Did you know that Rastafarianism spawned out of the European exploitation of Jamaica and Ethiopia? Ethiopia was the only country that had a coffee trade up to the time when Europeans smuggled beans out and crippled Ethiopia's economy. Jamaicans felt a similar "downpression" (a Rastafarian word meaning 'oppression') and sympathized with Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie. Rastas claim they are the real children of Israel and that their rightful and holy homeland is "Zion" (Africa, especially Ethiopia).

This schism between Jamaican and Ehtiopian descendents and "Babylon" will not be resolved by poking fun at them. All such gestures merely signal a greater unwillingness to empathize with them, and therefor more of "Babylon". It will just be seen as the flippant, self-absorbed, racionation "Babylon" has been engaged in since Nimrod.

So the term "individual" comes from L. individuus, meaning; indivisible.

Which is accurate, if you divide a person they are no longer a person. What we consider to be the individual is indivisible. This is a different meaning from independent which implies self-subsistence.

Self-subsistence is the state of independence, the state of not needing anything else to survive. The only true independent is the totality of all existence itself.

Just wondering if you noticed that the yogi in the picture is doing his thing above a brick ground, and his cane is apparently separated from it by a carpet. It doesn't look like he has 'anchored' his cane in the cement, but maybe he has. It seems a little more unlikely in this case, so I would surmise that maybe that isn't really a carpet and maybe his cane isn't really detached from the carpet. So the whole apparatus acts like a spring. Maybe the "carpet" is some kind of load-bearing material, though it looks quite light to bear his weight.

To put it in plain terms; the chin of one person when viewed by itself, appears basically normal, but when two chins are compared to each other; the one looks large and the other looks small. If we put a third person in their, one will be large, one small, and one medium. The one who is medium may be the person just added, or it may be either of the small or large persons depending on the size of chin the person we added third has. All such appearances; and ultimately their resultant judgments and descriptive modes, are merely relativistic comparisons happening within the field of all experience; which is itself quite flexible. What appears as a hideously large chin at one moment, becomes a sexy little chin in another contextual setting. All of these judgements are said to revolve around the self, in that they are not just relative to each other, but primarily to the position of the observer. Were the photographs arranged in different sequence, our relative position to them would be different, and we would experience them differently.

If, therefore, reason employs in the complete determina-
tion of things a transcendental substrate that contains, as
it were, the whole store of material from which all possible
predicates of things must be taken, this substrate cannot be
anything else than the idea of an omnitudo realitatis. All
true negations are nothing but limitations -- a title which would be inapplicable, were they not thus based upon the
unlimited, that is, upon "the All. "
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason P 485

Every 'thing' we experience is predicated on "the All" what Kant called Omnitudo Realitatis but which takes the form of ens realissimum when it is subrogated to the field of contingency. That is to say that when the All is conceived of as a thing, it is reduced to a finite conception, which then stands in relation to all other finite conceptualizations, and this is an error, because all finite conceptions are contained within the All.

If Kant was to write a Transcendental Psychology; he would have said that everything we experience attains its identity by contrast to what we have previously experienced and the ground of all possible experience. This accounts for the condition in which experiencing two phenomenas in rapid contiguity leads to an apparent "distortion" of one or both phenomena. It is not a distortion qua distortion, it is the mind's relativistic mode of representing the All in discrete form. Each and every phenomenal experience informs and shapes each other experience. Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi argued this is the case with respect to neural representation in the brain in their Integrated Information theory. When we experience black, we do not just experience black, but we also experience the absence of white and every kind of color.

@lame

ti;dc (too infantile; didn't care)

This is a useless debate; notice it has more participants than most debates. People like to argue about stuff like this; stuff that doesn't matter and can't be confirmed either way. It allows everyone to feel like they are right and no one feel like an idiot.

That's why all the important matters are ignored and we go around in circles arguing about UFOs, ghosts, and so on. The Miracle of the Sun takes the cake for me; if 100,000 people can claim to simultaneously see the sun convert into a spinning color disk, and then watch it zig-zag and crash into the earth, and after all that we are still here, all kinds of delusions and mass delusion are possible, or anything is physically possible. Either way; its a pretty unsettling result.

Illusions are spiritual matters

They have some pretty crazy trips; Aldous Huxley especially.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

[Or be a slave to the determining quality of 'boredom']

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero

It's a double-edged sword; you experience less pain - actually you are just not focusing on the pain, your conscious attention is elsewhere or on getting away from the pain. If you suffer a serious injury or disability this can cause you more harm.

