[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The following website has designed a Survey/Quiz (not sure what it should be called) that will, through your answering two pages of questions, match you up with the candidate that best suits your stand on various policies: http://glassbooth.org/gbapp/index.php/Topic There is a major flaw in this site; it's the first page, in which you *must* select criteria that are more important to you, and use them to weight the recommendation of the matching candidate. While it seems practical, it also has the effect of disallowing one from simply answering the questions on the following pages with no weighting at all, and thus finding out where the different candidates theoretically stand on the issues. I say theoretically because basically the weighting mechanism is a way for the site's designers to prevent anyone from finding out whether they are really representing the different candidates' stands accurately. As long as there is no way to answer the questions *without weighting*, there is no way to determine the site's non-bias. That's incredibly suspicious in my book. I have pretty serious doubts as to the supposed non-partisan nature of the site. What is needed is an explanation of their computational method, for nerds and statis- ticians. That is, for each of the questions, *without any weighting*, provide a list of the different candidates and how the site designers matched them up with all possible Strongly support / strongly against answers to each question. *That* is the important thing when judging the site's non-partisan nature. The fact that they seem to be hiding it, and then hiding it further by forcing people to weight their preferences, indicates to me that there is quite possibly something *very* partisan indeed about this website. I'll be interested to find out what comes out about it in the next few weeks. It should be a fairly simple matter for a good hacker to get their hands on the actual code that runs the questionnaire, and figure out whether it is slanted, and if so, in which political direction.
[FairfieldLife] Re: The Men Who Stare at Goats
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, hugheshugo richardhughes103@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend jstein@ wrote: Jon Ronson's great isn't he? I'd never heard of him before. He's superb. I was glued to the monitor. His I'm such a credulous innocent act is utterly convincing, which is how, I would imagine, he gets these fringe guys to open up. He does it well. My only complaint is he seems to go ages between publishing something. Here's one of his interviews from last weeks Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2198928,00.html If you like him I think you'll love Louis Theroux, his weird weekends are classics. He adopts a similar simple guy act and it always works. He spends weekends with people on the fringes of society, cults, white supremacists, body builders and even the porn industry. Here's one about UFOs, not sure if that's your thing but the conviction of the people is fascinating, no doubt at all. There are a few others here worth a look. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=- 857402722292365374q=Louis+Theroux+duration% 3Alongtotal=36start=10num=10so=0type=searchplindex=1 You have to fiddle around with this link but it's worth it.
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk shempmcgurk@ wrote: The following website has designed a Survey/Quiz (not sure what it should be called) that will, through your answering two pages of questions, match you up with the candidate that best suits your stand on various policies: http://glassbooth.org/gbapp/index.php/Topic There is a major flaw in this site; it's the first page, in which you *must* select criteria that are more important to you, and use them to weight the recommendation of the matching candidate. While it seems practical, it also has the effect of disallowing one from simply answering the questions on the following pages with no weighting at all, and thus finding out where the different candidates theoretically stand on the issues. I say theoretically because basically the weighting mechanism is a way for the site's designers to prevent anyone from finding out whether they are really representing the different candidates' stands accurately. As long as there is no way to answer the questions *without weighting*, there is no way to determine the site's non-bias. That's incredibly suspicious in my book. I have pretty serious doubts as to the supposed non-partisan nature of the site. What is needed is an explanation of their computational method, for nerds and statis- ticians. That is, for each of the questions, *without any weighting*, provide a list of the different candidates and how the site designers matched them up with all possible Strongly support / strongly against answers to each question. *That* is the important thing when judging the site's non-partisan nature. The fact that they seem to be hiding it, and then hiding it further by forcing people to weight their preferences, indicates to me that there is quite possibly something *very* partisan indeed about this website. I'll be interested to find out what comes out about it in the next few weeks. It should be a fairly simple matter for a good hacker to get their hands on the actual code that runs the questionnaire, and figure out whether it is slanted, and if so, in which political direction. In addition to the problems noted above, I just played with the site enough to figure out that the actual list of questions itself is dependent on the preferences you enter on the first weighting page. Basically, if you weight an issue higher, you get more questions on that topic; weight an issue lower, and you get fewer or no questions on that topic. What this means, again, is that the designers of the site have found a way to *hide* the full list of questions and disallow testers from answering them without weighting, to see how accurately the site's recommendations match the actual candidates' stands. Sorry, but I find this VERY suspicious. I am really looking forward to a hacker's report on this one, as well as an investigative report into who funded it.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey Card, Have you any opinion about the Sapir Whorf hypothesis? I've been pondering on it for a while now. At least on *emotional level* various languages seem to have very distinct effects on me. I don't like the standard Finnish very much. Some regional dialects OTOH are quite amusing to listen to. And for instance when an Estonian speaks Finnish well, that seems much easier to my ear than, say, the working class accent of my own home town. Sometimes when I occasionally watch Finlands Svenska Television (Swedish TV of Finland), and after that change to a Finnish speaking channel, the negative emotional effect might be quite strong. But I guess it's quite natural that one's mother tongue has such emotional load, both pleasant and unpleasant, that is lacking in a foreign language. This might be a trivial thing, but as an example of how languges might affect one's thinking is the difference of the (what's here called) rection (rektio: the case governed by a verb, I think) of many verbs in Finnish compared to English (and many other IE languages, too, I guess). In Finnish one reads *from* a book, buys *from* a store, finds something *from* some place, that is, one uses the elative [sic!] case in stead of the inessive, which corresponds for instance 'in' or 'at' in English. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis Or, Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar? I've blissfully forgotten most of that little I once knew about TGG. But I seem to recall I kinda liked it, though. A more useful tool in interpreting e.g. suutras (especially the tricky compound words like viraama-pratyayaabhyaasa-puurvaH) is the IC analysis of structural syntax: http://facweb.furman.edu/~wrogers/syntax/ic.htm
[FairfieldLife] Re: new rajas today
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of hugheshugo Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2007 5:59 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: new rajas today On a related note, there was a post on the TMfree blog the other day that the atmosphere around MMY was very tense as everyone was terrified of not meeting his expectations. I thought that sounded the opposite of what life around someone in unity would be like, How did it strike you? In my experience, it was fun around Maharishi because he was such a boundary-breaker. Always something crazy going on. But I think many found the atmosphere tense because he was very demanding and tended to scream (literally) at people who screwed up. There was also a lot of competition, sometimes cutthroat, to get closer to him. Lots of big egos. That was 30+ years ago. I don't know how it is now. I have heard that if you bring him bad news or criticize his plans in any way, you're sent packing. So maybe there's a lot of pressure to put a happy face on things. It doesn't sound like a healthy atmosphere to me. But, as you say, they all must like it for some reason. It also seems quite at odds with his own stories about Guru Dev and his search for a teacher, you remember the one about asking holy men for a light and if they got angry saying don't you know we can't use flames to cook he would reply where is this fire in you coming from then? (or words to that effect I can't remember it exactly). From this he'd conclude they weren't really enlightened and go somewhere else. I wonder if Guru Devs' ashram had this sort of atmosphere and what that says about MMY if it didn't. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
RE: [FairfieldLife] Re: new rajas today
From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of hugheshugo Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 3:38 AM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: new rajas today It doesn't sound like a healthy atmosphere to me. But, as you say, they all must like it for some reason. It also seems quite at odds with his own stories about Guru Dev and his search for a teacher, you remember the one about asking holy men for a light and if they got angry saying don't you know we can't use flames to cook he would reply where is this fire in you coming from then? (or words to that effect I can't remember it exactly). From this he'd conclude they weren't really enlightened and go somewhere else. I don’t know if GD’s considered freedom from anger (and lifelong celibacy) as necessary criteria for enlightenment, or just necessary criteria for someone he would want as guru. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
[FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Behalf Of hugheshugo It doesn't sound like a healthy atmosphere to me. But, as you say, they all must like it for some reason. It's kind of a rush, trying to attune your mind to someone else's. On the positive side, the process of doing this can break down a lot of your assumptions and preconceptions about life, as in, Oh shit...my teacher wants me to think like *this* this week, and I've always thought that this was low-vibe and beneath me. What the fuck do I do? I've certainly been through this, with Maharishi and with other spiritual teachers, and I am grate- ful for the many assumptions and preconceptions that got anihilated along the way. At the same time, there is IMO a potential danger in attuning one's mind to another's. That is the possibility of losing the ability to think for oneself. Learn to embrace or ignore one too many contradictions or outright crazinesses in your teacher and become comfortable with embracing or ignoring them, and you can find yourself heading down a path formerly trod by students of Jim Jones. They had all learned to try to think like their teacher, too, so successfully that when he drank the Kool-Aid, so did they. It's a double-edged sword. It also seems quite at odds with his own stories about Guru Dev and his search for a teacher, you remember the one about asking holy men for a light and if they got angry saying don't you know we can't use flames to cook he would reply where is this fire in you coming from then? (or words to that effect I can't remember it exactly). From this he'd conclude they weren't really enlightened and go somewhere else. I don't know if GD considered freedom from anger (and lifelong celibacy) as necessary criteria for enlightenment, or just necessary criteria for someone he would want as guru. A good point. However, think of the couple at the residence course that hugheshugo told us about earlier. They were enthusiastic about meditation, so enthusiastic that they signed up for a resi- dence course in which they could learn more about it. And they took one look at videos of Maharishi and the way he acts and thinks and at the people around him and the way that Maha- rishi has dressed them and at the way he expects *them* to act and think, and they were out the door. To attune yourself with the mind of a teacher, or to the minds of his closest students, you have to see something in them that makes you *want* to attune your mind with theirs. If it's there, you can overcome the silliness of the clothes that they wear and the craziness of many of the things that they say and think and do. Many of us here have been there, done that. But if it isn't there, you're out the door the minute you see the craziness. Some of us have been there, done that with this one, too. I think that the it, this something else, can be legitimately called charisma. If a teacher has it -- or at least a form of it that appeals to you personally -- you'll overlook any *amount* of craziness to be with them and attune your mind to theirs. The question would seem to be, do Maharishi and the people he has allowed to be closest to him and thus be perceived as his best students still have it? Would any of them have any charisma at all if perceived by someone who had never met them before and had no preconceptions about them? Or would they be perceived as merely crazy? I'm gonna have to go with crazy. What do you think?
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk shempmcgurk@ wrote: The following website has designed a Survey/Quiz (not sure what it should be called) that will, through your answering two pages of questions, match you up with the candidate that best suits your stand on various policies: http://glassbooth.org/gbapp/index.php/Topic There is a major flaw in this site; it's the first page, in which you *must* select criteria that are more important to you, and use them to weight the recommendation of the matching candidate. While it seems practical, it also has the effect of disallowing one from simply answering the questions on the following pages with no weighting at all, and thus finding out where the different candidates theoretically stand on the issues. I say theoretically because basically the weighting mechanism is a way for the site's designers to prevent anyone from finding out whether they are really representing the different candidates' stands accurately. As long as there is no way to answer the questions *without weighting*, there is no way to determine the site's non-bias. That's incredibly suspicious in my book. I have pretty serious doubts as to the supposed non-partisan nature of the site. What is needed is an explanation of their computational method, for nerds and statis- ticians. That is, for each of the questions, *without any weighting*, provide a list of the different candidates and how the site designers matched them up with all possible Strongly support / strongly against answers to each question. Actually they do show you what the matches are based on, not statistically but by referencing the candidates' statements on the various issues. *That* is the important thing when judging the site's non-partisan nature. The fact that they seem to be hiding it, and then hiding it further by forcing people to weight their preferences, indicates to me that there is quite possibly something *very* partisan indeed about this website. You can take the test as many times as you want, so theoretically if you took it a bunch of times and weighted the issues differently each time, you'd get to see all the questions. FWIW: I took a similar test some months back on a different Web site, and it matched me with the same candidates this one does (Kucinich and Dodd came out on top both times). I can't now remember whether it had you weight the issues; I don't think it did. I went through the GlassBooth test again, weighting the same issues, but I chose the *opposite* position in my responses to the questions. This time Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo came out on top, which makes sense because they're the most conservative of the candidates, whereas Kucinich and Dodd are the most liberal. I went through it again, giving each issue 1 point, then distributing the remaining 6 points evenly among the specifically social issues (gay rights, abortion, etc.). I answered every question as neutral. Romney came out on top, followed by McCain and Giuliani. That also makes sense, because they're the most moderate of the Republican candidates, whereas even the most moderate Democratic candidates take fairly strong stands on social issues. Then I went to one of GlassBooth's Partner sites, OntheIssues.org, also supposedly nonpartisan, and took its similar test. It doesn't weight the issues. With the positions I actually hold, Kucinich and Dodd came out on top again. With the *opposite* positions, again Hunter and Tancredo came out on top. With all-neutral positions, this time Biden (Democrat) and Brownback (Republican) came out on top--but that's without any issue weighting. Of course this is nowhere near conclusive, but it isn't inconsistent with GlassBooth being nonpartisan. As to funding, the Contribute page says, GlassBooth operates on the support of its users. The About page lists four partners, a business development site featuring content management systems for the Web and intranets, based in India; a Web designer; the On the Issues site mentioned above; and Rock the Vote, another supposedly nonpartisan organization geared to getting young voters involved in the political process. According to Eagleonline.com, a blog for students at Boston College Law School, run by students, GlassBooth was started by three 24-year-olds in Boston. The blog item announced a Boston fundraiser Nov. 1 that seeks to bring together Boston's best and brightest from a diversity of different backgrounds in a unique forum. It quotes Ian Manheimer, director and founder of GlassBooth.org: Television is still the number one source for political information, but it deeply fails to cover the issues. Instead, it focuses on who is winning and who is losing. An
[FairfieldLife] Re: Tough luck
I think your marriage is in a ton of trouble. STOP the lying and mental reservations. Emotional honesty is GOLD -- you're in hell if you cannot be open and real and LOVING with the one person on earth who you're supposed to be united in mind and flesh with. And it's not just a case of being honest once; it's about beating every dissonance-issue TO DEATH with mindfulness by the two of you focusing and being REAL and holding onto each other as if in a lifeboat. Get help. Get counseling. Find out now and fast if this advanced technique issue -- and all the other issues you two must be having if this one particular issue isn't being handled openly -- is/are deal killers. And be prepared for torture as you confess again and again on a daily basis how you're feeling and force yourself to be in the now with your love and your lover. You're in trouble, and you might be able to keep the wolves at bay for a while, but sooner or later they'll be chomping your ass. Do you want to see your marriage finally explode from these pressures that are building up -- you've confessed here -- YOU'VE SAID THAT TM IS NOT ALLEVIATING THIS HONESTY-DILEMMA IN THE LEAST OR YOU WOULDN'T BE WRITING ABOUT IT HERE. Here's proof: try to bring up an argument that you had with her, say, ten years ago -- on an issue that never quite got settled and each of you sorta got comfortable with that lack of closure. Go ahead, I dare you, bring it up again. See? Ten years ago and meditating all this time and yet it will be as if it happened just yesterday for you. Triggers will be pulled. This is sapping your psyche. Take back the energies you're wasting every second with harboring these dissonant processes within. This is sucking your identification from you. It's making you smaller instead of, you know, helping your identifying with evermore larger and subtler aspects of existence. Don't let resentments build. Hunt down the ones you've been shoving under the carpet -- hunt them like mad dogs and kill them on the spot. Spend the $3,000 on help -- the new mantra isn't going to do you any better than the old mantra has been doing FOR YOUR MARRIAGE thus far -- insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results. This is where the TMO destroys marriages -- it fosters a huge pressure on the budgets and hearts of the TBs, and yet it will take away a dome badge if one is found seeking help from any other mental professional. THIS IS AN UTTERLY DARK AND EVIL dynamic of the TMO -- and the adulterous BevaJohn is symbolic of this callous regard for what has been joined by God, and the TMO just puts asunder anything between a TB's wallet and the TMO. Sit down across from your wife. Knees touching. Look into her eyes and say, Honey we're in deep trouble, but I love you so much more that I'm willing to take the pain from the kind of growth we need to step up to the challenges of a relationship. I love you. I love you. I love you, and I'm so sorry that only now am I getting a handle on what that means to me and the kind of mountain we are climbing together. I've been hiding and fearing and resenting, and it's harming my ability to keep us on the front burner. I'm panicked, and I'm desperate to rekindle the intimacy we once had. Help me. Help me. Help me. I so so so want you to be my companion forever. She'll melt, but also harden into a Joan of Suzie with a ferocious resolve. There is no thrill deeper than having a warrior goddess next to one in the battle of life. Open your curtain, Oz, and feel the lessening of the travail instantly from the ending the exhausting labor of moving all those levers and buttons. Go from Oz to Ozzy. Harriet's heart awaits. Edg --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, suziezuzie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What would you do if you could afford an advanced technique, $3000, money being no problem and you had been meditating for 35 years and were ready for the advanced technique and the teachers were in town and it was all set up BUT your wife, who has never meditated and has no thought of it what so ever would kick you out of the house if she found out that you spent $3000 on something she thinks is a complete waste of money so in the meantime, you have to sneak the money out and lie about where you're going, oh, I'm just getting the car tuned honey, be back soon, hee hee hee, but she reads you like the English radar during World War II and starts asking, why are you acting so strange? What are YOU UP TO? And you say, oh nothing, while looking at your hands, starting to cough and chock as you run out the front door. Would you do this or just cancel the whole thing?
