thelerner

I was talking about facts. Not opinions. and I don't think the heart or body has much to do with researching factual things. Maybe spiritual, but factual reality, no. There's proofs, experiments, models.. the whole scientific method.. no heart, body or kenning, needed. Are you one who disregards facts because they 'ken' something different.

Not the Buddhists I've known or read or learned from. Careful you're not generalizing from a tiny minority of the very worst (teaching you to kill yourself??) to all of them. Same with life. World wide poverty has gone down drastically, that's a big plus. Violent crime, huge wars too. There are a multitude of problems but some things are moving in a good direction. There's tens of millions of good things going on, and there are 1,000's of awful things. Hopefully we're all doing something to make the world a better place. To keep balance we need to keep a healthy perspective and not poison our souls with a constant concentration of all that's wrong in the world. Good to have a cause, but one has to take the time to smell the flowers, hang with friends and find some happiness. I see much good, so much that its overlooked, it won't make the paper, or be talked about because its so common.

Staying sharp and alive is good advice, but I have lots of aids. I have years of education, I have the internet, I can check facts, I can correlate, I look into the sources and find bias's, there's and mine. Track the history of paradigms, see how the right ones flourish, the wrongs die out. Plus I have smart friends to bounce things off of, and dumb ones to amaze (kidding). I have very powerful tools for learning and finding out the truth. I have access to experts. The trick is not to fall so in love with an opinion that the search for truth becomes the search to back up your opinion. Thus its important to look at both sides, weighing facts and there accuracy.

fiber is filling and tends to be a pre-biotic that Dawei mentioned that feeds the probiotics. It also leads to better uh, throughput of food through the system. It also slows the sugar/carb hit that otherwise spike insulin levels. In the past it was ignored, people eating mostly processed food (the West) tend to get very little, but its increasingly becoming an important part of a healthy diet.

My sister turned me on to a breakfast of 1/3 cup (total) of - 3/4 oat bran, 1/4 ground flax meal, add in- heaping teaspoon of almond (or peanut) butter, half banana, (handful of blue berries if around). Then about 3 - 1/3 cups of water, nuke for 50 seconds, then nuke on half power another 50 seconds (or heat in pan 5 to 10 minutes). Looks like mush but pretty tasty. Eating it most days of the week really makes a difference in my gut health. Fast prep, lots of fiber, good proteins, micro-nutrients, decent fats, some fruit and not very high in carbs. High fiber slows down the carb hit. Tasty and satisfying. Probably my healthiest meal of the day. I'm a fan of Kombucha too, but not every day, maybe a few times a week.

I don't know much about the Tao, but maybe it treats us like straw dogs. and you know, straw dogs were traditionally used for ceremonies, they serve there purpose, some important, some not. Serving there purpose they are valued, when done they could be discarded. In Taoism even something as plain and common as straw can be appreciated. Are we important to the Dao? I think I am, because the warm sun is shining on me.

I think this is the way its always been, except in the past people had hardships** and didn't complain so much. It was the norm and culturally they accepted there lives and did the best they could without the complaining and existential belly aching so common now. Much of it is 'grass is greener on the other side-ism'. Most of those who think the best way is going to a cave and/or escaping society are those who haven't done it, and probably wouldn't be happy if they did. Humorously many of those in outside status have gone in the opposite direction, to bigger towns or cities to take advantage of 'our' luxuries, running water, plumbing, air condition, easy food, entertainment that we take for granted. Finding happiness and contentment isn't place oriented but acceptance and making the most of where you are. Making or finding your own sweet spot. **like will we starve or freeze this winter. will wife & child survive child birth. will child survive. will we get another round of polio, tuberculosis, small pox or various plague that kills 10% of the population. Or die of a small or large cut.. bad water, bad food.. etc.. etc.. my grandparents, great parents on down were much much tougher psychologically then I.. who have food water plumbing and medicine on demand.

I'd say I understand it through various proofs, ie the math the ancients used to figure it out. Through modern maps that show correct distances in the southern hemisphere. From photos done by different space agencies, even amateurs who've put video cameras on balloons. The ancients saw that ships at a distance moved up over the horizon from all sides when they approached. Modern math has provided formulas on how the earth's curve affect line of sight, and its easily shown with lasers. There are things I don't have to experience directly, ie get into space, to know they exist. Though such proofs are best with a preponderance of information from different sources and areas of study. Math (geometry), physics, explorers, map makers, astronomers.. 1950's balloonists who visited the edges of space, the Gemini and Apollo projects, all modern satellites for weather and GPS. There's another dozen ways and proofs I'm not adding. Thinking the earth isn't a sphere is more a psychological thing then any kind of logical thinking, ie one may as well be existential and doubt the world exists at all. And that point of view tends to be intellectually phony and not worth debating. Unless the persons in a coma and you need to convince them to wake up.

