Unlearner

I've been looking for some recipes and foods lately that will support good health of both mind and body. One of those I recently took an interest in is called Laba Congee, also known as Eight Treasures Congee or Buddha Congee, and is made during one of the festivals in many Asian countries. The recipe for this varies greatly, but seems to be made up of rice/grains, nuts, fruits, and beans, made into a porridge. I'm interested to see if anyone else has tried making this and what their experiences with it are. Also, if anyone has any other suggestions for foods that fall within a Buddhist (or Taoist) diet, I would very much like to hear them.

I'm not vegetarian specifically, but I have no opposition to vegetarian meals, so I'd be interested in finding as much as I can. The Laba festival is in China, though supposedly the actual dish is originally from India. I'm not very familiar with congee, I'd never really heard that term before a few weeks ago, although I was familiar with the Vietnamese equivalent, chao, from my girlfriend (whose family is from Vietnam). Some of those recipes sound pretty good, and I'm usually up for trying new types of food.

Agreed, I'm not for putting other stuff into my tea, it kinda ruins the whole "tea" aspect. Also, having lived in the south for the last few years, I'd like to go on record to say that "sweet tea" is not tea, it's sugar water with some tea flavoring.

-Excerpt from the Dhammapada My new initiative for myself (and anyone who might like to join) is to not hesitate to do something good for another person or the community at large. Many times, we see things that we want to do (or want "someone else" to do) that would benefit other people, but then sometimes we hesitate, think about it, and decide not to because it'd be too much trouble, or it's not important, or it's not our problem. STOP THE HESITATION! If you see something that you would think would be a good thing to do, but would normally make you hesitate and decide not to, DO IT!! And then post it in here. Doesn't matter how small or large. All good acts are encouraged, but this thread is especially for those acts that: a.) you normally wouldn't go out of your way to do, b.) would not normally benefit you in any way, and/or c.) most people would push off on other people to do because it's "not their problem" Since I'm starting this thread, I'll go first. Yesterday, I was doing my taxes, and while I usually try to save as much money as I can, I decided to donate $100 of my tax refund to four different charities and programs.

Heard a story on the local news the other day, people were complaining about all the trash was being dumped by people on a major bike/walking path. Today, I got on my bike with gloves and some trash bags, and I went down the path picking up trash. I spent about 3 hours on it, and I didn't come close to finishing (it's a really long path), but I picked up quite a bit of trash along an 8-mile section of the path. A lot of people saw me picking up trash. Most of them didn't pay much attention, but a few of them thanked me or showed their appreciation. Hopefully it might help some other people to think about doing something for other people.

I would really like to discourage acts of violence in this initiative. There should be other ways to handle 99.9% of situations without it, so I don't want the first thing people to think is, "Who can I kick the crap out of today?" Even in situations that you would normally think would require violence, you should be trying as hard as you can to avoid provoking any violent behavior. There are very few situations I've ever seen that would be solved by violence, and even then there are almost always other ways to resolve them. Violence only perpetuates violence. Still thank you for your post. Keep doing good things.

Well, I suppose it's just a matter of how you choose to define it for yourself, so it's up to whatever you believe. Personally, I don't believe in the concept of a fact, because there really is no way to prove anything, scientifically or otherwise. The best we can do with science is create a model that imitates the true reality, which is itself unfathomable. Our understanding of the model, from which we derive such "facts", can and has changed throughout history as we continue to play around with and observe the world we live in. However, these models are always based on a set of assumptions that we invariably must accept in order to increase our understanding and improve our model of the universe. The theories that make up the model can always get closer and closer to the truth, but they will never touch it, because a theory can always be disproven based on new evidence; a theory can never be proven in it's own right. That's why we stopped calling things "laws" after we realized that we keep disproving the "facts" that we thought were facts, but ended up falling apart before our eyes. As for math, it is simply a language through which we can understand our universe, nothing more. It has the same properties as any other language, it just tends to be more precise with how it defines and measures things. "Proof" is a term used solely in mathematics for the use of mathematics, people just decided to carry it over casually into science because they misunderstood the concept of what math is. Math can prove things within mathematics using mathematics, but that's it; it can't prove anything outside of itself. And if you think I'm just making it up, you should probably do some research on Kurt Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems, which quite literally prove that you can't prove anything with mathematics outside of itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompleteness_theorem But, as I said before, if you believe it the other way, that's entirely up to you, and I can't change that. I used to think that way as well, but I've just found that this perspective is much more open to new possibilities, that's all.

