Alot of people at a young age I feel are attracted to beliefs which they know they can't substantiate per se, but which they sort of take as a bundle.

For instance, there are many Christians who are of the opinion that they cannot prove their beliefs scientifically, but they understand that their beliefs give them emotional strength and a system of ethics or compassion they can believe in; but that is the thing- you can still have a system of ethics and positivity in your life without having to justify it with this or that metaphysical system.

For instance, perhaps you feel strong attachment to your belief system because it feels like a unified whole to you, and as a system you feel it improves your worldview, and lends you something to stand on. But it is also possible to take all the things about it that you feel give you strength or stillness, and put them on one side, and take all the ideas you can't really prove or disprove and put them on another side.

For instance, just because you can't prove that you have had past lives, or that there will be a fifth dimensional ascension, or any other idea like that, doesn't mean you can't take the joy it has given you, or the stillness of meditation, or the drive to practice compassion, and practice them all for what they are, outside of any doctrinal context.

Sounds a bit like what happens on the "Alec Jones show".

He brings on guests who have relavent things to say about current and pressing events, but Jones is always careful to present things in such a way that it becomes a fear-mongering stunt, because he understands that his listeners are addicted to the chemical high of being frightened, lol.

Marketing to the healthcare industry is one way to ensure skyrocketted profits though. It is a well-known fact that people have a built-in expectation that medicine should be expensive, and thus anything associated with it is therefore expensive. I highly doubt that the unit which costs 20,000 USD to purchase costs a tenth of that to manufacture.

There are many things at high price marks that have justified reasons for being there; for instance, a pedal-harp sells for 12,000 - 25,000 USD generally, and the reason is the extreme amount of labor to build them with the current tools; just to build the pedal-mechanism alone is around 4000 USD of labor, because harps are so few that industrial machines have never been built to automate that process.

But I think this may be one case of pricing by the consumer's expectation of just costs; that is what happens in college textbooks: people have the expectation that "college is expensive", and thus they are prepared to spend absurd amounts of money on texts which should cost a third of what they are marked at.

Yes I am seeing things personally, as you are, truth is subjective, the question was do we agree wit the legalisation of a recreational drug, but it appears you are advocating weed as a power source, great i all for it...But that wasn't the question, I am responding to the question and I am not for making the position of peoples mental and psychical health worse. Medication is subscribed and measured and medication and transport are an essential part of life. Recreational drugs are not.

I think the matter of recreational use goes beyond what things are essential and which things aren't though.

For instance, music, rich foods, movies and theatre, and fictional books are all inessetial to living, and some of them may cause harm at some times, and yet they are not banned. Most people feel that these things should be free to experience- that it is up to the discretion of the person to use them responsibly.

I mean the stuff largely isn't for me, but I think people who are responsible should be allowed to do what they choose if it isn't going to harm others; and by extension, that the arguements against recreational use are stopping it from being used in industrial products which in many cases it is the best possible candidate for is silly to me.

A hemp industry would completely redefine our society.  I read somewhere that if you farmed 8% of the US landmass as hemp, you could use the oils and do away with our gasoline dependency.

I want to say this shouldn't be true; the energy required to produce the industrial fertilizers needed to grow it for fuel, and then the energy needed to process and transport it would probably cause you to break near even in energy input vs output. The thing about oil is that even today it produces 30 times the energy that discovering, transporting, and processing it takes. It is almost the sole reason our society was able to develop so fast over the last 2 centuries, and it is near impossible to replace with biofuels. We more or less need to put as much research money as we spend on our military (fat chance) into solar research. Several forms of fusion may save us later, but they are still decade or more away.

But this is not a counterarguement for legalization, of course... it is also a moot point to me that the plant should be used in about a dozen ways. It is telling that people are actually suffering while medicine that could be greatly beneficial to them is withheld because we have a powerful phramaceutical industry that buys laws.

For me, there are lots of complexities to this issue, and it is very muddy (both with doubt, and in the explanations). The reason I speak of the moment when neurons are fully deprived of oxygen, is that it guarantees that if something is reported (and it truly happened in the moment it was percieved to, and not just before or after, it must have been metaphysical in nature, and this is the one time I think we can exclude physical explanations.

Throughout the rest of NDE time, it way well be that the metaphysical and the physical sort of intermingle, in a complimentary relationship. The physical is there (because well, we are having a physical experience for the moment, and the body won't go anyplace till we die, so it will have its say in one way or another), and the metaphysical side may perhaps introduce itself because the opportunity strongly presents itself (because it is a moment of profound sensory-disconnect, similar to the sleep paralysis state that so facilitates OBE for us).

Even during an OBE, we still have influence on our psyche of the physical; we may hear sounds or experience sensations of the physical body; in this experience, the physical and metaphysical appear to comingle- this is the type of situation I am suggesting, albiet with stronger physical input.

