The big question..

People with disabilities are bound by karma just like everyone else. Their present lives are a result of it.

You might ask why?

The first reason is their own karmic debt. Its possible to burn through it faster when one accepts handicaps in life, just like you use handicaps in gameplay, it helps things to balance.

The second reason is in the teaching of lessons to others. Of compassion, and charity. Noble qualities. The multitude of suffering around the world are a blend of these two elements, but each participant has different reasons for taking it on in life.



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"The kingdom of Heaven is spread out everywhere upon the earth and you do not see it." Jesus, Gospel of Thomas
Suppose you are looking for bear shit and find yourself in a large deep pile of smelly brown goop, but you have no instruments to measure it, so you can't prove for sure that it's bear doo doo instead of beaver doo doo or just smelley mud. Do you say, I have no proof there are any bears in these woods, because it hasn't been scientifically determined? Or do you run like hell?

Descartes is famous for the saying "I think, therefore I am." It's open to two different interpretations. The first, which may well be what he had in mind, is strictly logical:The process of thinking entails a thinker. The second, a position taken later by Sartre, which conflates thought with consciousness, is that awareness of our own subjective inner self is the most immediately self-evident truth we know. And yet I had a psych professor who denied there was such a thing as consciousness. He was of the behaviorist (rat psychology) school which was once quite the rage as being the height of scientific rigor for taking the position "If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist" and since the inner lives of rats and people are fuzzy, messy and subjective they don't exist. I think he provided a classic illustration of the behaviorist principle of conditioning--learned incapacity aquired through his professional training. Jesus (Gospel of Thomas) had a point.

 

I've got a few questions for some ppl.

-xexon-

are souls gender specific? or do people cycle through the two sexes when they reincarnate? and why?

-freakersoup and okie-

how would an asexually reproducing organism ever evolve, according to natural selection?

 

could be that the dying moment for you lasts forever . there-in , conciousness takes all the time in the universe as it goes to nothingness . go ahead and reincarnate if that's what you want to do with your ozo time . make a good vibe . sing your last beautiful song . once you die , it's the song we will hear .

 

If you're standing in a big pile of poo, you would say "what makes such big poo?" and try to find out. If it turns out to be a super-bear, so be it. But if there is poo, you will know that there is poo.

As for this professor, it sounds like he didn't actually think through this particular opinion. Consciousness is just a word for a particular phenomenon, a sort of realization of self. Whether you believe it is the result of something neurological or spiritual, it seems a bit ridiculous to deny that people have this.


Neodude - Sexual reproduction is only one small contributor to evolution. Most changes in genetic code come from mutation. If you take a single e. Coli cell and plate it so you end up with 5 million identical ones, you can then put it under a UV light for a minute or two and get all sorts of cool mutations! This could mean certain metabolism, certain resistance, certain survivability in certain environments, etc.

 

Souls don't have gender. Its something they assume upon incarnation just as an actor assumes a role.

There is no distinction other than what karma sets up for you to grow by. You'll go through many roles while here. Rich. Poor. Male. Female.
Child or elder. It all makes you a well rounded soul.


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Here's a definition of karma i read the other day:

"Also, it was then I knew that if time is NOW, and everything is happening in the now, karma is simply guilt. It was then I decided that karma doesn't exist, as guilt shouldn't/doesn't exist because we're all the perfect beings in the NOW because time doesn't exist. We are at once at the beginning and the end, without any effort on our part. You see? If we are One, we are totally free, sinless and without karma. Forget the guilt!."

.... i can't help agree with the guy in light of my own experience, ie. Realising you are the actor,... meaning the percieved karma is within the role you were caught in playing and a product of judgement and guilt.

 

There is no guilt in karma. No emotion at all.

It's cold and clinical and precise. Just like the IRS tries to be.

Sin and guilt are products of religious belief, and thats where they need to stay.



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Well i'd agree with that, but could you explain your own definition of karma?

 

Sex was one of the greatest all-time inventions in evolution. Before that, life was more stable but dull. Bacteria and amoebae reproduced by cell division, with changes resulting from genetic mutations. Sex, like other evolutionary milestones, developed because it gave definite survival advantages to organisms that used it: pooling of advantageous mutations (and disadvantageous ones, too, so that the offspring would be really messed up and eliminated from the gene pool); combining genetic material in novel ways, to increase chances of adaptation to different environments; masking of disadvantageous recessive genes by advantageous dominant ones, etc. For a good article on the subject, see

http://www.dorak.info/evolution/sreprod.html​

 

Karma is just the way the score is kept here. An accounting of your life.

Your actions, both positive and negative, wind up on a kind of report card. Your judgement day is at the end of each life. You're graded by your higher self on how well you've done.

There are 3 types of karma. The first is instant karma. I slap you, you slap me back. The account is balanced right then. The second type has a slight delay to it. You break a dish, then "wait till you father gets home." Payment is made, the account balances once again.

The third type is the biggy. Karma that accumulates over the many lifetimes. It is a huge burden with a dragging effect on your ability to have a happy life. Its also the reason why bad things sometimes happen to good people. Old debts.

This is the normal way things operate, but there is an old saying in the east that goes "mysterious are the ways of karma".

Because life can be complex, the karma associated with it can also be complex. Most people will pay off their debts in the regular way, however, for some people, karma can be payed off quicker by taking a handicap in life.

For a spiritual seeker fortunate enough to meet a spiritual master, karmic debt can be reduced or even forgiven because you now have a kind of tutor in your life which will help you navigate it.