This might be similar to what I'm working with doing Rawn Clarks Archaeous. On the mid level of the program, astral-mental, you work with the bodies intelligences in different areas. Waist down, survival, every day consciousness. Belly/gut area emotional, personal and sensitive way of understanding, chest area more perspective and ability to add in heart...

I thought the point of the video was that the people living 'mobily' were happy. I was just reading how Mcmansions weren't selling, and the small house movement is doing well. Not my cup of tea, having just lived in a tent for a few days, but there are those who master it and enjoy it. Finding meaning is important, but people find meaning in different things. Happiness too. Working in the fields is not the sole way, people have to find there own paths and causes, ones that will be different and seem strange to others. My path right now is family. Retired early, live under my means. Probably living under ones means is a help to happiness, more so then any material possession, in that it brings a certain amount of security into life.

I can drive 1100 miles without accident. I can hike in the Garden of the Gods. I can make pleasant conversion with strangers, learning & sharing stuff along the way. I can set up a camping site. I can party. I can suffer mild slings and arrows of misfortune and keep a smile. I can drive home another 1100 miles without incident. That's what I can do, and that's only in one week.

At 54, few things blow my mind. Hate to say it but over the top kindness tends to do it more then destruction.

An option could be publishing (vimeo or youtube) an easy to see Short video, 1/4 or 1/3 the whole length and then linking <for money> to the full one. or that might compliment one of the above strategies. and there's relying on the gratitude of stranger, beginning and ending each (free) video with a call for electronic karmic funding, ie 'If you've learned gained from this, I request you send $x to ..' and ending with 'I consider this form priceless, but ask if you practice it send $x to ..'. Note for many $5 and <$10 is throwaway money. Over that and its an expense to think about.

Some books, practices, yes; left handed maverick genius there. The man.. no. Later in his life, he was a mess and destroyed people. So.. take the good, realize the traps he fell into, and avoid them. interesting article on the good, bad & very ugly of his later years- https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/apr/07/cult-oregon-1980s-terror-netflix-documentary-wild-country

Its my understanding that fiber eaten at the same meal tends to slow down the sugar hit, so that it enters the blood stream slower, so the pancreas and other organs can take there time shuffling it where it belongs instead of being overloaded. Fruit has alot of sugar, but its fiber naturally slows the release and its not as fast acting sugar as some.

Glad you're not vindictive towards SoG, and curious you you knew that the Mo Pai gang laughed and laughed at SoG's posts from years and years ago. Hope you don't create dozens of pointless circular posts, which they tended too. So.. just to clear the air @zOOm, what are you interested in, any cultivation arts? Join a discussion, post something positive, that's what the site is for.

Course.. it could be said you're willing to be operated on by one of 2 surgeons who took seminars to learn the art. Got to level 3 or 4 out of 72, one died tragicly early, other quit the system. So, not roided-up but not exactly studying in med school either. Plus, I don't think SoG is roided up. From a brief correspondence I had with him, he's into old school kettlebells, whereas Americans tend to keep the ball facing gravity side down, the 'strong men' have such strong grips that they keep the ball facing straight out. Much much harder training. I could be wrong but I think its an outer muscles shows inner discipline kind of thing. zOOm, It's not my cup of tea, but I bet you'd learn somethings if put down old animosities and studied with SoG. Not that you would but if you wanted to criticize, and one or two who've studied w/ him has, from a point of knowledge instead hearsay then you should try a month or two. I bet $5 you'd be surprised. addon> I never made the connection but for years Pandabearguy would have his people spam the site with pictures of him(??) shirtless (maybe pantless) wearing a rubber baby panda mask. I don't know if that was Pandabear but now I know why he did it. He was copying SoG, showing off his muscles. Thankfully my large muscles are the kind that hide behind the layer of fat protecting them.

A quality library is its own gold mine.

Got it a few days after ordering. I thought it'd take longer and was surprised it came so quickly. Good book, worth it in my opinion. Though I'm keeping my practice relatively simple these days, so I'm reading more for the philosophy then multitude of techniques in it.

