thelerner

I think so. Long term, short term. The Dao is also a path. In some ways goals are pointers along the way. Skills to gain because the Tao calls for skillful means. From the Buddhist playbook, desires should be downgraded to preferences, where you may seek an outcome, but there are often gifts in the alternative.

I'd counter we're too poorly built to be intelligently engineered. Birth is a disaster, particularly in the past. We're way weaker then our cousin apes. Not great predators, nor efficient herbivores ie can't chew grass or leaves. Not that we don't have advantages, big brains, we run well for long distances, opposable thumbs. internet access. That's about it.

I'll add, many fights are not about what they seem. One party wants to leave for rational or irrational reasons and picks the most convenient part of your life to blame. People tend to be more rationalizing then rational.

If content and living 'In the Way', boom baby, it's all good. Yet Americans live hectic lives. Often searching for.. something to bring happiness and release. The Tao is more often a subtraction then a gain. Simplify, be natural, fit into your environment. I'm reminded of an urban taoist I met. He had the electricity (& thus the heat) turned off in his apartment. So it got dark when the sun went down, lit when it rose. It got cool in the winter but not too bad since there was ambient heat from the rest of the building. It was an experiment in keeping closer to nature. Not the direction I'd go, but pretty cool nonetheless. The guy had some juice- energy & focus. that's all i got .

Me- Truly one or two good books plus a desert island and we'd all reach enlightenment.

What dad gum operating system and browser are y'all using? Cause s'times the problem is the pig, other times its the poke. Hillbilly guyrage and tech support: If we can't fix it, we'll guarantee no one else ever will. More seriously, on a mac, using latest Firefox, there's no change, it's working fine. addon again> This morning on my Mac, Youtubes weren't showing, just sound. I shut down Firefox then restarted it and youtubes worked properly. Similarly, half the time one has a problem just shutting off the computer for a minute and two and restarting it solves the problem. This probably frees up resources and clears out old caches. Or as Hillbilly tech support would say: Treat the computer like you would your mother in law at Thanksgiving. Tell her one more problem, one more word and you toss her out. She says so much as 'pass the gravy' throw her out, reboot. When she turns back on, she'll be better behaved. or she'll never return, in which case throw the computer out. they're machines of the devil anyway. For P.C purposes please substitute whatever ethnic group, minority, majority or relation you prefer for mother in law in the above tale.

Perhaps try Ajahn Brahms. A pretty hip monk. His path Buddhism, one that freely dabbles in Siddhis. His main basis is simple sincere meditation, gaining wisdom through dharma talks. Google him and you'll find lots of free audio's wise and humorous. Good books, some free, others like 'Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond'. might be what you're looking for.

Yeah, sugar and its close cousin white starches are probably the culprit to a whole array of inflammatory diseases. I don't think its a conspiracy though. Just an evolutionary bonus gone wild as we've learned to cheaply feed ourselves what our ancestors needed and craved- cheap easy calories.

To embody the spirit of Santa Claus, if only for the season. That's pretty good. Be the archetype; open heart, spreading joy, making kids happy. Peace on Earth, good will to men kinda stuff.

this Being 22 you are facing an uphill battle. imo, If it starts effecting your life in a highly negative way, I'd vote for graceful surrender. From what I've read celibacy is best when it happens naturally. And/or when you have an art that supports the jing to chi conversion, and those tend to be involved.

actually it isn't even shades of gray. To be honest I see the world in variations of (most) every color, living color, each one dynamic, capable of change, with truths that reach into the past and future. It can be confusing, but that's the way it is with eyes wide open.

The great majority of time, I don't live or decide things in an 'absolute' world. Normal life is 99% relative. There are exceptions and grey can get pretty dark and forbidden but in general there are a million shades of grey.

just reading this now. good stuff. bump.

this has worked for many in the past. these infernal machines, one day they work, two days they work, then out of spite they play games with us. internet.. the matrix.. are they really so different??

