redcairo

Wow. You can just feel the healthy peace like a glow from the screen. Thanks for that. RC

This made me laugh out loud for some twisted reason RC

Thanks you guys. I need a LOT of protein. I eat eggs, beef, chicken, and minimal pork and turkey, already. I want to be able to cook with protein powder because a/ I need more protein/aminos and b/ it can actually contribute to what I call "breadishes" which are not-bread but can function as something to put stuff on and c/ I loathe the taste of protein powder, ALL of them, and denaturing the proteins makes the taste easier for me. @cheya This is the kind I said I thought was best above: https://naturalfactors.com/en-us/product/whey-factors-2-en-us/ Can't figure out what's wrong with the ingredients. I mentioned Syntha-6 for flavor but also mentioned the ingredients were crappy -- seriously on that one. Probably why it tastes better than others. But that is relative because IMO it all tastes bad. There was once a media theory about pressure cooking being problematic but it turns out there were some wrong assumptions in all that. The temp on an Instant Pot I think gets to 200-something, maybe 225 I forget the detail; it's the pressure not the heat that is doing a lot of the work. (Also electronic PC's are like 11.2-11.6 PSI vs. 15 on a canner or stovetop PC.) The timing is much less than many other forms of cooking. Far as I know anyway, protein denatured isn't a negative. Your stomach denatures it, liver bile, the whole digestive system does. Any cooking does 'to some degree.' But there are some advantages to complete proteins that are lost when that's done. Which is fine with me. I could eat jello (un-denatured) or bone broth (denatured gelatin) but I can eat a lot more broth over the course of a week than I can jello! I count denatured aminos (like collagen hydrolysate) as protein. Last night I finally used the Instant Pot for the first time. Don't know why I was so reticent about getting to it! Made a chuck roast with potatoes and carrots. This not so much for me as for the kids. I ate my portion standing at the counter. My body will not let me make roast without my hand and mouth conspiring to just eat it like crazy. They're perfectly happy to suspend my brain activity or attention to allow this theft... so by the time I realized I'd eaten all of mine the veggies were done for the kids. (Kids are young adults.) Then they ran off with their bowls and I never got a photo! I was supposed to make potato leek stew (experiment for daughter), tomato soup (experiment for me), red curry chicken (experiment for me), and ground pork with spinach and chorizo-spice-mix meatballs, but my weekend was seriously slim on getting cooking chores done. I'm back to half-living on "chicken-egg salad," which is just what it sounds like, a blend of those two, along with celery, radish, sweet pepper, hot pepper, scallions. We make it 1 dozen eggs / 5# chicken at a time, and put it in these little 4-5oz storage containers, and the fridge will be packed with them. We grab 1-3 at a time depending on how hungry people are and eat that until we run out. This and stew -- mainly chicken-veggie stew -- and scrambles with veggies and cheese is our staple but I'm getting a bit weary of the same thing all the time. I want the Instant Pot to rescue me! @thelerner I recommend that site to others too! I didn't realize that had protein powder recipes though! Edited (again) to add: Oh. They don't. LOL! Info on protein, but not a category for powder recipes. RC

