Collective Awareness

Phonological awareness shows beginning readers how to divide language orally into smaller units. This ability is developed through an understanding of rhyme, sentence and syllable segmentation as well as onset and rimes. Phonological awareness is the first skill which students need to learn even before phonemic awareness is developed. Phonological awareness should be taught in kindergarten. Like phonemic awareness, phonological awareness consists of listening activities. Phonological awareness should follow a Continuum. Rhymes should be taught first so that students learn how to match the ending sounds of words. Rhyming is usually one of the most fun phonological awareness skills to teach. That is because rhymes contain rhythm so they have a musical sound, that children love. Most children master the identification of rhymes very quickly. Sentence Segmentation should be taught next, again this activity is fun for most children and they tend to catch on quickly. Thirdly, syllables are taught, children are asked to listen and then separate words into parts and then put them back together. Finally onsets and rimes are introduced. These skills are taught in a particular order so that confusion is minimized, once these skills are taught children are ready to be introduced to phonemic awareness skills. Below I will break down the phonological awareness continuum into greater detail and give a few examples.

Rhyming--Remember those nursery rhymes you learnt as a child. They were fun but you were also learning. You were learning that words could sound alike and have rhythm. The learning of rhymes is one of the core skills of phonological awareness. Besides nursery rhymes you can find poems and books with rhymes and introduce them to children. Let them listen and clap to words that rhyme. You can also call a group of words together, for example: mat, hen, fat and have children tell you which two words rhyme. Listening is the key ingredient in phonological awareness by listening and responding children are learning how to divide the language into small units.

Sentence Segmentation--This is where children learn that a sentence is made up of different words.

For example: "I have a big red book."

Students should be aware that the sentence is made up of six different words: I/have/a/big/red/book/

You can have students clap, count or even march to the number of words in the sentence as they say it.

Syllabication--Here children are taught that one word can have several parts. For example: din/ner rab/bit. Allow children to listen as you call a word and then repeat the word and clap out the different parts of a word.

Onsets and Rimes--The onset of a word is the initial consonant sound of the word, for example: 'bag' in this case 'b' is the onset. The rime is the part with the vowel /ag/. An initial consonant blend may also be termed an onset. For example, in the word 'black' /bl/ would be the onset and /ack/ the rime. You should have children blend and then separate onsets and rimes. Here's an example: /c/ /ap/( said separately) cap(said together).

What is meant by the term "collective consciousness?" It is a collection of thoughts shared by all beings that has as its source the oneness of the universe. Other terms for collective consciousness are "mass consciousness," "collected thought forms," or "universal consciousness."

Mass consciousness grows from energy-the energy that is accumulated from every thought or word spoken by every person. We all contribute. All thoughts are energy-powerful energy-and energy attracts like energy. Love attracts love; fear attracts fear. Remember that whatever you add energy to multiplies-it does not add, it multiplies. It multiplies because it grows not only from your own energy, but also from the contribution of what other people are thinking. This collection of thoughts creates a "collective consciousness." Every thought contributes to this pool, actually creating an energy form, which is otherwise known as a "thought form." The thought form is real-people who are attuned to and can see energy fields usually describe it as a cloudlike formation, varying in color and sometimes accompanied by a sound or smell.

A visual analogy of the creation of thought forms and their attraction of like forms is found in outer space. Have you ever seen pictures of astronauts in space trying to eat or drink? Because of the lack of gravity, liquids are covered so they do not float out of their containers. Imagine there are two astronauts trying to drink two juices-one grape and the other orange. They knock into one another, spilling their juices into the empty space of the cockpit. Since there is no gravity, the splash of juices separate into individual droplets and float around the cockpit. As the individual droplets float, they begin to merge with other droplets. Eventually a mass of juice floats in the cockpit, a puddle suspended in space. Amazingly, all of the grape juice droplets merge together and all of the orange juice droplets merge together, each attracted to their like and creating two complete puddles of juice. This is a visual representation of the law of attraction, the process by which energy is attracted to like energy.

