Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Religion IS crazy!

Jump to new
Anyway guys I came in to make a couple of comments and didn't expect to be so actively involved :p

Thanks for the chat guys. I'm going to stick with stocks discussions for now.

Happy to answer any questions in PM. I know any further answers in here will lead to more counter points that will lead to endless discussion :p

The final point I'll make is that I respect whatever position you guys hold provided you have an evidenced based position.

Enjoy the chat guys! And enjoy your trading!
 
pavilion103 said:
An atheist doesn't have a belief in ANY gods. If you believe in one god, saying you are an atheist towards other gods obviously isn't the right word to use. It's not a major point, just the wrong use of the word.
Click to expand...

You've missed the point Bellenuit made quite clearly...

Atheism (by the generally accepted definition) is a statement of non-belief, not of belief. On the basis of the evidence available, an atheist does not believe there is a God. This is not the same as saying that an atheist believes there is no God. It is a subtle but important difference.
Click to expand...

Atheists declare there is currently no evidence for the existence of any God and most that I know are quite open to any credible evidence that shows otherwise.

Ordering ones life around the notion that a sky God exists and specific actions are required by this sky God to get the right ticket at the entrance gate to eternity risks choosing the wrong sky God. You had better adopt the right religious mythology or else. Personally I find Christianity the most appealing of the religions in this respect since a death bed conversion erases a lifetime of evil depravity.
 
bellenuit said:
Atheism (by the generally accepted definition) is a statement of non-belief, not of belief. On the basis of the evidence available, an atheist does not believe there is a God. This is not the same as saying that an atheist believes there is no God. It is a subtle but important difference.
Click to expand...

Thank you for this post Bellenuit. I have in the past been annoyed by the insistence of some people that not believing in a god equates to having a belief that there is no God, and that that in itself is a belief system. You have expressed very well what I could not find the words to say.

Ruby
 
Can't believe this.

Muslims need to get thicker skin and grow up! Western civilization is caving to this barbaric religion.
What a joke!


Lego withdraws 'anti-Islamic' Star Wars Jabba the Hutt palace model from sale after complaints


TOY giant Lego has reportedly agreed to stop producing a Star Wars toy product Muslims find offensive.
According to Britain's Independent newspaper, Lego agreed to withdraw the Jabba’s Palace product from production in 2014 to appease those who think it depicts Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, a church-turned-mosque, which is now a museum and one of the city's top tourist attractions.

Muslim groups also said the watchtower/spire of the toy palace - a Lego version of Hutt Castle, a monastery-turned-palace belonging to crime lord Jabba the Hutt - resembled the minaret of a Beirut mosque.

The Turkish Community Forum, which issued the complaint, also said the Lego version of Jabba himself - a giant slug-like gangster who enslaves Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi - resembled a “terrorist” who “likes to smoke hookah and have his victims killed”.

Complaints about the Lego set were first aired in January when the case came to light when a Turkish man expressed his dissatisfaction with the toy after it was purchased for his son by a family member.
After investigating, Dr Melissa Günes, General Secretary of the Turkish Cultural Community, said that Lego had been contacted with an official complaint.

One of Istanbul's most magnificent buildings, the Hagia Sophia was dedicated by the Bishop of Antioch in 360, under the reign of the Byzantine emperor Constantine II.

Its served as a Christian cathedral until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

It then became a mosque until the 1930s, when it was turned into a museum under Ataturk, the first president of the modern-day Turkish Republic.


http://www.news.com.au/world-news/lego-withdraws-anti-islamic-star-wars-jabba-the-hutt-palace-model-from-sale-after-complaints/story-fndir2ev-1226610764915#ixzz2PTUnxSGe
Click to expand...
 
I've seen this build over the past 10 years or so. The number of internet pages is growing very fast, and we're possibly close to a tipping point. Up until recently, the idea of enlightenment (or holiness) was viewed as something only a special few had achieved.\ But ordinary people are now achieving the same mind state. - there's even one woman in Adelaide. So it's happening - the evolution of the species. I bet that in 10-20 years time the talk of the town will be who's enlightened, and who's not. Stand by for the popular media to grab hold of this. Big trends like this take a while to get moving.

This article explains where science and the core root of religions meet.




