I've been coming here less and less, but it didn't seem right to just disappear so I'd like to say goodbye to everyone, especially those I chatted with, sunstone, birdy-birdy-birdo, willamina, panda, odion, mystic, alex, Abuser, anyone else who's name I've temporarily forgotten.
I'm sure I'll...
I heard on the radio this morning that some exam boards have been giving out impossible questions in certain exams. I don't think they're perfect, perhaps this is another example?
It would be wrong to label the whole of Vajrayana Buddhism as a cult, it would be comparable to calling all Restorationist Christian Churches cults. Sure you get some dodgy gurus and some inappropriate goings on, but you get that in any system where a person is elevated to a higher than normal...
Good question. I suppose in such a hypothetical situation I could only demonstrate by example, by remaining calm and content in situations we share but in which he forms mental suffering. In reality though, people experience non-suffering every day, people are often calm and content if nothing...
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. I hate people who can't tell the difference between weasels and pine martins, never mind stoats and polecats. He was lucky to get away so lightly...
Sounds like some sort of self-consiousness orientated hedonism. I don't think it would be much fun, too stressful worrying about how cool you look all the time.
I should have read the OP before voting no to going naked, if everyone else was naked I would go naked too, otherwise I'd be drawing more attention to myself and feel more self conscious, the clothing would have the opposite effect to what I wanted. A bit like a woman walking down the road in a...
Oh, I agree that people have different pain thresholds, I'm not debating that. What I'm suggesting (and when I say "I" I really mean people like Epictetus and the Buddha) is that with the right understanding we can distinguish between pain and suffering, see pain for what it is, temporary...
I used to play games a lot when I was younger, mostly 4-way splitscreen with friends. We got so good at Goldeneye it was a little scary, my friend took his N64 to school once, eventually people just refused to play against him, they thought he was cheating somehow.
Recently I bought a Wii on...
Serves 2-3.
Five large tomatoes, blanched, peeled and chopped.
One large onion, sliced.
Two garlic cloves, chopped.
A selection of bell pepper pieces of various colour.
Can of red kidney beans.
One green chilli for flavour
One red chilli for spice.
I don't eat meat, but I still find it quite...
How could anyone with a trace of humanity in them do such a thing?! There are literally no words I can use to describe the creatures who carried this out, they're not even animals, animals don't do this sort of thing, this is demonic.
What's traditional when it comes to Gnosticism though? It's a belief system that was so thoroughly expunged from the social consciousness that all we now have are writings without their contextual, living, interpretation. Gnosticism as we know it is a very modern animal, I would argue anyway...
Ok, but I think the only way to answer those questions is to say that on the dark side of the moon lives a creature that resembles a sock crossed with an upside-down elephant. He constantly replenishes the universe every moment by turning the handle of his jack-in-the-box. If he were to stop...
There are a couple of points in what you've said, first we need to distinguish pain from suffering, pain is physical, suffering is mental. You can have two cancer patients in equally severe pain, yet one can seem to suffer from it much more than the other and that suffering comes from his...
There's an old Buddhist saying, it's a bit cliche so you've probably heard it "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional". The reason it's survived and become cliche is that it's essentially true, pain will afflict us all but suffering derives solely from our reactions to circumstances such as...