Friday 28 April 2023
Krsna. Supports me in a Big Fight
Highly sensitive beings suffer more but they also love harder, dream wider and experience deeper horizons and bliss. When you’re sensitive, you’re alive in every sense of this word in this wildly beautiful world. Sensitivity is your strength. Keep soaking …
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To Emperor Krsna. Don’t ask for pumpkin. Weep bd. Ask for Gyan
One of the greatest awakenings comes when you realize that not everybody changes. Some people never change. And that’s their journey. It’s not yours to try and fix it for them.” ~Unknown
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Big question. No time
Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don’t ever want to be again.” ~Shane Niemeyer
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Realm of mystical experience. Beyond sensory experience. But all experience requires Consciousness. You are that Chetan
The happiness we seek cannot be found through grasping, trying to hold on to things. It cannot be found through getting serious and uptight about wanting things to go in the direction we think will bring happiness.” ~Pema Chodron
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Chetan. Vyakta and Avyakta.
ABCASS
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Here’s a simple example. The wooly mammoth inhabited the northern parts of Eurasia and North America, and was adapted to the cold by bearing a thick coat of hair (entire frozen specimens have been found buried in the tundra). It probably descended from mammoth ancestors that had little hair - like modern elephants. Mutations in the ancestral species led to some individual mammoths - like some modern humans - to be hairier than others. When the climate became cold, or the species spread into more northerly regions, the hirsute individuals were better able to tolerate their frigid surroundings and left more offspring than their balder counterparts. This enriched the population in genes for hairiness. In the next generation, the average mammoth would be a bit hairier than before. Let this process continue over some thousands of generations, and your smooth mammoth gets replaced by a shaggy one. And let many different features affect your resistance to cold (for example, body size, amount of fat, and so on), and those features will change concurrently. The process is remarkably simple. It requires only that individuals of a species vary genetically in their ability to survive and reproduce in their environment. Given this, natural selection - and evolution – are inevitable.11
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COMEDY CONTENT CANT BE REPEATED
Olding.
I Won’t Tell My Life Story When Someone Asks, “How Are You?”
It’s a rhetorical question—barely even a question at all! And nobody really wants to hear about stiff joints and indigestion—or worse—in response. I will remember the best answer to this question is almost always, “Fine, thanks, and you?”
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The passages in which Krishna speaks about himself are so splendid that a few short examples will suce. First, a passage of great delicacy, where the poet’s love for the most fundamental elements in human life shines through his philosophical disdain for “this sad, vanishing world”:
I am the taste in water,
the light in the moon and sun, the sacred syllable Ôm
in the Vedas, the sound in air.
I am the fragrance in the earth,
the manliness in men, the brilliance in re, the life in the living,
and the abstinence in ascetics.
I am the primal seed within all beings, Arjuna:
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the wisdom of those who know,
the splendor of the high and mighty. (7.8–10)
Next, in the wonderful ninth chapter, a passage that starts by seeing Krishna as all parts of the sacricial rite and expands until he is not only all parts of the cosmos but even vaster than the category of “being”:
I am the ritual and the worship,
the medicine and the mantra,
the butter burnt in the re,
and I am the ames that consume it.
I am the father of the universe
and its mother, essence and goal
of all knowledge, the rener, the sacred Ôm, and the threefold Vedas.
I am the heat of the sun,
I hold back the rain and release it; I am death, and the deathless,
and all that is or is not. (9.16–19)
And from chapter 8, this startling quatrain, which seems to move at the speed of light, breathless with adoration:
Meditate on the Guide,
the Giver of all, the Primordial
Poet, smaller than an atom, unthinkable, brilliant as the sun. (8.9)
The long passages in which Krishna describes himself are extraordinarily moving. They keep brimming over with love and boldness. Krishna’s rst-person pronoun is a resplendent act of the human imagination: it is the poet himself speaking as God so that he can speak about God. His love here is so intense and intimate that
Thursday 27 April 2023
JS 79. ONS. Champion of moral decay
Thrived on the inappropriate
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Pushed the envelope
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5k episodes
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Olding
Nevertheless, she persisted” may be an inspiring motto in political circles, but insistence and resistance aren’t always great qualities as we age. Learning to give a little, and dig out of certain well-worn ruts, can go a long way.
