Best Of
Re: Deliberatly Ending a Human life- How can we justify it ?
I’d like to add a coda…
My father’s death was another interesting case. When he was admitted to hospital it was with a stroke, not something you usually die from. Initially his prospects of making a decent recovery were rated quite highly. But then he had a lung infection and spent ten days on a breathing machine in Intensive Care, and by the time they moved him back to Neurology there were serious doubts whether he could survive unaided.
So what does it mean - surviving unaided. It means you can breathe and eat and drink without assistance. They put him on a Code 3 protocol, which means no invasive actions which extend life, so no liquid food via a tube, no extra liquids via injection, no breathing machine etc. And he couldn’t swallow. He had a less than comfortable 24 hours before he passed away quietly.
It was clear that my father required less aid in dying than my stepfather. He was not on morphine as far as I know, he didn’t get a deep sleep medication at the end, it was just his time. It was also his wish not to live on if he was going to be stuck in a wheelchair, something he made very clear to us over the years.
Yet if we had our own private hospital and a nurse and doctor, his life could have been extended. For the doctors it was very clear that by choosing the Code 3 protocol they were removing the supports which had been keeping him stable. So there was a conscious life or death choice on their part.
Jeroen
Re: What we are doing right?
I came across this quote…
Never make the negative the object of your study, because the negative is not there. You can go on and on and you will never arrive anywhere. Try to understand what light is, not darkness. Try to understand what life is, not death. Try to understand what love is, not hate.
I thought it was a good pointer. One should study the positive things in life, like the art of loving, like the art of appreciating nature and beauty, the art of enjoying small things.
Jeroen
Re: Daily meditation changes you
Listening to an interview today the teacher Matthew Brensilver said something that I thought shed some light on the idea to not get hung up on meditation progress. He said your meditation practice is none of your business. It was a kind of Zenny clever way of putting it, but he explained its kind of like doing bicep curls and constantly checking to see if your muscles are getting bigger. It happens slowly and almost imperceptibly, with exercise we see enough examples to have confidence that it will work. At the moment meditation is still fairly new in the West and its harder to have faith that our efforts will bear fruit, so we keep looking for affirmation.
He also shared something from his own teacher, can't remember her name, about not getting hung up on success or having good meditations. Her advice was along the lines of treat it like a job, just show up, punch in, punch out, and do the work.
person
Re: What we are doing right?
@Jeroen said:
I seem to have mastered my craving for sweets. There is a small holdout remaining first thing in the morning, when I want to have some chocolate with my first coffee, but after that i can go the whole day without sweets and I don’t miss them either.
That's interesting @Jeroen , I was under the impression if you can resist the craving when you first get up, that can set you up for the rest of the day.
Thus have I heard : The first craving or urge in the morning is often one of the strongest because it’s tied to routine and conditioned behaviours. If you manage to resist that initial urge, especially with something like smoking, sugar, or even checking your phone compulsively, you’re more likely to strengthen your self-control early in the day, which builds momentum and your brain learns that you can say no, which makes it easier next time.
Shoshin1
Re: Deliberatly Ending a Human life- How can we justify it ?
During my aunts funeral reception a couple of days ago my cousin showed up with his five young kids aged 13 to just a few months. The coffin had been closed just before the reception began, but still, there was inevitable talk of the deceased and dying. In a way that was very good, to not hide the fact of death from those young kids, and to let them partake in this facet of life also.
Jeroen
Re: The Plant Medicine Path
It’s quite interesting why these kinds of chemicals occur in the plant world. Pollan’s speculation is that there must be some evolutionary advantage. His first impulse was to see if it would serve as a defense mechanism, but then what to make of psilocybin mushrooms, where the substance is concentrated in the fruiting body of the fungus, meant to be eaten, and not in the mycelium network, which would need to be defended.
Jeroen
Re: The Plant Medicine Path
I came across someone on another forum who was talking about “the well-crazy psychedelic shit that is going down in some places” and he posted this link…
https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/dmt-on-mega-yachts-inside-the-psychedelic
It struck me, to be combining psychedelics with other drugs like cocaine and amphetamines or to be doing the strongest substances like 5-meo-DMT weekly when it takes most people six months to a year to get over a single experience is crazy and self destructive.
You have to ask yourself what hole in your life are you trying to fill with that behaviour. What the modern science of addiction tells us is that for the most part addiction is a response to something crucial lacking in your daily life, that if you are happy and fulfilled you will not go looking for substances. And merely being wealthy does not lead to happiness or fulfilment.
There are better ways to handle a psychoactive substance, and that is to learn and to cure. The shamanic path that the Peruvian curanderos follow is to learn a plant substance, to diet it, and in that way to learn to handle its spirit, for the purposes of learning and curing. It is a spiritual path, of curing those who are spiritually ill.
Jeroen
Re: “502” error on this site
Icrontic (which shares the server with NB) is getting swarmed by bots scraping the contents for AI nonsense, which is a growing problem across the Web. I've blocked a number of them for now, which hopefully will help. I have longer-term ideas but lack the time to implement them this week.
Linc