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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Lucifer, the "bearer of light", referred to an ancient king who made life difficult for the Jewish people. They wrote of him as thinking he makes the very sun rise. Later, Christians equated Lucifer with Satan. In the Fox TV show of that name he is an immensely charming character who punishes the wicked as opposed to encouraging evil.
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WBraun
climber
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Once the actual science is done it's NOT an idea anymore.
Base104 (Mark) you need better reading comprehension and less kneejerk reactions.
Science itself is never an idea.
The idea is there before the science starts.
I never said science has no ideas, that's what you projected onto me.
Keep on flying dude it will help to get your head out of your swamp .....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Interact with the world around you without any categorization...
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We already are, we're just not aware of it because it is happening beneath and before our minds categorize reality into known forms and constructs. Or a better way to put this: before our minds provide us with conditioned responses and interpretations. Obviously there is no "blue" out there. Our minds fashion blue for us. But in ways difficult to describe, we seemingly remain separate from whatever we are experiencing out there, though it is easy to get fused with internal content and think, at a pre-verbal level, "That's me."That is, we normally believe we ARE whatever is going on internally, while external reality is that which is not me. These are some of the ways we unconsciously categorize our experience. It happens so naturally that normally there is no reason to question this.
To get behind categories, so to speak, we normally have to deconstruct the "I" and the observer and keep going down to where finally the duality between "me" sitting here and "that" out there dissolves. In Zen language this is sometimes stated as "mind and body falling away." It is not a concept that can be communicated - though try we must - but rather a direct experience of there being no separation between you and everything. Some call this merging with reality.
Language goes little distance is making this clear because thought, logic and discursive language is geared to working with discrete quantities.
In my experience you cannot make this happen, rather you work on the conditions which are favorable to it happening and once the categories start to thin out, by fluke or luck or grace or a propitious shove at just the right time by a good teacher, you tumble out of yourself. It can be a very unnerving experience at first, and you thank your lucky stars that it usually doesn't last long. There are many examples of this happening to lesser or greater degrees when people are tripping on psychedelics, and many freak out because your discursive mind is warped in an altered state. When you are perfectly sober and grounded, it still takes your wind away.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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^^^ I question whether moving away from survival mode to this extent brings greater understanding or wisdom. In today's world you'd better have an armed and fully aware guard standing post to protect you as you venture out on your astral plane.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Good point.
Our conditioning is such that we run almost entirely on auto-pilot. The reason all traditions make such a big thing about the present is that this is our only chance to see the machine at work. Initially you can't DO anything about it because that which takes action is also the machine, trying to get out of its conditioned position. The "wisdom" is in seeing this. Then the situation starts to change.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Well stated.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jogill: I question whether moving away from survival mode to this extent brings greater understanding or wisdom.
I don’t see why an issue such as this is parsed or expressed in this way. There are more ways of seeing anything than either “this” or “that.” But that's what categorizations, classifications, taxonomies, labels, concepts, models, abstractions appear to do. He’s a conservative, she’s a liberal, they are Californians, that’s an atom, it’s a tree, and on and on. I suppose that anything can be labeled one way or another (e.g., life IS survival), but I can’t think of anything that is fully understood or indicated with a categorization, a model, or a framework. It’s all a conversation, in my view—and all the better for it, and us.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Mathematical Category Theory is entirely unproductive in the elementary complex analysis in which I dabble. If I were in set theory or some area of abstract algebra or even in soft analysis it might be useful. Yanqui may have a different take on the subject, and if so I'd like to hear it. And maybe Ed has encountered it in physics. But for me it's inert math.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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I wonder what other "world wide rankings" would be of interest? Could there be one for awareness? If there would or could, would it be related to a measure of the availability of leisure? I remember some history prof arguing that a civilization's decadence was positively associated to its power and wealth, comparatively. With decadence came rapid decay.
What a funny world we seem to live in. Just when things seem to finally get good, they next get bad.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Saw the Book of Mormon again for the second time tonight: first time was in Seattle 4 years ago, and now tonight again in Tucson. I don’t think I’ve seen a play with so many raw curse words and references to fortification. (Am I getting old?)
Like Malemute, it seems so easy to ridicule a religion and its people. Scratch a comedian, and one finds an angry and disillusioned cynic. Someone or something didn’t make right by them, and they must be made to pay. It’s a popular past time.
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WBraun
climber
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Like Malemute, it seems so easy to ridicule a religion and its people.
