It doesn't disturb me quite as much as the amount it disturbs me that others are disturbed by it. Being disturbed by something such as this seems to indicate a failure in the employment of mirror neurons. The toad physiology is markedly different from humans and should not be expected to experience any discomfort with the procedure. But perhaps by imaginging small toads coming out of your back, you are led to experience all kinds of imaginary discomfort, discomfort that you would not experience if you actually were the toad.

Disgust like this always bothers me, because it has a kindof blinding effect that leads people to react to the feeling of disgust instead of making good judgments.

@Timothy P

I'm not surprised that you read 9% of my posts. You frequently boast about your knowledge of my personal life, as if that had any bearing on matters of importance. To be honest, it seems a tad fanatic or stalker-esque.

I'm also not surprised that you think you can speak for 90% of neatorama viewers. 90% of megalomaniacs claim to share the opinions of the majority.

Note how people incessantly reject the authors claims and try to equivocate him/her with drug-use or variously try to undermine with the employment of myriad logical fallacies.

They are not thinking about it except to find ways to chop it up and make it irrelevant. There is a special kind of ignorance, I think, in doing this to matters of mental health. A kind of ignorance that requires one to ignore just about everything that is happening in their own minds.

The gross affect of obsessive comparison is obvious to me, but that is only because I've stepped through the door marked "Nigredo". Prior to this stage the ego dominates and the 'individual' is much more concerned about looking good than actually being good. So any chance that they might be delusional and engage in this kind of mindless comparison is a priori rejected prior to any actual self-reflection or contemplation.

There is actually a point to what I'm saying here. The term "satisfying" merely means to meet expectations. So I have given three different usages of the term "Marriage" that entail different expectations. Being that there are different expectations it will take something different to "satisfy" each of them.

A) From a legal perspective, a marriage is satisfied if people pay their taxes as married partners.

B) From a traditional religious perspective, a marriage is satisfied if man and woman remain faithful to each other until death and provide support for each other during temptation. They aren't even supposed to lust for each other, but are supposed to rely on each other when their lust is beyond their control.

C) From an egotistical perspective, a marriage is satisfied if everyone gets what they individually desire out of the marriage.

The claim that thinner women lead to more satisfying marriages could be taken as bearing some relation to B, but only where anagogical progress (spiritual progress) is not a dominant factor. For anagogical progress entails a dampening of the lustful habits of mind. Full spiritual attainment even suggests a loss of sexual appetite completely. But the claim would certainly be true of any usage of the term "marriage" in as narrow a sense as C.

This song means something to me and reflects St. John of the Cross' "Dark Night of the Soul" or the first phase of alchemical transfiguration; Nigredo

'the nigredo of the process of individuation on the other hand is a subjectively experienced process brought about by the subject's painful, growing awareness of his shadow aspects'. - Ashton, Brink p. 231

'the darkest time, the time of despair, disillusionment, envious attacks; the time when Eros and Superego are at daggers drawn, and there seems no way forward...nigredo, the blackening'. - Christopher Perry, in P. Young-Eisendrath/T. Dawson eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge 1977) p. 152-3

In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised
-- oh, happy chance! --
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest. - St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel

It also relates to similar phases of spiritual development in other traditions:

"The Christian maps, the Sufi maps, the Buddhist maps of the Tibetans and the Theravada, and the maps of the Khabbalists and Hindus are all remarkably consistent in their fundamentals. (…) These maps, Buddhist or otherwise, are talking about something inherent in how our minds progress in fundamental wisdom that has little to do with any tradition and lots to do with the mysteries of the human mind and body." - Ingram, Daniel M. (2007) Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, Third Edition

@Timothy P

I'm guessing your idea of a full-load is just enough to build a shit-house.

I'm just expressing my thoughts on the original post, and responding to some unwarranted criticisms of Zazen meditation and Taoist philosophy (note the Yin-Yang is part of Taoism not Zen, though Zen may take some of its influence from Taoism).

There is nothing immediately wrong with what I'm doing unless correcting myopic posts is wrong. You probably don't care about such things; generally people don't, but I try to adhere to W.K. Clifford's 'Ethics of Belief' and feel that any statement is only ever ethically justified if it is also epistemically justified. This differs from W. James in that James felt that anyone was ethically justified in stating a belief regardless of whether it was epistemically true. But this raises some obvious problems, for example if I say "I believe Timothy P is a rapist." having no epistemic justification for making that claim I may be wrong, and real and harmful consequences may follow from my claim. Hence there are laws in most nations against slander and libel. But these laws are probably more akin to Susan Haacks ethics of belief than Clifford's, for Clifford one was never justified in making an epistemically unjustified claim, rather it was up to the claimant to validate their claim epistemically before making it.

The vast majority of people intuitively think like James, and feel that there is nothing wrong with making truthful claims without ever having attempted to validate them epistemically.

I've been working on an explanatory mechanism with my girlfriend for a while. We both seem to think the idea I'm trying to express is the right idea, but finding ways of expressing it is proving to be difficult.

The idea is basically that each and every element of our experience contrasts each other element of our experience. Such that; the addition or subtraction of a smiley face in the periphery of our visual field can make or break a decision. The way I've attempted to express this is someway of having a perceived object projected through a lens which contains contextual information. In this case when I look down at my speedometer, I don't just see a plain speedometer, I see it through the lens of the smiley/sad face and what it signifies, and whatever else I have been experiencing. If I get into an argument early in the day and get behind the wheel, that argument is going to color my driving experience and probably encourage a heavier foot.