The Nuclear blast situation...  sounds like a cop-out in how I explain it, but I would suspect that the individual would skip the sensations of the NDE that relate to a dying brain, such as the tunnel-experience you mention, and procede directly to whatever part of the experience has no physical basis ( there is no ultimate way for me to sort out which are which, although I would suspect you could start to identify which experiences may be physical by catologuing which seem to occur most often towards the beginning of an NDE, or which experiences individuals of a certain genetic lineage seem to have exclusively to themselves, regardless of the culture they find themselves in.)

Stillwater, do you think that what people experience as a typical NDE (tunnel, light, being of light, deceased relatives, life review etc) is the same set of events that occur in an actual death experience (ADE)?

If the combined evolutionary-metaphysical model I have been entertaining here is true, my guess is that the NDE and ADE would be more-or-less identical, until some particular moment of death, at which point the ADE may take a new course, that is not tied to biology and its archetypes any longer. It also seems possible to me that a handful of the people who have had NDE actually passed this point, and somehow came back from the edge.

So the archetypal NDE may be presenting itself for as long as neurons have anything to say, but after they lack enough oxygen to function, it would seem what came after would be purely metaphysical.

So the beginning of most experiences under this model would be programmatic, but could diverge from this later.

Not necesarly; it is entirely plausible to me that NDE could have developed entirely by evolution, but arose as a situation where metaphyscial experiences may be had.

For example, the anecdotal reports people have of experiecing perspectives they couldn't have from their body, and retrieving information from these perspectives could be claimed as partial support for those claiming metaphysical aspects. But the programatic archetypes that recur and seem to deal with universal human fears and uncertainties strongly point to evolutionary development of the experience too. In my mind the idea that part of it could be meatphysical does not erase the need to explain parts of the expeiences that strongly invoke evolutionary psychology.

For instance, many here claim that dreams and dreaming have a metaphysical component; we also know though that dreams have very strong physicalist explanations too though; if both explanations my simultaneously hold in that altered state, the altered state of NDE seems like it could be a similar candidate.

Evolution isn't goal-oriented though.

It has the tendancy of passing on traits which increase survivability, but the particular trait only needs to increase survivability in more individuals than it descreases; a sucessful trait can both help some and harm others, if there is a net positive outcome; for instance take sickle-cell allele: if an individual has one copy of it, they have strongly-increased resistance to getting malaria, and if they have two, then they get sickle-cell anemia.

So it is entirely possible that the NDE can have a genetic background if it helps more people survive than it hinders.

The interesting thing about all of this though is that the metaphysical explanation of NDE and the evolutionary one are not mutually exclusive. It is very possible that both sides of them evolved in tandem. In fact, if the metahphsyical explanation is true, this is more likely to be the case than not, since evolution would have needed to select for it somehow in the physical in order to justify its existence there.

Rick Strassman, the scientist who investigated DMT, made the same observation, namely, why are NDEs so sophisticated, an what evolutionary mechanism could possibly have led to this?

Think about how complicated our protein-machinery inside cells are... hundreds of thousands of different protein machines per cell, pumping, acting as 1-way gates for specific substances, shipping and receiving centers, assembly and demolition units...

If there is a way for what can only be called a bio-robotic factory to evolve in the shape of cells (and that is truly what it is, if you understand how complicated functional proteins are), then something as simple as a programatic series of mental images should be childs-play for evolution.

And there are good reasons for it... humans are the only animal we know of that are strongly conscious of their own mortality (some other mammals might be too). Anything that eases humans of debilitating fears might give an evolutionary advantage, and thus be more likely to be passed on.

NDEs also can't be an evolutionary brain trait... It's impossible.

To play devil's advocate, why do you feel that?

I have read strong arguments to support your statement, and my own experiences somewhat support it, but I would be interested to hear your angle.

Yes.

The old masters at this say that the best place to meditate is sitting on the floor, because the muscles required to keep you in posture will develop fastest, and ultimately you will be able to do it longer. It also take a bit more balance, and when I do that, I tend to use a cushion.

A chair is not a much worse alternative. When using a chair, it is best not to lean on the back of the chair, for the same reasons of posture and muscle development.

What does your company use 3d printing for? Fabricating things like ceramic set pieces?

I have actually never used zbrush, haha- even the academic version runs 450$, lol.

They were about 95% meshed, and then I used blender's sculpt functions. I don't know how zbrush works, but if you sculpt too much in blender, you start to thin out the mesh geomertry in regions, so you sort of have to model most of it.

Lol stookie... you are going nuts with the penned stuff 

I like your paintings alot as well bed, good stuff.

Here are some things I have done recently: