Karl

Oh I see what you did. Tried to link libertarian with Fascism through the work of one man. I'm not, or wasn't familiar with Spencer. I also like to read a mans own words before taking a stance rather than acting to condemn someone because of populist opinion. The U.S. Ideology is most certainly Neo-liberal, fascist/conservative, but that has nothing to do with libertarian philosophy anymore than Jesus ( nominally Christian) was a cause for the inquistion and witch burnings.

Unfortunately most of that has been lost in translation. I can't argue, because what you have written seems completely at odds with my post. As I would class myself as anti-state and in complete disagreement with the political leaders. I am very concerned with effects of the state, crony capitalism and state education. If you mean 'market speculation' then without it the world would starve. I don't understand 'nourishes its own stupidly' or 'the system stays in place'. What system are you talking about ?

Right, yes very true. Goebbels used Gustav Le Bon and Edward Bernays works on propaganda and crowd control. However the Prussian model was pre spencer and based around Platos ideals of the pyramid.

Yes coerced. Except it was never 'survival of the fittest'. It was the 'the most adaptable survive'. Subtly, but completely different. Survival of the fittest was a slogan for eugenicists. It suited the scientific state and encouraged rugged individualism and patriotism/nationalism. Adapting doesn't mean that of course. Humans adapted by cooperation. Libertarian as a label was hijacked years ago. It's just a word without any clear connotations. In that sense I wouldn't argue that libertarian and Neo liberal are the same, probably neo conservative as well I don't really know.

Right, but this is no surprise to me. If you keep fleas in a box they eventually stop jumping any higher than the box. At which point the box lid can be removed and the fleas won't escape. Children in school are taught through a Pavlovian based system which reduces reasoning skills. All this experiment proves is how successful the state education system has been in training it's people to be obedient. You have to know what is being measured, if you keep a man in a chair for a few years then it should come as no surprise that they can't immediately run a marathon. A test that proves that humans subject to abuses are affected by these abuses shouldn't come as a big shock to anyone.

That's begging the question. It's also a truism. Attitude is not possible without reasoning. So, infact far from being unrelated it is key. You appear to be thinking in an anamalistic sense. Of course everything is experienced-how could it be any other way ? We create concepts. Some don't have strong critical thinking skills and so reasoning is poor. Anyone is capable of improving reasoning, but the state discourages it. Chomsky is not a good logician.

Err no. Try again. Milton Friedman.......shudder and social Darwinism is really far off the mark. Darwin was a eugenicist and proto Fabian. He was also misquoted. Objectivism is just Rands version of Aristotlian logic and I'm not upset to be associated with logic. I haven't read any Kirk, Mundell etc which suggests it probably doesn't align with my thinking. Try Von Mises, Bastiat, Rothbard. Hitlers propaganda expert Goebbels said people naturally did not want to go to war, they had to be persuaded by a constant Fear induction and then brand any objectors as traitors. Nazi courts were full of war objectors who were summarily executed. The state education system is designed to destroy critical thinking and make obedient citizens for the meat grinder. People can be conned, it doesn't mean they would take that course of action as a free thinking preference.

I would urge you to read about the 'Prussian' model for education and the reason for its implementation. It will give you great insight. Also research John Taylor Gatto and Albert J Nock. Gatto has several online videos which really will open your eyes-it did mine.

Thats a logically flawed statement. If humans are a species of followers then how come we have people who are keen to lead and dominate and those that do not wish to lead or follow ? You have generalised poorly. I find that people like to be liked. They want to be seen as charitable, neighbourly, fair, empathetic, honest, sensible and kind. Some will tolerate violence if they believe it is in 'the interests' of the community or those that are victim of the violence, or are forced into it by threats of violence themselves. Otherwise their are few who accept injustice and violence other than true psychopaths. We have the power of reason for 'a reason'. We arent instinctive, we have free will and choice. We choose to work with others because we can reason that things are better when we do so. So, we should be worried about our leaders who glory in conflict and the destruction of wars that serves to undo all our hard work. It is states and rulers who go to war, not the average person.