This may seem obvious, that our experiences affect each other at least this much, but I'm looking for an illustration or thought experiment that can make the extent of these influences more obvious.

The hypocrisy of it is manifold; these infants like to make claims, as for example Craig did when he spoke of the yin-yang symbol, and they don't want anyone to challenge that view-point.

They want to be able to speak their mind, but not have their minds spoken to or hear what is on anyone else's mind that conflicts with their preconcieved notions. They keep their opinions so shallow and misinformed that they need to spend any time in carefully expressing them and need not worry about dedicating much time at all. Such people pride themselves on their keen insight, but when it comes to making themselves vulnerable and open to others with just as keen or perhaps keener insight, these dunces resort to mudslinging.

I don't see what your attitudes are for. Unless your egos are so soft and squishy that the slightest appearance of intelligence and thoughtfulness puts you to such shame that you have to resort to ridicule and the other infantile tactics you use to avoid careful discussion.

Some call this a kind of "Dogmatic relativistic individualism" or a "Militaristic agnosticism" about everything under the sun.

Reminds me of something Marin Luther King Jr. said: “A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.”

Why, because the nation becomes ruled by small-minded men who use childish debate tactics to shut-up those who actually have insight, in order to save themselves a) appearing to be the myopic, infantile, pricks that they are, and b) having to actually educate themselves and spend some time in careful contemplation.

Seriously? I had one dresser growing up, and the one I bought when I was 19 I still have at age 30. I barely had enough drawers to constitute one dresser, let alone many pieces of furniture from which I could take pieces to make another fully functional piece of furniture.

I knew consumerism was bad, but has pragmatism died completely?

@Craig

Get a book on Zen

Yin-Yang illustrate duality, but the Zen student finds ways to skillfully manipulate duality to achieve a proper understanding of non-duality. In non-duality there is neither happiness or depression, but there is no way to communicate this state without saying it is neither happiness nor depression, yet some will use words like "happiness" to refer to the state of Satori. Others will call it happiness because that is actually what they have; they do not have enlightenment/satori, they have a kind of emotional alchemy that allows them to shift into states of happiness, but they are always destined to die from this state and be reborn in an opposing state, like the yin-yang cycle suggests.

It's sort of an abuse of the term 'marriage' however. If taken merely in a legal context there is no apparent measure of "satisfying" except that both members claim their marital status on their T4s. A legally "satisfying" marriage is one in which both partners claim married status and pay their appropriate taxes.

In the traditional, Judeo-Christian, bond known historically as "marriage", the marriage is "satisfied" if both parties are able to remain faithful to each other and supportive of each other during their earthly tribulations; some of which include the lustful habits of mind. If satisfaction for this comes not in the form of helping one overcome lustful tendencies, but merely on sating those tendencies then it may only pass as "satisfaction" if anagogical progress is absent from the marriage contract.

Or marriage becomes what Erich Fromm called it; an egoism a deux, and in which both persons are commodities with various features with which they can haggle in order to sort out the most economic exchange of goods. In this latter framework, it is easy to see how greater sexual attraction is the equivelant of greater "satisfaction".

The brain is known to use "eigenfaces" to recognize the differences between faces. There is no discrete values with respect to facial features, rather the difference is recognized... by recognizing the difference and not absolute values.

BTW, this wavey-line is a good illustration of what is called the "Wheel of Rebirth". At each trough in the line we may say the person has "died". Their psychological state, which peaks with the line, is in a state of disintegration (death) during the down-shoot, and the under-shoot reflects a momentary period of calm before rebirth. Rebirth happens when one psychological state is disintegrated and a new state is integrated. Metaphorically speaking; one state of mind dies, and another is born. Generally people go through a life-time of being reborn in the different psychological states. We experience suffering and elation in different forms, and cycle through them like a wheel turns. Satori is like a perfect calm that goes neither up or down.

My line would be relatively flat; I don't worry before going on vacation (which means I frequently forget things), but I don't worry about what I left behind when I'm on vacation either, and I almost never think about when I have to return. I just got back from a two-day camping trip and this was true of me then. Things like this never crossed my mind: Television, Computers, Internet, Cell Phone, other forms of electronics, video games, work or even my two cats I left at home.

I do something like Zazen to achieve this, but unlike meditation techniques that are obscured by Koans and Mantras, I utilize a keener depth psychology of which the Koans approximate. Koans and Mantras are really there for people who don't know, and don't want to know either. The Koan "See the face you had before you were born, indeed the face you had before your parents were born." points to "MU" but many things point to "MU" and the Koan is unnecessary to the one who knows "MU" already. So while many monks may spend years meditating on the Koan, I'm content to meditate on MU.

Kateigaho.com relates: When discussing Zen Buddhism, one often encounters the character for emptiness, mu, in expressions such as "no self," "no ego," "no holiness," and "no permanence." It is through the actual experience of mu — which means transcending affirmation and negation, being and nonbeing — that satori or spiritual awakening occurs and one can finally come to realize the essential spirit of Zen. Gaining some intellectual understanding is merely a first step in knowing about Zen; to enter into and deepen that understanding, one must experience mu for oneself.