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For example, my reading of "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip" is different.
We'll just have to agree to disagree, in that case.
Nietzsche had an immense love of himself not humanity, or else he would not have advocated the "annihilation of millions".
Or perhaps my reading of that statement is in the negative.
The Ubermensch was indeed a symbol of human potential ....but based on superiority/inferiority.
That his thought preceded Nazism should be obvious from the example of an Ubermensch trying to become world-tyrant by annihilating millions!
For a fuller discussion of the aforementioned opinions of Neitzsche and their relevant quotations from his works I would refer those interested to A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.
For a fuller discussion of the aforementioned opinions of Nietzsche and their relevant quotations from his works I would refer those interested to A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.
....and for the most revealing discussion of Nietzsche which is DOUBLE the size of Bertrand Russell's entire History of Western Philosopy read 'Seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra' by C.G. Jung abridged in 2 volumes. Russell's work is completely outdated and he certainly had his own agenda. That's my two pence worth......respectfully.
Darran
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Oscar Wilde
Nietzsche had an immense love of himself not humanity, or else he would not have advocated the "annihilation of millions".
Actually this 'annihilation of millions' was never published by Nietzsche.....in fact he advocated the anihilation of millions through breeding and not though war or genocide. Churchill advocated the same thing.
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Oscar Wilde
He loved war. He loved aristocratic superiority. He believed that the majority existed only for the use of the minority. He believed that the majority should suffer for the cause of a great man.
He abhorred the doctrine "Do not unto others that which you would not that they should do unto you".
He abhorred the idea of human equality.
Democracy or female suffrage are to be avoided at all costs.
He believed that the power of a will was demonstated by the amount of pain and torture it could endure.
He hoped for more evil and suffering in the world.
He believed that the ubermensch (great man) would arise through the annhilation of millions of the bungled and botched (you and me).
He wanted a world government ruled by men of power; artist-tyrants.
Women exist for the recreation of men; and should be dominated through fear "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip" {the only woman Neitzsche knew was his sister!}
He disliked Buddhism because it denied the superiority of one over another.
In a nutshell, his philosophy was rooted entirely in fear.
Because I cant be bothered going to the library, leafing through the entire works of Neitzsche and transcribing the relevant quotations on to this page.
PS the "annihiliation of millions" as well as being a direct quotation is implicit in many of his other expressed views.
I greatly appreciate Nietzsche as a philosopher and thinker, though I do not agree with his philosophy or conclusions.
I consider it important to recognise that the imbalances in his philosophy (obsession with power, superiority, etc) and his personal life (few friends, complete inability to relate to the opposite sex) were directly related to the mental-physical problems which led to his death.
As a chi kung student I now see this link as elementary though I would not have done so in the past.
According to Buddhist philosophy negative thoughts lead to negative occurrences; Neitzsche obviously had a lot of negative thoughts and this manifested in his health...the unhealthy aspects of his philosophy also had an effect on others - the ubermensch ideal was clearly influential on the imperialism of his day and also influenced the likes of Adolph Hitler, for example.
Nietzsche's ideas, like all ideas, exist on more than one level. The French philosopher Derrida said that we each interpret ideas according to our own world view, motivations, understanding etc. Nietzsche's ideas are the same - on one hand, they can be pointing to the ideal of kung fu - a noble hero whose will and training makes him stand head and shoulders above others, capable of leadership, self confidence, breaking the rules where necessary, not inferior to any Gods, but noble, taking upon themselves total responsibility for their own actions; Nietzsche saw this idea in the Greek heroes.
On the other hand, that idea can be corrupted, like any idea.
Nietzsche was in fact the opposite of a Nazi, and an outspoken critic of anti-semitism. The problem with Nietzsche is that he was right, that his ideas resonate and have deep, profound truth. Unfortunately, the implications of his ideas don't lead us to any Eden. So it depends what we want - truth, or a safe, Matrix like existence. Personally, I want truth, even though it make me mad.
There again, many of those ideas are common place now. We forget what an uproarious social cataclysm it was in Nietzsche's day to suggest that a human being can be utterly his own master. Today, many embrace that idea. For Nietzsche, it was probably easier just to be mad.
I referred to HoWP for the relevant opinions of Neitzsche......
Opinions indeed. I don't think you needed to re-quote Russell's work again. Are you trying to gain some power and domination?
That was a joke by the way. There is so much more to Nietzsche than the narrow view you are subscribing to. Like the similarities between the character Zarathustra and Buddha......
But that would be too much work (like you I can't be bothered)
See you in London on 13th?
Darran
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Oscar Wilde
I agree that evolution is absolute, provable fact, happening all around us.
