[FairfieldLife] Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rory Goff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: Looks like I got you that time. :-) Looks like You ALL got me! Dang, I LOVE You guys! :-) :-) :-) [JUDY:] They say we're young and we don't know We won't find out until we grow [RORY:] Well I don't know if all that's true 'Cause you got me, and baby I got you [RORY:] Babe [BOTH:] I got you babe I got you babe [JUDY:] They say our love won't pay the rent Before it's earned, our money's all been spent [RORY:] I guess that's so, we don't have a pot But at least I'm sure of all the things we got [RORY:] Babe [BOTH:] I got you babe I got you babe [RORY:] I got flowers in the spring I got you to wear my ring [JUDY:] And when I'm sad, you're a clown And if I get scared, you're always around [JUDY:] So let them say your hair's too long 'Cause I don't care, with you I can't go wrong [RORY:] Then put your little hand in mine TJUDYe ain't no hill or mountain we can't climb [RORY:] Babe [BOTH:] I got you babe I got you babe [RORY:] I got you to hold my hand [JUDY:] I got you to understand [RORY:] I got you to walk with me [JUDY:] I got you to talk with me [RORY:] Igot you to kiss goodnight [JUDY:] I got you to hold me tight [RORY:] I got you, I won't let go [JUDY:] I got you to love me so [BOTH:] I got you babe I got you babe I got you babe I got you babe I got you babe
[FairfieldLife] Re: Once again, killing time.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, tomandcindytraynoratfairfieldlis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Vaj writes:snipped The basic reason often given is that cultivation of siddhis thru samyama causes one to become vyuthana or outward and attached to the outer world. Tom T The Sutras of Patanjali are a description not a prescription as so many have supposed. Read them after thirty years of practice and recognize how much of what is presented is now your day to day experience. Tom T Bingo. As has been discussed here before (at least by me and Marek), it's the same relationship that the Tibetan Book of the Dead has to death and dying. Those who see it as a prescription for dying well have kinds missed the point. It's a description of living well, a description of every moment of everyone's life. In the Bardo between death and rebirth, ritam rules. Everything the self has ever feared appears before it, tempting the self to believe in it to the extent that it forgets the Self. Everything the self has ever desired also appears before it, tempting it again to lose itself in the desire-manifestations and forget the Self. In everyday life, it's the same situation. Interestingly enough from a Tibetan perspective, those who have become most proficient at ELR ( everyday life ritam ) and can easily manifest their desires *also* become equally proficient at manifesting their fears. What you focus on, you become. Neither the desire-manifestations nor the fear-manifestations really exist, nor does the self that's manifesting them. All of it is just a set of distractions that is designed by the self to help it pretend that it exists. But the Self always has the last laugh. It can wait patiently as the self tries to manifest this desire and that desire, hoping to gain the peace of eternality from them. It can wait patiently as the self runs away from the fear-images it has manifested, hoping to find the peace of eter- nality by putting distance between the things it fears and itself. And all the while the Self just sits there, eternal, waiting for the self to realize that whether it was running towards eternality or running away from it, it was, is, and always will be eternal.
[FairfieldLife] Clap on, clap off (was Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda)
Rory, with all due respect, you're not exactly tuned in here. You're right! I'm not tuned in to agree completely with what *you* are saying. It's not that I didn't understand it; I was offering a different look at it. You still don't understand, Rory! That makes you WRONG!!! There IS only one way of looking at things, the Judy Way. Anything else is delusion or mean-spiritedness, and if it's repeated several times after she's refuted it by expressing the RIGHT way of looking at things, the repetition becomes lying. Face it, dude...you're on the road to becoming Yet Another FFL Liar. :-) To rephrase: I am suggesting that what Barry *says* he wants, and what he *really* wants, may not be the same thing. He *says* he wants people to ignore you... Just to pour some gasoline on the fire :-), that's not precisely what I said recently. What I did was express in words what already seems to be happening. Most folks on this forum already ignore her, and never bother to respond to her posts. On the whole, the only people who still DO respond fall into two categories. The first is the TBs who agree with her because she's a TM TB, one of the few left on the forum; this group would include Nablus and Off and Jim and occasionally others. The second group consists of those (in my *opinion*) who, although they may be fools for doing so, still have some hope that there really IS a human being inside Judy Stein somewhere, and that if they try long enough, someday they might actually help it to come out of its closet and express itself. This group -- whom I henceforth dub as The Compassion Group -- consists of you, Shemp, Vaj, Rick, Curtis, myself, and a few others. Just as a matter of definition, the first group is always RIGHT; the second group is always WRONG. :-) But the second group has more fun, because they won't give up on someone who has gone to extra- ordinary lengths to get them TO give up on her. You want to see Judy REALLY hit the roof? Express compassion towards her. Watch what happens. In fact, watch how she reacts to this post of yours. ...what he may really want, is to continue to engage you, to nip you -- to do whatever it takes to irritate and get a rise out of you, virtually regardless of the seeming content of his posts. If so, I'd say his tactics appear to be working beautifully, and have been *for years*. N'est-ce pas? I'd have to say that this is a valid way of seeing things, with one minor correction. I rarely try to engage with the you you refer to above, the self that has Judy firmly under its control, and that has made her a prisoner of its machinations, an automaton that has to compulsively lash out at any way of seeing things except her own. I occas- ionally try to speak to the Self that she really is, but that doesn't really work, as you found out earlier on FFL. All she does is *get mad* when you remind her that she's already enlightened. So in lieu of being able to speak to the Self, I occasionally may taunt the self that has her in its control, to (as you say) get a rise out of it, to get it to *act out* its silly fantasies in public *even more*, and thus get *laughed at* by more people. It is my fervent spiritual belief that the more people laugh at one's self, the greater the chance that someday the self will become able to laugh at itself. The corollary belief, of course, is that a self that can laugh at itself is a Good Thing. . . . But I don't care in the slightest if he ignores me; I'll continue to comment on his sophistry as I see fit. As well you should! What good is one hand clapping? It kinda depends upon what it's clapped around, n'est-ce pas? If the one hand is clapping on thin air, not much happens. On the other hand, if one claps one hand on one's sexual organs, a great deal can happen. :-) It is my position that the neverending game of proving that the small s self is RIGHT, and that other small s selves are WRONG is a lot like the second one hand clapping. It's mental mastur- bation. As long as that one hand is clapping away at all that sensitive erectile tissue, the self can pretend that it exists. It knows that it exists, because it's literally playing with its self. :-) There may even be a sense of momentary pleasure or fulfillment as a result OF self playing with its self by doing the one-hand-clapping boogie. A little sigh here (I'm *important*; I stood up for 'truth' and 'righteousness' and 'honesty' and others didn't.), a little orgasm here and there (I *won* the argument.) But in the end it all comes down to self playing with its self. And in public. Except for a few pervs, nobody is really terribly interested in watching someone else clap off in public. And when someone from The Compassion Group points out, compassionately, that all this self clapping self stuff looks -- from another point of view -- a *lot* like clapping in thin air, and accomplishes just about as much in the
[FairfieldLife] What Does The self Fear Most?