Every thought you think or word you speak is like those individual droplets of juice. All float into space and go somewhere. The word and thought energies connect with similar thoughts and words. This collection of thought and word energy grows and grows as it is fed by more individuals' thoughts and words. This energy manifests and creates a reality of some sort. There are positive and negative realities created in this process. Fear, worry, hatred, greed, and dishonesty all create incredibly negative thought forms, with many people continually feeding them and contributing to their manifestation. We have examples of negative realities all over our planet. Let me share some examples that may coincide with your own experiences and give you a more tangible connection with the concept of collective consciousness. Take a moment to think about some of the cities you have visited. Cities usually have a distinctive feel to them. You may have felt energized, nervous, scared, or enveloped in the history of a particular city you have visited. I remember a client of mine saying, "I do not know what happened to me. I was driving on the highway in Los Angeles and I found myself honking my horn and flipping people off. That is just not like me. I have never acted like that before. It is totally against my principles." What happened? The collective consciousness lingering around that highway affected her. The accumulation of negative energy generated in that area by continual driving irritation, frustration, and rudeness entered her own consciousness, and she responded in a like manner.

Places hold collective consciousness in them. When you walk into buildings, they each have a "feel," especially the old ones. I was nearly brought to my knees when I walked into the Sistine Chapel in Italy. The magnificence of that place was truly overwhelming. I was only 22 years old, with absolutely no wisdom concerning spiritual matters, and had not entered looking for or expecting spiritual energy. Yet when I walked in, my knees started to buckle and I got goose bumps all over my entire body. I was awestruck. Millions of people had walked into that chapel before me and shared their awe, their prayers, and their love of God. The energy of those feelings lingers and grows. I had a very different experience when I visited the concentration camps in Germany. I cried uncontrollably. The terror, sadness, and depth of despair still linger there; it was a horrific experience. Although these are examples of two extremes in accumulated energies, they describe the phenomenon. All places have an energy to them-even your home or the individual rooms of your home. Become aware of what the energy of places feels like. As you tune in to these feelings and understand them in terms of energy, you enhance your work with energy.

Thought forms can control behavior and influence thinking because, knowingly or unknowingly, individuals tap into a collective consciousness, which actually exists. Even though you may not be able to see it, it is there. Remember, we are made of energy and are affected by the energy around us. Ideas, concepts, experiences, events, issues, cultures, and spiritual doctrines all have prevailing thought forms connected to them, which may represent hundreds of years of accumulated energy.

Thought forms follow the laws of energy. When you look at all-encompassing attitudes such as hatred, you can understand how massive some thought forms are and why they seem so impossible to heal. However, since all thought forms follow the laws of energy, it is entirely possible to change general attitudes and realities based in hatred or fear. Remember, manifestation comes about from an accumulation of energy. Thus, when you pray for global peace, visualize a healed planet, or speak of brotherly love. The energy of these actions has a powerful impact. Positive ideology and prayer adds positive energy to the collective consciousness, creating the possibility for hopeful change. The more people who add to this consciousness, the greater the likelihood for positive change.

Being self employed is a kind of self awareness of individual and collective assets. Being self employed is the process that lays the foundation of improved economic condition and help gain individual self sufficiency. Nobody can ignore the rewards of being self employed - own working hours, having control over your career, freedom to do what always have been wanting to do. If you think that self employed is decoded as liability while obtaining funding, then you must know it is the thing of the past.

The major difficulty that arises with self employed loans is the individual’s undocumented income. Regular salaried individuals can provide with pay stubs or lenders can verify about them with their employers. For self employed individual there is not such luxury. So, the next thing they look for is the income tax returns. Typically self employed loans lenders look for two to three years of income tax returns. Since income tax returns are not always so reliable for income is usually understated. Also, self employed lending suffers due to the fact that income of self employed people is not usually stable. Lenders would be eager to determine its stability and readily look towards current balance sheets. For self employed loans, business should not be less than two years old.

Most lenders offer self employed “limited documentation” or “no documentation” loans. This will be highly favourable of self employed who cannot forward documented income. In place of this provision Lenders will offer self employed loans at high interest rates (1-2% higher than normal interest rates) or will have tough requirement for qualifications. Lenders may compensate the high risk status of self employed with bigger down payments. Self employed loan programmes will vary from lender to lender. In such a scenario, looking around might be a good idea. There will be self employed loans lender who appropriately charge for self employed. All you have to do is keep shopping.

