JustARandomPanda

It need not be - nor did I intend for it to be U.S. centric. I don't live in Europe or South America so it would not be fair for me to start opining about the state of affairs in those countries or how plutocratic or fascist or insert-ideology-here they might have become. The only one I can comment for sure about is the one I live in. Comment on other continents would be due to reports from abroad. Likely the same for most of the other posters so far in this thread. But by all means...South Americans, Germans, Brits, Irish, NZ and Aussies please join in. If it goes off into discussing Europe or South American or Australia or whatever so much the better. My idea was to investigate if what I'm seeing around me lines up with the rhetoric - whether foreign or home-grown.

Whom is this Alinsky you are referring to Brian? I do not recognize this name and I have honestly tried to be widely read on many themes in politics, society and cultures, etc. P.s. I literally laughed over the "have-some-want-mores" Ah desires! What would humans be without you? All egos seemingly want the same things. LOL

Any country that traces back to the history of ancient Greece and Rome and Papal rule via Christianity. For example, I don't include India as part of "the West" even though it was ruled by Britain for many, many years. Papal rule never extended to India. Or at least I don't think it did. Indians already have their own rich tradition, laws and institutions that co-existed with Greece and Rome and Christianity and that remain to this day. My definition also includes countries most don't typically think of when thinking of "the West" (likely because they're not as rich as Europe or N.A. typically has been). For example I'd add Brazil and Bolivia in "the West" because of their historic ties and institutions with Spain - which to the best of my knowledge most people include Spain as part of "the West" rather than "the East" or "Oriental". Likewise I do not include Egypt as part of the West even though it fell under Greek aristocratic and later Roman rule. It's people maintained a distinct culture and it's institutions have ties to Islam.

This next article I'm posting is so depressing. What's worse is much of it is "legal". Many of these charities officially abide by the law but break it's spirit (intent). No wonder Master Nan Huai-Chin always advised his students to be very careful with how, where and what one donates to. Above the Law: America's Worst Charities

Just wanted to give a head's up for any TTB that owns a Kindle. Amazon has the following: In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Cannon on sale today for $3. I own the physical book and it's thick so you're getting a rather large selection of suttas from each section of the Pali Canon. It's a good buy folks! Like having AccesstoInsight.com on the go even when you don't have access to the internet. http://www.amazon.com/Buddhas-Words-Anthology-Discourses-ebook/dp/B0043D2FB2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1382039739&sr=1-1&keywords=in+the+buddhas+words

