modernPrimitive

Hi,

I have several expensive Extreme III high capacity SD cards where the housing has been damaged - basically the corners have been cracked or broken off (I suspect in my laptop SD card reader). My camera won't read them anymore, but the PC still does so I suspect it's just a case of the camera's SD reader has a pin or something in a place where those card housings are damaged so that it doesn't detect the cards.

Is it viable to buy a really cheap SD card and carefully try to pry open the housing using a sharp blade and replace the boards inside with the expensive high-capacity ones?

Thanks. ;)

Hi,

I've been experiencing bloating for almost 2 years now, the symptoms seem to come and go from time to time and are definitely worse when I'm feeling stressed out or not getting my 8 hours of sleep. Oddly, eating actually brings temporary relief (which should rule out gastroperesis, I think), and a large meal can bring even longer relief. The bloating seems to occur within 45 minutes to several hours depending on the size of the meal and doesn't seem to be related to the type of foods I eat - even an apple in the morning will produce bloating within say 45 minutes. Burping seems to provide temporary relief but there always seem to be more gas where the last burp came from and after several burps it just get "stuck". I am insulin-resistant so that could also be a case for gastroperesis?

I'm being treated for GERD-induced asthma, a mild form of asthma that seems to be mostly exercise-induced. I've been on a proton-pump inhibitor for 2 months with little relief so far (and a cortisone inhaler for the asthma). The breathing issues however seem however to be mostly related to the bloating and my symptoms seem similar to Hiatus Hernia.

A spiritual healer told me that she "intuited" that I have a Candida problem, but I'm a kind of skeptical guy and I did take a 7 week broad-spectrum anti-fungal course to no avail. The other possibility from what I've read is a distended colon or a slow emptying stomach or something to that effect - I do feel kinda bloated further down in the intestinal region as well at times but I am pretty regular. I've just taken 2 anti-spasmodics and they don't seem to have helped in the least.

I'm running out of ideas. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

My subjective experience is that of an largely indescribable connection with my environment (and myself) in terms of what I would call an "energic substrate of reality" (in particular this connection is felt most powerfully through the feet and hands).

What is YOUR experience?

"Truth is not an order discovered in the world, rather it is an ordering of the world."- Frederick Nietzsche

'I suspect them of being symbolical psychologists, to whom no greater wrong could be done than to take them literally. If it were really metaphysics that they mean, it would be useless to try to understand them. But if it is psychology, we can not only understand them, but we can greatly profit greatly by them, for then the so-called ‘metaphysical’ comes within the range of experience. If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important… like everything belonging to the sphere of reality.' - Jung, Psyche and Symbol, 1958

"Embodied mind theories hold that mathematical thought is a natural outgrowth of the human cognitive apparatus which finds itself in our physical universe. For example, the abstract concept of number springs from the experience of counting discrete objects. It is held that mathematics is not universal and does not exist in any real sense, other than in human brains. Humans construct, but do not discover, mathematics."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_maths#E...

I have this theory that truth often lies in reconciling opposites (at least opposite ideas that have been thoroughly well developed)...and I'm not sure that consciousness or matter have opposites as such, technically, but perhaps they are opposite "approaches" to the same problem.....so...

If we are to insist on a substance for our metaphysic surely the idea of a "primal consciousness" could well be synonymous with matter? Somebody here used the terms "primacy of matter" versus "primacy of consciousness" (as a sort of pantheistic concept) and I don't see that these terms are necessarily mutually exclusive. I think the problem is as always we simply don't agree on the properties of our proposed metaphysical substance.

Certainly matter does not exhibit the attributes of consciousness as per our modern western definition of "day-to-day" consciousness (nor vice versa) but I would suggest that generally Idealism (other than the solipsical type) suggests a consciousness of a different order not unlike that of the Hindu Brahman or Atman, a pantheistic order, a consciousness in perhaps a different "phase" to that of ordinary waking consciousness (since we know that altered states of consciousness are proposed by Hindu sages and Buddhists alike in order to attain such awareness). Since unless we have had such an experience cannot really begin to understand a consciousness of this order we can merely suggest through elimination that it is NOT like ordinary waking consciousness.

Moreover, these supposedly disparate metaphysics are not that disparate when we consider that realists work towards an "objective" or "God's eye view" of the World and that Hinduism / Buddhism discuss "Unity experiences" of consciousness (from altered states of consciousness). Both these religions also regard the ordinary day-to-day consciousness as being "illusory" (Maya), something that we as westerners would refer to as the "subjective" mind and would certainly concur that it is not always reliable by so-called "objective" standards.

The more I think about this the less disparity I see.....

Any thoughts?

