goldisheavy

It's the mind. Of course the mind is not really a thing. More accurately it's the mindset! A certain state of mind.

Good question. I don't seek increased bone density. But if someone wants it, why not? It's not worse than many other hobbies people take up. My guess is that people want to be stronger, more unbreakable and more imposing. I don't think it's necessary to have high bone mass for health.

I am very familiar with this phenomenon. I think what you're experiencing is excellent. It means you've opened yourself up and made yourself vulnerable on the inside. In this state, anything that threatens you has direct access to your inner being, and thus is a lot more painful/sensitive. Normally we walk through the day with like a shield around us. This shield creates a fake sense of security. The best way to describe it is like a wall that surrounds something like a small and tender flower inside. So inside we are very very weak. Should the wall crack, we'll be utterly devastated, and this does happen sometimes. In meditation you can strengthen your inner being such that it's no longer a fragile flower, but it can be a mighty oak, or even wind or fire or space, thus either much stronger or even completely invulnerable. The key is this. When you get disturbed, don't become disturbed by your disturbance. In other words, allow one level of the disturbance to happen. The original disturbance. But then treat this disturbance as something that's normal. In other words, don't allow the original disturbance to echo into further disturbances in your being. Allow it to be. Allow it to melt. Don't reject the disturbance. Be with it instead, but don't cling to it either. Just be with it. So there are two aspects of familiarizing yourself with threats and identity. First, aspect is more mechanical. Just being with the disturbance is it. Second aspect is more important though. When you feel disturbed, from time to time (you don't have to do this always, but it's important to do it sometimes), investigate what is the source of this fear which feels like pain on the inside? What if the worst happens? Is it OK? If not OK, why not? Who are you? Are you different from the noises you hear? Investigate this thoroughly over a long period of time as the opportunities for such reflection come up naturally. In this manner you'll have two sources of strength: you'll have wisdom and understanding. And you'll also have mechanical familiarity with disturbances. It will come to pass that even if you don't exactly understand something, you won't be as afraid of it. But be careful, because this kind of practice makes the person powerful. So you have to compensate by contemplating compassion and patience. Otherwise it may be all too easy to hurt someone due to lack of fear.

I thought this was well known already. Yes it can be done. Bone mass increases from stress. Lift heavy. Take up power lifting or Olympic weightlifting and you'll increase your bone mass (and density). I don't think you'll see a huge increase from simply healthy exercise though. You'll need to be lifting something like half a car in weight regularly to see some serious changes. Well, not literally, but basically heavy heavy heavy.

Alright. I'll answer this. Good and evil are simply amplifications of comfortable and uncomfortable, or desirable and undesirable. So for example, eating ice cream is good, but cleaning the toilet is evil. Of course we don't say this in real life, because eating ice cream is not a strong preference and cleaning the toilet is not as uncomfortable as being oppressed is. But good and evil are born of preferences which may start small, but become strong. So let's look at what Hsu Yu said. Hsu Yu is posturing here to appear as if he is beyond good and evil. In reality, he is not comfortable to teach Master Yao's student, thus he has a preference. He doesn't want to be bothered by having to question and analytically contradict everything Master Yao taught, because it's a big chore and takes a lot of time and is not necessarily a process that Hsu Yu enjoys. So in this case, teaching Master Yao student is a type of small evil for Hsu Yu. Thus Hsu Yu is at least slightly dirty, if not completely dirty with the dirt of hypocrisy. Nonetheless, there is some value in demonstrating that good and evil are not absolute, are not permanent, and are not worth losing one's head over. At the same time, if we completely ignore what is comfortable and what isn't, for oneself and for others, we will be making life harder than necessary, whatever you want to call it.

I embrace death and killing even of humans. What to say of animals? There is no conflict here Paul, other than what I was temporarily creating in my mind.

OK, when I was a vegetarian I noticed absolutely zero difference with regard to subtle energies or my state of being in general. I didn't feel better or worse. It was the same. The only difference was that I was disturbed almost every meal, because first I would look for what's available without meat, and then I'd have a little internal discussion with myself about how what I am doing is really justified. Except I wasn't convinced. And so I would argue with myself. So instead of enjoying my meal I would have an intense debate in my mind for the 30 minutes of the time it would take to consume the meal. As a result, I was miserable. In a different culture and in a different environment I can see myself being vegetarian. To me, being one is not really about health or diet. It's about being better to animals and it's also about being more economical, because in regions where Earth can produce directly consumable vegetation, raising animals is inefficient. So there are some good arguments for vegetarianism, but it's not high on my list of priorities. If that makes me more evil, so be it. I always set my goal to be a decent human being, but never good or angelic. I don't shoot that high.

