bradley

maybe its supposed to be a play on words, like the "Dude"-hha, but thats like just my opinion man.

i think your describing pleasure. pleasure and happiness are different things in my book. i think the concept is if you abstain from excessive pleasure seeking, thats when root happiness can take hold. when not seeking pleasure for its own sake, it can also amplifies the pleasurable experiences that do arise naturally. its not that you avoid pleasure, you just dont seek it for its own sake. try avoiding all sugar for a week and see what it does to your pallette...

my weird thought. karma is basically like time. its the force connecting one state of being in one moment to the next. maybe then karma is basically the force of gravity per relativity... just weird thought i had.

cause of many emotional problems is dopamine imbalance--though easy to attribute to demons or something unworldly like that because it takes away your own personal responsibility in the matter. engaging in pleasurable stimulation exacerbates the downward cycle. the cycle is improved though abstinence and pain. Rigorous physical exercise is a good way to improve the cycle. Simple zen meditation too. Hard work too. Internet scrolling bad.

Can I ask a question, so I am pretty happy and dont see "evil" running amuck in my own life, but when I think about some of the bad things that have happened in the past 200 years, it seems like there are sometimes these anti-karmic or dark-karma effects in the world. People undertaking "bad" actions many times (but not always) are the ones who accumulate more power, which only extends their ability to do undertake similarly "bad" actions. Most social systems do not reward morality. it seems like they mostly reward risk and aggression, and there is a feed back loop where when someone gains power they are more protected from consequences and and can better shape the rules in their favor. This amoral feedback loop is i guess is slightly different than karma. And, maybe these people do "get theirs" in the end and maybe they are deeply suffering individuals, but I don't think that's always true. Having worked at a large corporation, amorality seemed to be the rule for promotion, not the exception. So is there any validity to this kind of concept? Also, is evil the same as immorality?

I have to say, I am pretty happy in the world I live, and I don't think evil is running wild.

just picked this up.

Same in finnish: taivas. I once said to my neighbor in broken finnish something like "the sky is beautiful" and he got this weird look on his face. afterwards, i figured he probably thought I was talking about heaven.

the verbal version of moral would be moralize, and the participle, moralized. Thus, "a moral that can be moralized is not an eternal moral." Not presenting an opinion, just pointing this out. This is a super interesting conversation, though. Appreciate it.

he is MonSanta* spent, he's left the phosphate mine Christmas dinner's near *took me a minute to figure this out, but chuckled when I did ... who in the world is MonSanta : )

All else I release barbies, plush cats, candies, books cookies santa keeps

This is super interesting.

well what does perfect really mean anyway. and when is something imperfect? bit of a paradox if you think about it deeply, as perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

but wait--what's that rub? sweet smell of smoke and corn bread pat's friday burnt ends

this makes sense. see i thought they got that from the wesley snipes movie for some reason, but its all coming together for me now, yes okay, fine, japan is much more east of china than west.

I was just kidding. "Western Origins of Yijing." I guess its the "Western Origins" that still bugs me. Granted, everything west of china is west of china, including china itself and japan if you row across two oceans. The article is actually pretty interesting, though, I only now just read it Isn't the hypothesis just that the Yellow Emperor possibly came from an indo-european-derivative speaking people, alright ill say it, from the West....? Kublai Kahn was a mongol, though and doesn't mean everything in the Yuan-period came from mongolia... Seems like he focuses on the culture that has been attributed to "indo-europeans" like agricultural practices and the use of chariots and then the yijing and doaism itself, but isn't it possible for those cultural things like chariots and agriculture to migrate through ordinary cultural exchange independently. Also it seemed like the arguments about the Yijing and doaism were a little tenuous. First of all, the fact that different cultures have the number 3, does not mean a whole lot. I for one worship 7, but that's just me. I think he is just using that to support his yellow emperor theory, but feels like there is a lot of conjecture in there, though I dont know. If the question is whether there was cultural exchange in china with indo european speaking peoples in the bronze age, Seems like the answer is yes. how could there not be. The bronze age was a groovy time, baby.

i should have said not "necessarily" a people, in the same way that you cannot generalize that engligh speakers are from england, nor that english are french normans. I dont know much of anything about this, except what I pretend to in my head, so I will let you all go on. Seems pretty tenuous to me though to say that Europeans invented the root all of chinese culture, so to speak, but then again, any thing good that ever existed, came from the west, baby. also aussie football is legit.

if you are going to give up your soul to be rich, the 70s was the time to do it. sort of the height of analog american culture, before the start of the great digital downfall of man... : ) plus ive been watching a lot of Columbo.

indo-european is a proto language, not a people. it is not "western." otherwise india would be in the west. even if the article hypothesis is correct, which i kinda doubt, it just means that it came from some people who spoke some derivative of indo eu language. sanskrit is indo european, but doesn't mean buhddism has anything to do with western culture. americans speak english, but does not mean the english invented football ( you know, the real football where people smash into each other, not the wimpy one americans call soccer ... just kidding )

who needs a soul if you're rich... ( just kidding) but serious though, it'd be nice to be rich, you know like crazy rich. also be nice to be living in the 1970s, diving those awesome cars and calling people on your land line telephone, from the office in your mansion, of course, with my sectretary tapping away correspondences on her typewriter in the room next door. you know shes kind of cute, but Id never. meanwhile my private cook is making prime rib in the kitchen for dinner. oh i can smell it from here. oh yes, tomorrow there is an art auction, im going to buy some for my mansion, we still appreciate physical things in the 1970s. and i need to meet jane for tennis at 10:00 tomorrow, before lunch. going to be a busy day

oh the dao of debits and credits...

One aspect of Liber Null that resonated with me was the use of laughter. Do other magical systems incorporate anything like this, or is it specific to Chaos Magic? It’s amazing how liberating laughter can be. Quote: Consider laughter: it is the highest emotion, for it can contain any of the others from ecstasy to grief. It is its own opposite. Crying is merely an underdeveloped form of it which cleanses the eyes and summons assistance to infants. Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played upon itself. The trick is to see that joke played out even in the neutral and ghastly events which surround one. It is not for us to question the universe’s apparent lack of taste. Seek the emotion of laughter at what delights and amuses, seek it in whatever is neutral or meaningless, seek it even in what is horrific and revolting. Though it may be forced at first, one can learn to smile inwardly at all things.

here we go again : )

dude let the Jurassic park thing go.

I dont think we should just take Shaun C R Ramsden's word for it and does it even matter. Indo-European is a proto-language not necessarily a culture or people. The fact that Mexican's speak Spanish does not make a spicy burrito any less tasty, nor imply that it came from madrid.