Welcome to the "Last Word Café".

[glenn]

I think I found this room.

[Aciled]

I was always a little curious about this thread.....


I'm thinking of amalgamating them and producing an e-book for my ipad. Very interesting ideas.

Some posters may be interested in completing this on-line survey....
http://psychcentral.com/therapy/

Oh great, now I need therapy.

Finally...someone that gets the joke.....sigh.

[FalcoColumbarius]

I think I found this room.

No, you didn't.

[DelicaDJ]

yes he did!

[FalcoColumbarius]

Actually, that is exactly what we are talking about. The argument that 3 cars with the same plate could not come together by chance is the same argument that the Creationists use to suggest that the world was "intelligently designed" by a creator.

I guess that depends on your "Creator". If you are talking about the old man with the big beard in the clouds with a big bin full of lightning bolts to strike us down because we deserve it ~ then yes, I couldn't agree with you more. In fact it is really an absurd notion worthy of comic relief. But if we consider the "Creator" as a collective conciousness creating itself as a concept then perhaps there is more to intelligent design than some might give credit to.

I was once a choir boy, a blue ribbon first soprano in fact. When I wasn't standing in the stalls singing I would be in Sunday School listening to the teacher rabbiting on. When I was in the sanctuary with the choir there would be periods of sitting listening to the vicar going on ~ but the one item that he would constantly return to would be the Holy Trinity ~ "God the father, God the son & God the holy ghost". This puzzled me. My first instinct was to consider it in a literal sense, which was bolstered by the Sunday school teacher when I asked him: God the father? ~ old man with beard in cloud; God the son? ~ That's Jesus (with expression of piety when voicing those words); God the holy ghost? ... well son, you're too young to understand that one. A pat on my head and off I went........ to the next teacher. Same questions, same answers. It occurred to me as a little boy that my Sunday School teachers didn't know the answer to the last question.

Many years later and I discover a site on the internet (http://www.gnosis.org/library.html) that has an extensive library of sacred texts, including many of the ones raped from the original Bible at the Counsel Of Nicaea. Whilst meandering amidst the groves of the sacred gnosis of man's comprehension I came across some writings of the Alchemists. Within these writings I came across the Alchemical view of the Holy Trinity: God the father ~ the collective soul; God the son ~ the individual; God the holy ghost ~ the silver thread that binds us all together. At that moment I had an epiphany. After all these years of trying to understand why so many God fearing people would commit such horrendous acts in the name of their God it clearly dawned on me that at the base of every religion is the same thing. "The Great Web", also know as the "Unified Field" to some. The Tao; Christianity; Islam; Judaism; Paganism; Native North American; Science &c., all the same.

I suspect that you will not wish to see the Unified Field in this light, but humour me for a few moments before you compose your riposte.

If we are all apart of the Greater Unified Field then we would all be apart of the collective soul, if you please. We are all intelligent, for the most part ~ and could well be recreating ourself in our own image, as it were ~ which would explain why events can be affected by the observer.

Chance you say? I would more support a systematic continuum such as the Chaos Theory over "chance". Causality, mais oui? Then with causality comes affect. Cause equals affect. Spread your wings my little butterfly......

Correlation gives you cause to investigate further - it does NOT give you cause to draw a conclusion from the data set at hand!

Yes.

You can find patterns everywhere you look. And so what if the solar system lines up? Lots of celestial things happen all the time! People always seem to attribute the way certain bodies move in the heavens as relevant to their own lives - when of course, they are not. The solar system does not give a whit about our lives - and it is not even likely to be able to care. It is a bunch of inanimate matter moving around according to newtonian mechanics! (Perhilion advance of mercury and relativity included here for those who like to nitpick.)

Yes, you certainly can find patterns everywhere you look, which brings us to the Golden Mean. Let's start with "nipples". Why does Mankind have nipples? Well, for the female it is an obvious answer, to feed the offspring, but what about men? Why on Earth do men have nipples? When one looks critically at the human body it doesn't take long to appreciate that both genders come from the same template. In fact it doesn't matter what shape, size, race, gender ~ all human beings work off the same formula.



Your honour, next I call to the stand: Pythagoras, Leonardo Fibonacci & Donald Duck.

I am referring to the bestselling book "88 reasons the Rapture will happen in 1988" Huge bestseller. Everyone has totally forgotten it.

I was in England at the time, must of missed it.

We should absolutely throw the baby out with the bath water!

Why?

Because there is no evidence for any of these things - to simply rely on blind conjecture without proof is akin to following voodoo or similar things.

This internet we are typing on, our delicas, modern medicine and medical cures, longer lifespans - everything that makes our life better than our ancestors is based on a process of thought known as science. This scientific method can be distilled down into a set of rules that I listed on this thread before. These rules have been validated for about 3000 years since first starting to appear from the Greeks.

Blind conjecture? Yet the very things that support my argument are the very rules you refer to that have promulgated since the ancient Greeks. Those super novas out there in space follow the same Golden Section as our very DNA helix as the snail and the sunflower ~ so I suppose that what we need to establish here is what you mean by "evidence".

• Your Honour, although there were masked men brandishing shotguns and wearing balaclavas in the bank and screaming "EVERYONE GET ON THE FLOOR, THIS IS A HOLD-UP!", I saw no real evidence of a bank robbery.

.....To stray from this process is exactly what leads to all the hoxes and pseudoscience - like the horrific woman Jenny McCarthy who supports "Vaccines Cause Autism". What a crone. Children have *DIED*. *DIED*!!! Think about that! Children died because this woman did not know to follow the critical thinking rules and promoted a hoax.

I think we need to throw those ideas out, bad thinking kills people.

Of course. Although, in light of all the evidence of the universe ~ there is much to be said about "having a gut feeling".