[FairfieldLife] Re: Having Fun With Sin 2
I think Maharishi said that If you know it's wrong, don't do it. He didn't say wrong according to such and such scripture. I think he's pointing to what Christians might call the inner Ten Commandments written in one's heart. I have always thought that he meant, to whatever degree one is aware of emotional and conceptual discomfort being associated with a thought or an action, then one should resist any temptation to involve oneself with such. To follow this rule is to follow the rule of take it easy. TM twice a day -- but don't miss the HUGE POWER of taking it easy. To take it easy -- try that in today's camel/needle-eye world. This is where the TMO is hypocritical -- it puts such pressures on lives -- where is the possibility to take it easy? In exactly 100% of the times when I saw behind the curtains it was always a case of go go go and hurry hurry hurry and don't you dare fuck up things for our guru energies. Who can thrive in that milieu? Answer: almost no one. Maharishi burns everyone out with a massive torching of their ease. Take it easy out there folks -- it's more than half the battle. Edg --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: These Saturday-morning-over-coffee raps about sin are not, by the way, occasioned specifically by anything said here on FFL. Sure, Edg rants about sin and evil occasionally, and Nablus seems to feel that anything to do with the relative world is by definition lesser than the Absolute, and both bear more than a passing resemblance to the people I'm talking about, but they're not what really has me riffing on the subject. I heard an interesting definition of sin that I occasionally find useful in weighing a personal decision-- that sin is any action that retards my evolution. I like this definition because it takes the concept of sin outside the realm of moral judgment, and at the same time makes its association with an action personally unambiguous. Using this definition makes the role of sin in any action of mine clear, but not necessarily the basis for making a decision, more like one parameter of several to consider when I am considering a course of action. An inclusive, vs. exclusionary, consideration of sin.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
I hope you guys don't mind my interjecting a couple of thoughts here. Sapir Whorf doesn't address the emotional reaction we often have on hearing the sound of another language. We find French charming, Dutch funny, and German harsh, for example. Instead, the claim is that different languages constrain our thinking in various ways. For example, in English Jesus said something like, I am the truth and the light and the way...etc. But if a language doesn't have definite articles, as Chinese doesn't, for example, then that statement would read something like I am truth and light and way This is a profoundly different statement from the one with the definite articles. If someone makes that statement including the definite articles, then some one else could come along and say, No, I am the truth, the way... and an argument might well ensue about who is the real deal. Without the articles, there would be no conflict if someone else said, I am truth and light and way... Or consider the word knowledge. What happens to that word, that idea, when we add an article, as the TMO does when it speaks of the knowledge? It makes knowledge into something that can be given intellectual property protection. That is an unthinkable concept in Chinese---though, of course, it is something they could learn. Articles isolate a thing with definite boundaries from the flux of existence. Chinese has to make a special effort to create a word like thing. It tends to use a locution such as east-west for thing. The use of articles is just a very small example. The claim is that these small examples accrue to form a sort of cloud in which the speaker of a language is embedded and which makes him look at the world very differently than would a speaker embedded in a different cloud. A different world, moreover, is also a different self (since we are what we behold), and there is more than one eloquent literary statement by immigrants who speak of their American self versus their Spanish self, for instance. MMY has said that learning another language is not good for children, but he never said why he feels that way. I suspect the fact that a different language is tantamount to a different self is at the heart of his thinking. We know that language acquisition in babies is part and parcel with the formation of a separate sense of self. We also know that if a young child is removed from the environment of his mother tongue and plunged into a different environment, the result is almost always some personality disorder. Loss of mother tongue is a relatively new concern in psychology, but there is general agreement that this loss can be profoundly damaging. But the evidence points to the damage resulting from the loss of mother tongue, not from the acquisition of a new language. There is evidence that polyglots tend to have higher IQ's than monolingual individuals, which should not be surprising since IQ is 40% language related. On the other hand, there is also some evidence that polyglots tend to be out of touch with their emotional bodies, which, in turn, has the effect of lowering that same IQ--somewhat like a windchill factor tends to lower the feel of temperature. But there is a big HOWEVER in all this. The Sapir Whorff Hypothesis does a very good job of predicting tendencies in systems, but it cannot predict individuals. The reason it cannot, in my opinion, should make immediate intuitive sense to everyone here. Sapir Whorff addresses the small self only. It has nothing to say about the big Self; indeed, it doesn't acknowledge that there is such a thing. This is where Chomsky and the deep structure comes in, but with a caveat. Chomsky's description of the deep structure sounds to all TM'ers I know who've read it like a perfect description of Brahman or Para Vac. The problem is that Chomsky himself would most vehemently disagree with that. The reason I know this is that I've corresponded with him about that question, and I've come to no definitive conclusion about what is really going on with him in this regard. a cardemaister [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey Card, Have you any opinion about the Sapir Whorf hypothesis? I've been pondering on it for a while now. At least on *emotional level* various languages seem to have very distinct effects on me. I don't like the standard Finnish very much. Some regional dialects OTOH are quite amusing to listen to. And for instance when an Estonian speaks Finnish well, that seems much easier to my ear than, say, the working class accent of my own home town. Sometimes when I occasionally watch Finlands Svenska Television (Swedish TV of Finland), and after that change to a Finnish speaking channel, the negative emotional effect might be quite strong. But I
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
I'll reply to this one because I did a followup on my initial questions. I wrote to them, both in their blog comments and directly to their press email address, sending from my legitimate press email address. In the latter email I asked whether they'd send me a list of all the questions, and for each of the candidates, where Glassbooth thinks they stand on each of the issues, using their five ratings on a scale of strongly opposed to strongly for. If they send me the list, and its contents seem to jibe with how the candidates would rate them- selves on the same scale, I will withdraw any questions as to their non-bias. If they refuse to send the list, I will still have questions. If they delete my post from the blog comments (they're moderated) so that it never appears, I will consider my questions answered. :-) I'll let you know. Someone remind me in a week or so if I forget, Ok? In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk shempmcgurk@ wrote: The following website has designed a Survey/Quiz (not sure what it should be called) that will, through your answering two pages of questions, match you up with the candidate that best suits your stand on various policies: http://glassbooth.org/gbapp/index.php/Topic There is a major flaw in this site; it's the first page, in which you *must* select criteria that are more important to you, and use them to weight the recommendation of the matching candidate. While it seems practical, it also has the effect of disallowing one from simply answering the questions on the following pages with no weighting at all, and thus finding out where the different candidates theoretically stand on the issues. I say theoretically because basically the weighting mechanism is a way for the site's designers to prevent anyone from finding out whether they are really representing the different candidates' stands accurately. As long as there is no way to answer the questions *without weighting*, there is no way to determine the site's non-bias. That's incredibly suspicious in my book. I have pretty serious doubts as to the supposed non-partisan nature of the site. What is needed is an explanation of their computational method, for nerds and statis- ticians. That is, for each of the questions, *without any weighting*, provide a list of the different candidates and how the site designers matched them up with all possible Strongly support / strongly against answers to each question. Actually they do show you what the matches are based on, not statistically but by referencing the candidates' statements on the various issues. *That* is the important thing when judging the site's non-partisan nature. The fact that they seem to be hiding it, and then hiding it further by forcing people to weight their preferences, indicates to me that there is quite possibly something *very* partisan indeed about this website. You can take the test as many times as you want, so theoretically if you took it a bunch of times and weighted the issues differently each time, you'd get to see all the questions. FWIW: I took a similar test some months back on a different Web site, and it matched me with the same candidates this one does (Kucinich and Dodd came out on top both times). I can't now remember whether it had you weight the issues; I don't think it did. I went through the GlassBooth test again, weighting the same issues, but I chose the *opposite* position in my responses to the questions. This time Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo came out on top, which makes sense because they're the most conservative of the candidates, whereas Kucinich and Dodd are the most liberal. I went through it again, giving each issue 1 point, then distributing the remaining 6 points evenly among the specifically social issues (gay rights, abortion, etc.). I answered every question as neutral. Romney came out on top, followed by McCain and Giuliani. That also makes sense, because they're the most moderate of the Republican candidates, whereas even the most moderate Democratic candidates take fairly strong stands on social issues. Then I went to one of GlassBooth's Partner sites, OntheIssues.org, also supposedly nonpartisan, and took its similar test. It doesn't weight the issues. With the positions I actually hold, Kucinich and Dodd came out on top again. With the *opposite* positions, again Hunter and Tancredo came out on top. With all-neutral positions, this time Biden (Democrat) and Brownback (Republican) came out on top--but that's without any issue weighting. Of course this is
Re: [FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
...and you can find yourself heading down a path formerly trod by students of Jim Jones. They had all learned to try to think like their teacher, too, so successfully that when he drank the Kool-Aid, so did they. That was part of my point about New Age stuff and Hitler. TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Behalf Of hugheshugo It doesn't sound like a healthy atmosphere to me. But, as you say, they all must like it for some reason. It's kind of a rush, trying to attune your mind to someone else's. On the positive side, the process of doing this can break down a lot of your assumptions and preconceptions about life, as in, Oh shit...my teacher wants me to think like *this* this week, and I've always thought that this was low-vibe and beneath me. What the fuck do I do? I've certainly been through this, with Maharishi and with other spiritual teachers, and I am grate- ful for the many assumptions and preconceptions that got anihilated along the way. At the same time, there is IMO a potential danger in attuning one's mind to another's. That is the possibility of losing the ability to think for oneself. Learn to embrace or ignore one too many contradictions or outright crazinesses in your teacher and become comfortable with embracing or ignoring them, and you can find yourself heading down a path formerly trod by students of Jim Jones. They had all learned to try to think like their teacher, too, so successfully that when he drank the Kool-Aid, so did they. It's a double-edged sword. It also seems quite at odds with his own stories about Guru Dev and his search for a teacher, you remember the one about asking holy men for a light and if they got angry saying don't you know we can't use flames to cook he would reply where is this fire in you coming from then? (or words to that effect I can't remember it exactly). From this he'd conclude they weren't really enlightened and go somewhere else. I don't know if GD considered freedom from anger (and lifelong celibacy) as necessary criteria for enlightenment, or just necessary criteria for someone he would want as guru. A good point. However, think of the couple at the residence course that hugheshugo told us about earlier. They were enthusiastic about meditation, so enthusiastic that they signed up for a resi- dence course in which they could learn more about it. And they took one look at videos of Maharishi and the way he acts and thinks and at the people around him and the way that Maha- rishi has dressed them and at the way he expects *them* to act and think, and they were out the door. To attune yourself with the mind of a teacher, or to the minds of his closest students, you have to see something in them that makes you *want* to attune your mind with theirs. If it's there, you can overcome the silliness of the clothes that they wear and the craziness of many of the things that they say and think and do. Many of us here have been there, done that. But if it isn't there, you're out the door the minute you see the craziness. Some of us have been there, done that with this one, too. I think that the it, this something else, can be legitimately called charisma. If a teacher has it -- or at least a form of it that appeals to you personally -- you'll overlook any *amount* of craziness to be with them and attune your mind to theirs. The question would seem to be, do Maharishi and the people he has allowed to be closest to him and thus be perceived as his best students still have it? Would any of them have any charisma at all if perceived by someone who had never met them before and had no preconceptions about them? Or would they be perceived as merely crazy? I'm gonna have to go with crazy. What do you think? Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife] Re: Tough luck
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, aztjbailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Some would suggest that your mantra won't be cosmically legitimate unless it is properly imparted by a qualified person. A yes. Cosmic legitimacy! Truly awesome choice of words. I love it. I am, as the acronym file provides an acronym for, OTP. However, I feel great compassion for anyone who would like to attend a conciousness expanding event and dollars are in short supply. Know that you are already touching the infinite, in the practice you have now. You are already moving with the natural flow of the universe. Years ago, a friend who had been doing TM for years reminded me of the free technique MMY gave in the first book. I always remind myself amidst all the money orientation of the later organization, that he did that. What technique is that? OffWorld
[FairfieldLife] Re: Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
I was interested in the ployglot=increased IQ idea about 12 years ago in graduate school. As I recall, the research at that time finally found that learning another language did not increase IQ, with one possible exception: English speaking youngsters who became fgenuinely luent (it took a few years) in Chinese did show a 10-15 point IQ increase. The sample size was small, but other research also suggested that learning a second language that was based on tones having meaning (chinese, fo example) is what increases the IQ. Speaking Englihs and then learning French would not, but speaking French and then learning Korean would. The idea was that strengthening and developing the part of the brain invovled with music and tones and connecting that with the language/meaning areas resulted in the increase. I am sure more research has been done. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I hope you guys don't mind my interjecting a couple of thoughts here. Sapir Whorf doesn't address the emotional reaction we often have on hearing the sound of another language. We find French charming, Dutch funny, and German harsh, for example. Instead, the claim is that different languages constrain our thinking in various ways. For example, in English Jesus said something like, I am the truth and the light and the way...etc. But if a language doesn't have definite articles, as Chinese doesn't, for example, then that statement would read something like I am truth and light and way This is a profoundly different statement from the one with the definite articles. If someone makes that statement including the definite articles, then some one else could come along and say, No, I am the truth, the way... and an argument might well ensue about who is the real deal. Without the articles, there would be no conflict if someone else said, I am truth and light and way... Or consider the word knowledge. What happens to that word, that idea, when we add an article, as the TMO does when it speaks of the knowledge? It makes knowledge into something that can be given intellectual property protection. That is an unthinkable concept in Chinese---though, of course, it is something they could learn. Articles isolate a thing with definite boundaries from the flux of existence. Chinese has to make a special effort to create a word like thing. It tends to use a locution such as east-west for thing. The use of articles is just a very small example. The claim is that these small examples accrue to form a sort of cloud in which the speaker of a language is embedded and which makes him look at the world very differently than would a speaker embedded in a different cloud. A different world, moreover, is also a different self (since we are what we behold), and there is more than one eloquent literary statement by immigrants who speak of their American self versus their Spanish self, for instance. MMY has said that learning another language is not good for children, but he never said why he feels that way. I suspect the fact that a different language is tantamount to a different self is at the heart of his thinking. We know that language acquisition in babies is part and parcel with the formation of a separate sense of self. We also know that if a young child is removed from the environment of his mother tongue and plunged into a different environment, the result is almost always some personality disorder. Loss of mother tongue is a relatively new concern in psychology, but there is general agreement that this loss can be profoundly damaging. But the evidence points to the damage resulting from the loss of mother tongue, not from the acquisition of a new language. There is evidence that polyglots tend to have higher IQ's than monolingual individuals, which should not be surprising since IQ is 40% language related. On the other hand, there is also some evidence that polyglots tend to be out of touch with their emotional bodies, which, in turn, has the effect of lowering that same IQ--somewhat like a windchill factor tends to lower the feel of temperature. But there is a big HOWEVER in all this. The Sapir Whorff Hypothesis does a very good job of predicting tendencies in systems, but it cannot predict individuals. The reason it cannot, in my opinion, should make immediate intuitive sense to everyone here. Sapir Whorff addresses the small self only. It has nothing to say about the big Self; indeed, it doesn't acknowledge that there is such a thing. This is where Chomsky and the deep structure comes in, but with a caveat. Chomsky's description of the deep structure sounds to all TM'ers I know who've read it like a perfect description of Brahman or Para Vac. The problem is that Chomsky himself would most vehemently disagree
[FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
...and you can find yourself heading down a path formerly trod by students of Jim Jones. They had all learned to try to think like their teacher, too, so successfully that when he drank the Kool-Aid, so did they. That was part of my point about New Age stuff and Hitler. IMO, the problem is not with the New Age stuff per se, but with the baggage that the New Agers bring with them to that stuff. Stuff (the content or meat of the philosophy or religion) is just stuff. It's just ideas. It's how people think they have to *regard* the ideas that's the problem. Dogma is just a set of ideas. If you've never been taught to regard those ideas as more important or more right than any other ideas, the dogma *stays* just a set of ideas. But if a person *loads* the situation by bringing with them or absorbing from their environment a bunch of ideas that the dogma is sacrosanct and 100% right and better than any- body else's dogma and if you think badly of the dogma you'll go to Hell...well, now you've got a different situation. I don't think that all of the *content* of Eastern religion or New Age philosophy is bogus, just many of the ways it assumes one should *regard* that content. Some of the ideas are good, and a few of them just *rock*, like Do unto others as you would be done by. One shouldn't have to reject the good ideas in a philosophy or religion just because that philosophy or religion has a stick up its butt about how right the ideas are or how they should be regarded. I'd prescribe classes in comparative religion and philosophy at an early age, as on Aldous Huxley's Island. (Or as I remember it, 30+ years after reading it last.) None of the religions or philos- ophies are presented as better or higher than any other; all of them are presented as mere ideas. I honestly think that if more kids were brought up with this as a basis for how they viewed any new set of ideas in the world of spirituality, many of these problems you're talking about would go away. What I guess I'm saying is that as I see it, it's not the ideas that are problematic, but the 'tudes that people have *about* those ideas.
