Sam Harris

teuchter - 29 April 2009 05:19 PM

If you will allow me to be serious for a moment, I would like to clarify something.  By pointing out the bloodthirsty ferocity of pandas, I did not mean to say that penguins do not pose an imminent threat to our way of life.  Below, an actual unretouched photograph of penguins armed to their pointy little teeth!

I take it that miscreants in parochial school are no longer smacked with rulers.

unsmoked - 29 April 2009 06:59 PM

teuchter - 29 April 2009 05:19 PM

If you will allow me to be serious for a moment, I would like to clarify something.  By pointing out the bloodthirsty ferocity of pandas, I did not mean to say that penguins do not pose an imminent threat to our way of life.  Below, an actual unretouched photograph of penguins armed to their pointy little teeth!

I take it that miscreants in parochial school are no longer smacked with rulers.

Little Johnny was failing arithmetic.  His parents had done everything they could think of, tried to make him study, hired tutors, but he still just didn’t get it.  Finally in desperation they enrolled him in a Catholic school.  After the first day, Johnny came home, head for his room and hit the books.  He studied for hours every day and at the end of the term received an A+ in arithmetic.  Delighted, his parents asked him what it was that had turned him around.  He said: “The first day I got there and saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew they meant business!”

unsmoked - 29 April 2009 06:59 PM

I take it that miscreants in parochial school are no longer smacked with rulers.

Some are required to kneel before the one true ruler. I believe smacking is optional.

Gotta love those red shoes!!!

I think he’s just acting out in that pic because he’s pissed they wouldn’t let him take the name Pope Dorothy.

Notice he’s being careful not to step on the lines.

Salt Creek - 26 April 2009 11:20 PM

Does (real) spirituality ever make anyone unhappy? Would anyone admit to spirituality that made them “unhappy”?

Why do we need both terms, “spirituality” and “happiness”? Who judges that some kinds of happiness make someone “unspiritual”? Fuck ‘em.

So: Do you see the problem? The problem, my fine fellows, is wibbling. Wibbling always leads to happiness.

Exactly what I would have said… well, maybe not EXACTLY, but close enough. Especially the third, fourth and fifth comment.

Just wondering though: If weebles wibbled instead of wobbled, would they have been able to fall down and find happiness?

Funny observations McC, unsmoked and SkepticX. Thanks for the yucks… may the poop click his heel three times and go home.

A Zen master comments on spirituality and happiness:

“When you reach the point where not a single thought is born and before and after are cut off, you will suddenly penetrate through to freedom.  It’s like the bottom falling out of a bucket.  Then you experience joy.”

quoted from ‘ZEN LETTERS - Teachings of Yuanwu’ - translated by J.C. Cleary and Thomas Cleary

unsmoked - 22 May 2009 06:11 PM

A Zen master comments on spirituality and happiness:

“When you reach the point where not a single thought is born and before and after are cut off, you will suddenly penetrate through to freedom.  It’s like the bottom falling out of a bucket.  Then you experience joy.”

quoted from ‘ZEN LETTERS - Teachings of Yuanwu’ - translated by J.C. Cleary and Thomas Cleary

Or from a somewhat less enlightened state, when thoughts are simply observed as part of the river flowing through. 

burt - 23 May 2009 06:09 AM

unsmoked - 22 May 2009 06:11 PM

A Zen master comments on spirituality and happiness:

“When you reach the point where not a single thought is born and before and after are cut off, you will suddenly penetrate through to freedom.  It’s like the bottom falling out of a bucket.  Then you experience joy.”

quoted from ‘ZEN LETTERS - Teachings of Yuanwu’ - translated by J.C. Cleary and Thomas Cleary

Or from a somewhat less enlightened state, when thoughts are simply observed as part of the river flowing through. 

In that case, who is observing?

unsmoked - 23 May 2009 10:16 PM

burt - 23 May 2009 06:09 AM

unsmoked - 22 May 2009 06:11 PM

A Zen master comments on spirituality and happiness:

“When you reach the point where not a single thought is born and before and after are cut off, you will suddenly penetrate through to freedom.  It’s like the bottom falling out of a bucket.  Then you experience joy.”

quoted from ‘ZEN LETTERS - Teachings of Yuanwu’ - translated by J.C. Cleary and Thomas Cleary

Or from a somewhat less enlightened state, when thoughts are simply observed as part of the river flowing through. 

