liminal_luke

Beautiful.

Bums have reported combining Yi Gong (Sifu Jenny Lamb´s spontaneous movement practice) with vipassana-like mindfulness. If there´s an explicit connection between qi gong and vipassana I don´t know it, but I think the focus and concentration developed in vipassana can serve a person in many realms of life, qi gong included.

I feel the same way. When some of my friends put up flags after 9/11, I was like..."huh?" As countries go, we could do a lot worse, but if patriotism means glossing over the darkness in our history (and present), I don´t see how that can be a good thing.

It´s no fun bumming with someone whose so invested in being right it´s like arguing with a brick wall. There comes a point where further engagement in conversation is just an exercise in masochism, a point that I reached some threads ago. I for one am walking away from the Karl sandbox. About damn time.

Old River, I enjoyed reading your story, especially for how it showed your fundamentalist friends in such a human light. So often, when I meet people like that, I forget how we all have our own personal Katrina.

What if your heart tells you to rent a certain movie which it turns out you´ve already seen and in your frustration you post a question on Taobums about the nature of heart knowledge and twenty-four posts later you come to understand so much more than you did before....was your heart really wrong?

By suggesting that the example of racism I gave was an exaggeration, here.

Not everywhere in 1994, no. But historically, in some places in the South, yes. Everywhere or close enough to everywhere to have a traumatizing effect on a generation. You might not be denying racisim exists, but you seem to want to minimize it, and I am not sure why. What use is philosophy and so-called reason if all that thinking leads us to look the other way when a fellow human being is made to feel like a worthless animal?

Karl, If you prefer reality to imagination, here ya go. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/25/us/denny-s-restaurants-to-pay-54-million-in-race-bias-suits.html?pagewanted=all Denny´s paying out $54,000,000 in damages for refusing service to blacks in 1994. I asked Dustybeijing to imagine but if you prefer to examine the historical record, be my guest. In 1994 I was a white dude living in relatively liberal Portland, Oregon. I wasn´t particularly attuned or sensitive to racism, and things didn´t seem so bad to me. But for a black family in Mississippi in the 50´s? Different story.

Oh boy. It´s relatively easy to get behind your example because white people are not systematically discriminated against. Just one shop, right? Fuck em. They are only harming their own business. But now imagine you´re a black person and it´s not just a single mom-and-pop business, it´s Denny´s all across the country. Imagine that everywhere you go in your town you can´t order breakfast?

I´m not sure whether it´s true or not, but I think I saw Kumbhamela video footage of Hindu mystics being buried alive for not-sure-how-long and emerging from the earth just feeling just fine.

I haven´t done researched any studies or performed any statistical analysis, but, in the great Daobums tradition, I won´t let that stop me from putting forward some opinions. (1) Most seriously religious people aren´t violent. (2) Most violent people aren´t seriously religious. (3) My-religion-made-me-do-it is a time-honored excuse.

CT, I don´t know the exact percentage of violence that´s committed with religious justification, but it seems to me there is a lot of that going around. Hasidic Jews throwing rocks at sabbath-defaming Saturday morning car-drivers in Mea Sharim, an ultra-orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. Christians burning crosses in black people´s front yards. (Not so much these days, but historically.) Moslems wearing suicide vests and thinking of heavenly virgins. These are just references I´ve picked up from popular culture and casual reading. I haven´t done extensive research, and I´m sure a great deal of violent perpetrators don´t feel the need to pick up a Bible or any other such text. Just the same though, I´m confident that lots of violent people use religious belief to justify their violent acts and encourage violence in others. You disagree?

I only got through the first few pages of The Fountainhead, so I wouldn´t really know, though this explanation seems as good as any other. In case I sound like a spiteful free-speech killing politically-correct dolt, let me just say that I don´t think Karl is hateful. He´s just a champion of hater rights.

You needn´t worry on my account Aetherous. If I´ve attempted to silence Karl, I´ve failed miserably.

Like Ralis and Old River, I believe there´s value in piping up when folks post hate-filled drivel. See something, say something. There´s value in fighting back when they whine about how they are oppressed they are at the hands of nasty free-speech impeding progressives. But at a certain point, when the conversation isn´t going anywhere and isn´t going to, I start looking around for something else to do. Sometimes people enjoy getting others worked up (however justifiably) and the best thing to do, at least for me, is to stop playing. (Not sure if this is what you meant Karen, but it´s the way I took your post. Time to get back to work.)

