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Hi all, I propose that there exists a middle way which transcends both free will and determination. Upon what do we base our choices? Pleasure and pain. How can we discern between pleasant and unpleasant when our life becomes filled with persistent misery? What do choices amount to when we still suffer regardless of the outcome? Moreover, with impaired cognition one may find it impossible to seek and apply effective means of changing the vicious circle of suffering, and what could prove as a more fitting band aid than the temporary thrill of dopamine through violence and other extreme behavior? A caged bird, too, will start plucking its feathers if we restrict its spontaneous behavior, wuwei. Cultivating qi makes us more in tune with the spontaneous harmony which people usually call "true self," hence it leads to the liberation from suffering. Since we do not choose the contents (phenomena) of our consciousness, but rather experience and live them, we have no ownership or control over of how we manifest. We only navigate through life by the easiest and most effortless path we may uncover. Turned away from wuwei, suffering simply escalates into a strong tendency that we cannot solve by projecting more of it unto the world: Blaming and framing other people as criminals and deviants solves nothing, and even the accuser suffers the ill effects of bad temper needlessly. We have no need of creating a mystified high-brow concept of "free will," when the law of least resistance works just fine with perfect impartiality to all parties, hence no preferential dichotomies of us versus them and definitely no judgemental moral show-off. When will the people learn not to think in terms of binary categories? We have defined a substantial "will," therefore we have also given birth to "no-will." With this we turn our position from victim to accuser and resort to justification of retribution: We rationalize the material losses and demand for swift recuperation for the abuse of volition, thereby further sidestepping the spontaneous action of heart. Would you call that harmonious living? Obviously the international jurisprudence has not met the growing need for mercy and understanding. No one's happiness depends on a single linear variable such as "free will" because life weaves a complex harmony which transcends all the attempts to encapsule it. Cherish harmony and infuse more and more of it to your everyday life. Cultivate wisely! Blessings

Hi Stoner Shadow Wolf, Close, but no cigar. His gender leaves no doubt, but the secret behind his confidence might prove otherwise. Get it? Piece of cake, but let's have someone else solve it. Blessings

Whoever solves the current riddle first also provides the next one! Let's try to make original content, ok? I will begin. _________________ Business man, business man Busy bee toiling and plotting around Gathering the sweet nectar of revenue In the service of Her Royal Highness Your cultured manners and confidence leave a lasting impression Though people would surely think different of these merits If they knew that hiding beneath your expensive suit Lies a secret worthy of Victoria __________________ What kept the business man successful?

Hi Marblehead, Perhaps you should ask it otherwise around: Can you convince anyone that there exists even a single particle with strictly defined limits? But actually, I find your framing of the question flawed. When you ask for the strict space-time coordinates of a particle, you will necessarily omit its momentum, and by measuring its momentum you will omit its location. This, my friend, the physicists call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, though they misunderstand its proper meaning. When they talk about the wave equation, it gets all fancy, but it distracts from the true lesson here: They want to limit what they call "being" as something which possess an exclusive, static quality. A permanence, if you will. So how do you define this "being?" A presence in a relativistic space-time coordinate map? How do you define presence, if not as something that possess the quality of measurable interaction, so that you could measure it in the first place? And if you insist that this interactivity does not extend unrestricted from this bordered presence, then how can you account for the momentum vector and scalars of mass and charge which may all influence beyond the limit of simple presence, yet certainly constitute as something essential? I must say that definitions can become very limiting when they don't acknowledge the facts of interdependence and change. Nothing the particles may ever carry has anything inherent or unique to that particle, and neither does their interaction with the world happen unilaterally. We call it inter-action after all! You will get paradoxical results as long as you hold on to your contradictory premises of how "being" should manifest. Blessings

Hi Drew, Very nice, but these bits also include some seriously bloated intellectual wankery. A simple alternative view of universe based on wave centers can explain the quantum paradox with great consistency. Bearing in mind the Huygens principle of wave fronts, the scientists don't have to propose intrinsically complex theories of "fields as undetectable virtual particles," and therefore I find it reasonable to suggest that only discrete quanta may act as wave centers (i.e. particles). The fundamental forces of interaction have no need of intermediate particles to carry effects, for the wave nature of cosmos guarantees that influences extend and reach without mediators. Space extends as a continuum without limits; wave center quanta have discrete frequencies. Simple, no? God does not play billiards, but rather splashes around in the pond. Blessings

