Into the Void

“Sin is occasioned precisely by the fact that man refuses to admit his ‘creatureliness’ and to acknowledge himself as merely a member of a total unity of life. He pretends to be more than he is.”
Reinhold Niebuhr

moar funny pictures

George H. Gobel is an engineering professor at Purdue. Back in 1996 or so, he was attempting to design the perfect method for lighting a barbeque. After many trials and the occasional error, he settled on liquid oxygen (LOX) as a lighter fluid. Brilliant idea! The coals are perfect!

However, the barbeque grill was vaporized.

With the 4th of July coming up in a couple of weeks I thought I’d resurrect them.

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME! Turkey fryers are SO much safer…

Have a safe and happy 4th of July.

Photo/video credit: Joe Cychosz

See the video here:
http://jeff.nieusma.com/toys/grillx.mov

Byron Katie Newsletter: June 2008

The following quote is exactly what I have been going on about, the need to have an objective observer, one who pushes the ego out of the way and takes a good long look at who we are. The first step to healing is to know what has to be healed.

Byron Katie’s “The Work” is an interesting tool for examining how much misery we cause ourselves by forgetting that what is, is.

Stop by The Work web page to read and listen to the freebies.

I want to go to one of the 5-day events.

“To question that things might not be as they seem can shake the very foundation of habitual clinging. This questioning spirit is the starting point for self-reflection. Could it be that this tightly-knit sense of self is not what it seems? Do we really need to hold everything together, and can we? Is there life beyond self-importance? These kinds of questions open the door to investigating the cause of our suffering.

“The actual practice of self-reflection requires us to step back, examine our experience, and not succumb to the momentum of habitual mind. This allows us to look without judgment at whatever arises, and this goes directly against the grain of our self-importance.

“Self-reflection is the common thread that runs through all traditions and lineages of Buddhist practice. It also takes us beyond the boundaries of formal practice. We can bring the questioning spirit of self-reflection to any situation, at any time. Self-reflection is an attitude, an approach, and a practice. In nutshell, it is a way to make practice come alive for us personally.”

– Aryadeva, Buddhist teacher.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

FTC Consumer Information - Your Rights: Credit Reporting

It’s a good idea to check your credit report every year. Please ignore TV commercials telling you about free credit reporting sites. Go to the Federal Trade Commission site and use only the web pages they recommend.

I found this in my drafts folder. I have no idea where I was going with it or who I was answering.

I hear that they are studying drug-induced coma as a treatment for mania. Granted, sleep is a good prophylactic for bipolar. It’s just too, too creepy. The end game will be to stack comatose mentally ill off in a warehouse somewhere. Didn’t Robin Cook write a chilling medical fiction about something like this?

How much sleep does it take? Are they researching conversion tables to translate hours of coma to days of sleep?

There’s a good section on sleep and bipolar in Dr. Fieve’s latest book, Bipolar II: Enhance Your Highs, Boost Your Creativity, and Escape the Cycles of Recurrent Depression.

There was also a chapter in the first edition of Goodwin and Jamison. Incidentally, Manic-Depressive Illness Second Edition is out.

It’s rather disheartening to hear that the researchers are repeating the same old studies over and over instead of exploring new treatment options that would enable us to go back to work instead of turning us into mental cripples by reducing our IQs and impairing our short-term memory. And then stigmatizing us for having cognitive deficits.

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I feel very threatened when I hear someone touting the virtues of a religion that espouses death to non-believers. Further, it is predatory to try to suck in vulnerable people by pretending the the Bible is all sweetness and light.

I read the bible a couple of times, too. I know what it says. It SAYS that the way to enlightment is blocked by your prophet. In fact, the way has been blocked since the angel with the flaming sword denied us the fruit from the Tree of Everlasting Life.

Other traditions consider the snake to be a symbol for wisdom, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. So again, enlightenment - having your own epiphanies instead of accepting dogmatic interpretations is forbidden.

So sad that they block the way by diverting your soul to a sort of holding tank. The road to enlightenment, the cycle of birth and rebirth ends for you at that point. Game Over.

Mostly it’s all the prophets words pulled together as a checklist to follow in order to give the appearance of having fulfilled thousands of years of prophecies. Except that this happened a couple of hundred years after Jesus death when the Roman Catholics decided to pick and choose which books to discard and which to keep in the Latin Vulgate Bible. And most of it was translated from the Greek, not from the Hebrew or the Aramaic.

The Protestants did their own picking and choosing during the Protestant Reformation. The point being that whatever version you use, your bible has been spun and respun so many times that it is totally irrelevant.

I know, the bible comforts you. But it doesn’t comfort those of us who are in danger from Radical Fundamentalists.

Photo Credit: “The force be with you” controltheweb

Junk Post. Mr. X wants to see pictures of CSA swords.

In order to recognize our self-image, we can no longer identify with it. In other words, we have to learn how to objectify our own mental processes.
-Matthew Flickstein, Journey to the Center
Reprinted in Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations, edited by Josh Bartok.
www.wisdompubs.org

Photo Source - Flickr
Author *Gabisa Motonia

Found this in my error log. Apparently somebody drops nasties in people’s image directories and induce other folks to access the nasty. Fortunately the file doesn’t exist in my image directory. I can’t guess whether it was ever there, or whether the tech guys at laughingsquid removed it for me.

I see from looking online that if it were there, it would download a Bagel variant.

[Mon Jun 09 08:55:14 2008] [error] [client 63.123.82.75] script ‘/var/www/vhosts/bipolarplanet.com/httpdocs/index.php’ not found or unable to stat, referer: http://bipolarplanet.com/images/blst.php