But as usual on bulletin boards it is never easy. I have looked everywhere for the option to delete one's own account. Please delete my account (and please remove all record of it).
To me it is that nothing can be considered in isolation. Anything considered in isolation, arises conceptually from falsely presuming the context that allows for this isolated consideration in the first place, and in such light, anything considered in isolation logically amounts to no-thing. Interestingly as grammar works, it may also be said that Nothing can be considered in isolation.
Hmmm, thanks for the replies. I did not realize Ninjutsu will never return. Still, couldn't Ninjas return as a creature type? If they're good, then Mr. Still Wind will see play. I mean it seems so broken. Hum, I must ask though, does the attacker you return to your hand still deal combat damage? I Googled the card and couldn't find an answer.
Anyways, they could always make a Goblin Matron for Ninjas... I don't know, I see potential. Also Ninja really fits with blue, and is a pretty awesome creature type.. this alone seems to me to hint that Ninjas will be expanded upon? *shrugs*
Thanks for that comment about changelings, I am not yet familiar with the newer sets, and had no idea lol.
Nice clan, I do enjoy the coffee shop thing with me laptop, but I hate smalltalk.. if only coffee shops today were like they were in the 60s and 70s.. man I missed that wave.
Wow... I'd almost be tempted to call this type of question baiting. It's not that it's not a fair question (i.e., what's the core difference between good and evil, and what are the defining traits of each?), but the way you've phrased your question, Verzen, seems to be engineered to provoke kneejerk responses from people in the Judeo-Christo-Islamic tradition.
Alas my knee has carpal tunnel syndrom *because* of the Judeo-Christo-Islamic tradition.
Plus Jesus elicited plenty of knee-jerking in his day.
Well black market will always produce low quality drugs, and quality is very important because drugs are powerful and delicate things.
The drug culture is disgusting, and would seriously improve if the crime surrounding it and yes the black market would go away, if drugs were legalized.
If drugs were legalized, then scientists could also continue testing them for psychological, spiritual, and other health purposes, as they did around the 60s... right now good arguments for legalization can't even be made, because it's illegal to test drugs like this, or use illegal tests as evidence for a cause.
As the adage goes, the war against drugs is a war against consciousness.
Hmmmm, I do not really understand what you are saying, FoxBat. How to do you relate to the reality of the Trinity that is simultaneous oneness and difference? Personally I am coming from the perspective that you ask me what God is and I point to the salt shaker on the table or any other old thing. Picture the Zen teacher, when the student asks what is God, he says what isn't? This is not banal, but hopefully indeed it is not worthy of worship. Worship is another affair altogether.
More than the sum of its parts. I definitely take a view that does not minimize the importance of Maya. I do not think it is possible to say that Nothing is in any way better or worse than the salt shaker. So I would never say that God is "more" than "simply the largest possible collection of distinct objects (things)". To me this could be called sacrilegious if you are coming from a theistic perspective. Certainly I do not think highly of the commonly held views on such subjects. Suffice it to say that Blake was on to something saying that he sees the universe in a grain of sand, and if you get technical, you may just logically have to take him *literally* on that (as science is beginning to discover).
The word "Nothing" as the Divine lends itself in important ways to the personal experience of a spiritual reality.. how the process is largely at first deconstructive, and finally when one crosses the abyss, they remain in no-thing and use it as their blank slate, upon which a master can be created. My words here are not precise. But I am sort of trying to shock you. Even the word "Nothing" is tricky, because one may easily think that negative connotation is associated therewith. The point is that religion has been used as a weapon against humanity for ages, and the result today is a prison planet, that 'might' just avoid complete desolation.
I don't know what "tautologically" means but I beg to differ lol. What if All is just a word, describing all things? There is no All for any intents and purposes, yet it cannot be denied that the sum of everything is expressible. All is not a thing, it is many things. This is what I am speaking about, but more profoundly. If you dissect any particular thing on (wise) logical grounds, then you are left with but a shell, a phantom of a thing, you are left with no-thing. And all 'no-things' are one in Nothing. The one central permanence that allows impermanent conventional to arise into individual existence in the first place, this one thing cannot but exist in simultaneous oneness and difference, at once both all 'no-things' and separate from all 'no-things'. How could it be otherwise? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. "All" is a term, but also representative of all things. When you say the term, this expression is inclusive of what it represents, but gives something else, a label to say it better. Now imagine if the whole universe is words being read in sentences and stories.. how impressive will the label of it all be, even if it is called but 'Nothing'?