"Address the topic not the person" is a good rule. Conversations about hard topics are hard. There's no getting around it. And sometimes it depends on the particular people and I don't just mean how they talk to each other. I'm from a family where half the people are half- some minority race and/or often married to people of a minority race so family get togethers look like a United Colors of Bennetton ad, I've joked. Some are city folks and some very rural, and the ages and politics are pretty different. So when we get ten people debating a topic like say, illegal aliens, they are debating the topic of (wait for it) "illegal aliens." The reason is, half these people are native, mexican, black -- so nobody is going to say to them, "You just don't like brown people!" or whatever, because that would be ridiculous. So the conversation is totally spared that racism aspect of the argument which normally is unavoidable in public conversations, in part because, and this is the kind of funny part, it is often the people who ARE in fact a/ legal immigrants, b/ from (or parents or grandparents from) Mexico, and/or c/ black, who are most resentful of that situation, for their own focus reasons. Sometimes this helps keep the conversations more on track to be about ISSUES. On the internet I think people often assume a lot about other people based on limited info. Cultural issues are far more about personalities and regions in my experience, except it seems nearly opposite on the left and greatly race/sexuality-related -- but that might be just the media faking me out, I admit, because they emphasize it with such hyperbole. And by that I mean the left media, not the right -- they are the ones that present so many things that way. But in my experience, outside the areas most influenced by that kind of school/media/social drive (to get anybody who is not straight or not white to vote dem as if it's some kind of moral obligation), people are whatever they are without regard to the issues of race or sexuality. For example my next door neighbors are gun-totin' pickup-truck-drivin' jeans and boots-wearin' hard working manly men who love their country and are great guys. They're also gay. So what. Nobody cares. Why would anybody care? They fit right into the reddest-red-state of the nation (second reddest. OK ties with WY for every-county-red in national elections, but I expect culturally we are closer to center than them). These guys have just as much desire for the good of our country, protection of the nation, defense of the borders, enforcement of the laws, and so on, as any other citizen -- and why wouldn't they?! How bizarre and prejudiced it would be to see that someone is non-white or gay and think "Oh, well, they're probably anti-american sorts who support criminal behavior." How crazy and stupid would that be?! Yet if we believed the mainstream media outright about who/why people vote, that would actually become a truism, sheesh. On the internet I think the lack of knowing people personally sometimes makes it easier to categorize them like a stereotype. Of course sometimes it's just that the person typing (and it might be me) is obtuse. Or pedantic. Or a drama queen. It isn't ok to be rude toward an individual here. I believe it should be ok to say mostly anything about individuals who are not here but are public figures -- within reason of course -- and in particular, about "generic groups" of people who are not here, by which I mean reference to 'the fbi' or to 'politicians' or things like that. If people are going to be offended they need to limit that to being offended for their own self. Their ego does not need to spread to encompass planet earth so any conversation about anything is sure to say something offensive. That's just looking for reasons to be offended. My kid was that way prior to adulthood. If you insulted a song she was offended because she liked the singer. She wasn't old enough to understand that it not only wasn't about the singer, but it definitely wasn't about her. People... are supposed to grow out of that. :-) One cannot have honest conversation about controversial topics featuring public figures and groups and yet not be able to comment about them, directly or indirectly, in the negative. But like I said, being rude directly toward an individual in the conversation is not cool. Some of this, I think people need education about it -- they literally seem a bit oblivious to it, not like they are horribly intentioned, but like this is just normal to them. I think rather than hide their post, or ban or punish them, it might be useful to provide an example of "a way to make the point that was less personalized." Not to put words in anybody's mouth/pen but to example how any point about a topic COULD be made WITHOUT being insulting to another bum. (Of course if the only point was "You're a dick!" then probably, that didn't need to be made LOL.) One thing I've often thought about in these conversations. I read both left and right in social media / media at times, so I can say that in my view, sometimes Mother Jones has a point. Sometimes Brietbart has a point. Sometimes they both have a valid point but they're focusing on different aspects of the same topic. Sometimes nobody knows what's going on anyway. Even if someone DID get something from an obviously-biased source, that doesn't make it wrong. And assuming that people only get information from such sources -- vs. actually coming to a conclusion based on their own experience, or based on other data (e.g. I once spent all day gathering info from official government docs about illegal immigration stats, only to be accused somewhere of 'reading too much Brietbart') is just as irrationally prejudiced as thinking they only feel a certain way because of their race, location, etc. If the argument is about the topic then no matter what the source, the points made are what matter and ought to be what are addressed if anything. Sometimes we're just not gonna agree. And that's ok. Sometimes we just want to talk to someone about something that is kind of important to us in the moment, and we'd rather talk to another bum, even one we disagree with a lot, than anybody else, because usually (not always) at least the other bums are reasonably thoughtful individuals. Or if they're not, they're just one or two; the OTHER people reading might be reasonably thoughtful individuals. I mute people who offend me even if they aren't even talking to me. Saves a lot of angst. :-) Luke is right -- we should be nicer to each other. Maybe we should all agree to dogpile-tackle any direct-insult-of-another-member IN THE NICEST WAY -- the funniest way wins -- to use local peer-social behavior to try and help the "good people who are honestly challenged to avoid being insulting" learn to communicate in a way better suited to the good environment they -- and we -- surely deserve. :-) RC

