Thank You So Much
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Loading ...Allow me to take this opportunity to welcome all the new members to my site. I am so glad that you have embraced my initiative and joined the hundreds of other open minded people from every corner of the world. It is a good feeling to be doing something so worthwhile and so widely appreciated and I thank you wholeheartedly for acknowledging my work.
May I also remind you that it’s your calling as much as it is mine to continue to share the useful and inspirational knowledge I share with you. With such knowledge we have the power to change the world. More importantly, within this knowledge that I share with you, find your own truth and allow it to guide you through this journey called life.
It is also important to point out that I am not a spiritual guru of any kind; I am just a regular guy who would like to continue to plant the seed of love and hope into people’s hearts, which in turn, will grow to self-awareness and truth.
I have finally understood that I am finally doing what I am meant to do and it brings me great joy, so once again thank you for your appreciation and feedback. It is an exciting time to be living, for the search for truth has accelerated more and more in the last few years for so many of us and we are now fast approaching a massive changing point. A new time era is now being born, an incredibly positive one too. But, to get through it we will need to be strong, brave, hopeful, positive, open-minded and above all open-hearted. For you will always find the biggest truths deep within your heart.
Yes, it is time to start challenging your old beliefs, because now is the time to start knowing and not believing
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Ultimately, a true teacher cannot teach you anything, but can only remind you of what, on some level, you already know.
Happiness is Contagious
It is not very often that networks like CNN report on something inspirational and hopeful, however since it did happen I felt it was only fair to share it with you.
New research has shown that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly higher likelihood of feeling happy too.
The lesson is that taking control of your own happiness can positively affect others, says James Fowler, co-author of the study and professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.
"We get this chain reaction in happiness that I think increases the stakes in terms of us trying to shape our own moods to make sure we have a positive impact on people we know and love," he said.
Sadness also spreads in a network, but not as quickly, the researchers found. Each happy friend increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent, whereas each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent. This reflects the total effect of all social contacts.
When framing the question differently, the study found that you are 15 percent more likely to be happy if a direct connection is happy, 10 percent if the friend of a friend is happy, and 6 percent if it’s a friend of a friend of a friend.
Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of "Stumbling on Happiness," called the study "a stunning paper by two of the most respected scientists in the field" in a statement he e-mailed to CNN.
"We’ve known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized," Gilbert said. "It is sometimes said that you can’t be happier than your least happy child. It is truly amazing to discover that when you replace the word ‘child’ with ‘best friend’s neighbor’s uncle,’ the sentence is still true."
If you are the hub of a large network of people — that is, if you have a lot of connected friends or a wide social circle — you are more likely to become happy, the study found. But the reverse is not true.
"You might only have one friend or two friends or something like that, and if you become happy, you’re not going to try to get more friends. You’re probably going to stick with what worked in the first place," Fowler said.
It’s not just happiness that spreads in a social network. Fowler and Christakis have also looked at trends in cigarette smoking and obesity using the parts of the heart study network.
They found that when someone quits, a friend’s likelihood of quitting smoking was 36 percent. Moreover, clusters of people who may not know one another gave up smoking around the same time, the authors showed in a New England Journal of Medicine article in May.
Social ties also affect obesity. A person’s likelihood of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given time period, Fowler and Christakis showed in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2007.
And, like happiness, both smoking behaviour and obesity seem to spread within three degrees of separation in a social network, Fowler said. Beyond three, things get fuzzier.
"Eventually you get out far enough in the social network that you’re competing with all these other cascades of happiness and unhappiness that are sort of battling it out," he said. "Happiness on average wins, but once you get far enough away from someone in a social network, it’s not possible to detect their effect anymore.
Now!Do You Really Want to Be Happy?
Like everything else in life, you have to earn your happiness, stop waiting for it to fall out of the sky because you deserve it. The fact that anyone would cling to unhappiness as fiercely as others cling to happiness is baffling until you begin to learn to look more closely at what you’re doing.
Please feel free to continue sending in your comments, questions and/or suggestions. I am genuinely interested in what you have to say and would appreciate it if you could continue to pass this knowledge forward and help expand our “Inspiring Minds” network by recommending this newsletter to friends and loved ones. Simply click here to fill in their details.