The symbol and the symbolized is never the same. Indeed by this symbolic process does everything come back to Nothing. The moment you say that one thing exists in isolation from any greater context, then you confuse symbol with symbolized. The only constant is change. The constant is Nothing, and the change is everything, but the change is simultaneously a part of Nothing and apart from Nothing. It is difficult for us to grasp this because ours is a single-pointed focus that is temporally bound, as opposed to a focus that captures all eternity at once (leaving room for free will of course, hey it ain't easy to be a god!).
Actually it's also funny how you put it extremestan, because Nothing generally fits like magic into sentences in spiritual context. Like put it in the adage "nothing infinite exists apart from the finite" and the sentence also works as "Nothing infinite exists apart from the finite". Whenever you speak of "no-thing" in the Buddhist sense, usually you can substitute in Nothing and the sentences gains a different but still true meaning.
I really like this topic, because where others often know it through a spiritual faith, I know the 'Divine' as Nothing. Believe it or not, I'm trying to get this terminology more generally accepted in the modern Western marketplace of ideas, sort of like a new spiritual faith, which is only representative of the truths wise men and women have expressed throughout the ages. But the key thing is that I feel Nothing is the best expression of Truth, and I am not the first to use it as such. When you start to use other conventions to express Truth, then you make logical claims that need to be backed up, like God or Satan, or even the Tao where the Lao Tze's famous text the Tao Te Ching literally translates into the English title as "the Tao which is not the Tao".. the word Nothing fits perfectly with traditional Eastern spiritual understanding, and I don't understand why it has not yet been adopted in the modern marketplace of ideas as something of a synthesis of all religions, finally impersonal in nature and beyond dogmas and biases (which is not to say that under the way of Nothing various deities and godforms cannot exist).
So that was just background. Now I will offer a summary answer to the original topic question, coming from a spiritual as opposed to per se philosophical perspective. It is interesting to note that logic plays no less of a role in a spiritual perspective as it does in a philosophical perspective.
The only thing that exists, is Nothing. It is like saying, the only thing that exists is the Divine/God/All/etc. Many different spiritual and occult terms exist to go into greater detail. Of course there is always the matter of context, as for instance here I am assuming that there is such thing as a "Divine", but this is a separate conversation. So, Nothing is fundamental, and the source of universal procession, whereas universal procession is conventional, and the living manifestation of (and extension of) Nothing. Nothing is the ultimate essence and keystone of Creation. It consists in essence of universal principles of creation, in archetypal form both eternal and living, in the Qabalistic framework of the Tree of Life. It is all a matter of simultaneous oneness and difference. Where the Tree of Life, comprised of ten archetypal and infinite Sephirot, is like the alphabet, similarly is physical reality spoken. The Hebrew alphabet is an important aspect of this.
But what does this all mean?
To understand Nothing, is to be self-realized, is to See Maya and See *through* Maya. In the trinary vein of simultaneous oneness and difference, it is proper understanding of the nature of reality at large, that is completely logical as well as practical. Basically it is the knowledge that All is illusion, but where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so All does exist, as Nothing. This is where the logic is chiefly involved, especially if you are hearing all this for the first time. But it is complicated to express, and here the medium is a great deal the message, as most people have inbuilt psychological defenses to resist the notion and implications of Maya. However, new-age spirituality generally does a terrible job at explaining it, and the truth is that it is not so difficult to express. It is however very long, so I will only speak summarily here, but if you want to know more, read Alan Watt's The Wisdom of Insecurity.
Basically, if you name me anything, and feel free to, then I can explain how it does not exist. This is one way of going about it lol. What is a molecule but part of an atom, what is an atom but part of a larger piece of physical matter, what is this piece of physical matter but part of a planet, then universe, then dimension, etc,, all the way to Nothing. This is most simplistic and hardly conclusive, but gives you an idea. It also works through time, as in eternity, eventually star dust gets moved around enough that one thing is made up of bits and pieces of (formerly) tons of other different things. But it's much more than this, because space and time are not separate, but one thing that is space-time. To wit, how can a chair exist without the empty space around it to delineate its contour and form? Woah, now wait a minute. So a chair cannot exist in-and-of itself, the whole universe cannot be a chair, for then no one would be outside of the universe, to sit in the chair. This means that everything is contingent on emptiness for existence. Go deeper, and even emptiness is little particles, dark matter, etc.
