Its only a saying that gets trotted out now and again , not to be taken too seriously, although I do believe there is a small element of truth in it.
It's also said, you can't be religious without being spiritual, but you can be spiritual without being religious. I believe, the path to divinity is a pjersonal journey, although a good teacher is imperative. It is said, when the pupil is ready, the master will arrive.
I also believe regardless of your path, be it Christian, Muslim, Hindu Jew, or even in Buddhist philosophy, peace can be found. I remember a great Eastern Yogi saying to us at a discourse I attended, "all religions are like different staircases in the same building, they all lead to the same place. To find God, you need to go beyond religion, and observe."
Yes it's true, laughter has many beneficial effects on the body, more than you would imagine. I've been to a few 'laughter yoga' sessions over the last couple of years, they are quite an amazing experience. The first one went to was over two days and attended by around 150 people. It was impossible to not fall about laughing at nothing when you're surrounded by that many people in fits of laughter. The second day was partly taken up with the effects of laughter on the body, I was very surprised to find out just how beneficial laughter can be. Interestingly i've found out since that the body does not know the difference between forced laughter and real laughter. So, next time you're feeling down, just look in the mirror and have a good laugh at yourself.
Thanks for that link, it's very interesting. I watched the first 27 minutes and will certainly watch the rest when I have time to absorb it. I took paticularly notice of the section you mentioned, in fact I've watched it 3 times this morning. I love the bit where says, "who is this guy? They thought maybe I was going to say the word God in the Physics department."...
Anyway further on he leads up to saying, there's no such thing as empty space, which within the boundaries of conventional truth, I think I understand what he means. But, within Buddhist teachings, when we move on to ultimate truth, (in the part of the link i posted it only show a small section about conventional truth but goes on to compare it to ultimate truth,) the word 'emptiness' is woefully inadequate to explain emptiness, but it's the nearest we can get, within the confines of language. Emptiness is not something which can be described in words, more a realisation. I think I'm right in saying realisation of emptiness is the Holy Grail of all practising Buddhists. From my limited understanding of emptiness it would seem that in video, rather than disproving the existence of emptiness in ultimate truth, Nassim is adding to its validity. The term emptiness in Buddhism is misleading as it doesn't mean 'nothing' but rather NO THING. This can be seen in the flame example in the link I posted. The flame is clearly not nothing, but it's no thing in its own right, existing from its own side, which Nassim also speaks about.
The more we examine the world around us, in particular our own self, the more likely we are able to realise that we are no thing, just the same as our realisation of the universe, or the infinite space within us.
I guess their are certain countries, but not all in Africa, that are considered to be scammer hotspots. So, if someone with a UK address posts from those countries, there's a likelyhood it's a scammer with a false address. There a list of countries you can post from on here somewhere.
I was barred from cs for posting from Uganda a few years ago. It seems if you post from certain countries you are automatically remove from the site. When a friend on here wrote to admin on my behalf they reinstated my account, but I lost about five years of post history. They also changed my user name from bodleing to bodleing2.
A very short extract from an article on emptiness.
There are two truths in Buddhism, conventional and ultimate truth. This penetrating insight dates back to the original Buddha. Understanding the two truths and the relationship between them is vital in seeing through the illusion of inherent existence and realizing emptiness or Sunyata.
Conventional Truth ~ Conventional truth involves our everyday experience and understanding of the way the phenomenal world appears and functions. If our senses and cognition are in working order we recognize that fire burns, that dark clouds foreshadow rain and that birds and not elephants fly. Conventional truth is our agreed upon identification of things and how they work, and this understanding directs our worldly activities. ~ Conventional truth includes what is called valid cognition because it is able to distinguish conventional truth from conventional falsehood, an important difference. For example, there are consequences in distinguishing a snake from a rope and that sense of being right matters.1 If there was no reliability to our everyday assessments our activity would be senseless. There is a coherence, so that conventional truth cannot be constructed randomly or simply as we choose.