[FairfieldLife] Re: new rajas today
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, hugheshugo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, off_world_beings no_reply@ wrote: If it cannot continue to be documented then it will fall by the wayside. I can't see the latter happening in the great scheme of things. OffWorld I wish I could believe there was a great scheme of things, but I really don't think there is. There is no great sheme of things, there is just a general flow towards more and more conciousness. That is what the earth is - a living organism and higher states of consiousness are its natural blossoming, no less natural than a flower giving off its seed. And we are at the blossoming of consiousness now. I really don't know if the sidhis have any effect on the outside world. I've felt the power of group prog, every time, but what causes it? I never really accepted the UF theory and have tried to come up with an alternative but nothing else satisfies either. You won't be able to becuase you are the creator of your universe. You're consciousness organizes this playground in which it plays. You are the UF. But as we can't be sure, all theories are valid until one wins out. Science could easily say which but the TMO research isn't good enough, which is a big shame. Science would have to throw out most of all science if it wants to throw out the science on TM, but you are right more and more studies should be conducted, and they are being . There are more universities and institutes with big money researching TM now, than ever before. Back to the original story, wouldn't it be a pity if the ME did work and the TMO alienated so many that there was never enough coherence creating groups to change anything. Wouldn't that just beat all? You are looking at it the wrong way. The expansion of consiousness occurs because it is an expression of the blossoming of Ved (pure consciousness/pure knowledge) in human consciousness. The ME effect is an expression of that. It will occur...naturally. Theoretically at least. If it doesn't (or some version of it ) then we have global warming, mass starvation, disease epidemics that will obliterate the ablity of society to function, war over resources, prison planet, etc to look forward to. Only part of this will occur though, the blossoming will be there, smoother or a bit rougher, but humans will blossom. OffWorld
[FairfieldLife] Re: Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
That's really neat, wayback. Thanks for posting that information. There is a woman from Thailand and a Chinese couple in my beginner's Spanish class. I will have to remember to ask them what it's like for them to get their heads around a *non* tone-based language. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wayback71 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I was interested in the ployglot=increased IQ idea about 12 years ago in graduate school. As I recall, the research at that time finally found that learning another language did not increase IQ, with one possible exception: English speaking youngsters who became genuinely fluent (it took a few years) in Chinese did show a 10-15 point IQ increase. The sample size was small, but other research also suggested that learning a second language that was based on tones having meaning (chinese, fo example) is what increases the IQ. Speaking English and then learning French would not, but speaking French and then learning Korean would. The idea was that strengthening and developing the part of the brain involved with music and tones and connecting that with the language/meaning areas resulted in the increase. I am sure more research has been done.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev has something to say about rajas
Snip Judy: Was your life having a preordained purpose something you were taught in the TMO, or did you come up with that yourself? I ask because I never encountered any such teaching. Me: The purpose of human life in MMY's teaching is gaining enlightenment. You continue to reincarnate until you do. If you didn't get it from his lectures you would get it from the Gita commentary. Am I understanding your question? ME: snip A common theme for me is that I challenge self-proclaimed enlightened people to do something that unenlightened people cannot. Most gurus are only able to claim that they have a higher level of happiness or awareness but can't demonstrate to me that they have achieved more than that, a state of personal satisfaction. Judy: What's wrong with being in a state of personal satisfaction? ME: Nothing. I am all for it. I think it is achieved by a lot of people and is therefore not something grand enough to be called enlightenment. The association of enlightenment with enhanced cognitive abilities is part of its marketing appeal. Judy: Why can't you be in a state of personal satisfaction *and* pursue goals that you set for yourself? Why are those mutually exclusive? ME: I agree with you here. ME: If just one of them stepped up with their superior knowledge and cured cancer I would have to re-think my position. Judy: Isn't that sort of a shallow criterion? (I mean, obviously curing cancer per se isn't shallow, but you seem to mean it in the sense of being able to pull it out of a hat by magic.) Me: If they did it by superior intelligence or creativity that would be great too. I would hope that living the full potential of creative intelligence (remember SCI) would manifest in a person demonstrating more of these qualities. When I was in the movement MMY's superstar (in my mind) and super rich status was more impressive to me than it is today. Judy: What if the personal-satisfaction quotient in somebody's life were such that it enabled them to be especially persistent in the search for a cure for cancer? What if it enabled them to work on the science with a concentrated focus, without being distracted by petty concerns? What if their personal satisfaction granted them a degree of clarity of mind that enabled them to make out-of-the-box connections that turned out to be the key to a cure for cancer? None of that is magic, but it seems to me that firmly established personal satisfaction as a state of being might well facilitate getting to a cure for cancer--or any other worthy accomplishment--without the need for magic. It might. I just don't see anybody pulling this off in any magic or non magic way. If you assume that enlightened people are using their full mental potential shouldn't they be able to do something more special then becoming rich and famous? Brittany pulled this off too. Remember our discussions about the sidhis and how they may not be really volitional but are dictated by the needs of nature? Since there are just human capabilities according to MMY, it almost seems like there is a possibility that nature may not have a need for enlightened people to manifest any of the benefits of TM. TM is supposed to increase intelligence but maybe when you get enlightened you are at the mercy of Nature and if it suits nature you might end up acting like a dummy and not showing any increased intelligence in your daily life. That would totally suck wouldn't it?! --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues curtisdeltablues@ wrote: snip My shift of perspective on the value of the states of mind I had been cultivating through meditation that happened about 18 years ago brought a complete change in how I view my life and its purpose. Having dropped the assumption that my life has a pre-ordained purpose, I took up the challenge of creating purposes for my life. Was your life having a preordained purpose something you were taught in the TMO, or did you come up with that yourself? I ask because I never encountered any such teaching. snip A common theme for me is that I challenge self-proclaimed enlightened people to do something that unenlightened people cannot. Most gurus are only able to claim that they have a higher level of happiness or awareness but can't demonstrate to me that they have achieved more than that, a state of personal satisfaction. What's wrong with being in a state of personal satisfaction? Why can't you be in a state of personal satisfaction *and* pursue goals that you set for yourself? Why are those mutually exclusive? If just one of them stepped up with their superior knowledge and cured cancer I would have to re-think my position. Isn't that sort of a shallow criterion? (I mean, obviously curing cancer per se isn't shallow, but you seem to
[FairfieldLife] Re: Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
I met this woman from Denmark at some ATR course, and we were talking about accents and how they type cast a segment of the culture. Americans raised in Alabama can be interpreted as slow, stupid for instance because of the drawl. She told me that written Danish was understood by the whole country, but that there were accents that were so different as to constitute being almost separate languages. (Chinese works the same written/spoken way.) So I told her about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and said that from just the sounds one could derive a snapshot of a culture that has some practical heft. So I asked her to speak Danish, the same words, to me in the three accents, and then I would try characterize those subsets of Danish culture. I don't understand a word of Danish, but I completely nailed the type of people who used those accents. She was amazed, and so was I. It was so obvious to me, and I'm betting anyone in the world could listen to those samples and come to the same conclusions. Not that it was scientific -- it's merely my intutitive summation of this experiment. But, wow, it was really a biggie to see the message-of-sound so clearly being spot on. Edg --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, cardemaister [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung no_reply@ wrote: Hey Card, Have you any opinion about the Sapir Whorf hypothesis? I've been pondering on it for a while now. At least on *emotional level* various languages seem to have very distinct effects on me. I don't like the standard Finnish very much. Some regional dialects OTOH are quite amusing to listen to. And for instance when an Estonian speaks Finnish well, that seems much easier to my ear than, say, the working class accent of my own home town. Sometimes when I occasionally watch Finlands Svenska Television (Swedish TV of Finland), and after that change to a Finnish speaking channel, the negative emotional effect might be quite strong. But I guess it's quite natural that one's mother tongue has such emotional load, both pleasant and unpleasant, that is lacking in a foreign language. This might be a trivial thing, but as an example of how languges might affect one's thinking is the difference of the (what's here called) rection (rektio: the case governed by a verb, I think) of many verbs in Finnish compared to English (and many other IE languages, too, I guess). In Finnish one reads *from* a book, buys *from* a store, finds something *from* some place, that is, one uses the elative [sic!] case in stead of the inessive, which corresponds for instance 'in' or 'at' in English. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis Or, Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar? I've blissfully forgotten most of that little I once knew about TGG. But I seem to recall I kinda liked it, though. A more useful tool in interpreting e.g. suutras (especially the tricky compound words like viraama-pratyayaabhyaasa-puurvaH) is the IC analysis of structural syntax: http://facweb.furman.edu/~wrogers/syntax/ic.htm
[FairfieldLife] Re: Battle For The Republic Exposes Real Agenda
Sammy, Man, I have a hard time going to the conspiracy sites. I get riled, ya know? I ski a lot on those slippery slopes and sometimes I descend way muchly into such a crushing hopelessness. It's Kali Yuga -- easier for me to just say that skeleton thought and not flesh it out with my imagination. Avert the danger not yet come. Oh, yeah, I roil on purpose here, but as a writer I have a nice distance between me and the emotions I'm trying to convey here -- the editor in me keeps me from focusing on the angst and instead keeps me on the Art of wordsmithing. Otherwise, my essays would ruin my day. I appreciate your post here, you thunker you. Edg --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Samadhi Is Much Closer Than You Think -- Really! -- It's A No-Brainer. Who'd've Thunk It? [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I welcome exploring your insights, and your opinions of both Alex Jones's and Joseph Watson's information and perspectives on territory and the equitable distribution and consumption of resources. :-) ** *Of all that anyone leading or teaching has to convey, the most valuable thing to cultivate and convey to others is a moral conscience. Only such persons deserve to lead others, in any capacity. Anything less is a menace to society.* On 11/1/07, Duveyoung [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now this guy writes like me! And he's speaking the truth. Edg --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, PROUT News DharmaMitra1@ wrote: ** *Battle For The Republic * http://battle-for-the-republic.playz.it/* Exposes * *Real Immigration Agenda **Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet, October 30, 2007 * *Elite using balkanization strategy to * *destroy American sovereignty and * *create third world cesspit. * Alex Jones' Battle For The Republic exposes how the elite are using illegal immigration and pushing amnesty as a means of pulverizing the American middle class and ensuring that U.S. citizens, black, white and hispanic alike, are forced to sacrifice their freedom and sovereignty as America is sunk into a third world cesspool. The mini-documentary lifts the lid on how the backlash against rampant illegal immigration in America is a major concern for the Bilderberg Group, posing a threat to their plans to lower the living standards of U.S. citizens of all colors and creeds into second or even third world status. What is the real agenda behind last year's massive pro-illegal immigration demonstrations and who is really behind them? Battle For the Republic traces the legacy of the movement back to the Plan of San Diego, a shocking blueprint for race-based genocide directed against blacks and whites in America. The goal is to divide America by bankrolling the Aztlan movement, an extremist separatist plan on behalf of Mexican Ku Klux Klan style groups like Mecha and La Raza to reclaim the southern and western U.S. states, in order to eventually merge America, Canada and Mexico into a North American Union. Battle For The Republic shoots down the myth that Mexico has any rightful claim to the south western states by carefully documenting the history of how the west was won, bringing it up to the modern day and highlighting how the elite are using the enraged Mexican mobs as a weapon of conquest to slit America's throat and sacrifice its sovereignty on the altar of globalism. Hispanic Radio and TV stations owned by huge corporations based in New York spew hatred and division as Mexicans are radicalized and told that all their problems stem from the racist American middle class while ignoring the fact that the elite are the true cause of their misery, as taxpayers are sucked dry to fund welfare which only subsidizes the corporations that employ the illegals. Illegal aliens are being granted God-like status by the elite and given rights that super seed those of American citizens. The film highlights the case of a man who was assaulted and arrested by police for expressing his first amendment right to disagree with thousands of illegal aliens marching in downtown Seattle, and how illegals who assaulted him and smashed his car were left completely alone while throngs of Mexicans cheered as an American was taken to jail for exercising his freedom of speech. Now you're bleeding, what's it like now, bitch! yells one illegal as blood drips from the man's face. Battle For the Republic ends with Alex Jones' infamous protest of Vicente Fox when he came to Austin to give awards to police for breaking federal laws by not arresting illegal aliens. Fox was forced to cut his speech short after Alex Jones bullhorned the truth about his role in destroying American sovereignty, making headlines across Texas. ~~~ You may learn more about Alex Jones, PrisonPlanet.com, and his various offerings, including Battle for the Republic *HERE
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'll reply to this one because I did a followup on my initial questions. I wrote to them, both in their blog comments and directly to their press email address, sending from my legitimate press email address. In the latter email I asked whether they'd send me a list of all the questions, and for each of the candidates, where Glassbooth thinks they stand on each of the issues, using their five ratings on a scale of strongly opposed to strongly for. If they send me the list, and its contents seem to jibe with how the candidates would rate them- selves on the same scale, I will withdraw any questions as to their non-bias. If they refuse to send the list, I will still have questions. If they delete my post from the blog comments (they're moderated) so that it never appears, I will consider my questions answered. :-) Your comment hasn't appeared yet, but neither have any comments from November 4; the most recent is from yesterday early evening. That does suggest they're moderated and that they just haven't looked at the latest comments. But I'm wondering where you saw it *stated* that the comments are moderated. I don't know if you actually read my post, but I'd be interested in how you'd respond to my comment that it seems like a tremendous amount of work to go to in order to skew the test, for a very meager potential return (without even any way to measure it). Why would anybody put a significant amount of money behind such an effort on the off-chance of obtaining a few votes for a particular candidate or party? I'll let you know. Someone remind me in a week or so if I forget, Ok? In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend jstein@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk shempmcgurk@ wrote: The following website has designed a Survey/Quiz (not sure what it should be called) that will, through your answering two pages of questions, match you up with the candidate that best suits your stand on various policies: http://glassbooth.org/gbapp/index.php/Topic There is a major flaw in this site; it's the first page, in which you *must* select criteria that are more important to you, and use them to weight the recommendation of the matching candidate. While it seems practical, it also has the effect of disallowing one from simply answering the questions on the following pages with no weighting at all, and thus finding out where the different candidates theoretically stand on the issues. I say theoretically because basically the weighting mechanism is a way for the site's designers to prevent anyone from finding out whether they are really representing the different candidates' stands accurately. As long as there is no way to answer the questions *without weighting*, there is no way to determine the site's non-bias. That's incredibly suspicious in my book. I have pretty serious doubts as to the supposed non-partisan nature of the site. What is needed is an explanation of their computational method, for nerds and statis- ticians. That is, for each of the questions, *without any weighting*, provide a list of the different candidates and how the site designers matched them up with all possible Strongly support / strongly against answers to each question. Actually they do show you what the matches are based on, not statistically but by referencing the candidates' statements on the various issues. *That* is the important thing when judging the site's non-partisan nature. The fact that they seem to be hiding it, and then hiding it further by forcing people to weight their preferences, indicates to me that there is quite possibly something *very* partisan indeed about this website. You can take the test as many times as you want, so theoretically if you took it a bunch of times and weighted the issues differently each time, you'd get to see all the questions. FWIW: I took a similar test some months back on a different Web site, and it matched me with the same candidates this one does (Kucinich and Dodd came out on top both times). I can't now remember whether it had you weight the issues; I don't think it did. I went through the GlassBooth test again, weighting the same issues, but I chose the *opposite* position in my responses to the questions. This time Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo came out on top, which makes sense because they're the most conservative of the candidates, whereas Kucinich and Dodd are the most liberal. I went through it again, giving each
[FairfieldLife] Rick -- how's 'bout a discussion first? (Re: Posting Quotas Reached)
Bhairitu wrote: Let us know which show so we can see you in the audience. That would be Usenet. From: Barry2 Subject: OT: Democrats Applaud Date: Thurs, Jan 22 2004 11:30 am Groups: alt.meditation.transcendental http://tinyurl.com/elthv Fuck you, you little fascist shit.
[FairfieldLife] Re: The beginning of the end?
