SaLuSa 9-April-2010

We find that the sense of expectation of a major change is growing, and that is very encouraging as it means more of you are aware of what is planned for your future. In any event there are so many who sense that changes are happening, even if they are not so well informed as to the nature of them. The collapse of the old ways could have hardly have passed by without being noticed, and all in all it means that people are very receptive to the idea of receiving something new. They will not yet see it coming through the present world governments, as there needs to be a complete change within the administration and personnel before it can go ahead. There may be rumours and speculation as to what is in store, but only the higher sources will be able to clearly define the details of the plan. Although it has been amended where necessary, it has generally speaking kept to its central aims which are the key requirements for your upliftment. The coming Ascension has been the subject of many teachings and messages for a very long time, as the end times have been clearly defined since this cycle began so long ago. It is the whole purpose of everything that has been taking place, and the plan has been played out so that you have gained the maximum benefit from it. Dear Ones it is about experience so that your spiritual evolution moves further forward. It has been about opposites such as good and evil as you would define it, and duality having all but run its course it is time to bring it to an end. Although some souls go through the same experiences many times, there is always something to be learnt. Often there are groups of you that come together for that very purpose, and you help each other to progress. You play your parts fully immersed in the characters that you choose, and as far as you are concerned it is an absolute reality. Through many lives you set yourself up in all different types of roles, and truly you are all excellent actors on the stage of life. The problem for some souls is that they become so deeply involved with their characters, that they leave no room for their inner self to surface. It is hoped that each soul has those moments of sudden realisation that they are more than they seem. After all they carry their God spark with them at all times, and their Light cannot be completely subdued. Some will deny God, but often that comes from learning of an angry and revengeful God that is to be feared. That is the image of a false God and has no place where you are concerned. God is and always will be the totality of all Love, because Love Is. If you follow spiritual messages, there are few that depict God and the Higher Beings in anyway except as full of Love and Light. At their levels in the higher dimensions it cannot be any other way as only the Truth can exist. God gets the blame for so many things, and that can only arise from a misunderstanding as to what God is. Regrettably some teachings play upon the idea of an angry God that metes out punishment, and it is used as a way to keep people in a continual state of fear and obedience. Go confidently into the future knowing that God is All Love, and no matter how far you stray from the true path of understanding, it will always remain so. After your sojourn upon Earth you are always welcomed back with open arms, even if you have transgressed and carry guilt. That is in fact unnecessary as all is viewed as experience, and through further opportunities you can overcome your weaknesses without self-punishment. On one level you are all equal, and it is only Man that chooses to see others as different or separate to himself. Duality of course encourages that view, but how to overcome it is the challenge that it presents. View all souls as from the same source and a part of God, and you will realise that they are as much a part of you, as you are them. As time progresses all things will become clear, and you are already beginning to enter a period where anything other than the truth will be revealed to be transmuted. These are of the lower vibration and have no place in the future. As you are certainly noticing, the moves to reveal the truth about Man and his experiences are gaining momentum. We can say quite definitely, that by the time you come to the end of this cycle all stones will have been overturned. Nothing will remain hidden regardless of how much it has previously been covered up. In view of this it would help your progress, if you took a totally and truthful approach to all matters. Start putting it into action and become that which you really are, a Being of Love and Light. With time it will become easier to do so, as your levels of consciousness are rising much more rapidly. Dear Ones, everything is being done to help you move ever onwards, and you should be able to focus more easily on your future and not be not be distracted. Tame those emotions that sometimes get out of control, and you will actually feel all the better for it. When you get upset you disturb not just the harmony of your body, but the energies around it. Such imbalances can even make you feel ill, and it takes time to recover. If it happens try to centre yourself as quick as you can, and surround yourself with the pure light of the green healing ray. It will help return you to a peaceful and relaxed state, and speed up your recovery. Think upon it for a moment as to why Man is normally surrounded by so much greenery, and trips to the countryside can be so uplifting. On a clear day, why does the beauty of a blue sky seem so peaceful as you lie down and peer into it? In the higher dimensions you will be absolutely surrounded by beauty, and energies that are conducive to peace and stillness that has no equal on Earth at present. Any effort you put in now to move in the direction of Ascension will be more than worth it, as what you have now is little compared to what shall be yours very soon. No more shall you go through the experience of death, and ill health will be a thing of the past. Lack will be a word you will never use again, and life will be a heavenly experience in every sense of the word. I am SaLuSa of the Galactic Federation, and we so want you all to rise up when the opportunity presents itself. Become the loving souls you really are, and leave the physical dimension for your real home in the stars. Thank you SaLuSa. Mike Quinsey.