I see Luke's point. But I see this too. That thread has actually brought me face to face with repeatedly with asking myself: What do you choose to spend your time, attention, focus upon? Why? There's a huge forum here. You visit that thread and leave. Why? Are there seriously no people or threads about other topics of my interest? Of course there are. Why don't they draw me the same way -- sometimes? Because I let myself have that 'attachment' to the subject. Is it bad, good? It's not anything but what I make it for me, and what others make it for them. Has anybody ever been rude to me? Probably, but I have the internet-skin of a rhino so when I get really irked I usually leave and cool off before I return, lest I share with them my deepest feelings about their mama or whatever. Maybe a few exceptions. I've run my own forums for over 20 years so I know the sufferage of staff and I don't want to make it worse on them. Do I learn anything from it? Well I see for the zillionth time that what triggers anyone on any spot of the spectrum is being invalidated as if their words spawn not from genuine feeling or thought or experience but from being 'so stupid they just believe source X.' There are other things that trigger me personally. One is when the ability to make tongue-in-cheek half-joking things are intentionally taken over-literally so it can be interpreted as 10x the offense. Ideally when anybody feels like that -- we all get that way sometimes -- they would just avoid such threads, since they actually make a cantankerous but sometimes good natured spitball fest into a heavy bore where somehow you're walking on eggshells in a topic that is all about NOT walking on eggshells in a lot of ways. If you LIKE mud wrestling, I am sure there is a path of individuation to be found in that, but if you really hate mud wrestling and find it offensive, best to avoid the pit. The bums have tons of other threads -- some of which are also pits in some respects but only in the most appropriately challenging to help you grow ways hahaha -- that might be better. Do I suffer from all the negativity on the Trump threads? Sure, if I spend too much time on it. So what's the lesson here? The lesson is that I'm an adult, and I need to learn to evaluate the result things have on my state of mind, how much I get done if I do/don't participate in that. For some people the lesson is "don't go to the Bangkok market if chaos and the chance of getting robbed offends you" and for others the lesson is "hey there's tons of colorful life and great opportunities there" and for others the lesson is "learn how much you can stand, what your own boundaries are, and discipline yourself to visit or participate -- or not! -- appropriately." * All that being said... I think what Luke was in part saying, was not just (or so much) that he wanted the bums not to have a place for spitwads, but that he was distressed that bums he likes participating with in other areas of the forum have left those areas because of the political stuff. That part, I totally get. But this is life: people go to church, and then sometimes your favorite people leave "because of all the hypocrites." The fact that 90% of the people were kind friends and not hypocrites is worth noting; the fact that they often quit praying and doing anything related to their spirituality when they leave church, and it wasn't God who was the hypocrite, is worth noting; really what it means is they chose to focus on the tiny percent of whatever or whomever bothered them the most, make it more important than everything else, were unable to have the discipline to focus away from it or prioritize it downward, and ended up with such internal drama they just had to walk away from everything even associated with it. This happens with jobs, too, sometimes. That sucks. There's great people lost to topics and places and groups that way. But that's their path, you might say. It seems ok on the surface to say "well let's just root out that area of flaming mud" but when you think about it, what we're really saying is, "We have this huge neighborhood with so much interesting stuff and so many people. But way over on the west side, down by the railroad tracks, there is this neighborhood. And all the people are trash-talkin' longshoremen! They even have fistfights on the docks sometimes! And Danny got a job with them and then, he kept hanging out with them and then, he got so mad about the fighting and some guy mean to him he moved out of town entirely. We must go down there and make sure they all become more like us, or leave the city limits!" But... they're not in your house, or even in your part of town. If you have to specifically *go there* to even have any idea what is going on, they're clearly not inflicting it upon you. Danny's life is his own. Their life is their own. To finish the analogy, ha. The "reach into someone else's world and insist they be what I want" is, ironically, a philosophical tendency that is a political doctrine on its own. :-) Also: There's a lot of kinder-gentler and armchair philosophy and spiritual yearning going on in the rest of the forum. Some boot-wearing ass-kicking down-home jerks might be just the energy needed for a little balance in the overall bum-planet yinyang. ;-) Probably should have read more than the first page before typing this out. Sorry if it works out poorly. Must run but will return this weekend or sooner. RC

^^ post above: American history in a nutshell. We're nearly to the last line.

From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage

" Listen, you daft trout. ..." That is totally my new favorite-insult-ever. (Katie Hopkins, on Twitter) Maybe it's common in Britain but I never heard it before and I cracked up!