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Ethics are norms of conduct for distinguishing between right and wrong and between what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior
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The Gita’s portrait of the sage may seem like an idealization. It is not. Anyone who has seen the famous photograph of Ramana Maharshi and looked into those inexpressibly beautiful eyes will know what I am talking about.
Ramana Maharshi is only the most dazzling modern instance of a long tradition in India. It is a tradition with a strongly ascetic avor. This kind of sage barely notices his body and its needs, has no use for money or possessions, and is blithely indierent to art, society, and sexual love, not to speak of life and death. Such dispassion may at rst appear repulsive to some readers. But pure dispassion is a kind of compassion. Here is how Ramana Maharshi expresses it:
When you truly feel equal love for all beings, when your heart has expanded so much that it embraces the whole of creation, you will certainly not feel like giving up this or that. You will simply drop o from secular life as a ripe fruit drops from the branch of a tree. You will feel that the whole world is your home.
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OAP can’t go on strike unfortunately
Doctor visits aren’t much fun when they’re all about what’s falling apart, breaking down, and in need of repair. I may not agree with the advice I get, but I won’t lie and tell my doctor I’m taking my meds, exercising, or sleeping well when I’m not actually doing any of those.
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“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
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“deliberate practice (introduced in Rule #2): The style of difficult practice required to continue to improve at a task. Florida State University professor Anders Ericsson, who coined the term in the early 1990s, describes it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.” Deliberate practice requires you to stretch past where you are comfortable and then receive ruthless feedback on your performance. In the context of career construction, most knowledge workers avoid this style of skill development because, quite frankly, it’s uncomfortable. To build up large stores of career capital, however, which is necessary for creating work you love, you must make this style of practice a regular part of your work routine.”
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Generational grumbling
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Autism. Coined Kanner 1943
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Psychotropic medications, such as antipsy- chotics, are commonly used to treat challenging behaviors such as aggression and self-injurious behavior among individuals with ASD and other developmental disorders
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Wednesday 26 April 2023
DUST PLUS MYSTICISM INITIATIVE DPMI X PRARTHI BECOMES PRARTHANA
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-- A.A. Milne
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People with a higher IQ are more likely to be vegetarian, psychological research finds.
In fact, vegetarians could be up to 10% more intelligent than red meat eaters, according to some studies.
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SRM
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NH
‘The Lure of Death: Suicide and Human Evolution’,
At some point in evolutionary history, human beings came to understand, as no non-human animals do, that death brings to an end a person's bodily and mental presence in the world. A potentially devastating consequence was that individuals, seeking to escape physical or mental pain, might choose to kill themselves.
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"I could walk a mile in your shoes, but I already know they are just as uncomfortable as mine. Let’s walk next to each other instead."
– Lynda Meyers
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Different situations, mutual pain.
It’s impossible to measure what is unmeasurable, so why bother? The goal isn’t to outdo the misery - the goal is appreciation, empathy, and common humanness.
The problems may or may not be solved, but they often seem less heavy walking next to each other and the miles pass like time - and even if the shoe doesn’t fit properly, with the presence of mind, we hardly notice our laces are undone.
-debbie lynn
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ADB
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”
“There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”
“Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.”
“One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: ‘This too shall pass.'”
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”
“There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”
“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”
“Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.”
“If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.”
“A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.”
“The sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
“Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.”
“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.”
“Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.”
“To appreciate life’s small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.”
“As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.”
“Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.”
“Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.”
“Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”
“Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.”
“If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.”
“Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don’t yet know what to do with.”
“It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
“How we feel about ‘the nature of existence’ is largely determined by what we have to do in the next few hours.”
“Insomnia is his mind’s revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.”
“The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray.”
“Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”
“We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired.”
“It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.”
“It is easy to get upset about the deteriorating state of one’s body, but there are other ways to excel and impress than via one’s legs.”
“Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.”
“What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly ‘whole’.”
“The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.”
“Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad.”
“Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.”
“If you want to turn a stranger into a friend, try telling them some of the ways in which you’ve failed.”
“Anxiety is insight that we haven’t yet found a productive use for.”
“The constant challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.”
“It takes a serious lack of imagination to have an entirely clean conscience.”