I've been waiting for Zhongyongtaoist and Isimsiz Biri to come back to this thread but it looks like it's dead for now. So I'm going to add in a few things over the next few months from my own investigations into Chinese classics. Particularly Confucianism since that's what I've been studying off and on for the past year - but also intend to add things about Mozi, Guanzi and a few other things (Lushi Chunqiu - the spring and fall annals for example). In the meantime I thought I'd share the following article which was published this month on The Atlantic Monthly's website. Hope everyone enjoys it. p.s. I actually appreciated the addition of Sufism. If only for providing yet another culture's attempts to highlight how-to on 'wordless/concept-less/notion-less living' as I call it. ******************* Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy? The professor who teaches Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory claims, "This course will change your life." Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together. It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago. Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus. Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.” His students tell me it is true: that Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life. Elizabeth Malkin, a student in the course last year, says, “The class absolutely changed my perspective of myself, my peers, and of the way I view the world.” Puett puts a fresh spin on the questions that Chinese scholars grappled with centuries ago. He requires his students to closely read original texts (in translation) such as Confucius’s Analects, the Mencius, and the Daodejing and then actively put the teachings into practice in their daily lives. His lectures use Chinese thought in the context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing life. Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals” than he did when he began teaching nearly 20 years ago. A recent report shows a steep decline over the last decade in the number of Harvard students who are choosing to major in the humanities, a trend roughly seen across the nation’s liberal arts schools. Finance remains the most popular career for Harvard graduates. Puett sees students who orient all their courses and even their extracurricular activities towards practical, predetermined career goals and plans. Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan. Students who do this “are not paying enough attention to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,” he explains. If what excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him, he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling career. Puett aims to open his students’ eyes to a different way to approach everything from relationships to career decisions. He teaches them that: The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications. Confucius, Mencius, and other Chinese philosophers taught that the most mundane actions can have a ripple effect, and Puett urges his students to become more self-aware, to notice how even the most quotidian acts—holding open the door for someone, smiling at the grocery clerk—change the course of the day by affecting how we feel. That rush of good feeling that comes after a daily run, the inspiring conversation with a good friend, or the momentary flash of anger that arises when someone cuts in front of us in line—what could they have to do with big life matters? Everything, actually. From a Chinese philosophical point of view, these small daily experiences provide us endless opportunities to understand ourselves. When we notice and understand what makes us tick, react, feel joyful or angry, we develop a better sense of who we are that helps us when approaching new situations. Mencius, a late Confucian thinker (4th century B.C.E.), taught that if you cultivate your better nature in these small ways, you can become an extraordinary person with an incredible influence, altering your own life as well as that of those around you, until finally “you can turn the whole world in the palm of your hand.” Decisions are made from the heart. Americans tend to believe that humans are rational creatures who make decisions logically, using our brains. But in Chinese, the word for “mind” and “heart” are the same. Puett teaches that the heart and the mind are inextricably linked, and that one does not exist without the other. Whenever we make decisions, from the prosaic to the profound (what to make for dinner; which courses to take next semester; what career path to follow; whom to marry), we will make better ones when we intuit how to integrate heart and mind and let our rational and emotional sides blend into one. Zhuangzi, a Daoist philosopher, taught that we should train ourselves to become “spontaneous” through daily living, rather than closing ourselves off through what we think of as rational decision-making. In the same way that one deliberately practices the piano in order to eventually play it effortlessly, through our everyday activities we train ourselves to become more open to experiences and phenomena so that eventually the right responses and decisions come spontaneously, without angst, from the heart-mind. Recent research into neuroscience is confirming that the Chinese philosophers are correct: Brain scans reveal that our unconscious awareness of emotions and phenomena around us are actually what drive the decisions we believe we are making with such logical rationality. According to Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale, if we see a happy face for just a fraction of a second (4 milliseconds to be exact), that’s long enough to elicit a mini emotional high. In one study viewers who were flashed a smile—even though it was shown too quickly for them to even realize they had seen it—perceived the things around them more positively. If the body leads, the mind will follow. Behaving kindly (even when you are not feeling kindly), or smiling at someone (even if you aren’t feeling particularly friendly at the moment) can cause actual differences in how you end up feeling and behaving, even ultimately changing the outcome of a situation. While all this might sound like hooey-wooey self-help, much of what Puett teaches is previously accepted cultural wisdom that has been lost in the modern age. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” a view shared by thinkers such as Confucius, who taught that the importance of rituals lies in how they inculcate a certain sensibility in a person. In research published in Psychological Science, social psychologist Amy Cuddy and her colleagues found that when we take a power stance (stand with our legs apart, arms thrust out, taking up space), the pose does not only cause other people to view us as more confident and powerful; it actually causes a hormonal surge that makes us become more confident. At the end of each class, Puett challenges his students to put the Chinese philosophy they have been learning into tangible practice in their everyday lives. “The Chinese philosophers we read taught that the way to really change lives for the better is from a very mundane level, changing the way people experience and respond to the world, so what I try to do is to hit them at that level. I’m not trying to give my students really big advice about what to do with their lives. I just want to give them a sense of what they can do daily to transform how they live.” Their assignments are small ones: to first observe how they feel when they smile at a stranger, hold open a door for someone, engage in a hobby. He asks them to take note of what happens next: how every action, gesture, or word dramatically affects how others respond to them. Then Puett asks them to pursue more of the activities that they notice arouse positive, excited feelings. In their papers and discussion sections students discuss what it means to live life according to the teachings of these philosophers. Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them. You don’t have to be stuck doing what you happen to be good at; merely pay attention to what you love and proceed from there. Chinese philosophers taught that paying attention to small clues “can literally change everything that we can become as human beings,” says Puett. To be interconnected, focus on mundane, everyday practices, and understand that great things begin with the very smallest of acts are radical ideas for young people living in a society that pressures them to think big and achieve individual excellence. This might be one reason why, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education, interest in Chinese philosophy is taking off around the nation—not just at Harvard. And it’s a message that’s especially resonating with those yearning for an alternative to the fast track they have been on all their lives. One of Puett’s former students, Adam Mitchell, was a math and science whiz who went to Harvard intending to major in economics. At Harvard specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward. But after his introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him, and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. Mitchell threw himself into foreign language learning, feels his relationships have deepened, and is today working towards a master’s degree in regional studies. He told me, “I can happily say that Professor Puett lived up to his promise, that the course did in fact change my life.” ********** p.s. wanted to add a cheaper alternative to Wei Tu Ming's Humanity and Self Cultivation is a book from Robert E. Canright - Achieve Lasting Happiness. Canright thanks Tu Ming in the Forward for introducing him to the wisdom of Confucius and why he had such a huge influence of Chinese culture for hundreds of years. There's also this fascinating ditty I hope to check out sometime Was Pythagoras Chinese? An Examination of the Right Triangle Theory in Ancient China

It's not just America that's in decline. Check it out. ************ by John Michael Greer There's a mordant irony in the fact that a society as fixated on the future as ours is should have so much trouble thinking clearly about it. Partly, to be sure, that difficulty unfolds from the sheer speed of social and technological change in the age of cheap abundant energy that’s now coming to an end, but there’s more to it than that. In the civil religions of the modern world, the future functions as a surrogate for heaven and hell alike, the place where the wicked will finally get the walloping they deserve and the good will be granted the promised benefits that the present never quite gets around to providing them. What Nietzsche called the death of God—in less colorful language, the fading out of living religious belief as a significant force in public life—left people across the Western world flailing for something to backstop the sense of moral order in the cosmos they once derived from religious faith. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a great many of them found what they wanted in one or another civil religion that projected some version of utopia onto the future. It’s crucial not to underestimate the emotional force of the resulting beliefs. The future of perpetual betterment promised by the faith in progress, and the utopia on the far side of cataclysm promised with equal fervor by the faith in apocalypse, are no less important to their believers than heaven is to the ordinary Christian, and for exactly the same reason. Every human society has its own conception of the order of the cosmos; the distinctive concept of cosmic order that became central to the societies of Europe and the European diaspora envisioned a moral order that could be understood, down to the fine details, by human beings. Since everyday life pretty clearly fails to follow such an order, there had to be some offstage location where everything would balance out, whether that location took the form of heaven, humanity’s future among the stars, a future society of equality and justice, or what have you. Discard that imagined place and, for a great many people in the Western world, the cosmos ceases to have any order or meaning at all. It was precisely against this sense of moral order, though, that Nietzsche declared war. Like any good general, he sent his forces into action along several routes at once; the assault relevant to our theme was aimed at the belief that the arithmetic of morality would finally add up in some other place or time. He rejected the idea of a utopian world of past or future just as forcefully as he did the concept of heaven itself. That’s one of the things his doctrine of eternal return was intended to do: by revisioning the past and the future as endless repetition, Nietzsche did his level best to block any attempt to make the past or the future fill the role once filled by heaven. Here, though, he overplayed his hand. Strictly speaking, a cycle of eternal return is just as imaginary as any golden age in the distant past, or for that matter the glorious future come the Revolution when we will all eat strawberries and cream. In a philosophy that presents itself as a Yes-saying to life exactly as it is, his reliance on a theory of time just as unprovable as those he assaulted was a massive problem. Nietzsche’s madness, and the resolute effort on the part of most European intellectuals of the time not to think about any of the issues he tried to raise, left this point among many others hanging in the air. Decades passed before another German thinker tackled the same challenge with better results. His name, as I think most of my regular readers have guessed by now, was Oswald Spengler. Spengler was in his own way as eccentric a figure as Nietzsche, though it was a more stereotypically German eccentricity than Nietzsche’s fey Dionysian aestheticism. A cold, methodical, solitary man, he spent his entire working life as a schoolteacher, and all his spare time—he never married—with his nose in a polymath’s banquet of books from every corner of scholarship. Old Kingdom Egyptian theology, traditional Chinese landscape design, the history of the medieval Russian church, the philosophical schools of ancient India, the latest discoveries in early twentieth century physics: all these and more were grist for his highly adaptable mill. In 1914, as the impending fall of the British empire was sweeping Europe into a vortex of war, he started work on the first volume of The Decline of the West; it appeared in 1918, and the second volume followed it in 1922. The books became immediate bestsellers in German and several other languages—this despite a world-class collective temper tantrum on the part of professional historians. Logos, one of the most prestigious German scholarly journals of the time, ran an entire special issue on him, in which historians engaged in a frenzy of nitpicking about Spengler’s historical claims. (Spengler, unperturbed, read the issue, doublechecked his facts, released a new edition of his book with corrections, and pointed out that none of the nitpicking addressed any of the major points of his book; he was right, too.) One study of the furore around Spengler noted more than 400 publications, most of them hostile, discussing The Decline of the West in the decade of the 1920s alone. Interest in Spengler’s work peaked in the 1920s and 1930s and faded out after the Second World War; some of the leading figures of the "Beat generation" used to sit around a table reading The Decline of the West out loud, and a few other figures of the 1950s drew on his ideas, but thereafter silence closed in. There’s an ironic contrast here to Nietzsche, who provided Spengler with so many of his basic insights; Nietzsche’s work was almost completely unknown during his life and became a massive cultural presence after his death; with Spengler, the sequence ran the other way around. The central reason why Spengler was so fiercely if inconclusively attacked by historians in his own time, and so comprehensively ignored since then, is the same reason why he’s relevant to the present theme. At the core of his work stood the same habit of morphological thinking I discussed in an earlier post in this sequence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who launched the study of comparative morphology in the life sciences in the eighteenth century, remained a massive cultural presence in the Germany of Spengler’s time, and so it came naturally to Spengler to line up the great civilizations of history side by side and compare their histories, in the same way that a biologist might compare a dolphin’s flipper to a bat’s wing, to see the common patterns of deep structure that underlie the surface differences. Such comparisons are surprisingly unfashionable in modern historical studies. Most other fields of study rely on comparisons as a matter of course: the astronomer compares one nebula to another, just as the literary critic compares one experimental novel to another, and in both fields it’s widely accepted that such comparisons are the most important way to get past irrelevancies to an understanding of what’s really going on. There are historical works that compare, say, one revolution to others, or one feudal system to another, but these days they’re in the minority. More often, historians consider the events of some period in the past by themselves, without placing them in the context of comparable periods or events, and either restrict themselves to storytelling or propose assorted theories about the causes of those events—theories that can never be put to the test, because it’s all but impossible to test a hypothesis when you’re limited to a sample size of one. The difficulty with a morphological approach to history is precisely that a sample size of more than one turns up patterns that next to nobody in the modern industrial world wants to think about. By placing past civilizations side by side with that of the modern industrial West, Spengler found that all the great historical changes that our society sees as uniquely its own have exact equivalents in older societies. Each society emerges out of chaos as a decentralized feudal society, with a warrior aristocracy and an epic poetry so similar that an enterprising bard could have recited the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh in an Anglo-Saxon meadhall without anyone present sensing the least incongruity. Each then experiences corresponding shifts in social organization: the meadhalls and their equivalents give way to castles, the castles to fortified towns, the towns to cities, and then a few of the cities outgrow all the others and become the centers in which the last stages of the society’s creative life are worked out. Meanwhile, in the political sphere, feudal aristocrats become subject to kings, who are displaced by oligarchies of the urban rich, and these latter eventually fall before what Spengler calls Caesarism, the emergence of charismatic leaders who attract a following from the urban masses and use that strength to seize power from the corrupt institutions of an oligarchic state. Traditional religions rich in myth give way to rationalist philosophies as each society settles on the intellectual projects that will define its legacy to the future—for example, logical method in the classical world, and natural science in ours. Out of the diverse background of folk crafts and performances, each culture selects the set of art forms that will become the focus of its creative life, and these evolve in ever more distinctive ways; Gilgamesh and Beowulf could just as well have swapped swords and fought each other’s monsters, for example, but the briefest glance at plays from ancient Greece, India, China, and the Western world shows a wholly different dramatic and aesthetic language at work in each. All this might have been forgiven Spengler, but the next step in the comparison passes into territory that makes most people in the modern West acutely uncomfortable. Spengler argued that the creative potential of every culture is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, everything worth bothering with that can be done with Greek sculpture, Chinese porcelain, Western oil painting, or any other creative art has been done; sooner or later, the same exhaustion occurs in every other dimension of a culture’s life—its philosophies, its political forms, you name it. At that point, in the terms that Spengler used, a culture turns into a civilization, and its focus shifts from creating new forms to sorting through the products of its creative centuries, choosing a selection of political, intellectual, religious, artistic, and social patterns that will be sustainable over the long term, and repeating those thereafter in much the same way that a classical orchestra in the modern West picks and chooses out of the same repertoire of standard composers and works. As that last example suggests, furthermore, Spengler didn’t place the transition from Western culture to its subsequent civilization at some conveniently far point in the future. According to his chronology, that transition began in the nineteenth century and would be complete by 2100 or so. The traditional art forms of the Western world would reach the end of the line, devolving into empty formalism or staying on in mummified form, the way classical music is preserved today; political ideologies would turn into empty slogans providing an increasingly sparse wardrobe to cover the naked quest for power; Western science, having long since exhausted the low-hanging fruit in every field, would wind down into a repetition of existing knowledge, and most forms of technology would stagnate, while a few technological fields capable of yielding grandiose prestige projects would continue to be developed for a while; rationalism would be preserved in intellectual circles, while popular religious movements riddled with superstition would rule the mental life of the bulk of the population. Progress in any Western sense of the word would be over forever, for future cultures would choose their own directions in which to develop, as different from ours as ours is from the traditional Chinese or the Mayans. Spengler didn’t leave these projections of the future in abstract form; he turned them into detailed predictions about the near future, and those predictions have by and large turned out to be correct. He was wrong in thinking that Germany would become an imperial state that would unite the Western world the way Rome united the classical world, the kingdom of Qin united China, and so on, though it’s fair to say that Germany’s two efforts to fill that role came uncomfortably close to succeeding. Other than that, his aim has proved remarkably good. He argued, for example, that the only artistic forms that could have any vitality in 20th century Europe and America would take their inspiration from other, non-Western cultures. Popular music, which was dominated by African-derived jazz in the first half of the century and African-derived rock thereafter, is only one of many examples. As for politics, he suggested that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be dominated by a struggle pitting charismatic national dictators against a globalized oligarchy of high finance lightly concealed under a mask of democracy, a struggle that the financiers would eventually lose. Though the jury’s still out on the final outcome, the struggle itself is splashed over the news on a daily basis. All these events took place in other times and places, and will take place in future societies, each in its own way. What distinguishes contemporary Western society from earlier urban civilizations, according to Spengler’s view, is not that it’s "more advanced," "more progressive"—every society goes in a different direction, and proceeds along that route until the same law of diminishing returns cuts in—but simply that it happened to take mastery of physical matter and energy as its special project, and in the process stumbled across the buried carbon we’re burning so extravagantly just now. It’s hard to think of any historical vision less flattering to the inherited egotism of the modern industrial West; it deprives us of our imagined role as the cutting edge of humanity in its grand upward march toward the stars, and plops us back down to earth as just one civilization among many, rising and falling along with the rest. It’s in this way that Spengler proved to be Nietzsche’s heir. Where Nietzsche tried to challenge the imaginary utopia at the end of history with an equally imaginary vision of eternal return, Spengler offered a vision that was not imaginary, but rather rested on a foundation of historical fact. Where Nietzsche’s abandonment of a moral order to the cosmos left him staring into an abyss in which order and meaning vanished once and for all, Spengler presented an alternative vision of cosmic order in which morality is not a guiding principle, but simply a cultural form, human-invented, that came and went with the tides of history. Life was as much Spengler’s banner as it was Nietzsche’s, life in the full biological sense of the word, unreasoning, demanding, and resistant to change over less than geological time scales; the difference was that Nietzsche saw life as the abyss, while Spengler used it to found his sense of an ordered universe and ultimately his values as well. It’s among the richest ironies of Spengler’s project that among the things that he relativized and set in a historic context was Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche liked to imagine himself as a figure of destiny, poised at the turning point of the ages—this was admittedly a common occupational disease of nineteenth-century philosophers. Spengler noted his debts to Nietzsche repeatedly in The Decline of the West, but kept a sense of perspective the older man lacked; in the table of historical parallels that finishes the first volume of Spengler’s book, Nietzsche has become one more symptom of the late, "Winter" phase of Western culture, one of many figures participating in the final disintegration of traditional religious thought at the hands of skeptical intellectuals proposing new systems of philosophical ethics. When Nietzsche announced the death of God, in other words, he was filling a role familiar in other ages, announcing an event that occurs on schedule in the life of each culture. The Greek historian Plutarch had announced the death of Pan some eighteen centuries earlier, around the time that the classical world was settling firmly into the end-state of civilization; the people of ancient Crete, perhaps recalling some similar event even further back, used to scandalize Greek tourists by showing them the grave of Zeus. Every literate urban society, Spengler argued, followed the same trajectory from an original folk religion rich in myths, through the rise of intellectual theology, the birth of rationalism, the gradual dissolution of the religious worldview into rational materialism, and then the gradual disintegration of rational materialism into a radical skepticism that ends by dissolving itself; thereafter ethical philosophies for the intellectuals and resurgent folk religion for the masses provide the enduring themes for the civilization to come. It’s a stark vision, especially painful to those who have been raised to see the most recent phases of that process in our own culture as the heralds of the bright new era of history presupposed by the Joachimist shape of time, or the initial shockwaves of the imminent apocalypse presupposed by its Augustinian rival. Defenders of these latter viewpoints have accordingly developed standard ways of countering Spengler’s challenge—or, more precisely, defenders of both have settled on the same way of doing so. We’ll discuss their argument, and place it in its own wider context, in next week’s post.

Is there a DVD or book that teaches this Gift of the Tao running qigong? I am VERY interested in learning this.

Thought I would share this YouTube vid given by U.G. Krishnamurti. He says a lot of interesting things about thought, thinking, space-time, science, Descarte's I Think Therefore I Am and most of all - what he calls The Mystique of Enlightenment - which is the title of the Youtube vid. Ever since I discovered him several years ago I'd been interested in some of the things he said. I love his critique of Descarte and of people wedded to thinking in general (or as J.K. Rowling calls them - muggles). Imo this YouTube vid could just as well be (and far more accurately) titled The Mystique of Thinking and Opinions - since that's the discourse he keeps coming back to over and over and over in the interview. Wanted to mention U.G. discusses the scientific search for the Higgs-Boson particle and science in general.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I did too! It really hit home for me because the very things he's saying I only just recently - like within the past 2 weeks - came to the same conclusion myself. For the past 1.5 years I've had the growing conviction that there is no way I can understand death until I understand why and how I'm alive. I've done the following for the past year: 1. wonder what keeps me here - sustained - instead of suddenly blipping out of existence (like someone turning off a tv). 2. where do "I" go if there's no thoughts, emotions or sensations? Would there be any "me" at all if those disappear? 3. More and more I'd come to the conclusion that practically every avenue I'm used to does not answer that question. Krishnamurti is essentially saying it won't answer the question because it never will be able to answer it. As Einstein once said you can't solve a problem on the same level its created. The very instrument that asks the question "is there a me that's going to die and if so where will I go" - is the only thing that's interested in being sustained. physical bodies don't worry about living eternally or not. A physical body - devoid of an "I" and "me" - isn't interested in whether it will live eternally. It doesn't even know to care about such. That's why he keeps saying a body doesn't know if it's dead or alive. To care it'd have to know and to know it'd have to care. What gives knowing and caring? Thoughts. Thoughts are what know and care about living eternally and becoming enlightened because that's a way thoughts will ensure their being in perpetuity. To me it's as if thoughts (weirdly enough) somehow know they aren't the substantial things they want to be and so thoughts run the thought-program "me" and "I" to try to make something so that in its natural state isn't true. If you watch the program in depth you'll notice Krishnamurti actually says he doesn't want to deny that there have been enlightened beings in the past. But whatever enlightenment is is something that thoughts - which creates the "me" and "I" - will never be able to know or experience. Because knowing and experiencing are all within the realm of thoughts. Oddly enough - hearing Krishnamurti has made some things that Master Nan Huai-Chin talk about suddenly become more understandable. You know something even weirder? VMarco would be in complete agreement with everything Krishnamurti just said in this YouTube vid. So would deci belle.

