Owledge

Wise to leave other options open. It could, for example, also be based on a shallow mental conditioning: women being told that men that don't pay attention to them are more desirable. It could also be that they sense the qualities of respect and social competence in you and react to that.

Don't even try to fit the Tao into any kind of definition. Your idea of "the nature of Tao" is just part of the Tao. All definitions are part of Tao. You can never see a system fully while being a part of it. Good luck trying to step outside of the Tao!

Getting a boner I assume. That's probably what the funnel is for.

I suggest that there has always been honoring of wise people as well as persecution of them. People emphasizing social problems in contrast to earlier times need to take a broader and closer look at the past. The following paragraph about fearing deviating subjects in society because they make fearful people see their shortcomings rings true to me. It is basics of human psychology/sociology. Old souls will simply know. Haha. P.S.: recent insight: immaturity is fear P.P.S.: Eat more rice!

But your examples don't show that. They show a possible mix of competition and silent cooperation or a stagnation in competition. The basic phenomenon, competition, is still driven by existential fears. I'm not saying that there can be a different market system where competition is healthy, but that it could get healthier by abolishing competition. You could say that non-capitalist systems are an example for that, but in popular historic examples, usually the same thing that drives competition - existential fears - makes those not work. By the way, funny irony, and more realized by people after the recent financial crisis, that when people say socialism doesn't work as proven by history, it didn't work because of the things that make capitalism 'work' - or not work, depending on how you look at it. There, capitalism showed its basic nature by seeing socialism as a competing political system and trying to sabotage/corrupt it. And this corruption - converting perceived enemies or contenders on the market - shows the mentality of 'I-am-better-than-you', combined with a fear that the other systems might make capitalism obsolete. It should almost be trivial that the driving emotional attachment to socialism for example is the thrive for society's well-being and happiness of its people, while the driving emotional attachment to capitalism is material wealth, and that has strong potential to create competition within is boundaries. It even claims competition as a basic driving force, while socialism claims cooperation as a basic driving force. It is an interesting though by the way to see corruption as a neutral phenomenon and trying to imagine a capitalist seeing the ideas of socialism 'corrupt' his favorite system. This leads to the insight that if socialists are afraid of capitalism, they might help the latter. And, I mean, history shows that kind of irony in some examples. Here's an artificial one: If you want to fight the banking system, how do you get weapons without the banks making a profit? ;-) When a McDonald's and a Burger King are coexisting next to each other, then that's not because competition can be healthy. Should be trivial. It's simply that in the fast food business, they both stick to their own way because they have no means of being perceivably better in the consumer's eye, partly because they themselves made the consumer that way. It is like a deeply entrenched battle that goes on for years without movement. Another example: local chinese restaurant vs. McDonald's: McD has better marketing and a and slightly faster food delivery, the chinese restaurant has healthier food and a wider taste spectrum, so to speak. With this mix, none is 'better' than the other. Not to mention that even within the restaurant business, there are sub-attributes that don't compete, but it's arguable whether that's not part of the competition dynamic and created by marketing, since it can be observed how many businesses expand their product/service range to grow (= survive against other competitors trying the same). I'm pretty sure McD's used-to-be-frequent "Asia Weeks" was an attempt to get consumers away from chinese restaurants, and then they expanded it to other nationalities of food.

Could you please clear up that statement so that I know what you are saying? I only see descriptions of things that are apparent, but not how that is supposed to negate my statements.