In a very few words you have asked a tremendous amount of questions. No need for regulation but an absolute need for natural law. There will always be-at least in MMOW-those who attempt to gain advantage by cheating. However, the greatest advance in the direction of cheating is the Government and its regulations that are intended to protect the profits of vested interests by preventing competition. What we really need is laws which never ever disadvantage the consumer and always ensure businesses are subject to free market competition. There is not only static economics but also a steadily rotating economy, both are bankrupt. In the real world self interest is key. It is the only thing that creates action. Of course some employers will try and pay their employees as little as possible, but then the consumers of the products want to pay as little as possible, the workers want to be paid as much as possible and the business owner make as much profit as possible. The important thing here is that businesses isn't comprised of a static model that fits into society like an isolated component. Instead the workers are in turn consumers and as such are also the bosses. The business owner works for the consumer and by turn is also a consumer. It's all interconnected. The free market works to allocate resources correctly, but on its own it is only theory. It also needs private ownership and the base of natural law. This means a misuse of resources and pollution is minimised. Environmentalists should embrace free markets and private property if they wish to have a clean planet, but ironically they choose socialism- something that has proven to be a polluter and abuser of all resources. They also cleave to state to provide subsidies for green energy which tips productive capacity into the pockets of vested interests. They want the state to use its coercive violence to back their ideology. They are using fascism but have no clue they are doing so. The U.S. Prior to 1870 was as free market as it could ever have been. The model back then was Britain and its laissez faire policies (even then these policies were only partially free market in the UK but propelled Britain to become the dominant economy). The big U.S. Producers of the mid 19th Century eventually persuaded the government to protect them from competition by upcoming, innovative businesses- which were abundant as new innovations continually beat established ones. However, we don't even have to consider these obvious examples. All we need to see is that where the free market has had the slightest room for growth it has blossomed, thrived and increased living standards for entire countries. The golden age was built on the early success of free market entrepreneurs, not unions and that legacy has been squandered by successive crony supporting governments. A huge part of this crony empire is state education.

Reality. Its so overrated.

Except for the capital cost and potential competition which you have ignored. Unless of course you are talking about forced labour/slavery. An entrepreneur has to risk his capital to create production which he must accurately guess. If he gets it wrong he loses his investment and like snakes and ladders he ends up at the start with Bob. Bob on the other hand may prefer not to risk his capital. Unlike Fred his pay is ALL profit, risk free and paid regardless of Fred's income. Fred takes the risk, bob doesn't. That's the pay off for the worker-zero risk, instant payment. My example was to show that everybody in a market economy can be a producer and that it doesn't matter how little they produce, as their contribution benefits everyone and is a multiplier for production. If the state makes demands on the better producers to pay more than the less effective producer is worth, then it creates a barrier to entry into the labour market. The higher the wage the greater number of potential producers disenfranchised. The middle wage earning issue is due to jobs erosion caused by state monetary and market interventionism. I can go into that at some other time but that's not the point under discussion. Your final paragraph shows the degree of misunderstanding. Real free market capitalism does not cause any issues. What causes problems is state interventionism that has created crony capitalism, or in another way it is fascistic economics. Private ownership of profit and public ownership of debts. There are no 'sweet spots' just as the USSR could find no 'price sweet spots' and eventually used Sears catalogue in an attempt to find a 'correct' market price. Of course that failed and so did the idea that a Government can determine the price and desires of the market. Only the free market can discover price and only the market can reward the good producers and liquidate the bad. Neo feudalism is exactly what crony capitalism is, but even though it is called capitalism it isn't. It's soft slavery.

Exactly. It's sometimes difficult to figure out if it's just projection. Sometimes it can be "I have a friend who says ..." Or "we all do that don't we" Someone who sees meditation as a solution to fear of the unknown, but finds meditation creates the very fear that they wish to avoid is intriguing. The quick answer is not to meditate in the first place. ;-) as it's a diversion from the real problem.

