NewsGram with Sam Youmans

Relax your inner light and connect to God. The power is in you. This episode is based on the book, The Cosmic Romance with Existence by Murali Dharan who teaches us how to connect the inner light within us to a higher light – the light of God.

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram.

Are you ready to tap into the power of the universe? We can all do it. The power is actually within us. It is called our inner light or consciousness and today we are going to learn how to get close to it.

Do you like to meditate or have you ever done it? It has been said that honest, self-reflection can quiet the mind. Meditation combined with positive actions can remove ignorance and build knowledge. What am I talking about?? A means to an end. In the simplest of terms I’m talking about making life a little bit better today than it was yesterday — unless yesterday could not be improved upon then we’ll work on a repeat for tomorrow. To do that all you need to do is connect to the source.

Murali Dharan – God is not something that is far away. He is among us, within us and he is also influencing our daily lives. So, if we are able to build an intimate relationship with higher powers, universal powers, God; its how we say it but end of the day it’s about ensuring ourselves that if we want to move away from our life challenges, overcome our life challenges, our life suffering and then have a sense of awakening, have a higher sense of self awareness and connect to our higher self you know, enlightenment we should build an intimate relationship with higher power.

Tune in, turn on and drop out man....That is Murali Dharan and not unlike Timothy Leary he is advocating tuning into our higher consciousness but doing it by much more conventional means like meditation. In his book, The Cosmic Romance with Existence: A Personal Guide Book for Spiritual Warriors to Merge Their Light with The Cosmic Light he says when people realize and connect with their conscious divine self, they gain wisdom, clairvoyance and spiritual intelligence and the best way to do that is by building a closer relationship with God — and to do that, we need to get our inner light talking to a higher light.

Murali Dharan – In spirituality there are two lights. One, the consciousness is the light within us and there’s another light, higher light.

Connecting our consciousness or inner light to the higher light – God or the Universe is how we get what we want. There are divine forces within us and around us that we can tap into to grow as human beings and they are there to help us achieve our goals. So how do we tap into them? It can be done in many ways but it helps to know and experience the power of daily meditations.

Murali Dharan – Meditation helps us to overcome compulsive behaviors without putting too much strain onto ourselves.

Did you get that? He says meditation is also good for helping us to overcome compulsive behavior. His book emphasizes the sacred role of meditations in awakening your inner light of consciousness. It offers three guided meditations to help in various ways. For example, we might have self-control. We can stop ourselves from biting our nails, or drinking too many glasses of wine but our mind is still trying to do it. One of the forms of Meditation that could help is called Chakra.

Murali Dharan – Chakra meditation is about connecting to the seven spiritual power points in our body which is actually located in our spine area. So, from the base of our spine to the top of our head there are seven chakras....so in teaching this meditation I teach them how to open these chakras and what we can do to work on these chakra points. How does this chakra meditation help you? O.k. the first thing the chakra meditation is very helpful in self healing, clearing spiritual blockages and helping one to raise their spiritual vibes, frequency and connecting to the higher self.

We are painting with a very broad brush here to give you a flavor of the things he goes into in the book. The idea is to show you how to gain the wisdom you need to deal with daily battles. To give you self-knowledge, serenity and success and it begins by getting closer to the light.

Murali Dharan – The purpose of this book is to help a person relax their light. So if they want to relax their light there are two ways we can daily do our meditation on top of our gratitude. The second part is to cultivate these dynamic and powerful qualities. These dynamic and powerful qualities are the seeds of consciousness. So if we are practicing this, bringing these qualities into our daily lives we are able to get cl...

Over two millennia ago, in troubled times not unlike our own, a mysterious figure, distinguished by a pheasant feather in his cap, emerged with poetic visions of a future world of peace and justice. Like Laozi, Pheasant Cap (Héguanzî) understood the underlying unity in things and the power of Dao to make things happen.

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram.

If you’ve ever been curious about ancient China and its cultural history then this is your show. Here for the first time, we are going to get an insider’s view of early Daoism as it influenced philosophy.

Let’s start with a simple question, “How did a young boy named Chin (Qin) growing up in exile become China’s First Augustan Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi)?

Marnix Wells – Well this is all the best of a mystery because most of the records were destroyed after the fall of Qin which ended in a bit of a holocaust or an inferno when the future Han dynasty took over. This is now being remedied somewhat by the discovery of tombs with silk manuscripts miraculously preserved from that period and they show a lot of connections with the Héguanzî and his writings which I estimate in the period from about 250BC to 221BC which was the date in which Qin conquered the last of the six kingdoms and started the unified Chinese Empire and they still see this as the foundation of the unified China.

