Encephalon

The Way of Energy: Mastering the Chinese Art of Internal Strength with Chi Kung Exercise by Kam Chuen Lam I'd like to borrow this book for a week to evaluate whether to buy it or not. I have a list of references who could vouch that I handle books with respect and return them promptly! Anyone out there?

Just curious - they were sold in one day! Were Bums the ones who bought them?

There are many, many lessons to be had from Buddhist psychology and social theory. If you did nothing else but make an agnostic investigation of the 4 Noble Truths, the 8-fold Path, and the Three Poisons you could spend your entire life studying these alone and never exhaust the process. Check out Jack Kornfield's modern classic "The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology" to get an idea of just how inexhaustible yet powerful these teachings can be, without any notion of higher consciousness involved. As for me, it's on to see what spiritual states I can attain that intuit what I've learned from human ecology studies.

As of Friday, Feb. 17 @ 8am PST, there are two copies available on Amazon for $2.20!! Act fast!

Mighty fine feedback, Rex. Thanks for that. I guess we Angelinos are fortunate to have experts in virtually any field one could imagine, so I think I'll be asking Ken McLeod, author of Wake Up to Your Life and founder of Unfettered Mind, to steer me in a sound direction. He's a frequent speaker at our scrappy local Buddhist sangha Against the Stream. Thanks for the Heads Up on navigation. You're the first person whose actually spoken to my concerns. Regards, Scott

gas.

I don't think you're missing the point at all, although the record of over- intellectualism in zen offers pretty stiff competition to Tibetans. The Dalai Lama has said that becoming religious in the Buddhist sense is really nothing more than gaining greater control over one's mind, so it does seem that the tradition is predisposed to an intellectual hijacking by some. I mostly stayed out of the Buddhist discussions in here because I found them impenetrably contorted and useless. People who cannot write a properly constructed sentence are fooling only themselves when they attempt to delineate higher states of consciousness for the rest of us. But it would be unfair to Buddhism and this board to argue that TTB self-described Buddhists represent the dharma or the sangha at large. But what of interdependency? Much has been written of this subject in here, most of it impenetrable, but is it necessarily complicated or overly intellectual? Is it any more so than the Western notion of a human soul that is separate and permanent? Or does it make more sense that human beings are part of a global, interdependent ecosystem of living organisms, where the illusion of a separate and permanent self is simply the natural product of possessing a body and mind? Which tradition is guilty of overintellectualism? Is it any wonder that ecologists and ecopsychologists have a deep affinity for Buddhist and Taoist thought? This is what blew the mind of Fritjof Capra decades ago when he began his writing career; that pre-modern Buddhists and Taoists could develop means of attaining states of consciousness that could intuit grasp basic ecological facts about how life on earth operates, including the human mind. Actually, life IS mind. "In the emerging theory of living systems mind is not a thing, but a process. It is cognition, the process of knowing, and it is identified with the process of life itself. This is the essence of the Santiago theory of cognition, proposed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela." The idea that the Tibetans have figured out a way of training the mind to know intuitively and experientially what ecologists observe in the wild and in their labs is the single most mind-blowing fact about meditation there could possibly be, IMO.

Pardon my interjection, but his complete statement was "The compassionate buddhists are elsewhere. The people who prefer intellectualization thrive on the internet, and are prone to pop up at internet forums." I think there is some truth to that statement, and it raises more questions about the psychological and sociological effects that online forums have on the participants than questions about which Buddhists do or do not engage in forums. It's probably sensible to suggest that deeply committed Buddhists, lay Buddhists as well as ordained, have taken their precepts seriously and participate in one of the many expressions of Socially Engaged Buddhism. Buddhism has always had an intellectual reputation - "Growth of the heart by way of the mind" to quote the Dalai Lama - and the record of intellectual warfare between different sects, particularly the Tibetan schools, is legendary. So it's all too easy to see Buddhism as an unwitting means of enabling those prone to intellectualism. I have to agree that socially engaged Buddhism does not happen on line. It happens in real life, in the trenches, where compassion is needed most. I can hardly imagine any of the so-called masters signing off on the practice of spending hours every day bantering online when they could be either meditating or participating in acts of compassion needed by their community. That being said, modest online presence doesn't seem all that dreadful, but I've struggled myself with keeping it to a minimum during times when I'm craving destractions from more important matters.