However, I do not concur with evolution as proposed by Darwin, nor do I follow that these assumptions are the basis of manifest reality, as popularised by the high profile atheist Richard Dawkins and the Neo-Darwinian school of thought.
Im a trained molecular biologist and evolutionary biology was my favourite subject at Uni so Im very familiar with the dogmas of science. I used to base my thoughts on existence on these assumptions; survival-of-the-fittest, natural selection, random mutation, genes as drivers of human behaviour, etc.
However, I became sick (just like Nietzsche) following these lines of thought because I was unbenknownst to myself blocking out other information that would have led to different conclusions and setting up conflicts within myself; living in ignorance of the greater nature of being, essentially.
As examples of how I now think of evolution, consider the following:
Subjectively
Subjectively, I have been evolving all my life, as has everything else I have witnessed.
If I had been naturally selected (been killed) or mutated to a great degree (became seriously sick) - this would have got in the way of the process of my evolution!
Evolution therefore involves mind, both my rational thinking mind and my body consciousness. Body consciousness (including the information template DNA) is intelligent and interacts with the rational mind and the environment, not a dead template.
i.e. The forests of Mauritius are less fertile than 500 years ago. Reason: Dodo is extinct. The forest is diminished because the Dodo is gone; to define the forest you must define the Dodo, to define the Dodo you must define the forest. Just as the Dodo has "No Self", the forest as a whole also has "No Self".
Reality -> no separation between living and dead
i.e. The Sun is inanimate and therefore "dead", but if you switched it off then the majority of the animate "living" portions of the surface of the earth would die.
To define life you must define the entire cosmos, and all of its processes, from micro to macro.
Conclusions:
Evolution is the nature of space-time.
Evolution is information processing.
Information is consciousness.
Evolution is the unfolding of Creation (Cosmic Mind)
Evolution is pure creativity (information/energy processing) manifested through the energy that we humans define as Love; an interdependent cooperative process in a cosmic system
...not an independent competitive process in a cosmic accident.
Subjective and objective are of course themselves creations of our culture. There is, obviously, a dogmatic element to all mass movements, no matter how based they are in fact. One thing we should separate first of all is intelectuals and scientitsts - they aren't always the same thing. Dawkins can be anti-intellectual when it suits him, as in, attacking Derrida, for example.
Of course, we all know, that there can be dogmatic elements to science. Karl Popper, Foucault, to name two famous examples, give insight in to the limitations and social nature of scientific method. August Comte is an example fo scientific dogma that has little to do with science, but everything to do with dogma. His flawed philosophy is echoed in the ideas of physicist Dr. Kaku. Brilliant physicist doesn't necessarily mean brilliant social philosopher, and when the two are blurred, we can certainly have dogmatic, ill considered movements such as the new, militant atheist movement.
However, 'limitation' doesn't mean 'wrong'. Religious or spiritual viewpoints are equally as valid as scientific perspectives, but each within its own 'sphere'. Of course a spiritual view of the world has its place.
However, equally valid doesn't mean equally true according to the 'rules' of each 'sphere'. From the 'sphere' of looking at the world, the physical objects, how they relate to each other, the evidence that we find, Creationist ideas are shown to be simply nonsense. A poetic, Buddhist or Taoist, new age, old age, spiritual view of the world has its place, just as your Spinozan type view of the unfolding conscious universe idea has its place. But so do facts, and truth, and provable, demonstrable connections.
We shouldn't fear science or the scientific method, I think, is a vital message. And the other is true too - that scientists needn't fear spirituality. Each is valid, but in different ways. Creationist ideas simply aren't true, the end. That doesn't mean they don't give people something that's valid to them.
Equally, a mytho-poeic, semi-Buddhist view of the conscious universe has its place, but it won't build computers or do an organ transplant.
Perhaps the real thing to see here is the unnecessary polarisation of viewpoints in our society.
That negative thoughts follow (or rather underly) aspects of his philosophy should be stating the obvious:
His ethic is one of power (over), domination.
He loved war. He loved aristocratic superiority. He believed that the majority existed only for the use of the minority. He believed that the majority should suffer for the cause of a great man.
He abhorred the doctrine "Do not unto others that which you would not that they should do unto you".
He abhorred the idea of human equality.
Democracy or female suffrage are to be avoided at all costs.
He believed that the power of a will was demonstated by the amount of pain and torture it could endure.
He hoped for more evil and suffering in the world.
He believed that the ubermensch (great man) would arise through the annhilation of millions of the bungled and botched (you and me).
He wanted a world government ruled by men of power; artist-tyrants.
Women exist for the recreation of men; and should be dominated through fear "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip" {the only woman Neitzsche knew was his sister!}
He disliked Buddhism because it denied the superiority of one over another.