So not as simple a question as I thought but the discovery of new material is painting a clearer picture of the past. It’s all available now in Dr. Marnix Wells’ book Héguanzî, the Dao of Unity, Linking Politics, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China.

Marnix Wells – This boy who actually grew up, was born in the state of Chow which is where this book is centered. Later he managed to get back to Qin and claim the crown and from there he became the emperor and the conqueror of the whole Chinese world and founded the Empire.

Dr. Wells knows a great deal about Chinese history. He has a first degree in Chinese from Oxford and a PhD from London School of Oriental and African Studies. He also spends time working as a shipping manager in the Far East where he acquired first-hand knowledge of the people and their heritage. As you know — one way to better understand a country is not only to visit there but to have a look at its history and Chinese History paints a unique picture of Unity.

Marnix Wells – The Qin that founded the Chinese empire was basically in some sense tapping into Héguanzî, because he has this vision of old nations and racism coming together and while it wasn’t done peacefully as sit turned out, none the less they did adopt this idea of sort of centralized unity which China has enjoyed for the last 2000 years so it’s a good lesson of the world at the same time it’s also something we need to be careful about because it’s also a potential threat for the rest of us unless we can somehow work things out.

Yes, we do have an issue with Unity in this country right now but I am optimistic that the tide is turning on all that. We have had our differences over the years and we usually find a way to unite.

So if you find Ancient Chinese culture fascinating or you just want to broaden your worldview. Maybe you’re curious about early dismissed writings, now vindicated by some new archaeological discoveries — then this is probably a great resource for you.

Marnix Wells – I’m attempting to kind of bridge the gap between academia and the man on the street. Of course this is very dangerous because on the one hand you get the reaction from many ordinary people saying that, oh well this is something outside their understating and on the other hand you get the academics saying we haven’t peer reviewed it and so forth I would welcome any academic challenge because I’ve put in a lot of footnotes to back up what i say so if someone has a different interpretation that would be great.

We live in a global world. We do a great bit of business with China. We hear something about China in the news almost everyday but I wonder how much we really know about the country, its people and its origins.

Marnix Wells – Indeed, we need to learn more about the rest of the world. We need to know more about China and its culture. not from the propaganda so much as from the actual history and also into Asia, Africa, South America you know we mustn’t shut ourselves away in our Western paradise, or not so paradise. We must engage with the world.

So jump into your time machine and head back to the China of warring kingdoms in 250 B.C. on the eve of imperial conquest. The key to your travels is the internet where you’ll find a book about how the Chines...

What is your super-ability? Would you consider your primary skill to be your superpower? What if you had an actual superpower, what would you like it to be? This episode is based on the book Fog Vol. 1. Chaos in Quantum City by Athanasios Panayotou.

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram!

We all have unique skills and abilities but what if our strengths, our unique abilities, were our superpowers? Imagine finding yourself in a world where all that is possible. A world with a lot more than meets the eye and in that world these things are possible.

Speaking of Super-powers, when I was very young I wanted to be invisible. I thought it would be so cool to be able to go anywhere without being seen. Probably because I was a teen-aged boy and there were girls’ locker rooms to be explored. As I grew up my interests became much more sophisticated. Invisibility changed to the ability to fly — because why not. Over the years I’ve given this a lot of thought. Now, I think if I could have any superpower it would definitely be super-strength. My hero has always been Spiderman and you can do a lot of good with strength like Spidey’s but I digress...

Athan Panayotou lives in the city of Larne in Northern Ireland. It’s a city very much like the one you live in. A place where young people dream about being a superhero or having super powers. Right around the age of seventeen he became enthralled with the superhero fantasy.

Athan Panayotou – I’ve always wanted to make my own kind of superhero kind of universe and from a very young age like sixteen-seventeen I had illustrations of these characters that I was doing and I really wanted to write the stories as if they were like the comic books and I ended up making it into a novel.

His novel is now reality and it’s called Fog Vol. 1. Chaos in Quantum City and it is just the beginning! He calls it Volume one because there are definitely plans to expand this universe in fact Volume two is already written – but not published – but for now let’s focus on Volume one.

Athan Panayotou – It’s set in Ireland. There’s a lot of history I’ve fabricated too in between present day and 2183 to have things different and changed and new cities that have appeared. I like to say that it’s set in Galway but it’s like a fictional version of Galway.