I try to resist. I was a kind of shrink for a few years. Old habits die hard :-)

You are conflating things because you are not factoring in the effects of state interventionism. You are also confusing wages with wealth. Wealth is only production. It is only what the money can buy that is important and not the wages themselves. Wages are just claims on production. They are oil in the machine. There will always be those who have entitlement to greater quantities of production than others. The important thing is the equal opportunity to produce and trade. Anything that suppresses equal opportunity or tries to force increased balance destroys production for the entire group and creates greater disparity than would otherwise be the case. In other words interventionism makes us ALL poorer and creates increased disparity between groups. It also consigns perfectly capable, but lower skilled workers to the scrap heap. Interventionism is enacted by the state who hands out privileges and exemptions to those groups it favours. The mess this system makes results in greater interventionism to placate those who find themselves on the wrong end of those privileges. Everyone is trying to vote themselves a share of someone else's productive effort. It doesn't matter if these people are rich bankers, industrialists, union workers, small shop owners or the unemployed.

I can't get the forum to work properly. If I leave a couple of lines it bunches everything into one paragraph, if I add a space it adds 6. Not sure why. Let's first imagine a world without government intervention. We can take two men called Fred and Bob. Fred is an excellent worker and very skilled. He catches 50 fish, farms 500 berries and bakes 20 cakes a day. Bob isn't so skilled and is not very healthy. He catches 10 fish, farms 100 berries and bakes 5 cakes per day. Now, Fred and Bob can trade freely. Do you think they can do business together positively ? The answer to this question will surprise you. Not only can they trade together, but they can organise their overall production through trade and produce more between them than they could separately. This is termed the law of comparative advantage. It's one of those things that takes students a long time to grasp. It's counter intuitive, but the results are all around us. In free market capitalist countries where trade is not restricted by interventionism such as wage fixing, people thrive and grow wealthier by this mechanism. In countries where interventionism is strongest USSR/China/Venezuela the standard of living, health, lifespan decrease, whilst pollution and resource destruction increases. What underlies economic science is objective knowledge. It's like Geometry. I don't need to measure every triangle in order to apply the theory. I don't need to think it's fair, or unfair that the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle is the sum of its sides and angles. These things are axiomatic rules. There is a lot of rot talked about economics and many economists have undermined the basic laws by producing complex mathematical models in an attempt to find their own fame, fortune and the favour of the state. Going back to the example of Fred and Bob. The implementation of minimum wages are a barrier to production. They effectively cut bob off from participation in the production cycle. It tells Fred not to trade with Bob because Fred will be expected to give over a chunk of his production to Bob by force. If Fred has the freedom to choose who he trades with, then he will prefer to trade with someone with who he isn't forced to give to. Essentially this throws Bob on the scrap heap as no one wants to trade with him. What's more, the entire economic society suffers for this loss of Bobs contribution. In real life all the producers are forced to give over some part of their production in order to prevent Bob producing himself. That's a horrible thing to do to a man. That's what minimum wages do.

"The Secretary, to the extent necessary to prevent curtailment of opportunities for employment, shall by regulation or order provide for the employment, under special certificates, of individuals ... whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury, at wages which are lower than the minimum wage." This is article 14c there are approx 300,000 people on these permits working for sub minimum wages. The Government recognises that those who's productive capacity falls below that of the instituted wages would suffer. There you are. Black and White. There's a reason why a guy doesn't pump your gas and clean the windscreen these days, why there are cash point machines instead of bank tellers, why telephone receptionists have vanished and been replaced by touch tone selection and why self checkouts have appeared in supermarkets. There are lots of jobs that have vanished as a result of wage costs becoming uncompetitive. Once that happens then low skilled jobs become targets for automation. Henry Ford was forced to up his wages because of competition. Those he had trained in his assembly line were taking their new found skills to other manufacturers and raising wages was the only way he could keep the workers. There are an awful lot of carefully manicured stories which when looked into reveal that things were not quite how they seemed. Ford was delighted to violate "the custom of paying a man the smallest amount he would take." And yet "[t]here was . . . no charity in any way involved. . . . The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made." Ford was so pleased that in 1922, when Model T sales began to top a million a year, he raised his minimum wage to six dollars a day. Meanwhile, he cut the price to about $300. With all of their manufactured steel, vulcanized rubber, and processed plate glass, Model Ts were selling at about 25 cents a pound—perhaps the best bargain in the industrialized world. Ford did it for the best reason in the world, by paying more he cut the costs of training, recruitment and absenteeism. No one wanted to lose their jobs and a steady stream of applicants ensured the necessary incentive to make sure an employee stayed employed. One thing that isn't often discussed is that part of this wage was by bonus. Ford was a eugenecist and would check that his employees lived in a way he approved of.

