Accelerated learning Recipe - Chocolate Raspberry Brownies

As part of continued training with accelerated learning today i have made some chocolate brownies.

The recipe is from www.williescacao.com - I have tweaked the recipe and added in some raspberries.

Notes : Rather than whisking i used the mixer which cuts down on blending time and makes the process as simple as you like. I also don't worry about coarsely chopping the chocolate - letting it melt with the butter works fine. No need to lightly grease the baking tray just get the baking paper in the tray and pour the mixture in when it is ready to go.

Ingredients

• 200g Venezuelan Carenero Superior 100% cacao, coarsely chopped

• 100g slightly salted butter

• 4 eggs

• 200g caster sugar

• 120g walnuts, roughly chopped
• 130g raspberries

Equipment

• Baking tin, about 40cm x 24cm

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 170°C. Lightly grease the baking tin and line with baking paper.

• Melt the cacao and butter in heatproof bowl, set over a pan of gently simmering water, making sure the bottom of the bowl is not in contact with the water.

• Set aside to cool.

• Whisk the eggs and caster sugar in a large mixing bowl until light and creamy.

• Fold in melted chocolate and butter until well combined, then fold in the chopped walnuts and raspberries

• Spoon the mixture into the prepared cake tin and bake in the preheated oven for 15–20 minutes, until the centre is just firm to the touch.

• Remove from oven and allow to cool in the tin.

• Slice into approximately 4-cm squares.

• These brownies will keep for up to a week in an airtight tin.

Congratulations Sensei Todd on receiving your Budokon blue belt from Kancho Cameron Shayne

On the 7th of April 2013  it is fantastic to finally receive the blue belt. Thanks to all those who have helped me along the way. Special thanks to Sensei Ryan Carldon-Miah director of Budokon UK. 

Jason Chan Monthly message - April 2013 - Love can heal all sorrow

I know that I wrote about ‘The Power of Love’ last month, but Easter always reminds me of Jesus Christ’s incredible love for all of humanity –a love that inspired him to go through crucifixion on our behalf. So I am going to write about love this month too. I am sure you won’t mind, because most spiritual seekers are longing for love, and so we never really tire of this particular spiritual topic.

Do you realise how many people in this world are dying because of a lack of love? The world’s number one killer is heart disease, not cancer. Heart disease corresponds to an egoic belief in a lack of love. Because of our crazy egoic beliefs that love is limited and that love can die, we have all closed our hearts up against the pain of falling in love, and so we all suffer.

Many well intentioned individuals in our society now try and protect themselves from ill-health by eating a healthy diet which is low in saturated fats. However, I have to inform you that butter is not really a killer. In CSI, they do not arrest full-fat cheese week after week for the mass murder of thousands of overweight, unhappy Americans who have dropped dead from a heart attack or heart failure. No! When someone dies of heart disease, they are really dying from a lack of love, or a ‘broken heart’. Blockages in the arteries are basically a symptom of this lack of love in our lives.

When we tense ourselves up in fear and lack of love, the muscles around our heart also become tense, and then they can become weak, and so our hearts will tire, particularly as we grow older. So we urgently need to learn how to relax and open our hearts to ‘love energy’ in order to restore our natural inner strength, harmony and vitality.  Dwelling in love energy will not only improve and protect our physical health; it will also enable us to lead our lives in peace and joy, instead of fear and conflict.

But how can we dwell in love energy, when the world around us is still a very fearful and unloving place to be?  Well, first we have to raise our vibrational level way up above the level of normal, fearful human consciousness. Then we need to sit quietly in meditation on a very regular basis and focus our awareness on our heart centre. We can gently breathe love and light into our heart centre and then use the power of our mind to see it opening up in love and light, like a beautiful flower-bud opening its petals in very bright sunlight. If you keep doing this, I guarantee that sooner or later, your heart centre will open up and transform your whole life.

As a lost soul, you are longing for God’s Love, whether you are consciously aware of this deep soul longing or not. But you are also a highly intelligent, well-educated individual who cannot believe in an all-powerful, loving God who sits up in the sky and allows terrible things to happen down here on earth, so how can you possibly connect to His infinite love for you?

You urgently need a paradigm shift! Fortunately, through meditation, you can connect to God’s love, or ‘love energy’ directly and then eventually, you can live your whole life in this infinite love and light, rather than in egoic fear and darkness. But first, you need to raise your vibrations and consciousness up to a relatively high level.

