liminal_luke

I´ll pay extra if it´s a pasta carbonara -- that´s my favorite.

You could always offer to sit in full lotus for 4 hours for $25. Oops, already been done. Nevermind.

One thing I do that feels good is email back and forth with my mom daily. We started years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She´s long recovered now, but we found we liked it and never stopped.

I think what passes for "manly" courage is often anything but. Recklessness can be a kind of armoring, a shield used to protect against vulnerability: I´m afraid of death so I act recklessly to convince myself of my immortality. True courage, to my mind, is a stereotypically feminine virtue. It takes courage to be soft in a hard world, courage to acknowledge and live from one´s feeling heart, courage to be open.

I´d be honored to journey with you, Anand. (Though I suspect we´re all journeying together whether we like it or not.)

Good point. We do need to be skeptical, to have discernment, in order to decide what groups to join, which teachers to follow, etc. Nothing wrong with having a finely tuned "bullshit detector." I think the ickyiness I refereneced in some skepticism is a different animal from the kind of discernment you value. I´ll clarify with a recent example of something that happened in my own mind. A Bum named Shanmugam recently started a thread in which he claimed to be enlightened (or at least awakened). Reading his account, I felt an ornery contrariness arise within me and I wanted to fight, verbally anyway. I couldn´t just be happy for him. You´re enlightened? Good for you -- enjoy! I would have prefered to meet someone online who was suffering like me. It´s a shadenfruedey kind of ickyiness, the absense of mudita.

I love books and movies with super-competent characters and especially enjoy fantasizing that it´s me in the staring role outwitting bad guys with my computing genius, streetfighting prowess or telepathic abilities. Enlightenment is all of this raised to the gazzillionth power -- the ultimate ego trip. Oops, am I supposed to say that? Enlightenment is real, I´m sure, and at a certain point it makes sense to talk about it. Maybe. Still, I can´t help but think many of us -- and most especially me -- would be better off focusing on lesser spiritual goals. Instead of asking who is enlightened, how about asking who is kind? Sometimes it feels icky to me when people make super lofty spiritual claims and equally icky when those claims are challenged by skeptics. Maybe someday I´ll be enlightened, sure hope so. In the meantime, I think it´s enough if I can get through the day without eating a second blueberry muffin.

Agreed, one hundred percent.

I´m sure there are lots of good reasons to keep your story of meeting a fully enlightened person to yourself. The potential for "boring" us is not one of them. That seems very unlikely.

So far I´d say Shanmugam is doing pretty well.

Guess they don´t call him Dr. Hormesis for nothin´.

Next time I´ll include a selfie.

I think there´s value in spending time with enlightened (and perhaps endarkened!) beings but it´s not something I particularly search out. Instead, I look for people who have something to teach me. Nevermind enlightenment, these teachers often have some particularly glaring personality flaws. I´ve found that people can excel in some areas and be real flub-ups in others, and I try to learn what I can where I can.

I don´t think anybody has the right to infect others with impunity. But lets say, hypothetically, that the vaccine will cause a certain proportion of people to become infertile. Do I have the right to impose that fate on someone who has done her own research and decided the risks aren´t worth it? I know that you have a certain amount of biochemical expertise, ralis, and perhaps you´ve concluded that such concerns are silly. But other equally knowledgable people have come to other conclusions. Almost everything we do effects other people. As a society we´ve decided that heroin use and driving without a seatbelt are illegal. Dominos pizza and bungee jumping, permitted. The lines seem somewhat random to me.

Some proportion of those who plan to refuse vaccination are pandemic deniers, Trumpists and sociopaths. But there are also a few very smart cookies tucked in amongst the weak-minded fools. In fact, I´ve had occasion to converse with an anti-vaccine genius or two. Things are rarely so simple as I´d prefer. While I tend to agree with you that our society would be better off if more people choose to be vaccinated, I´m not so sure of myself that I´m willing to impose my reasoning on others.

You would make refusing vaccination a criminal act punishable by...fines? jail time?

