Encephalon

I started taking 1,000 mgs of calcium citrate about 8 months ago with dinner to help with some insomnia. I also took 300 mgs of niacin for my heart 1 hour before bed as it is also an effective sleep aid. This regimen became even more prominent after a surgery in February. What I failed to consider, even after selling nutritional supplements, was to maintain a proper calcium/magnesium ratio of 2:1 (some doctors now recommend 1:1 because of widespread magnesium deficiency in the population). Google low magnesium symptoms and you'll get some remarkable data that may sound familiar to some. I was constantly tired after my surgery and attributed the fatigue to standard post-surgical realities and medications. But the fatigue persisted and some of my meds even induced high blood pressure. I dumped the meds last week and started taking 500 mgs of magnesium a day. Today was the most powerful energy run I've ever had. I normally take an hour to perform the dissolving meditation (Frantzis) but the chi flow made its course in forty minutes, including the "gates" that are below the feet. A little poking around online revealed a hypothetical association between chi, ATP synthesis and magnesium. What I do know personally is that I feel f**king fantastic, my nervous system feels magnetic, I'm sleeping well, and my energy runs are 30% stronger. My blood pressure has also returned to normal, but that may be unrelated to the magnesium. I offer this in the hope that the rest of you can avoid this unnecessary mistake.

There are a bunch of food supplements like wheat germ and brewer's yeast that I've taken over the years that are very high in phosphorus and the poor man's way of balancing it out was to take 4 tbs of dried milk powder with 1 tbs of these products. I stick with calcium citrate with D now, btw. My meditation sessions today were once again extremely potent, chi flow much faster yet really smooth. Lower limbs feel like reflexology from the inside! I realize personal testimony ranks relatively low on the 'force of evidence scale' but I attribute this progress to the magnesium unequivocally. Thanks for the pointers. Scott

The basic task of government is to make the populace secure. The security of the populace is based on meeting needs. The basis of meeting needs is in not depriving people of their time. The basis of not depriving people of their time is in minimizing government expenditures. The basis of minimizing government expenditures is moderation of desire. The basis of moderation of desire is in returning to essential nature. The basis of returning to essential nature is in removing the burden of accretions. Remove the burden of accretions, and there is openness. To be open is to be equanimous. Equanimity is a basic element of the Way; openness is the house of the Way. - The Huainan Masters, 2nd Century B.C.E. I'm always on the lookout for basic principles that apply to both the individual and the collective. The Huainan Masters were a little more optimistic toward humanity than the Warring States era of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu that preceded them, hence the egalitarian theme. But this speaks to the corrupting influence that modern consumerism has on individuals and governments.

Thanks for that, RV! I did pick up a jar of sunflower butter this wknd.

Jetsun, I think it's been 2+ years. I have to say that the zhan zhuang and nei kung in the morning have prepared the ground for productive energy runs. Imonous, It's not possible to make an adequate one-daily vitamin/mineral supplement. It would be too big.I should also point out that I used to take ZMA at night when I was working out but completely forgot about it since my surgery. It's a very bioavailable form of magnesium and it puts you to sleep very well.

This is where I got the bulk of my BB library - http://iso-tones.com/

I've used it steadily for meditation for about 3 years and will continue to do so. The only problem is that there is no way to evaluate the effects. I think my nei kung practice is the most significant factor in my progress, but BB technology with my noise-cancelling headphones makes the urban environment much easier to handle. The World Health Organization recognizes noise pollution as a threat to well-being, and man I believe it. I use mine 3 hours a day on average and over the course of 3 years I think I've mellowed some.

I am proud to have just voted your post to #11! But as much as I agree with your sentiment, I just don't think it's practical with open forums. The general population is too ________________________ (fill in the blank with virtually any adjective you can think of). I tried to find an alternative forum where the rules of engagement were honored by the participants, and they do exist in some scholarly circles, but they're not very active. I also have to agree with Cowtao; this can be fertile ground for refining our communication skills, but it takes a lot of insight and spiritual maturity. Some days I'm centered and serene, some days I want to rip someone's head off for posting nonsense, but as long as that awareness becomes my "new normal" I can forge ahead.

I heard that too. The oil is a little pricey for me but they sell magnesium sulfate at the 99 cent store, and I heard that three 30-min. foot baths a week plus a chelated magnesium supp will jack up your mag concentration pronto.

