Nine years ago this month, the world witnessed an event so horrific that it bypasses all language barriers and we collectively identify it by just two numbers, 9/11. Just the mention of those numbers over the years since draws us all back to that terrible day. I was sitting by my mother's bedside in the intensive care ward of Royal Perth Hospital and, strange as it may seem given her condition, I gave thanks that she, at least, was unaware of the horror that had gripped the world.

But in that horror, as we are only discovering now, something wonderful happened. Immediately after the twin towers crashed to the earth, the earth's magnetic field registered a sharp spike that's clearly identifiable on a graph. The hypothesis for this otherwise inexplicable event is that the sudden immense outpouring of emotion as people everywhere began to pray for the victims or simply to send, unbidden, thoughts of compassion was heard by the universe. And it responded. As the mystics and seers tell us, what is in one is in the whole.

We owe this awe-filled insight to the work of Gregg Braden who shared it with us during last month's I Can Do It event in Sydney and Perth. In a fascinating talk, he put forward the theory that the universe responds to feeling, a phenomenon called heart coherence. It's led to an experiment called the Global Coherence Initiative, which has the aim of redefining our relationship with the earth. (See www.greggbraden.com) It's big picture thinking and it tends to put politics in the shade doesn't it.

If this theory is correct, and if we consider that our heart has a magnetic field 500 times stronger than that of our overworked brain, the possibilities for healing seem, well, mind-boggling. If our universe really is a feeling organism, not the purely rational entity that science has led us to believe until now, then transformational change really does seem to be in our grasp. I urge you if you're at all serious about living your life in a more conscious, coherent way, to take a look at this website.

Closer to home for me this month, I've come across something similar in talking with David Michie, author of the bestseller Buddhism for Busy People. We were discussing the concept of bodhichitta, the compassionate mind of enlightenment practised by Tibetan Buddhists. In his view, if enough people decide to take up this path and if in the process the world shifts towards becoming just slightly more compassionate and more caring towards our fellow human souls, whether they be in Pakistan, or Iraq or on a boat on the high seas, or here at home, to quote David "what a fantastic place it would be".

Increasingly I feel there is growing momentum towards really believing we can make a change. Of course, the sceptics and the cynics will have their say, but the choice never was in their hands. And now science itself seems to be falling in behind those who've always been more attuned to their souls than their minds.

Let's really start to believe that how we think, the words we utter and the actions we take in our daily lives really do matter. And that wonderful times are ahead.

Margaret Evans
NOVA Editor
September 2010

An ancient text beloved by the Dalai Lama is now being offered to a Western audience with the promise of genuine transformation. Margaret Evans speaks with author David Michie.

"Why be unhappy about something
If it can be remedied?
And what is the use of being unhappy
about something
If it cannot be remedied?"

How can you argue with that? So balanced and clear and, at the same time, so compassionate in its understanding of our human predicament.

While it sounds so matter-of-factly modern, in fact it is a verse on equanimity from an 8th century text written by one of Tibetan Buddhism's most revered sages, Shantideva.

In a story that parallels to a remarkable degree the life journey of the Buddha himself, Shantideva was an Indian ruler who forsook the wealth and privilege of his court in Gujarat, in western India, to study at the great monastic University of Nalanda. Always a non conformist, the privileged young man was ridiculed until he stood to offer his first Dharma discourse to the assembled monks. His incisive and brilliant words laid the foundation for what became his greatest work, Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.

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Losing weight for that annual spring detox involves more than just going on a diet. As naturopath Narelle Stegehuis explains, it means addressing the weight- inflammation-toxicity cycle.

We often think of inflammation as a result of injury due to sprains, strains, cuts and grazes, insect bites and stings, which produce localised pain, swelling, redness and heat. Yet when inflammation is happening internally, it is not so easy to detect. What we do know, though, is that inflammation is a key driver of many degenerative and chronic conditions, including weight gain.

You may not even be aware that you are inflamed . You may think that those aches and pains you feel when you wake up in the morning are a sign of old age, but pain is your body's way of telling you that you are inflamed. Almost all chronic pain is a result of inflammation - including arthritis and other joint, back and muscle problems, digestive disorders like irritable bowel disease and many types of headaches.

Chronic diseases such as dementia, fatigue, heart disease, obesity, arthritis, asthma, depression and autoimmune disease may appear unrelated, but they all share the common underlying state of inflammation.

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Is the next great breakthrough yet another hi-tech gizmo? Or is it how we view the human body? Nicola Silva takes on the board the latest revolutionary idea from Deepak Chopra.