Credit history will always play a crucial role in deciding the various aspects of self employed loans. It is evident that good credit history will provide benefits that no other qualification criteria can provide. Good credit score will make it easier for you to get approved for self employed loans. With good credit score, loan to value ratio can reach up to 90%. Also with good credits score the down payment is as low as 20% which otherwise can go as high as 40%.

Self employed loans depending on your choice and compulsion can be both secured and unsecured. Secured self employed loans are available on lower interest rates cause here the loan amount is given in return of security. Security is usually home and real estate; however, depending on the lender, secured self employed loans may be available at lower interest rates. Unsecured will be at higher interest rate, will not require any security and are better suited for smaller loan amounts.

There are 2.75 million people which are self employed in UK. With the rising number of self employed in UK, it is not a surprise that self employed loans are an emerging category in the loans market. A self employed borrower is the one who owns 25% or more of the business from which income is derived. Self employed loans are not new to the loans market; however, they have recently been adorned with flexibility and ease with respect to a self employed. With this new outlook towards self employed loans, self employed should be careful not to misuse this freedom. Refrain from overstating your income and exercise self control. Then, there is no stating the fact that self employed loans will prove integral to strengthening your very own micro economy.

In order to sell a solution, you have to build awareness that there is a problem. Once you have built that awareness, you need to build awareness that your firm can solve that problem. Then you need to build awareness that your solution is relatively pain-free, seamless, affordable, and gives companies good return on investment. This article will show you ways to do that.

Seminar Marketing is Very Effective

Seminar marketing is one of the best forms of IT marketing because it builds awareness. Instead of you or your salespeople going around on sales calls and spending an hour or two talking about the fundamentals to individuals, you can do pretty much the same thing in room full of prospects simultaneously.

No Pressure on Your Prospects

And it's MUCH less intimidating to your prospects. With the right registration, the right follow-up procedures, the right qualifications, the right invitation strategy, and right follow-up calls, you can do a tremendous amount of business from holding seminars on key technology issues for your niche. For more information on holding seminars, check out my Sweet Spot Clients Teleseminar Series ().

IT Marketing: White Papers

Publishing a white paper or an e-zine is another really great way for a lead capture and follow-up mechanism. Let's say you're running a direct mail campaign. One of the best ways to get a response is to offer some kind of white paper that you can give out that has a high perceived value.

This white paper can either be developed by you, outsourced to a freelance writer, or you can adapt something from one of the reseller programs you belong to. Of course if you regularly do seminars, you can simply offer an edited transcript or white paper based on the seminar to help with your IT marketing.

IT Marketing: Get the Word Out

You can advertise your white paper when doing any kind of display ads or direct mail piece. It gives people an excuse to call or excuse to go online and request something. Once they request something, you have a way of capturing their information and using it for further your IT marketing processes.

The Bottom Line on IT Marketing

To maximize your value to prospects, you need to let them know what problems they have and how you can solve it. Two great ways to do this are by holding seminars and advertising your white paper to prospects.

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Collective good is broadly defined as ‘all that is good for all people in a given community’. Some organizations claim their product or service adds to the collective good, some preach that the virtues of their operation benefit the collective good. Some have even named their companies after the term hoping in some way to veil their true motivation – making a profit.

To be sure, there are plenty of ways that business can help society. Green businesses, in particular, employ people, add to our GDP, help the environment, and make a profit. These types of operations are truly working for the collective good of their community.

One business model in particular that has all the traits of a ‘green’ business is cell phone recycling.

More than two thirds of the US population (200 million) uses a cell phone. Of those 200 million subscribers, over 11 million (5.5%) retire their old cell phone every month. There is no argument that this tiny electronic device has been woven into the fabric of society.

Some claim that because of the small size of the average cell phone it’s easy for a consumer to simply trash it. Maybe one person trashing a cell phone doesn’t seem like much but surveys suggest that each of the 200 million cell phone subscribers have 2.5 old cell phones shoved in a desk drawer or stored in a closet somewhere in their home or office.

Imagine if all those cell phones, 500 million in all, were discarded in household trash over the course of a year. Over 80,000 tons of additional waste would be generated. This is not common household waste that becomes fertilizer. It has the potential to pollute.