Cute, except it's you and the other Barry that are watching Californication on your legacy computers, and you're hooked up to non-union shop called ComCast. Don't know exactly how the other Barry gets his TV fix - piracy probably, since most US TV show aren't broadcast in Europe until months later. Bhairitu wrote: And I watch it on my 53 HD set not my computer. So, you watch porn on a 53 HD set connected to ComCast.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev has something to say about rajas
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Snip Judy: Was your life having a preordained purpose something you were taught in the TMO, or did you come up with that yourself? I ask because I never encountered any such teaching. Me: The purpose of human life in MMY's teaching is gaining enlightenment. You continue to reincarnate until you do. If you didn't get it from his lectures you would get it from the Gita commentary. Am I understanding your question? Oh, OK, in other words, the purpose of *every* life (and not just human life). I thought you meant a particular purpose for you, or for all TMers, or all TM teachers. snip Judy: What's wrong with being in a state of personal satisfaction? ME: Nothing. I am all for it. I think it is achieved by a lot of people and is therefore not something grand enough to be called enlightenment. Might there be degrees, though? ME: If just one of them stepped up with their superior knowledge and cured cancer I would have to re-think my position. Judy: Isn't that sort of a shallow criterion? (I mean, obviously curing cancer per se isn't shallow, but you seem to mean it in the sense of being able to pull it out of a hat by magic.) Me: If they did it by superior intelligence or creativity that would be great too. I would hope that living the full potential of creative intelligence (remember SCI) would manifest in a person demonstrating more of these qualities. When I was in the movement MMY's superstar (in my mind) and super rich status was more impressive to me than it is today. But if he'd come up with a cure for cancer instead of starting a worldwide movement, you would find that more impressive today? Judy: What if the personal-satisfaction quotient in somebody's life were such that it enabled them to be especially persistent in the search for a cure for cancer? What if it enabled them to work on the science with a concentrated focus, without being distracted by petty concerns? What if their personal satisfaction granted them a degree of clarity of mind that enabled them to make out-of-the-box connections that turned out to be the key to a cure for cancer? None of that is magic, but it seems to me that firmly established personal satisfaction as a state of being might well facilitate getting to a cure for cancer--or any other worthy accomplishment--without the need for magic. It might. I just don't see anybody pulling this off in any magic or non magic way. Pulling what off, a cure for cancer, or any worthy accomplishment? (I assume by anybody you mean any TMers, right?) If you assume that enlightened people are using their full mental potential shouldn't they be able to do something more special then becoming rich and famous? Brittany pulled this off too. How do you know they haven't? Remember our discussions about the sidhis and how they may not be really volitional but are dictated by the needs of nature? Since there are just human capabilities according to MMY, it almost seems like there is a possibility that nature may not have a need for enlightened people to manifest any of the benefits of TM. TM is supposed to increase intelligence but maybe when you get enlightened you are at the mercy of Nature and if it suits nature you might end up acting like a dummy and not showing any increased intelligence in your daily life. That would totally suck wouldn't it?! You're *always* at the mercy of nature, though, by definition. I guess my bottom-line point is that when you get right down to the nitty-gritty of what MMY teaches (although he doesn't make this plain), there just are no relative objective standards you can apply to the question of whether enlightenment is beneficial. Any attempted objective analysis is going to ultimately run afoul of some aspect of his metaphysics. We're all working without a net, in other words.
[FairfieldLife] Legally Blonde on MTV
Last night, MTV ran the Broadway stage production of Legally Blonde. If they re-run it, don't miss it. The writing is as clever as Rubic's Cube. And American Idol eat your heart out -- this is where the truly talented go FIRST. If you've got it, Broadway knows it when it's seen, and you're hired. The cast of this production were all righteous, multi-talented, athletic, dancing and singing scholars. Every style of dance, every musical genre seemingly was used and each performance was crisp and formatted with precision. The breadth of the skill-sets was so professional. The least singer could win American Idol, and the least dancer could best anything on So You Think You Can Dance or Dancing with the Stars. Any of them could win any reality talent show on TV today. The voices -- ALL OF THEM -- were powerful, instantly alluring, with range and elocutional elegance to spare. No one was stretching -- experts all. I was blown away. See it if you can find it. And, of course, be prepared for a rousing blast of EVERYTHING IMPORTANT ABOUT BEING HUMAN. Big-hearted, this play gathers the souls of all the characters within a warm poignant hug. Elitism is disemboweled, and hearts trump every trick. The energies will goose ya as much as anything felt on a first date. Edg
[FairfieldLife] Re: Devi Bhagavatam and Beeja Mantras?
bob brigante wrote: I distinctly remember, when I read the MIU library's copy (literally, a xerox copy) of the Srimad Devi Bhagavatam in 1975, a section in which all the bija mantras were listed with the warning that instruction by a qualified teacher was necessary to start using these powerful mantras, and that for one who started by self-instruction the results would not be good. This is totally outrageous!!! So, Bob, since 1975, you have known that the TM Beej Mantra Aing was a non-sense syllable overheard in the forest by an illiterate Brahmin, a thorough block-head, listening to the squealing of a pig, according to the Hindu scriptures. And that the TM Beej Mantra is a big mistake - the Beej is really Ai Ai. And you withheld this information for over 30 years, but I'm the drug-addled clown. This is outrageous! Why can't you TM teachers just be honest? 46-47. O king! There was a Brahmân, named Satyavrata, quite illiterate, a thorough block-head. Once he heard the letter Ai, Ai being uttered by a pig; and in course of a talk he himself uttered incidentally that letter and thereby became the one of the best Pundits.
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk shempmcgurk@ wrote: The following website has designed a Survey/Quiz (not sure what it should be called) that will, through your answering two pages of questions, match you up with the candidate that best suits your stand on various policies: http://glassbooth.org/gbapp/index.php/Topic There is a major flaw in this site; it's the first page, in which you *must* select criteria that are more important to you, and use them to weight the recommendation of the matching candidate. While it seems practical, it also has the effect of disallowing one from simply answering the questions on the following pages with no weighting at all, and thus finding out where the different candidates theoretically stand on the issues. I say theoretically because basically the weighting mechanism is a way for the site's designers to prevent anyone from finding out whether they are really representing the different candidates' stands accurately. After you get your results back, you can find out precisely where the candidates stand by clicking on the part on the results page that says why the candidates match you. As long as there is no way to answer the questions *without weighting*, there is no way to determine the site's non-bias. That's incredibly suspicious in my book. I have pretty serious doubts as to the supposed non-partisan nature of the site. What is needed is an explanation of their computational method, for nerds and statis- ticians. That is, for each of the questions, *without any weighting*, provide a list of the different candidates and how the site designers matched them up with all possible Strongly support / strongly against answers to each question. *That* is the important thing when judging the site's non-partisan nature. The fact that they seem to be hiding it, and then hiding it further by forcing people to weight their preferences, indicates to me that there is quite possibly something *very* partisan indeed about this website. I'll be interested to find out what comes out about it in the next few weeks. It should be a fairly simple matter for a good hacker to get their hands on the actual code that runs the questionnaire, and figure out whether it is slanted, and if so, in which political direction.
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: snip I say theoretically because basically the weighting mechanism is a way for the site's designers to prevent anyone from finding out whether they are really representing the different candidates' stands accurately. After you get your results back, you can find out precisely where the candidates stand by clicking on the part on the results page that says why the candidates match you. In other words, you're told exactly what the site has used as the basis for its matchings. All the quotes from the candidates are documented so you can check them out. And if you aren't familiar enough with the candidates' stances to know whether the quotes have been fairly selected, there are plenty of issues sites to check them against. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced it's simply not rational to suspect anybody would go to such trouble to skew a few votes, especially when there's no way to determine the results.
[FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The question would seem to be, do Maharishi and the people he has allowed to be closest to him and thus be perceived as his best students still have it? Would any of them have any charisma at all if perceived by someone who had never met them before and had no preconceptions about them? Or would they be perceived as merely crazy? I'm gonna have to go with crazy. What do you think? Yes, crazy; incomprehensible by the waking state intellect.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
If you can get a copy cheap, check out Antonio T. de Nicolas' Meditations Through Rg Veda: Fourth Dimensional Man. He has whole chapter on major themes of Rig Veda including whole chapters on the language of Sat and Asat. He thinks of languages as intentionality structures; Sat and Asat each having their own unique structures, which he goes into much detail -- it's an interesting analysis you would no doubt enjoy. The unique thing about the Vedic construction of the hymns concerning Asat is the multiple entendre is maintained, rather than ever taking a singular loka or POV. In most western languages it seems poetry or poetic language is the best way to create interwoven levels of seeing (darshanam), but in Sanskrit all P's of V can be kept alive simultaneously(!). Also, from that Vedic classic, The Vedic Experience (Raimon Panikkar): The Hymn of the Origins Nasadiya Sukta 1 The vision of this hymn comes out of a profound insight into the mystery of reality. It is the product of a mystical experience that far transcends the limits of logical thinking; it is a religious chant--for only in music or poetry can such a message be conveyed--invoking in splendid verses the Primal Mystery that transcends all categories, both human and divine. This hymn, while trying to plumb the depths of the mystery, formulates no doctrinal system but expresses itself by means of a rich variety of different symbols related to the one single insight. The hymn, in fact, presents an extraordinary consistency, which is patent only to the contemplative mind; in the absence of this latter, however, it is bound to appear either as syncretistic or as agnostic, as has in fact been sometimes asserted. We are dealing here, in the first place, not with a temporal cosmogonic hymn describing the beginning of creation, or even with an ontological theogony, or with a historical description concerning the formation of the Gods or even of God. It is not the description of a succession of stages through which the world has passed. The starting point of the hymn is not a piece of causal thinking seeking the cause of this world or of God or the Gods, but rather an intuitive vision of the whole. This hymn does not attempt to communicate information but to share a mystical awareness that transcends the sharpest lines of demarcation of which the human mind is capable: the divine and the created, Being and Nonbeing. It seeks to give expression to the insight of the oneness of reality which is experienced as being so totally one that it does not need the horizon of nonreality or the background of a thinking process to appear in its entire actuality. This oneness is so radically one that every distinction is overcome; it is that unutterable and unthinkable process that sees all that is and is-not, in its utmost simplicity, which is, of course, not a jnana, a gnosis, but an ignorance, an interrogation. The One is not seen against any horizon or background. All is included. All is pure horizon. There are no limits to the universal or, for that matter, to the concrete. The first verse brings us straightaway to the heart of the mystery and is composed of a series of questions. Neither an affirmation nor a negation is capable of carrying the weight of the ultimate mystery. Only the openness of an interrogation can embrace what our mere thinking cannot encompass. The Ultimate is neither real nor nonreal, neither being nor nonbeing, and thus neither is nor is-not; the apophatism is total and covers everything, even itself: darkness was wrapped in darkness. Being as well as Nonbeing, the Absolute (or Ultimate) as well as the Beginning, are contradictory concepts when applied to the primordial mystery. Absolute means unrelatedness, and when we speak or think about it we are negating that character. Ultimate points toward the end of a process that has no after, and Beginning toward a point that has no before. But what is to prevent our thinking a previous to the Beginning and a beyond to the Ultimate, unless our mind artificially imposes a limit on its thinking or bursts in the effort? If we think Being we cannot be prevented from thinking Nonbeing also, and so the very concept of an all-including Being which does not include Nonbeing defeats its own purpose. Indeed, a metaphysician might say that Nonbeing is a nonentity and an unthinkable concept; yet the fact remains that at least on the level of our thinking the concept of Being cannot include its contradiction. This verse tells us that the primordial mystery cannot be pinpointed to any idea, thing, thought, or being. It is primarily neither the answer to a set of riddles nor the object of current metaphysical speculations concerning the how or the why of creation. It is beyond thinking and Being. The symbol of water is the most pertinent one: the primordial water covers all, supports all, has
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: After you get your results back, you can find out precisely where the candidates stand by clicking on the part on the results page that says why the candidates match you. Not true for the ones I clicked. They displayed *one quote* from the candidate that seemed to justify giving his/her stance on that issue that particular weight. While it might very well be a *representative* quote of the candidate, and might accurately indicate his or her position on the issue, that isn't necessarily the case. It could have been an accurate quote but a *non*-representative one, from years or decades back, chosen malic- iously. I'm not *suggesting* malicious misrepresentation of candidates' positions here, merely that it could easily happen, given the non-publishing (so far) of the full list of questions and Glassbooth's score for each candidate on each issue. If they do that, and the scores seem representative of the candidates' real positions on the issues, then I withdraw all concerns about the site. What's more likely than malicious bias is that if their methodology wasn't rigorous enough, *unintentional* bias could have crept into the scores that they attributed to each candidate. H...we seem to have conflicting quotes on this issue from this candidate...which should we choose? I know...let's flip a coin. :-) We'll see over the next few weeks, because I've noticed that a number of far more influential sources than I have expressed the same concerns I did. I'm sure they'll follow up, and if the site is legit, they'll respond and publish their methodology and that will be that and the world will have a neat new tool with which to look at political candidates.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Two TMers arguing on National TV
On Nov 4, 2007, at 12:45 AM, shempmcgurk wrote: As for King's screw-up in the youtube clip, he really embarrassed himself and Seinfeld had every right to give it to him (in, of course, the nice way that he did). I mean, come on, it's just like Jerry said: it was the #1 show on TV and virtually everyone knew it. What a stupid question. I expected to agree with you since I've heard King come out with some whoppers (like the one below) but after listening came to the opposite conclusion--it was a reasonable question. Everybody knew what? I never watched even one episode. It was fairly obvious that Seinfeld's poor ego was hurt that LK didn't give him the proper obeisance, but instead dared to ask Seinfeld a question he didn't like. Horrors. And King did give him the benefit of the doubt, and was extremely gracious about it, even after it was obvious that Seinfeld was going off the deep end and anyone else probably would have ended the show right there. Now I realize, once again, why I was never interested in watching it. Who needs to spend extra time watching an insecure, trivial, and not-terribly-talented ego maniac put others down? He could have just answered the question and let it go at that. He was a complete asshole. The only explanation I can come up with is that King is going slightly senile. This Seinfeld moment wasn't nearly as bad as what he said to Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr when he interviewed them and the Beatles's wives on the show he did on the opening of Cirque de Soleil's Love. As he was going to break, he said after the break, we'll be back with the WIDOWS, referring to Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono. That was embarrassing, as were several moments with his interview with McCartney solo a few years ago. But I like King--in general, he doesn't purposely try to embarrass his guests. Sal
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev has something to say about rajas
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues curtisdeltablues@ wrote: Snip Judy: Was your life having a preordained purpose something you were taught in the TMO, or did you come up with that yourself? I ask because I never encountered any such teaching. Me: The purpose of human life in MMY's teaching is gaining enlightenment. You continue to reincarnate until you do. If you didn't get it from his lectures you would get it from the Gita commentary. Am I understanding your question? Oh, OK, in other words, the purpose of *every* life (and not just human life). I thought you meant a particular purpose for you, or for all TMers, or all TM teachers. The logic as I recall it was to eliminate suffering in one's life, and that any relative means to do this would eventually be transcended, and therefore becoming established in a state that was permanently free of the suffering of relative life; enlightenment, was the purpose of life. Makes sense to me. The catch is how we define enlightenment, becasue it is a state that coexists with every thought, action and lack of any thought or action. Until the reality of both enlightenment and action is lived, it cannot be conceived by the mind; the mind will only think of it in terms of its description of eternal peace and conclude no action is taking place, because the unenlightened mind is always bound to action, so if there is eternal peace it concludes that the body and mind are also not acting. The reality of enlightenment is that it is the eternal fulfillment of living a contented life. The enlightened part of us continues in eternal silence, eternal fulfillment, and if we are not recluses, our bodies and minds work and play as hard as possible while enjoying this simultaneous state of complete fulfillment and inner silence/infinity. Nothing stagnant or preordained about it. It is freedom of the highest order.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
On Nov 4, 2007, at 10:02 AM, Duveyoung wrote: I met this woman from Denmark at some ATR course, and we were talking about accents and how they type cast a segment of the culture. Americans raised in Alabama can be interpreted as slow, stupid for instance because of the drawl. She told me that written Danish was understood by the whole country, but that there were accents that were so different as to constitute being almost separate languages. (Chinese works the same written/spoken way.) So I told her about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and said that from just the sounds one could derive a snapshot of a culture that has some practical heft. So I asked her to speak Danish, the same words, to me in the three accents, and then I would try characterize those subsets of Danish culture. I don't understand a word of Danish, but I completely nailed the type of people who used those accents. She was amazed, and so was I. It was so obvious to me, and I'm betting anyone in the world could listen to those samples and come to the same conclusions. This is a known sociological phenomenon. One of the common examples is how the British classify people into approximately 8 segments of society just based on the words someone first speaks, accent, etc. Your example of Alabaman's just goes to show, it's very likely a universal thing, and I do believe it does not depend on knowing the language, merely the inflections. Of course if you were using the (common) TM bija, aieeng, on long courses you would've just been even more sensitized to it.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
If you ever cross the Canadian border and back to the USA, you will find that the Border Agent actually listens to your accent to determine which part of the US you live in and therefore can verify your citizenship without looking at your ID. Edg, you made an interesting point about sounds of a language. It sounds like you have developed a siddhi for determining the status of an individual based on what he or she speaks. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Nov 4, 2007, at 10:02 AM, Duveyoung wrote: I met this woman from Denmark at some ATR course, and we were talking about accents and how they type cast a segment of the culture. Americans raised in Alabama can be interpreted as slow, stupid for instance because of the drawl. She told me that written Danish was understood by the whole country, but that there were accents that were so different as to constitute being almost separate languages. (Chinese works the same written/spoken way.) So I told her about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and said that from just the sounds one could derive a snapshot of a culture that has some practical heft. So I asked her to speak Danish, the same words, to me in the three accents, and then I would try characterize those subsets of Danish culture. I don't understand a word of Danish, but I completely nailed the type of people who used those accents. She was amazed, and so was I. It was so obvious to me, and I'm betting anyone in the world could listen to those samples and come to the same conclusions. This is a known sociological phenomenon. One of the common examples is how the British classify people into approximately 8 segments of society just based on the words someone first speaks, accent, etc. Your example of Alabaman's just goes to show, it's very likely a universal thing, and I do believe it does not depend on knowing the language, merely the inflections. Of course if you were using the (common) TM bija, aieeng, on long courses you would've just been even more sensitized to it.