I tried to be a vegetarian, but in the end, being a vegetarian has disturbed my mind rather than pacified it, and there were other problems. The reason my mind was disturbed is that every meal I had to take special steps and make special considerations. I had to check if there was a presence of meat or not, and I had to look for things to order that didn't contain meat, which is a pain in the ass. This would be less of a problem if I cooked at home, but I don't, and I consider cooking a big waste of time most of the times, because I don't love the process of cooking enough. I enjoy cooking but not enough to do it every day. So to summarize the point in this paragraph, my mind was disturbed enough that switching to a vegetarian lifestyle has made me miserable, and I had to stop it. Plus, there was a bigger problem. The bigger problem I have is that, we as people, have a long way to go learning to treat each other better. Just like I laugh at someone who saves a penny and wastes a dollar (penny wise, dollar foolish), I also laugh at myself when I try to save an animal while relatively speaking participating in wasting the lives of countless humans. So I need to worry about the state of humanity first and foremost. When we can clean that up, I can focus on other animals next. Hitler was a vegetarian, for example. I respect vegetarians though, and as long as they don't annoy me or try to appear as holier than though, I believe their arguments have some merit. I also think that farms that produce meat can be improved and can be run more ethically before all of us switch to a vegetarian lifestyle. That said, I think in some future life I will probably become a vegetarian.

Suppose I have a deluded belief that the world ends where my room ends. As a result of this belief, I refuse to leave my room. Then you come along and help clear up my delusion. So now I know I can leave my room and explore a wider world. Does this mean that in all cases I will do so? No. There is a case where even though I now no longer suffer from delusion, I know about the wider world, I am still happy and content to remain in my room. So I would say that wisdom enables siddhis but doesn't guarantee them, because siddhis reflect intent and not just absence of delusions. If you don't want ice cream, you can't get it despite yourself, even if there is no delusion that would block your way to the ice cream store. Even without grasping, some things are less pleasant and some are more pleasant. Ending grasping doesn't completely flatten out the experience and make everything completely identical. This means that while preferences can soften up, they don't necessarily disappear altogether. I think all enlightened people have the ability to display siddhis, but there are a few limitations: 1. Ultimately your own beliefs and your own intent is as powerful as any other being's. So if an enlightened being intends to show you a miracle, but you completely and thoroughly intend to not see it, you will win out. Or in other words, to have a shared experience of a siddhi, your intent must be aligned with the person who is trying to show something to you. This is true with anything. All the mundane happenings are kind of siddhis too, and we can all see computers for example because our intent to see them is aligned, or overlapping. So to the extent our intents overlap, we witness something akin to objective reality, something common to us, and to the extent our intents do not overlap we witness subjective realities that are not common to us all. 2. The person must want to show you something before they can show you something. So even a simple thing like lifting a plate off the table with your hands is not going to get accomplished if you don't want to do it. This is exactly the same for siddhis. 3. The person should be accustomed to whatever display they want to perform if they want to do so reliably. So, for example, I know I can ride a bicycle, and there is no delusion blocking this. Nonetheless, if I am not accustomed to riding a bicycle, I cannot just hop on it at a moment's notice. So not having delusions is not enough, because we still experience some preferences, some habituation, some general flow. So if a thing is too far out of your flow, you'd have to train for it to be able to do it. Having no delusion means you're able to succeed in training. It doesn't necessarily mean training is completely unnecessary. If you read about Buddha's disciples, you'll read how they all had different paranormal talents, and even though they were all Arhats, they didn't all have the same exact abilities. Some were better in some things than others and some Arhats could do things other Arhats couldn't immediately and comfortably do. And some had no apparent paranormal powers at all. I believe Sariputta was one such. Sariputta was enlightened, but he seemed happy with his appearances so he didn't develop any powers. On the other hand, Mahamoggallana vowed to develop paranormal powers even in his previous life, before the life in which he met Gotama Buddha. So of course according to his resolute intent, Moggallana was foremost in psychic power.

