Thunder_Gooch

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Everything posted by Thunder_Gooch

  1. Reiki

    No no no no no no no no LOL NO I have absolutely no idea where you got your information from if you think it is anything even remotely similar to reiki, that would be like saying a nerf gun is similar to a .30-6 rifle.
  2. http://www.bloomberg...rs-in-mice.html A drug made from a plant known as “thunder god vine,” or lei gong teng, that has been used in traditional Chinese medicine, wiped out pancreatic tumors in mice, researchers said, and may soon be tested in humans. Mice treated with the compound showed no signs of tumors after 40 days or after discontinuing the treatment, according to researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Cancer Center. The research, funded by the university and the National Institutes of Health. was published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine. “This drug is just unbelievably potent in killing tumor cells,” said Ashok Saluja, vice chairman of research at the center and the study’s leader, said in a telephone interview. “You could see that every day you looked at those mice, the tumor was decreasing and decreasing, and then just gone.” The plant, also known as Tripterygium wilfordii, contains triptolide, which earlier studies have shown can cause cancer cells to die. In traditional Chinese medicine, the plant is used as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. While the researchers hope to start human trials in six months, Saluja said it’s still a long leap from mice to people. “Does that mean it will definitely work in humans?” he said. “We can definitely not say that.” The results pave the way for clinical trials in patients with pancreatic cancer, one of the most lethal malignancies, the researchers said in the study. About 44,000 new cases of the disease are diagnosed each year in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Only about 20 percent of patients survive a year after diagnosis, Saluja said. Survival Odds Even for patients diagnosed at the earliest stages of their cancer when the odds are better, only about 14 percent survive five years or longer, according to the American Cancer Society. The current treatment is Eli Lilly & Co.’s Gemzar (LLY), which sold $452 million last year. A generic version of the drug became available in 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “It adds six weeks -- it’s nothing,” Saluja said. “There’s definitely a need to discover and develop more strategies for pancreatic cancer.” The researchers dubbed the drug Minnelide, a combination of Minnesota and triptolide. They developed a water soluble version that could be injected into mice, and in the future administered to patients intravenously. Saluja and his group have formed a company, Minneamrita Therapeutics, which will attempt to take the drug into the first of three stages of human clinical trials that are generally required before U.S. regulatory approval. Saluja said the company has discussed the trials with the Food and Drug Administration.
  3. Reiki

    I know what I've experienced in my training, nothing about it is ridiculous based on my own observations.
  4. Steve, It's not that I am suffering. I have a really great life. Let me quote you a little something from Huston Smith:
  5. Reiki

    Has it been? Not to my knowledge. Could it be if an immortal spirit wished it so? Yes.
  6. Reiki

    Not my intention to derail threads, people reply to me necessitating a response. Usually I am gone the second I stop getting followup questions or comments.
  7. Reiki

    An immortal spirit as I understand it can interact with the world as if there was a physical body present. As to states of bliss, you may be right on that.
  8. Reiki

    Please see: As far as I know I try not to attack anyone personally, I say reiki is garbage, wicca is garbage, and anything else that produces no results that can't be demonstrated under laboratory conditions is garbage. This cannot to the best of my knowledge be construed as a personal attack upon them. This is permitted by the forum owner, personal attacks are not. The other option is sitting in the dirt, meditating on a plastic cushion on an airplane won't cut it, even if a guy who wrote 100 books says so.
  9. Reiki

    There may be more to it than newage fluff, but not much. It would be comparable to trying to put out a fire with a faucet, instead of using a fire hose. If you search around you'll find millions of testimonies from people who firmly believe in the efficacy of prayer, wicca, pagan practices and rituals, etc. Yet for all the millions of people using those methods, not one of them has stepped up to the plate and been investigated and studied like John Chang or Wim Hoff. Who by the way share similar practices in the beginning levels. I am not trying to be a Jack*** by pointing this out. I am just trying to be realistic and honest about the situation. Some practices get results, others don't. If you are satisfied with what you have I guess there is no reason to look for something more.
  10. Reiki

    Turtle, I am interested in results. If you point out that certain practices don't get results you become unpopular pretty quickly. The more I am here the more I begin to dislike this community, it has a sort of aversion to practices that gets results and require effort and a huge attraction to practices which require no work and get no results. If all we are trying to do is play make believe then this isn't the place for me.
  11. Reiki

    Reiki itself is probably as effective as sugar pills (placebo), or prayer in terms of it's clinical effectiveness. I am not claiming it doesn't have an effect, only that it is limited to that of the placebo effect. The practice known as "Reiki tummo" however has nothing to do with tummo at all and is indeed made up newage crap.
  12. Reiki