MLK is absolutely right in saying we can´t legislate away hated. But we also can´t legislate away the right of good people to object to hatred. Just because someone has a right to hate doesn´t mean everybody should just be quiet about it. Quite the contrary. Our moral, if not legal, obligation is to raise our voices high.

I´m reminded of that Buddhist story about the monk who carried a woman across the river. The monk´s companion asked how he could of carried a woman like that: wasn´t that putting himself into lustful temptation? The first monk replied that he had already put the woman down while his friend was still carrying her. It´s a little like that with yin and yang. They are useful concepts on one side of the river, but once we cross to the other side it´s time to put them down. Taoist cosmology, as I understand it, stretches from the relative to the absolute ... and there are practices and viewpoints that correspond to the various levels. Wuji -- TaiChi (yin/yang) -- five elements -- ten thousand things. (Bums more versed in these things-- please correct if I¨m mistaken.) If one is headed on a fast-train for towards the non-conceptual -- as in certain Buddhist/Bon practices-- dualistic concepts (and yin/yang is the very essence of dualism) may not apply.

Hi Edward, My partner is on olanzapine as well as an SSRI antidepressant. It´s took a lot for both of us to get to the point where we were willing to take a chance on these kinds of drugs. The first psychiatrist he ever went to prescribed haldol. I looked it up on the internet, and read about tardive dyskinesia, a neurological side effect that causes people to protrude their tongue and make other embarrassing and uncontrollable movements. It usually, but not always, goes away if you discontinue the drug. Well, that was enough for me to question whether haldol was the way to go. He took one dose, had a horrible nightmare, and that was it for haldol and that psych doc. He seems to tolerate the olanzapine much better. It doesn´t eliminate his paranoid thoughts but it gets him to the point where they don´t totally disable him. So I´m grateful. But even with this one, I read about the side effects and hope he doesn´t have to take it for the rest of his life.

This. It´s been interesting to me to note that those in this thread who assert their "right" to discriminate against others are very quick to take offense and play the victim when challenged.

I´m no Daoist scholar, but my understanding is that this is the classical view. You can´t really say that anything is yin or yang in an absolute sense. It´s always yin or yang in relation to something else. Our sun, for instance, is generally regarded as yang, and rightly so. But in the context of some supernova exploding out in deep space it might be yin.

Neither. Just the memory of a rather extensive (and not much fun) debate with you sometime back about this very same "point" in which nobody convinced anybody of anything. If I thought things might go differently this time around I might give it a shot, but I don´t.

Thanks Dustybeijing. You asked for some links and here they are: the results of my quick websearch on the environmental fallout of vegetarianism. I haven´t researched these (and am not really up for a scientific tit-for-tat) but I think this preliminary list suggests that the issue is far from resolved. http://www.sciencealert.com/vegetarian-and-healthy-diets-may-actually-be-worse-for-the-environment-study-finds http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1250532/Being-vegetarian-does-harm-environment-eating-meat.html http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/ordering-vegetarian-meal-there-s-more-animal-blood-your-hands http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/can-animals-save-us/joel-salatin-how-to-eat-meat-and-respect-it-too http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/vegetarian-diet-bad-for-environment-meat-study-lettuce-three-times-worse-emissions-bacon-a6773671.html http://huntergatherer.com/prominent-vegan-advocate-22i-was-wrong-about-veganism-22/ The people who I respect, by the way, are not the factory farmers. And not the people eating factory-farmed meat either. I don´t dispute that this kind of farming is bad for our health, bad for our environment, and unbelievably cruel to the animals. But as farmers like Joel Salatin point out, that´s not the only way to raise meat. Just so you know. I found it interesting that you feel judged by meat-eaters because I feel judged by vegetarians. While it´s true that most people eat meat, those same people believe (erroenously, in my opinion) that vegetarian diets are healthier. I hope you don´t think I´m judgemental. If you´re diet is working for you and you feel good about it, more power to you. Yes, I´m a little closed-off to information that I perceive as pro- vegetarianism. Maybe I should lighten up? It´s just that most of the vegetarians who have tried to influence me about this issue (in person -- not you) have just oozed hate. Or at least that was my perception. Happy eating (however you do it), Liminal

Although we disagree about so much, Karl, I´ll take you at your word that you wouldn´t discriminate. You seem more principled than hateful, to me. Not principles I´d espouse, mind you, but principles just the same. I wouldn´t even call you small-minded. A cyber rabble-rouser? Hey, if the shoe fits...