San Jaya Prime

1. Thinking positively about your partner. Having positive thoughts about your partner means that you focus on the good, not the bad, in your partner’s personal qualities and character. Ruminating about the things that bother you can only lead you to magnify the small foibles which will make your partner even more irritating to you than you would otherwise feel.  People in good relationships engage in “sentiment override,” meaning that they remember more of the favorable than the unfavorable experiences they’ve shared together.
2. Thinking about your partner when apart. When you leave your partner for the day, the evening, or for an extended period of time, do you forget about his or her existence? Is it out of sight and out of mind for you? If so, this may be a sign that you’re not that much in love. You don’t have to spend every second apart sighing longingly, but the fact that your partner isn’t there should at least cross your mind some of the time during the course of the average day.
3. Difficulty concentrating on other things when thinking about your partner. If you’re able to set aside your thoughts about your partner without much effort, this suggests that your partner takes up only a small amount of cognitive load.  Multitasking isn’t particularly desirable when it comes to musing over your loved one. In the O’Leary study, this factor was particularly important for men.
4. Enjoying novel and challenging activities. Like definitely attracts like when it comes to personal interests and hobbies. Spending time together is important, as you’ll see below, but it’s how you spend your time that influences your relationship satisfaction even more. Aron’s self-expansion model, tested in empirical research, suggests that couples can improve their love for each other when they spend their time together exploring new and challenging activities. The O’Leary study identified this factor as especially relevant for men. If you’re going to go bungee jumping for the first time, your relationship will benefit when you and your partner face this challenge together. If you’re not up to bungee jumping, seek out mentally challenging ways to spice up your daily routines. 
5. Spending time together. If you love someone, you want to spend time with that person, and the more time you spend together, the more your love will grow. The time you spend should include some new and challenging activities, as shown in point #4. However, even spending time together in mundane household activities can enhance your love’s intensity. That basement remodeling you’ve been intending to get started can actually become a way for you and your partner to strengthen your emotional bonds. Cooking, gardening, grocery shopping, and even cleaning the house are other ways to bolster your love for each other. This was another factor that, in the O’Leary study, was more important for men.
6. Expressing affection. Feeling love toward your partner is important, but so is expressing that love in physical ways. It’s not wise to play hard to get when your goal is to build the passion in your relationship. The affection you show doesn’t have to be elaborate or overly gushy. A touch on the shoulder or kiss on the cheek is enough to build your relationship’s intensity. 
7. Being turned on by your partner. Those tiny touches of affection can not only boost your emotional connection to your partner, but also stoke the sexual fires within. The respondents reporting the most intense love for their partner in the O’Leary study said that they felt their bodies responding when their partner touched them. This doesn’t mean a full-out sexual encounter has to follow from that touch on the cheek. Feeling a warm, tingling sensation from your partner’s physical presence is enough to keep the fire inside stoked until the time is right for sexual activity.
8. Engaging in sexual intercourse. It should come as no surprise that having intercourse is a positive expression of a love’s intensity. People in love are more likely to have sex with each other on a regular basis. The O’Leary study showed, however, that part of the reason for the positive association between sex and love is that people who are happiest in their relationships both love their partners more and have sex more frequently. Whatever the cause, the point is that sexual activity builds and maintains feelings of love and even happiness that endure over time. 
9. Feeling generally happy. People who feel happier about life also have stronger feelings of love toward their partners. We can’t determine whether people who are in love therefore feel happier or vice versa from the survey data in the O’Leary study (and the finding was more true of women than men). However, the finding suggests that if you’re experiencing personal distress, this can leak out and cause your relationship to suffer. Similarly, if your relationship is in trouble, your personal happiness will suffer as well. Either way, it’s important for you to seek help before these negative effects take a heavy toll on your mental health.
10. Wanting to know where your partner is at all times. Being intensely in love, for men, is associated with wanting to know your partner’s whereabouts. This component of intense love may seem a bit like stalking. But to put a positive spin on it, if you want to know where your partner is, this reflects the fact that your partner isn’t very far from your thoughts.  
11. Obsessively thinking about your partner. Being slightly obsessed with your partner turns out to be positively related to intense love, at least for women. The women most in love in the O’Leary study didn’t particularly care about knowing their partner’s whereabouts. However, they were more likely to engage in obsessive thinking about their partner more generally.
12. Having a strong passion for life. People who approach their daily lives with zest and strong emotion seem to carry these intense feelings over to their love life as well. If you want your relationship to have passion, put that emotional energy to work in your hobbies, interests, and even your political  activities. Your brain’s reward centers respond similarly to love as to getting excited about your other daily interests.Getting “fired up” in these areas of life translates into firing up the feelings you have toward your partner and in the O’Leary study seemed to matter more for men.