How do you define masculinity? It seems you deem boneheadedness as a natural part of masculinity. I think that being a man means being wise and strong, but being strong doesn't mean being boneheaded and stubborn, because that would conflict with wisdom, which is a primary masculine trait. Another critical masculine trait is playfulness. I always notice how men are more playful than women (but the trend in recent times is for women to approach men in their level of playfulness; I attribute this to women feeling more empowered). Women take themselves more seriously. Playfulness is a result of taking oneself less seriously, and this is a result of feeling empowered. When you lack power, you must be careful about what you do. If you feel powerful, you can afford some amount of carelessness, and that's what where playfulness comes from. But if you want to be healthy, you should not go to extremes. For example, playful carelessness shouldn't become recklessness, and so on. I think part of your problem is with how you see masculinity. You seem to have a distorted vision of what it is that is truly manly. If someone asks you to yield your place in line because that someone is in a hurry, and you yield, that doesn't mean you're a pushover. Yielding is a good trait, but sometimes you must stand up for yourself and for others, and even fight. The key is knowing what is fluff and what is important. When something important is being violated, that's when you have to stand up for yourself and for others. Standing up to your peers is not a big deal and there is not much manly about it. Try to stand up to power when the situation calls for it and when it is right. Then you'll be a man. There is not much manliness in standing up to your sister or to a smaller person than you, or standing up for something trivial, like your place in line, or haggling over the last penny or something like that. Good luck.

Two thumbs up for this! This is a well known approach in Russia. Pavel is just the guy who popularized it outside of Russia. Still, Pavel is cool and I respect him a lot, don't get me wrong. Just be careful not to give him too much credit.

The problem is that most people agree that we need to protect our way of life, but we don't all agree on what is the best way to do so. Fact is, a lot of people believe diplomacy is the best way. Other people think that killing half way across the globe is the way to go. When you become a soldier, on one hand, you become more powerful as a person in a sense that you are trained to be maximally destructive. On the other hand, the decision-making authority for the power that you represent gets delegated away from you, to some bureaucrat(s) in the government, who don't necessarily know what is the best way to protect the country. I wish that every time the president or other bureaucrat decided to engage in war, they and their sons and daughters were required to serve on the front lines for a year, to make sure they don't do so lightly. That said, training is easy. The hard part is sticking with it and being consistent, but even that part is not hard if you enjoy training. If you don't enjoy training, then sticking with it can be hard. You should do what you can to make training more fun so that you're more likely to do it again and again. When you go to the bootcamp, they will break down your psyche. That's what bootcamp does. They break you down as a person, so that they can program you, and tell you what you will become, when, why and how. There is no room for individuality in the army. Or not much room anyway. So going to the army is a severe sacrifice. It may be worth it. But it is certainly not a decision to be made lightly. For pull-ups, do lateral pull downs at the gym with the weight you can do comfortably for 3 to 4 sets of 6 reps or so. As you get better, the number of reps will go up. When you get to 10 reps or so, increase the weight. When you train, don't train till you pass out. A good rule of thumb is to train at 70-80% capacity. In other words, after you're done with 3 sets of 6 reps, you should still be able to do a few reps, at least, or even more. For push-ups, you can do push-ups off an elevated surface. So instead of pushing off the floor, you can push off the chair. This is easier than doing it off the floor. As you get better, you can lower the surface until you can do push-ups straight off the floor. Push-ups and pull ups will give you more or less all the upper body strength you need. If you want to get a little fancy and if you have a little bit of disposable cash, you can buy yourself a kettlebell. I believe a woman's starter weight is 8 kilos (men's is 16). You can look up kettlebell exercises online. If you do kettlebells, I suggest the basics. Don't get fancy. Just do swings, cleans, presses, clean and jerk, and snatch. But start with swings and spend a lot of time on swings. Kettlebells will make you very strong and will give you a very high endurance level, but they won't make you look manly (you can look up pictures of women who train with kettlebells if you don't believe me). Of course kettlebells are also excellent for men, unless you want to look like Hulk, then you need to do bodybuilding with a 10 lbs dumbbell instead. I don't train a lot, but I do own some kbs, and I play with them from time to time and I highly recommend them because they are fun, unlike dumbbells, so there is a good likelihood of using them due to their fun nature. There is a ton of good advice for training all over the place. There is no real need to ask spiritual people for advice on training unless you want to cultivate some exotic quality. If you just want good ole mashed potatoes and ham training, which has been used for hundreds of year and which still works after all this time, there are plenty of places to look. Here's a little secret for you that not many people know. If you want to train an exercise that requires many reps, you should train your strength first. In other words, if you want to do a lot of pull ups, don't just do pull ups over and over, because you'll get stuck at around 10 to 15 pull ups. Instead, once you can do 10 pull ups, you need to start adding weight and do fewer of them with the added weight. As you get better you have to keep adding the weight (using the weight belt). Once you can do 5 pull ups with half your body weight in added weight, you'll be bale to do many many ordinary unweighted pull ups. So strength and endurance work off each other. You always need both. If you want to do high strength stuff, you need very high endurance and not just strength. Good luck.

