Apech

Ah yes, I think that's where I first read it. Thanks. Can you recall what significance he gave to it?

Yes this is interesting ... I guess the location of the astronomical north and the circulation of polar stars including Ursa Major is of universal importance to the north hemisphere peoples. Just for comparison the Egyptian for right hand is the same as the word for West and left hand for East. Yes and modern city dwellers are perhaps the most disconnected - especially with modern light pollution. I have found living in a rural place that I am much more conscious of the moon phases and bright planets and so on than I ever was before. Are Western gardens different to Eastern ones?

I wonder how much of this is chicken and egg - in other words the 'Western' system is generated by western minds ... although much of it is now South Korean, Japanese, Chinese in terms of tech and social media wotnots. In the West we like to think we are rationalists and we objectify everything ... this must have some kind energy correlation ... ? what do you think?

... so true - cat's love boxes.

I'm listening to an arrow being fired ...

Sometimes life just confirms literature:

reminds me of the old football score joke: Barcelona :1 Surreal Madrid : fish

Buffy

Good Friday for a cat ...

Repetitive

Some of us just like to be davka.

I'm not aware of anyone on here who has that - and I've been around for a long time - you might be better trying dharmawheel (assuming it still exists) e.g. 'Malcolm' on there is a loppon ... etc.

Do you mean people who have some kind of qualification from a University or do you mean people who have undertaken a serious study of the subject(s).?

Hey hi fiveElementTao - good to see you back after all this time

By cord you mean an energy link? I think this is true. In your example of an advanced person and another I think yes they will get a boost but that it is temporary and it is up to them what they do with that energy - i.e. use it for spiritual development or just fritter it on egoic pursuits.

They do have gods for body parts/organs but I'm not sure that you could argue they were more original than others. But on the other hand there is a lot of microcosm/macrocosm stuff so maybe.

There's an Egyptian God for everything: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/wepwawet.htm

@Taomeow Just curious - does the cord and placenta fall off naturally after a while - rather than being cut? I read the other day that our 'cousins' the Neanderthals lived in very small groups in Europe/Asia for hundreds of thousands of years but that because of the numbers there were significant signs of inbreeding and congenital problems therefrom. Obviously, if one accepts the genetic results they did survive within us humans as did the Denisovans. I feel, but cannot really justify with facts, that the sperm count/penis shrinking and low fertility is related to a lack of purpose. I think that possibly not for the first time in history there is 'world tiredness' and a kind of lostness. There doesn't seem to be any inspiring vision of the future - and I'm not talking about fervid dreams of utopia - but more a kind of confidence that the world we make for our children will be better than the one we inherited and be filled with value and virtue.

There's a postulated number (the name of which I have forgotten) which is the maximum number of people you can easily identify - it is thought to be around 150 (though figures vary but always in the few hundred range). This is literally familiarity - as in your family - and is probably the rough number of people in a tribal group. They would be the ones you 'know' - while the strangers would be 'others'. I think this in-group, out-group thing is probably hard wired into us. I think also there is a huge psychological shift that occurs when the hunter gatherer or pastoralist tribes start to settle in fixed places - which is the beginning of civilisation (in the strict sense of becoming 'civic'). I am not saying the nomadic tribes were less developed and so on - in fact the opposite. I think we lost something fundamental about our relation to our environment, our selves and each other by forcing ourselves to live in one spot. Also this is when disease would start to be quickly spread. In fact it's kind of ironic that we now do 'lockdown' in response to pandemic when our ancestors would have practiced exclusion. People would have been thrown out of the 'cities' if they became sick and made to wander in the wilderness beyond - the survivors becoming 'outlaws' and perhaps living as their forebears did, adapting to the wilderness and having no love for the City dwellers and their laws. the same thing would happen, I would suggest to other law breakers and particularly those who broke sexual taboos. Maybe I'm taking this too far but I like to think that humans are half compliant and half rebellious because of the mixing in the past between the city dwellers and the outlaws. You can even see it in the various responses to the lockdown, wearing masks and wotnot - there's a tension between wanting to comply and resisting imposition from 'the Law'. Hmmm just thinking out loud.

I think that siddhis naturally arise from shamatha style meditation. Mostly I am talking about low level stuff like thinking of someone - then the phone rings and it's them. The idea that samsara, the world, includes all kinds of beings, gods, demons and so on has always been a part of Buddhism but quite well suppressed when it was being repacked for western rationalists. But then again it is samsaric and so not something you would expect monks to get deeply involved with. Magic tricks are specifically criticised ... but not denied in the sense of saying they don't work. Yeah, Lamaism is all about the transmission - while it does not seem the same for Gautama (although you have to bear in mind there may have been sutra selection going on) - It is also said that sometimes the Buddha just had to turn up and thousands of arhats spontaneously became realised - his 'teaching' did not depend on 'teaching' in the sense of the spoken word or instruction - and this is a form of transmission. Devotion to the Lama is all about 'pure perception' - this cannot depend on sensory or conceptual awareness - it only depends on something like intent - or if you like, just being there in that space occupied by buddha-nature.