Love of Truth asked:


One of the things that impressed me a lot about both shows is the spiritual maturity the shows are attempting to lead the viewer towards. I believe the action to be better in Samurai 7 and some of the sexual tension and underlining loves is done perfect to a T. Also the concept of following the Tao and or being in a state of Zen is portrayed with masterful effectiveness. In Full Metal Alchemist I really enjoyed the unbreakable bond the brothers share plus when they lose their cool or are scared it makes me laugh every time. It never gets old. That show has some real Shen.
Mutt, I think you should reconsider Samurai 7. It is very good.

Xavier

I_color_outside_the_lines asked:


Not necessarily “church”, because I think that can be anything you want it to be. So, has anyone gotten in tune with the “lover of their soul” today…whoever or whatever that may be for you?

I did. I go to a metaphysical gathering called Celebration Circle. We had a speaker on Zen and meditation today, and also a really cool band called Mombasa Code. One of the guys plays the digiridoo (sp?)
wanna check out Celebration Circle? here’s their website…

www.celebrationcircle.org

Noah

Siddhartha asked:


Monk Gloats over yoga Championship

——————————————————————————–
“I am the serenest!” he says

LHASA, TIBET - Employing the brash style that first brought him to
prominence, SriDhananjai Bikram won the fifth annual International Yogi
Competition yesterday with a world-record point total of 873.6.

“I am the serenest!” Bikram shouted to the estimated crowd of 20,000 yoga
fans, vigorously pumping his fists. “No one is serener than Sri Dhananjai
Bikram-I am the greatest monk of all time!”

Bikram averaged 1.89 breaths a minute during the two-hour competition,
nearly .3 fewer than his nearest competitor, second-place finisher and
two-time champion Sri Salil “The Hammer” Gupta.

The heavily favored Gupta was upset after the loss. “I should be able to
beat that guy with one lung tied,” Gupta said. “I’m beside myself right
now, and I don’t mean trans-bodily.”

Bikram got off to a fast start at the Lhasa meet, which like most major
competitions, is a six-event affair. In the first event, he attained total
consciousness (TC) in just 2 minutes, 34 seconds, and set the tone for the
rest of the meet by repeatedly shouting, “I’m blissful! You blissful?! I’m
blissful!” to the other yogis.

Bikram, 33, burst onto the international yoga scene with a gold-mandala
performance at the 1994 Bhutan Invitational. At that competition he
premiered his aggressive style, at one point in the flexibility event
sticking his middle toes out at the other yogis. While no prohibition
exists against such behavior, according to Yoga League Commissioner Swami
Prabhupada, such behavior is generally considered “unBuddhalike.”

“I don’t care what the critics say,” Bikram said. “Sri Bikram is just gonna
go out there and do Sri Bikram’s own yoga thing.”

Before the Bhutan meet, Bikram had never placed better than fourth. Many
said he had forsaken rigorous training for the celebrity status accorded by
his Bhutan win, endorsing Nike’s new line of prayer mats and supposedly
dating the Hindu goddess Shakti. But his performance this week will regain
for him the number one computer ranking and earn him new respect, as well
as for his coach Mahananda Vasti, the controversial guru some have called
Bikram’s “guru.”

“My special training diet for Bikram of one super-charged, carbo-loaded
grain of rice per day was essential to his win,” Vasti said.

The defeated Gupta denied that Bikram’s taunting was a factor in his
inability to attain TC. “I just wasn’t myself today,” Gupta commented. “I
wasn’t any self today. I was an egoless particle of the universal no-soul.”

In the second event, flexibility, Bikram maintained the lead by supporting
himself on his index fingers for the entire 15 minutes while touching the
back of his skull to his lower spine. The feat was matched by Gupta, who
first used the position at the 1990 Tokyo Zen-Off.

“That’s my meditative position of spiritual ecstasy, not his,” remarked
Gupta. “He stole my thunder.”

Bikram denied the charge, saying, “Gupta’s been talking like that ever
since he was a 3rd century Egyptian slave-owner.”

Nevertheless, a strong showing by Gupta in the third event, the shotput,
placed him within a lotus petal of the lead at the competition’s halfway
point.

But event number four, the contemplation of unanswerable riddles known as
koans, proved the key to victory for Bikram.

The koan had long been thought the weak point of his spiritual arsenal, but
his response to today’s riddle-”Show me the face you had before you were
born “-was reportedly “extremely illuminative,” according to Commissioner
Prabhupada.

While koan answers are kept secret from the public for fear of exposing the
uninitiated multitudes to the terror of universal truth, insiders claim his
answer had Prabhupada and the two other judges “highly enlightened.”

With the event victory, Bikram built himself a nearly insurmountable lead,
one he sustained through the yak-milk churn and breathing events to come
away with the upset victory.
its a Zen-thing Phat….

Jayden

Beatchanter asked:


Let’s use as a base definition …..

for Zen: “emphasis on practice and experiential wisdom—particularly as realized in the form of meditation known as zazen—in the attainment of awakening.”

And Paganism: “a term which, from a Western perspective, has come to connote a broad set of spiritual or cultic practices or beliefs of any folk religion, and of historical and contemporary polytheistic religions in particular.”

James

ღMYSTERYWOMANღ asked:


FROM OPRAH SHOW WITH DR OZ: “If you have more than 200 orgasms a year, you can reduce your physiologic age by six years,” Dr. Oz says. He bases the number on a study done at Duke University that surveyed people on the amount and quality of sex they had. “They looked at what happened to folks that are having a lot of intercourse over time, and the fact is, it correlated.”