Barry writes snipped: Being forgotten. It fears oblivion. IMO, it's not even that the self fears death itself. Most selves have caught a clue and have realized that they're gonna die, and have come to some sense of comfort with that fact. But what the self fears is that it'll be completely forgotten when it dies, as if its life had made no difference whatsoever to the other lives it touched. TomT from reading Byron Katie she encourages all to focus on the Big Three that will generally cover all the fears. Fear of dying -- 1. Alone 2. Unloved 3. Broke you put them in the order that suits you. Seems to cover most eventualities. Tom
[FairfieldLife] An Essay On Fouling Out
Just for fun, I shall wax eloquent upon the great sport of ice hockey. Hockey is an interesting sport in that fighting between opponents on the different teams -- within prescribed limits -- is tolerated. But go over the limits and you get a penalty, during which your team has to play without you. Get two (or three, depending on circumstances and the league in question) such penalties, and you're out of the game. I remember, back when I lived in Toronto, an interesting TV broadcast in which one of the players was interviewed after a championship game, the final game of the season. The player had been involved in something like seven fights during the game, losing every one of them, getting seemingly *pounded* by the players on the other team who had attacked him. The announcer started, rather agres- sively, with: So...you didn't do so well tonight. You got your butt whupped. The player responded with, What are you talking about? I won the game for the Maple Leafs. The announcer looked stunned, uncomprehending, so the loser being interviewed, who had scored no goals himself, continued, I knew that we were up against a tough team tonight. I also knew that there were a few key players on the other team who had a history of being easily lured into fights. So I did some research and watched some old footage of them playing, and found out what provoked the fights. For one of them it was any remark an opposing player made about his sloppy skating. For another it was any remark made about his wife cheating on him, which she was. For another it was any remark that an opposing player made about his...uh...sexuality, any inference that he was gay. So I just did all these things during tonight's game, and the guys jumped me. All three of them fouled out, and the other team had to spend three five-minute penalty periods playing one man down. We scored one goal during each of those three penalty periods. I won the game for the Maple Leafs. The problem in hockey with being easily taunted into a fight is that it makes you an easy mark. Anyone who has figured out your weaknesses -- the things that you just *have* to respond to by fighting back -- can lure you into a fight, and thus into fouling yourself out. T'would seem that now that the 35-post-per-week rule is in effect here on Fairfield Life, the same scenario applies here. Those who have no self control foul out, and have to sit on the bench for part of the week, watching everyone else play. Those who have more self control get to play out the entire game. Fairfield Life *used* to be like a hockey game with no rules. The compulsive posters, those who were either easily drawn into fights or who actually enjoyed starting them, could do so as long as they wanted. There was no down side for them to having zero self control. But now there are rules. Lose your self control, get compulsive about some silly issue and shoot your wad of posts within one or two days, and you've fouled out. You're on the bench for the rest of the game, watching the others play. Interestingly enough, at least one of the players who has spent some time on the gone-over-the-35-post-limit bench (and who it seems will spend more in the near future) struts around proudly, as if she won the fights that put her there. She claims to *never* have been manipulated by other posters, to have always been the one who decided whether to reply to each post or not. Yet there she is on the bench, unable to say a word, while the other posters who *put* her on the bench are still playing, and still having fun. It's just a metaphor. FFL is not a hockey game. There is no scoring system here, and no one wins or loses each week's game. But my bet is that there are a couple of folks here who will spend a great *deal* of time during each week's game on the bench. They'll claim up one side and down the other that they won all the fights that put them there, but there they are on the bench, aren't they, while the people they were arguing with are not. Let's hear a round of applause for the winners.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda
On Jun 4, 2007, at 10:00 PM, authfriend wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jun 4, 2007, at 7:09 PM, authfriend wrote: And all because you felt the need to trash Vaj. Actually not. Rather, because Vaj felt the need to respond to my reminder of his earlier lie by lying some more, again and again, compulsively, about his faux-Google search, until he finally got so strung out he became incoherent. I pointed out the precise nature of Gratzon's book as it directly relates to 'do nothing, achieve everything', how he conceals the principle with a catchy title horselaugh Right, Vaj. The title is The Lazy Way to Success: How to Do Nothing and Accomplish Everything. That sure is a great way to conceal the principle, by putting it in the title of the book. and how it links to literally hundreds of web sites. But none of that has ever been in dispute, of course. Here's the lie Vaj told: if you do a web search for 'Do nothing and accomplish everything' the phrase is usually tied to get rich quick schemes. In fact, virtually every Google hit on the phrase is tied to Gratzon's book, which is not, of course, a get rich quick scheme. Well, since you failed to define a get rich quick scheme I find your lame response unconvincing. So let's look at Judy's assertion that Gratzon's book is not part of the genre of get rich quick scheme books and whether or not it aims a quicker approach to starting a business compared to the more traditional approaches. Whether or not it is part of the genre of get rich quick books is a matter or both opinion and consensus. IMO it is part of the genre of new age, get rich easy or quick. I would also hypothesize that the majority of readers on this list who are objective, i.e. non-TB's, would also hold a similar opinion. What are the traditional paths to starting a business and how long do they take? One way is to 'learn the ropes' of an existing business and then break out on your own and start your own business. This typically takes years, at least several and often long periods of time (many years). The academic approach is to get bachelors or MBA along with some internship experience before striking out on your own. One may also decide to gain some experience in the work sphere before breaking out on their own. This would take a minimum of 4 years of college plus any experience and as long as 6 years plus any experience desired. So we have a range of a several years up to 6 or more years before starting ones business in more traditional approaches. How long comparatively would it take a reader of Gratzon's work to get into business? Much, much less. Assuming one wants to read the book several times to get the ideas down, let's say a month or two to digest the ideas. The 'attuning oneself to the lazy approach', to natural law, would take (if TM research is to be believed) only about three months maximum--the typical amount of time for TM benefits to level off. In other words it's much less time, very quick in comparison, this path to success and alleged riches. Let's say six months or less. How much shorter though? Is it really quick comparatively? Yes, it is. Let's take a gander at the numbers! If one started a business after getting detailed academic training by pursuing a MBA that would take typically 6 years. Even if we assume it would take the natural law/lazy approach double the amount of time, 6 months, the Gratzon approach is: 72 months vs. 6 months or 12 times faster! Even if we have someone just doing a bachelors and a years work experience, comparatively, Gratzon's lazy method is 10 times as fast! Clearly, just looking at standard business training vs. the lazy- natural law method, the Gratzon method is a get rich quick scheme: a scheme to make profitability and success in a comparatively much, much shorter time: 10 to 12 times faster. And the book also, IMO, is part of the genre of get rich quick new age schemes. I base this on direct experience of similar schemes ventured by TMers (who were often TBs).
[FairfieldLife] Clap on, clap off (was Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda)
I quite view things differently than you. First, as far as the TB camp assumption, the TB's agreeing with everything she writes, is silly since she writes on many things other than TM. And we all appear to have differnt defs of TB. In mine, Judy is hardly a TB.Just beacuse someone likes something doesn't make them a TB, IMO. Second, if those in the so-called healers group, really do belive they are healers, which other than you and perhaps rory, I doubt, I would suggest they heal thyself first, take out the log sitting in their own eye before commenting on, judging, and attempting to remove a small splinter in Judy's eye. Third, I think there is a significant third group, you are the king -- or rogue leader of the scoundrels :), who find nothing better to amuse themselves with than to regularly bait Judy (despite your repeated vows to not do so, to not read her posts, to not give her attention). Why Judy regularly takes the bait is mystifying to me, but to each their own. As I said, some posts are not worthy of a response -- and yours and others' baiting posts are core examples of such. And that you find your baiting amusing is even more mystifying. I find it pretty childish if not mean spirited. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rory, with all due respect, you're not exactly tuned in here. You're right! I'm not tuned in to agree completely with what *you* are saying. It's not that I didn't understand it; I was offering a different look at it. You still don't understand, Rory! That makes you WRONG!!! There IS only one way of looking at things, the Judy Way. Anything else is delusion or mean-spiritedness, and if it's repeated several times after she's refuted it by expressing the RIGHT way of looking at things, the repetition becomes lying. Face it, dude...you're on the road to becoming Yet Another FFL Liar. :-) To rephrase: I am suggesting that what Barry *says* he wants, and what he *really* wants, may not be the same thing. He *says* he wants people to ignore you... Just to pour some gasoline on the fire :-), that's not precisely what I said recently. What I did was express in words what already seems to be happening. Most folks on this forum already ignore her, and never bother to respond to her posts. On the whole, the only people who still DO respond fall into two categories. The first is the TBs who agree with her because she's a TM TB, one of the few left on the forum; this group would include Nablus and Off and Jim and occasionally others. The second group consists of those (in my *opinion*) who, although they may be fools for doing so, still have some hope that there really IS a human being inside Judy Stein somewhere, and that if they try long enough, someday they might actually help it to come out of its closet and express itself. This group -- whom I henceforth dub as The Compassion Group -- consists of you, Shemp, Vaj, Rick, Curtis, myself, and a few others. Just as a matter of definition, the first group is always RIGHT; the second group is always WRONG. :-) But the second group has more fun, because they won't give up on someone who has gone to extra- ordinary lengths to get them TO give up on her. You want to see Judy REALLY hit the roof? Express compassion towards her. Watch what happens. In fact, watch how she reacts to this post of yours. ...what he may really want, is to continue to engage you, to nip you -- to do whatever it takes to irritate and get a rise out of you, virtually regardless of the seeming content of his posts. If so, I'd say his tactics appear to be working beautifully, and have been *for years*. N'est-ce pas? I'd have to say that this is a valid way of seeing things, with one minor correction. I rarely try to engage with the you you refer to above, the self that has Judy firmly under its control, and that has made her a prisoner of its machinations, an automaton that has to compulsively lash out at any way of seeing things except her own. I occas- ionally try to speak to the Self that she really is, but that doesn't really work, as you found out earlier on FFL. All she does is *get mad* when you remind her that she's already enlightened. So in lieu of being able to speak to the Self, I occasionally may taunt the self that has her in its control, to (as you say) get a rise out of it, to get it to *act out* its silly fantasies in public *even more*, and thus get *laughed at* by more people. It is my fervent spiritual belief that the more people laugh at one's self, the greater the chance that someday the self will become able to laugh at itself. The corollary belief, of course, is that a self that can laugh at itself is a Good Thing. . . . But I don't care in the slightest if he ignores me; I'll continue to comment on his sophistry as I see fit. As well
[FairfieldLife] Re: Request to Rick to burn my months posts for Ron Paul
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, off_world_beings [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning no_reply@ wrote: Given that entitlements and debt service take up a large portion of the budget, this means most discretionary funding would be cut. Like for education, energy policy, expanded health care, science resarch, etc. Are you and others who like Paul really behind these ideas? Are you in favor of such policies? Incorrect. If you actually listen to his reasoning you will see that his policy would actually INCREASE money available for education, energy policy, health care, science research, etc.by FAR !!! This is his WHOLE POINT ! It is a rational approach. But you are right, most people in the country probably are not smart enough to understand this reasoning. OffWorld OK, I have looked for his reasoning on hiswebsites and some utube speeches and not found it. Can your provide a synopsis? I am interested Paul's fuller platform and reasoning. Regarding his advocacy of abolishing the federal reserve -- and transforming the dollar to a commodity backed basis, on the latter, the peer-reviewed economic journals have researched such, and variations, for decades and the large majority find it inferior to the present, albeit not perfect system. I thus assume you do not agree with Paul on this given that his stand is not substantiated by a majority view in peer-reviewd research.
[FairfieldLife] Re: What Does The self Fear Most?