Enlightenment: Is Science Ready to Take it Seriously?
| Jeff Warren | November 2012 - Issue 3 | 49 Comments


I’m not given to making grand predictions, but in this case I can’t resist: the very real spiritual transformation at the heart of mysticism is about to explode into the secular mainstream, and the consequences may just revolutionize our scientific understanding of the mind.

Yowzer! No doubt the reader’s New Age flapdoodle-detector is now shrieking. Bear with me. Let’s first get the tricky business of defining enlightenment out of the way.

For expediency’s sake, I’ll define enlightenment as a complex and multi-faceted process by which the mind comes to know – and over time rest more securely in – its own ground. As this happens, our habitual sense of being a separate and bounded self begins to fade. Ultimately, the person for whom this happens no longer feels themselves to be an autonomous entity looking out at an external world; rather, they feel themselves, more and more, to be an intimate part of that world’s humid expression, an unfolding natural process no different than anything else in nature. As a result, practitioners report a liberating sense of freedom, ease, spontaneity. The volume of self-referential thought often decreases, although, since enlightenment happens along a deepening continuum, they are still routinely trapped in old habits of dualistic thinking.

Despite the fact that this transformation has been painstakingly described in virtually every contemplative tradition – from Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism through to the mystical branches of the Western Abrahamic religions [eg. Christianity] – and is the central drama in the lives of thousands of lucid and intelligent human beings, here in the West there is zero mention of the phenomenon in any of our bastions of intellectual respectability. You’ll never read about spiritual enlightenment in a Malcolm Gladwell book, or the pages of The New York Review of Books. This is true even in most Western Buddhist books, where enlightenment may be mentioned as a general principle or orientation, but almost never as a tangible transformation that happens to real 21st-century human beings.

The reason for this probably has to do with accessibility. The first American Buddhist teachers, most of them operating out of the Insight Meditation Society (Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield and others), acted as skillfully as possible to bring the benefits of meditation to a large secular audience. Given how skittish Western intellectuals are around religious themes, the last thing you’d want to do here is start raving on about mystical oneness. There is also a lively debate in the spiritual world about the advisability of even mentioning different states and stages. On the upside it can help orient practitioners within often strange and difficult experiences; on the downside it can burden them with unrealistic expectations of “progress” that end up getting in the way. Compounding this, there are whole schools of contemplative thinking who argue that all of us are already enlightened; we have no where to go and nothing to do.

The majority of old-guard U.S. Buddhist teachers erred on the side of caution; as a consequence most of their books are filled with sensible soft-dharma insights gently shaped to fit our general Western model of psychotherapy. There are exceptions, and those exceptions, I’d like to argue, are about to become the new rule.

There is a new spirit of openness, for instance, in both the culture of spirituality and the culture of science. One spiritual Trojan horse is yoga. Another is the increasingly popular practice of “mindfulness.” Both of these are powerful spiritual technologies. Most people approach them for practical fitness or stress-reduction reasons, and this is all they ever deliver on. But, for a small percentage, something else happens. They find themselves – deliciously, inexorably, sometimes alarmingly – moving along a course of spiritual development they never expected.

I teach mindfulness meditation, so I have a particular interest here. Mindfulness is the practice of bringing clarity and concentration and equanimity to our moment-by-moment experience. Doctors chirp happily about its secular benefits even as the terrifying specter of loving mystical connectedness pours from the belly of the horse. You can thank Jon Kabat-Zinn for this. His pioneering Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction model is everywhere – over 120 medical centers in the US alone offer mindfulness programs, and there has been a commensurate scientific interest in the subject – official NIH-funded studies on mindfulness have gone from two in the year 2000 to 128 in 2010. Mindfulness in small doses is an immensely helpful way to address stress and anxiety and pain and all kinds of other conditions. Mindfulness in large doses is called vipassana; it rewires the brain and extirpates the sense of a separate self. Come for the raisin, stay for the perspective-shuddering cosmic U-turn. What starts subtle can grow, and, as the brilliant Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young says, “subtle is significant.”

In the multidisciplinary world of consciousness studies, the buzzword is nonduality, a translation of Advaita (literally “not two”), an ancient branch of Hindu philosophy. I’ve presented at two ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ meetings, a terrific annual assembly of the biggest names in neuroscience and philosophy of mind, among them Antonio Damasio, David Chalmers, Wolf Singer, Susan Greenfield, Stuart Hameroff and others. For the past few years nonduality has been a popular subject of discussion. There is even a dedicated ‘Science and Nonduality’ conference - now in its fourth year – that features some of the same speakers, many of them offering straight-to-the-bone “Direct Path” instruction in books and DVDs and weekend workshops.

