thelerner

First time I'm hearing about it. Certainly looks great. I'm not going to the Big Burn this year. Couldn't get tickets to the regional Burn in Colorado and I'm in the lottery for the Lakes of Fire in Michigan. It might be a cool place to hit. I'll have to look into it. Seems mellower then Burning Man. Thus I might be able to grab my mellow buddies.

ditto and thats why I only type... plus silence makes for a boring forum

hmnn, it may not be the dying so much as the pain and reflection that shock and rock the ego's foundation. See, trying to hurt yourself is all about You, and that's moving in the wrong direction. If you're indeed a selfish and self-centered bastard I'd recommend rocking and shocking the ego through karma yoga, ie long hard charity work. Smash the constant Me, Me, Me/Want Want Want against long term hard service, where others come first. Might be just the thing to crack the ego's egg open and reveal something to you. Course I'm talking months and 100's of hours, but hard is what creates the surrender. back to OP short term, hmnn, drinking..? drugs..? but for the long term, sustainability.. you need long term practice, cause you always pay a price for artificial boosts.

Forum emptiness- Finally one with the Dao at last some quiet

this may be a little off topic; when I was 24 and back packing around Europe and the Middle East, it took a while before I was comfortable taking gifts/meals from strangers. I traveled w/ some Australians and they pretty much expected a couple meals a week from tourists. I picked up there habits and soon invited into restaurants, trading stories and travel advice from the tourist class. A distinctly different bunch then the backpack/hostel group. It was good for me, I learned an interesting mix of humility and hubris. It was good for them too. Every now and then if I see a backpacking world traveler I'll pick up a tab.

or we need GULAG !

Good science should debunk the old. The scientific method demands an open mind. Sacred cows need to be sacrificed. We move from paradigm to paradigm trying to find the solution that presents the best 'map' of reality.

maybe we need to shake things up more on the bums. Something like.. ban one person each month. Totally capriciously. I'm thinking for month 1, we make it: The next person who posts gets banned for life. Then say when a new person joins we tell'em , 'Welcome to the bums, by the way, your banned for life.' The next month, we could say the next person who uses the 9th letter of the alphabet gets banned. That'd be very Zen, well cruel Zen. When someone writes 'I object'; we can tell'em 'And you're out of here'. For the third month we can say who ever mentions anything about the Tao gets booted. That might work like the first one, ie the next person who writes anything gets booted and we can tell them 'Buh, bye, its All about the Tao.'

Which cultivation practices do you enjoy most? I like sitting on my zafu w/ a quiet mind and gently rock (though lately I'm still, staring at my nose tip and breathing slowly & quietly, not as effortless or natural). I like standing in the afternoon sun, sometimes listening to Rawn Clark's Archaeous or a yoga nidra. In the morning I like arranging head pillows in a T, putting another under my knees (ala zero gravity position), 2 sobakawa pillows on my stomach, a heavy sand eye pillow over my eyes and listening to a meditation audio. Often Minke de Vos's. I like chanting in the shower, usually Rawn Clarks YHVH canticle. I like doing the first 3 moves of Michael Winn's Fundamentals II Video then the Pangu qigong sequence.

Its like he swallowed a didgeridoo!

Its interesting. At the moment I feel mellow & mature, like there'd never be anything that could rile me up enough to get banned or suspended. Yet, I've felt this way before then gotten spitting mad and decidedly less rational. Maybe like AA's version of alcoholism I can never say I'm above it. Just that it won't happen today and probably not tomorrow but Tuesday all bets are off

thought I'd bump this thread up. Some very good stuff on it. nice downloadable on p.15 To me, this is reminiscent of the breathing done on Minke De Vos Sexual Energy guided meditation.

Still, I wouldn't be surprised if some established quantum physics is bunk and much of its theoretical outliers. It's sciences most sexy, hip, paradoxical field verging on science fiction. There's a certain elitist swag to claiming full understanding of some of the more out there theories. Course that's just one version of me speaking. The others would probably disagree depending on who observed.

Don't know, but I think you might need more input then one physicist to declare a vast scientific theory debunked. Plus the article gets way side tracked by religious implications.