Interesting, so what this really means is that space and time are interconnected and mutually contingent. All space, all matter, is one thing, that constantly *changes* pattern. It cannot change without emptiness within which to work, creating the illusion of time as a function of *measurement* of the process of change. So the Now, as the spiritual term goes to describe the present moment, is different than it is *Now*, which is different than it is *Now*, etc. etc., it is ever-changing, and can never be grasped as if it were a static model suspended in animation, as opposed to a living pattern of evolution. Yet simultaneously, the Eternal Now, from the beginning of eternity itself, is the very same one Now, and forever. Clearly this matter is very complex.
You think about your process of self-realization and recapitulating your past so that you are not binded by it but rather regard it properly and in a way so that it no longer defines you. Interesting. This is exactly how it is for anything else, like a plant, in that it is not defined by its past. But then how does the plant know *how* to grow, if it is not sentient? How does the chair know how to age? Because the Eternal Now is not anything intellectual, as if a concept that represents a living truth, but rather it *is* the living truth of the eternal and ever-changing present moment, experiential in nature. There is no plant, just Nothing (think Tao) that is changing. There is no chair, just Nothing that is changing. There is no you or I, just Nothing that is changing. You cannot laugh without something funny, you cannot cry without something sad, you cannot live but for the inevitability of death in other words a symptom of the reality that you are impermanent and individually and sovereignly sentient as opposed to permanent in the sense of impersonality and inertness.
I have done a pretty lousy job at expressing what I mean to express. It is very difficult to do in isolated context. I apologize. Maybe ask me if a thing exists and I'll explain how it does not. I have not spoken about these sorts of things in much time, focusing rather on very different aspects of spirituality. It seems I am rusty! Having seen how dismally does most spiritual writing express Truth on this point, I have also become cautious always to give the downsides along with the (always redeeming) upsides, perhaps overly cautious, but I'm sick of portraying spirituality as something "empty". Honestly it is the key to personal immortality. If I try to say this in a more precise and direction fashion, then it will seem very negative, as if any negative connotation is associated with "Nothing".. it will only finally seem positive once I continue writing at length and finally come to the end where the reader becomes enlightened. LOL That's why eastern spiritual rhymes and riddles were as they were. If you say it bluntly, it will sound unfortunate and deterministic. It is truly wondrous.
Assuming Ninjas will eventually be expanded upon as a creature type, which I assume they will be. Personally I intend to save my copies of this card for the future. I have not heard anything similar along these lines, but I have not been listening too hard. What is the story?
Yes I was surprised when I realized that it is not possible to delete one's post, which I would have done after checking how the sig works. Thanks for the welcome!
Mang, now I've been out of the T1 loop for about two years, but I know a thing or two that still hold true. When aggro is the deck to beat, then the metagame is just in a state of change. Besides aggro is good because it can disrupt the opponent, which works best against control and sometimes combo. Creatures alone will accomplish nothing, because there are so many ways to deal with them. The problem is that control decks with said aim would be accordingly vulnerable in other places, with a less optimal configuration, because who really wins with creatures, as opposed to board and tempo control? So the metagame is slow to change away from aggro, because control cannot come in straight up to solve the issue with any success. Eventually, one or more decks will be invented or become refined enough to the extent of totally smoking/outclassing aggro often enough.. then control comes back into the picture, fighting multiple fronts since there is no "deck to beat" let alone an aggro deck to beat, which is what control does best, because its cards are powerful and *flexible*.
I think it's a huge myth that Vintage is that much more expensive to play then Standard. Think about it from this perspective. A set of power runs 3k-3500. You don't necessarily need all the pieces, just the important ones (Black Lotus, Mox Jet, Mox Sapphire, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk). Now your total is 1800-2000. Sometimes you dont even need all of these. In the end, you may have somewhere between 1k and 4k invested in Vintage "staples" and at this point, you can pretty much build most of the Vintage Decks (minus specialty cards). This base doesn't change much - if you own the cards already you don't need to keep buying.
In standard, some decks (at least when Rav was legal) had $100+ mana bases + staples. Standard is constantly changing so unless you can get even trades - we end up constantly buying cards. New land, New sets, etc... I think it may be fair to say that in a given year, you may spend less than what you would have for Vintage - but over 2-3 years I think you end up spending more in Standard when you just try to keep up.