However, our conventional reality is also deceptive. Objects, both coarse as in a rock and subtle as in thought, appear as distinct entities when they are not. Phenomena are mistakenly perceived and conceptualized as self-established, each with their own core nature that makes them what they are. In Buddhism, this deception is called inherent existence and is identified as the root error responsible for suffering. ~ Through examination and analysis, the Middle Way school asserts that no independent phenomena exist whatsoever. While objects appear to exist as separate things, this sensory-cognitive appearance is illusory. Phenomena are neither self-created nor self-enduring, but arise in dependence upon conditions without a nature or essence of their own. The example of fire is classic in illustrating what it means to depend upon conditions, one of the key types of dependencies in emptiness teachings.
Fire, which is seen to fundamentally exist, depends upon oxygen, fuel, heat, friction, and other innumerable conditions to appear, and does not exist intrinsically, as a thing in itself. If the conditions for fire are removed, there will be no fire. Fire cannot ignite itself or burn itself. The characteristic of fire depends upon conditions that are not considered to be fire and that are also dependently arisen. For instance, air is not considered to be fire because fire is not found in air. Nor is fuel such as wood, that also depends upon sun, rain, soil, etc., considered to be fire either. Fire, like all phenomena, is unfindable because it has no separate nature. Because fire does not independently exist, it appears under certain conditions and no longer appears when conditions change. ~ The assumption that objects inherently exist does not hold up upon deeper examination. This does not mean that fire does not exist at all, but that there is no independent nature or essence that is fire. If things existed in and of themselves rather than dependently, everything would be isolated and unchanging and nothing would relate to anything. It is the illusion of the inherent existence of phenomena that Buddhist philosophy targets and its nonexistence is the meaning of the word emptiness.
Just had a quick look through your post and noticed Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research.
That reminded me of a book I read in the late sixties.. LSD — The Problem-Solving Psychedelic P.G. Stafford and B.H. Golightly.
So I did a quick search and was amazed to find it still available on amazon albeit "worn but still of value." A bit like me I guess
Just wondering, have you read any stuff by Joe Dispenza? I enjoyed his book, Evolve Your Brain and hopefully be able to get hold of a copy of, Becoming Supernatural. Also, I noticed he's faculty member at Quantum University in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Anyway, going to have another look at the list on your post.
Just commented on another thread, I'm off out to my local climbing wall tonight. Meeting two psychiatrists there. I wonder if I can drive them up the wall.
Bit of a pun on a well known saying, but now wondering where that originally came from.
"Once we appreciate that fundamental disparity between appearance and reality, we gain a certain insight into the way our emotions work, and how we react to events and objects. Underlying the strong emotional responses we have to situations, we see that there is an assumption that some kind of independently existing reality exists out there. In this way, we develop an insight into the various functions of the mind and the different levels of consciousness within us. We also grow to understand that although certain types of mental or emotional states seem so real, and although objects appear to be so vivid, in reality they are mere illusions. They do not really exist in the way we think they do."
Just read this (a few times over,) seems to be one of the best explanations I've come across, and I've read many over the years.
The two slit paradox
The two slit experiment contains a device (the emitter) which strips the electrons off atoms and fires them at a screen. The screen is covered with thousands of tiny dots of phosphor (like a TV screen) which glow when an electron hits them. If we wish to obtain a permanent record of the results of the experiment we can place a sheet of photographic paper on the back of the screen.
We place a sheet of foil, which stops the electrons, between the emitter and the screen. The sheet has a very thin slit in it just above the level of the emitter. Looking at the screen we see what we might expect - most of the screen is dark but there is a glowing band behind the slit where the electrons are getting through and hitting the phosphorescent dots. The glowing band, slit and emitter are all in direct line of sight.
There is nothing remarkable about this. The main area of the foil is casting an 'electron shadow' with a thin stream of electrons passing through the slit. As the effects of gravity are negligible and there are no strong magnetic or electric fields, we would expect the electrons to travel in a straight line, and this indeed appears to be what happens.
