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104 year old woman: "Dr Pepper is good it has sugar in it." 104 year old woman: "Two doctors have told me if I drink it I'll die." 104 year old woman: "But they died first."

try if you dare you might get worse than “sore eyes”

nature´s best haiku a haiku without comment autumn´s first snowfall

(I haven’t read this thread) oh go on, you know you want to.

political talk transcendental type rambling best not to comment -- Haiku of the Day inspired by old3bob and stirling

There's very little truth in what the public has been led to believe about what's healthy. Also about what it is we're actually eating, drinking and smoking -- a lot of it is grossly falsified, depleted, and poisoned. "Feed the ancestors," meaning the ancestral make-up of your own body, which is one of the taoist culinary principles, can IMO serve one better -- try eating what generations of your ancestors ate before you, not the latest fad. Although a lot of our ancestors were starving, not fasting by choice but starving due to poverty and social upheavals and endless wars. Yet those of them who were well-to-do enough to eat "healthy" had access to the kinds and varieties of food we can only dream about. (My grandmother on my mother's side used to tell me what was eaten in her mother's home in the early 20th century and all I could do was salivate. On my father's side, however, the ancestors were very poor and lived through periods of starvation. My mother's side of the family were the longevity folks, not my father's side.)

I like avocado but let’s face it, a cigar is a smoke.

are there health benefits of nicotine? i.e. not the smoke itself? I heard (maybe on this site, actually) that is preventative against alzheimers? They have nicotine lozenges that one can take, for example.

@Taomeow this is very good news. I have given up smoking except the occasional one bummed off a friend. But I was intending to start cigars from my 80th and of course I drink red wine almost daily. I may bring the smoking forward on this news. After all one needs an occupation - to misquote Oscar Wilde.

This is a very important key. I asked AI (Grok) about smokers and drinkers among the verified longest lived individuals. Here's a partial list (there's a bunch of others too who have birth documents but "are not fully verified" so I skipped their names) Name Country Age at death Smoked? Drank? Notes Jeanne Calment France 122 y 164 d Yes – ~2 cigarettes/day for 96 years, quit at 117 Port wine daily The absolute record holder (verified) Antonio Todde Italy (Sardinia) 112 y 346 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes most of his life Wine daily Oldest verified man in Europe when he died in 2002 Christian Mortensen USA (Danish-born) 115 y 252 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes until late 80s Occasional alcohol Oldest verified man ever until 2012 Maggie Barnes USA 115 y 319 d (disputed) Yes – smoked unfiltered cigarettes for decades Moonshine occasionally Age debated but widely accepted at the time Susie Gibson USA 115 y 108 d Yes – smoked cigarettes until 106 Occasional whiskey Quit only when she couldn’t light them anymore Richard Overton USA 112 y 230 d Yes – 12–18 cigars a day until 109 Whiskey in his coffee daily America’s oldest WWII veteran when he died in 2018 That Richard Overton guy surprises me. Not so much the 18 cigars a day but whiskey in his coffee. Coffee pairs perfectly with cognac. Whiskey?.. Assuming he started when he was legal to drink, that's almost a century of misguided daily use of a rather uncouth beverage. But I guess couth/uncouth is not a factor in longevity.

Thank you both.

Speaking of longevity, I´m reminded of the many profiles I´ve read featuring happy centenarians who drink, smoke, cuss, and just generally live life on their own terms. They´re not afraid to get their claws out on occasion, when situations warrant. More than kombucha and bubble baths, this may be the key to a long life.

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to go ahead and ignore this. Do you ever find yourself somewhere you aren't? His point is, awakening always happens HERE and it happens NOW. The fundamental point is actualized (you are enlightened) when you wake up. Waking up happens all the time. When the mind is still, actualizing enlightenment happens... waking up happens! Dogen believed (correctly in my experience) that there IS no difference between the mind in stillness and enlightenment itself, only that the meditator may not realize this. The body? When the mind is "awake" and still, there is just sensation and awareness of it. There is no person sitting, no body, no specific place attention could find itself in experience. When the mind is deeply still: If this isn't a statement you can relate to you should check in with your teacher, and definitely double down on your meditation practice. If you are still in the standard 40 minute Soto sitting session, and have been meditating for a period of months or years, I would expect you should be sitting in this experience pretty frequently in the last 20 minutes or so of your practice. You don't have to find a place. Stillness is HERE. Take a deep breath where you are in this moment, and let it gently out through your mouth. Allow stillness to rise up. It's here. There is no need for a special time, place, cushion, location... anything. It happens naturally in the dentists office, or the grocery store, or when you ride a bike, drive, play drums, etc. once you are paying attention and noticing. With a few months of meditation practice, you can begin to become adept at awakening any time you realize you have been "asleep", lost in your thinking mind. The eventual track of practice in most Mahayana practices is that you start to bring awake awareness to as many of your moments as possible. If you don't have a teacher feel free to PM me. _/\_