"Happiness is the goal of all other goals," Dr Deepak Chopra tells his audience with subtle emphasis. As those six words sink in, I notice people in the Darling Harbour auditorium smiling, some rather wryly; a few heads nod in agreement. Have we all not, at some point in our lives, searched desperately for happiness or tried to win, woo or even buy it?

Children seem to intuitively know the secret of happiness, but somewhere along the road to adulthood it slips elusively away, only to return in fleeting moments.

We're more familiar with what makes us unhappy: debt, sickness, loss, past regrets, uncertainty about the future. Then there are what Dr Chopra calls existential dilemmas such as the fear of old age and, inevitably, death.

Dr Chopra is in Sydney presenting a seminar entitled, "Reinventing the body; resurrecting the soul". Wearing a conservative black suit, he is humble and humorous at the same time. When he speaks it is with clarity and a crisp sense of authority. By lunchtime, almost all his many books and CDs on sale have been eagerly snapped up. Clearly, there is a deep thirst for his message.

He has been called a poet and a visionary, but Dr Chopra is also a scientist, a physician and an undisputed spiritualist. Perhaps it takes someone with precisely those qualities, medical training and insight to present a radically different way of looking at our bodies, and indeed our entire reality.

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As pressure mounts for us to make more conscious choices in all aspects of our lives, none is more important than the food we eat, suggests Margaret Evans.

The Mexican American family of four, mum, dad and two attractive daughters, is sitting down to dinner - the same meal as virtually every other night - a burger, chips and cola gulped down in the car on the way home after another exhausting day. It costs US$11.38 to fill their stomachs for an hour or two - an equation that illustrates the crisis quietly engulfing the United States in an avalanche of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

The scene, from the gripping, Academy Award nominated documentary Food Inc, is graphic simply because it is so recognisable, so everyday, and not so far removed from the experience of many Australian families caught in the same spiral into ill health.

As mother and eldest daughter weigh up the cost of buying a fresh lettuce and a few tomatoes - they put them back because they're too expensive - we hear that dad, a truck driver in his forties (or maybe it's thirties) already has diabetes and the younger daughter is suspected of having the same insidious disease. The terrible balancing act they face every month is to pay for his medication or to buy the fresh food that would lessen the impact of his disease and perhaps save his daughter from its predations. We hear the horrifying statistic that one in three children born in America since 2000 - 10 year olds and younger - will develop young onset diabetes. Among minority groups, including the new poor of Hispanic Americans, it's 50%. Forget nuclear weapons, even climate change - here's America's greatest crisis in a greasy paper bag!

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We introduce Dr Kitty Campion PhD, an internationally recognised pioneer in the field of energy medicine and leading medical herbalist. As she outlines here, while herbal medicine is facing oblivion in the EU and the United States under the pressure of Big Pharma, China takes a different view.

Patients cannot be standardised, nor can their medicines, if they are to be truly effective. Even supposing the pharmaceutical industry was not as antipathetic to herbal medicine as it currently is, this presents it with an enormous problem.

The nature of the beast dictates that it produces drugs in huge quantities, but the problem is that the recipients of such drugs remain, thank goodness, stubbornly individual. Over the years, this has led to widespread disillusionment with modern drug therapy. One man's aspirin is another man's stomach ulcer.

There is an alternative to this - herbal medicine. But before it is wrongly elevated to the status of the universal panacea, I should point out it is the chemical bastardisation of the properties of herbs that has, in many instances, led to iatrogenic (unintentionally caused by a doctor) disease in the first place. Many people fail to realise that conventional medicine is, in fact, firmly rooted in herbalism. They tend to assume, if they think about it at all, that all those multi coloured pills have nothing to do with nature, whereas medical science still depends heavily on plant life to provide the blueprint for much modern medicine.

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There's no need for a facelift or a fancy wardrobe. The changes we seek start with feeling the love within us, says counsellor Dr Charmaine Saunders

Transformation is about change and altering, hopefully improving but not necessarily. It's more about becoming something else, rather than just another version of the former self.

There are many ways in which a human life can transform in the course of the journey between birth and death.

Death itself is merely a transformation, and while we're still alive, we go through many different stages of growth. Our bodies change constantly, we can literally change our minds in one glorious moment of insight, and we can lift ourselves up, spiritually and psychologically, through processes that are like walking on fire in order to become stronger.

All of life can be about transformation if we choose to live in a spirit of exploration and adventure. We don't need to have physical makeovers, revamp our wardrobe, shed kilos, have facelifts or engage a personal trainer. We only need to be our own best selves, no matter how hard that is sometimes!

Of all the approaches I could take with this topic, I decided to talk about the transformation that comes through counselling seeing as that's my day job. And it honours the brave men and women who take this journey with me and truly and amazingly transform.