The Internet is the great culprit in all of this. Where once you had to climb a mountain in Tibet to get answers to spiritual questions, you can now find them on Wikipedia, or an easily-arranged Skype call. Enlightenment is the Internet subject par excellence – vague, contradictory, fiercely blogged about by ill-credentialed authorities. It’s no small irony that the very medium that is hopelessly fragmenting human attention is simultaneously offering up some of the necessary tools to heal us – that is, if you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Within American Buddhism, the heart of this new transparency calls itself “Pragmatic Dharma.” The influential Buddhist Geeks podcast and conference is at the center of it. For the past few years, in popular interviews with dozens of scientists and teachers, they talk openly about different aspects of the awakening process, including frank testimonials of their own enlightenment experiences. This is a culture of learning and experimenting and exploring together. The Geeks believe – as do I – that the reticence and secrecy around spiritual transformation is no longer helpful or productive.

How do we know that all of these self-described enlightened practitioners and teachers aren’t bull****ting us? We don’t. And we won’t until we find some identifying neural signature in the brain, if such a signature even exists. I know several neuroscientists working on this question right now.

In my own case, I have stopped quibbling. People I’ve known for years tell me about their enlightenment experiences and I believe them. I believe them because my curiosity about what may be happening in the mind is greater than my allegiance to an outdated and uninformed scientific consensus. Western psychology is still outgrowing a reactive skepticism towards the subjective anecdote that it inherited from behaviorism. Fortunately, this is changing. These days, there is a growing appreciation among investigators that if you want to understand consciousness – as opposed to just brain activity – you have to start taking first-person reports seriously. This will soon include reports of enlightenment.

Science changes. That’s what it’s supposed to do. How it stands to change from enlightenment is something I’ll address in my next column.

[Part 2 of 2 -- click here to read Part 1]

In March of 2012, myself and twenty other “adept” meditators participated in an experiment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. The experiment was a collaboration between a young Harvard neuroscientist named David Vago and a Buddhist scholar and mindfulness meditation teacher named Shinzen Young.

Over a period of one week, all twenty of us meditated in a makeshift retreat space inside the functional imaging laboratory. On a couple of the afternoons, we completed various behavioral and psychological tests. But the main event happened in the hospital. Every few hours, a meditator was selected from the larger group and taken down the road to the hospital’s MRI facility to have their brain scanned both functionally and anatomically (because of a metal plate in my neck, the result of an injury sustained years before, I did not particulate in the scanning portion of the experiment).

Vago and Young were attempting to tackle one of the biggest problems in neuroscience: what is the real resting state of the brain? In order to look at any kind of brain activity in an MRI study – the recalling of a memory, the movement of a body part, the focusing of attention – the neuroscientist must have a baseline resting condition with which to compare the active state. And so for years neuroscientists would tell subjects in the MRI to let their minds “just wander” between active tasks – as though “mind-wandering” were some sort of idle resting state. But recent research on the “default mode network” of the brain has shown that there is nothing at all restful about mind-wandering. In fact, the “resting” brain is massively activated; in particular, the networks that support something called “self-referential processing” – i.e., the endless ruminative story of me.

This is the all-too-familiar part of our brains that engages in constant comparison and scheming and worrying and fantasizing, the part that pours over conversations at a party the night before looking for insults and clues and conclusions. In other words, it is the thinking mind, or at least one aspect of the thinking mind, a mode most of us reflexively revert to when not absorbed by some specific task.

True rest, Shinzen Young argues, is something else, something meditators can demonstrate for sustained periods of time, in order to help identify the real ground of sensory experience. And this was what our little group set our minds to doing.

Lying flat on their backs with the fMRI humming above them and three Tesla of magnetic activity scouring their brains, each meditator dropped into one of the four different rest meditations taught to them by Young: visual rest, auditory rest, body rest, and an open state known as “do nothing,” where the meditator surrenders all attempt to control his attention and just lets all thoughts come and go, while maintaining awareness. In an experienced meditator this creates a clear, open and spacious mind. When the subjects felt they had stabilized each of these states, they pressed a button. In between each of these active conditions, they would let their minds wander – again, in order to generate a contrast, but also in order to highlight how different mind-wandering was from these other flavors of deeper rest.