Turq, Well aren't we just a little busy bee lately. Good form, good concepts, glad your small self is getting its clap on. I was surprised that you used the bardo concept -- er, do you believe that the astral/causal body actually can exist without a living physical nervous system? If so, do you believe that such a 2/3rds existence allows for evolution? It seems the TM dogma would allow for evolution after death but only rarely. I think I heard that Guru Dev had to die in order to evolve to the sixteenth calla or something like that, but that might have been his last in-the-body action, not an after life action. Why am I not clear about this when I was a true believer for decades -- see? -- the TM movement never cared for an educated work force. Ramana Maharishi talks about the afterlife, reincarnation, etc., but for the most part, he didn't dwell upon such possibilities, since it's all small self stuff. I don't even think Ramana was all that hepped up to try all that hard to get the small selves coming to him to freedom -- he just operated like a dictionary -- people could look up the true meanings life's words in him, but he wasn't urgent about everyone reading him. More like, Well, if you must know, yes, it's possible to greatly reduce suffering while in the body, but even a perfect life is not worth attachment. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi agreed and said that angels want to evolve beyond their status, but they're cul-de-sacally as close to the godhead as possible without dissolving individuality, so they have to get a human body/mind to get to unity. I guess being on the right hand of the Throne is just as stifling as being, well, merely on the throne that's in a small room in my home. My jury's out on this afterlife thingy. My ego sure loves the idea, but, as a homonunculus-philosopher-in-my-own-mind, my ego holds that it would be wrong to live a life based on a tarbaby fantasy and be so unwilling to face the oblivion of Ozymandias. I think facing complete egoic death has wonderful fear-killing, real life egoic benefits. Meditate on a corpse thingy. Afterall, who WOULD want to psychologically reinforce the egoic patterns of hoping-for-more-life-ness? That's fershur going to bite one in the ass on the deathbed, me figures, as those patterns do as they have been trained to so and start screaming for fulfillment instead of being quiet while I lovingly give back my very small entirety to the Self. This is a central problem of religions -- to prepare personalities for death. But I've watched good folks die, and I'm going to the Lord was not the predominate experience for even the most religious of them. It's more like, Oh Lord, can I have one more breath? Simple beggary may be the most common of deathbed actions. I don't know -- do religions prepare most folks with an ability to calmly face death? Seems not, but maybe if I worked in a hospital I'd see more faith in the face of death. I hope I would. I think posting here has done me some great good along these lines. I've put some powerful words together -- methought -- and watched them worn down to Ozzy's legs as each person here ignored my precious offerings -- not even deigning to correct me if I needed it. My ego has to face that. At best, my words might still be googlable a thousand years from now, but my ego won't be one speck happier today even if my ego has that form of immortality as a deep belief (hard wired conceptual addiction.) For the ego to want to be preserved in print, in memories in other brains, in photos -- is such a tell. Those are not living embodiments -- yet the ego relates to them See? A fox knows its own scent. Who here doesn't smell their own farts like a connoisseur? My ego loves the waftings of conceptual-certainty's turds. The Advaita dogmatic stance at death seems preferable. There cannot be death if there hasn't ever been life. Identify with The Real for crissakes! Matthew 6:18-20 19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. Edg --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, tomandcindytraynoratfairfieldlis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Barry writes snipped: Being forgotten. It fears oblivion. IMO, it's not even that the self fears death itself. Most selves have caught a clue and have realized that they're gonna die, and have come to some sense of comfort with that fact. But what the self fears is that it'll be completely forgotten when it dies, as if its life had made no difference whatsoever to the other lives it touched. TomT from reading Byron Katie she encourages all to focus on the Big Three that will generally cover all the fears. Fear of dying -- 1. Alone 2. Unloved 3. Broke you put them in the order that suits you.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rory Goff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend jstein@ wrote: snip This is the part that *isn't* true. It's designed to embarrass me into not commenting on his posts. Could be; I don't really know. Getting you to feel embarassed, I can see, because I've been there (see below). But to embarass you into not commenting? Maybe so, maybe not. How can we really know? It would seem you are making him out to be a *total moron* if his true motive has been only to shut you up, since obviously, as you point out, this tactic hasn't even remotely worked in God- knows-how-many years. He's a control freak, Rory. He can't help himself. Has nothing to do with intelligence or rationality. Now I *do* know that parts of us (or parts of me, anyway) indeed appear to be essentially moronic, unthinking, repetitive habit- patterns that continually fail to accomplish the stated motives of the larger self. But I've found on closer look that these habit- patterns are usually sustained because they *are* accomplishing their own goals as best they might; they're actually quite content with the status quo, and/or are afraid of what the alternative(s) might bring them. Sure, it's part of the whole more and more paradigm--you go after either what brings you more pleasure, or less pain. So that's my hypothesis here: that on the level of the patterns doing the interacting, both you and Barry *are* quite content with the status quo. The fact that this status quo hasn't changed in so many years tends to support my hypothesis. In other words, it's what IS, so it must be Perfect! :-) Well, yeah, everything ultimately is perfect, so that isn't really saying much. On the relative level, however, I know I enjoy this forum more when Barry's not around; and I suspect Barry would enjoy it more if I weren't around. I'd enjoy it a *lot* more if Barry stayed around and got a clue, dropped his phony act and chronic dishonesty, started giving his intellect a real workout instead of flabbily flopping around in the shallows, took responsibility for what he said. Then he'd be fun and stimulating to interact with instead of being a pompous, boring pain in the butt.
[FairfieldLife] Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science
June 5, 2007 NYTIMES Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science By JOHN TIERNEY For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They've been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it. If students are going to read Silent Spring in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled Chemicals and Pests. It was a review of Silent Spring in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. He didn't have Ms. Carson's literary flair, but his science has held up much better. He didn't make Ms. Carson's fundamental mistake, which is evident in the opening sentence of her book: There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings, she wrote, extolling the peace that had reigned since the first settlers raised their houses. Lately, though, a strange blight had cast an evil spell that killed the flora and fauna, sickened humans and silenced the rebirth of new life. This Fable for Tomorrow, as she called it, set the tone for the hodgepodge of science and junk science in the rest of the book. Nature was good; traditional agriculture was all right; modern pesticides were an unprecedented evil. It was a Disneyfied version of Eden. Ms. Carson used dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass biocide. She warned that one of the most common American birds, the robin, was on the verge of extinction an especially odd claim given the large numbers of robins recorded in Audubon bird counts before her book. Ms. Carson's many defenders, ecologists as well as other scientists, often excuse her errors by pointing to the primitive state of environmental and cancer research in her day. They argue that she got the big picture right: without her passion and pioneering work, people wouldn't have recognized the perils of pesticides. But those arguments are hard to square with Dr. Baldwin's review. Dr. Baldwin led a committee at the National Academy of Sciences studying the impact of pesticides on wildlife. (Yes, scientists were worrying about pesticide dangers long before Silent Spring.) In his review, he praised Ms. Carsons's literary skills and her desire to protect nature. But, he wrote, Mankind has been engaged in the process of upsetting the balance of nature since the dawn of civilization. While Ms. Carson imagined life in harmony before DDT, Dr. Baldwin saw that civilization depended on farmers and doctors fighting an unrelenting war against insects, parasites and disease. He complained that Silent Spring was not a scientific balancing of costs and benefits but rather a prosecuting attorney's impassioned plea for action. Ms. Carson presented DDT as a dangerous human carcinogen, but Dr. Baldwin said the question was open and noted that most scientists feel that the danger of damage is slight. He acknowledged that pesticides were sometimes badly misused, but he also quoted an adage: There are no harmless chemicals, only harmless use of chemicals. Ms. Carson, though, considered new chemicals to be inherently different. For the first time in the history of the world, she wrote, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. She briefly acknowledged that nature manufactured its own carcinogens, but she said they were few in number and they belong to that ancient array of forces to which life has been accustomed from the beginning. The new pesticides, by contrast, were elixirs of death, dangerous even in tiny quantities because humans had evolved no protection against them and there was no `safe' dose. She cited scary figures showing a recent rise in deaths from cancer, but she didn't consider one of the chief causes: fewer people were dying at young ages from other diseases (including the malaria that persisted in the American South until DDT). When that longevity factor as well as the impact of smoking are removed, the cancer death rate was falling in the decade before Silent Spring, and it kept falling in the rest of the century. Why weren't all of the new poisons killing people? An important clue emerged in the 1980s when the biochemist Bruce Ames tested thousands of chemicals and found that natural compounds were as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones. Dr. Ames found that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens in our diet were natural, which doesn't mean that we are being poisoned by the natural pesticides in spinach and lettuce. We ingest most carcinogens, natural or synthetic, in
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev's deathbed instructions to Maharishi . . .
And came back. If so, I wonder why Marshy would have come back to the Upper Kashi from Madanapalle. And, I wonder how Marshy's Aunt got to the Upper Kashi to talk to Marshy about the trip to Madanapalle? And, this brings up another issue. If Marshy was at the Upper Kashi and observing silence how did he communicate with his Aunt? Using sign language? Did they have telephones in 1954 at the Upper Kashi? Maybe she called him on his cell phone or maybe she sent Satyanand or Uncle Raj up to see him. If so, that would really be a long walk for Uncle Raj. The Aunt could have probaly walked herself to Madanapalle by the time Uncle got up there to the Upper Kashi! And, why wouldn't her husband, Uncle Raj, have taken Marshy's Aunt down to Madanapalle? I wonder what's up with that? Come to think of it, why would the Marshy have gone up to the Upper Kashi in the first place if his Aunt wasn't well. And how would the Aunt have known Marshy was even up at the Utter Kashi? Does anyone know what happened to the Aunt? I didn't even think that the Marshy had any Aunts that he was on speaking terms with. Was it Aunt Varma or was it Aunt Srivastava? Did the Aunt practice TM? And I wonder if the Aunt availed herself of Maharishi's Ayer-Veda. What, exactly, ailed the Aunt? So far as I can tell, the story about his Aunt is probably just a story. I can't recall Marshy having mentioned this and I've spent hours listening to him and reading his books and watching his videos. Apparently Uncle Raj didn't mention an Aunt at the Upper Kashi when he was in Canada at the TM Center. I wonder why not? The only person that I know of that mentions his Aunt is Dr. Coplin. The Aunt isn't mentioned by Robert Hollings in his book 'Transcendental Meditation', a book which I presume was approved for publication by the TMO since it was once available from the MUM Bookstore. Work Cited: 'Transcendental Meditation' An Introduction to the practice and aims of TM by Robert Hollings The Aquarian Press, 1982 ISBN 0-85030-240-4 p. 82 - 83
[FairfieldLife] Re: What Does The self Fear Most?
