Alexander Tsiaras presents in under ten minutes the development of everyone from conception to birth using the latest imaging technology. Even though you were there when this happened you probably don't remember it (although Stan Groff has produced some evidence for his birth memory trauma theory, but that's a different story). Enjoy.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Buddha Loves That Mean Green
By which I mean money, not weed (although Shiva would care to disagree).
At current gold prices Buddha's net worth is estimated at $30,4367,085 - not bad for a guy who lived as a wandering ascetic for 51 years.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to Think Big and Kick Ass at $2.7 billion.
Up at UD is a story about the difference between Buddhist meditators (yo) and ordinary mortals. Whereas an ordinary mortal would only accept a crappy gift from a rich friend 25% of the time, a Buddhist meditator would accept the same crappy gift 50% of the time. The reason, according to the article, is that meditation changes the way the brain works so people use reason instead of emotion. A reasonable person would think "hey, better than nothing," whereas an emotional person would think "son of a bitch could afford more, screw their gift!"
It's a short story and that's pretty much all it says.
At current gold prices Buddha's net worth is estimated at $30,4367,085 - not bad for a guy who lived as a wandering ascetic for 51 years.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to Think Big and Kick Ass at $2.7 billion.
Up at UD is a story about the difference between Buddhist meditators (yo) and ordinary mortals. Whereas an ordinary mortal would only accept a crappy gift from a rich friend 25% of the time, a Buddhist meditator would accept the same crappy gift 50% of the time. The reason, according to the article, is that meditation changes the way the brain works so people use reason instead of emotion. A reasonable person would think "hey, better than nothing," whereas an emotional person would think "son of a bitch could afford more, screw their gift!"
It's a short story and that's pretty much all it says.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The Games We Play
When I was a kid I often thought life was like a video game. Everything seemed contrived and I set out to have fun playing it. Now I spend less time focusing on what, in 2006, I called "The Game of Life," but the thought does periodically come to mind, as it has at this 3 AM listening to the rain outside my window. Now, while I am not suggesting that the purpose of life is a game, that we are here to play, the case can be made that, fundamentally, that statement is accurate. It seems to me that there are many, many levels to the Game of Life.
In 2008 I was drawn to the notion that, like it or not, and most of the time it is not, we are always playing and never living from a position of authenticity. We are never living from a position of the true self, but instead are always putting on masks and hiding from the truth.
We are always lying, all the time, even, and I would say especially, with ourselves about who we are. We create a series of intersubjective rules where certain actions, behaviours, mannerisms, appearances, styles of dress, professions, and patterns of consumption will define us as a "winner" and other actions etc., will define us as a "loser." We are always trying to win this game we are playing with other people and with ourself. It may get us somewhere and there may be some temporary benefits to playing this game, but the real effect is seen in the anxiety it creates; the sense of shame and inadequacy we feel, the depression, the anger, the confusion all from this drive toward inauthenticity. It is no surprise that we are the most heavily medicated people in all of history. We damage ourselves psychologically so much and we are taken to believe, through clever advertising, that the cause to our problems are external to our own minds (be they society, our brain, the 1%, etc.) that we become drug addicts and shell out loads of money to either the cartels or the government's favourite pharmaceutical companies, who are deeply in bed together and working to create a drugged society.
As a result of this game you do not have one self. You create a new persona for every person you interact with. There is the self you present to yourself, the self you present to me, the self you present to persons X, Y, and Z, etc. All of this is a fiction. It is a mechanism of avoiding the truth. Maybe we cannot cope with who we are, cannot accept who we are. We are too damaged and so we play hide and seek with ourself. We erect boundaries and hide everything we cannot stand about who we are and it is this lie that is fundamentally the source of our problems. We invest so heavily in maintaining the lie that the lie consumes us.
Life is a game and it is one that we play to avoid ourself. Now there are some people who have uprooted this lie and are living from authenticity and there are more who have tricked themselves into believing that they are being authentic, but this is just the smallest percentage of the population. Most people will never even become aware of the lie. They cannot handle the psychological shock. For those of us who are aware that we are playing there is a long road ahead to get out of the game. Meditation cannot free us because it ignores the lie completely. In samadhi there is nothing arising, including the lie, but once we come out we are right back in the same pattern of self-deception (which is why so many great Eastern masters came to the West and became entangled in problems with drugs, money, or sex: they were fine in the ashram where no temptation existed, but back in society where temptation abounds they have no psychological mechanism for dealing with it. It's a lot like the alcoholic who doesn't deal with alcohol, he just avoids it. Avoiding temptation is not the same as overcoming it.). We have a Shadow, and that is what Western psychotherapy works on. We must integrate East and West to uproot the lie and start living from authenticity.
In 2008 I was drawn to the notion that, like it or not, and most of the time it is not, we are always playing and never living from a position of authenticity. We are never living from a position of the true self, but instead are always putting on masks and hiding from the truth.
We are always lying, all the time, even, and I would say especially, with ourselves about who we are. We create a series of intersubjective rules where certain actions, behaviours, mannerisms, appearances, styles of dress, professions, and patterns of consumption will define us as a "winner" and other actions etc., will define us as a "loser." We are always trying to win this game we are playing with other people and with ourself. It may get us somewhere and there may be some temporary benefits to playing this game, but the real effect is seen in the anxiety it creates; the sense of shame and inadequacy we feel, the depression, the anger, the confusion all from this drive toward inauthenticity. It is no surprise that we are the most heavily medicated people in all of history. We damage ourselves psychologically so much and we are taken to believe, through clever advertising, that the cause to our problems are external to our own minds (be they society, our brain, the 1%, etc.) that we become drug addicts and shell out loads of money to either the cartels or the government's favourite pharmaceutical companies, who are deeply in bed together and working to create a drugged society.