I'm thinking of something that is more consistent. Something on which you continually hesitate. A specific situation or question that comes up many times. Usually it presents as a sort of stickiness. You would feel torn between two or more options which would create anxiety. It's not normal indecision-unless of course you you find general decision making very difficult? It's not easy to do this over the Internet.

Maybe, maybe not. It might just be the result of English not being your first language. It's one of those things I would have explored during a breakthrough session. Do you ever find yourself seriously conflicted over specific things ? The kind of feeling that you are stuck and can't move forward ? Where one part of you wants to do one thing and another part wants to do something else ? These are rarely low level conflicts and you would likely be acutely aware of them as they are hard to subdue. If not, then that can be ignored.

The economic fallacies run deep in this thread :-) Will the U.S. End up like Greece ? Its down to creditor confidence and leverage. Greece is a tiny economy locked into a currency which it has no power over. It has become reliant on cheap money loans which its government has squandered in order to ensure election victories. When the credit crunch came and the world went into recession Greece was left high and dry like a dying fish on a Mediterranean beach. It had made no attempt during the times of plenty to either engage in free market activities, reducing the state, public spending and corruption and neither had it made any attempt to balance its budget through collection of taxes. It did nothing to help itself and it has no bargaining power with its creditors bar some poor attempts at blackmail. The Germans and the bankers took it to the cleaners. They made the sort of offer you often see in films which gets given to indebted gamblers. It was concrete shoe time. The U.S. Is a very different kettle of fish. The U.S. Defaulted in 1971 and couldn't pay its bills. Then it almost unilaterally ended the gold standard- or what shadow remained of the gold standard. It has a massive economy and can collect tax. It also has the dollar hegemony and enormous military power. It's very difficult for any other country to get the bite on the U.S. However, in both these cases the answer is based on certain assumptions about the original question. If we begin to look at individuals within these two countries there may well be similarities. Just because the U.S. is unlikely to end up as Greece, it does not mean it's people cannot end up like Greeks. I noticed some talk of minimum wages. These are always advocated by those who have no understanding of their impact. If the wage is set at or below the productive norm for the job to which the wage is applied then there will be no effect at all. If it is raised above that level then like any over priced good, the labour will be left on the shelf. The higher the wage the more unemployment there will be. Minimum wages are advocated by four groups, politicians, unions, corporations and the general public. Politicians get notional extra votes, unions protect their members from competition and increase subs/membership, corporations who can afford to pay the higher wage can ensure that new market competition will struggle to remain competitive in the short term. The general public think it's a nice idea, it seems fair and looks like it will help the economy- but that's because they don't have economic knowledge and are easy meat for the other three groups who will get them to support it. If minimum wage was so great then why not set it at $100 or $1000 dollars an hour ? And why is it that the government omit certain groups like the disabled from it ? It's because the Government already understand the economics, they just rely on everyone else being dumb enough to swallow the bull. They know full well that setting it above market rate causes unemployment and they also know that the disabled would not find employment at the higher wage rates and so that group is exempted.