    Reiki is probably on the save level of effectiveness as prayer. If you are looking for an art to control your immune system tummo is what you want to study: (reiki tummo is a bunch of BULL$#%^, don't waste your time learning made up newage crap) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22685240
  13. Steve, I do not know if Taoist immortals are truly immortal or just live as spirits for a really really really long time. Maybe when the sun engulfs the earth as a red giant, they'll be destroyed with the rest of the earth, I don't really have a good answer for you. So in the end becoming like them may well be futile. What I do know though is mainstream spiritual practices offer nothing of meaning or value to people who pursue them. The best anyone can hope for is achieving a state where they are anesthetized to loss, pain, disease, and death.
  14. When I have time I'll address this in the pit for you. Sorry you'll have to wait.
  15. I'll try to post something in the pit when I can find the time and energy to. It may be a while.
  16. I might start a new thread in the pit, I've talked about it quite a bit already, It's not something people really care about or take seriously.
  17. I ate enough shrooms to have to crawl on the floor before. Still that experience conveyed nothing profound or life changing, nothing like what I experienced as a result of my experiment in 2005 with meditation. There is really no way to go back to being normal after having experienced something of that magnitude, I fake it pretty well though. I think if your goal is to have an enjoyable life that you actually abandon the search for the profound, don't do shrooms, meditation, or acid. Get a job, and good wife/husband and family and try to enjoy it, if being happy is your goal.
  18. Assumes we exist, and we are experiencing something that also exists but is external to ourselves. Assumes we exist, and that our experience grants some reality external to what we experience. Saying "we experience" is really like saying, "we human" in which human is meant as a verb. A better way of putting it would be, We are the experience we are having and nothing more than that, everything we see, feel, smell, taste, hear, remember, visualize, imagine, verbalize, think, intuit, feel with our emotion, every bit of experience we have that is exactly what we are, and absolutely nothing more than that. If you want this explored more in depth, let's not derail his thread. Maybe create a new topic in the pit to address it, and I'll try to answer more in depth as I have time.
  19. Yes I think technically they probably could, but they have this huge psychological firewall up preventing it from occurring. Should what I say manage to break through that it would and has caused massive anxiety and nausea, existential crisis, depression, psychosis. I've observed the exact same reaction in Atheists as well. When it really clicks with a person it's like being punched gonads a few hundred times. When I try to tell people what I've realized the ones that actually get it, usually freak out pretty badly. I'm not suggesting I am on the right path. Right is purely subjective, and if a person doesn't care about what happens post mortem, there really are no wrong choices. Even then for me to be on a right path would mean I have a clearly defined goal, and that I have the ablility to achieve it, and that I do actually succeed in achieving it. More than likely I won't be successful, I have no instruction to continue on and can only go so far on my own. My only hope is that when I complete my training that a new door is opened to allow me to continue. I also agree wishcraft doesn't work, elbow grease with the right plan of action does however.
  20. Your question assumes we exist independent of experience.
  21. It would be easier to get Richard Dawkins to become a devout Baptist, than it would be for me to write off what I've seen and experienced first hand. I know what I am, and I know what God is. Not in some faith based belief sort of way, but as in a belief based on experience, observation and evidence sort of way. I am also fairly sure I know exactly what's going to happen after death based on the experience I had in 2005. Of course if any theist could grasp what I was talking about they would immediately become violently sick and have a really bad acid trip level experience. Of the few Christians I've spoken with, the only one that what I said clicked with went on to have an existential melt down.
  22. The answer is very very very few people, probably less than one hundred people on this planet are seriously training in any legitimate school that will lead to immortality or "supernatural" powers. In all honesty there is nothing supernatural anywhere in this universe, only what we don't understand. I am sure I'll get flamed for this comment, but it's the truth. Oh sure we've got lots of newage $@%^tards practicing reiki and wicca dancing with crystal wands round campfires naked under the moonlight while reciting an incantation in latin. Those people will die at the same level of progress they started with though. Sure we have tens of thousands of people attending vipassana meditation retreats, they too will die at the same level of progress they started at. Really for almost all spiritual seekers, their practice is a complete waste of time and effort and serves only as a form of entertainment. It doesn't actually lead to any meaningful accomplishment. The best outcome, most seekers can hope for is a state of being totally pacified, and at peace with death, loss, pain, and suffering. That is the best possible outcome from any traditional mainstream spiritual practice that anyone can realistically hope for. Just another crutch or opiate to get by. I often think about how I was much happier as a hardcore atheist, than I am right now. I had closure as an Atheist. I was going to try to be a good person, and just enjoy life, because when I died that was the end and I would never exist again. I was always interested in meditation though, I thought maybe that greater realizations and modes of consciousness were possible through meditation. Somewhere around 2002 I read a study about Buddhist monks and how their brainwaves shot out of sight on EEG during deep meditation, whereas you'd expect their eeg to resemble a that of a sleeping person. In 2005 the idea occurred to me to use a technology called brainwave entrainment to entrain my own brainwaves at that specific frequency seen in the monks, and after weeks of meditation I had an experience that effected people I knew in real life even separated by distances of hundreds of miles. It was after this experience that I realized it was either a mass hallucination or it had actually occurred as I perceived it to. What I realized during that experience was nothing short of a glimpse of the ultimate nature of reality. I realized that that my "observing" mind/self wasn't going to end at death, and that the thing observing would continue as it always had, just observing a new life with a new set of memories and ego. I realized that I want this madness to stop, either via eternal non existence, or eternal existence. So that's my interest in this whole "supernatural" bit. I don't want to fly around like superman, I don't want dragon ball Z powers. What I do want is to fuse my yang spirit (active thinking conscious mind) with my yin spirit (passive observing subconscious mind). Honestly the odds that I can accomplish this are not very good, but still I have to try. I can't just give up, I have to fight even in the face of almost certain defeat.
  23. Saving the World & Solar Energy

  24. Meditating on top floor

    Yin chi is very important, almost everything else does not work with it at all.