I confess to having never read this, even though it appears to be profoundly influential on a subject that is both vast and very dear to me: social conditioning. It one the pulitzer for non-fiction in 1969. I'm choosing to read it now because my own study of Buddhism has lead me to an understanding of the importance that Buddhism places on social conditioning. I'm working through "Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind Training" by B. Alan Wallace and the subject of conditioning has taken up, in some measure, at least the first half of the book. So far, I'm operating on a loose hypothesis that the Western imagination attributes human behavior to nature (genes), while the East seems to atribute human behavior more to nurture, which I think is a far more interesting, and optimistic, view.

Agreed. What we have here is a teacher's aide with delusions of omniscience, masquerading as the Scholar in Residence. Kind of amusing if it weren't so pathetic.

I picked up a copy of “The Practical Cogitator: The Thinker’s Anthology” in the library bookstore for fifty cents. One of the luckiest purchases I’ve ever made. It’s the perfect book to keep in the car to take up slack time usefully. It was edited by a professor who commanded a destroyer in WWII who thought that naval personnel should have some of the world’s wisdom gathered into a volume that could fit in a sailor’s tunic. I post an essay here for the purpose of investigating a plight that often afflicts the members of this forum; the degree to which we can become so identified with our thoughts and ideas (the only part of ourselves that we share with each other) that any challenge to them becomes a personal affront. As someone who has been scolded and reprimanded in here for “going for the jugular” when attacking someone’s views I felt worthy of attacking, I also feel the sting of seeing my ideas dismissed wholesale with a flick of the wrist. At the same time, I took my college career seriously (students who are old enough to be the fathers of their classmates frequently do) and I know from experience that with a little effort it is possible to excavate the sources of our ideas. David Denby, a film reviewer for New York magazine did precisely this when he re-enrolled in two courses in Western civilization at Columbia University 30 years later because he “had lost touch with the roots of his own ideas.” There was a wildfire that burned through this forum not too long ago regarding the subject of moderator policy. I still believe the real debate, personal accountability of posted content, never took place and I believe the quality of our online discussions will forever suffer for it, but for now, I’d like to hear what people think of the following essay and how it pertains to the psychological attachment to ideas (attachment in the Buddhist sense). ********************************************************************************************************************************************** We do not think enough about thinking, and much of our confusion is the result of current illusions in regard to it. Let us forget for the moment any impressions we may have derived from the philosophers, and see what seems to happen in ourselves. The first thing that we notice is that our thought moves with such incredible rapidity that it is almost impossible to arrest any specimen of it long enough to have a look at it. When we are offered a penny for our thoughts we always find that we have recently had so many things in mind that we can easily make a selection which will not compromise us too nakedly. On inspection we shall find that even if we are not downright ashamed of a great part of our spontaneous thinking it is far too intimate, personal, ignoble or trivial to permit us to reveal more than a small part of it. I believe this must be true of everyone. We do not, of course, know what goes on in other people's heads. They tell us very little and we tell them very little. The spigot of speech, rarely fully opened, could never emit more than driblets of the ever renewed hogshead of thought--noch grosser wie's Heidelberger Fass ["even larger than the Heidelberg tun"]. We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are. We all appear to ourselves to be thinking all the time during our waking hours, and most of us are aware that we go on thinking while we are asleep, even more foolishly than when awake. When uninterrupted by some practical issue we are engaged in what is now known as a reverie. This is our spontaneous and favorite kind of thinking. We allow our ideas to take their own course and this course is determined by our hopes and fears, our spontaneous desires, their fulfillment or frustration; by our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates and resentments. There is nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves. All thought that is not more or less laboriously controlled and directed will inevitably circle about the beloved Ego. It is amusing and pathetic to observe this tendency in ourselves and in others. We learn politely and generously to overlook this truth, but if we dare to think of it, it blazes forth like the noontide sun. We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told that we are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened. We are by nature stubbornly pledged to defend, our own from attack, whether it be our person, our family, our property, or our opinion. A United States Senator once remarked to a friend of mine that God Almighty could not make him change his mind on our Latin America policy. We may surrender, but rarely confess ourselves vanquished. In the intellectual world at least peace is without victory. Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so doing. We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. Am I Thinking? – James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936) http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/On-Various-Kinds-Of-Thinking-By-James-Harvey-Robinson.htm

Indeed, and I'm as convinced as ever that online discussion, limited as it is to expressions of beliefs and ideas, cannot fully enable people's better natures to prevail in the heat of argument. There are very few people in here mature enough to rise above the contention and dissolve it, and I don't count myself among them. I try every day to be less and less like the stickman below.

