ralis

The above post ignores several key points which are briefly outlined in the following articles. I must say that the above is a typical Libertarian, right wing argument with no basis in Constitutional law, whatsoever. The purveyors of such arguments choose to ignore the establishment clause in the 1st. amendment. Furthermore, in addition to the establishment clause, the 14th amendment has been conveniently excluded. The establishment of any state religion would be a dangerous precedent in that laws based on a state religion would also violate the 14th amendment. State funded parochial schools, mandatory prayer and other egregious violations of human rights, would be legal. A quick study of state religions present and past should give any reasonable person pause while reading arguments in support of state religions. As can be seen by the arguments given by persons in the state of Oklahoma who are claiming that Oklahoma is a faith based state and that other faiths should not be allowed to express their beliefs on public property are violating the 14th amendment i.e, discrimination. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=330&invol=1 http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/08/can-u-s-states-have-official-religions/

The OP is about a specific Constitutional issue i.e, the expression of specific belief systems on government property. The 1st. amendment is very clear on this issue. I am not interested in side issues being used as diversionary tactics by right wing religious conservatives such as yourself.

You obviously don't understand the Constitution of this country or the system by which it was founded. The above link is way off topic and is considered trolling. Why not participate by adding something intelligent.

Here in the U.S. there are Constitutional matters to be considered. That takes precedent over religious belief systems, which in this case, persons advocating that a Ten Commandments monument represents the religious belief system of an entire state be given exclusive rights over other groups of different beliefs.

Have you read the history of the founding of this country? This is not a Christian nation! You are beginning to sound like the typical hell fire and brimstone preacher.

For politicians and religious persons in Oklahoma and elsewhere to claim that Oklahoma is a so called faith based religious state, is dangerous to the extreme.

To you it may be a "villain monument" but to others it is not. Given that any government property belongs to all persons of that state and in this case Oklahoma, to infringe on others rights while being inclusive of one particular sect is against the Constitution. Separation of church and state. Go back and read it! Furthermore, Oklahoma is not a faith based or religious state! Not everyone in that state is of your faith. We are discussing Oklahoma and not a Muslim state. That is off topic.

Further info. with photo of statue. The above quote clearly shows the problem with religion. Authoritarianism, oppression, war, among other atrocities. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/06/satanic-temple-unveils-7-foot-goat-headed-baphomet-statue-for-oklahoma-capitol/

Your faith can put a ten commandments monument on public property but other faiths don't have the same right? Hypocrisy! For your information, the U.S. is not a Christian nation and was not founded on such principles.

Chris Hedges most recent comments on the decline of democracy. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105 This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives. The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive. The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security. I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation. The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection. The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state. The corporate state, in our case, has used the law to quietly abolish the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives. The loss of judicial and political representation and protection, part of the corporate coup d’état, means that we have no voice and no legal protection from the abuses of power. The recent ruling supporting the National Security Agency’s spying, handed down by U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III, is part of a very long and shameful list of judicial decisions that have repeatedly sacrificed our most cherished constitutional rights on the altar of national security since the attacks of 9/11. The courts and legislative bodies of the corporate state now routinely invert our most basic rights to justify corporate pillage and repression. They declare that massive and secret campaign donations—a form of legalized bribery—are protected speech under the First Amendment. They define corporate lobbying—under which corporations lavish funds on elected officials and write our legislation—as the people’s right to petition the government. And we can, according to new laws and legislation, be tortured or assassinated or locked up indefinitely by the military, be denied due process and be spied upon without warrants. Obsequious courtiers posing as journalists dutifully sanctify state power and amplify its falsehoods—MSNBC does this as slavishly as Fox News—while also filling our heads with the inanity of celebrity gossip and trivia. Our culture wars, which allow politicians and pundits to hyperventilate over nonsubstantive issues, mask a political system that has ceased to function. History, art, philosophy, intellectual inquiry, our past social and individual struggles for justice, the very world of ideas and culture, along with an understanding of what it means to live and participate in a functioning democracy, are thrust into black holes of forgetfulness. The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, in his essential book “Democracy Incorporated,” calls our system of corporate governance “inverted totalitarianism,” which represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.” It differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader; it finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new structures. They instead purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of expression and the press, the right to privacy and the guarantees of law. But they so corrupt and manipulate electoral politics, the courts, the press and the essential levers of power as to make genuine democratic participation by the masses impossible. The U.S. Constitution has not been rewritten, but steadily emasculated through radical judicial and legislative interpretation. We have been left with a fictitious shell of democracy and a totalitarian core. And the anchor of this corporate totalitarianism is the unchecked power of our systems of internal security. Our corporate totalitarian rulers deceive themselves as often as they deceive the public. Politics, for them, is little more than public relations. Lies are told not to achieve any discernable goal of public policy, but to protect the image of the state and its rulers. These lies have become a grotesque form of patriotism. The state’s ability through comprehensive surveillance to prevent outside inquiry into the exercise of power engenders a terrifying intellectual and moral sclerosis within the ruling elite. Absurd notions such as implanting “democracy” in Baghdad by force in order to spread it across the region or the idea that we can terrorize radical Islam across the Middle East into submission are no longer checked by reality, experience or factually based debate. Data and facts that do not fit into the whimsical theories of our political elites, generals and intelligence chiefs are ignored and hidden from public view. The ability of the citizenry to take self-corrective measures is effectively stymied. And in the end, as in all totalitarian systems, the citizens become the victims of government folly, monstrous lies, rampant corruption and state terror. The Romanian poet Paul Celan captured the slow ingestion of an ideological poison—in his case fascism—in his poem “Death Fugue”: "Black milk of dawn we drink it at dusk we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night we drink it and drink it we are digging a grave in the air there’s room for us all" We, like those in all emergent totalitarian states, have been mentally damaged by a carefully orchestrated historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. We increasingly do not remember what it means to be free. And because we do not remember, we do not react with appropriate ferocity when it is revealed that our freedom has been taken from us. The structures of the corporate state must be torn down. Its security apparatus must be destroyed. And those who defend corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt press, must be driven from the temples of power. Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up—which is what the corporate state is counting upon—will see us enslaved.