Except … there was a problem, something Vago hadn’t foreseen. The twenty meditators in the experiment had been chosen for the length and the consistency of their practice. But even here there was a demarcation between intermediate meditators and a few older practitioners who had been meditating for over twenty years. Their minds were different, both in degree, and, it seemed, in kind. They were no longer like the minds of regular folks.

The veteran meditators could do each of the resting states perfectly, but when it came to creating a contrasting condition, they were helpless. They had lost the ability to “let their minds wander” because they had long ago shed the habit of entertaining discursive narrative thoughts. They no longer worried about how their hair looked, or their to-do lists, or whether people thought they were annoying. Their minds were largely quiet. When thoughts did come – and they did still come – these subjects reported that the thoughts had a different quality, an unfixated quality. The thought “This MRI machine is extremely loud” might arise, but it would quickly evaporate. Thoughts seemed to emerge as-needed in response to different situations and would then disappear crisply into the clear backdrop of consciousness. In other words, these practitioners were always meditating.

This turned out to be the least dramatic of Vago’s discoveries. With the two most experienced meditators, something even more surprising happened, something that, to the knowledge of the investigators involved, had never before been captured on any kind of brain imaging technology.

Lying on their padded gurneys in the center of the humming MRI in this famous research hospital in the heart of East Boston and Harvard Medical School, each of the two research subjects suddenly … disappeared.

Har-Prakash Khalsa, a 52-year old Canadian mail carrier and yoga teacher – and one of the veterans to whom this happened – describes his experience:

“It’s a kind of pressure or momentum. I was in one of the rest states, and as I let go of it, I felt myself heading into a much bigger dissolution – a bigger ‘gone’ as Shinzen would call it. It felt impossible to resist. My mind, body and world just collapsed.”

A few moments later – blinking, refreshed, reformatted – Har-Prakash returned to consciousness, not at all sure how he was to supposed to fit this experience into the research protocol. He couldn’t indicate it with a button press even if he wanted to: there was no one present to press the button.

This wasn’t rest – it was annihilation.

For Har-Prakash, the experience was utterly familiar. He experienced his first cessation in 2003, after a particularly intense meditation retreat, and now they happened all the time.

“Sometimes it happens just walking down the street,” he told me.

In and out of existence Har-Prakash would strobe, often multiples times a day. It was no wonder he could live “in the moment” – the moment was literally always new. It was like waking up ten times a minute.

When I asked Young about the phenomenon he told me they were called “cessations,” or Nirodha, and were a hugely important theme in Buddhist practice. In fact, one of Young’s main jobs as the teacher of advanced meditators, he said, was to help his students acclimatize to these disconcerting little deaths, which often happened more frequently the longer the students practiced.

“It may sound dangerous, but somehow you always continue to function just fine,” Young said.

He told me about his own cessations, which, for example, happened while driving his car from his home in Burlington, Vermont, to where he runs a regular meditation retreat in Waterbury, a half-hour away.

“I’ll go in and out of cessation a hundred times. Time and space punctuated with nothing. But I’ve never even gotten a ticket, let alone had an accident. And that’s not just my experience. I’ve never seen a Zen master bump into a wall because for a moment, perceptually, he wasn’t there. Remember the material world doesn’t go away, this is all events in sensory experience. It’s consciousness. Causality is still there. Force fields are still there.”

Clearly, Young, like the two veteran practitioners in the MRI, no longer experiences reality the way most humans do. Attempting to describe how exactly his perception has shifted has become something of a journalistic obsession for me. In the mystical literature, commentators use one of a series of shorthands: “self-realized,” “awakened,” “liberated,” and, most loaded of all, “enlightened.” “A very clear experience of cessation,” Young told me, “would bring about classical enlightenment.”

Whatever you want to call it, after years of assiduous practice, Young’s sense of identity has shifted. Like the two experienced meditators in the study, he no longer has the same quality of discursive thinking. He spends more and more time in states of emptiness. And he no longer experiences himself to be a separate bounded self – rather, he feels himself to be part of a much larger selfless “doing.”

As both an observing journalist and a participating subject, I was in the MRI room while some of these events took place, and I watched Vago carefully. What would he make of these strange permutations of meditative experience? Although over the past ten years hundreds of scientific papers had been published on the neuroscience of meditation, few of them were brave enough to address the explicit goal of Buddhist practice, the end of suffering known as awakening or enlightenment (The name “Buddha” itself means “awakened one”).