Why? Why not? That is a better question! After all, if you think about it, those civilizations already came to an end! Their calendars were way off on that count! Why even attribute anything of signifigance to those calendars at all? It makes as much sense as people attributing signifigance to the number 666 as shown in Revelations, without actually being aware that it represented Emperor Nero, or the fact that the original number was in fact, 616!

But people still give signifigance to this number, blissfully unaware of the original meaning.

"....is believed by some to have been the original Number of the Beast.... " Would be the operative phrase here. Like the Alchemists and "turning lead into gold", a metaphor for turning ignorance into enlightenment ~ 666 and reference to "the beast" is not about some balrog from the deep but a geometric reference to the human beast that operates only on base instincts and not enlightened thought, which as a scientist ~ I would have thought you would appreciate.

"After all, if you think about it, those civilizations already came to an end!"

That's a rather disingenuous arrogant thing to say? I would think that the Chinese, the Hopi Nation and the Mayans would be disinclined to acquiesce to that comment. Have you consulted with them on this matter of their existence?

So, why even give meaning to outdated calendars? Is there a reason to even give them meaning at all? Especially when the Maya themselves did not even give them the same meaning that modern people do? And, if you are giving them an end of the world meaning, why? Hey, maybe it means when they all come together ice cream will rain down from the sky for all! Just like Manna from heaven! Or maybe there will be a sudden outbreak of peace all across the world, or on the convergence all forms of cancer will be cured by science, or maybe we will suddenly achive cold fusion...

Or not.

I see no reason to give meaning to the value of a sequence of random number, and for the same reason I see no value to give meaning to the convergence of the end of some calendars. It makes no sense to give them an arbitrary meaning.

These "outdated" calendars, which have been more astronomically accurate than our "modern" one, yet we still don't know why.... Maybe it's because we are superior because we are newer..... I think it is that attitude that is "dangerous" ~ it tells us that with all the technology we have developed we still haven't learned many basic lessons in life and are doomed to repeat them. Of a matter of course it should be acknowledged that more often than not it is the victor that records history and that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past" *. So when we look to the ancient Mayans as savages who brutally sacrificed humans ~ remember who recorded that, while burning the Mayan history in the name of the Inquisition. Even today we are finding evidence that the so-called "primitive Celts" had a far more sophisticated society than the Romans, so much so that the Romans, after slaughtering and enslaving the Celts (one reason for this was because the Celts gave power & land to their women, which the Romans thought as an abomination), adopted much of the Celtic social standards as their own ~ such as their monetary system.

So when you go on about "arbitrary calendars" ~ bare in mind that the most arbitrary calendar in known existence is the Roman Calendar.... the one we use today in our "modern society".

It is for this reason alone that we should heed ancient calendars ~ they might have been onto something. By the way, the Maya themselves attribute a prophetic meaning to their calendar, one told me so himself. Remember? At the coffee shop. Not sure how the professors in their ivory towers feel about that.

Falco.

Speaking of trinity... where's Ealanm's point of view?

* George Orwell, "1984".

[solanoid]

Falco,

Once again nice post, you hit on some great subjects, the golden ratio, phi, very interesting stuff, try to deny that pattern!

One comment, on the subject of religion; its a fact that all religions are based upon the same fundamentals. However Tao is not a religion because there are no dieties, thus it is more of a philosophy, as with nihilism. Anyone who demands real answers to lifes questions as opposed to rhetoric must look closely at these beleifs.

Religions demand that you reach out for help and salvation, eastern beleifs have you reach within. Do I beleive in god? YES! but not in the conventional sense.

Look at the yin yang, this symbol governs ALL THINGS including petty religions. When we look at it we see two sides in constant battle; black and white are equals, as is good and bad. What we fail to realize is that there is a third element in yin yang, THE LINES! the lines that we perceive to separate black and white....that is god (Tao) a force that binds

Tao will not save you, it will not answer your prayrs, or give the answers you seek. It contains both equilibrium, and imbalance; sense and non sense; truth and lies. For each of those examples require the opposite to exist. However no amount of speech or reading can enlighten you, one must seek the Tao for themselves, Tao=God

"The tao that can be spoken is not the true tao"

[CloudMountain]

"The tao that can be spoken is not the true tao"

I guess you shouldn't have said anything.


"Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jO1EOhG ... re=related

[solanoid]

indeed,
But I want you to know that the things I preach I did not have taught to me, I figured them out on my own (less a couple of quotes that I picked up)

[konadog]

"The tao that can be spoken is not the true tao"

I guess you shouldn't have said anything.

[konadog]

Perhaps I need to start using emoticons! If only I could figure out how to do it.

[FalcoColumbarius]

Falco,....
...One comment, on the subject of religion; its a fact that all religions are based upon the same fundamentals. However Tao is not a religion because there are no dieties, thus it is more of a philosophy, as with nihilism. Anyone who demands real answers to lifes questions as opposed to rhetoric must look closely at these beleifs.

You don't have to have a deity to have a religion. Look at Buddhism or Atheism. As far as "salvation" goes, that's kind of a Christian thing really ~ and even then Jesus says in the Gospel According To St. Thomas:

• "But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty."

Which tells me that there is an element of "Save yourself" here.

Regarding the Chinese religion there are references to the great web of life, which also qualities as "God" as it is the very vibratory conciousness that is life. Incidentally, the Taiji pretty much encompasses the Holy Trinity, as you say ~ the light, the dark and the space between. Three is a pretty cool number.

Regarding the Tao:



Falco.

[konadog]

Brain is the true Messiah!!

[solanoid]

Yes

As long as we use it

[FalcoColumbarius]

Oh... I thought you said "Brian", as in "Life Of Brian".

[konadog]

I DID mean the Life of Brian! though I see I spelled his name wrong...