In that case, who is observing?

what is

burt - 24 May 2009 05:50 AM

unsmoked - 23 May 2009 10:16 PM

burt - 23 May 2009 06:09 AM

unsmoked - 22 May 2009 06:11 PM

A Zen master comments on spirituality and happiness:

“When you reach the point where not a single thought is born and before and after are cut off, you will suddenly penetrate through to freedom.  It’s like the bottom falling out of a bucket.  Then you experience joy.”

quoted from ‘ZEN LETTERS - Teachings of Yuanwu’ - translated by J.C. Cleary and Thomas Cleary

Or from a somewhat less enlightened state, when thoughts are simply observed as part of the river flowing through. 

In that case, who is observing?

what is

Is ‘what is’ the stream of thoughts?

unsmoked - 24 May 2009 07:59 PM

burt - 24 May 2009 05:50 AM

unsmoked - 23 May 2009 10:16 PM

burt - 23 May 2009 06:09 AM

unsmoked - 22 May 2009 06:11 PM

A Zen master comments on spirituality and happiness:

“When you reach the point where not a single thought is born and before and after are cut off, you will suddenly penetrate through to freedom.  It’s like the bottom falling out of a bucket.  Then you experience joy.”

quoted from ‘ZEN LETTERS - Teachings of Yuanwu’ - translated by J.C. Cleary and Thomas Cleary

Or from a somewhat less enlightened state, when thoughts are simply observed as part of the river flowing through. 

In that case, who is observing?

what is

Is ‘what is’ the stream of thoughts?

It depends on what the meaning of is is… 

What is always changing
With permutations rearranging
The flow of night and day
The ocean in its play
The drops of foam and spray
What, indeed, are they
But that which does not change
And if this seems too strange
The only thing to say…
Take it all away.

burt - 25 May 2009 04:37 PM

It depends on what the meaning of is is… 

According to Hoyle, it’s ‘the scenery of the fundamental ground.’  (stop thinking about it and it’s still there).

However, I know some Christians who can foil Hoyle.  Even when they stop thinking about God, he’s still there . . . at least, he’s still there when they start thinking about him again . . . no, wait . . .

Aww fellas, you’re so cute, wading and wallowing in your Transcendentalism, but I think you’re both wading too deeply.

burt,  I think (but I could be wrong) that you wade so, because of your love of mathematics and its conceptual awareness of the positive and negative that flow from zero, and unsmoked, because of your love of the poetic imaginative flow that came from the ancients and their concepts of the transmigration of the “soul.”

From a psychological—or bio-electrochemical—perspective, these are both useful delusions but delusions nonetheless. Deep, Atlantically deep down, I hope your delusions are illusions that contain an element of the philosophically and ever elusive, capital ‘T’ truth… however, I don’t think any of these concepts exist except as concepts, and are in fact, delusional illusions concocted and passed on and either accepted or rejected by individual human brains.

At this juncture of my personal existence I remain a five-sensist, a realist,  an existentialist with optimistic tendencies that can no longer wish that any of the woo is true. I wish… I wish… I wish…

Eddie Veddar says it best:

I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off
I wish I was a sacrifice but somehow still lived on
I wish I was a sentimental ornament you hung on
The christmas tree, I wish I was the star that went on top
I wish I was the evidence, I wish I was the grounds
For 50 million hands upraised and open toward the sky

I wish I was a sailor with someone who waited for me
I wish I was as fortunate, as fortunate as me
I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good
I wish I was the full moon shining off a camaros hood

I wish I was an alien at home behind the sun
I wish I was the souvenir you kept your house key on
I wish I was the pedal brake that you depended on
I wish I was the verb to trust and never let you down

IF there is such a thing as a transmigration of the souls and reincarnation, Salt Creek is the reincarnation of Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote of the hopelessness or hope. And I am the reincarnations of an unknown victim of the plague of Athens, an unknown peasant impaled by Vladislav Dracula, a former court jester, Thomas Paine and Norma J….

Naaaahhhh!

Carry on with your zen-shmen, and convince thy selves of its “enlightened” “spiritual” and “happy” import.