Most people try to raise their vibrations through disco dancing, jogging etc., but my students and I do it with Infinite Tai Chi. Practising Infinite Tai Chi, Chi Kung, Yoga and Meditation (The Infinite Arts) really assists us to raise our energetic vibrations and consciousness up to the level of ‘love energy’ and thus enables us to lead truly joyful and helpful lives. Science and technology are brilliant, but they just cannot do this for you.

When you connect to love, all your basic needs will be automatically met because higher energy always covers everything underneath it. But first, you have to keep raising your vibrations until you are dwelling virtually all of the time in a beautiful, calm, harmonious state of mind. Then, you simply can extend your inner peace and light quite naturally to all those around you, who will benefit immeasurably from your radiant, peaceful presence.

However, before you can do this, you will need to cultivate inner power and strength, so that your emanation is both strong and beautiful. You actually need an exceptionally bright, strong aura to counteract the downward pull of this world. Collective consciousness is still relatively low and fearful, and so it does take quite some effort to rise above it into the light. But, as I always say to my students, however much effort it takes to connect to love and light, it is always totally worth it!

So please do your very best to live your life in love, whatever those around you choose to do. There is really no need to argue with others, who do not believe in ‘God’s Love’. Let them be. There is no need to get jealous about others’ worldly success. Such success is just a passing dream with very little real meaning to it. You can even let someone take your partner away from you, if they really believe that doing so will make them happy –Why not?  When you dwell in love energy, you no longer need to cling to another human being, or to imprison another human being in the name of love.

Set everyone you know and love free. Keep raising your consciousness upwards and focus on transforming your soul into a bright star. Keep opening up your whole being in the higher light, like a lotus flower opening up in bright sunlight. A lotus seed merges into dark mud for a while, before reaching up into the light, and this world is very much like a mucky pond, full of violence and cruelty. But you can rise above all of this to dwell more or less permanently in love energy and thus become a shining example for others to follow.

But please notice that when the sun goes down, the lotus flower closes up. You are like the lotus. You go on a spiritual workshop or retreat, and open up in the light. Then you return home, and close up again, so that you can function as a normal human being. However, after a while, doing this begins to feel heavy and uncomfortable, especially compared to the bliss of meditating in love and light, and so you will be inspired to practise even more diligently.

Eventually, you will be holding so much love and light more or less continuously that you will just have to pour it out onto everyone you meet, or even think about for a moment or two. You will naturally extend unconditional love and compassion to the whole of humanity, including murderers, politicians and even billionaire bankers! Without doing anything, except connecting internally to love and light, you will become a truly healed and  healing presence in the world: more healing than anti-cholesterol drugs, or heart surgery? Infinitely so!!

Jason Chan Monthly Message - March 2013 - The Power of Love

The outside temperature may still be close to freezing, but the sun is now shining and the birds and the bees seem to know that spring is coming.

So as February suddenly stops and gives way to March, I sense that love is in the air!

I do hope you have experienced the bliss of falling in love at least once in your life. Falling in love is part of the package of being a human being. When we are in love, we can focus exclusively on our loved one with great intensity. In that moment when we join with our beloved, we feel truly alive. When we gaze into the eyes of the one whom we love, the rest of the world seems to disappear for a while. Just go to a busy airport and watch two lovers saying goodbye or hello –totally oblivious to the tension and chaos all around them.

But I have to tell you that you do not have to meet the man or woman of your dreams to fall in love. If you train your mind to focus intensely on any object, you can then feel as though you are joining with it, and so you can fall in love with it! You can certainly fall in love with a tree in this way, or a flower, or a piece of music. You simply have to open your heart and focus intensely on something until you merge with it.

Love touches our hearts and stimulates them to open up like flowers in bright sunshine. So please do not wait for your soul mate to come along to be in love. Fall in love every day of your life. Love is everywhere. Love is in the air that we breathe. You just have to learn how to tune into its beautiful energy. When you really know that love is in the air, you will no longer need to grab hold of someone and hold them close to you to experience love.

But to experience this love in the air, we have to meet certain conditions. The thinking brain cannot really love. It can only strongly desire someone, or something, and then believe that this is love. So we need to learn how to rise above our thinking mind into a higher level of consciousness, if we truly long to tune into the energy of love on a daily basis.

When my students perform Infinite Tai Chi, this actually helps them to dwell in love energy for a while, because they focus their mind on their movements in a relaxed, but powerful way They join their mind and body together and raise their vibrations up to the level of love energy. When an advanced student performs Infinite Tai Chi with supreme focus, the whole external world and even their thoughts can disappear for a while, as they merge with love and light So Infinite Tai Chi is not really slow, gentle movement. It is a spiritual art. It is movement ‘in love’ or, as we have subtitled it, ‘Movement in the Light’.

