Earl Grey

A hero sacrifices for the greater good. My sacrifice here is enduring your stupidity so that others don't have to suffer through it. I shall bow down for them sincerely while farting loudly in your face.

So from China denying tests to keep numbers down as @Taomeow already mentioned when doing the maths, we now have this: https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/03/b09b868ec468-breaking-news-wuhan-doctor-blows-whistle-on-manipulation-of-virus-patient-numbers.html

A hero lives to serve others and is concerned with their safety and well-being before his own. Hoarding is not heroic, victim-blaming is most definitely not either. Where's your top hat, monocle, and cigar, Stosh? Do you and your fellow mutant vampires prefer to suck poor people dry and say it's their fault for being your prey? Tonight on the Evening News: Anderson Cooper endures the diabolical abomination popularly known Hugh Jass-Höhl Stosh for an interview on audacity. CNN requests viewers keep small children out of the room for disturbing images of egregious pomposity from interviewee.

Your fire escape of bad arguments is always looking herd mentality, even scientific consensus in favor of personal relevance. It is as though you prefer to be the wart boiling out of your scrotum so that you can stick out and be remembered for being different and unique. Sure, lock people up and forget about them, the same people who endured a century of conflict directly or indirectly. Throw the people who remember history under the rug and stomp on them so that we forget why there are problems with nationalism and authoritarianism.

There is a mysterious void that exists in the space between your ears and in front of your asshole, one of the mysteries of the universe, which makes everyone wonder why you have shit for brains. If I referred to poor black women in the inner cities, would your assumptions about me still stand? Here's my assumption about you: your fingers are too goddamned fat to even know how to properly space the commas and periods in your equally atrocious punctuation and run-on sentences.

No, I said other people live with those obstacles. Evidently, your comprehension skills are atrocious for an armchair intellectual.

Some people don’t have credit cards or live paycheck to paycheck. Some people are still computer illiterate believe it or not. Victim blaming is the mark of a mediocre being who is unable to gaze beyond the warts on their outstretched arms while gazing into a phone screen. It also denoted a serious level of ignorance worsened again by self-certainty.

Straw man argument. I never said such things about fear--you did and are putting words in my mouth. The natural world creates many things, including mosquitoes and poison ivy, malaria, and mutated viruses. Survival instinct is not the same thing as cowardice. Likewise in the vein of more false comparisons I will point out in your case, your uninformed opinions are most definitely not facts. Then many places with famine and genocide would have made a large number of saints. But we all know that hasn't been the case if we're going strictly by numbers--something you won't even be able to provide with one of your broad generalizations again. During more peaceful times, you will see winners and losers, because "peace" for the English-speaking peoples was fear and terror for their colonized subjects anywhere in the British empire. Spare us your stream of conscious posts, rube. Even before the lockdown, your boredom and self-certainty in your constant rants were egregiously boorish.

Except even the healthiest, most virtuous, and sanitary people are still able to catch the virus. 🙄

There is no doubt we need to change, but being preachy is an easy way to get people to remain as they are. I suspect that this is deliberate because individuals who offer cures or escapes continue profiting from it.

https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1516240-20200323.htm

The real problem with his approach is that it is elitist and condescending to others who don't have that privilege he has as a supposed cultivator or access to the natural ingredients and a TCM advisor in their lives. Go to a slum in most of the Third World and sadly, all they have are antibiotics, often overpriced or knockoffs (many expired too). His tone also sounds like a hippy cult leader too, and for his sake, I hope he has the experience of someone talking to him exactly the way he is to us now if he ends up in the ICU so he knows how condescending and absurd his reasoning here is.

