Apech

Ah thanks! Have deleted the stupid dog. Please can you check to see if this makes it ok for your virus checker. I thought it was the ads and have been checking these to no avail!!!!!!

Thanks CT already reported this. I will contact Sean.

Really? God commits suicide ... well I suppose if you were Christian you could say God incarnates as Christ and crucifies himself which is a kind of suicide. But then this text is Hermetic and not strictly Christian. To me the 'single blast of heat' suggests a high level energetic interaction rather than suicide tho'.

Thank you GiH I like that ... very helpful.

Yes that's interesting. But of course I am not sure that the definitions were ever meant to be non-contradictory hence the 24 Philosophers with their different definitions which they were meant to debate. @Vmarco Yes I know you prefer to say God does not exist and that is perfectly reasonable if you conceive of God is a certain way to start with. The reason that I found this 12 century text so interesting is that some of the definitions are far from the usual concept of God and more like statements about ultimate reality. It is not so interesting to think about whether you or I or anyone actually agrees with them or with the idea of God at all as it is to think that in the 12 Century (and probably 3rd Century) people were thinking like this anyway. They were not all dogmatists and some were actually struggling to conceptualize the ultimate in a meaningful way. This was happening in the midst of an intolerant Catholic 'regime' which actually burned these thinkers at the stake (e.g. Bruno) as heretics.

Anyone got any thoughts on this ...? 1. God is the monad that begat a monad and turned it back on itself as a single blast of heat.

Yes TM that's interesting ... I found this by a western master:

Interesting. Someone once said 'the God you don't believe in doesn't exist' ... meaning that most people's idea about God is wrong and should be discarded. That's why I find these definitions interesting because even in the Middle Ages they had some pretty profound/obscure ideas about God = ultimate reality as against the rubbish which the church spouts even today. I think they were engaged in deep contemplation of 'that which really is' and called this God. Hermeticism was a mixture of the ideas of the ancients (which in themselves were transmissions from something even older) and the neo-Platonic Greek philosophers. Thinking in terms of God is not natural to me but if I look at it the way this book does then I get closer to something meaningful.

I am drawn to this one: 21. God is the darkness in the soul that remains after light. What does it mean?

They are all quotes from this 12 century book. The thing is that many people quote from it like Maester Eckhart and others so you may have read it in their writings. But the original text is a hermetic text which mixes ideas from the ancient world (esp. Egypt and Greek Philosophy esp. Neo-Platonism.

Nice flowers marbles.

This man Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for teaching such things .

Wow you are so deep . I am thinking that no one wants new moderation rules about this so it is up to the TaoBumariat to challenge posters who don't cite their sources. Just keep asking and people will soon learn that it is expected.

Just to go back a bit ... the mystery schools did focus on experiencing death in this life as a mystical process because it reveals truths about the essence of our selves and the nature of reality (or is thought to). It is possible that this in itself is not real ... i.e. the process of the mystical death is not the same a 'real' death and these people were fooling themselves. However the point being I think is that they did not focus on death morbidly but as a source of revelation and possibly liberation ... perhaps another way of saying it is that the mystical death is life affirming. The Egyptians (my favourite subject) put an enormous amount of time and energy into 'mapping' the death process ... but they were the opposite of morbid in their cultural expression generally. I would also like to talk more about 'substance' i.e. the meaning or the lack of it ... if anyone has time ... but my time has run out as I am being summoned to supper. Examine death but enjoy life ...

That thread is quoting a newspaper article and then just poses questions about the promotion of medical qi gong. It seems to me to be a reasonable topic for debate. It is not spam or a direct commercial approach to people. There is paid advertising on this site but if like me you have adblocker or similar you will not see it. Apart from that people are free to link to or promote within reasonable discussion their particular practice or school etc. in fact links are one of the more useful things about TBs. There are no covert advertising schemes on TBs. None. OK?

Just posting as me not as a mod. 1. Anyone who starts a thread can go back and edit including the title if they so choose ... just as they can edit their own posts. 2. Nothing has been deleted just made temporarily invisible ... sorry for confusion. 3. I hope everyone agrees that the discussion about pain was very useful and hopefully will get back on topic. 4. I bashed my thumb with a hammer yesterday trying to force the lock a metal door ... ouch ... I am dealing with it without pain killers ... also decided not pursue career option as a petty thief .... I think Keith will get back to you on mod issues.

Coffee and toast. (sometimes my own bread which bake) I tried to give up coffee a while ago until the Coffee God called me back to the path of righteousness.

Thanks to Marblehead for starting this thread - a very interesting/important subject. I suffered from severe back pain about 10 years ago and some treatment e.g.osteopathy made it worse. I was diagnosed with all sorts but eventually it seemed to boil down to soft tissue damage (nothing compared to what some of you guys have been through). But the pain was debilitating in the extreme it took me hours to get up and dress in the mornings and I could not sit normally for longer than about 10 mins. I did take some pain killers but just paracetamol and so on ... nothing strong ... I needed them to get me to work basically. After a while of generally unhelpful western medicine I was referred to a special project which was basically a six week course on working through chronic back pain. This was based on understanding the nature of the anatomy of the back and the nature of pain. This was coupled with physio which was basically light circuit training. I added a yoga class and within a month I was back to normal. The point is that all this was counter intuitive. The pain was bad and the instinct was to rest and keep immobile so as not to aggravate the pain. Completely wrong. The pain killer and rest period should only be for about three days for many typical kinds of injury. Thousands of people perpetuate the pain cycle through fear of the pain itself and western medicine (for all its amazing achievements) tends to support this idea. i.e. 'nothing can be done, it won't get any better, take an aspirin' ... which is a quote that I got from one doctor. Understanding makes you pro-active and not reactive and removes the fear that you naturally feel.

That IP should be ok as far as I can tell. Maybe the uni has blocked this site???

Its not a fudge its a mathematical way of showing a direct proportionality between the force exerted by gravity, the mass of the objects and the reciprocal of the square of the distance between them. Compare it to ...'Pi' is a universal constant relating the area and the square of radius of any circle.

I think it may be an IE issue. Have you tried a different browser? If you can tell me the usual IP you are using then I can check its not blocked ... but I don't think that's the problem.

You mean the log in page won't load at all or that you can't log in?

Pizza.

Because Galileo dropped them from the leaning tower of Pisa? ?