Campion

That poster in the X-Files on Mulder's wall comes to mind, 'I want to believe'. I can feel a proverb coming on, something like - if you're a believer, watch out for the deceivers!

Maybe Mr H, it's come back down to the long-term price now. Where do you buy gas futures, a specialist broker?

I've just started looking into Druidry, so this is very much my initial impressions. But most orders operate with a three level of training, the first stage is the Bardic stage which is about expressing our creative side. Bards are the storytellers, singers, poets and artists of the tribe but nowadays this seems to be taken more widely as creativity in general. They have rituals to receive the Awen, which is a Welsh name for the artistic muse and inspiration although I haven't started down this path yet. Maybe the spiritual (and artistic) work helps to relax the linear logical thinking mind and opening up space for the subconscious to emerge, the emotional to express itself.

Yes, I won't eat a meat curry unless I'm sure it's not halal. Which is hard to do, often it's not labelled or just labelled with that arabic word for halal.

What's so occult about slitting animals' throats, isn't that how mainstream religions do ritual slaughter instead of stunning them? The only difference here is that the animal isn't eaten, and ofc it's done without permission.

Now Monty Don has given in to the politically correct mob. Apparently the Chelsea flower show is too white and middle aged. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/22485247/gardeners-world-monty-don-complaint-chelsea-flower-show/ I was kind of expecting Gardeners World to go woke, now there's very little left of our national icons to bother tuning into the beeb for. What's next, Antiques Roadshow? Last one out turn off the lights.

What's a rugpull? Is it like a boiler room pump and dump scheme?

The Japs need to do something to deal with their fertility rate (like many of us), currently on 1.4 when the break- even level is 2.1. This doesn't sound as much fun conceiving the natural way, but this way avoids women being pregnant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate

In our recent local elections the turnout was about 25% in my area, yet the politicians still get the same amount of power. I wonder what would be the turnout if we had referendums for the big decisions instead of leaving the politicians to get on with it and do whatever they want.

I went to a 10 day meditation retreat that had no speaking & touching too. After about a week of being very serious someone started giggling and we all couldn't help ourselves laughing at the absurdity of it all. It was like a sober high . And I had an out of body experience too, it was an amazing time. My life is too full up of other stuff with family and work to do it now.

All part of the plan to keep us locked up in a containerised system where the easy choices are designed from the top down and wealth flows upwards. If you don't vote for their choices they still win. Especially in high density population areas like western Europe where there isn't much free space to go off grid.

I guess buying a home is better if you're wanting to settle down and build a long-term nest so it depends on where you are in your life plan. Not to mention that over the lifetime of boomers and gen-x houses worked well as a geared investment because house prices have risen much faster than the interest rates they've paid. No doubt that's why they're now forced to sell up to pay for care in many cases. How long do young people take out mortgages for nowadays? It used to be 25 years which sounds a long time when you're young but I think this kind of long-term financial planning is well worth it. Take pensions as another example, you need to save into them even longer 40+ years to have a decent retirement. I have friends who buy-to-let properties instead of having a standard pension and it seems to work for them. However perhaps the horse has bolted for all that now as property prices have spiralled so far ahead of the rest of the economy, and the smart money will look elsewhere for easy profit.

Yup, definitely, tho it's better than paying rent your whole life imo. And I think it's also a symptom of the collapse of our once close-knit and cohesive family and tribal structure, into this corporate-marxist run prison camp which we call modern society. Asians still have some of that cohesion when they lend money within the family for buying property and starting small businesses, and keep the wealth themselves. Tho perhaps the corporate-marxists are chipping away at them too these days.

Nice one. Contradictions aren't necessarily bad, they're a teaching aid in the mystical traditions - as someone who used to practice Zen I've wrestled with a few. I reached a point where I needed to experience it first hand rather than trying to just analyse the illogic of it with the mind. How do I resist not the urge to resist? Trying not to resist is itself resistance. Like trying to relax isn't relaxing, or trying hard to pray is itself the barrier to God. Trying to meditate or become enlightened sends you straight to hell. It's where religion collides head on with the old chestnut of the free will debate. Without free will there can be no good or evil, and how can we have free will without having a separate ego who controls and is responsible for its actions? So the desire to be good and resist evil only strengthens our sense of ego which is where evil comes from in the first place! The devil is supposed to be a fallen angel, and angels, unlike us apparently, don't have free will! So the devil is only acting out his programming given by God. Yes we need to fight evil in self defence, but don't expect fighting to eliminate evil. To do that you need to transcend both good and evil (lower case) such that they collapse into a unified Good (capital G), which is God himself, or God's Love, or Infinite Love or whatever you want to call it.

Interesting experiment, shows how we're indoctrinated to buy more stuff than we need. And I wonder if it depends whether you have hard or soft water? What kind of retreat was it to have rules like that?

Thanks Mac, yes I can see how this stuff needs a lot of commentary to make it into an understandable and practical teaching, like with a lot of spiritual texts. But when we go to other authors to explain their version it creates new layers of teaching on top. It's the same when I'm learning about art. Ultimately it's not just the teaching of the original founder who we put on a pedestal, but over time it branches out and becomes communal property, with which I wrestle, create my own version and seek the truth as I see it.

I would agree, but don't we already have this in the form of the national insurance ID system, so the taxman can keep tabs on you? This issue then becomes, who has access to the database.

Yup, the message has also seeped into medicine, carry on with this toxic lifestyle which weakens our natural immune systems and rely on scientific superheros in the form of jabs, drugs and operations to save us. It's the same with those hyper-marketed superfoods to counteract the bad effects of the likewise hyper-marketed junk food.

Thanks Pi, I can't do justice to all the depths of this subject but here's a few off the cuff thoughts. Something within me rails against the idea that there's no right or wrong, and I wouldn't go so far as to say there's no right or wrong, just unpack it a little to distinguish between absolute vs relative (or objective vs subjective). The Crowley quote looks at first sight that it teaches a sort of Nietzschean individualistic will to power, but it's ambiguous - at least when taken out of context of how he would interpret it. It does imply that teaching if 'thou' means us as individuals, and 'law' mean natural or scientific law. But if 'thou' means God, then we're straight back into traditional Judeo-Christian ethics, where the 'law' is all about obeying God's will and he's telling us what to do. It all depends how you interpret it; so this teaching is relativistic too imo.

Ok thanks Pi, so it's just violent resistance which he is against. I haven't checked the original quotes in the Bible so I'll take your word for it. But I do also remember another passage about him not bringing peace but a sword. It all makes me think the context is important and we can't make generalisations out of specifics.

How about all those psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Erich Fromm? Maybe not everything they did was bad, but just look at how we deal with mental health problems nowadays, it's all about treating the individual not the sickness in society.

And he resisted the devil's evil temptation in the desert.

Didn't Jesus overturn the tables of the money changers at the temple to resist them? If that was an exception to the rule, I wonder why? Perhaps because it was at the temple rather than in regular society?

Another thing that puts me off is when we're told to do all this spiritual work for what is effectively a story, until we die to find out if it's true or not. To be fair, a lot of mainstream religions are the same. It's all a bit culty if it makes me dependent on someone else for the truth. So I'm only going to get interested if there's something I can experience for myself in this life.

Yes, it's the flip side of when millennials or gen z are supposed to blame the boomers for today's problems like the housing crisis, climate crisis, pension crisis, etc. The agenda seems to be to drive a wedge between the generations to continue to chip away at family cohesion. Maybe they are aware but they aren't expressing it by joining unions like their ancestors used to.