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Being forgotten. It fears oblivion. IMO, it's not even that the self fears death itself. Most selves have caught a clue and have realized that they're gonna die, and have come to some sense of comfort with that fact. But what the self fears is that it'll be completely forgotten when it dies, as if its life had made no difference whatsoever to the other lives it touched. It's afraid that *when* it dies, the following conversation is going to take place: Hey, didja hear that such-and-such-self died? Who? How's about them Red Sox, eh? Didn't they just kick ass in the game last night? And it will. The self aspires to be Ozymandius, King Of Kings. It wants those selves left behind to gaze upon its works and despair. Or applaud. Whatever. But it really, really, really, *really* wants to be remembered, paid attention to. Because as long as it can get others to pay attention to it, the self can convince itself that it exists. The thing is, it doesn't exist. Sit to meditate and forget the self, and there is only Self. Die, drop this silly bunch of muscles and sinew and bones and brain cells, and there is only Self. The thing that the self fears most is being forgotten. And strangely enough, one cannot begin to truly appreciate the Self until one forgets the self. The more that the self tries to be remembered, to establish itself as important, memorable, someone who made a difference, a hero, someone who worked with the highest teacher, a serious spiritual seeker, a warrior who fought against untruth and injustice -- WHATEVER the fantasy that the self has concocted in an attempt to gain attention and drive away the fear that no one will pay attention to it and thus confirm its existence -- it will die, and it will be forgotten. Beat the motherfucker to the punch. Sit to meditate and forget the self before all the other selves around you have a chance to. Let the self fade away and laugh as it goes. And then, when someone reacts to the death of the self with a hearty, Who?, it'll be the Self laughing. How's about them Red Sox, eh? What's interesting about this post is that Barry appears, out of all the main posters on this forum, to have the biggest ego of all of them. He celebrates his ego [self] in his posts - and appears to have all of the skills required to hide the terrors of non-existence he describes. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
[FairfieldLife] Beatles in Rishikesh
Don't know if anyones posted these before but here you go anyhoo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McAi6zDAuGU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbDR8IpkkTUNR
[FairfieldLife] Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jun 4, 2007, at 10:00 PM, authfriend wrote: snip Here's the lie Vaj told: if you do a web search for 'Do nothing and accomplish everything' the phrase is usually tied to get rich quick schemes. In fact, virtually every Google hit on the phrase is tied to Gratzon's book, which is not, of course, a get rich quick scheme. Well, since you failed to define a get rich quick scheme I find your lame response unconvincing. Most people (including you) know what get-rich-quick scheme refers to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get-rich-quick_scheme More importantly, though, your lie suggested the links were to lots of different get-rich-quick schemes, not to a single book. So let's look at Judy's assertion that Gratzon's book is not part of the genre of get rich quick scheme books and whether or not it aims a quicker approach to starting a business compared to the more traditional approaches. Irrelevant argument on both counts. There are no schemes in Gratzon's book, so it isn't part of the genre of books advancing such schemes. Rather, it attempts to prepare readers psychologically to approach the endeavor of making money without thinking it has to involve great effort on their part. His basic thesis is that once you stop thinking this way, things begin to fall into place (whatever the specifics) more or less automatically. No schemes involved, just a change of attitude. snip The 'attuning oneself to the lazy approach', to natural law, would take (if TM research is to be believed) only about three months maximum--the typical amount of time for TM benefits to level off. In other words it's much less time, very quick in comparison, this path to success and alleged riches. Let's say six months or less. Er, no. While Gratzon does recommend TM, it's as an adjunct, an extra; it's not the basis of his approach. More significantly, though, in none of the material I've read about and from his book, including his blog, is getting rich quickly a goal; it isn't what he emphasizes at all. As far as I can tell, what he advocates and promises has nothing to do with speed, only with not exerting effort. So it would appear you've spent a whole lot of time, Vaj, painstakingly knocking down a straw man, in your continuing attempts to pretend you didn't tell a blatant, knowing lie. Once again, here's what you said: If you do a web search for 'Do nothing and accomplish everything' the phrase is usually tied to get rich quick schemes. Here's the *truthful* version of what you said: If you do a web search for 'Do nothing and accomplish everything,' the phrase is almost always tied to a book by a TMer about how to make money without a lot of effort. But you didn't say that, because it doesn't sound as though there are lots of TMers out there trying to rope vulnerable dupes into investing in ethically and/or legally dubious *schemes* for getting rich quickly, using MMY's phrase (from a very different context) as the hook. There may well *be* such TMers. But instead of going to the trouble to document your claim, you fabricated the evidence out of whole cloth. You tried, in fact, to do nothing and accomplish everything; you attempted the Lazy Way to Success, but you didn't do it honestly, and you got caught at it, showing yourself to be a person lacking in credibility instead of achieving what you'd hoped for.
[FairfieldLife] Re: An Essay On Fouling Out
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip Interestingly enough, at least one of the players who has spent some time on the gone-over-the-35-post-limit bench (once, weeks ago, inadvertently) (and who it seems will spend more in the near future) struts around proudly, as if she won the fights that put her there. More fantasy from Barry. She claims to *never* have been manipulated by other posters, No, only by Barry. to have always been the one who decided whether to reply to each post or not. Yet there she is on the bench, unable to say a word, while the other posters who *put* her on the bench Um, no, if I were on the bench, *I'd* have put me there, you see. And Barry's already forgotten what I told him, because it doesn't fit with his fantasy: I have *other places to be* than at the game. Knowing when I'll be those other places allows me a lot of leeway about how many posts I make when. are still playing, and still having fun. Ah, but will they have had as much fun in seven days as I have had in three or four? (Not to mention how much fun I'll be having in the other places.) At any rate, we now have a very clear picture of how *Barry* would feel if he used up his posts before the week was out.
[FairfieldLife] Re: What Does The self Fear Most?
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, do.rflex [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What's interesting about this post is that Barry appears, out of all the main posters on this forum, to have the biggest ego of all of them. He celebrates his ego [self] in his posts - and appears to have all of the skills required to hide the terrors of non-existence he describes. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I'll answer this, even though it's a bit of a slam, because it opens the possibility for a discussion that I don't think I've seen here before. It's related to comments I made about love vs. lust recently. It's clearly possible to be as *attached* to love as it is to lust. And in many spiritual traditions, it's the *attachment* that's the boogey- man in the equation, not the activity itself. So is it the *having* an ego that's the boogeyman in the realization-of-Self game, or is it the *attachment* to one's ego that is the boogeyman? I'm kinda of the opinion that it's the latter. Do I have a big ego? You betcha. Do I *revel* in having a big ego? You betcha. Am I particularly *attached* to that ego? I don't think so, because I've had so *many* of them. I've watched them come and go for years now, ever since I met the Rama dude and sat with him in the desert and had my ego-at-the-time blown out of its socks and watched it die. This is a rap that is *not* gonna resonate with a lot of people here. Unless you have been in a situation in which your ego -- your small s self -- gets blown away and replaced with a *new* ego on a regular basis, what's to identify with? But that's been my experience. So shoot me. :-) We'd go out into the desert with Rama as one ego, and come back for a few days blown out of our socks, egoless. It would take a day or two for a new one to take hold. The same thing would happen at the weekly meetings; it was to a large extent what we were there for...those periods of between-ness in which the old ego has been blown away and a new one hasn't yet taken root. For those of you who can admit to having dropped acid, and assuming you actually did *good* acid, try to remember back to that experience. There was a *reason* that Tiny Tim stole the basis for his book The Psychedelic Experience from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. A good hit of pure Sandoz was literally like traversing the Bardo. You entered into the experience with a self, and the experience pointed out to you in no uncertain terms that you didn't really have one, and that Self was all there was. And for a few hours after the LSD experience, you remained in this between- ness state, with the old self blown away, but without having a new one (or, horrors, what you considered the old one) taking root again. That's very similar to what I'm talking about, but without the reliance on chemicals. I got *used* to this process of having one's ego blown out of its socks and, a day or so later, having a new one replace it. It happened on pretty much a weekly basis -- if not more often -- for fourteen years. THAT is to some extent where I'm coming from when I celebrate the latest and greatest ego or self I'm wearing. I don't *resent* the small s selves that play across my Self. I don't confuse them *with* Self. They are what they are, mere masks, costumes that Self has chosen to put on for some reason that probably even it doesn't understand, long enough to make a nice entrance at some costume ball. After the ball is over, the costume goes into the trash bin and the Self puts on another self. The new one is no more important than the old one. It has no more, and no less going for it than the last self did. It's Just Another self. So do I have an ego, a small s self? You betcha. But, unlike many here, do I *resent* that small s self and view it as some kind of barrier to Self, something that I have to overcome or get past? No I do not. My personal experience has taught me that that's going to happen pretty soon without my having to do much to make it happen. You guys are free to interpret all of this however you want. What you think about this rap, or my raps on this forum in general, doesn't really affect me that much. I've only met one person here in real life; the rest of you are just dots of phosphor. I live my life the way I live it. End of story. Part of the way I have chosen to live it is to *not* fall into the rut (as I perceive it) of resenting the self or believing that it's a terrible obstacle to Self. I have had enough extended experiences of Self to know that that's not true. So I choose to have *fun* with the ego, rather than resenting it or pretending not to have one. OF COURSE I have one; so do you. And, in my opinion, having exper- ienced enlightenment for short periods of time, so do the enlightened. Having an ego during those periods of enlightenment did *not* prevent my realization of enlightenment. I'm *comfortable* with my ego. I'm comfortable cele- brating it, and even more comfortable
[FairfieldLife] Re: An Essay On Fouling Out
TurquoiseB wrote: Let's hear a round of applause for the winners. Somehow, it always seem to be about Judy, or Barry. Maybe this forum should be called the 'Judy and Barry Show'. These two are giving Usenet and A.M.T. a bad reputation. They almost destroyed that forum over the course of ten years with their incessant verbal jousting. And for what purpose? What's ironic about this is that Lawson, who is one of the more informative respondents, resigned from this forum for getting flak for posting so many times, yet, Judy and Barry are still here bombarding the forum with their personal flame war. They just keep going, and going, and going... And some informers here seem to actually like it! I guess it's the quantity of the posts that matter, not the quality. Go figure. At least they've stopped posting their idiotic messages on Usenet. So, I've practically got the entire newsforum over there to myself so I can post my own drivel without any interference from the likes of them. On Usenet anyone can post anything they want to, as many times as they want to. Yahoo! Groups sucks as a newsforum. Lawson English now harrassing Buddhist groups: http://tinyurl.com/2yu9a4
[FairfieldLife] Re: What Does The self Fear Most?