In a nutshell, his philosophy was rooted entirely in fear.
Do you now agree that he may have been harbouring some negative thoughts, Darran? Can you see any links between his philosophy and both the imperialism of his day and the later work of Adolph Hitler?
Exactly.
Andy,you need to deeply consider where you get your information. Nietzsche wrote in a very formal German and we all know that translations can be altered and spun to give a completely false, non-contextual meaning.
Consider that Iranian President Ahmadenijhad never, apparently, actually said that 'Israel should be wiped from the map' - he said, so I have read (which may of course be someone else trying to sway me) frommore than one source, that the current Government of Israel should be gotten rid of.
What if I said 'The current Israeli regime should be eliminated' ?
See, there are many ways of saying the same thing, translating it according to my agenda.
Just the idea that the only woman Nietzsche ever knew was his sister is ridiculous, for a start. Actually, his sister was a terrible Nazi and racist, and it was she, whose ideas had been utterly rejected by Nietzsche, who endorsed Hitler, many years after his death. Rumour is you could hear him turn in his grave.
Current evolutionary thinking is based on assumptions, not fact. Scientists are always looking for missing links. They are not found. Instead, some raccoon looking animal is said to be the ancestor of whales. People see what they want to see. I don't believe that the world was created 6,000 years ago, nobody here is saying that. Rather I believe that humans have been here for much longer than currently proposed. If you look at the evidence without assumptions, you will see something different.
Mark
You need to bevery, very careful where you get your information from. Creationist 'scientists' tell lies, and then make other people look accidentally ignorant by repeating those lies as if they were fact. In fact, almost all the 'missing links' have been found in the fossil record. Yes, even fish with legs.
It's important to consider what 'dogma' really means. It just doesn't make any sense that hundreds of thousands of highly educated people, who actually have specialist knowledge in the area, somehow have fallen victimn to a 'swoon' of belief in a scientific idea that has no proof. That simply isn't the case.
What is true is that it is actually the Creationists who have very limited understanding and experience, who rely entirely on a dogmatic view of the world which not only rejects factual information but actively promotes an anti-intellectual agenda to attack people who are the most educated in the field.
What the Creationists accuse the scientists of is what they themselves are - ignorant of the facts, dogmatically led, and anti-thinking.
Evolutionary biology is a hugely advanced science, with a detailed fossilmap shpwing evolutionary change - certainly nothing like the dogmatic, factually incorrect dismissal you use here - compared to which Creationism is shown to be a simplistic dogmatic belief based on lack of factual understanding. And that lack of factual understanding is characterized by passing on false information, such as the idea that there are no 'missing link' fossils, when almost all missing link fossils have been found, or that there is no fossil continuum and 'all scientists have is a raccoon type being that is supposed to be the ancestor of a whale', which is simply factually utterly false and misleading in the grossest way. There most certainly is a fossil continuum of detailed evolutionary change. What's the argument against those? What Creationists have relied on is simply to dismiss scientists - the people with life times dedicated to the subject - as 'Dogmatic'. As opposed to people who have no knowledge in the area, but believe in a dogmatic religious or anti-intelectual agenda.
Last edited by Old-Liu; 23 November 2008, 06:52 PM.
We'll just have to agree to disagree, in that case.
Nietzsche had an immense love of himself not humanity, or else he would not have advocated the "annihilation of millions".
Or perhaps my reading of that statement is in the negative.
The Ubermensch was indeed a symbol of human potential ....but based on superiority/inferiority.
That his thought preceded Nazism should be obvious from the example of an Ubermensch trying to become world-tyrant by annihilating millions!
For a fuller discussion of the aforementioned opinions of Neitzsche and their relevant quotations from his works I would refer those interested to A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.
If you think Nietzsche was a Nazi, that in itself speaks volumes. MAybe you're thinking of Heidegger?
The Superman is an insight in to the puissance of human beings, not their anhililation.
I am not arguing Creationism as you understand it. I do not agree with these ideas, namely that the world was created some 6,000 years ago. Calling their ideas mine and using that to argue against me is invalid. I too disagree with "Creationism" as you are describing it. Focus on what I'm saying and not on what you think I'm saying.
As far as the whale missing link:
"It’s Indohyus, a fox-size deerlike animal that lived in what is now India and Pakistan at around the same time as the earliest whales."
Scientists who study evolution have long known that whales must have had ancestors that lived on land. Some characteristics were dead giveaways, most notably the fact that they are air-breathers.
But fossil evidence of the transition wasn’t found until the mid-1990s, when Hans Thewissen, a professor of anatomy at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and others described 50-million-year-old fossils of extinct whales with hind limbs. “It was clear they could walk on land,” Dr. Thewissen said.
