Owledge

Of yourse you can be totally unconscious of things happening and some time later someone else told you about them happening or someone observed the result. You put a little boat on a river and then let it flow and (in this theoretical model) not a single living being observes the boat, so does it cease to exist? Well, irrelevant, because on its way it could effect other things that are later observable, and the boat itself is later seen farther down the river. Your path of argumentation is, as far as I understand, inherently unprovable. It's exactly the already mentioned problem of trying to understand something that we are an inferior part of. This can and does create any number of theories. It's a bit like the humorous Bielefeld conspiracy (about a German city): Bielefeld doesn't exist and any claim that it exists can sufficiently be explained by a very resourceful conspiracy using mind control and other manipulative efforts. You can never prove that there is no Bielefeld conspiracy.

Thanks, but I think I'll post my thoughts here. You know, the great thing about The Tao Bums is that it's a forum about taoism.

@Mak_Tin_Si I really like the idea of letting the customer determine the 'price', because it prompts people to develop their empathy and sense for fairness. In a way, it's like a compassion practice. For my own possible future plans I imagined a somewhat similar concept, where even payment date and interval is free (and if applicable, investment mentioned as a guideline), for that saves a lot of 'bureaucrazy'. I guess that's why you call it a donation ... because while technically it is not a donation, your concept is quite similar to it.

That's the interesting part! Don't stop now! Because I can't grasp this fear-of-the-world-idea. I love seeing clearly, and I love not using glasses. What psychological factor could possibly still be active? My myopia began in school, started with 10 years age I think. I have (of course) changed so much to the positive since then, but not even a little improvement in eyesight. When I want to see clearly for a few seconds, I don't do it psychologically, but with concentrating on seeing clearly.

@More_Pie_Guy The video about exponential development is not good. Number games. The problem with exponentiality (besides that the video only selects cases that have not slowed down yet or are replaced by completely different concepts and is partly based on narrow-minded predictions) is that it is non-comparable due to its arbitrary standard/scale. For example: When you say that it took humankind millions of years to achieve travel by flight, but only some decades to travel to the moon, then a person from the far future could say: "Imagine: It took humankind millions of years to visit the moon, but only centuries to terraform mars." And a person from an even farther future could say: "Imagine: It took humankind millions of years to colonize another planet, but only a thousand years to colonize our galaxy." And another guy would just smile and say: "What? You still live in only ONE universe?!" And then a bright energetic entity appears and telepathically tells the others that they're all stupid.

I slightly disagree. I vaguely remember several occasions where Jon stubbornly practiced his ignorance or propaganda indoctrination and kept his intellectual horizon narrow when his guest expressed controversial topics. I noticed that he stays civilized when his guest has some authority that he then bows to.Many people do this, by the way. A good example is the Spiegel 'interview' I posted in another thread, where the totally disrespectful interviewer seemed to have forgotten that Ahmadinejad is a PRESIDENT OF A COUNTRY! Jon is a good guy, but still quite uninformed. ... What do you expect? His show gets the material from the mainstream media. On the other hand ... the many books that he hopefully reads should give him a better understanding. Maybe he reads very few of them. Damn, he made a special glorifying guest feature with Alan Greenspan! I wish he knew what an evil criminal asshole he was shaking hands with. The war criminal comment about Truman seems to come out of 'generic morality', so maybe you have to see a general critique of using nuclear bombs in it. When you consider how much the whole war is based on crime, then you could call Truman a war criminal, for what is the deciding factor: intent or results? If Hiroshima+Nagasaki hadn't worked, would he definitely be a war criminal then? I mean ... there were two bombs. How many had he been willing to use? What about Churchill? War criminal? He killed thousands of civilians to get the USA involved in WW 1. Maybe with the intent to reduce human deaths due to supreme US power. Very problematic concept.

What's "real taoism" and how does it differ to other forms of taoism and what are they?

Please don't dream about imposing your will on others.

Are you? You are funny! I have to say though ... Making money by offering prevention against something that you fear and that potentially could harm everybody offers big bucks and thus always smells extra-fishy. For this special flu-thing, I prefer my intellect as a protective measure. That's why I never need a FU against death by global warming either.

I use Cool Edit for adding hemisync frequencies to music, noise or tones.

