Centering Prayer or Self-Hypnosis or Yoga – What is it?!

Whilst I was browsing the blog Parchment and Pen, I came across a comment by a guy “britphil” who said he led “Contemplative Worship” in an Anglican church in Liverpool. I have never heard about this form of worship so I searched around trying to find what exactly it is. It turns out it is also known as “Centering Prayer”. As I began to read more about it, I felt that this type of prayer had a lot in common with meditation as it is practised in Eastern religions like Hinduism. For example, I found a quote in Wikipedia’s page on Centering prayer of Basil Pennington who appears to be one of the proponents of this technique giving guidelines about how to do this prayer:

1. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed, relax, and quiet yourself. Be in love and faith to God.

2. Choose a sacred word that best supports your sincere intention to be in the Lord’s presence and open to His divine action within you (i.e. “Jesus”, “Lord,” “God,” “Savior,” “Abba,” “Divine,” “Shalom,” “Spirit,” “Love,” etc.).

3. Let that word be gently present as [the] symbol of your sincere intention to be in the Lord’s presence and open to His divine action within you.

4. Whenever you become aware of anything (thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, associations, etc.), simply return to your sacred word, your anchor.”

The first thing that came to mind as I read this is “Woah! This almost sounds like what a Hindu would do”. The most striking thing about this is that in Step 2 just use the word “Om” to focus on and you will be doing what Hindus do in their meditations.

Live and Unsigned 2008 Finals: A review

I attended the Live and Unsigned 2008 (UK) contest for the Under 18’s on the 28th of June. It was the Grand Final of the competition. I was excitedly looking forward to seeing the cream of the crop of all unsigned English bands. It was due to an unlikely turn of events resulted in me being there. I was not supposed to have gone….

There were some very good vocal performances in some bands while others left a lot to be desired. But one wouldn’t deny the talents of the musicians who were at this level of competition.

As the curtains went up,

Laminin: A view from a “scientist to be”….

I heard about this molecule called Laminin that apparently looks like a Cross. In this age of stuff appearing in tortillas and what have you, I decided to check it out. Thinking about it, I remembered one lecturer in introducing histology mentioning about this Laminin molecule in connection to molecules in the extracellular matrix. He did not elaborate on the structure of this molecule.

So I went to Google. The first item on the search takes me to a video of Louie Giglio wowing a crowd showing a “scientific diagram” of this Laminin. Needless to say that his presentation was pretty cool (though overwrought with much emotion), I wasn’t too impressed by all the skeptics/atheists flaming in the comments section of the video. It was almost like the haters had a skewed perception of what exactly is being claimed here. In fact there was a good clarification by the uploader of another one of the video