Hi That Guy, "Deserving" can mean many things according to different people. The problems arise when deserving equals spending at leisure instead of social responsibility: I find it a terrible mistake to think that one may use such responsibility as money carelessly. Perhaps the more "primitive" cultures had understood it better than any of the modern folk when they took the leadership position as an undesirable burden for the morally vigilant; yet didn't Plato also argue for the same when he promoted the rule of philosopher kings? Nevertheless, this point doesn't even begin to address the problem of too complicated infrastructure and too much concentrated authority which exist to satisfy the rising tides of dissatisfaction with our very basic living, but never actually providing an efficient ease. The most of entertainment and pursuits our civilization offers work as distraction, and thus they create more trouble than fix. Well put, but I would add two things: 1) People may get the impression (via indoctrination, social pressure, etc.) that they need to get more stuff and toil more to obtain it, thus creating otherwise unsound equilibrium which depletes natural resources at unsustainable rates. 2) Having the means to invest, but no need to use it creates stagnant economy; lacking the means to invest, but needing for it creates social turmoil. Both imbalances thus imply severe economic and social disfunctions. There exist other equally bad effects of environmental degradation as pollution which stem from a common root. For example, I wonder if the topsoil erosion and forthcoming depletion of commercial minerals used for artificial fertilization affect the sugar cane production. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_%28soil%29#Soil_depletion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus#Occurrence You can't escape the problem of too much spending anywhere. I just find it pretty disheartening that people still invest so much faith in materialistic progression, when the real root causes lie elsewhere and need another type of considerations. By the way, what a nice piece of advice you offer there, Ya Mu! Blessings

Hi That Guy, Even at the risk of becoming redundant, I must make some wordings and their implications clear. I don't think I mixed anything up. Anything taken to extremes causes detrimental effects, and therefore excess profit indicates prior exploitation and a massive shift in social balance: Those with the most of money can ask for great services, and those with the least are in a great debt of service. Everybody understands how it would cripple and distort an agrarian society of a few hundred members, yet disturbances caused by the modern world economy go largely unexamined and misunderstood. A stong stagnation of money and great wealth disparities signify that the balance has become lost, and the continuing disease always reflects in the environment. I find nothing wrong in capitalism and profit, but when we use them to justify various invented desires and needs, then the world suffers. Transportation especially uses up a lot of natural resources by importing services from afar with the excuse of "cheap" energy, when the local professionals could equally well provide such services by using traditional means. How about cultivating some roots for a change? Blessings

That which makes for excessively profitable business can't spell good for the sustainable future. If mankind doesn't understand and treat the root problems, then it becomes a destiny to suffer the consequences until we learn. Blessings

The corporations are only selling a green image; anyone who thinks that alternative fuels can save the day has made a grave misjudgement. First of all, the amount of energy that mankind may derive from the Sun is limited, and when we include the implicit costs of agriculture management and fertilization, not to mention their environmental impact, we will spend more energy in converting oil to alcohol than genuinely shift to a sustainable energy source. Second, the acquisition of "free energy" would instantly cause an unprecented exploitation of Earth: We would use that limitless energy to transform more of the Earth into our image and procreate even more in the absence of growth limitations. That would completely ruin the Earth, as mankind does not have the integrity and balance to wield such power. Thirdly, all the environmental issues only echo overpopulation, vanishing of ethnic traditions and sustainable lifestyles for the sake of "progression and tolerance," and a paramount of fear. Rootless people lead a rootless life, and through the proliferation of our numbers the worth of average human has undergone a major inflation. The atmosphere of alienation and fear becomes a palpable transmitted disease, when on daily basis a handful of our sweet children find out through the conflicting interests that they have no place nor room in the society. "Mind the gap" could as well encapsule how we transform interdependence into codependence: Intimate living goes down into the drain with the quality of life, while population numbers bulge through artificially iniated schemes of unsatisfactory desires. As we cannot live in balance, we will fall. When you understand the signifigance of mathematics and physics, you have one foot in balance. To recap this represantion of misanthropy, allow me to throw in some quotes from the venerable Jacques-Yves Cousteau: Forget about the green movement, it has long since hijacked by pretentious hipsters and profiteers. We do not need better and bigger technology to solve the problems of extreme codependence we currently have; we need to simplify, scale down, and take responsibility in the local level. Central governance will never solve these issues, but only lull people into the sense that they should not think and act for their continued welfare due to an invisible mechanism handing them "free" welfare checks. If we don't let things to settle without interference and desire to help, the cup will keep storming and boiling until we get a bunch of tyrants and murderers who will make the past totalitarians look like sissies. Blessings