It is interesting to see it in a historical context. Here- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/john-quincy-adams-said-yes-expedition-center-earth-180955203/ By Marissa Fessenden smithsonian.com May 7, 2015 Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/john-quincy-adams-said-yes-expedition-center-earth-180955203/#d6cX86fGbeZe0Gcw.99 In the 1864 science fiction classic, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Otto Lidenbrock deciphers a message that reads: "Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jökull of Snæfell, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the Kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the earth. I did it." And so starts an imaginative and lively adventure. Today, Jules Verne’s subterranean adventure seems quaint in comparison to fictional space expeditions. However, at the time it was published, many wondered what lay deep beneath the Earth’s surface. A few people truly though planet was hollow. Decades before, a real-life journey to the Earth’s center nearly happened thanks to a notoriously passionate proponent of the Hollow Earth theory and an American president, writes Esther Inglis-Arkell for io9.com. It was the 1820's. John Cleves Symmes, Jr., an American army officer was traveling around the country on the lecture circuit, proclaiming his theory of a Hollow Earth, one that envisioned the planet as several solid concentric spheres, according to a circular he published, featured by Rebecca Onion at Slate’s history blog "The Vault." Symmes was asking for "one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia in the fall season, with Reindeer and slays, on the ice of the frozen sea…" with plans to slip between those concentric spheres, which he believed were open at the poles "12 or 16 degrees." For io9.com, Inglis-Arkell writes that Symmes lobbied Congress for funding for the epic journey. They said no. However: John Quincy Adams said yes. Adams was president as the result of a decision of the House of Representatives, after an election in 1824 that gave no single candidate a needed majority. Although Andrew Jackson had more votes, he was too devisive. The House went for Adams, but soon repented of it. The trip to the center of the Earth wasn’t the main factor in that – Adams was a proponent of a more powerful federal government and so clashed with the representatives of the states – but it certainly didn’t help. Even at the time, the theory was considered laughable by most. Adams still backed it, but his unpopularity led to a single term in office, and the conquering Jackson killed any momentum for the idea. It’s possible that Adams was more intrigued by the journey to the Arctic pole than the potential to find a way to the center of the Earth. His support for the idea might have stemmed from his ardent interest in the natural world. Nina Burleigh pulls from Adams’ diary in her book The Stranger and the Statesman, excerpted here at Smithsonian.com: I saw the sun rise and set, clear, from Charles' house on the hill. The pleasure that I take in witnessing these magnificent phenomena of physical nature never tires; it is a part of my own nature, unintelligible to others…. The sensations which affect me at the rising and setting sun are first, adoration to the power and goodness of the Creator…mingled in the morning with thanksgiving…and in the evening with sadness…and with humble supplication for forgiveness of my own errors and infirmities. Adams’ passion drove him to pursue the founding of a national observatory, a quest that opened him to ridicule from his political enemies, Burleigh writes*. However, he was ultimately successful with the Navel-Observatory in Washington, D.C. and helped ensure that the money from James Smithson’s estate go toward the founding of the Smithsonian Institution. So though the journey to the center of the Earth never happened, Adams did find a more useful way to advance knowledge of the natural world. and Here- https://allthatsinteresting.com/hollow-earth-theory-john-quincy-adams John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president and the son of its second (John Adams), grew up with every educational opportunity and took full advantage of all of them. He was educated by private tutors, traveled the world at his father’s side as a boy, read and wrote voraciously, graduated from Harvard where he earned several degrees with honors and honed his fluency in many languages, opened a successful law practice, taught at an Ivy League university, and finally rose to the top of American government with his presidential election in 1824. And, as president, he approved a mission to send explorers to the center of the Earth. Wikimedia CommonsJohn Quincy Adams The expedition, never carried out of course, arose out of a theory that our planet was actually hollow and that there might be entire worlds, populated with flora and fauna, below the surface. That theory crossed John Quincy Adams’ desk thanks to an Army officer with political connections named John Cleves Symmes, Jr. Starting in 1818, Symmes had been re-popularizing the hoary notion that the Earth was hollow. What Symmes brought to the age-old Hollow Earth theory was the contention that there were openings thousands of miles wide at the Earth’s poles through which one could venture inside our planet. Symmes offered this idea in a number of published papers and via his lecture tours around the country, then finally sought to put together an expedition that would prove him right once and for all. So, in the early 1820s, Symmes and some followers and associates lobbied Congress, Smithsonian writes, time and again to fund their mission below the Earth’s crust. Congress, however, wouldn’t give them what they wanted. President John Quincy Adams, on the other hand, approved Symmes’ mission. But by the time it began to materialize, Andrew Jackson was now president and the expedition was shot down. Its proponents, however, kept trying and one man, Jeremiah Reynolds, successfully lobbied Congress for funding in 1936. By then, Reynolds and company had either shifted their beliefs, or at least pretended to, by pitching the South Pole-bound mission not as a Hollow Earth theory crusade but one focused on trade, whaling, and nationalistic pride. That mission, of course, never uncovered any evidence to support the Hollow Earth theory, which fell out of whatever favor it had at around that same time. Wikimedia CommonsAn illustration about Symmes’ theories, originally published in Harper’s in 1882. But why did Adams ever sign off on a mission at least in part informed by such a theory? There seems to be no definitive evidence that Adams actually believed in the Hollow Earth theory. But it’s possible, Smithsonian writes, that Adams, a keen naturalist, was simply inspired by the fact that such a mission might uncover new mysteries in a little-explored corner of our planet. Adams was the man, after all, who helped create a national observatory (the oldest, still-operating scientific institution in America) and secure funding for the Smithsonian Institution. But perhaps Adams’ greatest scientific passion project was the one that he never quite managed to get off, or rather into, the ground. <<me>> So, what's old is what's new. While I fall in with the fat Earthers on this issue. It'd be nice to find some massive liveable bubbles within the earth. The truth is we haven't dug very deep. We've been excavating an oceans worth of oil, you'd think we'd be making some big hollow spots somewhere. Hopefully there are still some mysteries left. <<addon>> as far as drilling leaving massive bubbles in the earth. Nope (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/does-oil-extraction-leave-cavity) "..He points out that if you look at the rock that an oil well is drilling into, the porosity of that rock, in other words, the proportion of holes, is about 13%. So in other words, if you take the cross-sectional area that's holes as a whole proportion of the cross-sectional area of the piece of rock, about 13% is just empty space in the rock; and that empty space is filled with the oil. Now, he also says that that is about the same open porosity as concrete. So, in other words, when you take the oil away, you're left with something which is equivalently strong already to concrete. So you're not leaving a big space. You're just taking the oil out from between all these little holes which are, to a certain extent, in continuity. But then the next point to bear in mind is that this oil and gas that's underground is under extremely high pressure and that means that as you take the oil or gas away, largely under its own pressure, then other things will move in to displace it. And therefore, some water will move in from the adjacent rock and will also take up some of the space that's been vacated. In fact, when people call a well spent, in other words, they say that an oil well has become empty, actually, the amount of oil that's left behind can be as much as 90%, because the oil is very hard to get out..."