When our mind, body and emotions flow together in perfect harmony, we can get in touch with a universal life force that assists us to feel truly alive in the present moment. Moreover, once we are flowing harmoniously with life, we will inevitably attract more love into our lives. But this love is not the same thing as sexual chemistry, or physical desire that comes and goes. True love has a permanent, unchanging aspect to it. This true love never comes or goes. It is only our awareness of it that changes.

I am determined to be in love each and every moment of my life. But I have to tell you that this is ‘work in progress!’

Most human beings still love on another in a very possessive way, because they become fearfully attached to the object of their affections. If their partner flirts with someone at a party, for example, they inevitably feel horribly jealous. Some people even become very attached to possessions that they ‘love’, such as their designer watch. They say to themselves ‘This is my beautiful watch’ and then they are devastated when somebody steals it.

If you need to possess someone to feel love and security, you are in big trouble, because you do not even possess your own body, let alone someone else’s body. You just lease your body from Mother Earth for a while. You should certainly do your best to look after your physical body whilst you have one, but if you become too attached to it, you will suffer sooner or later, as your body weakens and then dies.

If you long for lasting freedom and happiness, you need to understand that needy attachments are the opposite of true love and can never bring us the lasting satisfaction that we seek.

When we keep thinking to ourselves that we want something, we are basically confirming our lack. If you want more love in your life, you are confirming that you are lacking in love, or wholeness. But all human beings feel this lack! Yet the more you raise your vibrations and consciousness up to the level of love energy, the more you can transcend this fundamental human problem.

Your personality-self has a thousand and one desires to pursue. Your personality-self can even try to imprison someone and call it love. But your soul, or core being, only wants to dwell in true love and freedom.

So please make a real commitment to live your life in love from this day forth. Only you can determine that from now on you are going to do everything in your power to live your life in love. Can your mother do this for you? Of course she can’t! No one else can lead your life for you, and so your happiness is 100 per cent your responsibility.

If you are happy, if you are in love, the whole world will become a happier place thanks to you. If on the other hand, you are determined to be fearful and miserable for the rest of your life, no one will benefit, not even a cat or a dog! So please never assume that pursuing love and happiness is a selfish goal. Happy individuals who are ‘in love’ are a true blessing to the whole world.

To experience love energy, we have to raise our vibrations way above the average level of human consciousness. We have to raise our vibrations up to the level of love, which is 500 on Dr David Hawkins calibration chart. Given that, according to Hawkins, the majority of human beings’ average calibration is still less than 200, you can see that this is quite a challenge, but one that a number of my long-term students have now achieved.

However, you will certainly need to take up some kind of regular spiritual practice to raise your vibration up above 499. Stephen Hawkins, for example has a brilliant mind, but he is a scientist, not a spiritual practitioner, and so he is convinced that a loving God does not exist, because science cannot find any proof of His existence. We actually need to have a subjective experience of God’s Love pouring down on us to know that God exists. I do not believe in God. I know God, because I have gone beyond my thinking, intellectual mind to experience Him directly with my whole being.

Unfortunately, most people in our world are living loveless lives. They are still imploding with fear and anger because of their low level of consciousness. Tensing up against the world is very normal, but when we tense up like this, we inevitably close our hearts, and then we experience living in fear, rather than love. The majority of human beings live all their lives in self-centred fear and lack, and so we have far more thieves than Saints. Saints love all living creatures unconditionally. But this is definitely ‘the road less travelled’.

If you long to live your life in love, please practise flowing harmoniously with life instead of tensing up against it. Keep raising your consciousness up to ever higher levels, until you really love life and can live your life without constant anxiety and stress, because you are living in love rather than fear.

When you are dwelling in true love, you can just share this love with others, without any of the pushing and pulling that inevitably accompanies conditional, human love. As we awake spiritually, we should notice that we are no longer aiming to go out and grab more love into our lives. We are aiming to be love. We are committing ourselves to rediscovering our true identity and to knowing that our true-selves are all made of love and nothing but love.

Stakes - 4 Hour Chef by Timothy Ferris

Setting the scene - Stakes. 

So you may have read the 4 hour chef or a similar book like the Talent Code by Daniel Coyle or Outliers by Malcom gladwell All of these books talk about what it takes to be the best possible person you can be.

 In terms of Outliers and Talent Code it is about deconstructing the components that make a great athlete or someone who is considered an expert at their chose field. 

The 4 hour chef by Timothy Ferris talks about Accelerated learning i.e. learning a new skill in a relative short period of time. 