That's awesome. Couple of decades ago, I was a week from giving birth to my daughter. My mom had died when I was 9 -- as did her mother, my grandmother -- and I was living literally in the opposing corner of the USA from my father and stepmother, and didn't know anyone else in the families, so I felt like I had nobody. But every night for nearly a week, I dreamed so intensely. It actually started with some woman I didn't know. She told me she was my ancestor (in my mother's line). And I met woman after woman, who would share with me ('perspective/understanding') about what part of her was reflected in me, and what part of her would be reflected in my daughter, soon to be born. Eventually this got close enough in line to be my great grandmother, whom I had briefly met when very young, and then my grandmother. I had lived with my grandmother a couple of times, once with my parents and once without. I loved her, but always felt that she was kind of disapproving of me, of my behavior or whatever. She was a typical grandma, always at home, knitted and crochet'd very well, lots of things for me. Due to location/travel I only remembered being around her for awhile at age 5, and then again briefly at age 8. I was shocked that grandma said that the esoteric experiences I'd had through my life, and the drive intellectually toward science, and the dichotomy of these two worlds of self and trying to find blend and balance in them, I'd gotten from her -- and that these are issues she dealt with throughout her life as well. Even in the dream I was nearly agog over that. I'd never seen the slightest indication of even local church spirituality, never mind deep metaphysics, from anybody in the family including her! Maybe especially her, since she always seemed like the practical, slightly disapproving one, in my recall. Nor had I seen any interest in science... she was the making pot roast, knitting ponchos kind of grandma, that was all I knew of her. I got some time with my mother, which was beautiful, but I remember none of. Anyway, it was clear at the time of the dreams, that this was "in my blood" -- that this was a genetic thing, but that the genetics are not just dead information, they are living geometry and the 'awareness' innate to that. Which lives in us. And in some cases of active gene expression, also through us. Much later, after all this had passed and I had a daughter, I was talking to my father on the telephone. I said, right before I gave birth, I had these great dreams about a whole line of female ancestry. In the dream, grandma was very different than I recall her. More interesting, you might say! He says something like, "Actually, your grandmother really was an interesting woman. Very intelligent. She was a psychiatric technician at the state mental hospital for 25 years. She retired when you were three or four years old." I had no idea that grandma was a psych tech for 25 years! Or that she'd ever had any job! She retired before I was old enough to remember apparently. That actually put a whole new spin on how I thought of her. Until that experience the week before having my daughter, I'd never thought much about the eastern 'ancestry' focus. And I've known so little of my family -- and I am so many nationality-sources it's ridiculous -- family and genetics just never seemed any focus to me. That changed my mind about it though. And it was good timing, because it shifted my mental state from the terror I had about giving birth -- I mostly expected to die in the experience, I was having some issues, and I thought that I had mostly come to terms with that and accepted it -- but my fear of the expected pain etc. was still a problem. But after that week of nightly visits, I felt calm. I felt like I was just one in a line of women who had been doing this since the dawn of time, and it was going to be fine. By the time I went into labor, I was at peace. :-) RC

Favorite videos of the moment On UFOs This is slow, and will be dull for anyone not into the topic, but I love listening to older people tell the accounts of their lives. :-) Boyd Bushman, a Senior Scientist at LOCKHEED MARTIN who speaks of first hand experience with Alien life forms and the UFO cover up at Area 51. Best commercial ever: Herding Cats Social Politics: feminist and award winning documentary maker, after eventually making a documentary called 'The Red Pill' about men's issues (which got her attacked rather than supported as she'd always been before), discusses how her existing belief systems about feminism (and assumption of male-patriarchy) interfered with her listening and interpreting, and some examples.

As I get old I realize that there are a lot of people who are stupendously amazing people, but have some weakness -- which is just as powerful as the other qualities. That saying, that "when the divine light shines through you, it highlights ALL your patterns, not just the good ones" seem apropo. RC

This entire 70s album is SUCH a great album. And it's a sign of how much music has changed: half this album is HUMOR songs - You don't mess around with Jim, Bad bad Leroy Brown, Roller derby queen, Rapid Roy the stock car boy, Car wash blues You don't see that any more, for sure. And it's nice folk and folk-pop and even a country/western vibe now and then. Some beautiful tunes. Croce has a "side man" on some tunes who is just awesome on the guitar.