I saw 'Tommy' the movie decades ago. It was strange but good, it made for a classic album with some of the best talent of the day on it. Northwestern university did the play a few years ago, it was a bit different, more coherent, it was surprisingly moving and blew me away. The orchestra was a full rock band and played brilliantly. Interestingly, The Who played the superbowl that year and I thought the band from the play sounded better.

every chance i get

mostly with long walks in the dark past midnight. time.. maturity.. friends.. perspective.. martial arts.. taking advantage of opportunities & long long walks

Thank you o great founder Sean for making this site possible so many years ago. And may I remind people that Sean was the single handed moderator for many a year back when these computational devices were coin operated and the internet was the wild wild west. .

hmnn, just as individuals can be self serving idiots, so can the people. I'd say that Laozi may not judge by type, ie capitalist, communist, dictatorship as much as by how happy, productive and free the specific system makes the people. later edit> and I'm not so sure about free

, well said. Spending years in sales, and having a norm of keeping little candies in my pocket to give to people, particularly receptionists and buyers has blurred my lines between kindness and manipulation... back to OP I know the story, more then the picture. I like it, but it always felt a bit heavy handed in the way its told. Maybe thats where the criticism comes from in the case of the picture and DDC. Get heavy handed and you come off looking manipulative cross the line into manipulation from what might be skillful means. Quoting (either Laotsi, Musashi or Futurama) when you've ruled/done well, no one knows who did it and assumes it happened naturally.

hmmn, I wrote nature/life. I was thinking more in terms of life. So for me being at peace with life means finding ways to be on the good side of (at times) troublesome people. If I have to be around them much I will scheme and consider ways to make them or the situation more pleasant. Nothing too drastic(haven't killed anyone yet), but finding out what they like and hitting them with a quick questions that flatters there expertise puts me on there good side. Heck I don't even know if thats scheming or an expression of my own curiousity but it does put me on people's good side. I think accepting and adapting to someone else's poor behavior is less skillful then being able to subtly shift them to a favorable mode. If someone's dog poops on my lawn, why accept and adapt when I can find them and befriend and change there behavior? Likewise better (at times) to light a candle then adapt to the dark.

I don't know what this means, but I notice in much of the anecdotal evidence against vaccines (in this thread for instance) there is a tendency to say; We found 'only 3 Amish kids who got the vaccine they all have autism' or '3 of her 4 kids got vaccinated, they all got some disease'. Statistically that seems wildly unlikely. Thus there's either more to the story, ie a genetic propensity or urban myth, wildly unlucky or something else. People who believe in vaccines know that there is a rate of serious side effects, depending on the vaccine of 1 (or a few) in thousands, and that the overall safety of the public is worth that price/risk. What kind of problem rate do people who are against vaccines think there is?

Re-reading the OP, this occurred to me. Right off the bat, my understanding is they're not drinking vinegar, they're sampling .. life; one finds it bitter, one finds it sour, Laozi find its sweet. While its kinda taoist propaganda, it points to the taoist principle to be at peace/harmony with life/nature, and grow and thrive where you're planted. Maybe at times the difference between skillful means and manipulation shrinks, especially when setting up situations to avoid unpleasant outcomes with people. Small pushes early on soothe the way.

It is only by chance that the stranger needing help is not your mother, father, sibling, friend or even yourself. Help them as you would your family and create a bit of happiness for them, yourself and the world will be a little better for it.

Sure we're not over philosophizing this? As long as people know the ground rules before they post, ie there post can be deleted or hidden at the whim of the Author, is it problem? That's what is going on now in PPD's. People would be free to start up a 'freer' post of there own in the general area. Thats how it 'should' work. Crazies (including myself at times) always complicate things. ie times when people decide they're enemies and put up dueling similar threads answering each other tit for tat rudely while not letting the others views on there thread. In those cases, highly possible but hopefully rare, mods can send one or both to The Pit. Course its always hard to predict how any new type of rule/authoring will go. Still some experiments might be worth it. We're weighing the hassle of controlling a dueling thread flame wars versus the benefit of highly interested people hosting threads that are kept tight and inline with the originator's intent. Or people can just do the linky thing I did from General Topic into PPD topic.