As a result of this game you do not have one self. You create a new persona for every person you interact with. There is the self you present to yourself, the self you present to me, the self you present to persons X, Y, and Z, etc. All of this is a fiction. It is a mechanism of avoiding the truth. Maybe we cannot cope with who we are, cannot accept who we are. We are too damaged and so we play hide and seek with ourself. We erect boundaries and hide everything we cannot stand about who we are and it is this lie that is fundamentally the source of our problems. We invest so heavily in maintaining the lie that the lie consumes us.
Life is a game and it is one that we play to avoid ourself. Now there are some people who have uprooted this lie and are living from authenticity and there are more who have tricked themselves into believing that they are being authentic, but this is just the smallest percentage of the population. Most people will never even become aware of the lie. They cannot handle the psychological shock. For those of us who are aware that we are playing there is a long road ahead to get out of the game. Meditation cannot free us because it ignores the lie completely. In samadhi there is nothing arising, including the lie, but once we come out we are right back in the same pattern of self-deception (which is why so many great Eastern masters came to the West and became entangled in problems with drugs, money, or sex: they were fine in the ashram where no temptation existed, but back in society where temptation abounds they have no psychological mechanism for dealing with it. It's a lot like the alcoholic who doesn't deal with alcohol, he just avoids it. Avoiding temptation is not the same as overcoming it.). We have a Shadow, and that is what Western psychotherapy works on. We must integrate East and West to uproot the lie and start living from authenticity.
Friday, November 11, 2011
11.11.11
It comes once every century (twice if you're using a 12 hour clock!): 11:11:11 on 11/11/11. In under 5 minutes I talk about the end of the First World War, the experience and value of the soldier, and what we can learn from them and from history.
P.S. The video was shot on 11 November, and posted here on the 12 @ 1:31 AM, but the time stamp has been changed to reflect the theme of the post.
P.S. The video was shot on 11 November, and posted here on the 12 @ 1:31 AM, but the time stamp has been changed to reflect the theme of the post.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Europe Dies
Like the Oracle says in the last Matrix film "everything that has a beginning has an end." Seems as if the end has come for the Eurozone (I'm on the record as of May 2008 saying that the Euro sucks and that the success of the Eurozone is a fiction that is artificially propped up by government intervention). Greece, the very place where all this started in 2010 when the world went mad, has crystalised into a stone that is dragging the entire Eurozone with it into destruction.
The very government of Greece is teetering on the edge, their military being decapitated for unknown reasons. Billions around the world were wiped out in the markets as fears of a coup arose. According to the story one Greek official (unnamed) is on the record as saying "It’s all over. The government is about to collapse."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pissed at how Germany is carrying the weight of the Eurozone and its endemic bailouts of all the failed countries. Pussies in Greece (which used to be the toughest bunch of people on the planet, producing the Spartans, Socrates, Alexander the Great, and Plotinus, all while wearing skirts no less, before turning into the biggest welfare state on the planet) have made Merkel as Hitler posters because she is the only sane leader in the EU and realises that this whole EU experiment in keeping something huge and complicated going as long as possible for no other reason that to justify the fact that it is very expensive and has been going on for a long time.
From The Independent: "The international economy is on the brink of a deep new economic crisis that could cost millions of jobs around the globe and trigger mass social unrest.... The UN agency warned that it could take until 2016 for global employment to return to the levels of three years ago – and that anger could erupt on the streets of Europe and other continents as a result."
If the Greeks were right (the classical Greeks, not the modern ones) and madness is contagious, and 2011 has been very good evidence that it is, we could be looking at something much worse than the end of the Eurozone. I don't like speculating about these sorts of things, but maybe the Mayans were right and the world will end in 2012. Not from some natural cataclysm, but from humanity's own hubris.
The very government of Greece is teetering on the edge, their military being decapitated for unknown reasons. Billions around the world were wiped out in the markets as fears of a coup arose. According to the story one Greek official (unnamed) is on the record as saying "It’s all over. The government is about to collapse."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pissed at how Germany is carrying the weight of the Eurozone and its endemic bailouts of all the failed countries. Pussies in Greece (which used to be the toughest bunch of people on the planet, producing the Spartans, Socrates, Alexander the Great, and Plotinus, all while wearing skirts no less, before turning into the biggest welfare state on the planet) have made Merkel as Hitler posters because she is the only sane leader in the EU and realises that this whole EU experiment in keeping something huge and complicated going as long as possible for no other reason that to justify the fact that it is very expensive and has been going on for a long time.
From The Independent: "The international economy is on the brink of a deep new economic crisis that could cost millions of jobs around the globe and trigger mass social unrest.... The UN agency warned that it could take until 2016 for global employment to return to the levels of three years ago – and that anger could erupt on the streets of Europe and other continents as a result."
If the Greeks were right (the classical Greeks, not the modern ones) and madness is contagious, and 2011 has been very good evidence that it is, we could be looking at something much worse than the end of the Eurozone. I don't like speculating about these sorts of things, but maybe the Mayans were right and the world will end in 2012. Not from some natural cataclysm, but from humanity's own hubris.
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