Karl

They prevent the people owning land or resource and are often reliant on foreign aid plus the income derived from foreign companies who mine their resources. Effectively a version of whisky, guns and beads in order that the population is kept poverty strapped and incapable of revolution.

Thought so, just checking you hadn't suffered a regressive incapacitation which would have been out of character for you.

You mean actively ignored ? Then you are exercising free will and ARE doing something about it, contrary to what you have said. Passively wishing it away is doing the Ostrich thing.

Everything is as it is, sometimes easy, sometimes hard. I only have it within my power to do what I can do and not that which I cannot.

If I may say so that sounds a touch Ostrichy. Ignoring it won't make it less of a problem.

What a complete pile of statist crap. The reason poor countries are poor is because they have few if any property rights and so they have no way to accumulate capital. Capitalism is the engine of growth based on the maintenance of property rights under law. It is not due to institutions or society, but the method of private ownership, law of comparative advantage, law of association, capital formation and competition. It was the harsh northern climates that pushed their populations into having to try new methods. Had it not been for China miring itself in bureaucracy, massive government and high taxation it is probable that the technologically poor European principalities would never have become wealthy and powerful. They were forced to trade and compete which produced an abundance. The USA was an outgrowth of European culture and for a few hundred years they practised an even freer form of lassez faire competetive free trade than Europe under its mercantile conglomerate state monopolies. As if this isn't obvious enough we need only ask which comes first; institutions or wealth creation ? Institutions do not produce anything, they consume. Wealth must first be produced so that they can exist. Our institutions are busy destroying us.

If a market exists for a product then a ban will drive down supply and increase price. That will make illegal shark fishing even more attractive to criminals who are prepared to take the risk in order to reap huge rewards. If the Chinese had allowed private property rights to cover oceans then the market would step in to sustainably farm shark and everybody is happy except the criminals who will now find it less attractive to harvest a lowered value bountiful supply.

I don't need to. You have just done so. You are attempting to utilise a concept in order to disprove a concept. Find some other way to argue your point if you can.

I was able to be SRM simply by reading his texts. I could become the mental form of anyone where there were direct texts of their thoughts/words. It was direct empathy which I now understand on a different level. Jesus didn't say enough to allow that connection. Indeed it was clear he had often not said what has been quoted, or that he said it differently. I knew all about overloading and had experienced it so handling meditation for me was very easy, as was SBP, Sanyama and Self Inquiry. I already had a plenty of stillness and the witness was present. I often advised others on how to deal with symptoms and overloads and wrote a book in which I included the use of these practices as being useful. The Trivium is far more effective. Had I known then what I know now, it is likely I would have gone straight to the Trivium. It is the key that releases the entire contents of accumulated experience and fits it together. There are millions upon millions of insights available that I had no idea I had. It's like cells that merge into new cells and grow at a fantastic rate. Go and try it and then you will see. You can know things that you had no inkling you could. I'm not that bright, so I can only glimpse what someone brighter than I would see.

In the beginning was the logos :-) In it was all the constituents of the harmonic universe including time. That is the reason there is no beginning, because without time there is no beginning and without space there are no coordinate and so no place or time. All particles are harmonic waves curled into themselves and spin with respect to time and space which is integral in their creation.

No idea what you are saying ?

