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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 1310687" data-attributes="member: 7464">True. To practice "Wu-Wei" (efforless effort) properly requires a great deal of practice and discipline. It's sometimes very hard to do things the easy way. It's getting increasingly difficult to argue against myself, especially since my Western philosophy is pretty rusty. I guess I'll bring up something on the "truth is universal and independant of observation" topic. Interestingly, it is impossible to prove that assertation. There are people on this earth who percieve things the rest of us do not. There is a remote chance that one of these people, labeled "insane" by the rest of us, actually percieves reality as it truly is, and the rest of us are living in some sort of mass delusion. Logic and science can wear themselves out futily trying to prove otherwise, but all they can do is calculate the enormous odds against the scenario; they cannot dismiss it entirely. (see? I used a semicolon. I must know what I'm talking about!) It is also possible (though improbable) that a single person got it right - understood the true nature of Truth and the Universe and nobody believed him. The knowledge of the true nature of existance might have been lost centuries ago, never to be recovered. I've heard (and never been able to verify. If somebody could provide some links it would be greatly appreciated) that results of experiments on the behavior of certain subatomic particles have varied based on the expectations of the scientists performing them. If they truly believed a result was going to happen, it did, while other scientists performing the same experiment but expecting a different result got the result they expected. The experiments and conditions were, as far as anybody can tell, identical except for the expectations of the scientists.  Science/logic (and to some extent philosophy) has one major flaw: it cannot prove the existance of something that is not logical. If there were a phenominon that operated and didn't behave a predicible, repeatable, observable fashion, science would not acknowedge it's existence. Examples of such things are the existance of God (or any other diety) or ghosts, the effectiveness of prayer or ritual magic, etc... All of these would involve independent dieties/agents/spirits/whatever of one sort or another who either choose to reveal themselves or obey your requests or they choose otherwise. No amount of scientific, double-blind studies can prove whether these things exist or operate since nowhere is it said they operate consistantly, or the diety/agent/spirit/whatever might object to being trifled with in such a petty manner and produce trash results. Yet billions of people believe such things can exist. You know, I'm starting to ramble and I'm not sure if I'm making much sense, or even if I'm sticking to what I'm trying to argue, so I'll just hit post and see what people say.</blockquote>

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