Science does not prove facts, it provides evidence for theories. That's why, while the rest of non-scientific society uses words like "science has proven" or "this is a scientific fact", the actual scientific community uses words like "hypothesis" and "theory" and "evidence". Proofs are for math, let's keep it that way. On the other hand, creationism is based on a story written in an old book, so take that for what it's worth.

I'll be hanging out in there for a little while

More or less a thing of curiosity, I kind of wonder at times what it is that draws different people to practicing, as I don't know if I understand what it is that brings people to these kinds of systems.

Originally from Oregon, went to college in Idaho, but not near Boise. I was up in Moscow in the Palouse area, lots of hills and farmland; nice place, but very rural, not much to do. Boise would probably be a little better in that aspect. I'm not sure how similar the two areas are, though, I've never been to Boise.

Well, I guess you already answered one of my questions, being "what is a Taoist?", but I think it's curious the way you phrased what you said. It seems like you want to live "like" a Taoist, and do things that are similar to what Taoists do, but does that imply that you don't actually consider yourself Taoist? or that the practices you do are simply "like" the practices that Taoists do? Sounds like imitation to me.

By this, do you mean you find satisfaction in simply imitating something that other people practice?

Lingering in the chatroom again

I'm actually a bit timid about telling other people, since I'm a bit of a loner in my philosophical views.

Interesting, lots of good and diverse answers. As for myself, (as I mentioned in Brian's poll) I'm not entirely sure why it is that I am drawn to this, but I feel it has something to do with finding peace with nature, others, and self, which can be accomplished through attaining oneness with tao or enlightenment.

I marked other as one mostly as an additional note to "join with tao/etc", which is to find peace with others, nature, and self. Ultimately, though, I'm not really sure why I practice, but perhaps I'll find out one day.

I suppose it'll be good to start using this thread more for using the chat. In that case, I'll be in the chat room for a while.

Not exactly on the initial topic, but in regards to those who have expressed anger in this thread, I offer this as someone who had a lot of serious anger issues when I was younger and having been to anger management several times: Anger is a secondary emotion. There is always another emotion that underlies anger. Find what it is that underlies your anger, and act to alleviate that rather than acting on your anger. If you are sad or upset with the situation, do not become angry because of it and act on your anger. This will only cause more distress and lead to more anger. Instead, respond by acting on what upsets you, and act with kindness. It is very easy to become angry, but it rarely improves anything. As to the actual topic, I would need to contemplate it for some time.

I personally would sometimes go to the chat room and just hang out for a while as I browsed the threads to see if anyone ever wanted to have a conversation, and I would get one every now and again, but they were rather few and far between, so I stopped frequenting it so much.