A year or two ago I was reading Robert Moss's work, he's an author, shamanic dream path. He wrote that we'd live better if we looked at life as a dream and took our night dreams more seriously. Looking at life as a dream is a good practice imo. It means going through you day, looking at the symbolism of what happens to you, what it might represent on a mythic scale. It makes you look for signs and synchronicities. Its kind of fun. As long you don't take it too literally in which case you might be tempted to think that dream car won't really run you over. Cause dreams come and go, reality tends to be more stubborn. In my personal section I have a thread 'Life as Dream'. I should update it. Yesterday I found a penny from 1920. Actually saw it in a tip bowl, fished it out and put in 30 cents. I find lots of old coins. An old penny is lucky, 1920 is luckier, symbolizing letting good times roll, exuberance building. I've been unusually lucky the last month with stock options. A couple years ago I had a Iching reading with a practitioner here. I asked how could I become a better Trader. The answer was, honor the feminine. So I'm willing to take smaller profits. End risk earlier, keep things diverse. Today, lying by my car I found a shiny dime. In my dream reality dimes are bad luck. Perhaps just cautionary. But that is life.

Going to Big Sur is a good idea. Its very beautiful there. I might suggest looking at this question from another angle, a more mundane, but perhaps useful one. What are some things the situation at Big Sur might want of me? These are things like, can you wash dishes? can you work a cash register? do you have a resume or even a letter stating your a good worker and trustworthy. Beginnings start small.. fast food, washing cars, baby sitting, apprenticing to be a guide.. There can be greatness in doing odd jobs and making enough money to live poorly cheaply on your own terms. Hear yea Hear yea, famous troubadours who sing a great truth: You can't always get what you want, but you find sometimes, you get what you need.

Fascinating, but give me more. What are you seeing? Is it book, is it computerlike file, telepathic knowing..? Do you ask questions? Look things up? and lastly, can you give an example of how you used it? Thanks.

Just found Jason Stephenson's guided meditations. Some seem pretty interesting. I've turned them into mp3's and can't wait to listen to some of them. He's got some nice trippy and sleep style meditations. Like Dream Creation and Setting Intentions Before Deep Sleep.. and Open the Magic Book and Powerful Talisman titled ones. Getting into a relaxed state and taken on a visual trip can be fun.

In an attempt to balance my usual skeptic nature with some cutting edge ideas, here is a link to a good article about life on other planets. Why its out there: from- http://www.cracked.com/article_22338_6-reasons-were-closer-to-discovering-aliens-than-you-think.html synopsis: "6 Reasons We're Closer To Discovering Aliens Than You Think By Ivan Farkas May 15, 2016 According to a woman named Ellen Stofan, we'll have definite proof of alien life within 30 years -- and nope, she's not a TV psychic or a National Enquirer writer; she's the chief scientist of NASA, so she probably knows what she's talking about. After telling us for decades that the prospect of finding life on other planets is about as realistic as the plot of Mork & Mindy, science has slowly started changing its tune in light of recent discoveries, like ... #6. NASA Just Proved That Life Can Begin In Deep-Space ConditionsDespite what the fungus growing on your bathroom wall seems to indicate, life can't just pop up anywhere. Deep space, for example, is so inhospitable that not even the most basic components of life could survive there. So you can jerk off into the vacuum all you want, John Glenn: There's no chance it could cross the cosmic divide to your extraterrestrial soulmate (who, for "Time to remove a glove, let my hand freeze, and give myself a 'space stranger.'" Or at least that's what we thought until recently, when NASA scientists reproduced the building blocks of life and precursors to genetic material in motherfucking space. And by space, we mean a simulated outer-space environment at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, which is the next best thing. The point is, the experiment showed that the cosmos could be teeming with all sorts of biological goodies that can rain down upon planets and seed life. See, our dumb caveman forefathers (read: us, like five months ago) used to think that the first terrestrial organisms could have been crafted only within the roiling shit-stew that was early Earth, when a combination of hydrothermal vents and solar radiation gang-banged the constituents of life into existence. But NASA's fiddling shows that you don't even need a planet, much less a serendipitous turn of ecological events, to form genetic bases. They plugged organic compounds that can be found throughout the cosmos into their cosmic Easy Bake Oven and zapped it with UV radiation until out popped uracil, cytosine, and thymine -- key components of RNA and DNA. It's very appropriate, perhaps even poetic, that this procedure was carried out by a state-of-the-art vacuum chamber that looks like a laser-based penis pump. Most importantly, this is a scenario that's very likely to occur throughout the universe. All you need are some readily available compounds plus some solar radiation, and boom -- you've got yourself potentially life-bearing molecules. Just remember to wash your hands afterward. #5. Turns Out There Are Shitloads Of Habitable Planets Of course, you can create all the molecules you want in space, but they won't do shit if they don't land on a planet where life can survive -- and everyone knows Earth is the only one of those, right? Yeah, they do, and everyone is also dead fucking wrong. Let's begin with our own Milky Way -- a 100,000-light-year-wide spiral that apparently houses a single, bloated species. Or not, because in 2013 astronomers from UC Berkeley and the University Of Hawaii determined that the amount of potentially habitable real estate in just this one galaxy is mind-boggling: It's believed that 20 billion Earth-like planets orbit their stars. At least one of which has to host a race of three-boobed alien women like in Total Recall, because come on. The astronomers extrapolated that number from data supplied by the Kepler Observatory (they couldn't get funding for an intra-galactic door-to-door census like they wanted, because Obama). The orbiting, battle-damaged space telescope detects planets by fixing upon a given star and waiting to see a shadow as any potential planets cross its path. By doing this, the Kepler has, over the past five years, tracked 150,000 stars and discovered more than 4,000 extra-solar planet candidates, plus an undisclosed number of Death Stars and wandering Galactuses. Sifting through data from Kepler, it became apparent that about 20 percent of the stars in our galactic neighborhood are suckling baby planets of their own. The nearest Earth doppelganger resides only about 12 light years away and is quite visible with the naked eye. They probably think we're extremely rude for being over here this whole time and not even saying hi. But what does this translate to on a universal scale? Well, there are at least several hundred billion galaxies, so that leaves us with a potential billion trillion Earth-like planets -- and that's only Sun-like stars. Furthermore, the figure doesn't even account for exomoons, which, as we've seen in our own solar playpen, can be just as habitable as the planets. If the most advanced life form in all those places is the one that buys millions of Pitbull records every year, then we have to say we're very unimpressed with this universe. #4. Life On Earth Started A Billion Years Earlier Than We ThoughtOf course, in order to host life, a planet doesn't just need to be in the perfect place -- it also has to be the perfect age. Remember, the Earth is 4 billion-and-change years old, but life only popped up halfway through that. Back then, the Earth was a steaming garbage heap with a toxic atmosphere whose only upside was not yet having any Pitbull in it. If even habitable planets go through billions of years of hostile barrenness, then the chances of finding life on them are pretty slim, right? Not really, because (and you might be starting to notice a pattern in this article) everything we knew was wrong. This February, scientists announced that they found evidence suggesting that life bubbled from the primeval muck over a billion years earlier then previously thought, making the first organisms 3.2 billion years old. They determined this by analyzing some extremely old rocks in Australia and finding ancient evidence of nitrogen conversion, and nitrogen which was like catnip to the earliest organisms..."