Then you need to argue this with Sean himself or else just take action to find another board to participate at regularly. He got into it with Seth Ananda point by point on one particular thread that it was discussion of opinion/views and not specifically promoting an anti-gay agenda by certain posters as Seth Ananda claimed. It was a thread as I recall you also posted needed to have the posters warned and suspended. He point by point said the points mentioned did not violate the ToS and as such there was no ground for Mod or Admin action. He did the same when a huge dispute broke out among mods as to whether sexist posts are permitted at TTB and whether there had been a violation of the ToS. Again...he went over it with the mods...point by point in each thread - that the assorted issues pointed out as being sexist positions were in fact NOT such at all and were rather debating a position. To take action was to be in favor of censorship. There is the one thing I learned as a mod very well and that is that Sean is extremely anti-censorship. He goes to very, very great lengths to avoid it. He would rather every reader learn self-governance/self-realization than depend upon outside circumstances to govern our reactions to a poster and/or posts. I've only been trying to explain why so many people see the modding at TTB as erratic and strange. Originally Sean didn't see the need for Mods at all. Those were the days of the Wild West at TTB. Maybe we should go back to that. I'm gonna bow out of this thread. Modding for me at least was a thankless job (unlike cat I never got any 'thank you' emails). I wish everyone well. And here's something else. I've started a thread in my own PPF on Aaron's subject of whether the West is Fascist or not. I invite you to it if you'd like to discuss it. At the very least it will relieve the mods of having to pick and choose. And for sure you'd know where the buck stopped in a PPF. Cheers to everyone.

The "dropping the ball" on modding happens for a number of reasons. Many times because there is disagreement among mods as to whether a post has violated ToS at all. There's a big concern of becoming heavy-handed and ending up censoring even if in the beginning the intent is meant well. The style of modding has evolved the way it has because of Sean's default position. He's the kind of guy whom waits for 100% agreement in modding disputes before moving to take action. This is even the case when by rights he could over-rule the deliberation simply because he's the owner of the board. He himself will wait for 100% agreement before acting. He permits a lot of things on this board to stay posted that many members here would rather see pitted or the poster suspended. He once told me personally - when I got into a debate with him - that a lot of calls on the boards to suspend or pit other posts/posters is because 'our hearts are not big enough' (those were his exact words to me) to let people simply be and post and yet we ourselves remain unruffled. This is part of the growth we ourselves need to do at Taobums. Or so his arguments with me all pointed to. For example: he's permitted many threads to stay that others found to be anti-gay and anti-female. Until you understand the position of 'growing our hearts' that Sean intends for all board participants the modding at Taobums will always seem erratic and strange and preferential.