TurquoiseB wrote: I'll answer this, even though it's a bit of a slam, because it opens the possibility for a discussion that I don't think I've seen here before. It's related to comments I made about love vs. lust recently. It's clearly possible to be as *attached* to love as it is to lust. And in many spiritual traditions, it's the *attachment* that's the boogey- man in the equation, not the activity itself. So is it the *having* an ego that's the boogeyman in the realization-of-Self game, or is it the *attachment* to one's ego that is the boogeyman? I'm kinda of the opinion that it's the latter. Do I have a big ego? You betcha. Do I *revel* in having a big ego? You betcha. Am I particularly *attached* to that ego? I don't think so, because I've had so *many* of them. I've watched them come and go for years now, ever since I met the Rama dude and sat with him in the desert and had my ego-at-the-time blown out of its socks and watched it die. This is a rap that is *not* gonna resonate with a lot of people here. Unless you have been in a situation in which your ego -- your small s self -- gets blown away and replaced with a *new* ego on a regular basis, what's to identify with? But that's been my experience. So shoot me. :-) We'd go out into the desert with Rama as one ego, and come back for a few days blown out of our socks, egoless. It would take a day or two for a new one to take hold. The same thing would happen at the weekly meetings; it was to a large extent what we were there for...those periods of between-ness in which the old ego has been blown away and a new one hasn't yet taken root. For those of you who can admit to having dropped acid, and assuming you actually did *good* acid, try to remember back to that experience. There was a *reason* that Tiny Tim stole the basis for his book The Psychedelic Experience from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. A good hit of pure Sandoz was literally like traversing the Bardo. You entered into the experience with a self, and the experience pointed out to you in no uncertain terms that you didn't really have one, and that Self was all there was. And for a few hours after the LSD experience, you remained in this between- ness state, with the old self blown away, but without having a new one (or, horrors, what you considered the old one) taking root again. That's very similar to what I'm talking about, but without the reliance on chemicals. I got *used* to this process of having one's ego blown out of its socks and, a day or so later, having a new one replace it. It happened on pretty much a weekly basis -- if not more often -- for fourteen years. THAT is to some extent where I'm coming from when I celebrate the latest and greatest ego or self I'm wearing. I don't *resent* the small s selves that play across my Self. I don't confuse them *with* Self. They are what they are, mere masks, costumes that Self has chosen to put on for some reason that probably even it doesn't understand, long enough to make a nice entrance at some costume ball. After the ball is over, the costume goes into the trash bin and the Self puts on another self. The new one is no more important than the old one. It has no more, and no less going for it than the last self did. It's Just Another self. So do I have an ego, a small s self? You betcha. But, unlike many here, do I *resent* that small s self and view it as some kind of barrier to Self, something that I have to overcome or get past? No I do not. My personal experience has taught me that that's going to happen pretty soon without my having to do much to make it happen. You guys are free to interpret all of this however you want. What you think about this rap, or my raps on this forum in general, doesn't really affect me that much. I've only met one person here in real life; the rest of you are just dots of phosphor. I live my life the way I live it. End of story. Part of the way I have chosen to live it is to *not* fall into the rut (as I perceive it) of resenting the self or believing that it's a terrible obstacle to Self. I have had enough extended experiences of Self to know that that's not true. So I choose to have *fun* with the ego, rather than resenting it or pretending not to have one. OF COURSE I have one; so do you. And, in my opinion, having exper- ienced enlightenment for short periods of time, so do the enlightened. Having an ego during those periods of enlightenment did *not* prevent my realization of enlightenment. I'm *comfortable* with my ego. I'm comfortable cele- brating it, and even more comfortable laughing at its silliness. If you knew me personally, you'd have more of a feeling for the full *extent* of that silliness. I can laugh at each silly ego because I know it's not going to be around that long. Tomorrow morning I'm likely to wake up and have a whole new ego to
[FairfieldLife] Re: What Does The self Fear Most?
Turq, Would you agree that, for you, the word identification has the same definition as attachment? That's my stance. The ego cannot be ended, (since it doesn't exist,) but the choosing process of identifying it as the I CAN be ended, and once this inordinate attentioning on one small aspect of amness stops, then the ego can be as wonderfully appropriate -- in that, now, the ego is not puffed, hogging the spotlight, and elbowing out all the other aspects of manifestation, but is instead, a boon traveling companion, a biographer of the body/mind. To me it is always about what is awareness awaring? That's a spotlighting process, point value thingy, and whatever is going through one's mind is being identified with as much as a dog does when sniffing his fresh pee and, for my money, is thinking, Ha, now that's an ablution of the previous hound's objectionable scent! (I'm imagining myself as the dog, so he had to be a good writer!) To me, enlightenment is not identifying. Period. The least identification is having both feet on the slippery slope. Even pure being, amness, is a primal identification, and sure enough, that slightest of all stains is all that's needed for the sin of manifestation to occur when ego starts saying, I'm that. I'm that. I'm that. Instead of, you know, neti, neti, neti. I think that I hear you loud and clear. I love the bon vivant you are and support your right to identify with the wondrousness that passes through your mind, but what about this sin I've mentioned? Do you see that if one is attending to anything, then one is not conscious of the ALL THING, the Self -- except that any THING must be a partial ray of the Self and thus, yeah, all things can only be SELF, but you know what I mean. I think you've been saying that the 200% fullness concept is part of your dogma -- that the game of enlightenment MUST allow for enjoyment in the relative without it being bad for evolution. You refuse to see yourself as a sinner in any eternal sense, so it seems you've got a very strongly held stance, which, to me, means that probably you've looked at this identification concept deeply. Have you? Have you pushed life through such a filter and seen if it is really all about ending identification -- not ending or starting any action? Which tion does ya choose? I mean, if you had a gun to your head, say maybe Judy had the gun, THEN which would you choose. I'm betting you resent the idea of having to choose though, eh? Hee hee. Edg PS See my posts, #140009 and 140633, for more about this. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, do.rflex do.rflex@ wrote: What's interesting about this post is that Barry appears, out of all the main posters on this forum, to have the biggest ego of all of them. He celebrates his ego [self] in his posts - and appears to have all of the skills required to hide the terrors of non-existence he describes. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I'll answer this, even though it's a bit of a slam, because it opens the possibility for a discussion that I don't think I've seen here before. It's related to comments I made about love vs. lust recently. It's clearly possible to be as *attached* to love as it is to lust. And in many spiritual traditions, it's the *attachment* that's the boogey- man in the equation, not the activity itself. So is it the *having* an ego that's the boogeyman in the realization-of-Self game, or is it the *attachment* to one's ego that is the boogeyman? I'm kinda of the opinion that it's the latter. Do I have a big ego? You betcha. Do I *revel* in having a big ego? You betcha. Am I particularly *attached* to that ego? I don't think so, because I've had so *many* of them. I've watched them come and go for years now, ever since I met the Rama dude and sat with him in the desert and had my ego-at-the-time blown out of its socks and watched it die. This is a rap that is *not* gonna resonate with a lot of people here. Unless you have been in a situation in which your ego -- your small s self -- gets blown away and replaced with a *new* ego on a regular basis, what's to identify with? But that's been my experience. So shoot me. :-) We'd go out into the desert with Rama as one ego, and come back for a few days blown out of our socks, egoless. It would take a day or two for a new one to take hold. The same thing would happen at the weekly meetings; it was to a large extent what we were there for...those periods of between-ness in which the old ego has been blown away and a new one hasn't yet taken root. For those of you who can admit to having dropped acid, and assuming you actually did *good* acid, try to remember back to that experience. There was a *reason* that Tiny Tim stole the basis for his book The Psychedelic Experience from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. A good hit of
[FairfieldLife] Re: What Does The self Fear Most?