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk shempmcgurk@ wrote: After you get your results back, you can find out precisely where the candidates stand by clicking on the part on the results page that says why the candidates match you. Not true for the ones I clicked. They displayed *one quote* from the candidate that seemed to justify giving his/her stance on that issue that particular weight. I got several on each issue, for each of my candidates, all documented as to context and date. While it might very well be a *representative* quote of the candidate, and might accurately indicate his or her position on the issue, that isn't necessarily the case. It could have been an accurate quote but a *non*-representative one, from years or decades back, chosen malic- iously. In a spot-check, the quotes I got were all recent and all representative. I'm not *suggesting* malicious misrepresentation of candidates' positions here, Of course, Barry just did suggest exactly that: a *non*-representative one, from years or decades back, chosen maliciously. And his first two posts on this both openly expressed suspicion that any such misrepresentation would be deliberate. merely that it could easily happen, given the non-publishing (so far) of the full list of questions and Glassbooth's score for each candidate on each issue. If they do that, and the scores seem representative of the candidates' real positions on the issues, then I withdraw all concerns about the site. What's more likely than malicious bias is that if their methodology wasn't rigorous enough, *unintentional* bias could have crept into the scores that they attributed to each candidate. H...we seem to have conflicting quotes on this issue from this candidate...which should we choose? I know...let's flip a coin. :-) There will always be some element of uncertainty along these lines, but there are unlikely to be enough instances of this to actually skew any votes. We'll see over the next few weeks, because I've noticed that a number of far more influential sources than I have expressed the same concerns I did. Which sources were these, please? (Prediction: Barry won't provide these sources. Should we accord him the benefit of the doubt if he doesn't, or treat him as he plans to treat the site if they don't cough up all the data he's demanded and assume there are no such sources?) I'm sure they'll follow up, and if the site is legit, they'll respond and publish their methodology and that will be that and the world will have a neat new tool with which to look at political candidates. Barry really *ought* to read my posts, because that would keep him from looking like quite as much of a fool. I pointed out that the tool is *not* new at all; there are several such tests on the Web already.
[FairfieldLife] Election Reminder-Note change of recommendation for the 4th Ward
From: Bill Blackmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Election Reminder-Note change of recommendation for the 4th Ward Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 09:58:42 -0600 Dear Quiet Zone Supporter, Please vote for these candidates if you want a Quiet Zone. Note the change in our recommendation for the 4th Ward: Ira Roffel, the candidate for the 3rd Ward, has been instrumental in getting us this far. The 3rd ward is west of 4th street and north of Hwy. 34 but also includes Suburban Heights and behind Econo Foods west. STRONG RECOMMENDATION! Christy Welty for the at large seat has been a consistent supporter of the quiet zone and favors using money from closing crossings towards the cost of the quiet zone. All registered voters can vote for the at large seat. STRONG RECOMMENDATION! Martha Norbeck for the 4th ward is strong supporter of the quiet zone and favors using money from closing crossings towards the cost of the quiet zone. STRONG RECOMMENDATION! The important thing is that everyone turns out to vote. Remember that the message sent by this election will help the quiet zone to become a reality in the very near future. Please remember to forward this message to friends and family. QUIET ZONE TROPICAL RAFFLE KICKOFF WILL BE FRIDAY NOV. 9TH AT 8 P.M. AT THE OLD ARMORY. TOM MORGAN AND HIS NEW BAND WALKIN SHOES WILL ENTERTAIN. FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE! RAFFLE TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE. A REMINDER EMAIL WILL GO OUT LATER THIS WEEK. TELL YOUR FRIENDS PLEASE. Regards, Bill Blackmore STRONG RECOMMENDATIONS! Candidate Ward Ward Locations Ira Roffel 3rd Ward West of 4th St. Including Suburban Heights and behind Econofoods Christy Welty at Large everyone Martha Norbeck 4th ward includes the downtown area and near east side, north to the RR tracks Ed Malloy Mayor Everyone-even though Mayor Malloy is running unopposed, he deserves your support and vote!
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: snip I'm sure they'll follow up, and if the site is legit, they'll respond and publish their methodology and that will be that and the world will have a neat new tool with which to look at political candidates. Barry really *ought* to read my posts, because that would keep him from looking like quite as much of a fool. I pointed out that the tool is *not* new at all; there are several such tests on the Web already. From a Yahoo search for +quiz +politics +candidates (just the first 30 or so hits, then I got bored): http://www.ontheissues.org/quizeng/XPolitics/start.asp http://www.speakout.com/VoteMatch/ http://www.propeller.com/ http://www.dehp.net/candidate/index.php http://www.selectsmart.com/president/2008.html http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/candidate-match- game.htm http://www.fortliberty.org/presidential-candidates.shtml
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev has something to say about rajas
snip But if he'd come up with a cure for cancer instead of starting a worldwide movement, you would find that more impressive today? Yes of course. But I understand this is due to my own valuation of his techniques. Snip If you assume that enlightened people are using their full mental potential shouldn't they be able to do something more special then becoming rich and famous? Brittany pulled this off too. How do you know they haven't? With the unsolved problems in the world, I think they must be working on some pretty obscure stuff or it would hit the news. Of course I don't know how many of the innovators in society are enlightened. Remember our discussions about the sidhis and how they may not be really volitional but are dictated by the needs of nature? Since there are just human capabilities according to MMY, it almost seems like there is a possibility that nature may not have a need for enlightened people to manifest any of the benefits of TM. TM is supposed to increase intelligence but maybe when you get enlightened you are at the mercy of Nature and if it suits nature you might end up acting like a dummy and not showing any increased intelligence in your daily life. That would totally suck wouldn't it?! You're *always* at the mercy of nature, though, by definition. I thought unenlightened clods like me could still violate natural law. It makes ignorance seem more free that the enlightened. I guess my bottom-line point is that when you get right down to the nitty-gritty of what MMY teaches (although he doesn't make this plain), there just are no relative objective standards you can apply to the question of whether enlightenment is beneficial. Any attempted objective analysis is going to ultimately run afoul of some aspect of his metaphysics. We're all working without a net, in other words. This part of our discussion really fascinates me. I think it represents a direct contradiction of the claims of TM. I mean in your own life as a long term meditator, you must feel concrete cognitive benefitsright? Of course unless you have tried quitting for a long period it might be hard to compare what you would feel if you didn't. But increasing intelligence and creativity is at the core of TM claims. If we accept that you might not display these qualities in enlightenment, not more intelligent, more creative, more virtuous, I think we are redefining what it is all supposed to mean. I guess after decades of people practicing TM we have to accept the obvious, that the benefits of TM are not as obvious as I had hoped. By now I would have expected people doing some amazing stuff. Instead we have an acceptance that enlightenment may not have any of the expected qualities. Your statement that : there just are no relative objective standards you can apply to the question of whether enlightenment is beneficial. seems like a pretty high level of honesty about it all. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues curtisdeltablues@ wrote: Snip Judy: Was your life having a preordained purpose something you were taught in the TMO, or did you come up with that yourself? I ask because I never encountered any such teaching. Me: The purpose of human life in MMY's teaching is gaining enlightenment. You continue to reincarnate until you do. If you didn't get it from his lectures you would get it from the Gita commentary. Am I understanding your question? Oh, OK, in other words, the purpose of *every* life (and not just human life). I thought you meant a particular purpose for you, or for all TMers, or all TM teachers. snip Judy: What's wrong with being in a state of personal satisfaction? ME: Nothing. I am all for it. I think it is achieved by a lot of people and is therefore not something grand enough to be called enlightenment. Might there be degrees, though? ME: If just one of them stepped up with their superior knowledge and cured cancer I would have to re-think my position. Judy: Isn't that sort of a shallow criterion? (I mean, obviously curing cancer per se isn't shallow, but you seem to mean it in the sense of being able to pull it out of a hat by magic.) Me: If they did it by superior intelligence or creativity that would be great too. I would hope that living the full potential of creative intelligence (remember SCI) would manifest in a person demonstrating more of these qualities. When I was in the movement MMY's superstar (in my mind) and super rich status was more impressive to me than it is today. But if he'd come up with a cure for cancer instead of starting a worldwide movement, you would find that more impressive today? Judy: What if the personal-satisfaction quotient in somebody's life were such that it enabled them to be
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From a Yahoo search for +quiz +politics +candidates (just the first 30 or so hits, then I got bored): So bored you've pissed away almost half of your week's allotment of posts in less than 28 hours, largely while trying to discredit or trash me? Judy's like a wind-up doll. All I have to do is make a comment strongly for or stongly against something -- anything -- and she'll go crazy using it as an excuse to dump on me. And, as a result, she'll be fouled out and out of our hair before the week really starts and we can have civilized discussions for a few days while she's sitting on the sidelines fuming and building up a head of steam for *next* week, when she'll do exactly the same thing. Thank-you gifts and other tokens of appreciation can be sent to P.O. Box 108, Sitges, Spain. :-)
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev has something to say about rajas
authfriend posted: Your statement that : there just are no relative objective standards you can apply to the question of whether enlightenment is beneficial. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: seems like a pretty high level of honesty about it all. It is. Of what use is a rhetorical discussion about enlightenment? Because the benefits are entirely subjective, there is no way to *prove* the benefits of it, one way or another, to another. Either for the sake of the other, or the sake of the enlightened one. Seen from within the establishment of such a state, there is a quantum, unmistakable benefit, but beyond each individual's need to pursue such a thing, or not, any attempt to justify such a dedication in one's life [towards gaining enlightenment] is completely worthless. Both for the one pursuing the permanent establishment of enlightenment, and others. Completely worthless to try to persuade others. People come to a pursuit of enlightenment for their own reasons, in their own time. If someone, such as yourself, sees no need to pursue such a thing, there is no reason that I can see to contradict that, or try to change that.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev has something to say about rajas
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: authfriend posted: Your statement that : there just are no relative objective standards you can apply to the question of whether enlightenment is beneficial. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues curtisdeltablues@ wrote: seems like a pretty high level of honesty about it all. It is. Of what use is a rhetorical discussion about enlightenment? Because the benefits are entirely subjective, there is no way to *prove* the benefits of it, one way or another, to another. Either for the sake of the other, or the sake of the enlightened one. This is a direct contradiction to MMY's claims that first, a person gains measurably increased cognitive abilities from TM practice,and that the performance of sidhis verifies that gains in higher states. According to MMY the benifits are not only not just subjective,they can be measured by relatively crude scientific techniques. I respect that he does give falsifiable criteria for the subjective state of enlightenment. Seen from within the establishment of such a state, there is a quantum, unmistakable benefit, but beyond each individual's need to pursue such a thing, or not, any attempt to justify such a dedication in one's life [towards gaining enlightenment] is completely worthless. Both for the one pursuing the permanent establishment of enlightenment, and others. Completely worthless to try to persuade others. Then MMY's life is a total waste because he has dedicated it to just this goal. People come to a pursuit of enlightenment for their own reasons, in their own time. If someone, such as yourself, sees no need to pursue such a thing, there is no reason that I can see to contradict that, or try to change that. Agreed. It shows a good development of intellectual boundaries. But for MMY and his closest followers, the evangelical nature of his activities are the basis of everything he does.
[FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer rick@ wrote: On Behalf Of hugheshugo It doesn't sound like a healthy atmosphere to me. But, as you say, they all must like it for some reason. It's kind of a rush, trying to attune your mind to someone else's. On the positive side, the process of doing this can break down a lot of your assumptions and preconceptions about life, as in, Oh shit...my teacher wants me to think like *this* this week, and I've always thought that this was low-vibe and beneath me. What the fuck do I do? I've certainly been through this, with Maharishi and with other spiritual teachers, and I am grate- ful for the many assumptions and preconceptions that got anihilated along the way. Yes, I can see how it works now and have met a few people I would consider to be highly evolved who have been through it and have nothing but praise for MMY and the whole process of attuning the mind to the guru. It might be saying a lot about me that I wouldn't consider MMY's method my sort of party. Still clinging to the ego too much perhaps. At the same time, there is IMO a potential danger in attuning one's mind to another's. That is the possibility of losing the ability to think for oneself. Learn to embrace or ignore one too many contradictions or outright crazinesses in your teacher and become comfortable with embracing or ignoring them, and you can find yourself heading down a path formerly trod by students of Jim Jones. They had all learned to try to think like their teacher, too, so successfully that when he drank the Kool-Aid, so did they. It's a double-edged sword. It also seems quite at odds with his own stories about Guru Dev and his search for a teacher, you remember the one about asking holy men for a light and if they got angry saying don't you know we can't use flames to cook he would reply where is this fire in you coming from then? (or words to that effect I can't remember it exactly). From this he'd conclude they weren't really enlightened and go somewhere else. I don't know if GD considered freedom from anger (and lifelong celibacy) as necessary criteria for enlightenment, or just necessary criteria for someone he would want as guru. A good point. A very good point. However, think of the couple at the residence course that hugheshugo told us about earlier. They were enthusiastic about meditation, so enthusiastic that they signed up for a resi- dence course in which they could learn more about it. And they took one look at videos of Maharishi and the way he acts and thinks and at the people around him and the way that Maha- rishi has dressed them and at the way he expects *them* to act and think, and they were out the door. To attune yourself with the mind of a teacher, or to the minds of his closest students, you have to see something in them that makes you *want* to attune your mind with theirs. If it's there, you can overcome the silliness of the clothes that they wear and the craziness of many of the things that they say and think and do. Many of us here have been there, done that. But if it isn't there, you're out the door the minute you see the craziness. Some of us have been there, done that with this one, too. I think that the it, this something else, can be legitimately called charisma. If a teacher has it -- or at least a form of it that appeals to you personally -- you'll overlook any *amount* of craziness to be with them and attune your mind to theirs. The question would seem to be, do Maharishi and the people he has allowed to be closest to him and thus be perceived as his best students still have it? Would any of them have any charisma at all if perceived by someone who had never met them before and had no preconceptions about them? Or would they be perceived as merely crazy? I'm gonna have to go with crazy. What do you think? Is it the channel or the people on it that put me off? I've never considered it like that. I don't think there is anyone on there with the charisma to transcend the damage done by the outfits. Hagelin I used to like, until I realised I didn't believe a word he was saying about quantum physics and these days he just sounds demented when he goes off on a rant. For the purposes of the charisma argument all the others are expendable as far as I'm concerned, I'm sure they're nice people (Heck, I know one or two they are definitely nice people) but they are doing something outside their comfort zone I can tell. And that, as you say, is most likely the point of the exercise. I'm going to go with crazy, I don't know anyone outside the TMO that wouldn't be put off by the crowns.
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend jstein@ wrote: From a Yahoo search for +quiz +politics +candidates (just the first 30 or so hits, then I got bored): So bored you've pissed away almost half of your week's allotment of posts in less than 28 hours, largely while trying to discredit or trash me? Non sequitur, and a lie. I've made only two posts trashing Barry. Judy's like a wind-up doll. All I have to do is make a comment strongly for or stongly against something -- anything -- and she'll go crazy using it as an excuse to dump on me. And another lie. And, as a result, she'll be fouled out and out of our hair before the week really starts and we can have civilized discussions for a few days while she's sitting on the sidelines fuming and building up a head of steam for *next* week, when she'll do exactly the same thing. And *another* one. Thank-you gifts and other tokens of appreciation can be sent to P.O. Box 108, Sitges, Spain. :-) Yes, by all means, support compulsive liars.