That's the same. There's that saying, roughly "The better is the enemy of the good". If A is better than B, A will eventually oust B. Maybe there would be no negative impact if B didn't have any investment in their approach, but in a competition-based system, that is the case, because without an investment, there couldn't be any competition in the first place. The idea of evolution through competition is getting people to act by threatening them. The only exception probably is when one person plays with ideas and lets them compete against each other, but then it's not really competition in the sense of inter-personal dynamics. All I can say is that I'm getting more and more practice with digging down to the core of things, so this is not just a convenient personal viewpoint, but a deep and ongoing analysis using all my understanding of spirituality, psychology, sociology and others. When you reach a certain depth of understanding, many things become apparent easily, because many things are just branches of the same root. You don't have to dig each time, you just have to look up. I'm not suggesting, though, that the world could work without any fear. This would be getting too philosophical and unpredictable, but competition surely has a purpose in our universe, from a taoist perspective. But I think evolution can happen without it, just differently. Here's an allegory to clarify it: It is a myth that people will hang around being lazy when they are not forced to get a job. Children prove it wrong. They are full of curiosity and activity, they are explorers and adventurers. But those tendencies can be disturbed or even totally ruined by 'the adult world' that is very fear-stricken. So in theory leave a society to children and there won't be stagnation, but invention, exploration, philosophy and a lot more. I think I already mentioned this child-factor in our world in another thread. There are practical examples for this; for healthy people not needing any external, man-made incentive or idea of competition.

Well, competition is based on being better than others, so by wanting to follow that mentality (= making it prevail), you become afraid of others being better than you. That's the whole point; that's what drives competition-based evolution in the first place. And this fear will cause destructive tendencies. An as can be seen in reality, a competitor who is far beyond others won't be less afraid because of the emotional attachment. He has a lot more to lose now and has to fear that other competitors will eventually copy his methods and then he won't have an advantage anymore. This can also lead to the opposite of an original positive purpose, namely stagnation, because a competitor will hold back advances for as long as they are not required to stay ahead of the competition. So you see, the whole thing is harmful. As I said, short-term advantages might occur, but they're bought for a high price that has to be paid later. And about mutually exclusive: You can't cooperate with people when there are other people who follow the road of competition, because they will try to kick you out of it and could coerce cooperative people into the competition game. This also shows that competition is a low-vibration phenomenon. Being afraid requires less effort than being courageous. And the more afraid some people are, the more courageous others have to be to not succumb to the same fear-game. You can even see it in reality how the people with the least scruples define the way for others. Either you succumb to the same level of malice or you are out. The only thing that can break this is consumers (people as a whole) shunning destructive methods, but usually they're mesmerized by 'low price' and stuff like that, which boils down to being corrupted. ("I know you are stealing, but if you give me some of the stolen goods, I'm in.")

Was just inspired by something... so Hollywood ran out of ideas? Remake glut ensuing. Well, why not adding a little modifier and making it super-awesome: Take two existing movie plots/worlds and combine them => Crossover Movies. Does anything like that exist (on a professional level)? I can't think of one right now.

About mutualism vs. competition: I think both can cause evolution, it's just that the way it changes people's way of thinking is different: competition: I have to be better than others! mutualism: Let's help each other improve ourselves! Thus, competition plants the seeds of its evolutionary effect's demise, because a mentality of being better than others will cause destructive tendencies and thus waste resources and cause devolution. And apart from that, competition might be solely focused on evolving in means for competing. It's like learning: Whatever you do, you get better at.

Do you realize how much you dropped a clanger there?

Five Reasons To Stop Saying "Good Job!" http://www.alfiekohn.org/parenting/gj.htm

I'm not sure whether that's the only origin of the statement, and even if it is, OK, then currently maybe there is not a single glacier that is growing, but at least one that is not shrinking? There's still so much deception and manipulation going on regarding the whole climate thing that getting excited over supposed threats to humanity might cause more harm than good. And there is another arbitrary human concept: "ecological crisis". Because helping nature is not dramatic enough. Now it's the crisis. What makes the crisis and when was before the crisis? And who determines what is crisis and what not? It's the age-old game of controlling people by instilling fear. It's repeating all the time, and each time there is a new generation who hasn't had experience with it and so still works and is used. More in detail, the idea of self-amplifying feedback loops in the ecological system makes no sense considering how well it avoids going rampant all the time, because there are many factors in the system, and humans are a part of it, and really not the only factor that can be considered harmful and destructive. Al Gore used the feedback-loop-idea as an explanation why CO2 changes happen after temperature changes, but it still made no sense, especially when even other climate alarmists contradicted Al Gore with their own theories. But there's a super-powerful self-regulating mechanism consisting of the sun and water vapor and the planet being a half-open system with huge amounts of input from space and output into space. People focus so much on the negative stuff, but there's a negative side to anything. Very unbalanced. A single person acting about a minor issue like that would be dissed for being so extremely pessimistic, but on a grand scale it is accepted. There are, by the way, feedback loops in people, when they only look at that which serves their own cause. Then they don't have a balancing influence for buffering. But nature doesn't pick some factors and dumps others. They're all there, working in concert. Any approach, any mindset that can be politically hijacked for ulterior motives, is not a reliable one for improving living conditions. The most powerful change happens at the basics of human needs, direct and without visions or philosophies. Anything that builds up an emotional attachment to some kind of personal relevance in the world can be hijacked. Maybe humankind could use a lot more yin in approach, but even good-meaning projects for initiating revolutionary change bear the potential of becoming confrontational and thus very yang-like. A bit poetically speaking, people tend to perceive the world around them based on their own mindset; So maybe it's not the planet that needs cooling, but people need to cool down.