PS I forgot to add this link which is the best I've found on Kundalini online: http://www.biologyofkundalini.com/

I am writing a book (that will probably take 5 years). In one tiny part, I summarize my experiences that got me from one point (medical-model skeptic) to another (point of writing the book related to psi {remote viewing}). A key turning point in my life was meeting a woman (a vietnamese boat person immigrant, who was half chinese, and grew up with her chinese herbalist aunts after arriving offshore in los angeles, and when I met her, was a "new age" sort teaching hands-on energy work and archetype meditations and misc. metaphysical stuff). A couple years after totally obsessing on hands-on energy work and archetype work, I had a kundalini rising, which of course I wouldn't have even believed existed two years prior. This did not enlighten me. If there is the slightest doubt, several bums in the political flaming threads will assure you. :-) It appears to have massively overstimulated heart throat forehead crown chakras, and damaged the crown chakra a bit. And led to two years of the most BIZARRE experiences of my life. Starting with being lucid 24/7 for most of a few months. And then... everything. Alternate realities, alternate timelines, a lot of stuff that seemed like it ought to be delta dream state but was in my actual reality... briefly! Entities and a profound sense of spirit, and a lot of crown symptoms (feeling 'rods of energy' through my crown and into me -- and IT REALLY HURT). Awareness of existing in multiple realities at once (and once briefly 'waking up from the lucid dream' of this one which was so brain-frying I hope it never happens again). Spontaneous psi and so much more. I fell in love with everything new (like the tree near my house) at the same time I 'disattached' from everything else. I had nearly instant manifestation for awhile just from thinking about something, often seeing my reality change within seconds to bring it to me -- I could make it happen on purpose about 80% of the time I tried. Wondering about a subject brought streams of energy info about it, that I could write down like channeling. I wrote a case study about it called 'Bewilderness' in '95 that I put online in '96. Anyway: It KICKED MY ASS. It certainly did "open me up" energetically to a whole universe I didn't know before, including profound spiritual/divine connection, but perhaps because it was temporary or because there seemed to be some damage that I had to repair and took time to heal in the crown, it was mostly "total surreality and chaos for two years" and then massively calmed down, fortunately, because I was pretty "out there" by the time that was over! My interaction with and definition of chakras is a lot different now than most others I see. So I go to look up the "official definition" of "kundalini rising" because if I'm going to mention it in passing, I figure I should define it, as most people in the west probably have no clue what it is. And everything I find varies from referring to it as something merely spiritual, to stuff that sounds like it was written by armchair philosophers, to sources saying it's about enlightenment. HAHAHAHAHAHA For me, mostly, it was like someone just accidentally turned up the volume "intensity" knob on my chakras heart-up, which was like a hard drug throwing me face-first into the worlds and experiences "at that level" -- for each of them. Of course I also spend 24 hours FREEZING TO DEATH FROM THE INSIDE before I got into warm water and the inner/outer finally adjusted. Apparently I had a 'block' on the "cold" channel at the heart level, so it was only the hot channel that rose past that. (Trivia: a couple years ago, with massive health issues that were of unknown origin (but turned out to be a birth defect heart valve issue sending most my oxygen/nutrients out the valve and into uber-massive body edema), I was having a talk with my kundalini chakra and asked, if I ask for help clearing that block, would you hurt my heart? And he/she/they/it said it probably would somewhat. So I sighed and dropped that line of inquiry. But during an experience some time later, I begged for help clearing it, even if it hurt me, as long as it didn't kill me. This was followed by a really AMAZING experience that I felt really DID clear it, and then my crown chakra going into the divine in the most awesome way, and, arms-up lying in bed in astonished bliss after it was all over, I fell asleep. And woke up 3 hours having a major heart attack. (Some time later I went back to K and said, what the heck! You almost killed me!! And they showed me this "plan" that looked like an engineer had made it -- it had this printed illustration of my body and the energy channels, and there was red pen with arrows and stuff, and there was technical-writing style pencil printing notes around it, and so on. I said, so this was on purpose? And they said yes. And I remembered that I ASKED for that EVEN IF it hurt me. Well. I came ten minutes from dying about 10 months later, and was saved with open heart surgery. I haven't had any close talks with K since that time, but I am still recovering. Anyway. I am HOPING that this means the block is now cleared!!) The primary thing still with me related to that was an introduction to my angel of soul as some would call it, which is actually an evolving relationship -- the "knowledge and conversation" increases and actually kind of cycles depending on me. And that I was part of a four-fold soul (so three other, 'encompassing/nesting' identities), which had been in my spiritual/dream life but I hadn't consciously understood it until then, and my Aeons (which 15 years after the fact or so I discovered is a gnostic teaching but I had no idea WTH it was initially), and eventually a radical shift in my perception of and relationship with my chakras. I perceived the equivalent of a "dark wet blanket over my crown" when a huge amount of my experience mellowed out. One of my inner identities told me that I had CHOSEN to "shut it mostly down" as I was pregnant and was living with someone threatening (possessed for some time. Yes seriously) and I was just moving into "survival mode." It's been 25 years since all that began. I've been pretty 'normal' since, but for what I'd consider minor stuff. Found this link when searching on definition: http://www.nithyananda.org/article/scientific-study-kundalini-activation-its-benefits#gsc.tab=0 Anyway. So how can I refer to "kundalini rising" in a super short explanation -- preferably something I can fit into a long sentence at most -- that is not one of the retarded western obviously non-understanding of the topic? RC