They all have one thing in common : Passion! Each of the individuals have the desire to be the best they can be and with passion comes stakes . Stakes literally means having something that is pushing you along whether it is a big game coming up , or an event or just because you want to show your mates you can do it. 

Stakes - also push you to continue in your pursuit when maybe things aren't going as smoothly as you would like or let you know that you still have something to finish.

Over the next couple of weeks i am going to use this blog to chronicle my efforts in completing all the recipes in the 4 hour chef.  

Jason Chan - February 2013 Message

The Year of the Snake: A Great Year for Meditation!

On February 10^th, we enter the Chinese Year of the Snake. The Snake, sometimes known as the Junior Dragon, is said to be an intuitive, introspective, contemplative sign. So I predict that this year is going to be a fantastic year for all those of you who follow some kind of meditation practice.

Some people use meditation simply for relaxation, and this in itself is so beneficial in our hyperactive modern world. However, others take up a meditation practice primarily to speed up their spiritual awakening. I tend to attract students who are longing to awake-whether they are yet fully conscious of that deep longing, or not – and so I always strongly encourage my students to meditate on a daily basis.

What is meditation for? You actually have to set your own intention. So each time you sit to meditate, decide what you want to attain through meditating; personal empowerment, infinite abundance, awakening, healing, or a connection with the divine, and then go for it with all your might.

How do you do that? Simply set your intention and then withdraw your mind from the external world and gently discipline it to be one-focussed for a while.

You can use a mantra to assist your mind to be one-focussed. Om Mane Padme Hum, for example, is a very powerful traditional Buddhist mantra, or you can use just one simple English word like love or light. In fact, there are many different ways to focus and still our minds during meditation. One of the simplest is just to keep noticing your outbreath.  Then each time that you become aware that your mind has wandered off into a train of thoughts and thus drifted away from the present moment, you can gently pull it back to being aware of each outbreath again.

Whatever particular technique you use to still and focus your mind, please do not give up, if you do not immediately experience deep peace or stillness as you meditate. It does take quite some time to train our ‘monkey minds’ to be still. But, as I always tell my students, every effort counts, and rising above all our thinking during our meditations definitely gets easier the more that you practise.

Creating a Better World through Meditating

Meditation is not really for your personality-self, it is for your soul. Meditation really assists your soul on its journey back home. But as you open up to your soul, or core being, you can also bring its higher wisdom and power back down to your physical existence.

Many experienced meditators perceive this higher wisdom, as a blissful light enveloping them. When you can connect to this spiritual light and embody it in your whole being, you will become one of the most peaceful and joyful individuals on our planet – I guarantee it! But connecting to ‘the light’ and then embodying it, will not only transform your own life, it will eventually assist the whole human race to expand its collective consciousness. How does this work? Well, all our minds are linked in one vast energy loop, and so each time one mind reaches up to the light, we all become just a little more ‘enlightened’.

The more you awake, the more you can contribute to a speeding up of the evolution of collective human consciousness. All awakened souls are naturally loving and compassionate. So as we meditate, awake, and open up our hearts and minds to true love and light, we will automatically become more and more loving and kind to all living beings.

Awakened individuals can no longer be violent or aggressive. They just cannot hurt another living creature. Moreover, as they awake, human beings begin to escape from the egoic ‘What about me?’ thought system that is suspicious at best and extremely vicious at worst. This totally self-centred thought system still governs our whole world and so our world is not at peace yet.

We all still have a dark shadow side deep within our own minds and hearts, but as you awake, you will notice that you become less and less tolerant of even mildly aggressive thoughts and feelings. This may mean that you feel more rather than less uncomfortable for a while on your awakening, healing journey, but try not to worry too much about this. It too will pass.

Realising Your Divine Potential

We all need to follow a spiritual programme for quite some time before we can rise above the default egoic programming of normal human existence. Human beings have now been slowly evolving for about 2 million years, but we are still having a really hard time because we are all still so self-centred, and therefore basically go out into the world to smash and grab what we want from others.

We even do this in the name of ‘falling in love’! We say that we would do anything for our beloved when we fall in love, but if the object of our desire later disappoints us in some way, our ‘undying’ love can very quickly turn to hate. I’m sorry to be so blunt so near to Valentine’s Day, but we all know that romantic love never lasts!

But if we follow some kind of genuine spiritual programme for many years, we do have the potential to become far less self-centred, more genuinely loving and caring  and ultimately even divine. In other words, we have the potential to evolve from being a normal human being to being a saint in an extremely short period of time. But to do this we will have to dedicate our whole lives to our spiritual path, because we simply do not have a moment to spare!

