Mark Foote

Apech, on the left...

There are a lot of folks who swear by "pure awareness" as the essential element of sentient being. Something like that. I think of Nisargadatta: My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense 'I am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am'. It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked! ("I Am That", Chapter 75, p. 375) 'You are not your body, but you are the consciousness in the body, because of which you have the awareness of 'I am'. It is without words, just pure beingness. Meditation means you have to hold consciousness by itself. The consciousness should give attention to itself. (Gaitonde, Mohan (2017). Self - Love: The Original Dream (Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj's Direct Pointers to Reality). Mumbai: Zen Publications. ISBN 978-9385902833) Or Dogen: Therefore, …take the backward step of turning the light and shining it back. (Eihei Dogen, “Fukan zazengi” Tenpuku version, trans. Carl Bielefeldt, “Dogen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation”, pg 176) I used to write about the location of awareness, but a friend of mine felt that awareness is all encompassing, throughout the universe. Because of him, I switched to writing about the placement of attention, but there's a trick (isn't there always!)--the placement of attention out of necessity in the movement of breath, with the activity of the body following entirely from the location of awareness, such as occurs in the moment before falling asleep. As a matter of daily life, just to touch on such experience, as occasion demands--that's enough.

"Pretenders", more so Made me look up the lyrics Fabulous, of course

The cat says, make it stop!

I can understand that Maddie did not see any point in continuing a conversation with Salvijus. Salvijus, I would suggest that offering personal experience would be more conducive to advancing a practice than debating angels or devils on the heads of pins. Feelings are complex, my feelings on the topic are complex. Maddie has offered a chance to dive into that.

My favorite band, in the '80's:

Salvijus--keep this in mind: Being intersex is a naturally occurring variation in humans, and it isn’t a medical problem — therefore, medical interventions (like surgeries or hormone therapy) on children usually aren’t medically necessary. Being intersex is also more common than most people realize. It’s hard to know exactly how many people are intersex, but estimates suggest that about 1-2 in 100 people born in the U.S. are intersex. There are many different ways someone can be intersex. Some intersex people have genitals or internal sex organs that fall outside the male/female categories — such as a person with both ovarian and testicular tissues. Other intersex people have combinations of chromosomes that are different than XY ( usually associated with male) and XX (usually associated with female), like XXY. And some people are born with external genitals that fall into the typical male/female categories, but their internal organs or hormones don’t. (https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/gender-identity/sex-gender-identity/whats-intersex)

It's complicated. There was a study done on why poor people living on welfare in the USA would vote for politicians who declared flat-out that they were going to end those welfare benefits. The answer turned out to be the fear in those same poor people of becoming the racial minority in their state, and the politicians who promised to cut off welfare were also the politicians who promised to keep down the minority. I guess I can understand the fear that's at work there. Just look at what the racial majority did to the racial minority in some states, and you can see why the majority would fear becoming the minority!

The body produces estrogen from fat cells, so there is still estrogen in a woman's body after menopause. Not as much, granted. What there is not, is progesterone. Many of the effects you mentioned are the lack of progesterone, particularly the onset of osteoporosis.

Like to thank snowymountains for the education, regarding modern therapy. I, like Taomeow and blue eyed snake, largely see Western medical science as only useful in cases requiring intervention. Chronic conditions appear to be largely beyond the capacity of Western medicine to treat effectively, although that may be changing with the new genetic science. The medical/pharceutical complex is real, and chronic conditions where a new medication must be taken for life are where the private research money goes. I've written about Dr. John Lee. One thing he commented on was the way that people put their faith in their doctors, in our society. He likened it to people in primitive cultures putting their faith in the witch doctor. A person might well die, if their witch doctor put a curse on them, and the same is true for Westerners and Western medicos. Another thing I've read. About 10% of Western medicos have reliable medical intuition and use it. They are witch doctors with a Western education, you could say. They have to be careful, not to get outed. I think I believe that. I've also read that the best intuition is the best-educated intuition, so I try to study up before I hit the ouija board.

Hopefully folks read my comments about progesterone, above. Dr. John Lee, who I mentioned, went around the country lecturing groups of women about the benefit of topical progesterone for treating osteoporosis among women who were at risk for ovarian or mammarian cancer. He tried educating the doctors, but because malpractice is defined as not doing what the rest of the doctors are doing (regardless of the science), he didn't have success with that. So, as he said, "I will educate the women, and they will educate their doctors." At the time I heard him speak (1995), hormone replacement therapy was all the rage, consisting primarily of estrogen. As Dr. Lee pointed out, when estrogen is not balanced with progesterone, there's a tendency for it to promote cancer. And in the northern hemisphere industrialized nations, progesterone production drops off in a woman at menopause, if not before (not so in some other parts of the world). Dr. Lee told a story about a husband and wife team of doctors in San Francisco (Dr. Lee had a family practice in Marin for 30 years). The husband would prescribe estrogen to a woman. Within a few years, the woman would develop ovarian cancer. The husband would refer them to his wife for the hysterectomy. They were making quite good money. You are right to be suspicious, Tao Meow--of course.

Sorry to be so late to the thread! My experience has been that physical actions of the body can take place without the exercise of will. Imagine, if you will, the body as the planchette of a ouija board with unseen hands guiding it, and you will have an idea of the experience I am describing. Or here's Buddhaghosa's description, the famous 5th century C.E. scholar: The air element that courses through all the limbs and has the characteristic of moving and distending, being founded upon earth, held together by water, and maintained by fire, distends this body. And this body, being distended by the latter kind of air, does not collapse, but stands erect, and being propelled by the other (motile) air, it shows intimation and it flexes and extends and it wriggles the hands and feet, doing so in the postures comprising of walking, standing, sitting and lying down. So this mechanism of elements carries on like a magic trick… (Buddhaghosa, “Visuddhimagga” XI, 92; tr. Bhikku Nanamoli, Buddhist Publication Society pg 360) You might think it was a form of auto-hypnosis, the power of suggestion, but there are peculiarities. Most strikingly, the action that takes place can be in accord with a future that was unknown at the time the action took place, as though things beyond the boundaries of the senses were at play in the action. For years after experiencing such action, I tried to always act through "the motile air", as Buddhaghosa put it. In the process, I discovered that what I believe can effect action in much the same way--without the direct exercise of volition, wriggling the hands and feet. What I understand from that is that it's very important to get the beliefs right, and to always be open to new facts and to science. Our beliefs become our actions, whether we will that to take place or not. To that extent, we are our beliefs.

Tommy Dorsey was pretty incredible, Buddhist teacher at S. F. Zen Center, former drag performer. He was very kind to me when I stayed at the Center for a week in '76. Ran into him at Hamburger Mary's once, asked him what he was doing there and he said, "oh, you know, burgers and drinks" or something to that effect (Mary's was a LGBTQ watering hole in '80's, in south of Market SF, and I lived in an apartment upstairs). I think he had a Buddhist rosary on, can't remember if it was around his wrist or his neck, but the juxtaposition of the Buddhist wear and the bar caused me to pose the question.

That would be progestins, then. Dr. Lee said that with the topical, the body will shut down absorption when it has enough. An advantage to the topical. I've spoken to a lot of people about topical progesterone. Only one of them said they didn't like the way it made them feel. The difficulty with estrogen is the way it promotes breast and ovarian cancer, that friend did suffer breast cancer a few years back. She's alright now. .