Owledge

As a layman I find it almost impossible to tell the basic types apart, especially since each one has so many varieties and names that refer to different things (e.g. falcon, hawk, kestrel, buzzard). All I can figure out by myself is that it's not an eagle. And it's a species that occurs in Germany. It's relatively small. Sadly I only got one picture, this shaky one from behind. When I had steadied my cam, it was already gone. I'm glad I made at least a snapshot. Does it really take a trained eye, or are there clues I am missing? The feather coat seems bread-and-butter bird of prey, and I don't know whether the foot color helps narrow it down.

BTW - holy shit, do you see the hawk in The Rabbit Hole there?! I hope it's not occupied!

Yep, that's the Sperber.

Thanks. Definitely seems to be a kind of hawk. Nisus seems to fit with the few white spots coming through on the back.

Could be some ET teenagers playing a dangerous spear-throwing physics game out of boredom. Or, as I said earlier, a warning shot.

That would have been great with the original remark. You did start with "sorry", so you must have known it could use some added ingredients.

I tried to see it as an outcry of frustration over painful life experiences so severe that the pain attacks the stark contrast of the solution. Basically a very cynical remark. I could encourage expression of the actual message behind it, but I can't give a shit all the time anymore. It can't always be me who is strong if others don't make an effort. Sometimes the strong need to abandon the weak to scare them into making the extra effort. I don't feel like participating in the hell people want to create.

ALT+ESC

It has a level-up system. That surely gives it credibility, heh. Very scientological. The 9er prices are also a dead giveaway to me. It's like a frickin' self-parody joke, since it shows that the person making those has either low awareness/enlightenment or an intention to deceive for personal gain or both. Of course you could argue that that's actually a high level of enlightenment, but I'd assume the end goal is to reduce exactly this kind of shit in the world. Otherwise I'm certainly not interested. Well, as they say, if you're being fooled, you are being offered a lesson.

Well, for some empirical data, I sat through the 20-minute Rasa in the video linked earlier (in case they imply it also works non-live, I'm never sure) and didn't notice any effect. I also wonder how much of what people might perceive is a result of merely sitting still for 20 minutes in the belief of receiving a blessing and not actually the doing on the other side, so I'd recommend focusing on the inner world in such examinations, too. (Have you seen the movie Kumaré? It is a good example for showing what potential for growth is in outselves.)

I'm interested in discussion this. I've read up a little and apparently it can have so many causes and different types, including psychological causes, and can range from totally harmless to life-threatening. I occasionally perceive something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectopic_beat mostly during a personalized simple nei gung technique, but also when there are certain positive spiritual-emotional triggers that impact my perception without me focusing intently on them. How much is known about this connection in spiritual circles? What are your personal experiences with this? And how much might the more phsical-medical types be triggered by or interact with spiritual practices? Lately for example, during said nei gung, for maybe 10-20 seconds I had an extra heartbeat in-between; I mean my heart was beating in triplets, almost like a short musical bass line. And it felt neutral or even slightly pleasant, like a gentle but distinct pulse going through the heart, and I might be mistaken but it seemed to move upwards. My practice also, when it works well (I think), makes my heart beat a lot stronger, usually when I push my waist and chest forward. That strong heartbeat during the practice usually coincides with my 6th-and-7th-chakra energy flaring up. (The energy feels like a mix of magnetic forces and gentle pressure moving about.)

Phantom limb syndrome would be more like the other way round though. Having been used to an essential part of the body, of course when it is missing the brain region for using it will still fire and create a familiar perception, especially since the person does not want the change.

They would never have become astronauts without asking for a gigantic support structure of many people working hard but not towards becoming an astronaut. (At this point I will not go into the whole escapism topic of the explorer mind.) What's the point of working hard to achieve something that you cannot share with the world? It would be purely selfishly motivated, and we already live in a world of selfish alienation where people even confuse shared selfish goals with working for the common good. Without going too much into the philosophical side, the belief system of doing stuff on your own can be an escape from the perception of unity of all things. In fact, the USA's pathological obsession with individualism is such an escape from the empathy that connects but also inconveniences. When you awaken spiritually, you realize you don't have to be strong, because if you don't buy into that fear-driven path, then you can(!) open to external support, which nourishes love/empathy. And at the core we are mere observers anyway, so nothing we achieve is really 'merited'. It happens so easily that someone confuses internal and external strength, especially since the use of the word "strength" itself has been filled with that confused perception. (Language shapes thought and thought shapes language. Always read between the lines.) For a perceptional take on what I am trying to convey in regards to this duality, look at these two character archetypes and tell me what you see:

You have to REALIZE that it is difficult to make a caricature of a caricature. Even doing a cariturtleure is tricky. As for the Rasa guy, I won't exclude that he does what he claims, but skepticism is still advised. When you run a business like that, even if the product is legit, there's usually deception involved. I will also say that I don't automatically buy into the "you have to do the work" mindset, because we are influenced by energy fields and actions of other people all the time and don't shy away from that. Ultimately, one has to decide whether what is (allegedly) offered is what one wants to have and understands what comes with it and what doesn't. To use an analogy: Imagine someone said: "Don't book a SpaceX flight when Elon Musk got it working. If you want to go to space, you should accomplish it yourself, through your own work." Tools are being offered. Finding them, choosing them, is something a person can actually take credit for if they want to. (But at the root it's all just viewpoints, beliefs, leading to experiences.) I've attended a Kunlun Nei Gung seminar and ever since that I often got energy moving about in my head, so maybe that's like a head start offered, or a tool given. You work with that. Without it it's much more difficult but your ego can pat itself on the shoulder and maybe that belief and confidence helps you. Others might work differently. What should matter even for the believers in the own-effort doctrine is what people receiving help like that then do with their new state of being, what impact they have on the world.