Thought everyone would enjoy this post. The author reminds me a lot of the ecological Druid John Michael Greer and (now deceased) ecologist Garett Harding. Also there's some similarities that bring to my mind the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. *********** What is an American Conservative? Earlier this week I began a series of lectures in one of my classes on the thought of the Anti-Federalists. I began by echoing some of the conclusions of the great compiler and interpreter of the Anti-Federalist writings, Herbert Storing, whose summation of their thought is found in his compact introductory volume, What the Anti-Federalists Were For. I began with the first main conclusion of that book, that in the context of the debate over the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were the original American conservatives. I then related a series of positions that were held by the Anti-Federalist opponents of the proposed Constitution. To wit: They insisted on the importance of a small political scale, particularly because a large expanse of diverse citizens makes it difficult to arrive at a shared conception of the common good and an overly large scale makes direct participation in political rule entirely impracticable if not impossible. They believed that laws were and ought to be educative, and insisted upon the centrality of virtue in a citizenry. Among the virtues most prized was frugality, and they opposed an expansive, commercial economy that would draw various parts of the Union into overly close relations, thereby encouraging avarice, and particularly opposed trade with foreign nations, which they believed would lead the nation to compromise its independence for lucre. They were strongly in favor of “diversity,” particularly relatively bounded communities of relatively homogeneous people, whose views could then be represented (that is, whose views could be “re-presented”) at the national scale in very numerous (and presumably boisterous) assemblies. They believed that laws were only likely to be followed when more or less directly assented to by the citizenry, and feared that as distance between legislators and the citizenry increased, that laws would require increased force of arms to achieve compliance. For that reason, along with their fears of the attractions of international commerce and of imperial expansion, they strongly opposed the creation of a standing army and insisted instead upon state-based civilian militias. They demanded inclusion of a Bill of Rights, among which was the Second Amendment, the stress of which was not on individual rights of gun ownership, but collective rights of civilian self-defense born of fear of a standing army and the temptations to “outsource” civic virtue to paid mercenaries. As I disclosed the positions of the Anti-Federalists, I could see puzzlement growing on the faces of a number of students, until one finally exclaimed—”this doesn’t sound like conservatism at all!” Conservatism, for these 18-to-22-year-olds, has always been associated with George W. Bush: a combination of cowboy, crony capitalism, and foreign adventurism in search of eradicating evil from the world. To hear the views of the Anti-Federalists described as “conservative” was the source of severe cognitive dissonance, a deep confusion about what, exactly, is meant by conservatism. So I took a step back and discussed several ways by which we might understand what is meant by conservatism—first, as a set of dispositions, then as a response to the perceived threats emanating from a revolutionary (or even merely reformist) left, and then as a set of contested substantive positions. And, I suggested, only by connecting the first and third, and understanding the instability of the second, could one properly arrive at a conclusion such as that of Storing, who would describe the positions of the Anti-Federalists as “conservative.” First, there is the conservative disposition, one articulated perhaps most brilliantly by Russell Kirk, who described conservatism above all not as a set of policy positions, but as a general view toward the world. That disposition especially finds expression in a “piety toward the wisdom of one’s ancestors,” a respect for the ancestral that only with great caution, hesitancy, and forbearance seeks to introduce or accept change into society. It is supremely wary of the only iron law of politics—the law of unintended consequences (e.g., a few conservatives predicted that the introduction of the direct primary in the early 1900′s would lead to increasingly extreme ideological divides and the increased influence of money in politics. In the zeal for reform, no one listened). It also tends toward a pessimistic view of history, more concerned to prevent the introduction of corruption in a decent regime than driven to pursue change out a belief in progress toward a better future. Conservatism—as a conscious political philosophy, rather than simply as a way of being in the world—begins as a reaction to the revolutionary movements arising from the Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution. Its “founder,” of course, was Edmund Burke, whose opposition to the French Revolution was the embodiment of this conservative disposition, displaying, with rhetorical brilliance, a prophetic vision of the tendencies of this revolutionary ideology toward barbaric inhumanity in the name of progress. Conservatism also takes a more problematic form—one of simple reaction to the opposition. As a reaction to the left, conservatism has always been prone to drift—it will tend to articulate its position in opposition to the current stances of progressives. Thus, today it is far from the positions once held by the likes of the Anti-Federalists: rather, it has assumed a series of positions that can only be described as closer to the vision of Hamilton—the most nationalist and commercial-minded of the Federalists—now aligned in opposition to a left that has since embraced the historicist philosophy of Progressivism. Where once American conservatives opposed an expansive commercial economy, today they are its champions. Where they once decried identification with the nation over localities, states, and regions, today they are the most vociferous nationalists. (Long forgotten is the fact that the Pledge of Allegiance was originally written in 1892 by the socialist Francis Bellamy, cousin of the utopian novelist, Edward Bellamy, during the high-water mark of the Progressive era.) Where they once deeply mistrusted “foreign entanglements” and insisted upon a citizen militia, fearing that a standing army would become subservient to the ambitions of a distant elite political class, today they are the close allies of the “military-industrial complex.” In each instance, they have moved to occupy the positions once occupied by the left. No wonder my students were puzzled. Only by linking a conservative disposition with relevant substance can we avoid the tendency of conservatism simply to march a step behind the left, of becoming a ship buffeted by historicist winds with a permanently leftward drift. The Anti-Federalists were conservatives not only because they were wary of the introduction of political innovation in the form of the Constitution; they saw its basic “tendency” as one of “consolidation,” a solution born of a purported political emergency that called for the scuttling of the then-inadequate political document, the Articles of Confederation. They believed especially that emergency powers would be constantly invoked by the executive, and that these powers would never stand down—that accumulation of power to the center would increase steadily, irreversibly, and with gathering strength. They predicted that the Supreme Court would eventually invalidate laws of the states, becoming a powerful unelected star chamber that would advance the liberal agenda on a national scale. The very argument that “times” would demand a fundamental change would be used later by the Progressives to discover a “living Constitution,” an eventuality predicted by the Anti-Federalists. Like Burke, their conservatism gave them a special gift of prescience, an awareness of both unintended—but also intended—consequences. Today’s conservatives are liberals—they favor an economy that wreaks “creative destruction,” especially on the mass of “non-winners,” increasingly controlled by a few powerful actors who secure special benefits for themselves and their heirs; a military that is constructed to be only loyal to the central authority in the capital, frequently moved about to avoid any rooted loyalty, and increasingly isolated from most fellow citizens; an increasingly utilitarian view of education aimed at creating individuals who will become able cogs in a globalized industrial system, largely without allegiance or loyalty; proponents of an increasingly homogenized society whose allegiance is to a set of ideas, especially a “more perfect union,” which Francis Bellamy expressed, was inspired by the example of the French Revolution. One reaction to my previous article, denouncing an economic system creating a two-class society, suspected me of not being conservative at all, even of harboring Marxist inclinations. This constitutes a logical error—just because Marx was a critic of capitalism, that does not make all critics of capitalism Marxist. To such criticisms, I can only reply—if what you seek to conserve is liberalism, then you’re right, I’m no conservative. And by today’s definition, who, except a few discredited neo-conservatives (a.k.a., paleo-liberals) trying to reignite the good old days of the Cold War, would want to be so defined? If conservatism is broken today, we need only blame liberalism. There is only one party in America—your choice is liberalism with deliberate speed, or liberalism in a hurry. What is needed is a new, doubtless very different, American conservatism.

