Stress Kills Is Truer for Pos Folk than Ever: By Jimmy Petrol

CD4-T cell loss in aids positive people has been found to be halted or slowed by mindfulness meditation, which is a form of meditation that is not generally understood in the West. Meditation is most often thought of as a "blanking" of the mind, which is not at all what Mindfulness Meditation is about.

To become mindful is to become aware of the now, to cease to dwell on the past and to forget to chew on what may be coming. Mindfulness is about being present in the moment, to feel and be what and where we are in time and space.

It is the practice of being not only where you are in space, but also where you are in time. This is not something that Westerners do well; it is hard to be present in the moment when you are trying to keep an eye on the "bottom line".

A quick net search turns up Buddhist sites, classes and all sorts of marketing for this meditation technique, which is becoming popularized as such an effective stress reducing agent that it is used to aid weight loss, ease depression and prevent the decline of CD4-T cells in aids infected persons.

The research, from the University of California, was so irrefutable that the good Doctors are busy searching for the mechanisms that go into play when stress is significantly reduced by the use of Mindfulness Meditation training.

While the tag line "meditation" may be new to the technique, the idea of living in the moment is at the heart of several religions and the most successful alcohol diversion program in the world, Alcoholics Anonymous.

The fact that a person that is adept at aligning him/herself with the actual time of living experience becomes healthier and has better immunity to sickness is no news; what is new is that Westerners can now get out for a trendy (yet effective) class and loose weight, get happy and preserve those T cell levels.

This alignment of the three "normal" dimensions with the fourth dimension, this novel idea of being where one is in Time as well as space, has effects that transcend our understanding. It is very much apparent that there is a physical manifestation of our mental time component; those that are living in the past or future are physically harmed from the excursions they take into time.

It is something to wonder about, time. All of the other dimensions have physical characteristics; space is tactile, three dimensional objects are hard.

Time, on the other hand, has always been a dimension that is mental in nature. Our perception of time is that it is observable in a sequential and intellectual way, but is not really a physical dimension like the other three.

Except for the rather esoteric experiments with synchronized watches and spacecraft, which show a real time dilation for travelers at super-high speeds, there has been no physical side to time.

Now there is.

If we align ourselves with the time we are alive in, rather than time that we think does not really exist (past and future times), we are healthier as an organism.

Time travel, after all, turns out to be damaging to your health. For this to be true might mean that when we think about other times we really go there in some physical way, which in turn means that the past and the future must actually exist in a physical sense. Otherwise, why the measurable physical damage to the organism?

Just think about that next time you are laying around astral projecting. If it is dangerous to be out of sync with time, how good can it be to be somewhere you aren't?