and not just the mutants and the ninja's. gotta look out for all teenagers, turtles or otherwise. Stosh- I vote, that the Sun, ,, Not be nuked. I got sunburn last year. I vote nuke the Sun. how do you like them apples, you yellow belly star.

If possible, honor your intuition enough to get a second opinion with another doctor, hopefully one who'll listen to your concerns and has good experience. addon> this has happened before, but I didn't read liminal post before writing. great minds think alike and so do we..

Others with personal experience can probably answer this better. Imo, Sometimes people run hot energy. It can have physical and mental manifestations from overblown ego to not being able to sleep and getting frantic.. Stay grounded means.. um going for walks, slowing down when things get hot, just sitting, staying humble, not obsessing.

Glenn Morris who led several people through Kundalini always said, keep your tonque up, body flexible, attitude positive, stay grounded.. helps but doesn't guarantee a smooth landing. May I suggest looking though this youtube channel and seeing if they make any sense to you. I haven't gone through it, but these guys seem to know there stuff. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdqXHUNuIq69dnxAF5gPF2Q sample-

Know how is only part of the equation. Maybe a small part. There's also the need for hard practice, a mentality of surrender, a body able to accept the energy and even a certain amount of karmic.. luck or fate. I don't think any technique or pill comes with a guarantee of success even if one is doing it perfectly. That may not be a bad thing either. For some Kundalini is poisonous.. they don't come out of the other end whole or happy.

I don't know if I've ever said it here. maybe one day. DAO = Reality, yet its.. kinda living, going through phases, give it respect and attention addon> In the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up which unexpectedly made best seller lists for months, has at its heart an amazing viewpoint of showing great respect to inanimate objects. Creating a home where everything; every object in it is loved. Even lowly socks must not be carelessly tossed or rolled but folded in a way that honors them. There something about that approach that seems the bright side of Taoism. That reverence.