My stepmom grows potatoes. I talked to her about those bags once. She said they would probably work great for growing potatoes, though she hadn't tried them. My idea of gardening is decent soil, weed-barrier the heck out of it, plant into it, auto-water it, now and then yank out some weeds and tell the plants they're beautiful, show up in autumn and pick food. This added to my 'standing' garden gives you a clue about how hard gardening isn't for me, lol. Most people work it much harder. Growing potatoes seems like those working-much-harder thing, since you have to regularly keep mounding dirt up over it as it grows. Last week I was reading about growing in 'grow-bags'. I'd never heard of them until now. RC

:-) The parrot plant is weird-cool! Never saw that before! Looks awesome. Yeah my stepmom was like, "Propagation. Stick it in the ground or a vase. Get another one." She didn't see the magic of the cloner at all. I'm still all eye-popping excited about it. My best friend always gets me the BEST christmas presents! I'd been hopping about the idea for awhile. Will have to get past a growth node before snipping the seedlings of course. They'll probably have a few leaves or couple nodes by then and hopefully will just branch at the point where snipped. I could be wrong. It'll be real obvious pretty quickly if I am. But it's ok... that's why it's an experiment. :-) The REAL goal is simply to go from seed to plant-out and end up with even just one, but vastly-more-robust, seedling. The only reason I am growing the seedling to put into the cloner is, of course, because I don't have a plant to sample to begin with. Growing the roots out in the cloner is the goal, so they're strong/big, but cloners can't do anything with seeds. I did do hydro seed starting one year in an aerogarden (a misnamed product which is a hydrogarden). They did grow a lot faster than those I've done in the ordinary way. It's possible this aero 'intervention' won't be any superior to the hydro, just a lot more trouble, but we'll see. Keeping all the bleeping cats from knocking this stuff over will be the hard part... my darling child and her boyfriend have FOUR cats, in addition to my two (one of my two is so old she is nearly inert). They are supposed to move within a couple of weeks. We will see. My other temporary roommate, a young girl with infant I was housing as she was in a hard situation end of last year, is supposed to move within a few weeks too. So it's entirely possible that before march is up I'll have my house all to myself (for the first time ever! I moved here when my kid was 3), and maybe late March can be a truly massive spring-cleaning effort that I haven't had in over ten years. Then I'll have lots more room for hobbies/crafts -- including grow lights and aeroponic cloners in a back room rather than in my front room. MUCH better, I am sure. I just found a 100w red/white/blue/IR spectrum regular-socket LED bulb on amazon for like $27. That's unheard of -- man LEDs are getting so much cheaper! I got it the other day but haven't tried it out yet. IF it's legit at 100w that'll be the best grow-light buy online, pretty sure. I was so excited about the topic that when my just-previous boss made the mistake of telling everyone they could do a presentation on anything -- didn't really have to be a work topic -- I did one on the development of '-onic' gardening, and aero vs. hydro vs. aqua, and cloning. I don't think that's at all what he had in mind but he'd said it out loud so he was stuck LOL. This led to others courageously jumping outside the boring business trail and resulted in two weeks of meetings that for the first time probably nobody slept through. (I'm actually kidding. Mostly.) The stuff I really WANT costs too much! I'm still a single mom darn it. I make a good income but life costs a lot. So I'm hoping I can get one thing and end up with several, or split a buy with friends to the same result. Stuff I want: So far my plan for this year was get lots of diff seeds including unique things, for as little money as possible. Fortunately gardenweb has been supportive. A couple people for a few bucks each are sending me a whole lot of diff seeds. Most people who garden have extra of lots of stuff, often years of stuff, so they're happy to get something free or paypal to cover that in exchange for stuff they wouldn't use anyway. Saves me having to spend $3-7 for every diff type of seed I want. I'm hoping the experiment will have normal stuff, root veg, alliums, vines, leafy stuff, etc. to see how it works out. I suspect some plants will just keel over being interrupted so early and others might be fine, so we'll see. Online, aeroponic cloning has not gotten too popular let, aside from growing pot. Which I find totally boring as a drug and uninteresting, a good thing I suppose since it's illegal in my state. Is the parrot plant a type of impatient? The way you said it made it sound like it. Looks nothing like 'em to me! :-) RC