Yet don't we create and preserve when we own the land? Don't we put it to productive use ? Isn't it true that Yellowstone has been damaged by state involvement ? Why would anyone build in Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon etc ? There are millions of miles of open space and yet where do people choose to live and work ? In the cities, where land is expensive, space is limited and people density is at the highest. Private areas it would be harder to get planning permission if the development did not be fit the community where it was to be based. The law- unlike today-would not allow industry to ride roughshod over the property rights of others. It wouldn't be acceptable to pollute or damage for 'the common good' as is the current law on commercial development. Look at the fracking that is going on. People can object but the state over rules them. Look at agriculture and cattle farming subsidised by the state that turns land into dust bowls. Watch the forests getting torn down for Maize growing to benefit the farmers growing it for fuel production. What about the oil spills, Fukushima, 3 mile Island, the BP platform fire and oil spills, not to mention the polluted mess that resulted from the exploitation by the centralised states of USSR and China. More state, more destructive pollution and mis allocated resource. In the UK we have vast tracts of Scotland which are wilderness and yet we are supposed to be a very over populated country. The developed areas are less than a few percent of the available land mass. Yet no one wants to build in Scotland. The most they can do is crofting and forestry. In both Scotland and the North East we struggle to attract industry despite reducing regulations to nothing and offering grant aid. Let people buy national parks just as our own, private, national trust does. It's funded by charity and buys up country houses, beaches and rural areas and conserves them. They charge a membership fee, or a small fee to enter their properties. They are scrupulously kept and well managed, where as our local state park is vandalised, strewn with rubbish and dog dirt. The facilities are badly maintained and the plants unkempt. Hordes of hoodlums infest the areas where children play and will often attack them, take money/ phones etc. If you can see your way to understanding that less state leads to greater liberty and increased wealth, then it will also lead to a better environment and less mis allocation of resource. It's really that simple, but you have to get rid of the brain washing that tells you the state is good. We can have laws and police we don't need the state to provide anything. The Government is always corrupt, wasteful, violent and inefficient. At best they are bearable at worst they will plunge us into a nuclear winter. They are just too dangerous to trust. Look at Biden, Clinton, Rice etc. Look at all those neocons banging the drum for intervention and war. They cannot wait to soak the land with blood and fill their pockets with money.

Do a search on Amazon. Definitely a nice thing to have on the shelf and full of wonders.

I don't meditate now. When I was then pretty much all the usual epithets about emptiness, mindfulness, floating along untroubled by life and doing what was in front of me. I recognise all the descriptions and experiences that I read on the forum. Even to the point of having unexplainable synchronicity in which life would offer up things just when and where I needed. It convinced me I had reached the point where things were automatic and effortless. Often I would become tree, animal, person, grass, even rotting logs, rivers, stone and wind. I would certainly say I felt at one and without identity. It was very carefree and joyous. I could and did meditate almost continuously so that 'no thought' stillness of mind was pretty much constant. Yet I knew that something wasn't quite right about the floaty, disconnected feeling. It felt almost drug induced. Pleasant but Somatic. However, I wasn't consciously looking for anything to change when a post on disqus pointed me towards the occult and the work of John Gatto. The post was quite a strange one, the writer didn't elaborate, he just mentioned these subjects in reply to a quote I had posted about the Matrix in connection with economics. You know the old saying 'when the student is ready the guru will appear'. So, I followed the signpost........

Think of the universe as unpacking itself, with time unfolding on the edge of the unpacking. There is no boundary to reach because time is unpacking at the boundary so it is impossible to catch up with it. The universe is finite but unbound. You can see it in all life and material forms. It is all resonant field recreating itself and ever expanding. Have you ever studied the golden ratio and the golden cut ? Fascinating stuff and visible in everything. You should get yourself a copy of 'the quadrivium' by the publisher 'wooden books' -it's the full compilation of the four smaller books. If for no other reason that it is simply a gorgeous thing to have. I deliberately leave it on a convenient table when guests come around and they never fail to pick it up and start reading. It's got great illustrations. The connection is sacred number, to sacred geometry, to music and cosmology. So, it is number, number in space, number in time and finally number in time and space. It's the stuff they didn't teach you, the connections between things. Add it to your library. Even the cover reminds me of an alchemists magic book-all holographic, symbolic on a black background.

Have you got any proof at all to substantiate all that ? I quite agree that meditation is simply thinking. That people can be engaged in more or less thoughts, with very different thoughts depending on their current concerns. Also 'practical' understanding seems similar to useful thinking, common sense with a practical value. Is that what you mean ?

