Into the Void

By way of BeliefNet:

[The] defilements are like a cat. If you feed it, it will keep coming around. Stop feeding it, and eventually it will not bother to come around anymore.

-Ajahn Chah, “Still Forest Pool”
From “365 Buddha: Daily Meditations,” edited by Jeff Schmidt. Reprinted by arrangement with Tarcher/Putnam, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

Early manifestations and first-contact incidence of schizophrenia in different cultures. A preliminary report on the initial evaluation phase of the WHO Collaborative Study on determinants of outcome of severe mental disorders.

Psychol Med. 1986 Nov;16(4):909-28.
Sartorius N, Jablensky A, Korten A, Ernberg G, Anker M, Cooper JE, Day R.

The results provide strong support for the notion that schizophrenic illnesses occur with comparable frequency in different populations and support earlier findings that the prognosis is better in less industrialized societies.

Technorati: schizophrenia WHO+Collaborative+Study

Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: randomised controlled trial — Puhan et al. 332 (7536): 266 — BMJ.

No, not a [tag]shaman[/tag]istic ritual.

The [tag]didgeridoo[/tag] is an Australian aborigine wind instrument. It is a long tube, traditionally made of wood. The timbre and tone depend upon the size of the instrument, whether the wood is straight or has a more interesting shape. If you attend folk festivals you’ve probably heard a digeridoo. You can buy quite nice ones made of plastic - the one pictured at left is a good example. You can even make one yourself out of a leftover length of plastic pipe.

The didgeridoo is sometimes used as part of a [tag]musical meditation[/tag]. Its droning tone is very relaxing. I found digeridoo music to be a nice complement to [tag]reiki[/tag].

In conclusion, didgeridoo playing improved daytime sleepiness in patients with moderate snoring and obstructive [tag]sleep apnoea[/tag] and reduced sleep disturbance in their partners. Larger trials are needed to confirm our preliminary findings, but our results may give hope to the many people with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and [tag]snoring[/tag], as well as to their partners.

Long-term [tag]didj[/tag] use won’t ever take the place of Continuous Positive Airway Pressure ([tag]CPAP[/tag]), but the music sounds a whole lot better than an air pump.

Virtual Talmud: Principle, not Expediency

Jewish tradition is based on the principle of eilu v’eilu — that conflicting positions each have standing and integrity in their own right, provided that the argument at hand is made for the sake of heaven.

Referring back to Shamanism and Talking to Dog.

We have the ability to perceive *everything* until our society teaches us to block out of our minds what’s happening on the other side of the door. Privacy is how it starts. Later it becomes political. This is the definition of [tag]sanity[/tag], sharing a world-view.

My cat always has a complete aural picture of the world outside the house because her hearing is much better than mine. Her visual concept of the world is limited to what she can see by running from window to window - a very disconnected picture of the world, don’t you think? Now substitute the word “psychic” for “aural” and “sensory” for “visual.” There is nothing [tag]mystical[/tag] about it. You know what you are taught to know and you de-reify what you aren’t taught.

I have no problem with concepts that lie outside the limitations of our technology. Not until some shady character tries to take my money. [tag]New Age[/tag] practices, in general, are when a bunch of slightly better educated people try to sell the rest of us something that doesn’t really step outside [tag]consensus reality[/tag]. [tag]Magic[/tag], after all, is nothing but a [tag]technology[/tag] that you don’t understand.

I’m also an Electrical Engineer and I graduated with a minor in mathematics. I had 4 years of science and 5 years of math in high school alone. And I’ve forgotten more philosophy than most people ever read in the first place. I can tell bullsh*t from a new way of looking at reality. I’m a [tag]reiki[/tag] master, by the way.

The first thing you learn in logic is that you can’t prove non-existence. [tag]Psychic[/tag] ability requires breaking your mind so that you can see the things you were taught to make non-existent.

Society has a vested interest in controlling the hidden information, and quickly punishes those who step outside what is considered sane. Therapists, then, are the gatekeepers of consensus reality.

The moral? Don’t complain about your psychic abilities to your [tag]therapist[/tag] unless you want to get rid of these abilities.

About [tag]schizophrenia[/tag] - schizophrenia does not equal psychic ability, though a broken brain is more likely to take a big step away from consensus reality. Schizophrenia, they say, results from an inability to categorize the world in the same way the rest of us do. Imagine if your grocery store sorted things by the size of the package instead of putting sugar in the spice aisle and dryer sheets in the laundry section. Now imagine that when you complain to the manager, he sends the cops and psychiatrists over to your house to rearrange the furniture.

