Apech

I agree it did dragon a bit.

One day all conflict will be settled this way. I look forward to the face off between the Isis entry 'Allahu akbar now we kill you' and the US entry Delta Force 8 'fire from the sky.' And beaten narrowly into third place the German entry 'we open our doors and you come flooding in'.

Def. of 'bum' US English: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bum (in British English it means something different ) I suspect the name of this site owes something to this book. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dharma-Bums-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141184884/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463245747&sr=8-1&keywords=the+dharma+bums

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/05/02/eurovision-referendum-leave-lead-20/ Excluding don't knows and wouldn't votes Leave has a 20 point lead over Remain in a hypothetical referendum on Britain's membership of the Eurovision Song Contest

That's why you feel like a puppet on a string - so congratulations - cos my heart is going boom bang-a-bang.

Do you mean Jesus?

Wot?

Interesting but I don't agree with you - the people who the speaker in the video was referring to had become numb not mindful.

... just for info.

Rinpoche here is comparing blind faith or perhaps the kind of imperative to place belief before reason and experience which is prevalent in Christianity (for example) with something he calls 'confidence'. He is using the word confidence in a specific way - because of course as a word it simply means 'with faith? - 'com/n + fidere' - so the two words mean more or less the same thing. However he is making a distinction in order to address the common faults in spiritual practitioners. Faith here means placing your reliance in an external person or god for your liberation. This is obstructive and non-creative since it merely switches off your natural discriminating mental processes. Confidence on the other hand is something you build through practice. In other words it is based on a kind extrapolation of experience. You might for instance receive some kind of guidance - or work out for yourself a possible strategy for dealing with situations you find yourself in and in trying it out you find some benefit. This builds confidence. Even in the most empirical pragmatism this kind of confidence is of service, for instance most scientists in looking at the natural world, a distant galaxy or a biological process make the assumption that it is something they can understand. This is confidence. Confidence that the human mind can understand and also that the natural laws of physics apply. In terms of spiritual practice, cultivation or whatever, this works similarly in that you are given praxes which you try. Meditation for instance. You try them and then note the effect. If the effect is positive then confidence grows - this is completely without the need to place one's belief in any spiritual agency.

How did I get back here then?

For Jocasta possibly.

Oedipus complex.

Without a child there is no mother.

camera shake?

Now I shout it from the highest hills Even told the golden daffodils At last my heart's an open door And my secret love's no secret anymore ..... Doris Day or Kathy Kirby

velcro

In Taoist cosmology the ten thousand things are not so much viewed as separate objects but more as events, processes or occurrences within the flow of change, or the flow of qi. A bit like fish bobbing in and out of stream. The Dao (via the Taiji) is the underlying unity which is both the source of the 'things' and that which sustains their appearance. That which sustains them and to whose music they dance (the beat of Heaven and Earth) is called the 'gangji' (the warp-and-woof or net) and this fabric or net is yinyang interaction. So yinyang is not the essence of duality but in fact the heart of non-duality. You will find in all non-dualist systems the presentation of 'two which are not two' - like emptiness and luminosity in Buddhism or Atman and Brahman in Advaita. I understand what you are saying about non-conceptualisation as I practice one of the Buddhist direct paths, mahamudra, but it is one thing to practice resting the mind in uncontrived and non-conceptual naturalness - but quite another to say that ideas that relate to the expression of non-duality do not apply.

@steve We probably agree more than we disagree - so I won't prolong the debate too much and risk hijacking the thread into our relative Buddhist/Bon practices and so on. I do though have a problem with the use of the word arbitrary (def: https://www.wordnik.com/words/arbitrary ) for yin and yang. Though there is a tendency to mis-assign them to 'things' - like Luke's example of the sun. The sun is yang relative to the earth - and also the usual example of a hill and it's sunny side. But if you look at the sun as an object then while it is radiating out vast amounts of energy into space it is also slowly condensing as hydrogen turns to helium and will eventually collapse - so there is an internal yin process. So its not that things are yin or yang in themselves but in relation to each other. You could perhaps, say that yin and yang are more verbs than nouns. I think perhaps, I would also like to suggest that while the reality we seek is beyond conceptualisation ... concepts are useful and in fact essential tools for humans as thinking beings. I see developing and continually redeveloping our view as an important support to practice. There may be times at which teachers will say, don't bother reading books, but I hope they would not suggest throwing them away.

Shu and Tefnut.

Different tradition - I could probably think of an equivalent if you give me a few hours.

I can recommend this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yinyang-Chinese-Thought-Culture-Approaches/dp/052116513X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462565616&sr=8-1&keywords=yin+yang+wang

ha ha ... ok I knew that someone was going to say that.