Vaccines are a complicated business. I´m not capable of digging into the basic science myself, not capable of accurately weighing potential risks and benefits. And so I rely on the opinions of others who are more biochemically inclined, not that that helps much: there are smart people both for and against. It´s easy to imagine that pharmaceutical companies are motivated by factors other than my personal health. Easy to see the conventional wisdom of government agencies and the medical industry through a jaundiced eye. If given the wand of public health zcar, I´d approach this whole thing differently. There´s all sorts of evidence that adequate vitamin D protects against severe COVID so I´d get the word out. We could print up T-shirts: Prevent Severe Infection, Take Your Shirt Off. We could offer people free vitamin D screening, free vitamin D supplements for the many people who lack adequate vitamin D in their veins and adequate money in their wallets. We could start programs to help people reverse many of the comorbidities that make COVID worse. Diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease --- in many cases these things are reversible through lifestyle choices. People need education and support and if I was public health zcar I´d get on it. Also, there´s lots of inexpensive natural remedy kind of stuff people can do in the early stages of the disease to stave off complications. We could be putting a lot more resources into figuring out what to do before people need ventilators. But I´m not public health zcar. We´re not going to get free vitamin D or sensible government programs to help people turn around chronic disease. We´re not going to get government encouragement to do things that might help but won´t make anybody money. Well, other than the ubiquitous advice to wear masks and social distance. People are desperate not to run out of toilet paper, but nobody is making a run for health food stores to load up on essential oil of eucalyptus. What we´ve got are vaccines. For me, the decision about whether or not to get vaccinated has interpersonal ramifications. It´s not just me doing what I think is best for me. It´s a little bit like wearing a seatbelt. Is wearing a seatbelt a personal choice? Is it solely a matter of individual freedom or do other people get to have a say in whether or not we buckle up? While part of me would like to live in a just-me bubble, the truth is that other people will be effected if I get seriously hurt in an accident. I live in a web of interconnections and have a responsibility to others, just as they have a responsibility to me. This is especially true with COVID, a contagious disease. What we choose to do or not do ripples through our social circles and the wider society. I might choose not to get vaccinated based on my (imperfect) understanding of the science or even my political beliefs. But if I decide against vaccination my mom won´t be happy.

@steve Thank you for continuing the work you do in these difficult circumstances. I´m not sure I´d have the courage.

I know Ilumairen´s significant other from online communication and never got the impression he was the type, alas.

I´d like to rescue the concept of "fear of God" from the clutches of faux-spiritual religious terrorists who seek control. We are not meant to fear God in the same way we might fear death or taxes. Fearing God, we can learn to stop fearing everything else. Try substituting the word awe for fear and the word universe for God. Better? Instead of cultivating fear of God we can cultivate a sense of awe in the face of the immensity of the universe. I think this comes closer to the true meaning of fear of God.

Sagebrush has a harsh beauty but I wouldn´t say it´s the friendliest of plants. You don´t have to be an expert botanist to tell the difference between sagebrush and, say, a petunia. Sagebrush grows in wide open country, not unlike our Bums posts -- more space than words. I´m partial to petunias myself but lots of folks prefer the high lonesome character of sagebrush land.

Hi Pie -- welcome! What are you hoping to get out of your basic male sexual practice? My take is that sexual practice is best approached within a larger context of other life practices. You´ll surely find a wide diversity of opinions here. Happy Bumming...

Thank you, Sketch. That was fascinating. I was especially moved by the idea that we don´t know whether or not we´re supposed to continue as a species. It seemed like she was saying that we could be open and neutral, without an opinion -- even about that. To me this feels more salient than ever before with the pandemic. I can spin out with anxiety about what´s happening in the world, choking on the sense that things are wrong, bad, evil. So it´s eye-opening to consider that maybe everything is OK. We are a part of a process that is larger than us, that is speaking through us, and if it happens that someday humanity doesn´t exist as it does now...just maybe that´s perfectly alright. Hard to wrap my brain around that one but I think I need to. I want to rest in the peace of that.

I generally think that the only way to really know someone is in real life, that online interactions are a distant second best. Then again, maybe not: there´s no way the Bums would buy a line like the above.