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Are there absolute, eternal truths or is everything constantly changing? Plato believed there were pure, fixed, archetypal forms shaping the universe from within. Heraclitus, on the other hand, believed that the only constant was change. “We never step into the same river twice,” he said.

Because Plato was so dogmatic, I have no hesitation in saying that he was wrong. We can’t find a single thing that doesn’t change. Scientific laws, religious beliefs, geological and biological structures, and personal habits are all fluid if we examine them closely enough, but Plato still has a point. Forms may not be eternal, but they may change so slowly as to be immutable for all practical purposes. Some things change easily, while some change barely at all, and some have more capacity for change than we think they do.

For example, it used to be part of scientific dogma that the structure of our brain cells, and therefore our consequent behaviour, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Brain cells can’t regenerate themselves and they steadily die off as we age. Despite these constraints, we now know that the brain is far more “plastic” than we ever imagined. At any age and within days, a brain cell can establish thousands of new connections with its neighbours, changing its physical structure to do so, if given the right stimulation.

Because of this ability, we can learn. We are able to develop new ways of thinking and acting. We can draw on libraries of memory, learn from mistakes, think laterally, imagine the unknown and implement plans to achieve it. A wise old man has fewer neurons than a young man, but he has the potential for far greater connectivity and, thus, intelligence.

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Feng Shui predicts turbulent times in the Year of the Golden Tiger, says Juliana Abram

The Chinese have a unique calendar system commonly known as the "Farmers calendar" or the "Hsia calendar". It is an enthralling system that provides us with information about prevailing elemental influences at any given point in time. It makes use of the five elements - water, wood, fire, earth and metal - and their cycles to determine the various aspects affecting the world in any period.

In Chinese astrology, the Tiger being the third animal to hear the call of Buddha has many attributes that make up its character. Those born in the year of the Tiger are generally considered to be magnetic and commanding, strongly valuing courage. They easily manage to whip up a storm, love a challenge and are prepared to assert themselves and take risks.

Yes...2010 is the year of the Metal Tiger and it is influenced by two elements, metal and wood. So, this coming year is represented by the image of Yang Metal sitting atop Yang Wood. In accordance with the cycles of the five elements, Metal attacks and destroys the Wood element, so this wood element is not particularly strong.

We live in a time of disturbing prophecies of climate change, sea levels rising and world wars and around the world people are suffering in dire situations through food shortages and civil wars. Many people are trapped in tragic circumstances, among them refugees, women, children, families facing terrible poverty and living under the conditions of war and displacement.

Many of the world's problems appear to be increasing, instead of being solved. At the same time, there is more than ever before in history, an enormous number of esteemed spiritual teachers and leaders sprinkled across the globe, providing light for their communities and hope in turbulent times. It's heartening that these leaders can motivate their followers to open their hearts to their fellow humans and create a better world for all.

In a secular world of greed and selfishness, it is spiritual values that must lead the way. And this year Australia is at the centre, providing the backdrop for a global gathering, the Parliament of the World's Religions.

This December, the world's religions and spiritual communities will convene in Melbourne for the largest and most diverse global interfaith gathering in the world. Based on the premise that there cannot be world peace unless the religions of the world are at peace with one another and working together to find solutions to global problems, the gathering aims to foster tolerance and unity.

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Urgent action on climate change is now an imperative that can no longer be ignored. Adrian Glamorgan previews this month's crucial talks in Copenhagen ...

The big environmental news, the only show in town, is the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, from this December 7 to 18. If the Kyoto Protocols helped get the world on the same page, and Bali two years ago focused us towards the rewrite, the Copenhagen United Nations conference is the world's best chance to create an operating manual for future change: meaningful action to do something about rising global temperatures.

Something needs to be done. The alternative ending to this story is climate disaster from warming: more droughts, more flooding, less ice and snow, shrinking glaciers, more extreme weather events, and rising sea levels. Any one of these scenarios is serious: combined, and we're looking at economic losses, famine, damage to infrastructure, drying river flows to major population centres, inundation of coastal cities, relocation of whole countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives, and civil war and wars competing for limited resources like water and oil.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's first official action after being elected was to bring Australia into the Kyoto Protocols, but subsequent decision making, including the 5% "targets", and infrastructure funding supporting the coal industry, has thrown doubt onto our own national commitment. It was a masterstroke, then, for the Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen to invite our former diplomat PM to join the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, and the Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, to become one of the three lead negotiators to pressure other world leaders to commit to action. Australia now can make a lasting difference.

The whole point is to arrest rising world temperatures. The key is lowering concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air. At the time of Captain Cook, our atmosphere had 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Now it is about 380 parts per million. We can't predict the tipping point, but 450-480 parts per million seems precarious.

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