There are signs that this may be shifting. Indeed, the year before, Vago and a consortium of Harvard colleagues published a paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science called ‘How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work?’ In its review of the different components of mindfulness mechanisms, the authors of the paper include an aspect they call “change in perception of the self.”

If in the early stages of meditation, the authors explain, there is a de-identification with some part of mental content. A more “drastic disidentification” around our core sense of self is said to happen at more advanced stages of practice. “In place of the identification with the static self, there emerges a tendency to identify with the phenomenon of ‘experiencing’ itself.” Both theoretical accounts and experiential reports, the authors write, “ascribe to the change in the perspective on the self a crucial role for development and maturity in meditation.” They then go on to summarize the few neuroimaging and self-report findings that could shed light on what might be happening in the enlightened brain (although they are careful never to use ‘the E word’).

In a science paper, this is simply a string of interesting words. In someone’s actual living experience, it is a complex and radical shift that time and again is described as the most important re-orientation of that person’s life. And not just in Buddhism. Although the language is different, throughout history, this shift from self-thoughts to an entry into the stream of consciousness itself has been described in all the world’s contemplative traditions, as well as in the secular literature.

There are many ambiguous maps and contradictory descriptions of enlightenment. In Young and in Vago’s hopeful view, a true “science of enlightenment” might be able to bring together and illuminate all the paradigms and experiences that lie at the heart of serious spiritual practice.

Why is this endeavor important, and what might its effect be on science?

On the individual front, we are looking at potentially revolutionary insights to help address human mental and emotional anguish. As a person’s identity shifts through the practice of meditation, time and again practitioners report dramatic reductions in personal suffering. Pain does not go away, of course. Pain really is part of the human condition. But one’s relationship to suffering can change.

What is the core dynamic here? It seems to involve a kind of “unfixating” from sensory experience in general, and then, as practice deepens, from our actual identity as separate autonomous individuals. In Young’s way of thinking, one of the skills the practitioner develops is equanimity, which he describes as a lack of gripping in the sensory system.

Experiences move more fully through the meditator, stirring up fewer disturbances, returning them more quickly to homeostasis. A sense of lightness emerges, an internal balance and capacity for fulfillment independent of external conditions. As practitioners struggle less with themselves, energy is freed up that can also be directed towards helping others. The meditator feels more connection to the soul of the world, and to other people. Indeed, another aspect of the “awakened” mind is the unfettering of what many describe as a primordial compassion. Our basic nature may be more loving and easy than we suspect.

These changes seem to happen along a continuum. Right now there is a huge scientific interest in mindfulness meditation because it is one way of moving people along this continuum, which even at the “shallow end” can have a dramatic effect on conditions ranging from stress-related complaints to anxiety, depression, addiction, pain management and more.

But as I’ve tried to show, more dramatic shifts can happen too. Any science of mind worthy of the name must try to isolate, describe, and understand the full continuum. Otherwise, the paradigm of the power of meditation is missing its cornerstone.

Once the full dynamic is better understood (which may or may not include important neural correlates), then it may be possible to bring the benefits of serious practice to people who do not have the luxury of meditating full time for twenty years. We may be able to fine-tune our meditation techniques – or, more controversially, use some form of techno-boost, as Young himself has suggested – in a way that allows us to literally change our minds and achieve a deeper level of fulfillment and connection in our lives.

As we get more clarity about the real elements of human experience, we may reach a time when, in Shinzen Young’s words, “outer physical science could cross-fertilize with inner contemplative disciplines to create a sudden and dramatic increase in global well being.” Young describes this as his “happiest thought.” Such a cross-fertilization could leave us with an enriched neuroscience, new tools for addressing human suffering, and a vastly expanded sense of human potential.

How might this cross-fertilization work in practice? I’ve already suggested that scientific understanding could make the benefits of serious meditation more accessible. But this is a two-way street. There’s another possible consequence – namely, that enlightenment itself might affect the scientific practitioner. Young often says the next Buddha may be a team of enlightened neuroscientists. What he means is that deep practice confers a quality of deep seeing. This is both literally true, in the form of extraordinary sensory clarity, and metaphysically true, in the form of deep insights about the nature of reality.

That these two may amount to the same thing is captured in a story Young tells about his own teacher, Jōshū Sasaki Rōshi (I’ll risk one last anecdote at this late stage in the column).

