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The images above are an example of what the white space around the image will look like when it's printed.

Go to my Flickr here: Fashion and Figure to see my photos. You can also view my Deviant Art Gallery for other images.

Any questions just message me here or email me at visioluxus@hotmail.com. I will order all the prints on the 15th and ship them out by the 20th hopefully!

Can anyone recommend a resource on chanting mantras properly? I'm just starting and I haven't been able to get a good rhythm between the chants and my breathing. I'm left feeling rushed or breathless if I attempt to emulate the low, continuous stream that I've heard monks doing.

• 10:38 @JustCallMeJamie I believe that your note about the authorship of that review is entirely correct, of course. #
• 10:42 Bards of approaching Dawn, who know the heavens, are come with hymns to throw the mountain open! RV V.45: bit.ly/2HsaNC #

Indeed, you may follow me on Twitter

http://www.mazikeen.com/2009/11/burj-al-arab.html

What is the relationship between the brain and the mind? Can chemicals in the brain give rise to varying mental states? Are our habits of mind somehow encoded in our dna, or passed down from our parents? Or is the mind something non-physical and therefore independent of physical causes? I know the Buddhist viewpoints on this, but this community isn't really a Buddhist community anymore, is it? It's much more open to varying ideas, but the one thing we all have in common is the quest for truth, so this community can still be useful if we can come together and help each other in our learning. Then it doesn't matter if we call ourself a Buddhist or not, for what's important is the truth and the way to peace.

So I'm interested in any logical or experiential viewpoints on this, and I hope we can try to learn together rather than fight each other. Usually we have the motivation to drive our point across, but isn't it better to have the motivation to learn from each other instead? I am as guilty as anyone else here; I'm an addictive debater, I confess. And please try to limit the links you post, and answer from your own mind. People don't tend to bother reading the massive text from links anyway.

We've made some additions and improvements to Notes!

The Notes feature has been added to two action-taking pages:

• You can now add a Note directly on the Add a friend page - handy if you'd like to mark down where you met them or another name you know them by!
• On the Ban and unban users page (under Account -> Privacy) you can now add a Note, including to a group of users all banned at the same time (so that next year you won't need to ask yourself "hey, why did I ban these guys?")

Other changes:

• When you're viewing your existing Notes they're grayed out; click in a field to activate it to change the text (this page can be found from the header by using Profile -> Manage Notes)
• Changes to editing:
  • When you're going to create a new Note but one already exists, you'll get a warning that you're editing an existing Note
  • You can now delete a note from the "Edit note" pop-up in the hover menu
  • You can now delete notes for multiple selected users on the Manage notes page
  • When you change Notes on "Ban|unban users" page, they can be edited and saved with "Save Changes" button

How do people deal with depression? I don't know how anymore, it seems.

http://www.mazikeen.com/2009/11/purple.html

I've had this cold which seems a bit more tenacious than what I've had in the past and feel feverish although no measurable fever. So I went to a doctor, the first in over 12 years. The last time I was about go embark on cross country holiday driving trip and didn't want to head out and turn out to be seriously sick. Nothing but my first prostate exam and clean bill of health. This time it is a little different: "Have you heard of Claritin? Try something more than generic benadryl clone. And keep drinking lots of herbal teas."

Oh, plus, since I am of an age now, they have scheduled me for a series of tests that they think people over 50 should be having.

At least now I've got referral to surgeon to get my hernia taken care of. Near 2 years since it first tore at me.

Hello! I decided to type up this part of the book The Only Dance There Is by Ram Dass. This is the beginning of the section titled "Love as a State of Being."  It's absolutely wonderful. I feel comfortable crediting my happy relationship with my boyfriend to this.
     "If a Western man were to become a fully enlightened being what would happen to his human relationships, particularly love? Let me start with the word "love" for a moment. I think there is a transformation that goes on in one's conception of the term "love." And I think one changes from seeing it as a verb, to seeing it as a state of being. And you move much more toward what would be called Christ-love, that is, the state of being where one "is" love. One is like a light that emits, and one is a loving being. Consciousness and energy are an identity, as I said last night, and similarly with those identities is the term love. That is, that love and consciousness are one and the same thing. So that as you get into a higher state of consciousness you come closer to being in love. That doesn't mean in interpersonal love. It means being- love. Now if you and I love, or fall into love and I say, "She really turns me on. I love her," from this model what I see is happening is that I'm saying, "You are a . . . ," in the imprinting literature, "You are a superordinate key stimulus that is eliciting an innate response mechanism. You're releasing an innate response mechanism." Or I could say it in a more general sense, saying that, "You're turning me on." And you're turning me on to a place inside myself that is love. So I am experiencing what it means to "be in love." And I'm saying I am in love with you. I am in love with my connection to the place in me that is love, in the way I would now say it in this Western framework. Now to keep working with this I would say that as you are making love and getting totally into interpenetration as much as your bodies would allow and your thoughts and feelings would often allow and still feel that there was a separateness. And it is interesting that as long as you are under the illusion that what you are loving is "out there," you will always experience that separateness.
     It is only when you being to understand that if you and I are truly in love, if I go to the place in me that is love and you go to the place in you that is love, we are "together" in Love. We start to understand that what love means is that we are sharing a common state together. That state exists in you and it exists in me. Now the enlightened being- what happens to him is that he changes the nature of his love object from a specific love object to it all, finally. You would say that an enlightened being is totally in love with the universe, in the sense that everything in the universe turns him on to that place in himself where he is love and consciousness. So I would say that an interpersonal relationship that has any qualities of possessiveness in it, or ego drama of any kind, certainly undergoes changes as the nature of consciousness changes. And at the same moment I would say that as a person becomes more conscious, he understands that he has certain karmic commitments, that is, existing contracts which may be with parents, it may be with a husband or wife, or it may be with children- and that he cannot rid himself from these without creating a karmic cost- without leaving behind him some uncooked seeds that he's running away from.
     The game of enlightenment starts from exactly where you are at this moment, and therefore, if you have an existing social-emotional-sexual contract with another human being, that's where it starts. To say, "Well, I've got to go do my work on myself. I can't afford you any more" leaves a ripping which ultimately you've got to rectify. There's no doubt about it. You've got to work from where you are now. You just can't walk away from anything, any part of your life. You've got to bring it all into harmony at every new level.
. . . ."
 

OK, guys. Seriously, I'm a troll. I know I'm good at what I do, but damn. There's no need to take me this seriously.