So this gritty take on the superhero genre is set on the West coast of Ireland in the fictional city of Quantum.

Athan Panayotou – Quantum City is like a semi Utopian, the other half Dystopian, it’s not all good and there’s always people plotting behind the scenes and these characters just kind of get thrown in mix and have to figure out what’s going on and how they’re going to use their abilities.

So Nathan, Keris, Felix and Natasha are just a few of the characters that are tasked with defeating the threats that plague them in Quantum City. Threats like Elliot...

Athan Panayotou – He’s the one that’s stirring the pot. He is causing grief and uh, what’s the word...hindering. He’s a hindrance . He’s got his own plan in the works and things he wants to do and they’re not morally good. Elliot’s very upper class, stereotypical kind of snob, he’s very intelligent, he can be kind of unhinged.

There is humor, suspense, revenge and of course superpowers but not everyone uses their unique abilities for good. How did they even get their abilities? Was it something they wanted or was it done to them? The answers are all in the book but here’s the deal. You can’t just have abilities. You have to have a a good story and this book does have that. A good story and some great characters. In fact character development is one of Athan’s super-powers.

Athan Panayotou – Yea, definitely, I really do love character development. The characters definitely aren’t the same as they were in the start of the book as they are at the end of the book. I really had a lot of fun with their individual journey’s and like how they change. I really do love the change in character development, I love it.

The lives of these characters are completely changed over a couple months as they acquire their special abilities and work to take responsibility for them. And as you might expect, not everyone uses them for good. In one pivotal scene Kerys infiltrates Elliot’s company using her thorn-based abilities.

Athan Panayotou – Kerys goes on a bit of a rampage she goes after the company that wronged her and she just kind of let’s all hell set loose there’s a pinnacle moment that happens there where things happen, I’m not gonna spoil but I just had a lot of fun writing her as a character and how she deal w...

Should a pastor keep the peace or stir the waters?! This was the moral dilemma that Rev. Galusha Anderson faced when he arrived from the North to serve a congregation of divided loyalties in a divided city during the Civil War. This episode is based on the book GALUSHA. Crisis and Courage in a Civil War Pastor by Stephen D. Jones.

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram

We live in divided time. Is that the understatement of the day or what? I’m not just talking about politics. It used to be that way but it seems we keep finding new and bigger ways to get more and more divided. Think about it. Which side are you on when it comes to the economy, racism, immigration, climate control, taxes and the 1%, Gender equality and the list goes on. It’s a lot more than just liberal vs. democrat. How did it get this way? Good question and it demands more attention than just this one episode of Newsgram but I’ll tell you what. Let’s take a trip to a time when our country was it’s most divided, the 1860’s and visit a city uniquely positioned on the far West end of the Mason Dixon Line.

Stephen D. Jones – Well the unique thing about St. Louis during the civil war is that people on both sides lived side by side. They shopped in the same shops they lived on the same streets, the same neighborhoods, they attended the same churches, belonged to the same organizations and clubs and so forth and yet they were sending their sons out to kill their other sons on the battlefield. You don’t usually think of that in such close proximity. So these people had to learn how to hold deep passions which they did both pro-Union, pro-confederacy, but not have it blow up in the city of St. Louis and the fighting largely did not take place in the city of St. Louis. It happened all around it but not in it.

That is Reverend Stephen D. Jones of theFirst Baptist Church of Kansas City Missouri, just a few hours drive from St. Louis. He recently wrote a book about another man of the cloth, the Reverend Galusha Anderson, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of St. Louis. (The Story of Border City During the Civil War)

Stephen D. Jones – I had never really heard of him before I went to St. Louis.

He was there doing some research and came across a book called “A Border City During the Civil War” by Galusha Anderson and it inspired him to write his own book which is called GALUSHA. Crisis and Courage in a Civil War Pastor and one of the things I found most interesting about all of this was learning about some of the challenges that pastors face when dealing with a divided congregation. To bring it closer to home for you let me ask you a question. Have you ever faced a serious moral dilemma, and realized that there is both a costly way through it, and an easy way out? Which would you choose?