....

To really understand this text it is extremely helpful to read chapters 13 and 14 of Master Nan Huai-Chin's masterpiece Working Toward Enlightenment. Once you read these chapters you'll see that the Nie-Yeh is actually explaining in detail seeing Original Nature - the Tao. There is wisdom in this poem that talks about cultivating realization - of which one method is cultivating the breath (which is the beginning of cultivating the 5 elements and seeing them return to Tao). I can not stress enough how much Nie-yeh is a practical manual of cultivation.

I've been busy these past few months getting much deeper into meditation and trying to get through assorted blockages. Recently I'd swear that for brief moments my 'center of being' has moved from my head to the center of my chest. I guess that is the heart center (heart mind)? Tonight was a good meditation session. I'd been ruminating briefly about the text . But something came up unbidden tonight that surprised me and I do not know what to make of it. I'd swear I got the impression a Taoist Being (Immortal?) visited me only a few moments ago (I could sense him plain as day!) and granted me these lines: Hexigram 16 Daughter Under Mountain In Winter Old Yang becomes Yin Hexigram 16 And then he left!! And I am absolutely befuddled. I have never studied the I Ching ever so I do not really understand what these lines are telling me. I do have a copy of the I Ching (Master Alfred Huang) so about the only thing I could figure out to do was simply look up Hexigram 16. Master Huang translates 16 as Delight Then he goes on to discuss what this hexigram means (I presume) depending on which line it's placed in? There were many different interpretations for just this one hexigram. Some were of seemingly good omen (lots of times they seemed variations of 'persevere and you'll be rewarded' type) but others seemed to indicate pride and conceit which leads to woe. Or I guess as a westerner might say "pride goeth before the fall" So I do not know if these lines are the Tao telling me to persevere and I'll make progress in meditating or if I'm scheduled for some sort of woe this coming winter. Does anyone have any idea what this might mean?

Has anyone had any experience with the following book by Damo Mitchell? Heavenly Streams: Meridian Theory in Nei Gong The blurb reads as follows:

Under, Check your PMs.

Found a Platonist/NeoPlatonist site to share with others. Enjoy!

Just for all us Buddha Bums!

A little something to cheer you up!

I like the idea except there are a few issues all the Vedanta forum fans need to consider. 1. Sean (the owner of Taobums) is the only Admin for the site. That means he is the only one who actually has access to the software controls that can create such a subforum. 2. Sean let the Mods know that he is very, very busy lately and simply does not have the time this year to be involved with running Taobums. That means he actually delegated all running of the site to the Mods. Also...even we - the Mods - have a very difficult time getting a hold of him. Believe me. We've tried on several occasions and months will go by with not a reply from him. So it could be months before I or other Mods could even hear back from him - much less see if we could convince him to create such a subforum. 3. I was thinking...since it IS so difficult to get a hold of Sean (and there doesn't seem to be any indication this will change through this year or possibly the next) it might be easier to create a Pinned Topic within the Vedanta forum for discussion of the Upanishads or whatever other traditional literature Vedanta forum participants might like. That IS something the Mods have access to. Furthermore...since I'm pretty much the only Mod on the team that has a deep interest in the subject I don't think the other Mods would object to having such Pinned Topics within this forum. Especially if it became clear to them that there was enthusiasm for such among the Vedanta (this goes for the Buddhist forum as well) forum participants. Edit: Oh F*** it. I'm gonna pin this sucker anyway. If any of the other Mods squawk and throw a hissy fit - too bad. LOL. I just like the idea too much. So! Let's get started discussing the Upanishads! Woot!

Thought any TTB gamers might enjoy this little ditty. Makes me glad I'm a PC gamer instead....

Well dunno how XBox gamers take achievements. I'm only aware of achievements on Steam. They seem like a nice little freebie Valve tosses out but some Steam gamers take pride in getting some of the odder or more difficult badges for whatever game their playing. Any current 360 gamers here? Do you take trophy placement seriously?

Don't do what you want. Then you may do what you like.