Firstly I would question your pro-capitalist stance. Government simply extract money from one group by force and give it to another group whilst giving themselves a nice cut of the stolen loot. But as you say that is a digress. Funnily enough I wasn't an An Cap until about 4 years ago and would have considered myself broadly socialist pro state. We must first accept the premise that the Government has done some good things-if they hadn't then I doubt you would even be arguing. However, we also have to accept that the free market might well have done these things anyway. So, in the case of building and zoning regulations, if you had local, accountable governance for a specific private area I suggest it would do something similar at less cost and with greater efficiency. People don't generally build things that will fall down on purpose as its costly for purchaser, insurance company and builder both in terms of reputation, finance and often falling foul of the law. No area is really free. Indeed during your own issues with Government finance the very first thing the Government did was to close your national parks. The state was holding the people to ransom, it didn't close down its tax offices but went straight for the thing that would hurt the people the most. They could close them down because they are filled with state employees who you are paying through taxation. What's more they often do a very poor job, there are immense problems with wildlife at Yellowstone due to the Government intervening in nature. There are also many stories of parks that were once private being bought by force and then let to go to ruin. Central Park has/had a curfew due to the number of crimes being committed-that doesn't happen in Disney land. Also, what happens about those who never use these state owned areas ? Why are they forced to pay ? When the Suez Canal was nationalised we had the suez crisis. The canal ended up full of sunken ships. I haven't researched the full history behind it so excuse any inaccuracies, but it was an undertaking thought to be impossible by the state. It would never have been built but for private money and vision. There would have been nothing at all to nationalise as it simply wouldn't have existed. Back to the ocean. Private actors are rational. The market forces them to be rational. The ocean wouldn't necessarily be owned by many seperate people, it's pointless to conjecture how the market would work until the possibility is implemented. People always ask how things are going to work in the absence of state control because they are brainwashed into believing things could not work without it. That's deliberate. The school systems begin it by saying how there would be no education without the state because they are taught that through going to state schools, reading state defined history, state regulated text books supplied by state employed publishers, in schools built by state employee builders, by state licensed employees. In Russia it was unthinkable that the private sector could supply footwear optimally. Who would know how many shoes, boots were needed and how would the quality, style be regulated and price be kept at affordable level. Surely the private sector would gouge the market and the poor would go without shoes, whilst the wealthy had the finest boots. The private shoe manufacture would monopolise leather, rubber, labour and machinery and squeeze the people for everything they had. Yet we know this isn't what happens. Instead, unlike the state footwear companies that often ran out of shoes in summer, or boots in winter, that made a wasteful excess of boots that would then find there way onto a black market. That couldn't keep up with sizes, so that children were forced to wear adult sizes and all made in factories which were inefficient. The result was a very expensive shoe industry that could never hope to compete with the free market that could produce endless styles, sizes and types of footwear to suit every pocket.

I still ask what is meant by God. If it's unknowable then it's unknowable and therefore there isn't any point in mentioning it. If it's knowable then we should be able to discuss what it is with universal commonality and by definition. If it's a great creator, or a bloke on a cloud then we can discount it. I've noticed this hurry into flights of fantasy over the why and how of the thing discussed without ever touching on the what, where or when of a thing. We may just as well be discussing the tone used by the three bears to goldilocks instead of wondering why we have never experienced a talking bear, never mind ones that build houses and make porridge.

Exactly. Science may one day answer these questions, but until then it is an irreducible axiom. TI loses nothing, he can utilise the Trivium more exactly than he is currently using it. He goes looking in texts to answer his experiences, but he doesn't utilise his own logical power pack to become his own scientist.

You are using the Trivium to try and construct an argument. Every time you reason, you are using the Trivium. The problem is that you don't want to play by your own rules, I can argue with you and you aren't losing anything- exactly as Stosh stated. It's only when you go and apply the Trivium more concisely to your own argument that you will reveal the truth of it. No matter what I say you will carry on believing in rainbow bodies, until such a time comes when you may question your belief. Until that time al, you are really trying to do is to persuade me that they are real. That they are real to you I have no doubt, but you haven't provided any proof to substantiate them to my satisfaction. I don't completely agree with Bill Joslin either because he does not provide proof of the specifics of his theory, but I have sufficient experience of meditative practice and I know Bill has quite a lot of experience, so I can make an inductive leap-if not an empirical one-that meditation has some value, but that it isn't the magic carpet ride to some 'otherwhere' except in the mind of the practitioner. It may even be nothing more than a placebo for those already having made the decision/moving towards greater self awareness.