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Turq, Would you agree that, for you, the word identification has the same definition as attachment? That's my stance. Hmmm. I've never really thought in those terms. I'll try to do so on the fly here. My first reaction is to say No, that I don't think they are the same thing. I find myself able to identify with my current self quite well, but with- out being terribly attached to it. I *like* some of my selves, and identify fully with being them while I'm wearing them. And then they go away and the next self, when asked about the self that it liked so much, says, Who? I'll try to ponder this further as I move along to your own explanations of what you mean above. I may change my mind and say Yes by the end of the post. Really. :-) The ego cannot be ended, (since it doesn't exist,) but the choosing process of identifying it as the I CAN be ended, and once this inordinate attentioning on one small aspect of amness stops, then the ego can be as wonderfully appropriate -- in that, now, the ego is not puffed, hogging the spotlight, and elbowing out all the other aspects of manifestation, but is instead, a boon traveling companion, a biographer of the body/mind. I have no problem with this at all. I think it's a valid way of expressing the same sense of comfort- ableness with self that I was trying to express earlier. To me it is always about what is awareness awaring? Good phrase. That's a spotlighting process, This one, too. ...point value thingy, and whatever is going through one's mind is being identified with as much as a dog does when sniffing his fresh pee and, for my money, is thinking, Ha, now that's an ablution of the previous hound's objectionable scent! (I'm imagining myself as the dog, so he had to be a good writer!) I have to walk my best friend's dogs as soon as I finish writing this. You have me chuckling in anticipation of trying to get into their heads during the walk. Many thanks. To me, enlightenment is not identifying. Period. So far, I'm still going with No. I think that enlight- enment can be about identifying fully, *in the moment*, and being unattached to that moment when it's passed. The least identification is having both feet on the slippery slope. That might be true if the object being identified with wasn't your Self. But the sages, and often our own intuition, tells us that it is. So the slippery slope would seem to me to be more of a Giant Water Slide ride from Self to Self. :-) Even pure being, amness, is a primal identification, and sure enough, that slightest of all stains is all that's needed for the sin of manifestation to occur when ego starts saying, I'm that. I'm that. I'm that. Instead of, you know, neti, neti, neti. Wow. Too much to bounce off of right now. I really *do* have to walk the dogs, and it's lookin' like rain. So there would be no time for me to do justice to amness being an identification, let alone the sin of mani- festation. When it comes to the latter phrase, I'm not sure I even want to go there. Too icky and Puritain for me. If you believe in God and God created manifestation and, if what we have been told is true, is One with that manifestation, where is the Waldo of sin in this picture? Maybe later... I think that I hear you loud and clear. I love the bon vivant you are and support your right to identify with the wondrousness that passes through your mind, but what about this sin I've mentioned? Do you see that if one is attending to anything, then one is not conscious of the ALL THING, the Self -- except that any THING must be a partial ray of the Self and thus, yeah, all things can only be SELF, but you know what I mean. I think I do, and I'm still in the No camp. You seem to be saying (in more Buddhist terms) that nirvana is not samsara. And that nirvana is preferable to samsara. I'm more in the nirvana IS samsara camp. There is no preference in play because there is no difference between sitting samadhi no thoughts no perceptions no self only Self and walking samadhi full of thoughts full of perceptions full of self AND full of Self. To me your concern is based in dualism, the belief that the relative is not the Absolute and can't ever be. It has to be one or the other. But remember 200% of life? I think you've been saying that the 200% fullness concept is part of your dogma I really am writing this on the fly, as I read your post for the first time. It's more fun for me that way when dealing with a mind as flexible as yours. So I wrote my 200% of life without reading yours first. :-) -- that the game of enlightenment MUST allow for enjoyment in the relative without it being bad for evolution. You refuse to see yourself as a sinner in any eternal sense... In any sense at all. ...so it seems you'v got a very strongly held stance, which, to me, means that
[FairfieldLife] Clap on, clap off (was Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda)
Yes, I don't really see the people on FFL lined up into the two camps you described, Turq, and I am not trying to heal Judy. I see nothing in Judy that needs fixing, any more than I see anything in you that needs fixing. I didn't find when I tried to point out her a-priori enlightenment, that she just got mad. Rather, she showed me rich and lovely multisensory layers of a particle-self of mine that had *not* been loved before -- including constriction, stagnation, suffocation, deep shame, and finally, beneath it all, Love. That's how the process usually works for me -- I introduce a Truth, process the bodymind's objections, and discover a deeper and richer synthesis as all my particles come to Understand and be Understood in a whole new light. That's my *only* goal in communicating with anyone here -- to find more of my unloved and underappreciated particles and to Understand and Love them, and thereby to be Understood and Loved -- to expand, to grow in simplicity, while simultaneously becoming more rich and subtle and nuanced and complex. It's fun -- generally delightful and immensely rewarding. I do this because for me there is no real difference between a small self and a large Self. Loving the small self is feeding oblations to the large Self, expanding the influence of the large Self, helping the Immense and the infinitesimal to appreciate each other as two sides of the same coin. Being Shiva, utterly free, includes adoring Shakti -- every particle of Creation -- as Shiva's bodymind, the perfect Lover. Whether any of this has *any* bearing on what *you guys* go through, out there, outside of me -- if there *is* an out there, outside of me -- is of no real import to me; it's not my business; it can't be my business. Shalom Shanti Shanti! :-) --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I quite view things differently than you. First, as far as the TB camp assumption, the TB's agreeing with everything she writes, is silly since she writes on many things other than TM. And we all appear to have differnt defs of TB. In mine, Judy is hardly a TB.Just beacuse someone likes something doesn't make them a TB, IMO. Second, if those in the so-called healers group, really do belive they are healers, which other than you and perhaps rory, I doubt, I would suggest they heal thyself first, take out the log sitting in their own eye before commenting on, judging, and attempting to remove a small splinter in Judy's eye. Third, I think there is a significant third group, you are the king -- or rogue leader of the scoundrels :), who find nothing better to amuse themselves with than to regularly bait Judy (despite your repeated vows to not do so, to not read her posts, to not give her attention). Why Judy regularly takes the bait is mystifying to me, but to each their own. As I said, some posts are not worthy of a response -- and yours and others' baiting posts are core examples of such. And that you find your baiting amusing is even more mystifying. I find it pretty childish if not mean spirited. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: Rory, with all due respect, you're not exactly tuned in here. You're right! I'm not tuned in to agree completely with what *you* are saying. It's not that I didn't understand it; I was offering a different look at it. You still don't understand, Rory! That makes you WRONG!!! There IS only one way of looking at things, the Judy Way. Anything else is delusion or mean-spiritedness, and if it's repeated several times after she's refuted it by expressing the RIGHT way of looking at things, the repetition becomes lying. Face it, dude...you're on the road to becoming Yet Another FFL Liar. :-) To rephrase: I am suggesting that what Barry *says* he wants, and what he *really* wants, may not be the same thing. He *says* he wants people to ignore you... Just to pour some gasoline on the fire :-), that's not precisely what I said recently. What I did was express in words what already seems to be happening. Most folks on this forum already ignore her, and never bother to respond to her posts. On the whole, the only people who still DO respond fall into two categories. The first is the TBs who agree with her because she's a TM TB, one of the few left on the forum; this group would include Nablus and Off and Jim and occasionally others. The second group consists of those (in my *opinion*) who, although they may be fools for doing so, still have some hope that there really IS a human being inside Judy Stein somewhere, and that if they try long enough, someday they might actually help it to come out of its closet and express itself. This group -- whom I henceforth dub as The Compassion Group -- consists of you, Shemp, Vaj, Rick, Curtis, myself, and a few
[FairfieldLife] Clap on, clap off (was Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rory Goff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, I don't really see the people on FFL lined up into the two camps you described, Turq, and I am not trying to heal Judy. I see nothing in Judy that needs fixing, any more than I see anything in you that needs fixing. I didn't find when I tried to point out her a-priori enlightenment, that she just got mad. Rather, she showed me rich and lovely multisensory layers of a particle-self of mine that had *not* been loved before -- including constriction, stagnation, suffocation, deep shame, and finally, beneath it all, Love. That's how the process usually works for me -- I introduce a Truth, process the bodymind's objections, and discover a deeper and richer synthesis as all my particles come to Understand and be Understood in a whole new light. That's my *only* goal in communicating with anyone here -- to find more of my unloved and underappreciated particles and to Understand and Love them, and thereby to be Understood and Loved -- to expand, to grow in simplicity, while simultaneously becoming more rich and subtle and nuanced and complex. It's fun -- generally delightful and immensely rewarding. I do this because for me there is no real difference between a small self and a large Self. Loving the small self is feeding oblations to the large Self, expanding the influence of the large Self, helping the Immense and the infinitesimal to appreciate each other as two sides of the same coin. Being Shiva, utterly free, includes adoring Shakti -- every particle of Creation -- as Shiva's bodymind, the perfect Lover. Whether any of this has *any* bearing on what *you guys* go through, out there, outside of me -- if there *is* an out there, outside of me -- is of no real import to me; it's not my business; it can't be my business. Shalom Shanti Shanti! :-) Well said.
[FairfieldLife] the Auras of dogs
thought I'd take a chance and start a new topic, for a breath of fresh air- crawl out of the Q-rut, if you know what I naem... I was at a dinner party last weekend, and the couple hosting had two irish retrievers, one a younger female and the other an older male. As the evening wore on, I began to notice the auras emanating from the dogs' heads, a more pointy, helmet or mane-like aura from the male dog and a distinctly rounder aura emanating from the female dog. Something I wasn't expecting but was a pleasant surprise. I know auras are always depicted in colors, but I see them as clear energy bands, similar to seeing summer heat rise off a roadway.
[FairfieldLife] Clap on, clap off (was Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rory Goff rorygoff@ wrote: Yes, I don't really see the people on FFL lined up into the two camps you described, Turq, and I am not trying to heal Judy. I see nothing in Judy that needs fixing, any more than I see anything in you that needs fixing. I didn't find when I tried to point out her a- priori enlightenment, that she just got mad. Rather, she showed me rich and lovely multisensory layers of a particle-self of mine that had *not* been loved before -- including constriction, stagnation, suffocation, deep shame, and finally, beneath it all, Love. That's how the process usually works for me -- I introduce a Truth, process the bodymind's objections, and discover a deeper and richer synthesis as all my particles come to Understand and be Understood in a whole new light. That's my *only* goal in communicating with anyone here -- to find more of my unloved and underappreciated particles and to Understand and Love them, and thereby to be Understood and Loved -- to expand, to grow in simplicity, while simultaneously becoming more rich and subtle and nuanced and complex. It's fun -- generally delightful and immensely rewarding. I do this because for me there is no real difference between a small self and a large Self. Loving the small self is feeding oblations to the large Self, expanding the influence of the large Self, helping the Immense and the infinitesimal to appreciate each other as two sides of the same coin. Being Shiva, utterly free, includes adoring Shakti -- every particle of Creation -- as Shiva's bodymind, the perfect Lover. Whether any of this has *any* bearing on what *you guys* go through, out there, outside of me -- if there *is* an out there, outside of me -- is of no real import to me; it's not my business; it can't be my business. Shalom Shanti Shanti! :-) Well said. Are you familiar with the expression, The courage of your convictions. Just curious how you reconcile apparently not having any.:-)
[FairfieldLife] Re: What Does The self Fear Most?