Now, as far as I know Idealism originated with Hindu thought where "Brahman" is considered the "consciousness substrate" of all existence. This is not synonymous with consciousness as we understand it in a modern western medical sense or in terms of "day-to-day" waking consciousness in the individual sense but rather the old Hindu sages and yogis related knowledge of Brahman to experiences obtained during altered states of consciousness, hence an underlying substrate of awareness behind all existence. In a sense this could actually be taken to be ra form of realism. (But I'll ask another question about that later)

Western philosophers have tended to approach Idealism from the point of methodological solipsism (that all one can know is one's own mind and that this is the correct starting point for an epistemological theory [theory of knowledge]). In so doing they have for their starting point a state of consciousness which is "individualistic" as opposed to the corresponding Hindu idea which shall we say is roughly "pantheistic".

Now given that when John Doe drops dead while looking at a tree that tree does not stop existing for the rest of us, it is fairly easy to dismiss any "individualistic" form of idealism as rather nonsensical. Equally, it's fairly easy to accuse the corresponding Hindu idea of being too metaphysical to launch any theory of knowledge. However, it must be noted that according to the Hindu theory it is not so much a metaphysical assertion as it is simply a matter of the lack of mental training required to access such mental states or properties consciousness.

Your thoughts?

So the question is can these metaphysics even be reconciled?

(Apologies for the lack of clarity on my previous question. I have added the terms "philosophical", "metaphysical" and "mind / matter" to clarify my question.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

What happens if we try and reconcile these? Is it even possible?

Personally I see Kant's teaching as being epistemic rather than metaphysical. In fact my reading is that he avoids positing the metaphysical at all even though he frames his argument within the ambit of metaphysical assertions that were prevalent in his day...Hume etc.

Terminologies:

Epistemological Idealism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_ideal...

Metaphysical Idealism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_idealism

I don't know if it's just me being stupid, but to me what people should mean by the word "objective" is "subjective consensus".

From wikipedia (Objectivity):

"While there is no universally accepted articulation of objectivity, a proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are "mind-independent"—that is, not the result of any judgments made by a conscious entity. Put another way, objective truths are those which are discovered rather than created"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_(philosop...

Can anyone explain to me how a form of knowledge (because truth is a property of knowledge) such as mathematics fro example can be "mind-independent", or perhaps how physics is "discovered" (rather than being an anthropocentric mental construct that approximates a "supposed" noumenal reality that we supposedly know phenomenally via sense perception [as the metaphysical assumption posits])?

I have the suspicion that so-called "spirituality" in it's popular meaning is practiced by most as form of escapism. Since we HERE, NOW and "PHYSICALLY INCARNATE" (rather than amorphous "farts" of energy) does that not imply that our purpose is in this "physicality", in this here and now, in embracing life, death, impermanence, relationships, expansion, growth, humanity, evolution etc.

Why are we philosophically / theologically obsessed with the unanswerable when the obvious is right under our noses? Isn't the search for a "greater meaning" simply an infantile fear that stems from our inability to face the facts of life?

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I'll leave you with the following quote as food for thought:

"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on" - Frederick Nietzsche

Since the old Hebrew calendar was lunisolar and we have about 13 lunar cycles per sun cycle (year), someone of 900 "lunar years" would be 900/13 = 69 (solar years).

Methuselah fathered Lamech at the age of 187 which would have been around the age of 14 (in solar years) which means he would have been sexually mature enough to do so.

Another issue for biblical literalists to consider is that the age of the Earth, (being supposedly 7000 odd years old) would only allow for around 6 generations from the time of Adam to the time of Jesus and according to Luke Joseph was the 74th generation after Adam. Even if we just take the genealogy from Adam to Noah that's 11 generations multiplied by an average of say 800 years = 8800 years which is older than the Earth which means Noah hasn't even been born yet? This simply does not compute!

Anyway, if you have anything academic, scholarly or intelligent to say please do so.

Are all these systems in agreement?

In other words Kaballistically speaking the avoidance of the pillars of Severity or Mercy, which are associated with Left hand and Right hand paths respectively and a focus of cultivating the balance between these aspects as the "middle pillar" (path).

The only difficulty I see here is that Tantra is considered a left-hand path by certain traditions due to it's reliance on sexual practices which I assume according to some schools of Buddhism would be considered as "sensual indulgence".....however to that I would say one must bear in mind the motivations and goal of such practices fall outside the attainment of sensual indulgence for it's own sake. Of course Tantra as a philosophy would necessarily consider that a balance between the extremes of the "masculine" Severity and "feminine" Mercy should be cultivated...as would Taoism.

This has some pretty big implications in terms of the exoteric idea of "good" vs "evil" in the sense that overt "goodness" can equally have a negative karmic effect. In other words the only action that should be practiced is that which assists in the "liberation" of self and others which include practices that could be exoterically judged as either "good" or "evil".

Given that my intention is to bring the unconscious into consciousness...that healing cannot begin unless those unconscious neuroses which drive our behaviour are stripped naked in plain view for us to see, that we may learn to make them serve us.

Is there even a gentle way to tell people the facts of life or is it more compassionate to be ruthless?

In other words does the term occult imply that the knowledge is attained as a consequence of the performance of "occult practices" rather than say a knowledge that can be read in books. Is this the REAL "secret" (occult) knowledge?

"Atah Gebur Le-Olam Adonai"

What would be considered too much?