I look at the animation showing the object's peculiar trajectory that they describe as 60x Earth-moon distance away, as if that was much, and think: Yet another warning shot and we're still not getting our shit together. Hah. Especially considering the thing was basically mooning us, it is disappointing that I can't find more detailed information about its nature. I mean, I can understand that nearly 10% speed of light might make it difficult to examine, but it's just a matter of angles. When it's leaving it should be especially easy to track. ... Maybe they don't want to reveal it, hah. So it came from Lyra, passed near Luna and went for Pegasus, eh? ...

Typical example of 'those better, simpler times back then'. Founding of the USA is really a bad example for virtue. What we see today has been put into the country's very foundations and thus could be seen just as easily back then.

A bit of a train-of-thought essay Also on my blog: https://dowlphinblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/15/understand-matter-and-you-understand-gravity/ There can be a confusion regarding the fact that love unites and fear divides, because love does not unite through condensing, but through empowering the connections that exist regardless of distance. As such, love is expansive and fear condenses. Considering the experience of vast bliss when connecting to the divine, it becomes clear that the material realm, or the realm of the manifest, which is so often bowed to by pragmatists/opportunists whereas idealists focus on the unmanifest as that which could be, is a phenomenon of fear. It is the realm in which we experience our self-manufactured separateness from the divine, the realm of the analytical mind that identifies differences as opposed to the synthetic mind which identifies commonalities. And once you understand this as the driving force that manifests matter, you can understand the manifestation “matter” as a mere result, a symptom, of fear, and then you can see gravity as part of the same process; one could say inseparably inherent to the nature of matter. Look at what matter does: It gravitates (i.e. attracts) to its closest likeness. There might be other matter out there, but with increasing distance, attraction quickly fades, just like a person of little faith quickly loses devotion to things not in immediate grasp and is afraid of things from farther away which might have assumed somewhat different characteristics due to being in a different energy field. For a moment do the mental experiment and see gravity as matter’s nationalism or xenophobia. And thus, collectives form, held together by mere vicinity and familiarity, just like your typical loose fear-based alliance (sometimes labeled as a form of friendship). And like in such a nation, you find yourself tied to it by its overwhelming forces, struggling to deviate or distance. You might want to just fly away, but its energy field that you have been subjected to is pulling you back to it. And the only way this collective of fear allows you to ‘fly away’ is by sticking to its rules and thus further affirming them: Through things like explosive force or exploiting the pressure of heat, basically elemental violence (or just yang), you are allowed to circumvent the dictate, a little bit, for a limited time. Every effort to distance yourself from the pull reaffirms its existence.

While people unphilosophically proselytizing about Western-scientific doctrine with lots of projection and ad hominems is all part of the Dao, it is arguably not a good motivation for frequenting a Daoist forum. The reaction is understandable of course and I take responsibility for that, for with my writings I insulted your egoic (analytical, fear-driven) mind, your idea of yourself and what things your ego values. Here is something you probably are not open to either, but it would be beneficial:

@Nungali 8000 posts on this forum and you still have learned so little.

That depends on whether you have a holistic (Eastern) view of science or not (Western). Physics means "knowledge of nature" and is the science of the universe, understanding how it behaves.

I think Pinkie Pie is in a way spiritually awakened and a more powerful wielder of magic than Twilight Sparkle because she is not controlling it, and is possibly not even fully aware of her condition - or if she is, she's enjoying her role too much to show it. She is enjoying worldly pleasures and trivialities, but she has no concept of what is impossible and thus her mind is not closed to the most out-there things like alternate dimensions to the point of even intuitively receiving knowledge from them. It also enables her to pull things out of nothing; because to her mind when it's useful it's possible. There's good reason why Pinkie Pie is often compared to Deadpool. Breaking the fourth wall is like second nature to her, and her friends had to learn to fade it out so as to not get a big headache, haha. There was that one scene where she was doing springboard dives into a pond and others were complaining they're getting wet, so she started slowing down right before entering the water. They wondered/asked how she even does that and Pinkie responded not with a how, but with a why - just being considerate. Hyperactive party pony is a very deep character, but that flies over almost every fan's head. (For some even in denial of the most obvious.) So to come back to your observation: I think she's only falling back down because not doing that wouldn't be fun. She is profoundly accepting duality even when she's acting like she isn't. She's like a white-bearded Daoist master who enjoys riding a loud Harley. To me she is an iconic representation of divine intelligence. (While Fluttershy is an angel who makes your heart melt like butter with a smile, heh.)

I just read up a bit on the two languages. Interesting. Cantonese closer to middle Chinese (old language), but Mandarin simpler and easier to learn. Wondering though whether Mandarin means any loss of nuance or any other practical purpose or whether it's just a national identity thing that some Hong Kong Chinese resist the imposition of Mandarin. It might be that their adherence to Cantonese is a mere symptom of colonial indoctrination and wanting to stick to what's familiar. (Reprogramming minds to turn people into dependent cultural agents is not untypical for imperial colonialism, so in case Beijing sees it like this, I could understand why they're pushing Mandarin in schools. On the other hand, the Chinese government also seems to pursue a general mindset of cultural assimilation, if I look at their treatment of Tibet.)

Isn't it the other way round? With Taoism being Cantonese and Daoism being Mandarin and Taoism the term that was adopted widely by Western culture?

That's pretty much the same as righteousness. I wanted to leave Marblehead's question as rhetorical for himself to ponder on, but I'd say below righteousness is nothing of that lineup of concepts, but only impulse-driven action that requires no conscious thought. (You could say righteousness is exactly that but with an intellectual bullshit paint.)