This, too, is social conditioning and upbringing. In a healthier environment, people won't even think twice before doing dishes or taking out the trash. It has to be done, so it's done, and why not retain the same happy attitude while doing it? After all, what's so bad about doing dishes if not something more pleasant in contrast to it and a person who is exhausted by various other unhealthy factors? When was the last time you heard a statement like "I love doing the laundry with my wife! Doing it together with her, hand-in-hand. It's done in no-time, and now I'm trying to find more laundry."? ;D

By talking to them and explaining things. Not by treating them like "a messed up child". You can see in sectors like TV series even how children respond very well to 'high quality stuff', even love it. Children can handle a lot more than people think. So how you treat a child has an influence on them. It might be insulting to some, but apparently many parents are treating their children as if they were stupid. And then that's the result they might get. The thing is that the need for motivation is unnatural to begin with. It already indicates that something went in the wrong direction. Children are naturally inquisitive, curious, adventurous. This is only culled through a society that doesn't allow that degree of freedom. So I'd say the only "safe way to motivate" is to provide what is missing. It's actually so simple that it's probably difficult to understand. A child is unmotivated to do something: Don't apply force. Figure out what's behind it. And don't expect that eventually you will find the problem in the child and fix it. The problem might be in you. ;-D There is a guy who was on TV. He grew up in a very healthy and unrestrictive society. The interviewer simply couldn't believe that that guy, as a child, voluntarily, out of own impulse, and with passion read Shakespeare and learned German as a foreign language. No-one ever urged him to do this or that. There was stuff offered and he did what he felt like. And now he's mentally healthy and well-educated. I tend to say: Listen to children's wisdom. They are new here. They still have the smell of divinity on them. They still remember what you have forgotten.