We replace the first sheet of foil with another sheet which has a very thin slit just below the level of the emitter. Looking at the screen we see what we might expect, which is almost the same as we saw for the first slit. Most of the screen is dark but there is a glowing band behind the slit where the electrons are getting through and hitting the phosphorescent dots. As the glowing band, slit and emitter are all in direct line of sight the band is at a slightly lower position than for the first slit.
We now replace the sheet of foil with one containing two slits, of exactly the same size and exactly the same positions as before. Common-sense tells us that we should see an additive effect of the two individual slits. There should be two glowing bands, one at each of the previous positions.
But common-sense is wrong - this doesn't happen!
Instead we see a number of glowing bands at different positions from those seen with either of the two individual slits. Regions which were dark in both previous experiments have become light, and vice versa. In fact the electrons are showing interference effects, which are typical of waves. Waves which converge after travelling two different paths show a pattern of high energies at places where troughs and peaks converge simultaneously, and zero energies where troughs coincide with and cancel peaks.
Stretching common-sense a little we conclude that introducing the second slit has somehow forced the electrons to behave as waves rather than particles.
One of the characteristics of waves is that they spread out. But if we observe the screen closely we notice that the glow isn't spread out. Individual dots are still momentarily glowing while their neighbours may remain dark. The electrons are arriving as particles. So we may conclude that the electrons are travelling as waves, and interfering with one another, but as soon as they meet a detector they immediately resume particle behavior.
Physicist Richard Feynman once said, nobody actually understands quantum mechanics. It's easy to see why he said that...
"Quantum mechanics is notorious for tangling people's minds up. Part of the problem lies in the complicated mathematical formulation.
It's easy to overstate how complicated quantum mechanics is: after all, it's one of the most successful theories in the history of science, something that wouldn't be possible without some level of comprehension. In many ways, though, the most difficult experiment to understand is one of the simplest: the so-called "double-slit" experiment, in which the experimenter shines a light on a barrier with two narrow openings in it, and study the interference pattern it produces on a screen.
Light famously has two natures: it is wave-like, interfering in the same way that water ripples cross each other; it is also particle-like, carrying its energy in discrete bundles known as photons. If the experiment is sufficiently sensitive, the interference pattern appears grainy, where an individual photon appears on the screen, as you can see in the simulated projection pattern shown. In other words, single photons travel as though they are interfering with other photons, but is itself indivisible. Matter also has this dual character; interference of electrons and atoms has been observed experimentally. All of this is backed up by years of work.
The major difficulty with quantum mechanics is its interpretation. The standard Copenhagen interpretation (named in honor of the home city of Niels Bohr, who first formulated it) takes a simple stance: the reason why photons sometimes seem like particles and sometimes like waves is that our experiments dictate what we see. In this view, photons are products of our experiments without independent reality, so if we're bothered by seemingly contradictory notions of wave and particle properties, it's because we're expecting something unreasonable of the universe."
Just watched a programme where this saying was explained. In the late middle ages woollen fleeces were dyed before being spun, hence the phrase, 'dyed in the wool.'
Not sure how that became to mean set in your ways though
I understand the laws of karma and karmic accounts, well I guess as much as anyone who has only studied Buddhism for around eight years could do. It is a massive subject and makes little sense to people who have not gone beyond the basic premis of the topic and, understandably so. I remember many years ago when the ex English football team manager suggested babies who were born with a disability, we're so due to actons in previous lives. This caused outrage as you can imagine. I'm not sure where he got this idea from, but it displays how the topic of karma can be misunderstood by a lack of deep and prolonged study into the subject. For most people, what goes round, comes round is as far as their understanding will go, even though that's far from the true meaning of karma.
bodleing2 Forum Posts (6,132)
RE: Come to God before is too late
The original meaning of the word sin was....to miss the mark.I think many do that when it comes to matters of divinity.
Shanti