Apech

They are imprints of activity/experience which carry an emotional charge - and therefore operate in your being according to triggers and so on which resonate with them. But if you examine what they actually are you can see they depend on causes themselves and are not independent - so it is possible in various ways to run down the energy stored in them so they dissolve so to speak - when this happens you see them more as 'effects' (as in appearances) for which you might use the term illusory. For instance if you had a phobia about spiders but made yourself familiar with spiders over a period of time - after a while you might ask where did the fear go and was it real in the first place.

By karma do you mean cause and effect or do you mean the emotionally charged records one carries like baggage?

How would you know if your karma is affected?

You complete and utter Buddhist!

So no river then?

What is it that makes it the same river?

Ah! Ok. I would guess that a spontaneous realiser still has work to do. I suppose a kind of finding their way back to work out how they got there. While everyone else is trudging up that hill - but at least on arriving will have the advantage of knowing how they got there. I think all systems at some stage will be intellectual because of the need to get the right ideas aligned. I think perhaps this is only a problem if intellectual understanding is seen as the end point and not just a kind of helpful support.

All goes back to the Victorian/Edwardian attitudes to sex. They made up the spleen chakra to avoid talking about the naughty bits.

Energy? A river flows and changes constantly but is always a river.

You are just trying to be different

Not sure why you think Neidan (which is actually practical) is intellectual. Also what is called spontaneous - does it arise randomly? or can we say that although it is not caused overtly - that Ramana's being was somehow in ways that we may not know prepared for this insight/realisation?

'experience' means essentially 'outwardly probed' (ex = out and 'perience' = as in 'experiment' i.e. 'tested') - given this if something is an experience then it is outside while the witness to this is inside and thus there is a duality. So a non-dual experience would be only an echo of the truth and not the reality itself.

Non-duality does not say 'all things are One' - that is a common misconception - to say things are one would be monist. Non-duality says something more like 'although things are not the same, they are not different either'. I guess I would say that non-dualism is a philosophical position but you need to remember that in the east particularly India the division between view and practice is not a sharp division. So, for instance, those practicing Vajrayana would consider themselves doing a practice which is based on a non-dual view. Similarly those practicing Advaita Vedanta.

This place isn't the same without TM - and I miss Brian (mostly for arguing with ) - but I still miss him.

Had time to watch this today - very good I thought - well researched. But although as a critique of John Oliver it works there is no critique of Chavez and Maduro so I'm guessing the truth lies somewhere between.

I asked not because I need them but because I was interested in which countries you were thinking about. I'll give you US Post as state owned - but the rest is not socialism it is social policy - socialism means the common ownership of the means of production.

I don't need examples - I was just interested in which countries you thought were capitalist before the dark ages. 'any country in the world that was not part of the western roman empire' - well which ones do you have in mind?

Are you American, cos you seem very confused about these things. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. (...) The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; (...) The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. — Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

Only if it is democratic socialism - revolutionary socialism does not respect/require democracy. As I understand it.

Not technically. socialism ˈsəʊʃəlɪz(ə)m/ noun a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. Has this happened in the USA?

There is no socialism practiced in the US - although there are socialists. High taxation is not socialism.

I'd agree that Daoism is something akin to eternal wisdom but Marxism is an economic theory based on the conditions which pertained when marx lived.

Could you give examples.