Quoting Günther Jauch: "Television makes stupid people more stupid and smart people smarter." Apply that to any of the new means of communication. It is much easier to educate yourself, to help humankind progress, but it's also much easier to dumb people down and deceive on a mass scale. There are changes happening. But there are also basic things that aren't changing. I think there's a lot of wishful thinking going on. Maybe it's needed to get to work, because if you knew how little changes, you'd not even bother beginning it. One repeating pattern I see when people are talking about the future is to point out certain things like they are a novelty, when in fact they existed for a long time. Or when people are saying stuff like: "Clearly the world is nearing a crisis." Well, I only see that the world is always nearing some kind of crisis, or coming out of it, or being in it, or far away of it. All depends on how you view at it. Some people say: Thanks goodness, slavery has been abolished!". Others say: "No, there's actually more slavery today than ever before!" Well, how do you measure that? Absolute numbers of some kind? Human poulation is growing. Many people suck at statistics. Maybe humankind is still struggling with the same issues for half an eternity, because the thinking patterns are still there. And don't feel oh-so progressive. There have always been very spiritual, very educated, very progressive people. There has always been a dumb pseudo-majority. There has always been a suppressed, fearful majority. What's really new? Also, regarding the talks about technological advance: How do you measure technology? Is there a unit? If not, then how can you say it is growing exponentially or ever faster or whatever? Could it be that the so-called revolutions in technology today have less impact and relevance than those back then? How to measure this? And then again... how is relevance measured? There are thousands of ways to do that. Which one is valid? There's a lot of claptrap going on. Taoism says there are cycles. Ups and downs. That probably sums it up quite well. The wider your view on human history, the more things stay the same, while a narrower view will show more 'spikes in the graph'. Even Al Gore deceived people who didn't realize this. Closer to the initial posting - rebirth is an arbitrary concept. When does it start? What is part of it and what is not? Aren't things changing all the time? Isn't everything in flow? Just dump the rebirth idea and do what you think is right. That's what everybody is doing all the time anyway. @fullotus "the glaciers are melting." - some are. Some are growing. And on average there are cycles. Then that Strogatz quote: "When the End of Insight comes, the nature of explanation in science will change forever. We'll be stuck in an age of authoritarianism, except it'll no longer be coming from politics or religious dogma, but from science itself." Full of concepts and exclusives. Written in capitals, the "End of Insight". When it comes. It's not there yet. Still some insight left. But when it comes, then the "nature" of explanation in science will change. And not only that, it will change "forever". Because that sounds more dramatic. Then we'll be stuck not with the ordinary authoritarianism that we have all over the world right now, but then it will be an "age". Because that sounds more dramatic. And what does "stuck with" mean anyway? And isn't it a nice thing that authoritarianism will no longer come from politics or religious dogma? That's so awesome, I can hardly believe it. Well, then it'll be coming from science itself. Isn't that already true? Well, I guess it depends on where you draw your arbitrary distinction of science vs. politics. I like the idea of less criminal charges. The line above could be the result of a president Al Gore's eco-gestapo. For all we know, we live in a world of everything, since it's the only "world" we know, and everything is in it. And why should I compete with myself? What does that even mean? I once lay on a couch for 10 hours and didn't even do anything. Try that! Are you applying current black market prices to a hypothetic world in which you can grow hemp in your back yard? ... Ok, now that that's said... Any idea to have success needs participants. In a way we already know what is good and what is bad (those things where all people can agree on). Convinving people of something that is beneficial to them usually only has one barrier: fear. Fear of all kinds. See which fear poses an obstacle and then try to neutralize it; don't feed it. And if someone clings to their fears fiercely, stop trying. You will only get angry and/or bitter. One thing that's also an obstacle for people trying to find support is focusing on an expected outcome. You cannot control most of the things going on, so when you focus on an outcome and you don't achieve it, again, you get bitter/angry. Pragmatism is not sincerity. If you can be yourself and live according to your convictions, you don't need to set fixed goals. This is even expressed in that old saying "The path is the goal."

This sounds like it's based on the idea of scarcity. Scarcity is man-made - no necessity. Furthermore, mismanagement can exist in every type of system. Anything can be done right or wrong. Fact is that for decades now very clever people, among them academics, have presented mathematically sound models for systems of managing tax money that many people just refuse to believe will work. Sometimes it's really funny when our current state of wastefulness is ignored. For example, in Germany everybody could receive a basic monthly income, whether they have work or not. Then critics say this can't work, there wouldn't be enough money, it would be unproductive. But they're ignoring the irony that a system like that is already in progress in a different way, because the social system already pays a basic income for many people. The difference is not the amount spent, but that in the current system, people still have existential fears because they're tyrannized all the time. But that doesn't help them find work if there is none. So I repeat what I usually say: Fix the root causes, the underlying issues, and talking about systems and concepts and details won't be necessary - it'll all develop easily. But if people cannot even start with the simplest and most basic first steps - electing sincere politicians - how can they expect things to improve?! And this change has to start in every person, not the politics. In order to make the right elective decisions, YOU have to change. But many people don't want to change. In a way they're very lazy. In a society like that, politicians aren't elected as servants, but as champions. Massive chuzpah for him to say something like that, since he's one of them.

Thesis: A government that is at least not predominantly yang is rarely to be seen, if at all. The basic concept of government as it is seen today (= 'people in power' and lobbyism instead of servants doing the bureaucratic and administrative work) already bears the yang principle within.

I didn't participate in the political process of the USA.

I don't know the details, but I'm sceptical about who actually made free medicare not happen. Can you please provide some info about that? Who had the means? Which process was involved? Which party's representatives had how much influence? I'm just trying to figure out who you mean by "you".