RE: [FairfieldLife] Re: Two TMers arguing on National TV
I watched the whole interview live on TV, and my impression is that Seinfeld was just joking around. He’s really a very detached, easygoing guy. At another time during the interview, King told Seinfeld that he was 12th on some list of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time, and as with the other bit, Seinfeld at first feigned outrage, then King read him the list of the first 11, including Richard Pryor (#1), Rodney Dangerfield, Steve Martin, Roseanne Barr, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock, etc. With each one, Seinfeld nodded or uh-huhed his agreement, and after the 11 were read, he agreed that it was a good list and that he wouldn’t feel justified in bumping any of the others out of their spot. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
And Judy goes over the halfway mark. :-) Who do you think she'll spend the remaining 17 posts (more if Edg comes to her rescue again or if she thinks she can get away with it) criticizing? insert Church Lady voice from SNL here Could it be...Satan? :-) Or Barry. Seems to be the same person in her mind, or what she passes off as a mind. ( She'll probably waste a couple of posts on that last line alone...I'm bettin' that at this rate and with this much of a hate Jones on she'll be out of our hair before Monday. ) --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend jstein@ wrote: From a Yahoo search for +quiz +politics +candidates (just the first 30 or so hits, then I got bored): So bored you've pissed away almost half of your week's allotment of posts in less than 28 hours, largely while trying to discredit or trash me? Non sequitur, and a lie. I've made only two posts trashing Barry. Judy's like a wind-up doll. All I have to do is make a comment strongly for or stongly against something -- anything -- and she'll go crazy using it as an excuse to dump on me. And another lie. And, as a result, she'll be fouled out and out of our hair before the week really starts and we can have civilized discussions for a few days while she's sitting on the sidelines fuming and building up a head of steam for *next* week, when she'll do exactly the same thing. And *another* one. Thank-you gifts and other tokens of appreciation can be sent to P.O. Box 108, Sitges, Spain. :-) Yes, by all means, support compulsive liars.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Tough luck
I think a body awareness exercise was given by MMY. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, off_world_beings [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, aztjbailey aztjbailey@ wrote: Some would suggest that your mantra won't be cosmically legitimate unless it is properly imparted by a qualified person. A yes. Cosmic legitimacy! Truly awesome choice of words. I love it. I am, as the acronym file provides an acronym for, OTP. However, I feel great compassion for anyone who would like to attend a conciousness expanding event and dollars are in short supply. Know that you are already touching the infinite, in the practice you have now. You are already moving with the natural flow of the universe. Years ago, a friend who had been doing TM for years reminded me of the free technique MMY gave in the first book. I always remind myself amidst all the money orientation of the later organization, that he did that. What technique is that? OffWorld
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev has something to say about rajas
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip But if he'd come up with a cure for cancer instead of starting a worldwide movement, you would find that more impressive today? Yes of course. But I understand this is due to my own valuation of his techniques. Snip If you assume that enlightened people are using their full mental potential shouldn't they be able to do something more special then becoming rich and famous? Brittany pulled this off too. How do you know they haven't? With the unsolved problems in the world, I think they must be working on some pretty obscure stuff or it would hit the news. Of course I don't know how many of the innovators in society are enlightened. Yes, that was my point. But not necessarily just innovators per se. snip supposed to increase intelligence but maybe when you get enlightened you are at the mercy of Nature and if it suits nature you might end up acting like a dummy and not showing any increased intelligence in your daily life. That would totally suck wouldn't it?! You're *always* at the mercy of nature, though, by definition. I thought unenlightened clods like me could still violate natural law. How could that be possible if natural law is said to govern everything? snip I guess my bottom-line point is that when you get right down to the nitty-gritty of what MMY teaches (although he doesn't make this plain), there just are no relative objective standards you can apply to the question of whether enlightenment is beneficial. Any attempted objective analysis is going to ultimately run afoul of some aspect of his metaphysics. We're all working without a net, in other words. This part of our discussion really fascinates me. I think it represents a direct contradiction of the claims of TM. I mean in your own life as a long term meditator, you must feel concrete cognitive benefits right? I think I said here once before that the only way I could describe the changes that are taking place is as increasing transparency. That's pretty vague, but it's such a holistic, subjective, subtle type of change that articulating it any more concretely just doesn't seem accurate. Of course unless you have tried quitting for a long period it might be hard to compare what you would feel if you didn't. But increasing intelligence and creativity is at the core of TM claims. If we accept that you might not display these qualities in enlightenment, not more intelligent, more creative, more virtuous, I think we are redefining what it is all supposed to mean. How can you tell whether these qualities are being displayed? By what standards are you evaluating them? Unfathomable is the course of action. I do think one's understanding of the implications of the claims changes over time. I guess after decades of people practicing TM we have to accept the obvious, that the benefits of TM are not as obvious as I had hoped. By now I would have expected people doing some amazing stuff. Instead we have an acceptance that enlightenment may not have any of the expected qualities. Well, that's *my* view, not necessarily anybody else's. Your statement that : there just are no relative objective standards you can apply to the question of whether enlightenment is beneficial. seems like a pretty high level of honesty about it all. I'm not pushing enlightenment, just suggesting that objective arguments against it don't fill the bill.
RE: [FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of hugheshugo Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 12:50 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today) I'm going to go with crazy, I don't know anyone outside the TMO that wouldn't be put off by the crowns. I wouldn’t call them crazy, just indoctrinated. For decades, they have been “attuning themselves to Maharishi’s thinking” because Maharishi has told them to do so, and that’s the way to succeed in the TMO. There was a time when his thinking was outside the box, but in a way that made sense to most spiritual seekers. But then gradually, it drifted farther and farther into territory that all but the indoctrinated would regard as strange. Like a boat that had taken a wrong branch in the river and the surroundings became increasingly unfamiliar, but hey, you were on the boat. What were you going to do, jump overboard and swim upstream and hope to find some other boat going down a branch more to your liking? Many did that, but some stayed on the boat, maybe because they were afraid to jump; maybe because they had important positions on the crew and didn’t want to lose the power and status. Leaving the boat metaphor, I think many have found a comfortable and fulfilling niche in the TMO without buying into the whole rajas and crowns trip. They think it’s odd, it doesn’t inspire them, but they just steer clear of it and enjoy the things they enjoy, such as going to the dome, teaching business or biology at MUM, etc. A friend on MUM staff told me that at least half the faculty and staff think this way. They don’t know what they’d do if they left campus, they like what they’re doing well enough, so they just keep on keeping on, ignoring stuff they can’t relate to, reading what they want to read in private, and even sneaking off to see other spiritual teachers occasionally. Some even visit various ashrams in India, unbeknownst to the MUM administrators who would bust them for doing so if they found out. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
RE: [FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of TurquoiseB Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 1:03 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest! And Judy goes over the halfway mark. :-) Who do you think she'll spend the remaining 17 posts (more if Edg comes to her rescue again or if she thinks she can get away with it) criticizing? insert Church Lady voice from SNL here Could it be...Satan? :-) Or Barry. Seems to be the same person in her mind, or what she passes off as a mind. ( She'll probably waste a couple of posts on that last line alone...I'm bettin' that at this rate and with this much of a hate Jones on she'll be out of our hair before Monday. ) You just wasted a post by nibbling on the Judy bait. If you were really indifferent (which IMO is the best way of dealing with people who aggravate you) you wouldn’t comment on what she’s doing. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
Re: [FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
you make some really good points. a TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...and you can find yourself heading down a path formerly trod by students of Jim Jones. They had all learned to try to think like their teacher, too, so successfully that when he drank the Kool-Aid, so did they. That was part of my point about New Age stuff and Hitler. IMO, the problem is not with the New Age stuff per se, but with the baggage that the New Agers bring with them to that stuff. Stuff (the content or meat of the philosophy or religion) is just stuff. It's just ideas. It's how people think they have to *regard* the ideas that's the problem. Dogma is just a set of ideas. If you've never been taught to regard those ideas as more important or more right than any other ideas, the dogma *stays* just a set of ideas. But if a person *loads* the situation by bringing with them or absorbing from their environment a bunch of ideas that the dogma is sacrosanct and 100% right and better than any- body else's dogma and if you think badly of the dogma you'll go to Hell...well, now you've got a different situation. I don't think that all of the *content* of Eastern religion or New Age philosophy is bogus, just many of the ways it assumes one should *regard* that content. Some of the ideas are good, and a few of them just *rock*, like Do unto others as you would be done by. One shouldn't have to reject the good ideas in a philosophy or religion just because that philosophy or religion has a stick up its butt about how right the ideas are or how they should be regarded. I'd prescribe classes in comparative religion and philosophy at an early age, as on Aldous Huxley's Island. (Or as I remember it, 30+ years after reading it last.) None of the religions or philos- ophies are presented as better or higher than any other; all of them are presented as mere ideas. I honestly think that if more kids were brought up with this as a basis for how they viewed any new set of ideas in the world of spirituality, many of these problems you're talking about would go away. What I guess I'm saying is that as I see it, it's not the ideas that are problematic, but the 'tudes that people have *about* those ideas. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
Rick Archer wrote: From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of TurquoiseB Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 1:03 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest! And Judy goes over the halfway mark. :-) Who do you think she'll spend the remaining 17 posts (more if Edg comes to her rescue again or if she thinks she can get away with it) criticizing? insert Church Lady voice from SNL here Could it be...Satan? :-) Or Barry. Seems to be the same person in her mind, or what she passes off as a mind. ( She'll probably waste a couple of posts on that last line alone...I'm bettin' that at this rate and with this much of a hate Jones on she'll be out of our hair before Monday. ) You just wasted a post by nibbling on the Judy bait. If you were really indifferent (which IMO is the best way of dealing with people who aggravate you) you wouldn’t comment on what she’s doing. Yup, looks like another badminton game between Judy and Barry. I thought about putting up an they're off and running topic here yesterday to comment on how as soon as the new week starts some people here can't wait to use up their message quota. How soon until they've managed that by noon on Saturday? :) To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Sanskrit (Vedic) 101: sat and asat
The tones as phonemes business is overrated in my opinion. The difference between shit and sheet is huge to a speaker of English. A speaker of Spanish has trouble telling the difference because no neural pathway making that distinction has been programmed until they learn English well enough. The difference between tones is on a par with that. Let's say you have a conversation about a cat constantly stealing your food. You and your wife have discussed this before, and so now, the food is missing and you say to her, Cat? and she says, Cat. Notice the difference in your voice in each pronunciation of the word cat. Such a different can be a phonemic difference in Chinese. In other words Cat? will have a different meaning from Cat! This no bigger (or smaller) a problem than differentiating between sheet and shit. a TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That's really neat, wayback. Thanks for posting that information. There is a woman from Thailand and a Chinese couple in my beginner's Spanish class. I will have to remember to ask them what it's like for them to get their heads around a *non* tone-based language. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wayback71 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I was interested in the ployglot=increased IQ idea about 12 years ago in graduate school. As I recall, the research at that time finally found that learning another language did not increase IQ, with one possible exception: English speaking youngsters who became genuinely fluent (it took a few years) in Chinese did show a 10-15 point IQ increase. The sample size was small, but other research also suggested that learning a second language that was based on tones having meaning (chinese, fo example) is what increases the IQ. Speaking English and then learning French would not, but speaking French and then learning Korean would. The idea was that strengthening and developing the part of the brain involved with music and tones and connecting that with the language/meaning areas resulted in the increase. I am sure more research has been done. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife] Re: This is the coolest!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip [Barry wrote:] ( She'll probably waste a couple of posts on that last line alone...I'm bettin' that at this rate and with this much of a hate Jones on she'll be out of our hair before Monday. ) You just wasted a post by nibbling on the Judy bait. Judy bait. Uh-huh. Somehow you completely ignored the post of Barry's I was responding to. I wonder how you managed to do that? It was quoted, in full, at the end of his post. No kidding, Rick, your posts on this look as if they were written by someone to illustrate the meaning of the phrase blind spot. Barry's pissed because I've pointed out the flaws in his take on the candidate quiz. Instead of acknowledging them, or revising his remarks to fix the problems, he attacks me. Here, let me help you out; this is Barry's previous post (in which everything he says about me is a deliberate lie): --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From a Yahoo search for +quiz +politics +candidates (just the first 30 or so hits, then I got bored): [Barry wrote:] So bored you've pissed away almost half of your week's allotment of posts in less than 28 hours, largely while trying to discredit or trash me? Judy's like a wind-up doll. All I have to do is make a comment strongly for or stongly against something -- anything -- and she'll go crazy using it as an excuse to dump on me. And, as a result, she'll be fouled out and out of our hair before the week really starts and we can have civilized discussions for a few days while she's sitting on the sidelines fuming and building up a head of steam for *next* week, when she'll do exactly the same thing. Thank-you gifts and other tokens of appreciation can be sent to P.O. Box 108, Sitges, Spain. :-)
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: language and IQ
It stands to reason that there would potentially be an increase in IQ in polyglots, though I'm not entirely certain about bilingualism. If you know two languages well, they still seem very different. If you know three, you begin to see beneath them to the similarities in how they go about business. In any case, you'd have to have a sufficiently large sample to make any determinations about IQ, and the languages in question would have to be genuinely fluent. If you've ever learned another language and have tried to get along with it in another country (not just as a tourist) then you'd know how stupid you feel. You don't get jokes, you don't get subtle points, you don't get double meanings, you don't get allusions, and the list of what you don't get is practially endless. But if you've got a siddhi, as it seems I have, then you can understand even without understanding the surface structure. But siddhis aside, once a language is fluent, you have another whole chanelling system for intelligence to flow, and you'd have more than one world to compare with one another. Owning another world should, by definition, increase working IQ. My assumption is that the Absolute is a reservoir of infinite intelligence and that a language is a plumbing system through which it can flow and thus become useful.The sophistication of the plumbing system is what IQ then measures, not the intelligence itself, which is always infinite. But this assumption is not sufficient to explain a potential increase in IQ. I remember a wonderful cartoon in which an owl explains that his abysmally stupid cousin had learned several languages. Oh, he redeemed hisself, remarks the racoon. No, says the owl, Now he's abysmally stupid in French and in German in addition to being abysmally stupid in English. And experience certainly confirms for me that you can be stupid in more than one language, though it doesn't tell how stupid the individual was before learning them. What makes the difference to my mind is not only the horizontal dimension of owning several languages, but a vertical dimension. It happens in polyglots that the Absolute comes more and more into direct play to the extent that they translate regularly from one language to another. So it isn't only the fact of knowing several languages. The process of translation is a process of transcending, and, with practice, the same thing happens that is said to happen with an effective meditation technique. This vertical dimension can be an aspect of language learning even when only one language is in use. The British mathematician G. Spencer Brown (who knows more about deep structure than Chomsky does) explains that in all mathematics it becomes apparent that we have been following a rule without being consciously aware of the fact. In this respect, he says, the study of mathematics is literally psychedelic. Of course, he uses the term in its original meaning as being mind-expanding. Well, the same thing can be said about language. Unfortunately, we never teach it as a mind-expanding discipline. There was some research in the fifties on language learning, native and foreign, and on the effects of translation on IQ, but that research is nowhere to be found now. I believe it has been supressed because we don't actually want a technique of language teaching in our schools that is not only effective, but that actually increases the mean IQ of students. Even one or two points would be significant spread over a whole population, though in an individual, that wouldn't be much. a wayback71 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I was interested in the ployglot=increased IQ idea about 12 years ago in graduate school. As I recall, the research at that time finally found that learning another language did not increase IQ, with one possible exception: English speaking youngsters who became fgenuinely luent (it took a few years) in Chinese did show a 10-15 point IQ increase. The sample size was small, but other research also suggested that learning a second language that was based on tones having meaning (chinese, fo example) is what increases the IQ. Speaking Englihs and then learning French would not, but speaking French and then learning Korean would. The idea was that strengthening and developing the part of the brain invovled with music and tones and connecting that with the language/meaning areas resulted in the increase. I am sure more research has been done. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I hope you guys don't mind my interjecting a couple of thoughts here. Sapir Whorf doesn't address the emotional reaction we often have on hearing the sound of another language. We find French charming, Dutch funny, and German harsh, for example. Instead, the claim is that different languages constrain our thinking in
[FairfieldLife] Quotes from the Dhammapada
We are what we think All that we are arises with our thoughts With our thoughts we make the world. Speak or act with an impure mind And trouble will follow you As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. We are what we think All that we are arises with our thoughts With our thoughts we make the world. Speak or act with a pure mind And happiness will follow you As your shadow, unshakable. Look how he abused me and beat me, How he threw me down and robbed me. Live with such thoughts and you live in hate. Look how he abused me and beat me, How he threw me down and robbed me. Abandon such thoughts and live in love. In this world Hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, Ancient and inexhaustible. * Anger is like a chariot careening wildly. He who curbs his anger is the true charioteer. Others merely hold the reins. * Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. * You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Quotes from the Dhammapada
TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: \You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. This is the overall message in Dante's Divine Comedy as well. And that provides a definition of sin as that which will punish you. In Dante, however, there is a divine limit set by divine mercy on how far in the wrong direction you can go, and hell is that limit. Modern Christianity thinks of hell as somewhere where you are punished for your sins eternally. In Dante, the situation was more like, hell is an eternal place, but that doesn't mean you have to hang out there forever. Hell is the limit to the wrong direction. It's like a wall. You can bang your head against that wall until you realize, hey, this is a wall, this is not a path. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife] What's all this on loan crap?