Cosmic circus.

I first examine the underlying doctrine. This has lead to my rejection of about half of all the mystical practices right off the bat. If the doctrine is reasonable, we can move forward. Then I compare the practice with the doctrine. Is the practice consistent? In a lot of cases I find the doctrine is wonderful, but the practice does something opposite or contradictory to the doctrine. This way I reject a lot of practices (for example, Taoist doctrine embraces death as part of the natural course of events, thus all the immortality-seeking practices can be rejected, but that doesn't mean amazing "immortal-like" abilities are impossible, the "-like" suffix is key). Finally, the practice has to be compatible with my nature. I am energetic. These days I can sit, but when I started, I couldn't sit and relax. I could either relax or sit, but not both at once. Thus my preferred method was walking meditation at first. Then I realized that what matters most is not a formulaic direction of the mind, but rather the underlying beliefs, the understanding I have. Then my main practice became walking contemplation. For a while, I also practiced lucid dreaming, because I had specific things I needed to find out, such as, what is the difference between dreaming and waking? How does magic work in dreams? And so on. Once I found the answers, I lost interest in lucid dreaming.

Don't know about post-op, but hypnosis has been used successfully to control pain and bloodloss during operations. My guess is that hypnosis can be used for post-op as well, but you'd have to talk to a qualified hypnotherapist/hypnotist. I've had very severe pain during my eye problem and I've used hypnosis recordings to bring the pain (the most severe pain I've ever felt in my life) pretty much down to zero to help me sleep. I've also seen a picture of an operation performed on someone who was anesthetized with only an acupuncture needle in an earlobe. I don't know anything more about this though. You'd have to ask an acupuncturist about their abilities. If I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about your chi flow. You'll recover soon enough and everything will be back to normal, even if you use conventional pain relievers.

I don't care about entities or lack of entities. I don't care about colorful language or polite language. I don't even care about mistakes. Everything has its place. Everything, that is, except an obvious intentional mockery of the sentence structure, which is a very basic element of communication. You have to find a way to pause in your thoughts. For others, these pauses allow time to consider what you're trying to say. For oneself, the pauses allow time for reflection.

Interesting documentary. Thank you.

Bullshit. In the West no one wants to fuck a virgin, since it's a chore. It's uncomfortable for the girl. She doesn't enjoy herself fully for the first week, and if you're the type of person who can't enjoy sex unless both people enjoy it, this really puts a damper on things. Plus a virgin has to be taught everything about sex, which is good and bad. It's good because you can custom teach the girl to your liking, but it's bad because teaching is not always easy and it can sometimes be boring. So let me explain this sale of virginity. The guy wants sex. The guy doesn't really want virginity. If an attractive lady was selling herself, there would be takers no matter what. The whole virginity thing increased the number of bidders due to all the media hoopla the angle has created. Increasing the number of bidders led to a bidding war which led to the higher price. You must also consider that a lot of the bidders likely view themselves as the champions of the poor or some crap like that. They think "I will enable this girl to get an education. I am a good guy." So the idea of charity plus the idea of guaranteed sex is what drives this. It's like high class prostitution combined with charity. I have nothing against the prostitutes (assuming they make efforts to stay clean), but please, don't BS us about virginity being valuable.

I reported this troll to the admins. This can't be taken seriously.

I think we should help these slaves instead of competing with them. Competing with a slave is the road to hell. I also agree with Blasto, although I think we should tax the rich as well as implement all the other measures. Really, the rich should be sent to re-education camps to be taught what is and isn't ethical and why not. If you're in a leadership position and you choose to employ slaves, you've sealed your fate.

Ultimately you can't "make" it sincere. It either is, already, or not, but it can change. Intent is what does the making. Since intent is not a subject to itself, it cannot directly operate on itself. Your intent is what you really want (as opposed to what you think you want). The best you can do is keep an eye on your beliefs, and make sure you challenge all your beliefs from time to time, to make sure you don't accidentally believe something that's harmful to your vision. Beliefs form networks, and so, sometimes if you want to change some beliefs, you'll also have to change adjacent supporting and related beliefs. Just pay attention in your life and you'll understand all this in due time on your own.

