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No I didn't....I said you're overweight and the comment was in relation to the topic. But, I'm not beyond making personal commentary, its just something I try to avoid on.
How do you avoid "on" something? If you climb onto it you're not avoiding it.
Remember: if you don't talk to someone, they will (eventually) go away, and the thread can stay on track.
In almost all cases you would be correct, dear ... but we are dealing with a distinct, historically proven anomaly here
But, that said, I am done making my point at length. I had gone into a semi-retirement phase -- where I would enjoy a few contacts with a few folks I have met on CD California forum who I found personally interesting and exceptional. I posted this link for them to enjoy. I did not participate in the conversation -- until a certain "vampire" (great personification, Imho) decided to crash the party. I then engaged at length to make a point by allowing this individual the opportunity to fully reveal his hypocritical modus-operandi.
It is done. He can continue to wander the thread without further engagement from me. He has nothing to offer of value, as, indeed, it was never his intention. He has no interest in the topics.
But he will persist. Just without me.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming of a delightful thread. Imho.
Garlic... Why is garlic good for chasing away vampires?... Lets talk about Garlic!......
I love garlic... Not the industrial California white, but the hundreds of kinds of Garlics that exist in the world, Chinese garlics, Russian garlics, German Garlics, Italian garlics...
Where have they gone?... I would say 99% of Americans have only tasted industrial California white..
Here is my fav site for garlic sets. Garlic & Potatoes
Every year we try a couple different varieties...
How does this relate to the Esalen Institute? It is about learning to love diversity and variety in our diets again, how to slow down and understand, enjoy take in the subtleties and nuances in life. What France and Europe have retained to a higher degree and we have just about lost in America.. Cheap convenience, highest profit money and greed drive us..... IMO the bio dynamic movement, the local food movement, slow food movement are attempting to address the most rudimentary of human desires and needs.
Placing priority of quality over quantity would do us good.. IMO..
What France and Europe have retained to a higher degree and we have just about lost in America..
You are, to a large degree, romanticizing Europe. France has a strong culinary tradition, indeed, it has a strong artistic tradition in general. But other European countries don't share this focus on the culinary arts and produce some of the worst cuisine around.... Regardless, this group has a religious focus, just a sort of new age church. Not the place to look if you're wanting to experience diverse foods or the culinary arts in general....
Speaking of garlic though, one day a few years ago I was dicing some garlic for a holiday dinner and one of my relatives asked what it was..... I said "garlic"....and they said "oh, I didn't know it looked like that, we just use the stuff in the jar" referring of course to powdered garlic. So, I think you're not being grim enough, most Americans don't even know what raw garlic looks like!
...
Sure yes we are visual creatures, this is what makes the use of scent so powerful.. Primal responses that bypass our most used sensory defenses...
Again to each their own... I am not debating this.. Different scents give different responses...This is simply fact, for those people who practice aromatherapy throughout the ages use scents to get different physical and mental responses is how it is done.
I had not intended to contribute much beyond posting the article link. But now, as we have taken this turn to "scent" (and garlic! ), I will offer some observation:
While humans are firstly visual, and secondly aural, in most opinions -- and while our sense of smell is physically far less capable than many other animals (dogs, for example), the "lesser" senses are still highly acute and deeply contributory to our overall experience and well-being. My wife has been profoundly deaf since birth. I have lived with serious hearing loss, myself, for over 40 years. We speak with our hands by a language that is basically "air-art". We 'draw' illustrations in the air. It is a visual language that demands a visual life orientation.
Deaf, and blind, people are often considered to have heightened other senses (such as smell and touch). This is not exactly correct any more than my wife or I having grown better eyesight than anyone else. The amount of other sensory information taken in is actually the same as anyone's. The increased abilities (oh yeah, that is very apparent) are due to mental focus -- not any increase or change in sensory receptors. The ability to 'use' the senses remaining is a consequence of mental opportunity: less information from one source allows for more information to be processed from another.
Animals other than humans demonstrate remarkable abilities all the time that, actually, humans are also quite capable of -- were we to have such limited minds as the animals, which in turn focuses them on what is most significant to their being.
So it is likely the case with the Alzheimer's patients' response to smells. Their minds have been 'free'd' from a lot of distractions. Now simpler pathways dominate.
My wife is a 'garlic queen' ... I also like garlic - to a point - but eat it more as a self-defense mechanism since my own consumption allows me to be in her presence. If I stink I do not hardly notice her anti-vampiric superpowers.
It was Alan Watts, who had a particular knack for bridging the Zen stream of the east with the western psyche and his writing and teachings were my introduction to Zen when i was in my late teens.
People like to make fun of the "hippies" but it's the caricatures that they scoff at and without much if any insight into who in essence they were and what they were about or of the rich cultural wave and contributions of those (the "beat generation") that preceded them and prepared the soil for that next wave of counter / alternative culurists (another new word!).
Being closed and cynical about people who had a new vision for our world and who were deeply interested and invested in increasing / expanding awareness both individually and collectively is a very unfortunate thing and, imo, it's that cynicism and disconnection from the essential (not to mention extreme rationalism!) that will quite possibly destroy the planet.
It's happening now.
Why aren't people up in arms?
What's going on that people aren't rising up against a parasitic dominant culture that is sapping people of their soul / life force?
If what's happening today was happening back in the late 60's and early 70's this kind of somnolence and lack of outrage wouldn't be.
Why are people in such extreme denial and not realizing that we're in a time of crisis ... a time to make crucial decisions about the direction(s) that we as a human species need take?
I'm not a group person either (at all!) and i'm not involved in politics in any way.
But there are many ways to partake in what could be a new age .... not the silly pie in the sky ungrounded airy fairy naive new age deal but something more real and grounded and appropriate for the times we're living in.