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, do.rflex do.rflex@ wrote: What's interesting about this post is that Barry appears, out of all the main posters on this forum, to have the biggest ego of all of them. He celebrates his ego [self] in his posts - and appears to have all of the skills required to hide the terrors of non-existence he describes. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I'll answer this, even though it's a bit of a slam, because it opens the possibility for a discussion that I don't think I've seen here before. It's related to comments I made about love vs. lust recently. It's clearly possible to be as *attached* to love as it is to lust. And in many spiritual traditions, it's the *attachment* that's the boogey- man in the equation, not the activity itself. So is it the *having* an ego that's the boogeyman in the realization-of-Self game, or is it the *attachment* to one's ego that is the boogeyman? I'm kinda of the opinion that it's the latter. Do I have a big ego? You betcha. Do I *revel* in having a big ego? You betcha. Am I particularly *attached* to that ego? I don't think so, because I've had so *many* of them. I've watched them come and go for years now, ever since I met the Rama dude and sat with him in the desert and had my ego-at-the-time blown out of its socks and watched it die. This is a rap that is *not* gonna resonate with a lot of people here. Unless you have been in a situation in which your ego -- your small s self -- gets blown away and replaced with a *new* ego on a regular basis, what's to identify with? But that's been my experience. So shoot me. :-) We'd go out into the desert with Rama as one ego, and come back for a few days blown out of our socks, egoless. It would take a day or two for a new one to take hold. The same thing would happen at the weekly meetings; it was to a large extent what we were there for...those periods of between-ness in which the old ego has been blown away and a new one hasn't yet taken root. For those of you who can admit to having dropped acid, and assuming you actually did *good* acid, try to remember back to that experience. There was a *reason* that Tiny Tim stole the basis for his book The Psychedelic Experience from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. A good hit of pure Sandoz was literally like traversing the Bardo. You entered into the experience with a self, and the experience pointed out to you in no uncertain terms that you didn't really have one, and that Self was all there was. And for a few hours after the LSD experience, you remained in this between- ness state, with the old self blown away, but without having a new one (or, horrors, what you considered the old one) taking root again. That's very similar to what I'm talking about, but without the reliance on chemicals. I got *used* to this process of having one's ego blown out of its socks and, a day or so later, having a new one replace it. It happened on pretty much a weekly basis -- if not more often -- for fourteen years. THAT is to some extent where I'm coming from when I celebrate the latest and greatest ego or self I'm wearing. I don't *resent* the small s selves that play across my Self. I don't confuse them *with* Self. They are what they are, mere masks, costumes that Self has chosen to put on for some reason that probably even it doesn't understand, long enough to make a nice entrance at some costume ball. After the ball is over, the costume goes into the trash bin and the Self puts on another self. The new one is no more important than the old one. It has no more, and no less going for it than the last self did. It's Just Another self. So do I have an ego, a small s self? You betcha. But, unlike many here, do I *resent* that small s self and view it as some kind of barrier to Self, something that I have to overcome or get past? No I do not. My personal experience has taught me that that's going to happen pretty soon without my having to do much to make it happen. You guys are free to interpret all of this however you want. What you think about this rap, or my raps on this forum in general, doesn't really affect me that much. I've only met one person here in real life; the rest of you are just dots of phosphor. I live my life the way I live it. End of story. Part of the way I have chosen to live it is to *not* fall into the rut (as I perceive it) of resenting the self or believing that it's a terrible obstacle to Self. I have had enough extended experiences of Self to know that that's not true. So I choose to have *fun* with the ego, rather than resenting it or pretending not to have one. OF COURSE I have one; so do you. And, in my opinion, having exper- ienced enlightenment for short periods of time, so do the enlightened. Having an ego
[FairfieldLife] Clap on, clap off (was Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rory Goff rorygoff@ wrote: Yes, I don't really see the people on FFL lined up into the camps two you described, Turq, and I am not trying to heal Judy. I see nothing in Judy that needs fixing, any more than I see anything in you that needs fixing. I didn't find when I tried to point out her a-priori enlightenment, that she just got mad. Rather, she showed me rich and lovely multisensory layers of a particle-self of mine that had *not* been loved before -- including constriction, stagnation, suffocation, deep shame, and finally, beneath it all, Love. That's how the process usually works for me -- I introduce a Truth, process the bodymind's objections, and discover a deeper and richer synthesis as all my particles come to Understand and be Understood in a whole new light. That's my *only* goal in communicating with anyone here -- to find more of my unloved and underappreciated particles and to Understand and Love them, and thereby to be Understood and Loved -- to expand, to grow in simplicity, while simultaneously becoming more rich and subtle and nuanced and complex. It's fun -- generally delightful and immensely rewarding. I do this because for me there is no real difference between a small self and a large Self. Loving the small self is feeding oblations to the large Self, expanding the influence of the large Self, helping the Immense and the infinitesimal to appreciate each other as two sides of the same coin. Being Shiva, utterly free, includes adoring Shakti -- every particle of Creation -- as Shiva's bodymind, the perfect Lover. Whether any of this has *any* bearing on what *you guys* go through, out there, outside of me -- if there *is* an out there, outside of me -- is of no real import to me; it's not my business; it can't be my business. Shalom Shanti Shanti! :-) Well said. Are you familiar with the expression, The courage of your convictions. Just curious how you reconcile apparently not having any.:-) I'm not sure who you are speaking to here. If to me, I see no problem with anything Rory said. It's just as valid a way of seeing things as was mine. And far more poetic. I repeat my earlier review -- Well said. If to Rory, that's not my business -- is of no real import to me. :-)
[FairfieldLife] Clap on, clap off (was Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda)
Very sweet, Rory, thank you. And nicely said. ** --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rory Goff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, I don't really see the people on FFL lined up into the two camps you described, Turq, and I am not trying to heal Judy. I see nothing in Judy that needs fixing, any more than I see anything in you that needs fixing. I didn't find when I tried to point out her a-priori enlightenment, that she just got mad. Rather, she showed me rich and lovely multisensory layers of a particle-self of mine that had *not* been loved before -- including constriction, stagnation, suffocation, deep shame, and finally, beneath it all, Love. That's how the process usually works for me -- I introduce a Truth, process the bodymind's objections, and discover a deeper and richer synthesis as all my particles come to Understand and be Understood in a whole new light. That's my *only* goal in communicating with anyone here -- to find more of my unloved and underappreciated particles and to Understand and Love them, and thereby to be Understood and Loved -- to expand, to grow in simplicity, while simultaneously becoming more rich and subtle and nuanced and complex. It's fun -- generally delightful and immensely rewarding. I do this because for me there is no real difference between a small self and a large Self. Loving the small self is feeding oblations to the large Self, expanding the influence of the large Self, helping the Immense and the infinitesimal to appreciate each other as two sides of the same coin. Being Shiva, utterly free, includes adoring Shakti -- every particle of Creation -- as Shiva's bodymind, the perfect Lover. Whether any of this has *any* bearing on what *you guys* go through, out there, outside of me -- if there *is* an out there, outside of me -- is of no real import to me; it's not my business; it can't be my business. Shalom Shanti Shanti! :-) --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning no_reply@ wrote: I quite view things differently than you. First, as far as the TB camp assumption, the TB's agreeing with everything she writes, is silly since she writes on many things other than TM. And we all appear to have differnt defs of TB. In mine, Judy is hardly a TB.Just beacuse someone likes something doesn't make them a TB, IMO. Second, if those in the so-called healers group, really do belive they are healers, which other than you and perhaps rory, I doubt, I would suggest they heal thyself first, take out the log sitting in their own eye before commenting on, judging, and attempting to remove a small splinter in Judy's eye. Third, I think there is a significant third group, you are the king -- or rogue leader of the scoundrels :), who find nothing better to amuse themselves with than to regularly bait Judy (despite your repeated vows to not do so, to not read her posts, to not give her attention). Why Judy regularly takes the bait is mystifying to me, but to each their own. As I said, some posts are not worthy of a response -- and yours and others' baiting posts are core examples of such. And that you find your baiting amusing is even more mystifying. I find it pretty childish if not mean spirited. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: Rory, with all due respect, you're not exactly tuned in here. You're right! I'm not tuned in to agree completely with what *you* are saying. It's not that I didn't understand it; I was offering a different look at it. You still don't understand, Rory! That makes you WRONG!!! There IS only one way of looking at things, the Judy Way. Anything else is delusion or mean-spiritedness, and if it's repeated several times after she's refuted it by expressing the RIGHT way of looking at things, the repetition becomes lying. Face it, dude...you're on the road to becoming Yet Another FFL Liar. :-) To rephrase: I am suggesting that what Barry *says* he wants, and what he *really* wants, may not be the same thing. He *says* he wants people to ignore you... Just to pour some gasoline on the fire :-), that's not precisely what I said recently. What I did was express in words what already seems to be happening. Most folks on this forum already ignore her, and never bother to respond to her posts. On the whole, the only people who still DO respond fall into two categories. The first is the TBs who agree with her because she's a TM TB, one of the few left on the forum; this group would include Nablus and Off and Jim and occasionally others. The second group consists of those (in my *opinion*) who, although they may be fools for doing so, still have some hope that there really IS a human being inside Judy Stein somewhere, and that if they try long
[FairfieldLife] Spirituality Paradox Contradictions Spirituality All True
Learn to accept contradictions and don't be obsessed with your *truth*. Christine Breese has many amazing satsangs but I thought this short talk will be relevant/appreciated on this forum, many times people here will find themselves in such defensive situations that they feel they need to protect their truth no matter what. It's worth the 7 min to listen to it,imo. http://youtube.com/watch?v=MKf9CmNzpxY Enjoy.