Referring to what here? I think the better metaphor is that he's the mascot. As far as I know, Ron Paul is not the only candidate wanting to uphold the constitution. And he won't be available for another try for president. He said where he is now, he can do a lot of good. In the current system, Ron Paul would never become president, not even 'by accident'. When Paul ran for president, there was heavy election fraudregarding his votes and also in the media ... but who knows about that? Control over the outcome is well enough. The fact that elections are so often a very close call show that the controllers aren't panicking... that they only apply as much manipulative influence as is required. Close call all the time is not coincidence. By the way... I used to say that Gore instead of Bush as president might have been no better. After (D)Obama's performance so far, maybe you understand why.

What is "Zen thinking"? Maybe the good old 'empirical thinking' helps here. Deepak Chopra is naive. He has been enchanted by Obama's psycho-marketing campaign. Let me re-quote a trivial wisdom mentioned earlier: "Political factions, the Dao de Jing suggests, should be dealt with according to their accomplishments, not their promises or their theories." Apply that to single politicians, too. You know, before the Bush era, people like Dick Cheney used to be known among intelligence agencies as "the crazies". Then the nightmare happened and they formed the administration. And now Obama is bordering on that same craziness, judging by his bellicose and unprovokedly aggressive statements. Not to mention how he continued the old game of doing the opposite of what he promised during election campaign. And I really don't see how it is the "middle road", as the country with the most nuclear weapons, bound by a treaty to reduce them but actually developing new ones, and being the only country to ever have used nukes against another country, to unilaterally threaten a country with war and adding a threat of 'preventive' nuclear first-strike, all solely based on own, and disproven or unproven allegations. This is not middle path, it's good ol' warmongering and the unsurpassed U.S. brand of hypocrisy that is expressed in utmost craziness by people like Hillary Clinton, with Obama being a close second. And you are seriously considering voting for more of that? You have "2012" in your name. Referring to the 'prophecies'? You think some major turmoil is happening towards the end of 2012? Well, where do you think the potential for causing that is situated? Who wants peace right now and who just can't accept that and keep their fingers still? Things are so close to boiling point that you don't even have to look for politicians' deeds, because they're openly speaking their mind. One half of the world is saying that war has no place in a reformed world and the other half is talking about war all the time. I recommend not voting for any group that you do not agree with. I had a nice chat a while ago with a guy on a boat trip. He said he still thinks that of republicans and democrats, democrats are the lesser evil, so he votes for them, since it doesn't make sense voting for a group that has no chance of winning. I explained to him that by thinking like that he gives away his power to shape reality according to his ideas, and helps the politicians shape reality according to their ideas. It is part of the practice of self-empowerment and sincerity to not succumb to that age-old psycho-game of "lesser-evil" and "vote for winners", but to vote according to your own convictions and wishes for the world. If enough people do that, those who was once said to have no chance will win. There are even practical examples of so many political parties that started out small and gradually grew.

That might be because books with old knowledge are often the teachers of people who are basing their career on the acquisition of power. It's simple: You follow old stuff, you get a repetition of history. Macchiavelli is very popular today, too. And it's also not a coincidence that the highly imperialistic USA have Roman/fascist symbols everywhere.

Isn't a koan supposed to be a story that makes one think and this process guiding the way? The stories presented here as koans appear to have a relatively obvious morale in them, a message that can be summed up. The koans I've heard usually employ some kind of means (like a conundrum) that make it impossible to form a morale or message.

I didn't read the whole thing, but this line caught my attention: Isn't it funny how there is a perceived need to remind people of utter trivialities like this? To that quote one can only say "Of course!", but still a great number of people disregard this. I think it's because it is wisdom, and although it is very trivial and apparent wisdom, wisdom has to be cultivated and practiced, using intellect. But if you are ruled by emotion and intellect is disregarded, wisdoms like the quoted one will have no place in your reasoning. Emotion and intellect need to be in balance. You only follow the path of emotion, and that weakness will be exploited, just as a state of emotionlessness will be exploited. Some of the loveliest people you know might also be the most misled you can imagine.