Updated 3/6
Journey to Wild Divine is a biofeedback program disguised as a computer game. In the game you use your autonomic responses/breathing/emotion to perform tasks such as levitating a ball, spinning a lotus-like mandala, and other tasks that I haven’t reached yet. It’s something like a graphical version of the old adventure games, but with a New Age appeal. I hear that you get to play chess against the Grim Reaper on Level 7.
The biofeedback unit plugs into the USB port, and consists of a “[tag]light stone[/tag]” control unit with three finger sensors that measure heart rate and skin resistance. The optional graphing expansion pack lets you view your EKG. Quite fascinating, really.
I had a world of trouble installing the software because of a bad install CD. It took me several tries and some trickery. However, the good folks at Wild Divine sent me out a replacement CD right away.

Deleted technical description of installing from a warped CD.

Once I got things working, playing the game was like being in one of those dreams where I’m sure that I can fly, if only I can allow it to happen. The feeling was absolutely delightful. I’m looking forward to setting aside time to start playing the full game.

Technorati: biofeedback autonomic+responses mandala New+Age Grim+Reaper EKG Journey+to+Wild+Divine

Belief-O-Matic — A personality quiz about your religious and spiritual beliefs

Your Results:

The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa.

Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.

How did the Belief-O-Matic do? Discuss your results on our message boards.

1. Neo-Pagan (100%)
2. Taoism (98%)
3. Unitarian Universalism (92%)
4. New Age (92%)
5. Mahayana Buddhism (89%)
6. Liberal Quakers (85%)
7. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (81%)
8. Scientology (78%)
9. New Thought (75%)
10. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (70%)
11. Hinduism (69%)
12. Theravada Buddhism (65%)
13. Sikhism (64%)
14. Bahá’í Faith (62%)
15. Jainism (59%)
16. Orthodox Quaker (43%)
17. Secular Humanism (43%)
18. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (32%)
19. Reform Judaism (32%)
20. Nontheist (21%)
21. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (21%)
22. Orthodox Judaism (18%)
23. Jehovah’s Witness (18%)
24. Seventh Day Adventist (14%)
25. Eastern Orthodox (9%)
26. Islam (9%)
27. Roman Catholic (9%)

Technorati: religion faith spirituality beliefs Neo-Pagan New+Age

“God must be greater than the greatest of human weaknesses and, indeed, the greatest of human skill. God must even transcend our most remarkable - to emulate nature in its absolute splendor. How can any man or woman sin against such greatness of mind? How can one little carbon unit on Earth - in the backwaters of the Milky Way, the boondocks - betray God almighty? That is impossible. The height of arrogance is the height of control of those who create God in their own image.”
– Ramtha, in “What the (#$%&) Bleep Do We Know”

I’ve been listening to Ken Wilber’s Kosmic Konsciousness on SoundsTrue the last couple of days, and am trying to sort out levels and lines.
This isn’t what he wanted me to get out of it at all.
It is my understanding that a spirit can be limited by the vessel it finds itself under some circumstances. It says something important about my unrealistic expectations that everyone can evolve. Some just can’t, they don’t have the proper structures for it. I just have to figure out exactly what that all means in terms of human potential. Can it be true that large numbers of humans don’t have the potential for enlightenment? When do we accept that we’ve gone as far as we can? Isn’t it a sort of surrender to settle into complacence, when we can’t know whether we’ve hit the glass ceiling, vs. whether we are merely at a plateau?
It also comes back to a previous conversation I had about animal intelligence. Some animals may happen to have brain structures that give them better reasoning skills, or the higher emotions, or perhaps an unusual capacity for understanding human language. Imagine owning a veritable Da Vinci among dogs. Would he get bored easily?
It convinces me all over again that intelligence is a continuum. All types, even the ones where I personally have severe deficiencies.
While humans are unmistakably at the top of the food chain, it is likely that there are animals that are more highly evolved in other lines. For instance, can you conceptualize a chair as a pattern of echoes rather than as a visual construct? Can you describe a chair by duplicating the sound reflections off that chair? Dolphins can and do. But they won’t be building any libraries any time soon.

Spirituality doesn’t have to take the form of a belief in a god, or even in an intelligence. It especially doesn’t equate to organized religion. In fact, churches have to discourage religious epiphanies in the general membership, lest their god tells someone outside of the power structure something the church elders don’t want to hear.

I am an electrical engineer, and I really, really like what I do. I am also a Master in Usui Shiki Ryoho. I like that too, but for different reasons. Reiki isn’t a religion, it is a modality with spiritual overtones. This isn’t the Occult, it is a simple technological limitation, that frequencies outside our limits of detection actually exist. After that, make the great leap into the void… in some way that I do not yet understand, we can act as transducers. Do headphones understand piezoelectricity?

Chaos in the extreme becomes perfect order. Chaos also has a fractal similarity with scale that enables us to understand the cosmos through generalization of human-scale ideas. Make chaos your god, and try to find the order in it.