[FairfieldLife] Clap on, clap off (was Re: Ron Dector: A Prison of the Mind, Sthapatya Veda)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: Well said. Are you familiar with the expression, The courage of your convictions. Just curious how you reconcile apparently not having any.:-) I'm not sure who you are speaking to here. If to me, I see no problem with anything Rory said. It's just as valid a way of seeing things as was mine. And far more poetic. I repeat my earlier review -- Well said. If to Rory, that's not my business -- is of no real import to me. :-) Hi, I was writing to you Turq. I guess where I am going with this is you appear to have set things up in your writings here so that anytime it is convenient for you to disavow ownership of something, you do, while on the other hand, when you want to express an opinion strongly, you do also. Best of both worlds it would seem. However what I am left with is it looks like you are making the point that integrity or having the courage of your convictions is merely for lesser evolved beings who are attached to their illusory small selves; in other words, patsies or suckers. Ownership of our beliefs is not a bad thing, imo. In my experience, life does not progress without such ownership and such conviction. Otherwise all I am left with is emptiness. Not the emptiful absence of manifestation of the Absolute, but truly nothingness, no life. So I am curious how you reconcile the ownership, the dedication to, and hard work towards your values and ideals, while at the same time saying you have no values or ideals? How do you accomplish anything? :-)
[FairfieldLife] Lutes' account of MMY's early days
http://www.maharishiphotos.com/mem2a.html
[FairfieldLife] Grey water on the cheap
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/garden/31greywater.html
[FairfieldLife] FF Jobs cut
Word on the street is that Earl Kaplan's old business in FF that he sold is shifting jobs to Chicago, is not re-hiring positions, down- sizing in FF. Alot of the third floor buying is empty now. It has been a good white collar employer paying decent money to workers and flexible with people.
[FairfieldLife] Interview with Kim Eng, associate of Eckhart Tolle ,
Relationships - True Love and the Transcendence of Duality by Kim Eng September 2004 source Eckhart Teachings During my travels, one of the most frequently asked question is What is it like to be in relationship with an enlightened being? Why this question? Perhaps they have the idea or image of an ideal relationship, and want to know more about it. Perhaps their mind wants to project itself to a future time when they, too, will be in an ideal relationship and find themselves through it. What is it like to be in relationship with an enlightened being? As long as I have the idea in my head I have a relationship or I am in a relationship, no matter with whom, I suffer. This I have learnt. With the concept of relationship come expectations, memories of past relationships, and further personally and culturally conditioned mental concepts of what a relationship should be like. Then I would try to make reality conform to these concepts. And it never does. And again I suffer. The fact of the matter is: there are no relationships. There is only the present moment, and in the moment there is only relating. How we relate, or rather how well we love, depends on how empty we are of ideas, concepts, expectations. Recently, I asked Eckhart to say a few words on the ego's search for love relationships. Our conversation quickly went deeper to touch upon some of the most profound aspects of human existence. Here's what he said: ET: What is conventionally called love is an ego strategy to avoid surrender. You are looking to someone to give you that which can only come to you in the state of surrender. The ego uses that person as a substitute to avoid having to surrender. The Spanish language is the most honest in this respect. It uses the same verb, te quiero, for I love you and I want you. To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change. The ego singles someone out and makes them special. It uses that person to cover up the constant underlying feeling of discontent, of not enough, of anger and hate, which are closely related. These are facets of an underlying deep seated feeling in human beings that is inseparable from the egoic state. When the ego singles something out and says I love this or that, it's an unconscious attempt to cover up or remove the deep-seated feelings that always accompany the ego: the discontent, the unhappiness, the sense of insufficiency that is so familiar. For a little while, the illusion actually works. Then inevitably, at some point, the person you singled out, or made special in your eyes, fails to function as a cover up for your pain, hate, discontent or unhappiness which all have their origin in that sense of insufficiency and incompleteness. Then, out comes the feeling that was covered up, and it gets projected onto the person that had been singled out and made special - who you thought would ultimately save you. Suddenly love turns to hate. The ego doesn't realize that the hatred is a projection of the universal pain that you feel inside. The ego believes that this person is causing the pain. It doesn't realize that the pain is the universal feeling of not being connected with the deeper level of your being - not being at one with yourself. The object of love is interchangeable, as interchangeable as the object of egoic wanting. Some people go through many relationships. They fall in love and out of love many times. They love a person for a while until it doesn't work anymore, because no person can permanently cover up that pain. Only surrender can give you what you were looking for in the object of your love. The ego says surrender is not necessary because I love this person. It's an unconscious process of course. The moment you accept completely what is, something inside you emerges that had been covered up by egoic wanting. It is an innate, indwelling peace, stillness, aliveness. It is the unconditioned, who you are in your essence. It is what you had been looking for in the love object. It is yourself. When that happens, a completely different kind of love is present which is not subject to love / hate. It doesn't single out one thing or person as special. It's absurd to even use the same word for it. Now it can happen that even in a normal love / hate relationship, occasionally, you enter the state of surrender. Temporarily, briefly, it happens: you experience a deeper universal love and a complete acceptance that can sometimes shine through, even in an otherwise egoic relationship. If surrender is not sustained, however, it gets covered up again with the old egoic patterns. So, I'm not saying that the deeper, true love cannot be present occasionally, even in a normal love / hate relationship. But it is rare and usually short-lived. Whenever you accept what is, something deeper emerges then what is. So, you can be
[FairfieldLife] Re: Request to Rick to burn my months posts for Ron Paul
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, off_world_beings no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning no_reply@ wrote: Given that entitlements and debt service take up a large portion of the budget, this means most discretionary funding would be cut. Like for education, energy policy, expanded health care, science resarch, etc. Are you and others who like Paul really behind these ideas? Are you in favor of such policies? Incorrect. If you actually listen to his reasoning you will see that his policy would actually INCREASE money available for education, energy policy, health care, science research, etc.by FAR !!! This is his WHOLE POINT ! It is a rational approach. But you are right, most people in the country probably are not smart enough to understand this reasoning. OffWorld OK, I have looked for his reasoning on hiswebsites and some utube speeches and not found it. Can your provide a synopsis? I am interested Paul's fuller platform and reasoning. Regarding his advocacy of abolishing the federal reserve -- and transforming the dollar to a commodity backed basis, on the latter, the peer-reviewed economic journals have researched such, and variations, for decades and the large majority find it inferior to the present, albeit not perfect system. I thus assume you do not agree with Paul on this given that his stand is not substantiated by a majority view in peer-reviewd research. Your chances of finding on interenet are as good as mine, but it is a wide platform from the things I have seen, so maybe if you ask specifics, I could answer them. Regarding your federal reserve question. I don't understand Ron Paul's exact thinking on this, so if anyone else does let me know, but I know he is going in the right direction. But do you know what the Federal Reserve actually is? Answer: Nothing. It does not exist, except on paper, so abolishing it will make no difference whatsoever, except cut out the middle man. The governement borrows money, through the Federal Reserve from the banks (based on the LAW that the banks are allowed to lend every dollar they own, one hundred times ! ! ! ) That means if I was a bank, and had 100,000,000 dollars, I could lend 10,000,000,000. The Government gets its debt from Federal Reserve which just funnels ficticious money from the banks. There is no federal reserves. The banks are able to get away with this because the biggest feuler of the US economy is the Military Industrial Complex (Haliburton et al). Without this input the US economy would flounder. Haliburton, a US company, has its head offices in the TAX HAVEN Cayman Islands. Its head office is a tiny office with a phone and answering machine which does nothing. No people. Nothing. Do you still want to keep the ficticious Federal Reserve which has no money? Not since your founding fathers started printing British pounds sterling money illegally has there been such a scam. OffWorld
[FairfieldLife] Re: FF Jobs cut
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, dhamiltony2k5 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Word on the street is that Earl Kaplan's old business in FF that he sold is shifting jobs to Chicago, is not re-hiring positions, down- sizing in FF. Alot of the third floor buying is empty now. It has been a good white collar employer paying decent money to workers and flexible with people. *** I think I read that the new owners of Reader's Digest are planning to sell Books are Fun, but I can't find any such reference on the net -- Reader's Digest does have a new owner, so many changes are probably in store for all aspects of this declining business -- Reader's Digest took a huge write-down on Books are Fun because of its underperformance: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/message/122267 * Wall Street Journal 11/16/2006 Top Task at Reader's Digest: Revival By Sarah Ellison and Dennis K. Berman Word Count: 676 | Companies Featured in This Article: Reader's Digest Association Private-equity firm Ripplewood Holdings LLC, leading a group that agreed to buy Reader's Digest Association Inc. for $1.6 billion, now faces the tough challenge of turning around the long-declining magazine publisher. To help do so, Ripplewood plans to integrate its existing media businesses, which include Time Life Books and the Weekly Reader, with Reader's Digest direct-marketing machine. Aside from the pint-sized magazine, Reader's Digest publishes 26 other titles, including faster- growing names such as Every Day with Rachael Ray and Backyard Living. The deal comes as private-equity firms are bidding on a growing number of media properties struggling to cope with ...