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Words are one of the most powerful and ancient forms of magic. The only other comparable human magic is music. Words have power. In a word is the very essence of the balance between logic and emotion, between limits and freedom, between mind and heart. A word is limited by its definition, the limitation itself gives it its own specific power away from other words, which is why definitions are important. But the emotional power and the context and tone by which a word is used give it power also, so that it cuts, or that it has even greater significant impact. Without both, a word becomes hollow. When one word is confused for another word, both words lose power. The true power in a word comes from both the heart and mind, and in this balance is revealed the magic.

I had a friend recently who was on the edge of “opting out” from life… self-destruction with a final closing note. It didn’t happen and different choices were made.. and because my friend is more of a “brother” than a “friend”, and someone who once saved my own life, the choice for life matters even more. I thought about opting out when I was either 9 or 10… and never again afterward. For me, if it got low enough, I could always change everything, leave everything behind…. if things were so bad that I would turn my body to ashes… then it was enough to turn everything to ashes and be born again.. and that is exactly what I have done three times now. I love change. At any time, a person can get up, walk to the highway, and hitchhike into a new life… or they can work with others and create a new life together. There is always a new way, a new life. Even if I were caged in a jail or asylum, I would find a way. When I die, if anyone ever thought I committed suicide, that person is a liar and does not know me… never would I opt out… there is always a way.

Nine zeros behind a one is easy to write, but a billion is a difficult number to comprehend. What is one billion in 2012?

• A billion seconds ago, it was 1981.
• A billion minutes ago, the “current era” had barely celebrated its first century (111 C.E.).
• A billion hours ago, our ancestors were still living in the Stone Age.
• A billion days ago, no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
• A billion dollars ago was spent in less than one and a half hours at the current rate of government spending in the United States.

See the original article [Here on Snopes dot Com], and look deeper into government spending [Here on US Government Spending dot Com].

When listening to Madeleine Albright’s speech at The Forum 2000, I was surprised when she placed “freedom” in opposition to “responsibility”. This is a repetition of a mistake I first saw in the writings of Victor Frankl. Both of these influential personas have collapsed the two concepts of “duty” and “responsibility” into a single idea, calling it simply “responsibility”. It is a radical failing at worst. It is an error in lexicon at best. Collapsing “duty” into “responsibility” removes the possibility of being responsible to yourself. If you are drowning, your responsibility is to save yourself. If you and a car full of people are drowning, then you have a choice to be responsible to yourself or be personally irresponsible and risk your own life for the life of others. No choice is right or wrong, but both choices mean being irresponsible to either the individual or to others. Responsibility is not purely social nor purely individualistic. It’s both.

Freedom exists in the realm of personal responsibility.

Duty exists in the realm of social responsibility.

Therefore it is “duty” that stands opposite to “freedom”. Both of these are forms of “responsibility”.

You wake up to the sound of barking dog. The sound is coming from the house next door again, and the dog’s barking right towards your window. Do you: A. Explain the situation to your neighbor?; or, B. Kill the dog? Many decide to try explanation before taking action. Not good. What if they let the barking continue or, worse, spur the canine into barking louder? If you talk to your neighbor, then kill the dog later if the barking doesn’t stop, then you have already made yourself suspect. The solution? If the odds are that your neighbor will not stop the dog from barking, then by-pass diplomacy and take action directly. Your quality of sleep determines the quality of your day. Kill the mutt and get your sleep… that is, at least as long as you are more important than the dog. Practice intelligent solutions. Ask yourself: Where else does this example apply?