People like to make fun of the "hippies" but it's the caricatures that they scoff at and without much if any insight into who in essence they were and what they were about or of the rich cultural wave and contributions of those (the "beat generation").....
People make fun of things, that's just what they do. But the hippie subculture is largely dead and has been replaced, in the sense that many ex-hippies have switched, into a vague religion defined around western spiritual notions. Sure they pay lip service to the east, but its just that, the notions are twisted into a western framework and that should be apparent by the fact that its mostly middle-class white folks that are into this stuff.... Its entirely bourgeois.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jaijai
What's going on that people aren't rising up against a parasitic dominant culture that is sapping people of their soul / life force?
May have better luck if you detach your politics from your religious beliefs...Effective political movements are, almost always, secular in
nature.
But ignoring the religious gobbledygook there is a simple answer here, propaganda has become increasingly effective with more advanced communication technology. Today people are exposed to propaganda, whether state or corporate, on an almost hourly basis. And nobody can escape unless they entirely remove themselves from society....
It was Alan Watts, who had a particular knack for bridging the Zen stream of the east with the western psyche and his writing and teachings were my introduction to Zen when i was in my late teens.
People like to make fun of the "hippies" but it's the caricatures that they scoff at and without much if any insight into who in essence they were and what they were about or of the rich cultural wave and contributions of those (the "beat generation") that preceded them and prepared the soil for that next wave of counter / alternative culurists (another new word!).
Being closed and cynical about people who had a new vision for our world and who were deeply interested and invested in increasing / expanding awareness both individually and collectively is a very unfortunate thing and, imo, it's that cynicism and disconnection from the essential (not to mention extreme rationalism!) that will quite possibly destroy the planet.
It's happening now.
Why aren't people up in arms?
What's going on that people aren't rising up against a parasitic dominant culture that is sapping people of their soul / life force?
If what's happening today was happening back in the late 60's and early 70's this kind of somnolence and lack of outrage wouldn't be.
Why are people in such extreme denial and not realizing that we're in a time of crisis ... a time to make crucial decisions about the direction(s) that we as a human species need take?
I'm not a group person either (at all!) and i'm not involved in politics in any way.
But there are many ways to partake in what could be a new age .... not the silly pie in the sky ungrounded airy fairy naive new age deal but something more real and grounded and appropriate for the times we're living in.
Very nice post, jaijai ... rep button still not responding, no matter how I push it
I appreciate your enthusiasms and sentiments, though I don't have the slightest expectation that "humanity" will evolve or embrace any "new age" ... I do, however, recognize that individuals have always, and will continue, to break free of the cycles of our past, and, in this regard, people such as Watts, and organizations such as Esalen, have made deep contributions.
The earth will survive, obviously ... and with total indifference to our species' cancerous nature.
Our species likely will not survive our own apparently boundless appetite for material growth and consumptions.
But the amorphous mystery we call 'spirit' is eternal -- beyond even the earth's life cycle.
Feeding this mysterious spirit feels like a good thing to me
... and mine seems to like raw [preferably organic] veggies an awful lot to go with its philosophical musings!
Garlic... Why is garlic good for chasing away vampires?... Lets talk about Garlic!......
I love garlic... Not the industrial California white, but the hundreds of kinds of Garlics that exist in the world, Chinese garlics, Russian garlics, German Garlics, Italian garlics...
Where have they gone?... I would say 99% of Americans have only tasted industrial California white..
Here is my fav site for garlic sets. Garlic & Potatoes
Every year we try a couple different varieties...
How does this relate to the Esalen Institute? It is about learning to love diversity and variety in our diets again, how to slow down and understand, enjoy take in the subtleties and nuances in life. What France and Europe have retained to a higher degree and we have just about lost in America.. Cheap convenience, highest profit money and greed drive us..... IMO the bio dynamic movement, the local food movement, slow food movement are attempting to address the most rudimentary of human desires and needs.
Placing priority of quality over quantity would do us good.. IMO..
Quote:
Originally Posted by nullgeo
I had not intended to contribute much beyond posting the article link. But now, as we have taken this turn to "scent" (and garlic! ), I will offer some observation:
While humans are firstly visual, and secondly aural, in most opinions -- and while our sense of smell is physically far less capable than many other animals (dogs, for example), the "lesser" senses are still highly acute and deeply contributory to our overall experience and well-being. My wife has been profoundly deaf since birth. I have lived with serious hearing loss, myself, for over 40 years. We speak with our hands by a language that is basically "air-art". We 'draw' illustrations in the air. It is a visual language that demands a visual life orientation.
Deaf, and blind, people are often considered to have heightened other senses (such as smell and touch). This is not exactly correct any more than my wife or I having grown better eyesight than anyone else. The amount of other sensory information taken in is actually the same as anyone's. The increased abilities (oh yeah, that is very apparent) are due to mental focus -- not any increase or change in sensory receptors. The ability to 'use' the senses remaining is a consequence of mental opportunity: less information from one source allows for more information to be processed from another.
Animals other than humans demonstrate remarkable abilities all the time that, actually, humans are also quite capable of -- were we to have such limited minds as the animals, which in turn focuses them on what is most significant to their being.
So it is likely the case with the Alzheimer's patients' response to smells. Their minds have been 'free'd' from a lot of distractions. Now simpler pathways dominate.
My wife is a 'garlic queen' ... I also like garlic - to a point - but eat it more as a self-defense mechanism since my own consumption allows me to be in her presence. If I stink I do not hardly notice her anti-vampiric superpowers.
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He can continue to wander the thread without further engagement from me. He has nothing to offer of value, as, indeed, it was never his intention. He has no interest in the topics.