When I was roughly 8 years old I fell out of a kitchen chair and broke my arm. A day or two passed before my parents noticed I was favoring my arm and took me for x-rays at the hospital. They were surprised I hadn't complained about having a broken arm, since broken limbs are generally quite uncomfortable. But no more than a year earlier I had been hit by a truck that caused a paramount pain, so much that my mind blocked it out. This "blocking out" of the pain must have carried over to my broken arm a year later. It may have even modified my pain sensitivity and pain threshold; it is a matter of some amazement to my friends and family that I do not react to items they find unbearably hot, cold or otherwise painful.

One night when partying with my father; we were doing drugs and drinking. He and I got around to playing a "tough-guy" game. We put our forearms together and dropped a lit cigarette between them; whoever pulls away first loses. My father pulled away after only a few seconds and exclaimed "I don't know how you can stand it." to which I said "It's only pain." It may seem a strange paradox or out-right contradiction to say that pain doesn't hurt, but that is the position I occassionaly find myself in with respect to certain pains; heat pain, cold pain, stabbing pain, sharp pain, etc... Only the throbbing pains do I find difficult to bear. But there may be other reasons for this; for one I want to overcome pain, I do not want pain to have the final say over my actions. It is a useful indicator, but I do not want it to cause a reaction. So I consciously focus on that task; but not by "resisting pain", resisting pain only causes more pain, I do so by accepting the pain, loving the pain, inviting the pain, and then it is not unbearable.

But to put on a show of confidence, puffed up chest and all, is to put up a facade, to play a part that is not realistic. I think feelings and attitudes convey an epistemic content; they reflect a judgment of the way the world actually is. Pride is the easiest to identify as having epistemic content; the feeling is defined as 'an elevated sense of self-worth'. To be more or less worthy than others is an epistemic claim; it not only says "I" am better or worse, which is erroneous in and of itself, it also says "You" are better or worse than me. So by feeling proud, or by harboring the attitude of pride within me, I am making not just a moral judgment, I'm also making a factual claim about the state of the entire world. This is the depth at which we can examine our factuality, or the degree to which our feelings and attitudes are justified or unjustified, realistic or delusional. By fancying myself proud; I become a delusion.

“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you.” - C.S. Lewis

My saying this may be an example of real love in action. Though by saying these things I place myself in a position apart from the norm, and therefor my audience and possibly the administrators of this website, and though that carries a weight of fear with it, I am in the act of saying it anyway.

My mental process involves much of the 'old man'. Currently I can identify several threads of concern; ranging from fear of reprisal, fear of error, fear of rejection, fear of ridicule, and just a general fear of asserting myself amidst a group of 'others'. All of this serves in some measure to prevent my saying anything, despite the carefulness and solidity of my deliberations. I may have the choicest bits of wisdom to share, but the fear remains, and probably will for the remainder of my days. But this is not an excuse for complicity or inaction, my rational and conscientious mind knows that right action is consistently thwarted by fear and normalcy. Fear is normalcy; it drives the bulk of our behavior. Fear drives us further into abstraction; seeking comfort for our egos in the unreality of pure thought. From there we can look down upon reality, as if it's laws and constants were merely circumstantial to our existence. We can turn a blind eye to the wisdom of the past, and hoist ourselves up on an ivory pillar, proclaiming our methods to far surpass our ancestors, without ever having an open-interest to their sentiments. We can ignore such realities because they make us feel uncomfortable and undervalued; but such realities will not ignore us.

Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
Erich Fromm

When faced with a decision that pits one attachment against another we are forced to judge the weight of our attachments. When faced with a decision that pits an attachment against something we derive no self-worth from, the decision is easy, we choose our emotional attachments.

Parents have been studied as to their behavior toward children, and it is frequently found without fail that parents are only really mindful of their own children. Without even being caught off-guard in a blind experiment, but simply being questioned; parents report that they would not rescue other children from a burning schoolhouse, but would ensure their own children's safety. They would pass-up the opportunity to save children being burned alive in the front of a building, and run into the inferno to save their own children. The value of each child is ostensibly the same, the parents are rescuing their own emotional attachments.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
Erich Fromm

Rising above this abysmal state requires one relinquish all egotistical attachment. One must liberate themselves of the incessant need to find psychological comfort. For the ego will make life very difficult when trying to attain to true love. Begin by imagining going without your family, your friends, your spouse, your children, you should experience a loss as if you had really given these things up, or you aren't in a proper meditation. You may find your mind seeking solace in a pet cat or dog, or even something as lowly as a fish ("The world hates me, but you still love me, don't you sparky?") Give up sparky, sparky doesn't need to love you, you need to accept reality and yourself as they are without any attachment to relationships, possessions or status. Imagine you've come home and your house and all your belongings have been burned down and you are not insured. You are now destitute, with no friends, family, or even animal companionship. You are merely a person roaming through space and time, you must give up your national identity. You are not American, you aren't even Caucasian. At most you can say you 'belong' to the human race, but this must be overcome at a later time. Give it all up, and get used to not having.

"The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity."
— Erich Fromm