It is common knowledge that electronic waste, or e-waste, contains toxins that are harmful to the environment. Electronic circuit boards in cell phones contain toxins such as arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury; just to name a few. Research has shown that cell phones, when disposed in landfill conditions, leach hazardous levels of lead.

One cell phone leaching lead into soil and groundwater may not be a big deal…but 500 million of them…this could be a problem. It is easy to see how cell phone recycling becomes a benefit to society in general - a benefit to the collective good.

To be fair though, we need to remember this is a potential environmental problem. The likelihood of all 200 million cell phone subscribers tossing their old cell phones in the garbage in the next 12 months is slim. Still, if they did, landfill managers say that their collection facilities would sift out most of the e-waste, cell phones included. And if a small percentage actually made it to the trash pile, the construction of the landfill would not allow toxins to leach into the environment.

But even if the environmental danger is mitigated there exists a financial benefit to the collective good.

According to data collected from cell phone recycling web sites, the average value of a cell phone retired in the last 18 months is well over $10. Do the math - in the last 30 days $110 million dollars worth of cell phones were just tossed aside.

In fact, the top cell phone recycling companies as a whole claim that they have recycled only about $20 million dollars worth of retired cell phones in the first ten months of 2005. They also estimate that all cell phone recycling efforts only manage to collect, at best, between 3 and 5% of all cell phones retired on an annual basis.

Using these numbers, the argument can be made that more than $1 billion worth of cell phones are retired annually and left to rot. The longer a cell phone sits the less it is worth, its value declining, rotting away, as each day passes.

Just imagine if every person sent their old cell phones to a single location to be recycled. What could society do with $1 billion dollars? Could it be used for the collective good? The answer is obvious; the solution is not.

At this point in time there is not one effective national cell phone initiative. Most are big company afterthoughts or undercapitalized small company efforts, all of these initiatives face the same enemy; ignorance. The potential tidal wave of cell phone waste sits idle in the homes of America held back, not by education, but awareness.

Surveys suggest that 90% of Americans would recycle their cell phone if there was a convenient way to do it. What most don’t realize is that there are hundreds of convenient ways. From drop-off locations to web-sites, hundreds of low or no cost cell phone recycling options exist, the problem is most people are not aware they exist.

When we consider the environmental and financial benefits it’s obvious that cell phone recycling does add to the collective good. But the challenge is getting the word out. With so many options there is no reason for any cell phone to be tossed. With just a little web searching anyone can find a convenient, no cost cell phone recycling solution.

So next time you upgrade your old cellphone or change to another service provider do your part for the environment, for your community, for our collective good – recycle your old cell phone.

Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology originally coined by Carl Jung. While Freud did not distinguish between an "individual psychology" and a "collective psychology", Jung distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal unconscious particular to each human being. But, what about the collective consciousness?

While I embrace the Jungian concept of a collective unconsciousnes (God, Spirit, Being), I feel that much of what the 2012 concept is about is a rising and comprehension of the all important collective consciousness that is truly needed to tip the scales from self-destruction and self absorption to a unification of the beings on this planet to save our very existence.

Sound too mysterious or climatic? It's what's needed to save the planet!

We must begin asking more and more questions and quit buying into whatever pablum is being fed to us. Milk will no longer serve us as it has in the past. And as the writer of the book of Hebrews said, we need to start being able to chew and digest some meat. Questions are meat! Eugene Ionesco put it this way, "It is not the ANSWER that enlightens, but the QUESTION." Unfortunately we've been taught to not question.

One of the fascianting traits of all mammals is their curiosity- the exact thing that our societal leaders (especially religious ones) try to keep us from. An age of enlightenment is on the way. A far greater one than we've ever experienced.

Mankind only advances through compassionate and loving antithesis. Synthesis is incest!

From the questions will come new realities which will demand action, which will force us into some modes of courage wew'll not readily embrace. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, "Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what is the use of seeing."

There is coming a new species: homo sapien sapien sapiens. And the whole universe groans our coming into being as the writer (Paul) of the book of Romans has reminded us. A collective consciousness is on the way and it's coming at such a fast pace, many are not seeing, let alone acting.

From time to time it seems as though our world is infected by some sort of virus- a madness bacteria or virus. Dean Radi called such crazy world wide destructive thinking as "mass mind infection". And there is no one who can escape being tainted with such. One would hope that the church could somehow lead the way; however, that's not been the case historically.