I dig it. Kudos to the brave souls who venture out looking for a simpler sustainable life. Even more applause for those who actually succeed at it. I just have more sympathy for the 'system', ie governing is hard, requiring compromises that make no one happy. Do what you can, where you are. Got a lawn start a garden. Have a patio, grow a container garden. Take walks in nature, advocate for open spaces and controlled and limited growth. We individuals won't save the world, but we can save our selves.. maybe.. or at least aim at the goal of doing better. And truly better is a happier more connected, sustainable life.

There are things I wouldn't mind changing, but I've read enough history to know, that right now things aren't so bad. I don't think working for a living means you're a slave. I think there's a interesting combination of decadence and paranoia that leads people to think the grass is greener on the other side. Living in a commune or off the land is possible, but like farming its a whole lotta work. Way more then what most people are willing to do. Are the people around you, your friends, family neighbors, really so immoral? Or you mean the extremes shown on TV, or who get there names in the paper. Those are far from the majority, but if one lives in an echo chamber its easy to believe they are. my 2 cents.

You have a good point. But I'm sure when its updated and modernized, Jonathon Snow will be cowering down so the dragon can't see him and texting Arya, 'U go grl'

Birth of disco. Who knew it was so old? (tell me it doesn't inspire '.. you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man, no time for talk..') Dancing is great.. improving spirit- body & soul. I'm a fan of the late Gabriel Roth, who did programs such as Sweat your Prayers, exploring the 5 Rhythms and finding ones own dance. For those who do long sitting, dancing is a huge plus.

https://www.coursera.org/ has many relatively cheap (or frequent sales) programming courses Youtube also has many series for programming beginners in many languages. Most computer languages have sites with series of video and manual lessons. Still, programming is alot like learning a language. There's a big hump to get over before you're literate enough to write sentences and complete stories..ie program.