Well, I am not necessarily less ignorant than you, but I am more confident, so watch out! Here's my suggestion: Step 1: Take it easy! Change nothing. Step 2: When you have free time, slowly look around. Look around means, read a bit at the library, or browse and buy some books at the local book store or on amazon.com or at other publishers or stores online. If it strikes your fancy, check out meetup.com to see if there are any like-minded people who meet in your area, or ask around on forums, including this one, for references to meetings or teachers, if you're so inclined. If you do find a teacher, you shouldn't mindlessly believe anything that person says, but instead, you should see if any of it makes sense and if any of it is true to life as you know it. I would suggest to be wary of dogmatically or mindlessly following any teacher, no matter how good or wise you think that teacher is. Last thing you probably want to do is to get caught in some personality cult. Respecting your teacher is a good thing, but following mindlessly or uncritically is very bad. If your teacher demands a lot of respect upfront, run, don't walk, away from that teacher. Whether or not you find a human teacher, you will always have life as your teacher. So don't worry too much. Just pay attention. Step 3: If you're up to it, meditate for 3 minutes in the morning, or in the evening, or during lunch time. 3 minutes is good enough to start. By meditate I mean just relax your body to the point of stable and reassuring comfort but avoid relaxing so much that you fall over or have trouble breathing. You can be sitting on a chair, or standing, or even walking at the time. Quiet down your thinking. To quiet down your thinking, you don't need to stop it, but simply give your thoughts less weight in your mind, and otherwise you can allow your thoughts to proceed as usual, or if thoughts slow down to a trickle or even stop for a time, that's OK too. The most important thing is not to control your thoughts, but to be in a relaxed and alert frame of mind, and a strongly controlling attitude can interfere in relaxation. As you quieten down, just pay attention. Be alert. Be awake. Observe. That's pretty much it. Once 3 minutes or even 30 seconds passes, you're done, can you can do things as usual after that. Some people recommend a stable time to meditate. Others say it doesn't matter. It's better to meditate randomly everyday than to keep promising oneself to meditate in the morning and blowing it every time. So you kind of have to know yourself and work with your temperament. If you're not up to meditating, just continue learning. Talk to people. Give yourself time to ponder things on your own. It might become clear to you later on what is the best path to take. Most important thing is to avoid the extremes of, on one hand, wasting time and doing nothing, but on the other hand, rushing too fast and making unnecessary errors. Step 4: Try to be decent to people. You don't have to be an angel, but just try to avoid screwing people over if you can help it. This is especially true at work. If you're in sales, try to avoid tricking people or lying to them. If you can't do your job without bullshitting people, you may want to consider a change of employer or maybe even a change in profession. In general, try to be awake to life. Pay attention. Be mindful. Try to avoid doing things mindlessly or roboticly. But whatever you do, take it easy and don't burst your vein. So just 4 easy steps.

You can infer it, reliably. How? All you have to do is examine the edges, namely start and finish. Does awareness have a start? That would imply that without any context an experience appears. And what do we know about all experiences? All experiences are contextualized and only have meaning within some specific context. Thus awareness can't have a start, because for a start to be recognized as a start, it would need to be experientially preceded by something. For example, if I click a start button on my stop-watch, there is obviously a time before the click, thus "start" makes sense. If a human is born, there is life before that birth, from the point of view of parents. So from POV of parents, birth is a start, since there is "before birth" context. Thus, awareness ultimately cannot come ex-nihilo (from nothing). It need context to pre-exist the starting point in order for starting point to make sense. The end can be analyzed similarly. Thus awareness has neither start nor end. Only particular objects within awareness have start and end, but not awareness itself. This is a reliable inference. You can take it to the bank. In general, edge and boundary analysis is one of the strongest tools in the toolbox to demolish pretty much any erroneous view.

The jaw should be relaxed if possible. Keeping the teeth together is contrary to relaxation. It's a bad habit.

Yes. Who watches you age right now? Is that a paradox? I think I've already proven that you are not your brain. Where is the proof that tomorrow exists outside the operation of the brain? They could, but what does it mean exactly? Does imagination have a limit? Could all this right now be a figment of your imagination?