Ram Dass – sometimes known as Baba Ram Dass – was an American-born exponent of Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. He was also a qualified psychoanalyst and author. He was perhaps best-known as a spiritual teacher who did a great deal to bring many aspects of Hinduism to a wider audience in the post-war generation of Americans. Ram Dass travelled to India in the late 1960s where he became a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, a Hindu guru. It was him who gave Ram Dass his new name which translates into English as 'Servant of God'. Following a stroke in the 1990s, the spiritual teacher was left with some paralysis, but he learned to speak again and took up travelling once more until he became ill again after a trip to India in 2004. He died in Hawaii in December 2019.
At its simplest, raw food is any sort of edible material that has been uncooked in any way. Of course, cooking may mean a variety of things when it comes to raw food, not simply heating food so that it breaks down somewhat. As such, for food to be considered raw, it should not have been processed in any meaningful way. Cured foods or those that have been tenderised are usually not considered to be fully raw, for example. At its simplest, the concept of raw foodism – the dietary practice of only consuming unprocessed and uncooked foods – means eating things in their most natural state. The idea is that this is closest to man's relationship with the natural world before human beings were able to harness fire to begin cooking their food.
Also known as NLP, neurolinguistic programming is an approach that tries to tie together ideas about human development, psychotherapy and communications systems to explain human behaviour. At its simplest, NLP describes language acquisition and usage as a neurological process. As this has a physiological and psychological effect on the brain so that humans behaviours can be ascribed to their use of language. At its heart is the idea that neurolinguistic programming means behaviours are learned – or modelled, according to the theory's proponents. Another key factor is to do with the way a subjective conscious experience is reinforced in our heads. In other words, as well as gaining experience from our senses, we also 'rehearse' the experience of phenomena in our minds which can often come in the form of thinking in a language system. This, according to NLP, means we programme our behaviour with language without ever really realising it.
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