OMG! Please forgive my lack of detail... the last thing I want to do is start another dead-end investigation into the nature/nurture debate. I've noticed over the years that the West places more emphasis on nature, while the East emphasizes nurture. The West's Judeo-christian doctrine of "original sin" and the misanthropic view of human motives, particularly among conservatives, is a far cry from the East's notions of interdependency and the belief that "all beings possess Buddha nature." I wanted to ask if anyone has noticed this very general polarization.

Wow. That's about as clueless as it gets. High marks for presumption as well. The Book of Nei Kung is not 'read'; it is a reference work for the postures of the set, to be consulted as one grows deeper and more precisely into the postures. It was deliberately written in a basic style, without flourish or theory, but with a specificity that cannot be immediately appreciated, but only after years of careful practice. The story behind the very thoughtful development of the book can be read here. I'm envious, HumbleOne! I'm sure your learning curve was reduced considerably by all the personal attention, especially the focus on precision. The book is a classic because even after we learn to align yourself for the bubbling spring effect, we'll have that reference for as long as we practice. Those who think Nei Kung can be learned from a book are in for a rude awakening.

February 6, 2012 9:43 AM A Martian psychoanalyst observing the US Superbowl on TV would be shocked by the vicious animal spirits emanating from that spectacle, starting with the triumphal trumpet blasts borrowed straight from the old 1950s Hollywood epic movies echoing the prideful mis-steps of ancient Rome, along with the by-now clichéd CGI trick in the opening credits of gleaming metallic heraldic insignia spun into a military cordon of stars so as to protect the tender collective ego of this anxious nation. America wears its zeitgeist plastered right on its sweaty forehead. Everybody knows that the commercial messages between the play-action amount to a national Rorschach test, and this year's collection made us look more psychopathic than ever - starting with the advertisement for the Chevy Silverado: Fade in on a devastated nameless American city, the buildings smashed, the streets littered with debris, a gray ash coating over everything, and no living creatures in evidence.... A newspaper headline proclaims "2012 Mayan Apocalypse...." How reassuring! Wait! Something stirs behind a heap of rubble... it cracks open... and out drives a plucky American male lumpen "worker" dude behind the wheel of a gleaming giant pickup truck. He is soon joined by other men and their trucks, all of them blithely unfazed by the end-of-the-world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxFYYP8040A A curious scenario. What's the take away? I wondered, of course, where these plucky fellows would look for their next fill-up in the devastated landscape. Surely the service stations would miss the next scheduled fuel truck delivery. Are American men not expected to think beyond the immediate moment they are in? Are they on an intellectual level with lemurs and Holstein steers? The Superbowl pageant is a window into the condition of American manhood, and the view is pretty pathetic. It's a picture of men who feel so weak, insecure, and fearful that they have to compensate with fantasies of limitless destructive power. Ads for several new movies and (I think) video games followed the Silverado apocalypse romp. There were unifying themes throughout. All depicted the problems of life as 1) coming from outside our own society (or world); 2) in the form of aliens who wield mystifying technological destructive power; and 3) leaving a few human remnants on a smoldering landscape after a cosmic showdown. These onslaughts from elsewhere in the universe always end with superior American guile and the latest technology defeating the purblind invaders. The aliens are vanquished by Apple computers, Air Force stunt pilots, and a little extra help from God Almighty, who is surely on our side. From these realms of engineered grandiosity, we slip in and out of the grinding ground game in Lucas Oil stadium in Indianapolis, another pseudo-military operation loaded with acronyms and jargon intended to confer an illusion of control and competence. The reality out there in "flyover" land is an audience of diabetic fat men in clownish loungewear slouched on sofas in foreclosed houses enjoying stupendous portions of cheesy and lard-laden foodstuffs between cigarettes and beers. They have a lot to worry about and they have no idea how they might overcome their financial, familial, and medical problems. The real onslaughts besetting the nation in realms such as banking fraud, money in politics, peak oil, climate uncertainty, and economic contraction are at once too complex for the diabetic fat men to comprehend, and grossly misreported in the public arena, were Cable TV and newspapers work the levers of propaganda for one client or another. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9L-8372A3w Then there was the grotesque half-time extravaganza featuring Madonna, which was a weird parallel commentary on the state of American womanhood. Pretending to be ageless and indomitable, the old trooper performed a variety of standing crotch-locks on her Praetorian guard of hoofers and then stumbled more than once on the ridiculous bleacher stage-set that looked as if was designed to trip the performers up. Message to American women: be sluts as long as you possibly can because there is nothing else for you in this culture. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyfdoZldrS4 I couldn't help thinking that American chanteuses of yesteryear - say, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carole King - sang about adult problems and emotions with a greater thematic range, and would never have subjected themselves to such a display of pitiful narcissism. (Did anyone notice that Madonna's corps de ballet all wore her monogram on their loincloths?) America needs a prayer, all right, but I don't think they'll find it by calling Madonna's name. Meanwhile, in whatever remains of the Real World, we have a couple of things to be concerned about this week. One is the ultimatum tendered to Greece by the Lords of Euroland to make a deal or die-dog-die. Last time I checked, they had until 11 a.m. today Berlin time to reply... and nothing happened. The other matter is the pending possible robo-signing settlement with the TBTF banks, which is designed to let them off the hook for any and all future lawsuits in this matter if they pay a penny-ante fine. This latest ghastly trespass of the rule-of-law is a joint project of the Obama White House and 50 states attorneys general in an epic act of perfidy. You can read about it at Yves Smith's excellent Naked Capitalism blog. Your country is being stolen from you. I hope you are getting ready to re-occupy it with your bodies and minds. Don't plan on giant magical robots flying to your rescue.

Permies.com I just discovered this permaculture website. It looks like a valuable resource for anyone contemplating the prospect of joining/creating a Taoist-oriented anarcho-syndicalist post-industrial permaculture community to get through the next bottleneck.Aren't all of you Taoist, anarcho-syndicalist post-industrial permaculturalists? I thought so. See you over by the mass heater. Please post at will any new sites you find having to do with the themes of sustainability and permaculture,like thisand this.

I managed a pretty good kettlebell workout and I played with my kid but I spent way too much time in here and all I got from my investment was moral nausea and a grinding case of guilt from nonproductivity. Screw this noise.

Lots of points to respond to. Few are worth investigating. If we were compelled by pain of death to speak with civil tongues I'd have to repeat what I've said repeatedly at junctures like this - we harvest the data for our mental universes from different sources. My curiosity about the world led me to a graduate degree in geography, a subject which synthesizes a variety of disciplines, and I continue to build my ideas from the sources I gathered in that venture. I needn't comment on where you harvest the fodder for your ideas, Joe, but suffice it to say, the incredulity you experience in the presence of the ideas I present in here goes both ways; I find your ideas incomprehensible, and it's not for a lack of trying. Rather than address every point you brought up, I would invite you to take a hard look at the role of subsidization in this country. You repeatedly raise the question of how on earth we can rebuild the infrastructure. The entire experiment in American industrial capitalism for the last 150 years, including suburban consumer culture, has been a vast exercise in subsidy. Auto-dependency, highway construction, and suburbia was a great idea in the 50s and 60s for soaking up surplus productivity but now it requires massive subsidization just to remain on life support. In an era of dwindling resources, it is likely that the subsidies and protectionism that make private transportation affordable to steel, auto, road construction, gasoline, to name a few will be redirected to public transportation systems. I can drive my Saab 9000 to Redondo Beach every summer because I dont have to build my own freeway, refine my own gas or bake my own tires. Part of the bogus Reinvestment Act is actually going to pay off for me this summer. Ill be able to walk a half mile and connect with a line that can take me all the way to Redondo without gas, wear and tearon my car, or parking fees. Im not sure how it will compare, especially with a newborn, but well see. Its not entirely the same with the health care sector, but we choose to give preferential treatment to insurance companies instead of making health care universal. Thats the choice weve made and theres nothing historically inevitable about it. Other countries make different choices. The debate world-wide has been over how long the US will protect it's insurance companies; only in the US has it been framed as a conflict between the public and private sector. It makes sense that the 3-fold plan of a reconstructed rail system, decentralized agriculture, and urban renewal would appear as fantasy to you, given that urban planning itself is considered anathema to the modern right, as are ecology and the prospect of finite resources. American suburbia is generally taken as the natural order of things, but when oil inputs eventually become too expensive or disrupted there will have to be plans in place. Subsidizing suburbia will give way to subsidizing public transportation and complementary urban and AG corridors. Less auto-dependency, in other words. I sincerely hope we can retool in a deliberative fashion. But these three projects will have to be done if catastrophic disruptions in energy flows are to be absorbed. I hope all the whiny liberals and ecofreaks are wrong and that the earth never runs out of cheap oil or cheap credit and suburban bliss remains the order of the day. If you're wrong, and BAU proves untenable, we're totally fucked. I'd rather we err on the side of caution. Oh, btw - this "flower child" as you say, completed his tour of duty 30 years ago this month, so your shit-slinging about my commitment to the health of my country is the sound of your larynx vibrating your rectum.