At 105 years old, Sasaki Rōshi is very likely the world’s oldest living Zen master. A good case could be made that he has been meditating longer than any other human on the planet.

One day in a public talk, with Young translating (Young began his monastic training at Mount Kōya south of Osaka and speaks fluent Japanese), the Rōshi asked an unusual question, “Do you know what the number one is?” Before the baffled audience could respond, he answered, “The number one is that which has the number zero as its content.” He went on, “Do you know what the number two is?” and again answered his own question, “The number two is that which has the number one as its content. Do you now what the number three is?” He continued in this vein, and as he did, Young, something of a math geek, had a revelation.

The Rōshi was articulating a fundamental dynamic of consciousness, one no scientist has yet reported, but has been described in slightly different language by Buddhists for over two thousand years. In the Rōshi’s way of seeing things, each sensory moment emerges when an empty source (Zero) polarizes into an expansive force and a contractive force. Between them, these two powers shape each nanosecond of perception. Again and again they mutually cancel and reunite, pulsing sensory reality into existence, creating ever-richer states of Zero that experienced meditators can learn to observe and even to ride (Young once told me this accounts for the bouncy vitality and spontaneity of some Zen monks).

Young realized the Rōshi’s exposition was remarkably similar to the modern foundation of mathematics known as “set theory.” And yet the Rōshi knew nothing of math – his 19th century education was essentially feudal. When Young pointed out this similarity, there was a long pause before his teacher eventually replied, in an unimpressed Zen deadpan, “Ahh… so the mathematicians have seen that far, eh?”

Of course, as Young himself is careful to point out, this may be a superficial coincidence. Many people are eager to make comparisons between spirituality and science (usually involving quantum mechanics), a move that in most cases just annoys real scientists, who have a more nuanced view of these processes. But then, the scientific tendency to make a vague generalization about “meditation” – a hugely complex set of techniques and processes – equally annoys contemplatives. This is one reason why the idea of investigators with training in both domains is so appealing.

What might we find as we begin to probe the intersection between deep self and wide world? Any honest scientist or philosopher will tell you that the relationship between mind and matter is still a mystery, perhaps our greatest mystery. Contemplatives from historic times to the present have argued that as we increase in perceptual sensitivity and openness, we begin to detect a more interactive and integrated relationship between our inner and outer worlds. Is this discernment or delusion? Only a genuine collaboration between science and advanced contemplation will tell us.

Fin.
 
The aforementioned Adelaide woman is Linda Clair. There would be others, however.

Here's a short Q and A with her, followed by a youtube interview. Not what you expected is it?

http://www.spiritualteachers.org/linda_clair.htm

Try to listen and read as if it isn't some poetic, fantasy, woo-woo bull****, but actual literal truth.


excerpt:

Q: Enlightenment is to die while you're alive -- I think Bunan said that, and to me that communicates the profundity what we're talking about. You're saying that first comes the realization that "I'm not the mind," and then comes "I am not the body"? Doesn't Vipassana typically have people watch their body first, then watch the mind? I've had a number people say to me "I know I'm not the body, but I can't say that about my mind/awareness." Do they only "think" they are not the body and don't really understand?

A: You have to ‘realise’ that you’re not the body, and this is not an intellectual exercise. You can’t reason or talk your way through it. To realise means that it has become real for you in your body and this is only possible when the mind completely subsides. You need to go so deeply into the body that you trust the intelligence of the body rather than using the mind as security. You have to prove to yourself that the body does not need the mind to survive, because the great fear is that if you let go of the mind, the body will die. It’s such a huge thing, much bigger than I ever imagined. It’s the reason you have been given your body – to use it to realise that you are not your body – to realise the meaning of life.

Q: What is the greatest difficulty that students have with your method?

A: Fear. When people start to really look deeply into who they think they are, the mind/ego becomes very fearful as it knows that it can’t exist when someone is fully here, now.
 
I was watching a science doco on SBS tonight which triggered a realization, and I was able to add a few pieces to my personal science/religion puzzle. I say 'personal' because I'm sure others elsewhere have come to the same realization, but I feel like I just "discovered" it, so here it is:



The Trinity of Religion and Science:



OBSERVER God (the realization of oneness, where there is no separate 'other'). "You" cannot exist here. .....versus... Black Hole (no separate thing can exist, nor emerge from here, because everything in the universe (including space, time and each other) are created AT the event horizon, not BY black hole). You are destroyed here.