Yes but a good standard player can keep cycling his cards into the new things, once he has enough stock to do so, which is less than what you'd need to invest for the T1 necessities. That's often what good standard players do, they only ever spend money to sign up for tournies and possibly travel.
Thank you for your time.
Regards
If a conversation has run its course, just leave it be - spammy chitchat is not necessary.
I will post more later.
Anyways, they could always make a Goblin Matron for Ninjas... I don't know, I see potential. Also Ninja really fits with blue, and is a pretty awesome creature type.. this alone seems to me to hint that Ninjas will be expanded upon? *shrugs*
Thanks for that comment about changelings, I am not yet familiar with the newer sets, and had no idea lol.
As Master Splinter said, I made a funny!
Nice clan, I do enjoy the coffee shop thing with me laptop, but I hate smalltalk.. if only coffee shops today were like they were in the 60s and 70s.. man I missed that wave.
Plus Jesus elicited plenty of knee-jerking in his day.
Anyways I think that 95% is pretty low.:-/
The drug culture is disgusting, and would seriously improve if the crime surrounding it and yes the black market would go away, if drugs were legalized.
If drugs were legalized, then scientists could also continue testing them for psychological, spiritual, and other health purposes, as they did around the 60s... right now good arguments for legalization can't even be made, because it's illegal to test drugs like this, or use illegal tests as evidence for a cause.
As the adage goes, the war against drugs is a war against consciousness.
More than the sum of its parts. I definitely take a view that does not minimize the importance of Maya. I do not think it is possible to say that Nothing is in any way better or worse than the salt shaker. So I would never say that God is "more" than "simply the largest possible collection of distinct objects (things)". To me this could be called sacrilegious if you are coming from a theistic perspective. Certainly I do not think highly of the commonly held views on such subjects. Suffice it to say that Blake was on to something saying that he sees the universe in a grain of sand, and if you get technical, you may just logically have to take him *literally* on that (as science is beginning to discover).
The word "Nothing" as the Divine lends itself in important ways to the personal experience of a spiritual reality.. how the process is largely at first deconstructive, and finally when one crosses the abyss, they remain in no-thing and use it as their blank slate, upon which a master can be created. My words here are not precise. But I am sort of trying to shock you. Even the word "Nothing" is tricky, because one may easily think that negative connotation is associated therewith. The point is that religion has been used as a weapon against humanity for ages, and the result today is a prison planet, that 'might' just avoid complete desolation.
The symbol and the symbolized is never the same. Indeed by this symbolic process does everything come back to Nothing. The moment you say that one thing exists in isolation from any greater context, then you confuse symbol with symbolized. The only constant is change. The constant is Nothing, and the change is everything, but the change is simultaneously a part of Nothing and apart from Nothing. It is difficult for us to grasp this because ours is a single-pointed focus that is temporally bound, as opposed to a focus that captures all eternity at once (leaving room for free will of course, hey it ain't easy to be a god!).
Actually it's also funny how you put it extremestan, because Nothing generally fits like magic into sentences in spiritual context. Like put it in the adage "nothing infinite exists apart from the finite" and the sentence also works as "Nothing infinite exists apart from the finite". Whenever you speak of "no-thing" in the Buddhist sense, usually you can substitute in Nothing and the sentences gains a different but still true meaning.
So that was just background. Now I will offer a summary answer to the original topic question, coming from a spiritual as opposed to per se philosophical perspective. It is interesting to note that logic plays no less of a role in a spiritual perspective as it does in a philosophical perspective.
The only thing that exists, is Nothing. It is like saying, the only thing that exists is the Divine/God/All/etc. Many different spiritual and occult terms exist to go into greater detail. Of course there is always the matter of context, as for instance here I am assuming that there is such thing as a "Divine", but this is a separate conversation. So, Nothing is fundamental, and the source of universal procession, whereas universal procession is conventional, and the living manifestation of (and extension of) Nothing. Nothing is the ultimate essence and keystone of Creation. It consists in essence of universal principles of creation, in archetypal form both eternal and living, in the Qabalistic framework of the Tree of Life. It is all a matter of simultaneous oneness and difference. Where the Tree of Life, comprised of ten archetypal and infinite Sephirot, is like the alphabet, similarly is physical reality spoken. The Hebrew alphabet is an important aspect of this.