Stephen D. Jones – I think many people have kind of a crucible moment in their lives where you get tested and pushed to the limit and your true metal comes out and I think that’s what happened during these, really only six years that he served in St. Louis but they were crucible years for Galusha for several reasons, personal as well as pastoral. I was so taken by what happened to him, to his family, that I read the book several times and I began to realize that underneath that history that he was trying to write was his own personal story and it just kept coming out and I don’t think he intended it. I think if somebody told him, “you are writing a lot about yourself”, he might have edited it out, thank goodness he didn’t and what I did was pick up on all those personal vignettes and put them together and ofd that it told a striking story that i felt deserved to be told.

Galusha Anderson became the first pastor in St. Louis to take a stand against slavery and for the Union. Not an easy stand to take.

Stephen D. Jones – There was one Sunday night when he decided as the first pastor in St. Louis to speak out against slavery and against the succession of the southern states, against the confederacy. It did what everybody feared that it would, which was that his church was one of the larger churches in town and it was not quite evenly divided but there was an awful lot of confederate supporters in his congregation and the next Sunday morning they were all gone.

You were thinking that the confederates were going to burn down the church weren’t you? So was I. Galusha wasn’t the only pastor dealing with this moral dilemma but the difference was he spoke out. The others just kept quiet about the issue making Glaus...

The original Bill of Rights is now about 210 years old. Is it time to re-evaluate our fundamental constitutional rights? Are we ready to trust ourselves as individuals with the personal responsibilities that go with rights? This show is presented from the personal perspective of John Boushkaa gay man who grew up in a period of enormous change and migration toward cultural individualism. He is author of the book Do Ask, Do Tell: A Gay Conservative Lashes Back

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram.

Starting in February of 1994 and running all the way through September of 2011 “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was the official US policy regarding non-heterosexual people in military service. It was instituted during the Clinton administration and by 2008, more than 12,000 officers had been discharged from the military for publicizing their homosexuality.

It was overturned by the senate during the Obama administration on December 18, 2010. The repeal allowed gay and lesbian military members to serve openly in the armed forces.

This is not a history lesson on gay rights and the US government — we don’t have that kind of time but a little background is necessary. Today we are going to focus on John Boushka’s new book about several important issues including what “discrimination” is really all about, and what the debate regarding “family values” is really all about. Why equal rights for gays is important for everybody and how the “Don’t Tell” mentality interferes with political and social debate in many areas but since all that is clearly laid out in th ebook let’s take a step back an examine what life was like before writing it, because for anyone who has ever come out publicly, it is a moment you will never forget.

John Boushka – It was Friday November 24th 1961. The day after Thanksgiving 1961.

The Day after Thanksgiving, John Boushka walked into the Dean’s office while he was away at college and admitted that he was having feelings for men. There had been no sexual experience before that but the feelings were there.

John Boushka – The call from what my father said came in around eight o’clock in the evening. The dean identified himself and said they needed to come back to Williamsburg to talk to me. Him and my mother and so it would have been a very stressful thing for a couple to wonder why a dean wanted to talk to their child. Can you imagine what that would have been like?

I’m already wondering about a lot of things. Like why that call needed to be made in the first place. I guess because it was 1961, which also explains what happened next.

John Boushka – The end result was I was taken out of school. I would only be allowed to go back if a psychiatrist certified it was ok for me to go back to school.

The assumption being there is something psychologically wrong with being gay and further evaluation was necessary. Couldn’t just let him run free on campus with those crazy feelings of his.

John Boushka – This is one of the reasons why you had McCarthyism and you had witch hunts in the government and state department because the psychiatrist profession was making money off it. Today, Gender theory, who is making money off of it.

A lot to think about but poor John had to spend six months at the national Institute of Health in Bethesda Washington

John Boushka – There was actually a program to examine this problem in the fall of 1962 and some of the book deals with that.

When you look at the way things were then and you hear the stories about what life was like it’s absolutely fascinating and if you feel like we haven’t made progress I can tell you that when you hear John’s story you will understand that we have definitely made progress.

He talks about joining the military in the late 60’s and while Don’t ask Don’t tell may not have been the official policy it was definitely a thing. He also spent time in Dallas in the 80’s. Not the best place to ride out the Aids scare.

John Boushka – In Dallas they threatened to reinforce the Sodomy law with what was a much more draconian law in Texas in the mid nineteen eighties before they had a test for HIV that was politically a very difficult time. I talk about that in the book

Yea, Dallas definitely had its share of controversies in the 1960’s in effort to come full circle here let’s fast forward to the Clinton Administration. When you look at the living conditions of servicemen, which is what they had to do to come up with this policy, there are a lot of parallels with the living co...