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Well, it seems to me that such drastic and instantaneous mutations would pretty much destroy them on the spot. Also, even if they were to survive wouldn't their genetic CODE be pretty fucked up, for lack of a better term. I dont see how things subjected to this would be able to reproduce.

This is mutation coming from an external enviornment. I dont think any organism would benefit in the long run, and would be able to fare better than a control group ( organisms not exposed to radiation) and evolve based on the principals of natural selection.

We did a lab on this in the first quarter. 4 groups of marigold seeds were exposed to different levels of gamma radiation (50k, 150k, 500k, 4mil), and then of course we had our control group. What we saw is that when you increase the amount of radiation, what happens is that the germination time for the seeds go way down. Now, this would obviously be a huge advantage concerning survival and reproduction, if it wasn't for the fact that after germination the seeds had little to no growth and pretty much just bought the farm.

I dont imagine one would see drastically different results for unicellular organisms.

 

hmm..

i understand the implications of crossing - over, and random assortment.

But I think what my question really goes back to is abiogenesis. In the atheist side of my brain, i've always imagined that however the first organism came to be, it would have to be understandably simply. Simple, but however it got the complex code of DNA and life in general we will save for a nother day. but, i would also assume that it would reproduce asexually. Asexuall organisms must only be able to produce exact carbon copies of themselves, so evolution would never take place.

It seems like the only plausible answers are if A) freakersoup's theory of severe changes in the environment, but i dont find that plausible, or B) these first organisms would have had to come equipped with sex pili.

but even if they had sex pili, which would be very odd if they were created by accident, there would still had to have been more than one organism instantaneously created by accident, and these (at least) two organims would have be have variations in their genetic code.

or maybe i dont get it. but that is my understanding of it.

 

So do we all agree that time is non-existant?

Also, what is your alls opinions on ghosts we see in this world? Since people claim to see "people", I think it has to do with a crossing in dimensions... What do you all think?

 

http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=268882


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Most mutations are harmful or neutral, but some are helpful in giving adaptive advantages, and those are the ones that are selected. Mutations come about for a variety of reasons, radiation being only one of them.

 

I think I'm with Freaker on the mutations and severe changes in the environment. You're correct that asexual organisms produce exact copies of themselves. The evolution that took place would result from mutation, and would be relativley slow. Sex speeded things up considerably. But there were other mechanisms at work besides natural selection. Remeber Margulis' serial endosymbiosis we talked about before in the evolution from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, genetic drift, geographic migration, etc. All of those can go on without sex.
The definitive book on the evolution of single-celled organisms (by no means easy reading) is Margulis and Sagan, Microcosms: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution.

 

Well, then I can't answer because I believe we are our bodies (well, certain parts of the brain). But I don't mean to say that we are nothing more than cold dead lifeless matter. I believe we are a mind and a soul, but I don't believe these things are separate things from the physical body. I believe physicality and mentality (or spirituality) are two sides of the same coin. I believe that when we die, our mind/soul will continue to parallel our body through the process of decay and reabsorption into nature (like the coin falling to pieces yet each piece still having two sides). I believe the experience will be so drastically different from what we are familiar with in terms of our ordinary everyday experiences with consciousness that it will not be describable in terms of anything we are familiar with (like memories, thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc.). It will be totally new and unique experiences. Think about how altered our minds can get by a simple alteration in chemistry (i.e. when we take drugs). Now think about how altered it will get when the brain (and body) go through the process of decay? I think this process ends with the disolving of "ego" or "self" and we re-experience our one-ness with nature (or the universe), just as all the material components of our bodies disolve and become one with nature again (from dust to dust). In effect, there is no more "I" or "you", there is no more individual that experiences him/herself as distinct from the world.

Well, it's like I said - our experiences change so drastically that we would not experience anything like "memory" - we would have a whole new set of unimaginable experience. It might have been the same way before our birth. It might have been that as the sperm and egg came together to form a zygot, and then a fetus, and then a baby, and so on, the original experience was nothing like memories, thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc., but as we developped into infant human beings, whatever experiences we were having original changed and morphed until they became memories, thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc.

Also, I'm not sure if there could be any meaningful sense in which this could be construed as "reincarnation", but I do believe that our conscious experiences never end. It's just that we come from, and go to (after we die), a mind-state of one-ness with nature or the universe, in which case, there is no "self" per se, so it's hard to trace a line of continuation between a previous self and current self, but at the same time, the self you are now never really began from nothing (a non-conscious state) and won't ever go into nothing.

 

Pretty much. Ghosts are just shadows of those in the 4th dimension, just like we in the 3rd cast a 2d shadow, they cast a 3d shadow.

 

Well first, you are correct. As Okie said, most mutations are harmful, so most of the e. coli effected would die, or at least be less hardy. But you have to remember, when you use bacteria, you can work with huge numbers. So even if 99.9% of them die, you'll have plenty of interesting and non-lethal mutations left. Mutations that change a cell need not be drastic. X-rays just insert little dimers of Thymine, but they can give you cancer without much trouble. Little mutations in the right place can change a lot.

The thing with seeds is that it is made up of a lot of cells, so if you expose it to radiation and half of them die, the plant won't do as well. With unicellular stuff like e. coli, you can kill all but one and still have one perfectly functioning organism. It's all about scale. Well, it's a lot about scale, at least. If you did it with 2 million marigold seeds, I imagine you would see some interesting results over at the edge of the bell curve.