If we go by the "That's just the way I am", then the possibility of a firestorm of insults from some of the more passionate and outspoken members here is just the way they are too, and you will have to accept that. I suspect you will probably think they are imbalanced and prescribe some platitude, but I also reckon that they will conclude the same about you. It will aggravate anyone who takes your prescriptions to heart while living in a heavily-infected area and family members who are all struggling themselves with prior health conditions unrelated to your criticism of modern life. Said criticism that reads more like what would happen if the Unabomber sold incense with leaflets summarizing his doctrine outside of Whole Foods instead of making explosives. When you or someone close to you is in unbearable pain and suffering, I wonder: how would you feel if someone stood over you with your "Tsk, tsk; you should have lived better and not been so involved in modern society's follies that made you sick and suffering" approach. I wonder if you would accept them as such, whether it's Mother Theresa, Bob Ross, or Richard Simmons, talking over you and above you rather than talking with you. Get a grip on reality, dude.

Not at all. Hope your weekend equinox was good.

All right, then we'll bring the party over there too, honey. Just remember, we still love you, and even if we didn't: And if they call you names or drive you mad: I'll join you in the PPD party later. <3

Correct--and goes well with what I mentioned earlier about the certainty of others. Since you mentioned the Buddha, I'll tell you about a funny story about someone with certainty about the Middle Path. My sister's roommate would lecture her about her life decisions and dating life, saying "Buddha said this, Buddha does that" but said roommate had only ever read, "If the Buddha dated" and attributed quotes to the Buddha that were actually said by Oprah. The same was also done with people claiming they were quoting the Tao Te Ching but also quoting Oprah. Roomie basically began wearing the saffron robes every time she opened her mouth and then removing them (and whatever shred of dignity that remained) every time someone challenged her (namely me) to summarize the Diamond Sutra in 20 words or less or how "Buddha" dating looks different in Theravada, Vajrayana, and Zen traditions compared to feel good books in the Dating and Relationships section of the bookstore. Roomie's love for the Buddha dating magically disappeared once she herself began dating again, and my sister began repeating the same annoying phrases she said back to her--using a tape recorder with Roomie's own voice saying the same platitudes multiple times, much to the frustration of Roomie. The only middle path I can think of that is appealing to me at this moment is being between the bed and bedsheets right now. Digression aside, there's no problem with people choosing to follow their own paths--the problem, again, if it isn't clear, is people telling others that their path is shit because others don't know and yet revealing that they themselves don't know that much either. A geographer isn't on the same level as a flat earther...different paths, yes, but the flat earther can't tell the geographer he doesn't know, and the geographer can describe the scientific consensus, but now the flat earther treats it as an imposition of religious dogma rather than statement of facts. EDIT Anyway, the OP was on brain cleansing, and we can chat about spiritual egalitarianism again and again, but what my hope is that personal values and beliefs stemming from stubborn dogma for their system, however questionable it may be, does not lead to a flat earther saying an actual researcher in the field doesn't know anything. It is again the fruits of the practice: knowing and knowing what we don't know, rather than not knowing while claiming to know. A cultivator's perception changes drastically, and you can get there via meditation, training in the cultivation arts, and so on, and as you are alluding to here, spiritual maturity as a form of intelligence too.

And you've gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure...

I ain't no mod, honeys. I started the thread, but I have no power other than wishing that we keep with the spirit of the guidelines of the OP. Since we keep talking about it being "my" thread and seems like some people want me to say something about it, let me change into something more appropriate if I'm going to be someone else acting like a mod. All riiiiight, ladies. Let's look at things here. @moment, you said my name, but you forgot to say the proper full titles, for which "The Fabulous Earl Grey" or "Sweet and Handsome Earl Grey". That is a minor sin, darling, but no problem. Shantay, you stay. @Taomeow, honey, you already moved your beautiful work over to your lovely PPD, even though you still kept within the spirit of our girl talk here. Shantay, you stay. @ralis, baby, we love you and your hard work as much as you love redheads and blondes, but if you wanna play cops and robbers for us here, I suggest you switch your steel handcuffs out for some fuzzy ones and play nicer and naughty, honeycakes. Shantay, you stay. Now, before our thread goes cray-cray, I'm gonna say this once: You better lip sync for your lives, darlings! I hope we got dance fever now and not corona, darlings. Now let's kiss and makeup before going back to playing nice here.