But what does this all mean?
To understand Nothing, is to be self-realized, is to See Maya and See *through* Maya. In the trinary vein of simultaneous oneness and difference, it is proper understanding of the nature of reality at large, that is completely logical as well as practical. Basically it is the knowledge that All is illusion, but where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so All does exist, as Nothing. This is where the logic is chiefly involved, especially if you are hearing all this for the first time. But it is complicated to express, and here the medium is a great deal the message, as most people have inbuilt psychological defenses to resist the notion and implications of Maya. However, new-age spirituality generally does a terrible job at explaining it, and the truth is that it is not so difficult to express. It is however very long, so I will only speak summarily here, but if you want to know more, read Alan Watt's The Wisdom of Insecurity.
Basically, if you name me anything, and feel free to, then I can explain how it does not exist. This is one way of going about it lol. What is a molecule but part of an atom, what is an atom but part of a larger piece of physical matter, what is this piece of physical matter but part of a planet, then universe, then dimension, etc,, all the way to Nothing. This is most simplistic and hardly conclusive, but gives you an idea. It also works through time, as in eternity, eventually star dust gets moved around enough that one thing is made up of bits and pieces of (formerly) tons of other different things. But it's much more than this, because space and time are not separate, but one thing that is space-time. To wit, how can a chair exist without the empty space around it to delineate its contour and form? Woah, now wait a minute. So a chair cannot exist in-and-of itself, the whole universe cannot be a chair, for then no one would be outside of the universe, to sit in the chair. This means that everything is contingent on emptiness for existence. Go deeper, and even emptiness is little particles, dark matter, etc.
Interesting, so what this really means is that space and time are interconnected and mutually contingent. All space, all matter, is one thing, that constantly *changes* pattern. It cannot change without emptiness within which to work, creating the illusion of time as a function of *measurement* of the process of change. So the Now, as the spiritual term goes to describe the present moment, is different than it is *Now*, which is different than it is *Now*, etc. etc., it is ever-changing, and can never be grasped as if it were a static model suspended in animation, as opposed to a living pattern of evolution. Yet simultaneously, the Eternal Now, from the beginning of eternity itself, is the very same one Now, and forever. Clearly this matter is very complex.
You think about your process of self-realization and recapitulating your past so that you are not binded by it but rather regard it properly and in a way so that it no longer defines you. Interesting. This is exactly how it is for anything else, like a plant, in that it is not defined by its past. But then how does the plant know *how* to grow, if it is not sentient? How does the chair know how to age? Because the Eternal Now is not anything intellectual, as if a concept that represents a living truth, but rather it *is* the living truth of the eternal and ever-changing present moment, experiential in nature. There is no plant, just Nothing (think Tao) that is changing. There is no chair, just Nothing that is changing. There is no you or I, just Nothing that is changing. You cannot laugh without something funny, you cannot cry without something sad, you cannot live but for the inevitability of death in other words a symptom of the reality that you are impermanent and individually and sovereignly sentient as opposed to permanent in the sense of impersonality and inertness.
I have done a pretty lousy job at expressing what I mean to express. It is very difficult to do in isolated context. I apologize. Maybe ask me if a thing exists and I'll explain how it does not. I have not spoken about these sorts of things in much time, focusing rather on very different aspects of spirituality. It seems I am rusty! Having seen how dismally does most spiritual writing express Truth on this point, I have also become cautious always to give the downsides along with the (always redeeming) upsides, perhaps overly cautious, but I'm sick of portraying spirituality as something "empty". Honestly it is the key to personal immortality. If I try to say this in a more precise and direction fashion, then it will seem very negative, as if any negative connotation is associated with "Nothing".. it will only finally seem positive once I continue writing at length and finally come to the end where the reader becomes enlightened. LOL That's why eastern spiritual rhymes and riddles were as they were. If you say it bluntly, it will sound unfortunate and deterministic. It is truly wondrous.
Assuming Ninjas will eventually be expanded upon as a creature type, which I assume they will be. Personally I intend to save my copies of this card for the future. I have not heard anything similar along these lines, but I have not been listening too hard. What is the story?
Yes but a good standard player can keep cycling his cards into the new things, once he has enough stock to do so, which is less than what you'd need to invest for the T1 necessities. That's often what good standard players do, they only ever spend money to sign up for tournies and possibly travel.