Hi yuanqi and tyler zambori, Thank you for your input, I find it a lot to consider about. I will keep looking for a good practioner of TCM. I might not have diabetes (i.e. insulin non-production or resistance), but the body mechanisms seem complicated enough to warrant other malfunctioning pathways in the case of a disorder. Thanks to everybody who contributed; I will pester professional consultants with these issues in the next time. Blessings

Hi folks, I have had my blood sugar tested twice without any trace of diabetes or insulin abnormalities. Besides, no one in my extended family has diabetes despite most of them having bulging issues with weight control, so such tendencies seem unlikely. I would also like to point out that my experiences with low carb diets provided no noticable difference to my standard diet which includes fermented bread and porridge. I've read that stress acts as a potent body acidifier along with refined sugars, unfermented grains, coffee, meat, and tobacco. Blood comprises a very delicate buffer liquid in which even the slightest pH variations indicate major changes to the solubility and balance of ionized minerals and dissolved carbon dioxide, which leads to the alteration of breathing pattern and how body handles blood sugar. I did some addinational searching and saw that the sour taste connects to the wood element and liver/pancreas function, so I will pull a mild liver detox in the weekend and see how it helps. Cat, Thanks for the insert! I had previously noticed the term "bone breathing" somewhere, but now that I think about it, focusing the breath enter and leave the bones seems to bring further progress. Why didn't I figure that out earlier? I find it very humbling and immensely insightful to notice how I must once again get back to basics and integrate the foundational knowledge in new light. Blessings

My my, does the ghost of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck linger around here? I always found this article from Peter Svoboda as very fascinating for how he describes an Aghori adept who could change his eye color at will: Who knows what feats the cultivation arts might eventually enable. It almost seems as if strong, recurrent tendencies allow us to purposefully alter the physical function of the body. Perhaps consciousness has a stronger role in the biological evolution than we've ever admitted; I've always found the purely mechanical sense of "natural selection" quite inadequate to describe how the species mutate. Blessings

It has occurred to me that people spend absurd amounts of time in championing "the truth," or any such ontological or epistemological branch. I find it fairly clear that these discussions never concern about the truth or reality, but merely reflect its virtue and the desire for effective application: How to live a happy and satisfactory life? Dogmatic abstractions and intellectualization kill all the fun, and without the fun we can't find any attractive virtue that leads to the Way. Otherwise the religious nutjobs and secular moralists would've long since turned the world into a loving paradise. Instead we have had waves of competitive rationalization and petty justification over the minute aspects of human behavior. Wouldn't it do much better if we taught our children that we can never give a comprehensive answer for anything and that they should act as the sole authors to decide what is good for them, instead of shoving to them the rigid dogmas of interference and inhibition? Feeling good leads to acting good, and making them go the other way around seems very backwarded to me. Do we need to coerce and convince people to join a system of governance or money, or can they reach fair and mutually beneficial solutions without regulatory intervention from those who claim knowing better? For one thing, the emergence of hierarchies and jurisprudence endows the righteous with the licence to exploit and kill in the name of law and civility. We raise the children to obey the statutes and conventions because we, the parents, think those exemplify the measures of good human life. We ask for more innovation and entrepreneurship from our children, but contradictorily to this we first make sure that they all follow a standard model of thinking and behavior. Yet people seem perfectly capable of finding the good by trial and error when the network of social interaction does not stop them from doing so and learning thus. Show us; don't tell. Words imply a static presence, which is hardly enough to govern the world of changes. Blessings