He's just a heavily brainwashed fool who thinks Science is "god" and the answer to everything just like fruitloops and the rest of these types .....
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand
A critical observation of the universe/ourselves tells us a number of things such as:
Intelligence isn't simply a case of either or but exists on a continuum as in I'm more intelligent than that shell fish over there.
If intelligence exists on a continuum then there are, perhaps, intelligences greater than our own, as in what you're trying to do with that computer over there.
That the laws of physics impose an order on the universe that is inviolate. That that order was inherent in the beginning and remains so presently and science doesn't have the slightest idea from where such an order comes.
That the existence of intelligence is written in to that order as an inevitable product given the time/space parameters of the universe.
I wish I had the faith to believe in God, but I certainly see where those that do are coming from and it's not from a position of irrationality.
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WBraun
climber
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I wish I had the faith to believe in God,
Faith and belief don't do much ultimately.
There still must be absolute proof and that comes from doing the actual experiment, real science.
Not like modern scientists saying there is no need and making claims there is no God.
St00pid
Science means observation and experiment, not just observation and then saying there's no God.
More st00pid.
Modern science does NOT do the experiment .......
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Modern science does NOT do the experiment ...
I like you, Werner, but you’re certainly not a science guy.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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That the existence of intelligence is written in to that order as an inevitable product given the time-space parameters of the universe
Interesting comment, but I don't know what it means. That's OK.
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WBraun
climber
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^^^ the brainwashed wackjob so called scientist ^^^ picks all the wackjob so called religious.
They're made for each other.
The intelligent class has nothing to do with these brainwashed fools .....
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Thanks, Jim, that's awesome!
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Lesson 167
There is one life, and that I share with God.
There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what God created shares His life. There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are One.
In this world, there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. All sorrow, loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. And thus deny you live.
You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. A thought is in the mind. It can be then applied as mind directs it. But its origin is where it must be changed, if change occurs. Ideas leave not their source. The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God.
Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator. It is the belief conditions change, emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control, you did not make, and you can never change. It is the fixed belief ideas can leave their source, and take on qualities the source does not contain, becoming different from their own origin, apart from it in kind as well as distance, time and form.
Death cannot come from life. Ideas remain united to their source. They can extend all that their source contains. In that, they can go far beyond themselves. But they can not give birth to what was never given them. As they are made, so will their making be. As they were born, so will they then give birth. And where they come from, there will they return.
The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its waking state. It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. It cannot make the physical. What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep.
The opposite of life can only be another form of life. As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. Its form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping. It is not its opposite in anything created, nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps.
God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them. The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly, but yet within themselves, for they are everywhere.
What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was.
Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage. Our life is not as we imagine it. Who changes life because he shuts his eyes, or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps, and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is? We will not ask for death in any form today. Nor will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the Thought of life eternal has been set by God Himself.
His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be forever and forever. He is Lord of what we think today. And in His Thoughts, which have no opposite, we understand there is one life, and that we share with Him, with all creation, with their thoughts as well, whom He created in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the Source of life from where it came.
We share one life because we have one Source, a Source from which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds which He created perfect. As we were, so are we now and will forever be. A sleeping mind must waken, as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there. And now it is no more a mere reflection. It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. No vision now is needed. For the wakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.
http://acim.org/
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Xcon,
I suppose you read fully the wiki site on GNH. The concept (as all are) is not without detractions—both empirical and theoretical--as Wiki reports. However, thought as to what happiness is or might be (holding in abeyance for a moment metrics) could present a learning opportunity. Is happiness excitement (like in a peak experience), would it be contentment, would it be a deep sense of safety, an expansive feeling of freedom, or a felt-sense of complete care and concern projected to you by others?
Certain schools of Buddhism think there are four qualities that are unlimited: equanimity, loving-kindness, bodhichitta (compassion, sort of), and joy. Saivism argues that bliss (ananda) arises automatically with consciousness that is fully present or awake. What’s that? That’s seeing how things really are. How are things really? Look at the space between thoughts.
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WBraun
climber
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Certain schools of Buddhism think there are four qualities ...
Why "think" guess and mental speculate?
Find out if it is an absolute fact or not.
The intelligent class goes from point A to point B and not wanders all over the place like the gross materialists.
To escape successfully requires perfect intelligence of which the conditioned living entity does NOT possess.
The gross materialists and their st00pid mechanical rockets consciousness (the ascending process of gaining knowledge) will permanently always fail ......
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