengers from Lima, Peru, to Pucallpa, Peru, was struck by lightning and exploded in the air.

Everyone on board died that night except for Koepcke, who was believed to be dead before she reappeared after trekking through the jungle for 11 days.

In a 2010 interview with Vice News and a 2000 German documentary about her story, Koepcke goes over what happened during those days that changed her life.

If you've been into self growth for any length of time, chances are you've heard of (and probably tried) affirmations. You know, those positive, self-affirming "I am" statements that are supposed to retrain your mind to believe in the best version of yourself? I am loved. I am whole.

I am abundant... and whatever other flavor-of-the-month idea you want to integrate? Depending on who and what you believe, affirmations are supposed to be the secret to getting whatever you want in life. And they work fabulously—for some people. And for the vast majority of us, it's hit or miss... or worse.

In fact, Dr. Richard Bolstad, a pioneering NLP practitioner and researcher found (along with a group of interested colleagues) that affirmations, arguably "one of the most popular self-development tools of all time, generally lowered people's self-esteem and made them less likely to act." Their findings were based on a number of studies, and one in particular, which was conducted by University of Waterloo psychologists Joanne Wood and John Lee, along with Wei Qi Elaine Perunovic from the University of New Brunswick.

Scientific beliefs are destined to supersede and replace primitive religious views, once argued 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte. His scientific positivism birthed today's scientism: the notion that science has exclusive access to the truth. "Science" is usually equated by proponents of this view with empiricism or, in many fields, with a method of inquiry that employs controls, blinding, and randomization. Now, a small group of contemporary psychologists have published a series of provocative experiments showing that faith in science can serve the same mentally-stabilizing function as religious beliefs.

In 2013, a study published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology​ found that when subjects were stressed, they were more likely to agree to statements typifying scientism such as, "the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge." When people felt anxious, they esteemed science more highly than calmer subjects did, just as previous experiments have shown to be the case with religious ideals.

Another study led by University of Amsterdam's Bastiaan Rutjens in 2010 found that uncertain subjects expressed an increased faith in God o​r i​n evolution, provided that evolution was presented as a structured and predictable process. In these cases, beliefs about science may be defended emotionally, even if they are false, as long as they provide a reassuring sense of order. That is to say, beliefs about science may be defended thoughtlessly—even unscientifically.


So what does it mean that both religious and scientific outlooks may function to becalm our existential anxieties? What we believe, the parallel implies, can sometimes be less important than h​ow ​we believe it. In other words, deep faith in science is sometimes just another form of (irrational) extremism.

Scientific studies about how people act or think can rarely be replicated by outside experts, according to a new study that raises questions about the seriousness of psychology research.

A team of 270 scientists tried reproducing 100 psychology and social science studies that had been published in three top peer-reviewed US journals in 2008.

Just 39 per cent came out with same results as the initial reports, according an international team of researchers known as The Open Science Collaboration.

Their findings are reported in the journal Science .

The topics of studies reviewed ranged from people's social lives and interactions with others to research involving perception, attention and memory.

No medical therapies were called into question as a result of the study, although a separate effort is underway to evaluate cancer biology studies.

"It's important to note that this somewhat disappointing outcome does not speak directly to the validity or the falsity of the theories," says Gilbert Chin, a psychologist and senior editor at the journal Science.

"What it does say is that we should be less confident about many of the original experimental results," says Chin, who was not involved in the study.

Study co-author Brian Nosek from the University of Virginia says the research shows the need for scientists to continually question themselves.

"A scientific claim doesn't become believable because of the status or authority of the person that generated it," says Nosek.

"Credibility of the claim depends in part on the repeatability of its supporting evidence."

It is easy to statistically measure the effects of bad nutritional consumption, knowing one out of three children in the U.S. are considered overweight or obese. But how do we calculate the effects of an unhealthy diet of the mind? How do we measure mental nutrition?

Today it is very popular for people to focus on the importance of what children eat and how nutrition is important for the proper development of their bodies. The effects of junk food are substantial in a child's life. Yet not enough attention is directed toward what is being fed to the minds of our youth. Meaningless entertainment, instead of judicious messages, dominates today. A constant barrage of nonsense influences children. The media resorts to cartoons that portray vomit as entertainment, books with intentionally poor grammar about an underwear-wearing super hero, and repugnant stories about a farting dog, highlighting and celebrating stupidity and meaningless trivia that hold absolutely no importance in life.

This is what many refer to as "Mind Garbage." An immature ploy of "potty humor" seems to have replaced witty humor. Junk food for the mind is unquestionably accepted and often used as a distraction for children because of parents' busy and stressful lives. Bored and unmotivated children tend to desire entertainment over engagement in learning. In today's Age of Information true knowledge is scarce, and children are overwhelmed with foolish stories based on mindless material with little or no value.

With US Empire a possible culprit behind the massive Tianjin explosions, the ongoing currency and cyber wars with China are now escalating to potential military war. China or Russia's potent electromagnetic pulse weapons could destroy America's electrical power grid making our nation an increasingly vulnerable target. Even an ISIS invasion with its US gifted missiles (while fighting as US mercenaries against Assad's Syrian forces) could take out the power grid. In an instant this could end life as we know it in America, killing 90% of US citizens within the short time of just one year. A buildup of Russian troop movement along the Eastern Ukraine border in response to the US-NATO-mercenary-Nazi coalition is presently converging with Kiev forces moving eastward for what could become an epic military showdown with both the Russian rebels alongside the Russia army.

South and North Korean military forces just exchanged artillery fire during the latest annual US-South Korean war games joined by over a half dozen other Western nations after North Korea threatened to attack mainland US should joint exercises go forward. Are all these near daily developments and confrontations bringing the already simmering East-West tensions to boil over into all-out war in Asia? As ISIS just blew up Syria's ancient Roman temple in Palmyra, its control only seems to be spreading in Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State scourge is rapidly expanding its US created and supported savagery into Ukraine, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and deeper into sub-Saharan Africa in partnership with Boko Harem and al-Shabaab. It appears that world conflict between the US-led West in methodic acceleration of aggression to isolate Russia and China now have the entire planet on the brink of nuclear world war.

Pink elephants serenading the world's tallest woman might be an improbable situation, but our brain is able to comprehend this thought.

Humans can generate an infinite set of ideas from a finite set of words, but how the brain accomplishes this feat remains unclear.

Now, a new study by US scientists suggests the human mind flexibly combines the meanings of individual words to compose structured thoughts.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, they reveal our brain works like a computer in processing meaning and identify key regions where this takes place.

"Given the vast number of sentences we can understand and produce, it would be implausible for the brain to allocate individual neurons to represent each possible sentence meaning," writes first author graduate student Steven Frankland.

"Instead, it is likely that the brain employs a system for flexibly combining representations of simpler meanings to compose more complex meanings."

Co-author for the study Frankland and Professor Joshua Greene, both in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, devised two experiments to identify regions in the brain that encode for meaning where the structure of the sentence is critical; and then how the brain represents this meaning.

In the first experiment, 18 participants undergoing a functional MRI scan read simple sentences that could be conveyed in either the active or passive voice.

These sentences could also be arranged to have mirror meanings: "the dog bit the man" or "the man bit the dog".

Through this they were able to identify that the left mid-superior temporal cortex in the brain plays a key role in decoding of sentence meaning and predicting the required response based on this information.