It's interesting how you change view points from 'you' to 'I'. That is a clear distinction within your writing. Can you account for it ? Who is the 'you' and who the 'I' ? There is no 'getting rid' of fear. Fear can however be managed and irrational fear removed. There are several methods to do this, but first I suspect you might well have been subject to early year trauma of some description. It can be as mild as having a blanket fall across your face whilst asleep during early childhood, or it can be more adult based trauma such as combat, car accident, assault etc. Without getting into those complexities and concentrating purely on meditation I would start by sitting and performing a series of slow blinks throughout the period of meditation. Over time you will find those blinks will lengthen, finding it going slower and with ease until eventually you will find your eyes can remain closed and comfort, able to feel safer and relax ed ucated as you read these words finding deeper and with more comfort able now. Second, you can unhitched emotion from the mind picture. Bring up the image of the thing you fear, it may be in distinct, it doesn't matter. Now, use your mind like a TV. If there is sound then turn it down and then add your own soundtrack that makes you feel happy and relaxed. If the image is moving freeze it. If in colour, then turn it black and white. Try making it smaller and larger. See what has the effect of reducing the anxiety. Keep doing this over and over and notice that the fear of the image subsides.

I was hesitant to write this post concerning AYP but feel it's important. Of course it must be accepted that there are two sides to every story and anyone reading this should be aware of that and I urge them to research my posts on that site over the last 8 years and draw your own conclusions. I resigned from moderating the AYP forum because I could no longer, with a clear confidence, continue to support something that has fallen closer to a cult, than a method of safely helping people. After over 8 years it's a huge disappointment to discover this to be the case. Anything which conflicts with Yogani and his methods is no longer tolerated-perhaps as others have said it really never was but I was blind to it. At the time threads such as this were started by those who had been singled out, I was urging open discussion with moderation-only if there were direct insults and other plain abuse-but found myself over ruled. There was, at the time, what I regarded as an unhealthy preoccupation with those who came to the TB forum and criticised AYP. I found that difficult to understand coming from those who claimed to have attained stillness, unconditional love and expanded consciousness. I must issue a warning. Anyone thinking of following the AYP method should be aware of what is happening at that forum. It does not mean to say you should not try it, but with caution. I think it has merit, but it is not truly open-those who Support it seem to defend it blindly. Yogani is a self promoter-nothing wrong with that, but it shouldn't be confused with altruism. Yogani is building a business and I wish him well in his endeavours but he is not being honest-though I do not know if this is premeditated-and that needs to be exposed. After several recent posts since my self imposed exile from moderator status, I found the same heavy handed attempts at moderation which have afflicted others who have posted here. It appears as an attempt to discourage discussion. Today I discovered this email in my inbox which I assume is either generated by Yogani or Christi ( who appears to be Yoganis UK lieutenant): Hello karl. You made a post in the Jnana Yoga/Self-Inquiry - Advaita (Non-Duality) forum entitled Mukti. A forum moderator has decided to reject your post for the following reason: Sorry, we are no longer going to approve posts from you of this nature. They are not consistent with the AYP approach to self-inquiry, which is practicing and coming to one's own experience and interpretation of same. Lecturing others on what their experience is supposed to be is not appropriate. This is the neo-advaita approach, and it is suggested that you find a more appropriate venue for that line of posting. The AYP forum is not the place. Thank you. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]

I like it here :-)

:-) I couldn't help seeing the similarity-not that I am religious in any way except for cleaning my teeth, which I do twice a day.

It's interesting that we confuse the error we can make about the nature of things, with that of the reality of things. It is entirely different and yet we treat it as the same. If we think the Sun goes around the Earth, then this is simply a theoretical error, but if we believe the Sun is a God, or that the Sun only exists in subjective consciousness, then we make an error of reality. Like you, it was only when I began to explore reality that I dispelled the errors I made about reality. I will happily continue to make theoretical errors and to experiment to expose them, but they do not impinge on my love of reality, and it is that love which is pure. To love what is, in every moment, without question or condition, yet to accept that there will also be liking and disliking . Then that is an end of suffering. I find that it must be continually worked at. That it is not enough to say, or believe a thing, it must also be done. Maybe this is the essence of the Lord's Prayer. 'Thy 'will' be done on earth as it is in heaven'. That you must engage your will, not only in thought, but also in deed. Thy 'will' is conscious reasoning it is free will. The ability to choose.