Most human beings are still more or less totally self-centred, and when they cannot get what they want from the world they tend to get very angry, or really depressed. No wonder our world is still in a mess! All those individuals who are still totally trapped in lower levels of consciousness really don’t give a damn about others’ welfare. So please give thieves and con-artists a break. They really cannot help being so self-centred that they are basically oblivious to the pain they are inflicting on their victims.

But each time an individual raises their consciousness and awakes to their true nature, they inevitably become genuinely selfless and thus assist the whole world to become a much better place. Isn’t this a wonderful motivation to sticking to a meditation practice through thick and thin? Not only will meditating transform your own life for the better – in ways you cannot yet even begin to imagine – but in some small way, your dedication and commitment to pursuing the light will also benefit the whole of humankind.

Jason Chan’s New Year Message

Well my last month’s prediction was spot on. The world did not end on 21.12.12 and now it is 2013. Happy New Year!

A dear friend of mine, who is serving a long prison sentence, recently wrote that many of  his fellow prisoners really celebrate New Year because it means they have completed another year of their sentence.  This rather poignant story got me thinking!

Basically, until we become enlightened, we are all imprisoned by our egoic mindset. We are trapped in our judgemental, fearful thoughts and volcanic emotions, such as anger, hatred and even despair. Because our thoughts are so negative so much of the time, our lives tend to be a constant struggle. Now wonder then that we are often very relieved when one year ends and another starts.  

At the very beginning of a new year, we can imagine that it is going to be so much better than the year that has just ended. We also like to make New Year’s resolutions that often involve us vowing to take up more healthy activities in order to lose weight, to lower our cholesterol, or enhance our six-pack. The more spiritually minded of us may vow to meditate more, or to go on a spiritual retreat, but these resolutions are still ‘action packed’.

Most people still have no idea that their thoughts are far more important than their behaviour in determining what sort of year they are going to have. But I have to warn you that if you continue to indulge in the extremely damaging human habits of moaning and groaning about life and blaming others for all your pain and suffering, nothing much in your life is going to change for the better in 2013. On the other hand, if you really begin to replace your fearful/angry thoughts with loving/compassionate thoughts, everything can begin to change for the better quite miraculously.

 A fundamental spiritual truth is that we create our own reality with our minds. If we utilise our minds to project all our fear and self-hatred outwards, and to insist that others are ‘the guilty ones’, our world is not going to change much for the better. If on the other hand, we take a vow to replace as many negative thoughts as we can with much more positive ones, we are taking a huge step in the right direction of creating a more peaceful, fulfilling, abundant and joyful future for ourselves.

Let me give you an example of how this works.  We all know that we are going through quite tough times in terms of the downturn in Western economies. The easiest thing to do in such circumstances is to sit around thinking really angry thoughts about the bankers, or the politicians, for getting us into such a mess in the first place. But where does this actually get us? We might gain an immediate sense of satisfaction by venting our anger out onto others in this way, but in the long run, doing this changes absolutely nothing about our lives, or the world in which we live.

If however, you make a solemn vow at the beginning of 2013 to transcend all your fearful, angry attacking thoughts and to fill your mind and heart with love and compassion every day of the year, I absolutely guarantee that your life will improve beyond your wildest dreams!

So please, make a conscious choice this New Year to love and to forgive everyone in the whole wide world. Trust me, you do not have to go out to dinner with your worst enemy, but you do have to learn to replace fear and hatred towards your ‘enemies’ with unconditional love and light. Keep choosing love over fear a million, or even a trillion times if necessary, or you will be trapped in pain and suffering forever.

In the early 21^st Century, more and more people are learning how to follow a path from fear to love. But we still live on a very fearful, troubled planet. Virtually everyone on this planet still thinks a load of angry, fearful thoughts day in and day out. But as yet, hardly anyone realises that all their pain and suffering arises from fear and unworthiness stored deep within their own minds and hearts.

Whenever I am teaching a course, or leading a spiritual retreat, I do everything in my power to assist participants to rise above all their anger and fear, until their minds are dwelling in peace, love, light and joy for longer and longer periods of time. I believe that this core spiritual practice is crucial for the survival of the whole world. So please, join me at the very beginning of 2013, and commit to doing your very best to practise holding love and peace in your heart and mind day in and day out, regardless of what is going on in the world around you. If you keep up this practice for long enough, I know that you will eventually become an exceptionally happy and fulfilled individual and a shining beacon of hope in our still rather dark and troubled world.

Thank you for reading this message and for wanting to do your bit to make the world a better place in 2013. I salute you for taking the time and effort to improve your own life and the lives of others, and I wish you and all your loved ones a truly miraculous year ahead.