This session struck me in so many ways, I can't thank everyone participating in the session live and on the forum enough.
(L) Well, that's true. You can hook up with somebody who has good ancestors, and their ancestors become your ancestors by you having shared realities. You're opening up and sharing your worries and troubles. The good ancestors of any group or any one person in a group kind of become the good ancestors of other members of the group.
(Pierre) And here you mentioned not ALL your ancestors - just the good ones. The same is true for the saintly figures. I think people should be aware that there are many saints who were not saints and other people who were vilified who were actually good.
(L) There are saints who were made saints, but they weren't actually very good people. And then there are other saints who deserved that title. That's a good topic for discussion... not a C’s discussion, but rather a discussion amongst people.
I'm definitely interested in these kinds of discussions on the forum here. I started a
thread on Socrates since I didn't see one for him yet.
I'm also slowly learning more about the monastics in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, particularly as discussed by St Nikodemos in his anthology of monastic writings the
Philokhalia.
Q: (L) Okay. So, is there anything that I didn't have on my list that should be on the list?
A: Not as such.
Q: (L) I guess we can expand it as we see fit.
Reading this list there was one thing that I thought should be added to the list, which I think is communion or eating together food people prepare. And it's not because people aren't doing it but rather because it's so commonplace that I think people sometimes forget its value. As a person who lives alone and doesn't eat at work, a part of me really misses and cherishes the times I share meals with others. There's the adage that families that eat together stay together as well.
In Christianity communion is a important sacrament. In essence it was about Christ giving his flesh and blood (as symbolized by bread and wine) for people to consume, so that they would assimilate Christ and so quite literally as individuals and a church become the body of Christ and be connected to him.
In more mundane terms I always feel great when having a good discussion with people I like and care about, but having everyone prepare and eat food together adds another dimension to it. When I think of spending time with people and wanting to cook and organize ingredients, there's a lot of effort and creativity that is involved with that. Sometimes I would catch myself singing positive songs while working in the kitchen, and would just generally be in a good mood. A part of me wonders if that imprints on the food somehow, like part of the information in the water or something. I remember even Gurdjieff said that actually emotionally caring for a cow or goat improves the quality of its milk - not just good animal husbandry.
Normally it is ordained priests and the like who are qualified to get "Christ" to manifest in the bread and wine through the liturgy and conducting sacraments to help the congregation consume Christ and so add his being to their own. Stripped of the ritualistic elements, it comes down to a person bringing something higher and positive (FRV?) into the food, which people literally are consuming and assimilating into themselves in a very real fashion.
This is just a hypothesis I came up with. Communion or eating together food people make overlaps with the other recommendations like diet, sharing (providing/cooking food, real networking conversations), and karaoke (in terms of collective work that raises people's vibration).
(Joe) The point is that... I mean, you have in your head that there's going to be some kind of clash of civilizations, but that doesn't seem to be the point. If you look at social media today, they've gotten to the point where Christians are denounced as basically atavistic racist backward nutjobs. When they...
It's really frustrating for me to hear that. Christianity is a universalist philosophy like Stoicism, which means it stands really above any sort of racialist in-group preferences because you're to be honoring the higher values that connect all peoples regardless of their ethnic backgrounds or contingent self interests.
During the process, I witnessed what seemed to me a complete transformation of the dying woman's personality. Later, I had a symbolical dream of an angel with its wings spread out from above in a cave's upper entrance which I interpreted to mean that I just witnessed something very special.
I wonder if that was Plato's cave she snuck out of? :P
A few notes: "Qigong" is not actually Qigong. It's something that Ark and Chu formulated, and have been doing for about 1 year. It's a combo of Qigong, yoga, 5 Tibetan Arky Exercises, stretches, and some normal exercises for building strength. They do it every day first thing in the morning.
Wow. Is this something either of them would be interested in sharing with peeps on here sometime?