Most of what is practiced is textual theory which leads to a realization of the theory as opposed to the root of consciousness, whatever that is.

Instead of visualizing steaming cauldrons in the LDT, why not just fall into the vastness of that space and see what happens?

It seems to me as if one is in the dream as well as the real world. How deep does the rabbit hole go? What I mean by 'real world' is consensus reality.

Excellent point!

I would like to hear about concrete experiences as opposed to theoretical conjecture.

My experience with the MDT while sky gazing was infinity i.e, no limitation. I have read some writers from the Sufi tradition that have said the same thing regarding the infinite space of the heart center. From what little I know, the dantiens are centers of creative potential. That is all I know at the moment. Positing an anthropocentric/materialist view is an error.

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/02/big_brothers_little_siblings_how_local_police_departments_are_spying_on_us_now_too/ By now, it’s well known that the National Security Agency is collecting troves of data about law-abiding Americans. But the NSA is not alone: A series of new reports show that state and local police have been busy collecting data on our daily activities as well — under questionable or nonexistent legal pretenses. These revelations about the extent of police snooping in the U.S. — and the lack of oversight over it — paint a disturbing picture for anyone who cares about civil liberties and privacy protection. The tactics used by law enforcement are aggressive, surreptitious and surprising to even longtime surveillance experts. One report released last month made front page news: an investigation by more than 50 journalists that found that local law enforcement agencies are collecting cellphone data about thousands of innocent Americans each year by tapping into cellphone towers and even creating fake ones that act as data traps. A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law details how police departments around the country have created data “fusion centers” to collect and share reports about residents. But the information in these reports seldom bears any relation to crime or terrorism. In California, for example, officers are encouraged to document and immediately report on “suspicious” activities such as “individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go,” “individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular phones,” and “joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time.” In Houston, the criteria are so broad they include anything deemed “suspicious or worthy of reporting.” Many police departments and fusion centers have reported on constitutionally protected activities such as photography and political speech. They have also demonstrated atroubling tendency to focus on people who appear to be of Middle Eastern origin. ADVERTISEMENT Like the NSA – their heavy-handed Big Brother – these fusion centers cast a wide net and risk civil liberties for paltry returns. And all of it is happening without sufficient oversight or accountability. In other words, no one is watching Little Brother. How did it come to this? In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, all levels of government – federal, state and local – embarked on a massive effort to improve information sharing. Federal taxpayer dollars fueled the transition into a new role for state and local police as the eyes and ears of the intelligence community. The ad hoc system that has developed — of individual police departments feeding information to federal authorities — has been plagued by vague and inconsistent rules. For one thing, there’s a lack of agreement about what counts as “suspicious activity” and when that information should be shared. The goal, in theory, is to reveal potential terrorist plots by “connecting the dots” of disparate or even innocuous pieces of information. But in practice, such programs often infringe on civil liberties and threaten safety, producing a din of data with little or no counterterrorism value. In Boston, for example, the regional fusion center fixated on monitoring peace activists and Occupy Boston protesters but may have been unaware that the FBI conducted an assessment of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev based on a tip from Russia, or that local authorities had implicated him in a gruesome triple homicide on the anniversary of 9/11. In fact, a 2012 report by the Senate Homeland Security Committee found that much of the information produced by fusion centers was not only useless, but also possibly illegal. Indeed, more than 95 percent of so-called suspicious activity reports are never investigated by the FBI. We can do better. First and foremost, there must be a consistent, transparent standard for state and local intelligence activities based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity – the traditional bar for opening an investigation. The federal government should make this standard a prerequisite for sharing suspicious activity reports on its networks. State and local police should adopt it as well. Second, stronger oversight and accountability is necessary across the board. At the federal level, Congress should tie continued funding for fusion centers to regular, independent and publicly available audits to assess compliance with privacy rules. State and local elected officials should also consider creating an independent police monitor, such as an inspector general, to safeguard privacy and civil rights. To be sure, cooperation between levels of government is essential, and state and local law enforcement have an important role to play in keeping Americans safe. But the current system is ineffective, wasteful and harmful to constitutional values. It is time to recalibrate the system and make the state and local role in national security efficient, rational and fair.

The finest performance of Bruno Ganz. The movie is in German. The CC button will give subtitles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LocaOvmBg7Q

I saw these guys in Philly early 70's.

Is SirYuri still around? I thought he was banned for multiple accounts, among other things.

No problem. Thanks for clarifying! Friend just commented on this issue. http://thetaobums.com/topic/33133-indonesian-tridaya-similar-to-mopai/#entry510188

Tenaga Dalam is another category that is the same as Tridaya. I have extensive teachings on these systems.

More alarming news from the NSA. The do nothing Congress does nothing about this intrusion. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powerful-toolbox-in-effort-to-spy-on-global-networks-a-940969.html http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024245470

What is your point? If it is on Scribd, I trust that all copyright laws are followed. The author may have downloaded for all to read which may be a clever marketing tool, given that Tridaya gurus insist on transmissions for money. BTW, you are proceeding from the incorrect conclusion that I have the same docs as on Scribd. There is much in Indonesia that is termed and taught as Tridaya.

Not in the docs I have.