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Articles
Surrendering to Love By GangajiMany people have trouble with the word love. Love, as most of us have known it, can be sentimental, potentially messy, and most definitely out of control. And yet, love is what we crave. There is often a love/hate relationship with the idea of love, most likely stemming from our experiences as children where we loved helplessly. We projected love out onto our loved ones - our mothers, fathers, brothers, or sisters—and at some point found our loved ones to be unreliable. We confused their actions with love and concluded that love was not trustworthy. People are definitely not trustworthy, because in general, they are very busy protecting their story of who they think they are. Since they are mostly involved in their story, they can only give a certain amount of love before they start wondering, “Well, when do I get mine?” And since love has been identified as being connected with another person, this sets up a whole continuation of distrust around love. But love is not a person. Love is the individual, collective, and universal soul. Love is God. Love is truth. Love is beauty. Love is peace. Love is self. To know yourself, to surrender to the truth of yourself, is to surrender to love. Many people are aware of their resistance, and they want to surrender, but they don’t know how. The only actual barrier to surrender is in not seeing the underlying story you are telling yourself about the danger of surrendering everything to love. And the degree to which you hold back surrendering everything to love is the degree to which you suffer. The degree to which you try to maintain the story about who you think you are is the degree to which you feel isolated from love. Until you realize, "I want truth, which is love, more than anything," you will experience yourself as separate from love. Love is the constant. Love is not an aspect of truth. Truth, God, and self are aspects of love. What is the worst that could happen if you surrender to love? What we seem to fear the most is the broken heart. Yet the very unwillingness for the heart to be broken is the broken heart. The tragedy and the irony is that in order to avoid a broken heart, people live in a state of broken-heartedness. In the willingness to have the heart be broken a million, trillion, zillion times, true love is revealed. Let the whole world break your heart every instant of the remainder of your life. Then this life can be lived in service to love. It does not mean you stay in abusive relationships. It means only to stay true to that which is always true to you, and that is love. Anything else is a story. If the story is never investigated, your whole life is lived on the assumption that the story is real, and that your heart, your soul, and your love need to be protected. But that assumption is actually a denial of your heart, your soul, your love. It is a denial of self-love. The great good news is that love is free and it has not gone anywhere. In all of these aeons that you have been hiding from love, love is still here, it is still open, it is still waiting for your commitment, still waiting for you to say, “Yes, I give my life to the truth of love. I vow to let love live this life as it will, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.” Through honest self-investigation, it is possible to see why you may not be surrendering to love, and to see that you actually have the choice to surrender. It is a way to let the unconscious storylines become conscious, the unknown become known. Ask yourself this question: Why is it dangerous to surrender to love? Not why is it right to surrender to love, or why is it good to surrender to love, but why is it dangerous to surrender to love? Let your individual consciousness drop down into the source of consciousness, into the space where all of the reasons and justifications for resisting surrender are seen simply as stories, as something made up that you can very easily let go of. Allow all of the stories, all of the defenses, to be seen for what they are. Are any of these stories worth keeping? What is the cost to your life? The love that you search for everywhere is already present within you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events. A mountain can evoke this love. A sunset can evoke this love. But finally, you must realize you are this love. The source of all love is within you. For more information contact the Gangaji Foundation
Algae: 'The ultimate in renewable energy'Texas may be best known for “Big Oil.” But the oil that could some day make a dent in the country's use of fossil fuels is small. Microscopic, in fact: algae. Literally and figuratively, this is green fuel. Plant physiologist Glen Kertz believes algae can some day be competitive as a source for biofuel. “Algae is the ultimate in renewable energy,” Glen Kertz, president and CEO of Valcent Products, told CNN while conducting a tour of his algae greenhouse on the outskirts of El Paso. Kertz, a plant physiologist and entrepreneur, holds about 20 patents. And he is psyched about the potential algae holds, both as an energy source and as a way to deal with global warming. “We are a giant solar collecting system. We get the bulk of our energy from the sunshine,” said Kertz. Most people know algae as “pond scum.” And until recently, most energy research and development projects used ponds to grow it. But instead of ponds, Valcent uses a closed, vertical system, growing the algae in long rows of moving plastic bags. The patented system is called Vertigro, a joint venture with Canadian alternative energy company Global Green Solutions. The companies have invested about $5 million in the Texas facility. "A pond has a limited amount of surface area for solar absorption,” said Kertz. “By going vertical, you can get a lot more surface area to expose cells to the sunlight. It keeps the algae hanging in the sunlight just long enough to pick up the solar energy they need to produce, to go through photosynthesis,” he said. Using algae as an alternative fuel is not a new idea. The U.S. Department of Energy studied it for about 18 years, from 1978 to 1996. But according to Al Darzins of the DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab, in 1996 the feds decided that algae oil could never compete economically with fossil fuels. The price of a barrel of oil in 1996? About 20 bucks! Government scientists experimented with algae in open ponds in California, Hawaii, and in Roswell, New Mexico. Valcent research scientist Aga Pinowska said there are about 65,000 known algae species, with perhaps hundreds of thousands more still to be identified. A big part of the research at the west Texas facility involves determining what type of algae produces what type of fuel. One species may be best suited for jet fuel, while the oil content of another may be more efficient for truck diesel. And she said a knowledge of algae's virtues goes way back. “Even the Aztecs knew it was beneficial; they used it as a high protein food,” said Pinowska. The other common commercial use of algae today is as a health food drink, usually sold as “Spirulina.” I'm too sexy for my pond And who knew that single celled plants could be such “hotties” when it comes to sex? Kertz said it's a real “algae orgy” under the microscope. Some algae reproduce sexually, some asexually, while many combine both modes. In some green algae the type of reproduction may be altered if there are changes in environmental conditions, such as lack of moisture or nutrients. And after more than a decade hiatus, the U.S. government is back in the algae game. The 2007 Energy Security and Independence Act includes language promoting the use of algae for biofuels. From the Pentagon to Minnesota to New Zealand, both governments and private companies are exploring the use of algae to produce fuel. “There's not any one system that anyone has chosen yet. Whatever it is has to be dirt, dirt cheap,” said Darzins.
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