What was still missing was the closest nonwhale ancestor, the animal that was the link to these early whales. Now Dr. Thewissen and colleagues are reporting in Nature that they’ve found the link. It’s Indohyus, a fox-size deerlike animal that lived in what is now India and Pakistan at around the same time as the earliest whales.
The animal, of the order artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates, has been known for about two decades, but it wasn’t until Dr. Thewissen examined fossils from Kashmir that he realized certain characteristics of the animal’s skeleton tied it to whales. Modern and ancient whales have a bone in their ear that is a half-sphere, thick on the outside and thin on the inside, the better to hear underwater.
“Indohyus has that,” Dr. Thewissen said. “It’s the first nonwhale to have that. That’s the most spectacular piece of evidence.” Further indication of the link to whales was found in the structure of some if its teeth, he said. Other evidence suggests that the animal might have spent at least part of its time in water.
Molecular analysis has suggested that the closest land relatives of whales are members of the hippopotamus family, which are also artiodactyls.
Dr. Thewissen said his work showed hippopotamids might be the modern sister group of whales, but they go back only 15 million years. Indohyus’s age is more in line with early whale evolution. “It’s closer to whales but doesn’t have extant relatives,” he said.
"Then how could chi kung overcome diseases where the cause is unknown or when there is no cure? The question is actually incorrect. The expressions "the cause is unknown" and "there is no cure" are applicable only in the Western medical paradigm. The expressions no longer hold true in the chi kung paradigm. In the chi kung paradigm the cause is known, and there is a cure."
It just doesn't make any sense that hundreds of thousands of highly educated people, who actually have specialist knowledge in the area, somehow have fallen victimn to a 'swoon' of belief in a scientific idea that has no proof. That simply isn't the case.
There are plenty of specialists in a field who are highly intelligent and well trained, but that doesn't make them totally right. Western medicine, which is practiced by thousands of specialists, is struggling to find cures for problems which are so easily cured by other systems, such as Shaolin Cosmos Chi Kung. Western science, just like medicine, is missing many links.
As it's been said, it's not that evolution doesn't exist, one can clearly see the world changing to meet circumstances, but I believe it goes beyond what science is examining, ie. the phenomenal world.
The fossil record is an interesting subject. The only fossils that can be found pre-cambrian are small and many have undergone heat and pressure from their travelling under the earth's surface; nothing big could easily have survived the long, long journey through time. The earth's plates are constantly regenerating. The farther in time you go back in the fossil record, the more difficult it is to find older and older rocks. What if there were large living things in the pre-cambrian? How would we know?
"Then how could chi kung overcome diseases where the cause is unknown or when there is no cure? The question is actually incorrect. The expressions "the cause is unknown" and "there is no cure" are applicable only in the Western medical paradigm. The expressions no longer hold true in the chi kung paradigm. In the chi kung paradigm the cause is known, and there is a cure."
The assumption of course is that it doesn't matter because there weren't large creatures living back then. You know what assumptions do to YOU and ME! hehe
There is always more to know and understand, and the theory of evolution is the same thing.
"Take a moment to feel how wonderful it feels just to be alive."
- Sifu
There is always more to know and understand, and the theory of evolution is the same thing.
Gentlemen ,
How ?
1) Do more scientific/palaentological research .
2) Look for someone who might know , and ask her/him.
3) Travel back in time and find out .
The intellect is not bad per se , in fact it is indispensable to function in this phenomenal world . But by thought alone , we cannot fully appreciate Reality . Find another way : until then , everything remains just a working hypothesis . By the way , OldLiu , ( if i read you correctly ) it is not correct to insinuate that there is aready absolute evidence for the hominoid to homo sapien evolution theory : even professional anthropologists and palaentologists do not claim to have completed Nature's jigsaw.However , you are definitely entitled to your stance .
Gamma and x-rays existed even before Roentgen was born ( Nature is bigger then all scientists' conceptions put together ) . Qi existed even before laboratory experiments documented/measured some of it's characteristics . Yet , many highly educated specialist doctors i know dismiss Qi as non existant . I work with xrays at my radiology clinic and with qi during Shaolin practice everyday but i do not have 1 st hand knowlegde of the origins of you and me : so lets work on it and share your experiences if you wish without getting emotional when comfort zones are being nudged .Children may think that electricity comes out of a hole in the wall , but it would be a mistake for adults to assume that the true source of electricity was the main domestic input .
Dogma and expanding consciousness cannot co-exist . Dogma will always decline as understanding increase. In our Shaolin Wahnam School , we aspire to and practise the wholistic cultivation of body , energy and mind (intellect and spirit ).
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