“We mostly lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; but with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.”
“You have to feel quite out of control in order to get controlling.”
“Hypochondria: an above-average imagination applied to the deeply improbable nature of being alive.”
“The difference between bitterness, confusion, nostalgia – and resilience is… a plan.”
“Change begins when the fear of not acting at all at last outstrips the paralysing fear of making a mistake.”
“For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.”
“The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.”
“Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.”
“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”
“Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.”
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JK
One is aware, and naturally so, of the danger of physical insecurity – not having enough money, proper health, clothes and shelter, and so on – but we are hardly aware of our inner psychological structure. One feels that one lacks the finesse, sensitivity and intelligence necessary to deal with the inward problems.
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Emmanuel Levinas described a dog who used to wander into the Nazi labour camp where he was imprisoned. ‘The dog was always glad to see the prisoners, and thus was the sole creature to treat them as humans. He knew perfectly well that his imprisoned friends were sentient beings and he treated them as such, while their own conspecifics, the Nazi prison guards, did not.’
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argued, on theoretical grounds, that phenomenal consciousness is restricted to warm-blooded animals. It wasn't a physiological possibility until the brain warmed up, nor was it ecologically relevant until animals became relatively free of environmental constraints. If that's right, the simplest evolutionary scenario would be that sentience arose early on in the stems of both mammals and birds and thereafter has remained a universal feature across their descendants. This would imply that, if we can be sure that any mammal or any bird is sentient, we can be pretty sure all are: that's to say all 6,000 mammal species and all 10,000 bird species. But there's a plausible alternative scenario. This would be that sentience has actually arisen several times among mammals and birds, not in the stems of the evolutionary tree but later on, in the branches to which they gave rise.
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From ~~~ Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, T. 28
M.:
It is inscrutable.
No motive can be attributed to that Power -
no desire, no end to achieve
can be asserted of that one Infinite,
All-wise and All-powerful Being.
God is untouched by activities,
which take place in His presence;
compare the sun and the world activities.
There is no meaning in attributing
responsibility and motive
to the One before it becomes many.
But God’s will for the prescribed course of events
is a good solution
of the free-will problem (vexata quaestio).
If the mind is restless on account
of a sense of the imperfect
and unsatisfactory character of what befalls us
or what is committed or omitted by us,
then it is wise to drop
the sense of responsibility and free-will
by regarding ourselves
as the ordained instruments
of the All-wise and All-powerful,
to do and suffer as He pleases.
He carries all burdens and gives us peace.
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ACHILLES HEEL X KRSNA RT HEEL
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Tuesday 25 April 2023
STRDDLE INJRY NARF CRSS
Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth II has said one of the keys to a monarch’s success is never passing up a chance to use the loo. With the urge calling me a lot more frequently than it once did, I will take that advice to heart (and bladder).
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“There are many misconceptions when it comes to being a spiritualminded person and being successful in the world. One is that spirituality kills our ambitions and zest to achieve. This is false because spirituality just changes our motive to achieve. It makes us want to be hugely successful so that we can have the resources to help others. The story of Krishna and Arjuna in the Gita explains more: Fight and achieve to help others, but be internally content in your personal life. Another is that spiritual people get walked over in business because of their values. The story of the sage and the snake describes how we should stick to our values but be meticulous and straightforward in business. Though we can make as much money as we desire, and use it to serve, we should be wary of its potential to distract us from our purpose.”
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Monday 24 April 2023
DOMQ ON ENTRAPMNT Q X QDU NT1
Older adults with a more optimistic outlook experience fewer memory and judgement problems, research finds.
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| Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." |
| - Mark Twain |
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EARLY EXPANSION OF EAST
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tom
Look at us humans. Mind-reading, as humans practice it, revolves around
self-knowledge. We discover by introspection the intimate story of our
selves. Then, when we want to model the mind of someone else, we
construct the other's mind in the image of our own. We assume the other to
be a conscious subject who thinks and feels in the way we've learned that
we do. Then we read into them the mental states that we would have if we
were in their place, and we expect the thoughts and actions that flow from
these states to follow the same path as they would for us. We can do this
because—but only because—we've experienced these very states of mind
ourselves and seen for ourselves how they connect.
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