I presented it, you can decide if it has value. If you don't-jog along, nothing to see. You are relying on texts to decide what your experiences are....LOL and if you can't evaluate the writers experiences or lack of accomplishments either. So what are we left with. We have to make our decisions on the value of information by using a knowledge of grammar, the reasoning power of logic and the output of a rhetorical answer. Of course you will regard it as an experience and then look for yet another piece of text to corroborate your own conclusion.

I tried my best to answer you based on your accusation that I ignored your question. You are convinced of your argument and I will leave it at that.

There are lots of tolls and restrictions already. The market really doesn't do 'nightmares of tolls and restrictions', that is very much a product of anything the state does. What causes the biggest delays in receiving a package from abroad ? Customs and Excise. We are then shaken down to pay duty and taxes which the state forces the delivery company to collect at your expense. Did you know the first lighthouses were private enterprises ? The state was more interested in catching pirates than making navigation safer or faster. The Suez Canal was a private enterprise which carved weeks off sea transport and made it far safer. What I'm showing is that the private sector market does not tolerate delays or losses. It is the Profit and loss accounting plus competition that results in ever greater innovation, improvements and reduced costs. What was good for farming in private ownership, would be equally great for the sea. In Britain, prior to the agricultural/industrial revolution the population of a mere 6 million were starving, now we are a nation of ten times that many worried about obesity-in which an enormous market has grown up around a slimming industry. How unimaginable is that for a period of only a handful of centuries ?

You have just agreed with what I have said. I don't need to know what it feels like to be pregnant in order to know how it works, what can go wrong, the responsibilities of it, the mental conditions such as post natal depression. I don't need to know it in order to deliver a baby or get a woman pregnant. I'm not at all enamoured by titles and certificates, only in what I can reason as reality. You have picked on the fallacy of vericundiam (appeal to authority), but are using that in defence of your argument. This is your game, you love texts, famous teaching books and fancy sounding rhetoric. Your world revolves around texts you perceive as having prime importance. You aren't thinking. You are trying to persuade by false rhetoric and fallacy. I don't know if you are aware you are doing that ?

It's very different to meditation. As I said, meditation gives the ability to have a more intimate view of how I thought and felt. Beyond that -if you are taking practices seriously-there isn't much except continued reinforcing of an ideology. Practice meditation and you get good at meditation. The Trivium is a combing out of what I had absorbed. Imagine a big jigsaw all muddled up in which some pieces match the shape, but not the picture. The Trivium allows a simplification of the puzzle so it can be easily fitted together and the false bits removed. It means a highly accurate rendering of reality as opposed to trying to substitute consciousness primacy as a fluid reality. If meditation leads you to believe nothing is real, then it's easier to believe any old rubbish that passes I front of your eyes. I thought you understood what I was saying re the illuminati and NWO. These are real things. The illuminati being two separate movements of which one existed in 1700s in Austria and the NWO was a stated aim by politicians-I don't think it's a group as such. It could be said that we are all illuminati now to a greater or lesser degree. These are historical facts, but interestingly you believe they aren't. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. I can dig out the history if you want, but it's as pointless as discussing Mccarthyism, or the the new deal. I don't think 'out of their influence' is anything like the way I see it. I only want to know reality as closely as possible. The esoteric practices create an 'I'm up and above all this mundane human mess' or even that a meditator has gained certain powers with which they can alter reality so there is no requirement for concern. It's like pretending the attacking tiger is just a cuddly bunny rabbit, or some figment of imagination. At present you don't know so it's difficult to discuss what you don't yet have any access to. Take the red pill and you get to find out just how unpleasant things really are and then how amazing they are too. True Liberty requires knowing reality no matter how difficult it is to accept it. Many people who begin to suspect something isn't quite right will attempt to find ways in which they can make things more bearable- either by trying to mentally seperate themselves from reality, or by full physical separation such as moving to the woods and trying self sufficiency. The Trivium shows how it is without any buffer, it's real and direct-like coming off the soma in Huxleys novel 'A brave new world'.