A Zapper is said to be able to kill HIV. Kunlun meditation (and probably others) maybe in a supportive way, and the extent of that is determined by how successful you are in the practice. At the latest when your body has dissolved, you're immune to HIV.

I see no point in creating even more advanced, potentially powerful technologies as long as the human mind is so immature. The more powerful it is, the more it will be misused to do harm.

@9th Quantum physicists are a bit like the wizards from Terry Pratchett's books. They are mystified... way too fascinated by not understanding, and often not that intelligent. (Don't think being a quantum physicist automatically makes you a genius. ) As a good example, you have to exclude "dark energy" from this topic. It's one of the things that scientists invent to keep their bad theories from falling apart. In this context, this website is very interesting : www.thunderbolts.info

Open discussion. I'm really interested in analyzing the rationale ( if there is any ) of this native american(?) belief. I have very mixed and vague thoughts about it, thus I'd like to hear your thoughts/knowledge first.

This is so extreme, I almost laughed. I just read an interview that the German 'news' magazine "Der Spiegel" did with the Iranian president ( 'A-Mac' ), and the interviewer acts more like an ambassador of the Bush administration doing negotiations or a missionary demanding someone to abjure his religion and convert. Well... no futher explanation necessary. If you like a good laugh about gross things, read the interview. This is so impertinent and biased!!! P.S.: "Der Spiegel" belongs to the (Axel) Springer family, if that name rings a bell. Not quite impartisan and objective. ... No, not at all.

Can someone explain in simple words how a virus could could integrate DNA from another virus? I mean... as far as I know viruses procreate by cell division, not by copulation. Or do they have a DNA scavenging habit?

I'm very interested about more information about that NMT for astigmatism. I read somewhere that the hard type of contact lenses can help against myopia better than the soft type.

Yeah I know that glasses tend to make it worse, that's why I only use them for driving or detail work and the remaining time pinhole glasses or no glasses at all. Got roughly -3 dioptries and 1 diop. astigmatism. Doesn't seem to have gotten even a little bit better though, so it seems that without practice session it's no good. Probably just won't get worse ... but it didn't when I wore glasses all the time either.

Depends on what you call "conscious choice". There are very efficient ways of exploiting intellectual laziness. There's always some people with 'evil on their mind' that are more clever than you, thus even "laziness" is relative.

Vaccine for SARS: 500 ml Chickensoupan, administered orally.

@rodgerj Did he try the application of a Zapper or various other, more or less related, straightforward remedies? From what I could research yet, cancer is a combination of some factors. Caused by microorganisms, by a weakening of organs or other regions of the body by traumatic stress of unsolved psychological troubles, deficiency of essential but neglected nutrients... and so on.

What is cheaper - table salt or aquarium salt?

@Aasin My advice (going in the libertarian-humanistic direction) would be: Mind your own business. That might mean to generally try to see things from other people's perspective, but focus your concerns on yourself. If you think she's stupid, as long as it doesn't have a negative influence on you, don't care. If it has, you are legitimized to give her open and honest feedback in the form of not judging, but stating the obvious and/or framing it as your personal opinion. When you get angry, it shows that she triggers a vulnerability/weakness of yours, but that could be purely emotionally based. So for example, why not just asking her how she feels about or can deal with voting for a guy whose name she can't spell correctly? And if she makes you pay for cinema although she knows that she's got more money (thus lying), let her aground; let her receive feedback from her actions. That's a simple learning process about what's decent behavior and what's not. And if she keeps calling you, tell her that this conflicts with her behavior towards you and explain it. Do this from a not acted but sincere position of serenity. And don't do it in a way like giving her conditions on which she might continue to do what she does. You know, sometimes people lie, and you unintentionally give them advice about how to lie better. The idea behind this is to help her learn some basic lessions about life in a relatively nice way, before she is painfully hit by them later. ... But remember, not from a standpoint of wanting to lecture her or doing her a favor (because if she learns them later painfully, who cares?), but only as a reaction of her negative actions towards you.

Search function might know. There a so few people teaching this because few people believe this stuff, or want to learn it, or are of a suitable mindset, and because teachers are careful about who they teach (but they are opening up lately). You could have answered this yourself, though. The question belongs in the same category as "If method X can cure cancer, why isn't it practiced everywhere?" The more you understand the basics of the world, the more details become apparent and self-explaining.