The personal insults--while I'm not above it and make my own here, come from frustration speaking for myself. It is like explaining that the earth is round to someone who insists that the earth is flat, then them insulting and mocking you for not knowing, saying your science is flawed while they pull up pseudoscience and conspiracy papers while calling your citations conspiracy, then arguing you have no siddhis to see how the earth is truly flat the way they and their teachers have siddhis and can see truth others can't. I repeat what Ward Just said though: facts and truth are not the same thing. Looking back at his reporting career in a 1973 profile in The Washington Post, he said, “Facts don’t lead you very far, facts don’t lead you to the truth, they just lead to more facts.” You can talk about spiritual truth, yes, but facts of cultivation treated as equal footing--not so much. Unless you're talking about system specifics, which are a complex methodology, then it becomes a situation where a microbiologist is arguing with a quantum physicist who knows their sciences, yet they come from completely different fields and describe their paradigm relative to their niche. Or, perhaps more of a human example: cooking Indian curry and Japanese curry: different palates and ingredients, so between people with styles that work comparing and contrasting with one another, it works--the problem is, someone who makes microwave curry that he bought in discount from the market with flavors from Indian to Japanese to Thai variations--thinks he knows more about curry than the two who made their curries from scratch and tells them that they don't know what curry is.

That’s nice for people who are teachers with their students. It is difficult here though because everyone is hardly a master here, yet some act like they know more and are qualified to make statements with absolute certainty. The role of who is the authority teaching to lift the unknowing up and those seeking to learn is ambiguous here because too many people believe they know while accusing others as not knowing—even those who actually do know. Many who believe they know are appropriating terms or concepts and reframing them while completely losing the essence of the concept itself; e.g. the LDT somehow becomes this mythical thing that one person quotes as activating only when one balances their masculinity and femininity—which can be done by unknowing astral sex with the self-professed and “awakened teacher” who shall not be named yet again for those shenanigans. So when many come thinking they know and creating a fake system using the names of those concepts from classic cultivation terminology, it confuses people who don’t know and creates friction for those trying to save others from those pitfalls. It isn’t a matter of lifting others up—too many think they’ve already been lifted up and the others need to be lifted up instead.

Yup, certain meditation and Taiji affect the neurological pathways. The long Gayatri mantra is good for patients with Alzheimer's and memory loss, believe it or not--but then again, so is playing mahjong. Taiji does open up neurological pathways and speed up recovery too: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29667260

EmeraldHead is one of several people here who run away when asked direct questions and then rationalize that the people asking them don't even know what they're talking about. He reminds me of rubeforever, who in a completely different category of absurdity, makes up his own criteria for understanding based off of appropriating terms like jing, qi, and shen and the LDT that has no basis in anything that is in classical texts who goes around calling others ignorant and disregarding actual qualified people who know what the hell they're talking about. But I digress--this thread is about how people know and how the brain is cleansed, rewired, and modified from practice. The only thing I can think of is "By the fruits, ye shall be known" and based on the absence of anything close to coherent thoughts from certain individuals here, it shows that their practice isn't working too great for them. The worst part is how certain they are of themselves, time and again. I don't know if a yawn or a sigh escapes my mouth now...

I never said that. You’re confusing who said that and makes me wonder about your ability to glean details or if you’re making things up. Why don’t YOU cite or explain why it does or doesn’t then? My only interest here comes from seeing someone speak with such certainty and self-assuredness to see if they can explain it or not and prove it.

Why don’t you cite your sources? Reading from “the old texts” often has a lot of problems when one doesn’t read the original language or know the nuances that translations can and often miss when a translator is a scholar, not a cultivator, and then there is the bias of people who claim they know like Jeff acolytes who are really appropriating concepts and saying totally bogus shit.

I actually was on a similar regiment before because I freelance and have a lot of free time, but the problem was my sleep schedule and walking my dogs. Now that everything requires me to be up at 0500 daily and people who expected me at certain times had to shift appointments according to quarantine in their countries as well, it opened up more hours in the day that I’d normally be sleeping in instead. Before, I’d be going to sleep at 0500 instead of waking up at that time, and that limited my training area availability due to extreme heat or too many people!