Among the benefits of having sex often, Dr. Oz says, is that it can prove that your body is functioning as it is supposed to. “But in addition, having sex with someone that you care for deeply is one of the ways we achieve that Zen experience that we all crave as human beings,” he says. “It’s really a spiritual event for folks when they’re with someone they love and they can consummate it with sexual activity … seems to offer some survival benefit.”
BENEFITS OF HAVING SEX….When Dr. Oz said healthy, monogamous sex can help you lose weight, viewers wrote in with lots of questions.

First, Dr. Oz wants to clear up a misconception that sex burns a lot of calories. In fact, sex only burns about 25, equal to half a slice of bread.

Instead, Dr. Oz says the real value of meaningful sex—not recreational sex—comes from the release of a hormone called oxytocin, which makes you feel community, love and empathy. “That is incredibly important because besides lowering your blood pressure, what it does is it tells your gut not to send signals to the brain to eat. So it’s a wonderful tool to get you where you want to be,” Dr. Oz says. Losing weight then tends to increase your sex drive, he says.

And, losing weight improves the sex lives of men in another way. “If you lose 35 pounds, if you’re a male, you are gaining one inch of penis length,” he says. Often when a man is carrying a lot of extra weight, Dr. Oz says a fat bundle builds up and starts to surround the shaft. As a man drops the weight, that fat starts to recede.

“I’ve been doing this show 21 years,” Oprah says. “I always love to hear something I’ve never heard before, and I’ve never heard that before.”

Mason

♡♥Kendall♥♡ asked:


I’m more spiritual, personally. I come froma Catholic upbringing, but over the years i’ve developed my own little…….spiritual state, i suppose you could call it. It’s like a mix between Catholocism, Zen Buddhism, and Paganism. I’m not into rules really, at least not when it comes to religion. i just can’t see a reason to be so firm with religion.

Jason

Breath on the wind asked:


A zen story:http://www.serenityfound.org/readings/spiritual_disease.html
If you think it might be then how would you go about emptying yours? Does answering questions help or hurt?
Thanks for all of your answers. For some, liquids seem more important than the container, for others saying anything seemed more important than the story, Following, I think you are trying to cheat this is only a metaphor. What about the real thing?, dubh, you have to get the prize for the cleverest response, and yes this might in fact be the ultimate answer to the problem, (expand your capacity), Pedestal, your answer at first made me angry and then laugh. It is definitely, “Special.” Dr, ditto read following above. Blind, I am just so sad. Mom, consider dubh answer above. I am not so sure we have to “let go” as grow into something else. Joe, you constantly surprise me and I appreciate your getting to the last part of the question.

As this sunset begins for this question, there is another very similar one beginning: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ag0utTk.3gP6c6vqrTOjqMI8.Bd.;_ylv=3?qid=20080819161617AABfZ51
What makes a “best answer” is probably as different as there are types of people. I guess for someone writing the question you like to see that people have taken a good look at the proposition, up close and maybe far away, have flipped it over and shaken it a bit, maybe stuck one foot in it or tried it on and ultimately rendered some kind of opinion or observation as well. Maybe they agree and for some that is the ultimate criteria, but it is also nice when someone makes an observation you didn’t think about or just makes you laugh.

I don’t think that we have to become innocent and like a blank slate to grow. Neither can we be so full of what we know that there is no more room. (The full cup.) Thanks to “dubh” for pointing out that expanding our capacity is as good as “emptying the cup.” It is Joe who reminded me that it is through the eyes of a child we remember the awe and wonder that makes everything we see as fresh as the first time.

Sebastian

snowonlava asked:


for the past decade, i’m 23, i’ve had this feeling that “i’m gonna take over” i’m gonna show all those people that i’m good enough. i’m gonna will myself through everything and achieve my dreams. I always had this nagging feeling that i’m missing something, like i’m missing the last piece to my puzzle which will allow me to “take over” totally control myself, achieve my goals and dreams and be eternally happy, like learning the secret to eternal happiness and nothing will bother me ever again. The perfect example is you know those zen masters who have realized enlightenment after hearing a sentence from their master, or a bird chirp, or the waterfall, and they are never the same again? Well i feel exactly like that, i feel like a pear that’s been hanging on the tree ripe for 10 years, and i’m just waiting to fall i’m ready for “something to happen” that’ll dramatically change me for the better; i’m waiting for me to wake up, that’s what i mean. I’ve read some eastern spiritual books, but mostly i can’t stablize my mind. I can’t sit down and really do anything(except surfing the internet or watch movies, and play games), because i know i’m just missing this one last peace that’ll set me free like the zen masters. You know that saying about one fish asking another fish has he ever seen water, or what water is. Its like the perfect way to describe my mental condition day in and day out, like i’m so darn close, like i know its right in front of me, but i still can’t see it. I know its so simple and so this and so that, but i still can’t see it.
I’ve always wanted to give up on this search, but on the other hand I sort of pride myself for fighting the ultimate fight and being a “true believer” like never give up. But i don’t know how much of this i can take i need to get on with my life. But this pear on tree/fish in water/last missing puzzle piece feeling is so great that it pushes everything else in my life beneath it and just takes over almost like a junkie searching for his next high, except i’ve never used any drugs of any kind. A little bit about my background, i came to the states from a foreign country when i was 8, and have been bullied in my younger years, even once when i was 18. I have alot of trapped anger and “quick temper”(sort of)(probablly from the bullying), I’m not crazy or insane even though my rambling writing and diction may indicate so. i’m not bipolar or adhd and i don’t believe in medication. What i need is some sincere help and advice. Please help, please, thanks.(pls don’t say anything about medication, god, just relax)

Brandon