1) For a long time I have had a craving for sour treats such as sauerkraut, and acidic dips and sauces. What imbalance does it imply in terms of Chinese medicine? Today I tried taking some vinegar with my meal, and for sure it did great for my usually awful blood sugar. I feel better and better almost every day, and this day made no exception, but I couldn't help but notice how the vinegar helped me. Thanks to drewhempel and cat for exposing this treasure, you guys rock! 2) When I concentrate on my bones, a curious sense of expansion takes place: It feels almost as if I use the outer muscles when I in fact don't. Does there exist a protocal of cultivation pertaining to this sensation, and should it be considered an important aspect of practice? Blessings

Hi mikaelz, Fundamentally I don't disagree with any of this: the consciousness represents a continuum including both the so-called "subject" and "object." However, my question still went unanswered. I will try to elucidate my position over the following quotes. Can we conclude that the Moon has no consciousness? Can we call consciousness a falsifiable concept in the first place, so that we could even argue of its ontology? See, your position seems to me that there exists a definite ontological basis for consciousness, but I by no means propose a contrarian view: My argument stated that consciousness transcends the previously mentioned four categories of existence, non-existence, both existence and non-existence, and neither existence nor non-existence. In the light of this, it would not matter what we argued, and this seems consistent with the view that the ultimate reality remains beyond the petty dualism of falsehood and truth. Do you think that awareness provides a shared, universal procedure upon which the universal harmony rests? Science explains that the universe exchanges ontological information with "virtual particles," but what else would we call this process if not the actual awareness? As such, I find it an imperative that the awareness deals with the knowledge of change instead of static being, or otherwise it would necessitate the existence of consciousness for celestial bodies, so that they would figure out and estimate where to go next with their knowledge of static locations and keep up with the harmony... I would call consciousness as the epiprocess of awareness. I wish I had an easier way of explaining this. Consciousness provided me with the means of forming a solid identity and intellectual cognition, but everything within it keeps changing according to some laws and rules that have no ontological basis. I can't affect whether I see red as red and blue as blue, nor can I alter sense desires when they arise without any previous solicitation. One may fight and resist this, but the way of going with the flow proved to be the optimal for both pleasure and balance. I stopped juggling around with the aggregates and trying to dodge the skandha rocks along the downstream of river. Sometimes I forget about myself and later realize that awareness had sustained the body and mental cohesion regardless of the apparent absence of the "being that watches over." With the death of the body the desires and inclinations may dissipate along with the consciousness, but the same undivided awareness still governs the world and gives the newly born fish the consciousness with typical duties and desires typical to that species. Still, I see no permanent substance, but a bundle of processes or skandhas that carry on without reason or shape, thus forming the totality we call consciousness. These processes go on like sometimes overlapping wave functions, and in no turn do they imply anything else than the inevitable change. Think of happenings, not things! All wisdom begins and ends with understanding how changes weave a harmonious continuum, which we cannot realize if we fixate upon the illusion of static existence. You can tell "things" apart; can you also tell what connects "them" in the continuum? If the process of causality changed, then it would become non-causality. If the law of gravitation changed, then it would become non-gravitation. If the process of awareness changed, then it would become non-awareness. I will reiterate my point with the transcendence of non-ontological descriptions: They don't possess any sensory or measurable quality, thus they are not subject to limits and changes. How can you differentiate a state without first contrasting it to something which you call not-state? By creating an identity you introduce the conditions of interdependency and impermanence. If you forget about existence, then you enter the timeless nothingness which both balances and endures. Apparent complexity often indicates a lack of careful analysis of the premises, so that you will have to represent reality with flawed concepts which add in ambiguity and confusion. So the moment should be understood as an isolated and permanent virtue or being? I can see here a contradiction with the doctrines of interdependence and non-permanence, since the moment never stands apart of its idealized precession and succession. By the way, can you exactly tell these three successive movements apart when and where they begin and end? Define me them, and then I will surely believe in the concept of existence. Please contrast this with the previous paragraph I wrote. Calling for an identity and telling the successive movements apart are equivalent conditions. Perhaps, but can you tell the three successions apart in the first place? I will grant that the complicated skandhas may form semi-stable feedback-looping which resembles self-awareness, but this impression cannot account for existence. What a silly debate we have! Blessings