Which means the coming events of 2012 doesn't bode well for how mankind might act.

One need only look back a few years at the genocides in various nations like Rwanda and Serbia. You can go back a few decades and find the name of Hitler who in spite of what Ahmadinejhad thinks, killed millions of Jews in one of the worlds worst exterminations. Unfortunately, the church has no place to hide when it comes to such a collective madness.

Most everyone has heard of the Crusades and the Inquisitions, but few about burning witches!
Once upon a time, it was thought by the church that when a storm blew down a home, a loved one was taken suddenly, or a cow was lost or stolen, it was because of witchcraft! I guess they had never heard of "stuff happens" back then. Back then begins in the 1400's when Pope Innocent VIII (what a name to boot) declared in 1484 that the church had a moral obligation to hunt down witches and burn them at the stake.

With the Pope's approval, the deal was on!

One Bishop in Geneva burned 500 witches in 90 days while historical church records who some Bishops burned near 1,000 in less than year. This collective madness went on for nearly 200 years with somewhere between 750,000-1,000,000 witches (can you say women!) burned at the stake. In some cases a few children and men deemed demonic got toasted as well.

Here's the point.

It doesn't matter who you are, Christian, agnostic, or atheist. When man's consciousness turns dark, some of the most awful things happen. Mankind is capable of unbelievable atrocities. We better not forget our past, but learn from it because if you take a good look at the headlines of the newspapers (for those who still read paper print), you can see the ghosts of future madness lurking behind the stories.

May the church be an instrument for love and healing and not hate and harming.

Note: This is the first in a series of articles on how your team can incorporate the principles of collective intelligence.

What is collective intelligence? It's the capacity of a group of individuals to tap into the power of collaboration in a way that produces outcomes that surprise even themselves. The key word here is "surprise": a team that successfully leverages its combined wisdom can generate genuinely new solutions that aren't traceable back to any one individual. Your team's interactions can produce fresh ideas that the group is passionate about, resulting in a dramatic performance improvement.

When your team employs collective intelligence, you can:
- Increase team members' ownership of decisions, and their commitment to agreements
- Realize potential pitfalls sooner, and be able to navigate around them
- Tap into team members' discretionary effort because they're committed to the success of the team
- Transform a moderately successful team into a high-performing group that's "greater than the sum of its parts"
- Produce truly new ideas that could only have emerged through the collective knowledge of the members

These outcomes are what separate collective intelligence from "groupthink," a word used to describe unproductive group processes that produce predictable or flawed outcomes. Groupthink happens when team members acquiesce to ideas they don't fully support, either to please superiors or avoid rocking the boat. The result of groupthink can be a stale idea backed by only a few members of the group.

So how can you prevent groupthink? You can promote two important elements: openness and interlocking success. Openness, of course, is when everyone on your team feels comfortable verbalizing their own thoughts and inquiring into the thinking of others. Interlocking success means creating a situation where every individual's success is tied to the achievement of others. In cases of true interlocking success, no team member can be successful without ensuring the success of everyone else. Improvisational acting troupes are often told, "Your job is to make everyone else on stage look good. If everyone does their job, everyone looks good."

Here's an example of how these two elements can help foster collective intelligence. A team I recently coached was scheduled to make a presentation to an executive committee. Everything was going smoothly, except that one team member repeatedly insisted on presenting a segment that others thought he shouldn't. In a private discussion, I discovered he was up for a promotion and wanted to appear as an expert on that subject. To resolve the situation, I facilitated a session that allowed team members to express openly what each of them needed to feel successful. When he revealed his motivations, others on the team shared similar aspirations. This openness allowed the team to find a unique solution: the individual wouldn't need to present that specific segment, because all team members agreed to support each other by "talking up" their colleagues' skills to executives. The result was a successful presentation, and a satisfied and engaged team.

Where individuals come together for a shared purpose, the possibility of a self-organizing collective intelligence already exists. Encouraging collective intelligence to emerge is less about imposing a process and more about removing barriers. In upcoming articles, we'll consider approaches to facilitating collective intelligence to raise your team's productivity and involvement to new heights.

In the meantime, you can read more about collective intelligence at MIT's
Center for Collective Intelligence, or on Wikipedia.