In purely biomechanical terms, this breathing deeply oxygenates your bloodstream. Over time, this causes the autonomic nervous system to switch from sympathetic (fight or flight) to parasympathetic (rest and digest) mode, a condition where your endocrine system changes your hormonal blood chemistry, causing your stress to go way down and your immune system to go way up. There also appears to be some calming effect of this kind of breathing on the vagus nerve. From Dan Reid - The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing

5. Seeing to the Heart Some behavior in your children will seem “good” to you. Other behavior will seem unequivocally “bad.” Notice both in your children without being overly impressed by one nor overly dismayed by the other. In doing so you will be imitating Tao which sees our behavior as a mask and sees immediately beneath it to the good within our heart. Above all, do not attack your child’s behavior and attempt to change it by endless talking and scolding. Stay at your center and look beneath the behavior to the heart of your child. There you will find only good. When you see the heart you will know what to do. Of course some behavior is dangerous to the child and to others. Express your concern with the behavior. Do not attack the child. Consider now a particular behavior that concerns you. Meditate carefully and see through to the heart of your child. What does it tell you? ************************************************************************************** I read six different interpretations of the TTC before I could realize some measure of meaning from this chapter, as I can be awfully dense. It again reminds me of the Buddhist virtue of Right Speech, not presuming that my exalted view as a grownup with a 50-year lead on life qualifies me to narrate children's lives as they unfold. I love my neighbor's kid. He regularly misbehaves and refuses to listen but his exuberance is contagious. His parents won't be winning any parenting awards any time soon; they exhaust themselves, their kid and everyone around them with incessant micro-managing of his daily experience. We take him to the park a couple nights a week, just to get him out of his straightjacket, and he acts like a perfectly healthy 5-year old. We try to loosen the behavioral parameters as much as possible and he seems to blossom before our eyes.