Iraq War Vet: "We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us"

On Monday, April 5, Wikileaks.org posted video footage from Iraq, taken from a US military Apache helicopter in July 2007 as soldiers aboard it killed 12 people and wounded two children. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency: photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh.

The US military confirmed the authenticity of the video.

The footage clearly shows an unprovoked slaughter, and is shocking to watch whilst listening to the casual conversation of the soldiers in the background.

As disturbing as the video is, this type of behavior by US soldiers in Iraq is not uncommon.

Truthout has spoken with several soldiers who shared equally horrific stories of the slaughtering of innocent Iraqis by US occupation forces.

“I remember one woman walking by,” said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. He told the audience at the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland, “She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.”

The hearings provided a platform for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to share the reality of their occupation experiences with the media in the US.

Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq, and how lax they were, to the point of being virtually nonexistent.

“During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot,” Washburn’s testimony continued, “The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry ‘drop weapons’, or by my third tour, ‘drop shovels’. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent.”

Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.

“One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation…. One of the snipers replied back, ‘Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?’ The lieutenant colonel responded, ‘You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.’ After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.”

Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in the al-Qaim area of Iraq near the Syrian border, told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take “trophy” photos of bodies.

“An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by,” he said, “This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment.”

Kelly Dougherty – then executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War – blamed the behavior of soldiers in Iraq on policies of the US government.

“The abuses committed in the occupations, far from being the result of a ‘few bad apples’ misbehaving, are the result of our government’s Middle East policy, which is crafted in the highest spheres of US power,” she said.

Source: http://www.truthout.org/iraq-war-vet-we-were-told-just-shoot-people-and-officers-would-take-care-us58378

Aleister Crowley. Wonderful set of photographs.

A wonderful set of photographs from the life of the ‘Great Beast’, via LIFE:

Born the son of a wealthy and devout British family in 1875, Edward Alexander Crowley became a rebel after his father’s death when he was 11. He became increasingly skeptical of Christianity and was expelled from school for “corrupting” another boy. Crowley’s own mother, alarmed by his affinity for what she saw as morbid and morally questionable pursuits (i.e., black magic), referred to him as “the Beast.” In time, as Crowley’s notoriety as an occultist and very public celebrant of unrestrained hedonism grew, the press dubbed him “the wickedest man in the world.”

View more photos at LIFE.

Study Sheds Light on What Makes People Shy

The brains of shy or introverted individuals might actually process the world differently than their more extroverted counterparts, a new study suggests.

About 20 percent of people are born with a personality trait called sensory perception sensitivity (SPS) that can manifest itself as the tendency to be inhibited, or even neuroticism. The trait can be seen in some children who are “slow to warm up” in a situation but eventually join in, need little punishment, cry easily, ask unusual questions or have especially deep thoughts, the study researchers say.

The new results show that these highly sensitive individuals also pay more attention to detail, and have more activity in certain regions of their brains when trying to process visual information than those who are not classified as highly sensitive.

The study was conducted by researchers at Stony Brook University in New York, and Southwest University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, both in China. The results were published March 4 in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

The sensitive type

Individuals with this highly sensitive trait prefer to take longer to make decisions, are more conscientious, need more time to themselves in order to reflect, and are more easily bored with small talk, research suggests.

Previous work has also shown that compared with others those with a highly sensitive temperament are more bothered by noise and crowds, more affected by caffeine, and more easily startled. That is, the trait seems to confer sensitivity all around.

The researchers in the current study propose the simple sensory sensitivity to noise, pain, or caffeine is a side effect of an inborn preference to pay more attention to experiences.

They first used an established questionnaire to separate the sensitive from the non-sensitive participants. Then, the 16 participants compared a photograph of a visual scene with a preceding scene, indicating whether or not the scene had changed. Scenes differed in whether the changes were obvious or subtle, and in how quickly they were presented. Meanwhile, the researchers scanned each participant’s brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Sensitive persons looked at the scenes with subtle differences for a longer time than did non-sensitive persons, and showed significantly greater activation in brain areas involved in associating visual input with other input to the brain and with visual attention. These brain areas are not simply used for vision itself, but for a deeper processing of input.

Role in evolution

The sensitivity trait is found in over 100 other species, from fruit flies and fish to canines and primates, indicating this personality type could sometimes provide an evolutionary advantage.

Biologists are beginning to agree that within one species there can be two equally successful “personalities.” The sensitive type, always a minority, chooses to observe longer before acting, as if doing their exploring with their brains rather than their limbs. The other type “boldly goes where no one has gone before,” the scientists say.

The sensitive individual’s strategy is not so advantageous when resources are plentiful or quick, aggressive action is required. But it comes in handy when danger is present, opportunities are similar and hard to choose between, or a clever approach is needed.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/health/shy-brain-process-information-differently-100405.html