The Egyptian knowledge of physiology was good - although not developed in the way modern science has. They held that the lungs draw in the 'breath of life' (ankh) into the body and feed it to the heart. This is more or less true - as the lungs oxygenate the blood which feeds to the heart to be pumped round the body. The heart was thought of as the central organ which was connected to all other parts of the body by channels called 'metu' which were not arteries, nerves and so on - and have been compared to the nadis of yoga. These channels stimulate activity in the body, such as circulation. They are sometimes given as 22 channels tho' sometimes 46. If the channels were blocked or contained pollutants this was said to cause disease. The liver was said to generate blood. This is not quite true as red blood cells come from the bone marrow - however the liver does produce the nutrients, sugars, amino acids and so on for the blood and regulates the content of the blood, so in a sense it is close to the truth. The stomach was called the 'r-ib' which may be translated as mouth-heart. They recognised its function in taking in food. The intestines were known to absorb food and produce chyle (a white milky lymph fluid) which feeds the heart. This may be part of the reason that the organs stomach and intestines are associated with the white crown. While the liver and lungs with the red (blood).

Yes! I´m not a fan of the Blue Zone literature, but it´s worth noting that old folks in Sardinia and Okinawa generally don´t have gym memberships or shop at Whole Foods. The way they eat and move is baked into their lifestyle, not an add-on wellness obsession.

Perhaps stressing about health is an indicator of being unhealthy. For instance I have known a lot of strict vegetarian/ vegans who seem to obsess about health in terms of food. Every one I can think of is either ill or dead from some horrible disease. As you say may be it’s all about attitude.

Could be but I can’t remember lol

Kombucha is good, but bubble baths are quite harmful (toxic chemicals). Getting one's claws out when the situation warrants it is IMO healthier than being addicted to the drug peddled heavier than any other -- Repressitol. All things in moderation...

From the translation of Line 1 of Chapter 1, it indicates that the translation was way off. "A way that can be walked is not The Way A name that can be named is not The Name Tao is both Named and Nameless As Nameless, it is the origin of all things As Named, it is the mother of all things" Tao may be the way(of principles) , but the way is not Tao. Tao is alive, it is not a walkway. However, Tao was treat as a walkway in his translation which is incorrect. Tao is not Named nor Nameless. You(有) and Wu(無) are used as proper nouns, thus it should not be translated at all. Tao was named as You(有) and Wu(無) were given at two present states. You(有) is in a visible state and Wu(無) is in an invisible state. How reliable/accurate/respected of the translation? I shall reserve my comment on that or you may have your own judgment. PS Tao is not nameless. It is because Tao has two given names: You(有) and Wu(無).

Hi, nice intro. Imo this is a very good place to start. Welcome to the forum, enjoy.

Hi and welcome.

If one is intellectualising awakening Life will throw things at you to shake things up in your system.

No . I talk to myself but here I write for others to read . 'We' ? I am of no mind about it . I am in my way at this moment , I am in my place where I am ( and live here daily ) . I found it decades ago and before that I have been awake since 1965 . The way at this moment moves towards dinner time . I shall practice my cooking . ... and try to be single pointed conscious in doing it .

I once had Rogerian therapy where they say nothing but let you talk - if they do say something it is just to repeat something you have already said. I found it helpful. But I couldn’t resist playing a game of trying to get them to say something. I succeeded a couple of times. Overall it helped me through a difficult time - so I would say it was useful but a bit limited. The spiritual path is definitely not therapy. In fact if you are stressed it can make you more stressed and the same goes for people with mental health problems. While it is good to help such people, if you can, they should not be encouraged into meditation or yoga etc. ( in my opinion).

Meaning is an imputation devised by the thinking mind. It belongs to "YOU". Buddhism (like all other traditions) is a vehicle to realize something BEYOND conceptualization and the thinking mind. The vehicles themselves are empty of meaning, and ultimately NOT the realization. Some quotations might be fun! Realization only comes from EXPERIENTIAL gnosis. No amount of intellectual fabrication can get you there. Stop where you are. Allow the mind to be come still - here and now is where understanding happens.

Yes there are many schools out there but only a few know the correct method of doing it. In other words if one has the teacher it does not mean the teacher knows the correct method. He does what he was taught by his teacher

Any system worth its salt has a wuji posture. Southern mantis for example uses wuji to teach inner sinking without external sinking.K atori shinto ryu does the same with their natural stance, as described by Sugino. A similar description is done by Tom Bisio too. Almost the same as explained in Sun family methods (tcc,xingyi,etc). Dan Harden teaches it as misogi model. Damo mitchell has wuji teachings too... It's more like if you are only doing stillness in your wuji, you never learned wuji.