So, Judy's been getting loaned extra posts by Edg so that she can legally go over the 35+ posts per week rule? What silliness! Why doesn't she just do what I've been doing and post under an alias ever since the rule came into effect?
[FairfieldLife] Re: Tough luck
Good advice. Whether he's ready to actually do this loving confrontation at the risk of giving up things he perceives as positive in the relationship is another question. Edg is communicating bottom-line truth. Many conciousness developing strategies do good things at some level of awareness and then the promotional (money driven) organization insists that 100% of all levels (such as the level of human relationships) can be quickly and easily brought to full, perfect expression. If that is not achieved, they induce guilt in the practitioner that it is he who is lacking. This is too much male energy. I am not speaking from a politico- femnist perspective but a metaphysical one. A human cell, for example, has the interior where the important work is done and then the cell wall, which divides the cell from the rest of the world. If that male energy, rigid separation, were not there, the important work would not get done. The cell needs to take in new nutrient and allow growth. If the cell wall restricted nutrient limited growth or no-growth would result. The culture of India is profoundly more homogenous than the united states, racially, socially, including the male-female relationship spectrum. It is quite different than the here. The issue this gentleman brings up would quite possibly never be brought up, or, culturally acceptable solutions would be available. To expect to plant, wholesale, a deep conciousness development program and then carry along with it the culture of the inventing country is ridiculous. We need a vibrant, powerful, meditating community planted firmly in american culture, standing in its own power, expressing its own creativity, using and adapting various methodologies, where appropriate, for the healing they are useful for. tj ps - speaking of India this is an eye-opening article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2022983,00.html --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think your marriage is in a ton of trouble. STOP the lying and mental reservations. Emotional honesty is GOLD - - you're in hell if you cannot be open and real and LOVING with the one person on earth who you're supposed to be united in mind and flesh with. And it's not just a case of being honest once; it's about beating every dissonance-issue TO DEATH with mindfulness by the two of you focusing and being REAL and holding onto each other as if in a lifeboat. Get help. Get counseling. Find out now and fast if this advanced technique issue -- and all the other issues you two must be having if this one particular issue isn't being handled openly -- is/are deal killers. And be prepared for torture as you confess again and again on a daily basis how you're feeling and force yourself to be in the now with your love and your lover. You're in trouble, and you might be able to keep the wolves at bay for a while, but sooner or later they'll be chomping your ass. Do you want to see your marriage finally explode from these pressures that are building up -- you've confessed here -- YOU'VE SAID THAT TM IS NOT ALLEVIATING THIS HONESTY-DILEMMA IN THE LEAST OR YOU WOULDN'T BE WRITING ABOUT IT HERE. Here's proof: try to bring up an argument that you had with her, say, ten years ago -- on an issue that never quite got settled and each of you sorta got comfortable with that lack of closure. Go ahead, I dare you, bring it up again. See? Ten years ago and meditating all this time and yet it will be as if it happened just yesterday for you. Triggers will be pulled. This is sapping your psyche. Take back the energies you're wasting every second with harboring these dissonant processes within. This is sucking your identification from you. It's making you smaller instead of, you know, helping your identifying with evermore larger and subtler aspects of existence. Don't let resentments build. Hunt down the ones you've been shoving under the carpet -- hunt them like mad dogs and kill them on the spot. Spend the $3,000 on help -- the new mantra isn't going to do you any better than the old mantra has been doing FOR YOUR MARRIAGE thus far -- insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results. This is where the TMO destroys marriages -- it fosters a huge pressure on the budgets and hearts of the TBs, and yet it will take away a dome badge if one is found seeking help from any other mental professional. THIS IS AN UTTERLY DARK AND EVIL dynamic of the TMO -- and the adulterous BevaJohn is symbolic of this callous regard for what has been joined by God, and the TMO just puts asunder anything between a TB's wallet and the TMO. Sit down across from your wife. Knees touching. Look into her eyes and say, Honey we're in deep trouble, but I love you so much more that I'm willing to take the pain from the kind of growth we need to
[FairfieldLife] Anatomy of a Black Hole [animation]
http://www.thinktechnologies.com/portfolio/demos/Blackhole.html
[FairfieldLife] Re: Two TMers arguing on National TV
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I watched the whole interview live on TV, and my impression is that Seinfeld was just joking around. I think it was to Jerry's credit that he made a jokey bit out of it because, the gentleman that he was, he didn't want to make a big deal out of it and so expressed his hurt by joking about it. But to suggest that what was arguably the most successful television show in TV history could have been cancelled by the network was an insult. At the very least, it showed an incredibly shallow approach by King and an enormous lack of information. He's really a very detached, easygoing guy. At another time during the interview, King told Seinfeld that he was 12th on some list of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time, and as with the other bit, Seinfeld at first feigned outrage, then King read him the list of the first 11, including Richard Pryor (#1), Rodney Dangerfield, Steve Martin, Roseanne Barr, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock, etc. With each one, Seinfeld nodded or uh-huhed his agreement, and after the 11 were read, he agreed that it was a good list and that he wouldn't feel justified in bumping any of the others out of their spot. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
RE: [FairfieldLife] What's all this on loan crap?
From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of shempmcgurk Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 2:33 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] What's all this on loan crap? So, Judy's been getting loaned extra posts by Edg so that she can legally go over the 35+ posts per week rule? I let them get away with it last week but we’re not going to keep doing that. What silliness! Why doesn't she just do what I've been doing and post under an alias ever since the rule came into effect? Why bother? You haven’t been using up your quota as Shemp. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
[FairfieldLife] Re: Sopranos
Just saw the last episode. You are the americans, what was that all about ??
[FairfieldLife] Sopranos
Or raher; what was that supposed to mean ?
[FairfieldLife] Re: Quotes from the Dhammapada
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoted Buddha: You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. This is the overall message in Dante's Divine Comedy as well. And that provides a definition of sin as that which will punish you. In most of the Buddhist thought I have heard or read, there is no real notion of sin, merely the consequences of karma. And there are two levels of karms -- one is potentially long-term, taking years or lifetimes to work out, and the other immediate. Indulging in the lower emotions is of the immediate type of karma, in that these emotions lower your state of attention *immediately*. There is no waiting. Indulge in anger, or hate, or any of the other toxic emotions (as they see them), and the resulting state of attention *is* your Hell, right here, right now. No need to wait for all that dying stuff. :-) In Dante, however, there is a divine limit set by divine mercy on how far in the wrong direction you can go, and hell is that limit. I doubt that Buddhism conceives of a divinely- set limit to the depths that a state of attention can sink to, because it doesn't need a divine to explain things. Modern Christianity thinks of hell as somewhere where you are punished for your sins eternally. In Dante, the situation was more like, hell is an eternal place, but that doesn't mean you have to hang out there forever. That would be more in accord with Buddhist thought, as I understand it. Each *state of attention* is a place, and an eternal place. The qualities of that state of attention, and the karmas of dwelling there, are pretty well-known. How long you choose to dwell there, however, is up to you. You can wake up from the dream of Hell, and its particular state of attention, at any time. The ability to wake up from the bad dream is just as available to you in Hell as it is in Heaven, or anywhere in between. It's just a matter of choice. The first long quote I posted from the Dhammapada is, in fact, often grouped under the heading Choice.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Guru Dev has something to say about rajas
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: authfriend posted: Your statement that : there just are no relative objective standards you can apply to the question of whether enlightenment is beneficial. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, curtisdeltablues curtisdeltablues@ wrote: seems like a pretty high level of honesty about it all. It is. Of what use is a rhetorical discussion about enlightenment? Because the benefits are entirely subjective, there is no way to *prove* the benefits of it, one way or another, to another. Either for the sake of the other, or the sake of the enlightened one. This is a direct contradiction to MMY's claims that first, a person gains measurably increased cognitive abilities from TM practice,and that the performance of sidhis verifies that gains in higher states. The practice of TM and the sidhis *are* verification of general (TM) and specific (sidhis) clearing of the physiology, yes, but these can be experienced without the permanent establishment of enlightenment. According to MMY the benifits are not only not just subjective,they can be measured by relatively crude scientific techniques. I respect that he does give falsifiable criteria for the subjective state of enlightenment. Two different POVs here-- Maharishi wants to wake up those with any interest in enlightenment, and so will tie it to as many relative phenomena as he can. I am speaking from my personal POV, with no such objective. Seen from within the establishment of such a state, there is a quantum, unmistakable benefit, but beyond each individual's need to pursue such a thing, or not, any attempt to justify such a dedication in one's life [towards gaining enlightenment] is completely worthless. Both for the one pursuing the permanent establishment of enlightenment, and others. Completely worthless to try to persuade others. Then MMY's life is a total waste because he has dedicated it to just this goal. Again, different POV, mine from his. And different dharmas too. His job is to open the door. I only had to walk through it. People come to a pursuit of enlightenment for their own reasons, in their own time. If someone, such as yourself, sees no need to pursue such a thing, there is no reason that I can see to contradict that, or try to change that. Agreed. It shows a good development of intellectual boundaries. But for MMY and his closest followers, the evangelical nature of his activities are the basis of everything he does.
[FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, hugheshugo I'm going to go with crazy, I don't know anyone outside the TMO that wouldn't be put off by the crowns. If you can't handle a couple of f. crowns you might just go f... yourself and not waste my time. T said that. :-)
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Quotes from the Dhammapada
Dante thinks of sin merely as a natural consequence of action. For example, Paolo and Francesca have committed adultery. The consequence, expressed symbolically, is that they are together, but they are blown here and there by a whirlwind. The implication is that they can't really relax and get into the deeper levels of a relationship. TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoted Buddha: You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. This is the overall message in Dante's Divine Comedy as well. And that provides a definition of sin as that which will punish you. In most of the Buddhist thought I have heard or read, there is no real notion of sin, merely the consequences of karma. And there are two levels of karms -- one is potentially long-term, taking years or lifetimes to work out, and the other immediate. Indulging in the lower emotions is of the immediate type of karma, in that these emotions lower your state of attention *immediately*. There is no waiting. Indulge in anger, or hate, or any of the other toxic emotions (as they see them), and the resulting state of attention *is* your Hell, right here, right now. No need to wait for all that dying stuff. :-) In Dante, however, there is a divine limit set by divine mercy on how far in the wrong direction you can go, and hell is that limit. I doubt that Buddhism conceives of a divinely- set limit to the depths that a state of attention can sink to, because it doesn't need a divine to explain things. Modern Christianity thinks of hell as somewhere where you are punished for your sins eternally. In Dante, the situation was more like, hell is an eternal place, but that doesn't mean you have to hang out there forever. That would be more in accord with Buddhist thought, as I understand it. Each *state of attention* is a place, and an eternal place. The qualities of that state of attention, and the karmas of dwelling there, are pretty well-known. How long you choose to dwell there, however, is up to you. You can wake up from the dream of Hell, and its particular state of attention, at any time. The ability to wake up from the bad dream is just as available to you in Hell as it is in Heaven, or anywhere in between. It's just a matter of choice. The first long quote I posted from the Dhammapada is, in fact, often grouped under the heading Choice. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife] Re: Quotes from the Dhammapada-P.S.
I was interrupted, so in my last post the sentence got garbled. Sin to Dante is merely an obstacle on a path, and it is an obstacle because there are consequences to be worked out. The whirlwind is a consequence of Paolo and Francesca's action. The difference between hell and purgatory for Dante was that the soul in hell suffers, but does not know that there is an end to the suffering and also does not understand why this suffering has occurred. The soul in purgatory also suffers, but it knows that there is an end to suffering and it is also very clear about why this suffering is happening. a TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoted Buddha: You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. This is the overall message in Dante's Divine Comedy as well. And that provides a definition of sin as that which will punish you. In most of the Buddhist thought I have heard or read, there is no real notion of sin, merely the consequences of karma. And there are two levels of karms -- one is potentially long-term, taking years or lifetimes to work out, and the other immediate. Indulging in the lower emotions is of the immediate type of karma, in that these emotions lower your state of attention *immediately*. There is no waiting. Indulge in anger, or hate, or any of the other toxic emotions (as they see them), and the resulting state of attention *is* your Hell, right here, right now. No need to wait for all that dying stuff. :-) In Dante, however, there is a divine limit set by divine mercy on how far in the wrong direction you can go, and hell is that limit. I doubt that Buddhism conceives of a divinely- set limit to the depths that a state of attention can sink to, because it doesn't need a divine to explain things. Modern Christianity thinks of hell as somewhere where you are punished for your sins eternally. In Dante, the situation was more like, hell is an eternal place, but that doesn't mean you have to hang out there forever. That would be more in accord with Buddhist thought, as I understand it. Each *state of attention* is a place, and an eternal place. The qualities of that state of attention, and the karmas of dwelling there, are pretty well-known. How long you choose to dwell there, however, is up to you. You can wake up from the dream of Hell, and its particular state of attention, at any time. The ability to wake up from the bad dream is just as available to you in Hell as it is in Heaven, or anywhere in between. It's just a matter of choice. The first long quote I posted from the Dhammapada is, in fact, often grouped under the heading Choice. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife] Re: Quotes from the Dhammapada
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In this world Hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, Ancient and inexhaustible. * Anger is like a chariot careening wildly. He who curbs his anger is the true charioteer. Others merely hold the reins. * Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. * You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. Having seen, and had to interact with those that are angry, including myself, an aspect of it, i think is a type of craziness, in the sense of insanity. Or at least dangerously, unpredictably irrational. Dealing with someone who is angry and has some influence on your life -- spouse, parent, boss, etc., ups the stakes. The uncertainty of how far they are going to cross the line of rationality and appropriate response is great. It can be dicey. Per ToK (theory of Karma) -- if someone in power over you gets irrationally angry at you -- you must have done the same to someone in the past. Wear that persons shoes for a few miles. Ouch. Not going to dothat again. And thus we learn. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast. Its a self-correcting, self-regulating, educational mechanism -- not dependent on any code of morality, judges of morals and sins, final judgement, fear, guilt or shame. As is a Spanish proverb (help me out here Turq -- including if I have been mislead), PP (paraphrasing), God, the infinite storekeeper, said 'take what you want, but pay the price'.
[FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap?
Shemp: Why doesn't she just do what I've been doing and post under an alias ever since the rule came into effect? Rick: Why bother? You haven't been using up your quota as Shemp. Lurk: Sometimes, once you know you CAN do something, you're not as interested in doing it. In Aleister Crowley's, Diary Of A Drug Fiend, that is one of the strategies put forth to dealing with the two main characters addiction to cocaine and heroin. Do the drug whenever you want, no prohibitions. I thought it made some sense, even based on my tendencies, (not drugs), but Kirk Bernhardt, (Rudra Joe), blasted me as being totally naieve.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Quotes from the Dhammapada-P.S.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I was interrupted, so in my last post the sentence got garbled. Sin to Dante is merely an obstacle on a path, and it is an obstacle because there are consequences to be worked out. The whirlwind is a consequence of Paolo and Francesca's action. The difference between hell and purgatory for Dante was that the soul in hell suffers, but does not know that there is an end to the suffering and also does not understand why this suffering has occurred. The soul in purgatory also suffers, but it knows that there is an end to suffering and it is also very clear about why this suffering is happening. a Then Dante's Hell is a stupid place -- base on retribution. Purgatory is a place of rehabilitation and and learning. Walking in the person's shoes one has hurt -- and learning from it. Sin as an obstacle and consequence. Per my last post, take what want, take all you desire, but pay the price at the door. I like this view, because it presents a framework of self-regulating education and learning form action. And is not a pejorative threat, as in the sense of you WILL pay the price dude!. The thing bought (sin) is not bad in and of it self. But it has consequences. And is an obstacle to buying other things. Like the economists market basket. You can have this OR that, but not both (at your revenue line). (Gotta love those isoquants.) Buying THIS, presents an 'opportunity cost' to buying THAT. and vice versa. Neither purchase is a sin, nor a great moral action. It is a framework like any store -- or warehouse superstore. You can buy that 65 1080p TV -- no sin in that. But you have to pay the fair price for it. That means, its not free. You have to trade so many hours of work for it. And you have to set it up. And be hassled by it when you move. The deal is -- you can enjoy it totally -- its all cool, but there is a price to pay for it. Just like anything, there is a price to pay. You can be a western yogi in India -- and may enjoy many things from that -- but there is a price for that. You can do a corporate job -- and enjoy the things from that -- but there i a price to pay for that. You can covet your neighbor's wife -- and enjoy -- but there is a price too pay for that. You can rob a bank -- and enjoy -- but there is a price to pay for that. In this view -- there is NO sin. Just payments. Some manage their credit cards wisely. Others don't. The sin is not in what is bought -- but only whether one has the resources to pay for it -- both physical payment and inner payment. And to be able to handle well any future returning payments. Like a dividend -- or a future balloon payment on a large loan. As written by the seers of old, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant ...
[FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap?
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, lurkernomore20002000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Shemp: Why doesn't she just do what I've been doing and post under an alias ever since the rule came into effect? Rick: Why bother? You haven't been using up your quota as Shemp. Lurk: Sometimes, once you know you CAN do something, you're not as interested in doing it. In Aleister Crowley's, Diary Of A Drug Fiend, that is one of the strategies put forth to dealing with the two main characters addiction to cocaine and heroin. Do the drug whenever you want, no prohibitions. I thought it made some sense, even based on my tendencies, (not drugs), but Kirk Bernhardt, (Rudra Joe), blasted me as being totally naieve. Take what ever you want, just pay the price at the door.
[FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'd prescribe classes in comparative religion and philosophy at an early age, as on Aldous Huxley's Island. (Or as I remember it, 30+ years after reading it last.) None of the religions or philos- ophies are presented as better or higher than any other; all of them are presented as mere ideas. I honestly think that if more kids were brought up with this as a basis for how they viewed any new set of ideas in the world of spirituality, many of these problems you're talking about would go away. I heard an interview, a while back -- on NPR I think -- of guy that teaches proverbs in k-12 classes. Proverbs from all religions and cultures. No higher or lower. And via Socratic method, let kids explore how such can be applied to daily, modern life. Or are bogus if that is the logical conclusion. There were some quite insightful little dudes espousing and ponder on.
RE: [FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap?
From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of authfriend Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 3:09 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap? --- In HYPERLINK mailto:FairfieldLife%40yahoogroups.comFairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Behalf Of shempmcgurk So, Judy's been getting loaned extra posts by Edg so that she can legally go over the 35+ posts per week rule? I let them get away with it last week but we're not going to keep doing that. Rick, did you see my post in which I addressed all the reasons that have been given for not allowing limited loaners? I didn't see any response from you. I’m afraid I didn’t. I miss a lot of posts. Send it to me on the side if you like, so as not to use up a post, and to be sure I see it. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
[FairfieldLife] I'm not here.
Just saw the new film about Bob Dylan called I'm not here. Its the best bio-pic I ever saw. Rather than doing a surface gloss over the events in his life, it picks his psyche apart and used images and music to convey the emotional and spiritual tone of the man. Completely non-linear, abstract and non-conventional. Think most TM people will get it right away. s.
[FairfieldLife] Shopping is the Ultimate Metaphor for Morality -- No Need for God Here
Sin and Should are related -- more that both beginning with the same letter. Sin depends on a moral code of do's and dont's. Shoulds and Should Nots, Sinful People and Righteous People. Positing a Should Be eliminates, or dampers, what Could Be. And What IS. Moral Codes are rule based. A low form of education. Moral Reasoning is better -- but still flawed in that it posits some actions superior to others. If some action needs to be repaid, worked out, then why would it ever be a sin, or be less superior to morally reasoned ones, to do such? Be free from sin -- means, IMO, be free of moral codes -- and even moral reasoning. Take whatever you want in the infinite store of life. Just pay the price at the door. This may mean to follow prudent rules of shopping: don't put more in your basket than you can afford, Save for a rainy day, etc. Or you can ignore that too -- and pay the price. No sin in that. Just step up to the plate. Place your charge card on the counter. Shopping is the ultimate metaphor for morality, moral learning, moral reasoning, and moral codes (self-developed -- that fits ones circumstances). And shopping skills are all the moral training one needs. No need for God, Gods, Judegment Days, guilt, shame, moral coercion, manipulation, anger, rejection, etc. (That is not saying God doesn't exist -- just that in the sphere of morality he/she is not (or no longer) needed. [No longer in that thay may have 'set up this perfect shopping scheme / system -- who knows. Or it just happened -- evloved (btw, evloved is a love drenched type of evolution). And for some, a cool typo] Shop 'till you drop. Or not. Just pay the price at the door. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander mailander111@ wrote: I was interrupted, so in my last post the sentence got garbled. Sin to Dante is merely an obstacle on a path, and it is an obstacle because there are consequences to be worked out. The whirlwind is a consequence of Paolo and Francesca's action. The difference between hell and purgatory for Dante was that the soul in hell suffers, but does not know that there is an end to the suffering and also does not understand why this suffering has occurred. The soul in purgatory also suffers, but it knows that there is an end to suffering and it is also very clear about why this suffering is happening. a Then Dante's Hell is a stupid place -- base on retribution. Purgatory is a place of rehabilitation and and learning. Walking in the person's shoes one has hurt -- and learning from it. Sin as an obstacle and consequence. Per my last post, take what want, take all you desire, but pay the price at the door. I like this view, because it presents a framework of self-regulating education and learning form action. And is not a pejorative threat, as in the sense of you WILL pay the price dude!. The thing bought (sin) is not bad in and of it self. But it has consequences. And is an obstacle to buying other things. Like the economists market basket. You can have this OR that, but not both (at your revenue line). (Gotta love those isoquants.) Buying THIS, presents an 'opportunity cost' to buying THAT. and vice versa. Neither purchase is a sin, nor a great moral action. It is a framework like any store -- or warehouse superstore. You can buy that 65 1080p TV -- no sin in that. But you have to pay the fair price for it. That means, its not free. You have to trade so many hours of work for it. And you have to set it up. And be hassled by it when you move. The deal is -- you can enjoy it totally -- its all cool, but there is a price to pay for it. Just like anything, there is a price to pay. You can be a western yogi in India -- and may enjoy many things from that -- but there is a price for that. You can do a corporate job -- and enjoy the things from that -- but there i a price to pay for that. You can covet your neighbor's wife -- and enjoy -- but there is a price too pay for that. You can rob a bank -- and enjoy -- but there is a price to pay for that. In this view -- there is NO sin. Just payments. Some manage their credit cards wisely. Others don't. The sin is not in what is bought -- but only whether one has the resources to pay for it -- both physical payment and inner payment. And to be able to handle well any future returning payments. Like a dividend -- or a future balloon payment on a large loan. As written by the seers of old, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant ...
Re: [FairfieldLife] Sopranos
nablusoss1008 wrote: Or raher; what was that supposed to mean ? David Chase (the creator of The Sopranos) decided to leave the ending up to the audience. You can draw your own conclusion (pardon the pun).
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Quotes from the Dhammapada-P.S.
You could say that there is no sin in Dante's world. You pay a price. And he observed that there are lots of folks in the world who suffer but who do not know why they suffer. From his point of view, they are in hell. They do not remember that they are paying a price for something. That is his definition of hell. It is not a stupid place, but is populated by folks with amnesia. a new.morning [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I was interrupted, so in my last post the sentence got garbled. Sin to Dante is merely an obstacle on a path, and it is an obstacle because there are consequences to be worked out. The whirlwind is a consequence of Paolo and Francesca's action. The difference between hell and purgatory for Dante was that the soul in hell suffers, but does not know that there is an end to the suffering and also does not understand why this suffering has occurred. The soul in purgatory also suffers, but it knows that there is an end to suffering and it is also very clear about why this suffering is happening. a Then Dante's Hell is a stupid place -- base on retribution. Purgatory is a place of rehabilitation and and learning. Walking in the person's shoes one has hurt -- and learning from it. Sin as an obstacle and consequence. Per my last post, take what want, take all you desire, but pay the price at the door. I like this view, because it presents a framework of self-regulating education and learning form action. And is not a pejorative threat, as in the sense of you WILL pay the price dude!. The thing bought (sin) is not bad in and of it self. But it has consequences. And is an obstacle to buying other things. Like the economists market basket. You can have this OR that, but not both (at your revenue line). (Gotta love those isoquants.) Buying THIS, presents an 'opportunity cost' to buying THAT. and vice versa. Neither purchase is a sin, nor a great moral action. It is a framework like any store -- or warehouse superstore. You can buy that 65 1080p TV -- no sin in that. But you have to pay the fair price for it. That means, its not free. You have to trade so many hours of work for it. And you have to set it up. And be hassled by it when you move. The deal is -- you can enjoy it totally -- its all cool, but there is a price to pay for it. Just like anything, there is a price to pay. You can be a western yogi in India -- and may enjoy many things from that -- but there is a price for that. You can do a corporate job -- and enjoy the things from that -- but there i a price to pay for that. You can covet your neighbor's wife -- and enjoy -- but there is a price too pay for that. You can rob a bank -- and enjoy -- but there is a price to pay for that. In this view -- there is NO sin. Just payments. Some manage their credit cards wisely. Others don't. The sin is not in what is bought -- but only whether one has the resources to pay for it -- both physical payment and inner payment. And to be able to handle well any future returning payments. Like a dividend -- or a future balloon payment on a large loan. As written by the seers of old, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant ... Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap?
Rick Archer wrote: From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of authfriend Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 3:09 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap? --- In HYPERLINK mailto:FairfieldLife%40yahoogroups.comFairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Behalf Of shempmcgurk So, Judy's been getting loaned extra posts by Edg so that she can legally go over the 35+ posts per week rule? I let them get away with it last week but we're not going to keep doing that. Rick, did you see my post in which I addressed all the reasons that have been given for not allowing limited loaners? I didn't see any response from you. I’m afraid I didn’t. I miss a lot of posts. Send it to me on the side if you like, so as not to use up a post, and to be sure I see it. Don't allow message loans. Nobody has anything that important to say anyway that they need a message loan. If the obsessive-compulsives here blow their wad so be it. And this from someone who opposes message limits altogether. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap?
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rick Archer wrote: From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of authfriend Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 3:09 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap? --- In HYPERLINK mailto:FairfieldLife% 40yahoogroups.comFairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer rick@ wrote: On Behalf Of shempmcgurk So, Judy's been getting loaned extra posts by Edg so that she can legally go over the 35+ posts per week rule? I let them get away with it last week but we're not going to keep doing that. Rick, did you see my post in which I addressed all the reasons that have been given for not allowing limited loaners? I didn't see any response from you. I'm afraid I didn't. I miss a lot of posts. Send it to me on the side if you like, so as not to use up a post, and to be sure I see it. Don't allow message loans. Nobody has anything that important to say anyway that they need a message loan. No, but maybe we could sell them? $2 a post, 70 bucks a week... h. OffWorld
[FairfieldLife] Re: I'm not here.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Stu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just saw the new film about Bob Dylan called I'm not here. Its the best bio-pic I ever saw. Rather than doing a surface gloss over the events in his life, it picks his psyche apart and used images and music to convey the emotional and spiritual tone of the man. Completely non-linear, abstract and non-conventional. Think most TM people will get it right away. s. Thanks, where can we see it? Is it in theatres? I'm having a Bob Dylan relapse. http://youtube.com/watch?v=mvBkbPEoeAI OffWorld
[FairfieldLife] Bob Dylan Prophet?
In this live clip below from the early '70s, Dylan's line goes: So he drifted down to New Orleans, lucky enough to be destroyed... Why would he say that? In the original 'Tangled up in Blues' LP from the early '70s, (I got into the LP in late '70s), this line was: So he drifted down to New Orleans, where he was lucky enough to be employed... http://youtube.com/watch?v=mvBkbPEoeAI OffWorld .
[FairfieldLife] Bob Dylan Prophet?
In this live clip below from the early '70s, Dylan's line goes: So he drifted down to New Orleans, lucky enough to be destroyed... Why would he say that? In the original 'Tangled up in Blues' LP from the early '70s, (I got into the LP in late '70s), this line was: So he drifted down to New Orleans, where he was lucky enough to be employed... http://youtube.com/watch?v=mvBkbPEoeAI OffWorld .
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap?
off_world_beings wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rick Archer wrote: From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of authfriend Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 3:09 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: What's all this on loan crap? --- In HYPERLINK mailto:FairfieldLife% 40yahoogroups.comFairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer rick@ wrote: On Behalf Of shempmcgurk So, Judy's been getting loaned extra posts by Edg so that she can legally go over the 35+ posts per week rule? I let them get away with it last week but we're not going to keep doing that. Rick, did you see my post in which I addressed all the reasons that have been given for not allowing limited loaners? I didn't see any response from you. I'm afraid I didn't. I miss a lot of posts. Send it to me on the side if you like, so as not to use up a post, and to be sure I see it. Don't allow message loans. Nobody has anything that important to say anyway that they need a message loan. No, but maybe we could sell them? $2 a post, 70 bucks a week... h. OffWorld Isn't that subprime? :D
[FairfieldLife] Stop lying to yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/05/kucinich/
[FairfieldLife] Re: Stop lying to yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, bob_brigante [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/05/kucinich/ Heh, I just read it myself. We must have been reading it at the same time. The writer says if you don't believe Kucinich is your candidate, you should take one or more of the candidate-matching quizzes; she gives URLs for three of them (none of them the one Shemp found). That's exactly the same point I made this morning, that any lefties I've read about who have taken one of these tests have ended up with Kucinich as their candidate (and Dodd second, often with Gravel third).
[FairfieldLife] Re: Stop lying to yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, bob_brigante no_reply@ wrote: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/05/kucinich/ Heh, I just read it myself. We must have been reading it at the same time. The writer says if you don't believe Kucinich is your candidate, you should take one or more of the candidate-matching quizzes; she gives URLs for three of them (none of them the one Shemp found). That's exactly the same point I made this morning, that any lefties I've read about who have taken one of these tests have ended up with Kucinich as their candidate (and Dodd second, often with Gravel third). I really like Dennis K's political views, and he comes up as my choice on the two quizzes I've done. But I don't think the consciousness of the USA will support him as president. Maybe things will change in the next year, but I think I'll end up electing Hillary Clinton for prez instead.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Stop lying to yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, bob_brigante no_reply@ wrote: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/05/kucinich/ Heh, I just read it myself. We must have been reading it at the same time. The writer says if you don't believe Kucinich is your candidate, you should take one or more of the candidate-matching quizzes; she gives URLs for three of them (none of them the one Shemp found). That's exactly the same point I made this morning, that any lefties I've read about who have taken one of these tests have ended up with Kucinich as their candidate (and Dodd second, often with Gravel third). Politics is just not a rational operation at any level. I have to quibble a little with the Salon writer's characterization of Kucinich: ...his reign as mayor of Cleveland was a mess. Sure, it looked messy, since Kucinich was doing battle with bankers and other thieves, but he saved the city a shitload of money by not knuckling under to the money interests, and that's a big time accomplishment: Kucinich's supporters say that Kucinich kept his campaign promise of refusing to sell Muny Light to CEI and was brave for not giving into big business. There is little debate, wrote Cleveland Magazine in May 1996, over the value of Muny Light today. Now Cleveland Public Power, it is a proven asset to the city that between 1985 and 1995 saved its customers $195,148,520 over what they would have paid CEI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayoral_administration_of_Dennis_Kucinich
[FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of hugheshugo Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2007 12:50 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Charisma (was Re: new rajas today) I wouldn't call them crazy, just indoctrinated. For decades, they have been attuning themselves to Maharishi's thinking because Maharishi has told them to do so, and that's the way to succeed in the TMO. There was a time when his thinking was outside the box, but in a way that made sense to most spiritual seekers. But then gradually, it drifted farther and farther into territory that all but the indoctrinated would regard as strange. Like a boat that had taken a wrong branch in the river and the surroundings became increasingly unfamiliar, but hey, you were on the boat. What were you going to do, jump overboard and swim upstream and hope to find some other boat going down a branch more to your liking? Many did that, but some stayed on the boat, maybe because they were afraid to jump; maybe because they had important positions on the crew and didn't want to lose the power and status. Leaving the boat metaphor, I think many have found a comfortable and fulfilling niche in the TMO without buying into the whole rajas and crowns trip. They think it's odd, it doesn't inspire them, but they just steer clear of it and enjoy the things they enjoy, such as going to the dome, teaching business or biology at MUM, etc. A friend on MUM staff told me that at least half the faculty and staff think this way. They don't know what they'd do if they left campus, they like what they're doing well enough, so they just keep on keeping on, ignoring stuff they can't relate to, reading what they want to read in private, and even sneaking off to see other spiritual teachers occasionally. Some even visit various ashrams in India, unbeknownst to the MUM administrators who would bust them for doing so if they found out. They sound like my sort of people, they know what they like and what's good for them. Maybe the Raja thing will die awa, I doubt it would be the first time one of MMYs plans has been abandoned. I wasn't actually calling anyone crazy, as I remember, Turqs question was how would the rajas apopear to the uninitiated. I agree with your indoctrinated analysis, I always kept one foot in the outside world so I'm a bit more sensitive when the TMO takes a step away from it. We all have our limits and this was obviously a step to far for me and many others, interesting to see what happens next. No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.20/1108 - Release Date: 11/3/2007 9:42 PM