I found this interesting. My current meditation format (which has e/de/volved over time because the internal stuff is a relationship) doesn't really have any steady state. Sometimes I am just "being" so it's pretty zazen like, most the time though I'm interacting internally, and there is a "directed" element (although I may leave it open, usually there is a given topic or energy I'm working on) but the interactive experience is spontaneously unique to the moment, albeit some common practices (sort of cultural norms) are inside that. Often it begins conversation, becomes interactive, shifts to a sort of shared-bliss of not thinking. (and on a less ideal day, then Zzzzz lol) It seems to me that the "soft tech" of the human mind could probably do a whole spectrum of things for exploration or communion. Doesn't need to be one extreme or the other. I know when I began I needed and wanted some kind of paint-by-number plan. But eventually if the inside opens up, so to speak, that isn't really required anymore. RC

(I know this thread is ancient, so what, that's what forums are for) "Shared hallucinations": My daughter and I shared dreams, while she was in the womb and for years as she grew. I think the last one we shared that we both recalled, she was prior to age 7 or so. I recalled one she didn't though (so I can't really evidence it as shared but I believed so), several years later. A local deva came and talked with us (I'd sent a message earlier in the day, about my plan to bug-bomb the property the next morning), and she was frightened. (Because spiders are frightening.) But the deva enthralled her a bit (which was really sort of amazing, as if suddenly a web was spun with diamond-stars, every point an amazing fascination) as distraction, and it was ok. I think shared dreams might count as shared hallucinations if both people remember it. Casteneda: I read a couple little things from him in high school but had no interest in that sort of thing. I actually had a kind of eye-roll attitude about him and the whole "good vs. evil" thing at the time. Then around late '95 after a couple years of kundalini-inspired experience, I read one of his books that was fairly recent at the time -- I think The Art of Dreaming -- not because I was interested in his stuff, but I was staying with someone in a hot summer and they had the book on a table nearby on a dull day. I was "agog" that he was describing so many things I had experienced the prior couple of years -- things that to me were so bizarre and inexplicable, and I was pretty sure I had not heard/read of elsewhere at the time. (Particularly interaction with "inorganics." And other things. And I had journaled many of these so I had them in writing to refer to.) For the first time, I actually took him seriously. Then I found out that by then, a lot of people were dissing him left and right, and actually critiqued that book as being hokum, which is pretty funny, since it's one of the few books (outside Seth's writings) that ever explained internal experiences I had previously assumed were unique to me. As for peoples' characters, I think like the saying goes -- when the divine light shines through someone, it magnifies all their patterns, not just the good ones. If someone isn't marrying into my family I am less interested in "opinions of their character" than how their information resonates with me. Which to me is more about the information than about them. Anybody can be a conduit; like another saying says, "sometimes the worst people give the best advice." I read something, I feel it internally, I should be discussing it internally with my inner angel and the rest of the consortium -- there's a ridiculously large extended family inside, so to speak -- and they guide me for understanding of the materials. (I once woke up at 4am in a hotel room, and woke up my best friend in the room with me excitedly but half-asleep whispering, "It's all about the stars! The universe, the cosmos!" and spent the next 48 hours feverishly typing trying to pull an understanding together (everything is cosmic, in the end). If you just ASK for understanding and ALLOW it, for me at least, it usually comes. Sometimes at inconvenient moments.) A friend once told me that on some level it shouldn't matter who wrote (or rewrote) the bible or any other holy book; it wouldn't matter, in a way, if it were written by a housewife in Kansas last week; what matters, is whether the information is aligned with Truth-capital-T, and how you can internalize it. Truth "is" and no source makes something more or less true inherently. (In terms of probability maybe. But not inherently.) If Casteneda was essentially doing an "internal-intuitive Q&A with self" that he was writing out as conversation with Don Juan, so what? I think part of the problem is that CC was made into a cult figure and got TOO popular; he was canonized early and then could only fall from grace from that point on. IMO He shouldn't have been stuck up on that pedestal to begin with. Not for any bad reason, just for lack of the cosmic-hippy-coolness-factor having anything to do with legit spirituality. RC

Someday they will discover that isn't a bear (anymore) but that guy they've been looking for nigh on 60 years...