I think I may have accidently posted this in the wrong thread, so I'm reposting it fresh. I just wanted to add that I've watched Buddhism get dragged through the mud in here for a few years now, sometimes for good reasons in response to very unusual behavior by self-described Buddhists, but I hope this clears the air a little bit. My mental universe is Buddhist; everything else seems Taoist for now. ************************************************************************************** The nature of the self has been up for grabs in TTB lately. I thought I’d take the liberty of sharing the thoughts of two of the most important Buddhist scholars alive today, Stephen Batchelor and David Loy. Years ago I taught myself to type while typing Batchelor’s “Buddhism Without Beliefs” in its entirety. His explanation of “no-self” is the best I have come across. Following Batchelor is Loy’s account of what we find in the absence of our “self.” Buddhism generally suffers from gross misinterpretations in TTB. I hope this contributes in some small way to a more accurate understanding of Buddhist psychology, the portal through which Buddhism has traditionally been in dialogue with the west these past 50 years. Scott ************************************************************************************** “In everyday experience, one thing leads to the next. I become irritated by something S said to me and end up wanting to hit him. I imagine I see a snake in the pottery shed and freeze in terror. Everything we do now becomes a condition for what is possible later. We may speak of conditions and consequences as though they turn out to be processes with no independent reality. The harshness of a barbed remark that haunts us for days is no more than a brief instance isolated from a torrent of events. Yet it stands out in the mind’s eye as something intrinsically real and apart. This habit of isolating things leads us to inhabit a world in which the gaps between them become absolute. The snake in the shed is really there, as sharply differentiated from the frightened person who beholds it as from the shards of discarded pottery on which it is coiled. Clutching at ourselves and the world in this way is a precondition for anguish. By regarding things as absolutely separate and as desirable or fearful in themselves, we set ourselves the task of possessing something we can never have or of eradicating something that was never there in the first place. Noticing how things emerge from and fade back into an unbroken flow of conditions begins to free us a little. We recognize how things are relatively, not absolutely desirable or fearful. They interconnect and interact, each contingent on the others, no one of them intrinsically separate from the rest. Whatever emerges in this way is devoid of an intrinsic identity: in other words, things are empty. They are not as opaque and solid as they seem: they are transparent and fluid. They are not as singular and straightforward as they seem: they are complex and ambiguous. They are not only defined by philosophy, science, and religion: they are evoked through the play of allusions, paradoxes, and jokes. They cannot be pinned down with certainty: they trigger perplexity, amazement, and doubt. ~ The same is true for each one of us. Just as a potter forms a pot on the wheel, so I configure my personality from the spinning clay of my existence. The pot does not exist in its own right: it emerges from the interactions of the potter, the wheel, the clay, its shape, its function (each of which in turn emerges from the interactions of its causes and components ad infinitum). There is no essential pot to which its attributes adhere—just as there is no essential daffodil to which stalk, leaves, petals, and stamen adhere. Pots and daffodils are configurations of causes, conditions, parts, functions, language, images. They are devoid of an identity stamped like a serial number in the core of their being. And so is each of us. As a human being I am more complex than a pot or a daffodil, but I have also emerged from causes and am composed of diverse, changing features and traits. There is no essential me that exists apart from this unique configuration of biological and cultural processes. Even if intellectually I agree with this, intuitively it may not be how I feel about myself. In any event, dharma practice is concerned not with proving or disproving theories of self but with understanding and easing the grip of self-centeredness that constricts body, feelings, and emotions into a tight nugget of anguish. Imagine you are at a crowded exhibition of Ming porcelain. A voice calls out: “Hey! Thief! Stop!” Everyone in the room turns to look at you. Although you haven’t stolen anything, the glare of accusation and disapproval provokes intense self-consciousness. You stand as exposed as though you were naked. You—or rather the tight nugget of anguish—blurts out: “It wasn’t me! Honest.” It is as though this self—which is a mere configuration of past and present contingencies—has been fired in the kiln of anxiety to emerge as something fixed. Fixed but also brittle. The more precious it becomes to me, the more I must guard it against attack. The circumstances in which I feel at ease become ever narrower and more circumscribed. ~ Self-consciousness is at once the most obvious and central fact of my life and the most elusive. If I search for my self in medication, I find it is like trying to catch my own shadow. I reach for it, but there’s nothing there. Then it reappears elsewhere. I glimpse it from the corner of my mind’s eye, turn to face it, and it’s gone. Each time I think I’ve pinned it down, it turns out to be something else: a bodily sensation, a mood, a perception, an impulse, or simply awareness itself. I cannot find the self by pointing my finger at any physical or mental trait and saying: “Yes, that’s me.” For such traits come and go, whereas the sense of “I” remains constant. But neither can I put my finger on something other than these traits that —however ephemeral and contingent they may be—nonetheless define me. The self may not be something, but neither is it nothing. It is simply ungraspable, unfindable. I am who I am not because of an essential self hidden away in the core of my being but because of the unprecedented and unrepeatable matrix of conditions that have formed me. The more I delve into this mystery of who I am (or what anything is), the more I just keep going. There is no end to it, only an infinite trajectory that avoids falling into the extremes of being and nonbeing. This trajectory is not only the center, which is free from this duality, but the central path itself. ************************************************************************ Dr. David Loy, a western-trained philosopher and qualified zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan lineage of Zen Buddhism, is also one of the most original thinkers in contemporary Buddhism. Loy has made it clear that egocentric consciousness finds it very difficult to conceptualize non-egocentric consciousness, a task similar to a hand grasping itself or an eye seeing itself. I want to stitch together Batchelor’s characterization of the self as the emptiness of the pot to Loy’s account of what emerges from that emptiness. Literally, nirvana means something like “blown out” – but what exactly is it that is blown out? The answer is sometimes expressed nihilistically: there is no more dukkha (suffering) because the self is blown out, which means an arhat’s death is extinction, without the dukkha of any future rebirth. More often, nirvana has been understood as some type of transcendental salvation: an enlightened person attains or realizes some higher reality. Both of these interpretations seem incompatible with what the Buddha himself emphasized: there can be no extinction of the self because there never was a self to be extinguished, and there can be no salvation for the self because there never was a self to be saved. Perhaps the meaning of “blown out” is better understood in terms of what has already been said about our sense of lack, the “black hole” at the core of our being. The Third Noble Truth reassures us that something can happen to our black hole, that we are not fated to forever trying to fill a bottomless pit. Although we cannot get rid of the hollowness at our core, we can experience it differently. It turns out that our hollowness is not so awful after all; it is not something that needs to be filled up. We cannot make our selves real in the ways we have been trying – the bottomless pit swallows up all our efforts – but we can realize something about the nature of the hole that frees us from trying to fill it up. We d not need to make ourselves real, because we have always been real. I do not need to ground myself, because I have always been grounded: not, however, as a separate, skin-encapsulated ego somewhere behind my eyes or between my ears and looking out at the world – for there has never been such a self. Rather, the bottomless, festering black hole can transform into a fountain and become a refreshing spring gushing up at the core of my being. The bottomlessness of this spring means something quite different than before. Now it refers to the fact that I can never understand the source of this spring, for the simple reason that I am this spring. It is nothing other than my true nature. And my inability to reflexively grasp that source, to ground and realize myself by filling up that hole, is no longer a problem, because there is no need to grasp it. The point is to live the spring, to let my fountain gush forth. My thirst (the Second Noble Truth) is “blown out” because a letting go at the core of my being means my sense of lack evaporates as this fountain springs up. There is a problem, however, with this metaphor: the image of a fountain at our core is still dualistic. Our core, our formless ground, seems to become even more separate from the world “outside.” The actual experience is just the opposite, because the duality between inside and outside disappears when “I” do not need to try to ground myself by grasping at some phenomenon in the world. Of course there are still thoughts, feelings, and so forth, yet they are not the attributes of a self “inside.” The fountain gushes forth as the spontaneity of words and acts – not so much as “my” spontaneity as a characteristic of the world of which my particular fountain is an inseparable part. From Loy, The great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory Tai Po - I haven't acquired full control of my right little finger since my surgery, hence a lot of Tai Po.