I may be a little inexperienced to offer good advice, but I would simply like to say a few things regarding this post. Regarding emotions, unless you cease having any emotion whatsoever, then you are always going to go through ups and downs. It's only natural to experience negative feelings which offset the positive, otherwise you would not feel anything. As an apprentice practitioner, I've certainly noticed that this is greatly amplified when I begin paying more attention to my various states through meditation. Most of it probably comes simply from becoming more attuned and conscious of thoughts and actions. For people who don't meditate or focus their attention inward, most of this becomes ignored through distractions and apathy. By meditating, I'm attempting to increase my awareness, both inward and outward, and reduce the number of random distractions I let capture my attention. This brings me to my next point, you should figure out exactly what it is that you hope/expect to gain from meditation. By altering your awareness and trying to improve yourself, you can't exactly expect to approach everything with the same mindset you've had for all the rest of your life that you haven't been meditating. Try to figure out where it is that your meditation is going to take you as you increase your awareness and understanding so that you won't be caught off guard when you actually reach that point. If a person's goal in meditating is simply to feel better, either physically or emotionally, then they should probably rethink what the actual act of meditation is going to do for them. To me, improving health through meditation is more of a side-effect than the actual goal, so in order to take my meditation seriously it's important to understand what I'm doing to my state of mind. I can't offer much in the way of the specific physical sensations. The only thing I can really say about the dreams is just pay attention to them. In my personal experience, I had some rather intense and terrifying nightmares about once or twice a week for about 3 or 4 months. It was a very unpleasant experience, but they also helped me to realize some important personal issues I was having trouble with, and once I found the source of these issues and working to amend these problems, I was able to understand what made those nightmares so intense for me, and then they stopped shortly afterward. One more thing I could say in conclusion: if you choose to stop your meditation, you're not really doing anything except going back to distracting yourself, it's not really changing anything.

I was raised in a Catholic family, attended private Catholic schools for 13 years, and was never once taught that the Bible was a book of historical facts, or that evolution was false. I'm not sure where people got that idea, and I'm not even sure who teaches it or why, but it sounds a lot like indoctrination.

Good post, very interesting (I drink tea quite a bit). It's actually funny that you should post this, because I was thinking about going away from buying tea in store to trying to harvest and prepare my own herbs.

I think this deserves to be looked at a little more closely for a few reasons, and from both sides of the argument. This is the same stance that my acquaintance has with drugs, so it most certainly fits well with the topic. On one hand, it's hard to imagine drugs providing the same philosophical insights that can be found through meditation. As the typical consensus has been, drugs seem to provide a jolted, wild ride, but there doesn't seem to be any control, and thus very few beneficial effects come from it. On the other hand, it is important to point out that there is a key point in this, in that people who practice meditation are going to ever claim that one can easily achieve the same effects with a natural or man-made substance. Why is this? Simply, I think it boils down to the fact that those who put significant amounts of time and effort into achieving something are going to instinctively claim that the same cannot be achieved through something simple, easy, and enjoyable. To exemplify this concept, it's similar to the idea that no wage-earning lower/middle class person is going to say that getting rich is easily done, and that it takes lots of hard work and time in employment, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of people who become rich out of mere luck. So, automatically, there is going to be a huge bias in favor of meditation over drugs in the first place. However, even after weighing these two together, I think that the issue runs a little deeper than a simple argument between the meditation group and the drug group. Namely, I don't imagine that drugs and meditation even take people to the same state of mind in the first place, let alone in the same manner. Exploring the mind's capabilities is really interesting, but that's not really what philosophy is about. Let's even assume for a moment that, yes, drugs are an amazing and simple way to "expand your mind" (whatever that might mean), and opens you up to entirely new possibilities. So what? That doesn't really do anything on its own. The most I could possibly see is that it could cause someone to want to explore further into the avenues of philosophy and such, similar to Rara's account. Still, it's not going to make up for time spent trying to actually fortify your mind's positive attributes, diminish the negative ones, etc. This isn't the greatest example I could come up with, but it might help put it in perspective: if you want to build a computer yourself, it doesn't matter how many manuals you read on putting it together, or how much you know about using computer programs, or how cool you think computers are; until you actually open up the case and start taking things apart and seeing where everything fits in place, chances are you're probably not going to have any idea on how to actually "build" the computer from scratch.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm pretty much with MH when it comes to drugs in general, but most of what's been said is not too far off from what I would imagine (I also like z00se's pizza analogy). I think Seeker's explanation basically sums up what I was thinking for the most part. juliank: That's actually pretty interesting. After hearing about Ayahuasca the first time, I actually did a little research on it (this isn't the first time I've heard someone mention it as a part of a cultural ritual), so that's kind of cool that you know an actual medicine man.