Oooh, lovely orchid. I got a cloner for christmas! I'm so excited! I plan to have masses of flowering trailing plants on my porch this Spring-Fall -- particularly all the ones I would have to actually buy but won't because if I have one I can clone it en masse. :-) Here's pics I got on whatsapp yesterday from my best friend who was at the British Museum in London looking at John Dee's stuff (heh) and more. Here's a few of the more. But the WEIRD picture of the day is this one from his hotel. It's a rug... and a bear... with the same rug... to me it looks like the bear is trapped, like this old Outer Limits episode where aliens kidnap people by basically entrapping them in large "portraits" before transporting them back to the zoo. Or dinner. Or whatever. Anyway, it's just bizarre! RC

Bob Wills! Wow that's a lovely blast from the past. :-) My dad's been a C&W musician since long before I was around, he's nearly 80 now. Guitar pickin' -- Chet Atkins groove preference, but he's from the old days so he was bred on Johnny B Good etc., since "country" music only came around later after music started further dividing into genres. I think he'd call Bob Wills "Western" music -- as opposed to today's "Country" music (which for the most part, excepting a few, is about as pop as the Eagles slow stuff in the 70s, with a specific stylization). He also plays steel guitar, which I find nearly incomprehensible -- 12 strings, 4 knee pedals, 5 foot pedals, key of E flat, and he transposes key in his head with the band -- while singing harmony, when not singing lead. The man has more talent in a finger than I'll ever have, and I played most instruments and sang pretty naturally from a young age (although songwriting was my thing and never his). My whole life he was the band leader man in black (yeah, like Cash, who actually lived in our town), looked more like a young Waylon (before his braid days), and played weekend honky tonks. He had a 'day job' (helped build up and ran a very large instrument store from my ages 5-18 in southern California) but the weekends for music were his reason for life. We took him to see/meet Chet at a small venue not long before Atkins died. Dad put music on reel-to-reel -- Western, and Country, and other stuff, also some rock and pop -- 4-6 hours of a given artist that would play in the background all day through my childhood, as his wives (count them, five) were all music lovers. He still plays, with a band he says affectionately is a train wreck -- old men having fun. One of them, his son is one of the guys in Rascal Flatts, he's so (rightfully) proud. He also plays a one-man band gig pretty regularly, and they LOVE Western music -- a lot of senior centers have dance events and they just eat that stuff up. I'm just rambling. :-) I love my dad. It's so crazy watching people (me too! I'm 52) get old. Music is one of the 'anchor' emotional things in my life. RC

Those salt pictures, some of them, looked like an ancient herd of sphinx that were all turned into pillars of salt by flying weapons in biblical times. I may be someone imaginative today. :-) RC

Naw, not rushing to judgement (I'd already have one were I in a rush). And I am not fond of Moore the religious nut anyway. But as noted it's past time for actual legal dealings, and he said vs. she said is a wash without bias, so the general public is left to evaluate whatever remains. Due process may normally be legal process, but the spirit of it seems the point to me, of not assuming people guilty merely because someone says so. Otherwise maybe we'd still be drowning people for witchcraft right & left. If 'evidence of truth' presented has inconsistent story, or is wrong on details, or based on TV press conference video, when looked at up close, appears to be fraudulent, not to mention something being presented by a known paid democrat operative, that Lawyer, well those seem perfectly fair things to take seriously in evaluation to me. RC PS I might add, and this is from a boatload of observational experience as a woman, that it is not very uncommon IMO for women to have 'an' experience, to modify memory rather radically over time and based on other following events or feelings (particularly emotinos), and eventually have a completely different 'memory' of 'what happened' with a man -- and believe it genuinely, so they are very convincing, and they are genuinely traumatized by it and wounded at being doubted -- but it simply wasn't true to begin with. This makes using the "I believe her" logic fraught with injustice. It is not any attempt to harm or marginalize women when victims, but rather, an attempt to avoid making men victims as well, and in doing so, furthering the existing problem of marginalizing REAL victims who are often not believed in the chorus of cry-wolf in the larger population.

I do not accept statements from either side as factual; I accept them both as "alleged." That's why we have due process. RC

Interesting At this point probably doesn't matter even if it was proved a forgery (which I think it is, up to the end of Ray/Roy it's real, the rest tries to fake it for his last name (signed on many things so easily available), the rest -- well as noted, the job title is wrong, the numbers don't match his writing elsewhere, and name of the place is slightly wrong and not even close.