PROCESS OF OBSERVATION ego/mind/self (the celluloid 'film' that contains all scripts and images - film is 2 dimensional). ....versus.... event horizon (stores all the information that goes to create 3D reality on its 2D surface).

OBSERVED "3d reality" (recognized over 2500years ago as illusion/projection) ...versus..... 3d reality (just starting to be recognized as a hologram).


Just as the mind and intellect cannot realize God, so no object can survive crossing the event horizon.

There's no gap really. The most advanced scientists and the most advanced spiritualist practitioners are approaching the very same point, one from the East, one from the West. It will be a good day when they meet.
 
Isn't it amazing that people can come up with such extreme crap and convince themselves of it? Not surprising that it often requires lengthy sessions of twisting, spinning and confusing.

Watch a religious person when posed with clear and obvious facts which completely oppose their empty beliefs. Watching their faces gives me a mixture of amusement and disappointment, as does listening to their responses.
 
Sdajii said:
Isn't it amazing that people can come up with such extreme crap and convince themselves of it? Not surprising that it often requires lengthy sessions of twisting, spinning and confusing.

Watch a religious person when posed with clear and obvious facts which completely oppose their empty beliefs. Watching their faces gives me a mixture of amusement and disappointment, as does listening to their responses.
Click to expand...

If you're referring to me with your rude comments, I don't believe in anything. I'm pointing out the striking similarities between real religion and science. They parallel each other exactly.
 
GB is there some esoteric meaning attached to your 'signature' of multiple numerals at the base of every post?
 
Julia said:
GB is there some esoteric meaning attached to your 'signature' of multiple numerals at the base of every post?
Click to expand...

Not really. I had been contemplating non-dualism, and how the entire universe can only exist when there are opposites (one male, one female, one up one down, one good, one evil, one pleasurable, one painful, and so on). Then I was comparing that to the way a computer can encode limitless amounts of information into a simple string of zeroes and ones. The computer chip only needs two things (1 and 0) to encode and create everything it does. Two things - yin and yang. Creation of anything requires "two", and the two are opposites. So if pleasure is possible, then pain and suffering will always be possible. This is how/why the non-dualist philosophers came to realize that the only end to human suffering was in abandoning both.

The myth of Adam and Eve (and it is a myth) is a remarkably accurate symbolism of the origin of life and the human condition, so long as one knows how to read it (carefully).

That's probably more than you were after, but anyhow! :rolleyes:

edit: Good one dude.. haha.
 
Some Dude said:
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't :)
Click to expand...
And those who find the repetitive appearance of it somewhat visually irritating, especially when it has no specific relevance to the topic.
 
Julia said:
And those who find the repetitive appearance of it somewhat visually irritating, especially when it has no specific relevance to the topic.
Click to expand...
Can you name one single forum signature on the internet that ever has? :(

It's the same as screen names, avatars (like my Cho'gath and your dog - sorry I don't remember his or her name) and everything else that has personal relevance that people attach to their internet appearance.

It's really just a bit of novelty.
 
Is religion crazy?

My opinion. Yes.

Teen Witness must have a transfusion, rules judge

A 17-year-old Jehovah's Witness suffering from a lethal form of blood cancer and refusing treatment threatened to rip the IV needle out of his arm if doctors attempted a blood transfusion.

But the NSW Supreme Court has overruled the wishes of the patient, known only as ''X'', and his parents, ordering him to undergo the potentially lifesaving procedure.

The case is unusual because at the time of the court's ruling on March 28, X was just 10 months away from turning 18 - by which time he would be considered an adult and entitled to refuse blood products.

Usually, such court cases involve much younger children whose parents have refused to allow lifesaving treatment.

In his judgment, Supreme Court Justice Ian Gzell said X had been ''cocooned in faith''.

Professor Glenn Marshall, who is treating X for Hodgkin's lymphoma at Sydney Children's Hospital, was told by the patient being sedated for a blood transfusion would be akin to being raped.

On a whiteboard in his hospital room, X's father wrote a scripture reference to abstaining from blood, which is forbidden for Jehovah's Witnesses.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/teen-witness-must-have-a-transfusion-rules-judge-20130417-2i0lc.html#ixzz2Qntsg5d7
Click to expand...
 
Top