You're coming off like someone who's holding me accountable for your lack of direction. The first step to moving forward is at least recognizing the nature of the problem. You came off as if you had no idea what our country is facing and chose to get bent out of shape over a piece that was critical on American consumer culture. Yeah, identifying the problem is an essential step. Studying the ramifications comes next. Putting your knowledge into practice and demonstrating a viable alternative to consumer culture is the next step. I told you as clearly as I could how my family and I are going to do that in 2015. But it's not incumbent on me to plot your course unerringly. What the fuck do you want from me? A goddamn blueprint on how to change the world? Later - I just re-read your previous post and I am again left wondering what it is you're looking for in terms of authentic action. The single greatest feat a relative handful of people could pull off is to demonstrate a viable alternative to the unsustainable consumer lifestyle. You dismiss my plans to move to an eco-village as pointless, but those who have successfully done so are demonstrating a saner, more sustainable, and more meaningful way to live. Throw in some Taoists and you've got what many in TTB long for, but to you it's just BS. Are you an expert on the ecovillage movement too, or are you just looking for flaws in everyone else's plans?

Maybe so, but I'm willing to set aside base ego concerns for the sake of clarifying some important points.

I agree with just about all of this, especially the galvanizing events of post-oil, post-consumerism, anarcho-syndicalist voluntary associations (of which I desperately hope a few will model on the ancient Taoist village plan!) I would estimate that given the opportunity, the bulk of the Cultural Creatives Class- 50 million Americans - would take off their ties and high heels today and begin the task of retooling for such voluntary organizations. that leaves about 260 million Americans who want their McMansions and Hummers to stay just as they are, or who're going to wait for the 2nd Coming, or who are just too numbed out to care if they live long enough to see another Superbowl. So, I would like to reaffirm my optimism in the voluntary associations of the future, but my pessimism regarding the path to get there.

Mypresumptuous and unwarranted judgmentalism? You started the fingerpointing, snot-nose. But to answer your earlier post -- Honestly, I really see no reason why you gave yourself permission to go off on me so quickly. I'm not Kunstler. If you've got some deeply reflective rebuttal based on your years of studying the human condition then by all means, enlighten us. But in your words... Not that I expect you to, though.

I think your judgmentalism is presumptuous and unwarranted. I'll just weigh that against the other voices that have chimed in, voices that often speak with thoughtfulness and a measure of depth.

You've got no reason to be surprised. You know nothing about me and even less about him. He is a pessimist toward consumer culture and often comes across as Don Rickles but his scholarship in urban theory makes him a highly respected author in the world of geography and urban planning. "The Geography of Nowhere" is a modern classic. People who do not share the collective delusion of perpetual suburbia and consumer culture know how to put his pessimism in context. And, in the end, his optimism becomes clear, but it's post-industrial, not what we see while watching the Superbowl.

Pete Hoekstra's stab at Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow What a brilliant ad! I'm sure it will win him the election. I love the inclusion of all the stereotypes; the rice paddies, the bicycles, the broken english... It's even truthful since we all know that the Bush Administration never allowed the US to borrow money from the Chinese; that all started 7 seconds after Obama was sworn in. Nope, all we borrowed was slave labor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxw4uZAezaI&feature=player_embedded