What Do You All Think Of TED...?

[Love Zhaoying]

13 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

The  "designed for 100% mortality" is an interesting idea. Biologists wonder if immortality is possible. Under the right circumstances, they think organisms, or at least the cells within them, might live significantly longer than we see in nature. So, why do they die prematurely? Is there an advantage to keeping lifespan short so that genetic selection can run fast enough to keep up with environmental changes? A thing that lives forever can't be reproducing very often, or it would fill up the space available to it. It really does seem that death is an essential part of life.

Thank goodness the genetic secrets of the super-centenarians have not been unlocked yet, or only the rich and powerful will benefit.

I am reminded of Heinlein’s Lazarus Long, who being from a naturally long-lived stock was part of a sponsored “breeding” program to encourage those with good ancestry (long-lived) to have children with others of the same good genetics. 

Eventually, age caught up with Lazarus Long, by that time science had an initial solution: “total blood replacement”. If the same stories were written today, I imagine the fix would have been some type of gene therapy.

Maddie, I often think of you as either Lazarus’ mother, or the character from Heinlein’s Friday. Just realized it. You’re welcome.

[Luna Bliss]

14 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I don't feel guilty. It's an innocuous event and she's happy I remember details of it for her. I place this deception along with lies like "yes, that necklace looks good on you" or "I didn't answer your three phone calls this morning because my phone was dead".

She knows I'm a devil, I've told her so and proved it.

Ahh ok, that sounds rather innocent as they know you play games, and so in that sense they are in on the joke or experiment.
If someone did that too me though, without my awareness of the experiment I'm being used for, I would feel like they were attempting to gaslight me -- deliberately trying to change my sense of reality for their benefit.
I share your fascination with the brain though...in trying to understand just how and to what degree our brains can fool us, and most especially when approval is at stake (either from self or others).

*Looks warily around, wondering if an experiment is taking place ;0

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

If someone did that too me though, without my awareness of the experiment I'm being used for, I would feel like they were attempting to gaslight me -- deliberately trying to change my sense of reality for their benefit.

My guru did such things all the time, trying to get you to see what’s real. Simple things like, “I wish you could be happy.” (I thought I was.) Singing the praises of your name, even in group chant. (What reality am I in, where a saint and his disciples are singing praises of my name?) Putting my picture on the shrine for 6 months. (Am I being offered up, included in worshiped items, or is it just so I look at myself differently?) Etc.

[Luna Bliss]

28 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

My guru did such things all the time, trying to get you to see what’s real.

That's really cool, to have such help. It seems, as far as I can tell from what you've described, that he was trying to show you what you are identifying with. What we identify with can limit us.
It's interesting, all this talk of the mind as it relates to Science, and how many think if people would just be rational and not fall for the distortions in reasoning that all would be well. Honestly, it's a bit crazy -- in some articles I've read people adopt a religious zeal for this kind of computational representation of the mind.
In Yoga, as I'm sure you know, the goal is to stop identifying with the mind, because we are much more than the mind -- the mind is more seen as one of the tools we have, but it is not 'us'.
I wish I could say I had great success in not identifying so much with my mind, but I'm afraid I'm pretty much at the level I was years ago when one of my teachers came by where I was stirring a pot of soup in the ashram and said, with his very cute Indian accent, "Luna, your mind is like the soup in the pot, going round and round".  lol

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

the goal is to stop identifying with the mind

I’d say, body.

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

6 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

the goal is to stop identifying with the mind

I’d say, body.

Yes, anything really.

I remember a mantra:

We have a body, but we are not our body.

We have emotions, but we are not our emotions.

We have a mind, but we are not our mind.

[Rolig Loon]

Some of us are just out of our minds.

[Love Zhaoying]

14 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Some of us are just out of our minds.

I’ll wait patiently until you return.