It may not take a degree but ag skills and animal husbandry are no less technical than plenty of useless subject matter foisted upon students in college, and quite probably more technical and certainly important. The subject matter I cared most about in college geography and human ecology had to do with sustainability and permaculture on the scale of ecovillages. Yeah, it's a worthy subject in this era of social contraction, and yeah, I grew up in a family that produced organic gardens. I chose to underplay the issue of climate change so as not to repeatedly rear the ugly and heated argument of climate change with the deniers who haunt this board.

I'd have to respectfully disagree with this minor point; I believe we most definitely are without fairly simple solutions. Even if we were to find a plausible political solution to the problems of inequitable distribution of resources, the simple fact is that the petroleum era, well into it's fourth and final quarter of a 200-year old drama, has made it possible to grow enough food to feed 7+ billion people. Best case scenarios for a post-oil future - with containment of desertification and topsoil loss, access to water, and successful management of climate change - are in the range of 2 billion people fed, almost one quarter of what we feed now. I don't think there's any question that world leaders are planning on a massive Darwinian culling of the human herd as the 21st century unfolds. I hope I'm wrong and a viable alternative to petroleum is found but it's pretty clear how global elites are playing their hand. Sorry for being so bloddy dark!

Yeah. There are few things I am truly definitive about.

Oh my!

Sack up more. Flake out less.

That's the most satisfying exchange you and I have had. I am grateful. I think it's a great point you made that the socially constructed self is a natural process. And of course we are in agreement about the nature-nurture debate. (Speaking tangentially about nature/nurture, there is a great point made on this subject by a physician up in Vancouver who works with hardcore drug addicts. His insights into the balance between Na v Nu and the role of upbringing is illuminating, almost like a modern Maslow who looks for negative criteria. I have plenty to brush up on before I tease out specifics regarding how much ego is involved in wu-wei. I understand our ego can be harnessed for good and used conscientiously, but in those moments of intense spontaneity, such as resonding to physical attack, I believe Taoist treatises do cite egolessness as the desired end.

" Welcome. I cannot speak of a journal but I'd recommend checking out The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine" by Michael Gershon. It's a gold mine of info on the function and structure of the lower tantien, although he doesn't use the chinese term. It was recommended to me by a friend who suffers ciliac and IBS syndrome. All the best. http://www.amazon.com/Second-Brain-Groundbreaking-Understanding-Disorders/dp/0060930721/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305485874&sr=1-1 PS - is your gardening in any way connected to Aggies at UC Davis? I majored in geography and dug into post-oil, apocalyptic scenarios as a grad student. All the theorists in down-sizing are unanimous that food prodeuction will be the most important industry after the crash. Don't mean to sound dark; I'm actually an optimist, but not about civilization.

Joanna would be pointing to the moon also. Nevertheless, comparing mutual causality with general systems theory is one hell of a way to construct a road map for westerners without confusing the map for the terrain. I don't believe she fell prey to this, but I may be too enthralled by her. We hail from the same neighborhood and she's a dear friend of my favorite professor. There ya go...objectivity right out the window.

If the mood ever strikes you, the voluminous record of zen training and promulgation by western monastics such as Thomas Merton, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Father Thomas Keating and others is clear that zen transcends religious allegiance. Also, zen training is zazen; replacing one with the other can't be done. finally, and I'm beginning to channel Seth's perturbation - The Noble Truths and the 8-Fold Path are not beliefs to be believed. They are not beliefs! They are investigative tools. Honestly, at some point a meaningful conversation still depends on understanding what we do not subscribe to! THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS AND THE EIGHT FOLD PATH ARE NOT BELIEFS!

Already been tried. Useless gesture. It does do well in certain workplaces however. http://www.criticalthinking.org/articles/valuable-intellectual-traits.cfm